Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/philosophy-for-screenwriters).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 483 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we discuss character’s moral codes, philosophies, and beliefs, and how deep a writer really need to go fleshing those out. Then we’ll talk about virtual pitches, attaching element, eight-sequence story structure, and how to read a script.

**Craig:** Hmm. Eight-sequence story structure? I didn’t know that there was an eight-sequence–

**John:** There’s a thing. There’s a thing.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah. We’ll talk through it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will revisit our disagreement over when it’s OK to lie.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t remember what I said. But I’m sure I told the truth.

**John:** All right. So we’re recording this on January 8. It’s two days after what happened at the Capitol, so it feels weird not to talk about it, but it’s also going to have been a little bit in the past. Watching the events at the Capitol, it felt like the How Would This Be a Movie kind of flipped in reverse, in that you saw a bunch of people who were trying to act like they were in a movie and didn’t know what to do in the movie that they were in.

I had not watched that much cable news in decades. And it was just overwhelming.

**Craig:** Yup. As always these events sometimes are disturbing fodder for those of us who write because normally people are presenting themselves within a general range of behavior of social norms and so on and so forth. And in these instances they break out of it. And in breaking out of it you start to see certain bizarre aspects of human behavior that are counterintuitive. The example that immediately comes to mind is the fact that they were rioting and smashing their way into the Capitol building, but upon entry many of them chose to stay within the boundaries of the velvet ropes that would guide tour members through the halls of Congress.

It is so strange. And those details are fascinating. But, yeah, I think you kind of nailed it. They thought that they were in a movie and then they ran out of script.

**John:** Yeah. You think about if you had written any of these scenes into a movie, like the event didn’t happen but you were writing these things, the notes you would get back would say like, “Well that doesn’t make any sense. They wouldn’t just stay within the velvet ropes there. I can see them breaking into the offices, but wouldn’t they have a better plan? Wouldn’t there be an agenda?” And the fact that they had no actual idea of what to do once they got in there you saw the horrifying guy who had like the zip ties and clearly maybe did have more of a plan, but most of them had no plan. They were a bunch of older white people who needed help getting down the stairs afterwards. It was so unsettling to watch just because you didn’t know what was going to happen. And they didn’t know what was going to happen.

I remember watching 9-11 and going through that and that sinking feeling of like I just don’t understand what’s going on, how we got here. And in this case I did know how we got here, but I still didn’t have a sense of how it could resolve.

**Craig:** I think they were in part as surprised as everybody else was. That it got as far as it went. But they don’t know what to do. Their philosophy is incoherent. They are actually more chaotic than just about any other mob I’ve ever seen in the sense that mobs are always chaotic in their motion and their actions, but they have a goal. So from a writing point of view what do you want is the fundamental question we ask. I don’t know if they knew what they wanted exactly.

I mean, to have Donald Trump be president. But how?

**John:** They had slogans but less than an actual philosophy, or belief system, or a set of principles. And so that actually is relevant to what we’re going to get to today, because one of our sort of framing questions is how much work do you need to do to establish a character’s philosophy. How much do you need to think through that going into it? And this is a good example of people who cannot articulate their philosophy. They can articulate their affiliation, but it’s not actually based upon anything.

**Craig:** I think that’s spot on. I mean, it’s always a little uncomfortable to immediately relate these things to craft work and such, because people have died and our country is in chaos. But I guess in our defense I would simply say that this is how we’re going to be processing this stuff anyway. And the more you and I talk about how the news of the day is narrativized and how it could be narrativized, and how it should be narrativized, the more hopefully people can listen to the news and so forth and be a little more critical in the way they see how things are being presented to them.

**John:** And I’d also like to reflect because I think I’m the person on this show who often encourages people to think of themselves as the protagonist in the story of their life. And this might be a good counter example of that. Maybe don’t think of yourself as being the hero in Star Wars which some of these people do. And there’s a degree to which there’s like a fanboy thing happening there which is not healthy because it’s not based in reality. And so there’s a limit to how much you perceive yourself as being in a story because you are actually in real life and there are real life consequences in ways that there aren’t in fiction.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, weird intersection between neo-fascist rioting and cosplay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is disturbing as you see the not just a sense of reality breaking down, but even an interest in reality breaking down.

**John:** Yeah. It was as much Comic-Con as it was a political convention.

**Craig:** Yeah. The one guy wearing the fox furs and holding his wizard staff. Just, oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** All right. So we will get back to that, but there’s a bit of follow up to get through because this is a new year. There’s new stuff to talk through. Really quickly a rundown. This whole last year we talked about the WGA campaign with the agencies. To remind everybody of what happened in previous episodes, all the agencies have signed, including CAA, except for WME. That was the last holdout.

When we last talked WME had gone to court asking for an injunction that would allow them to represent writers again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** While they were waiting for the decision from the judge they made a new proposal. WGA said that proposal was weak sauce and wasn’t going to cut it. And that they needed to basically sign the same agreement everybody else signed with some sort of side letter or something else to show how they were going to sell down to the limits that everyone else was facing.

On the 30th, right before the New Year, the judge came back and said no injunction. So WME lost in court. And that’s kind of where we’re at. So this is sort of non-update update, but basically there’s not a resolution to the WME of the agency campaign.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there are pending cross lawsuits between WME against WGA and WGA against WME that are still floating out there waiting to be entertained. Is that correct?

**John:** That is correct. And so in the previous ruling the judge had strongly urged WME and WGA to meet and figure it out.

**Craig:** Figure it out I think he said. I mean, in this case it seemed like WME was just throwing up a Hail Mary, a 2020 Hail Mary, to see if they could do an end run around that. And that was not probably ever meant to succeed.

**John:** Yeah. So I have no other news to report but I wanted to at least acknowledge that there’s still one plot line from 2020 that hasn’t resolved here. So that’s one of them.

**Craig:** I mean, since I’m always happy to criticize the WGA when I feel like they are bungling or making missteps, more than happy to do that with the agencies when they do so. This is dumb. WME is engaging in a similar kind of behavior to the people who believe that Donald Trump will in fact still somehow be president on January 21. This is delusional. It’s over. It’s over. Kind of conventional wisdom about a situation like the one the WGA was in with these various agencies. The second to last agency to sign a deal is setting the final term. There is no possibility that WME is going to get, nor should get, a better term than CAA or any of the agencies that came before CAA. None. Zero. Not possible.

I don’t know what they’re doing. I truly don’t know what they’re doing. They should just give up or sign the thing, otherwise maybe they’re just kind of pinning their hopes on this lawsuit, but by that point I think they’re going to be losing a lot of their old clients. I don’t understand.

**John:** Not to take your analogy too far, but I remember another situation in 2020 where this guy threw up a bunch of lawsuits hoping to overturn the results and they didn’t come out well for him. So, maybe the lesson is how do you resolve things quickly so you can get back to work might be the best goal here. But, anyway, I’m not here to give them business advice. But that’s where we’re at with that.

**Craig:** I am. [laughs]

**John:** More importantly – well, actually this is somewhat related because Endeavor Content is related to this, this past week it was announced that the Rubik’s Cube Movie which is often one of the things we speculate about, like what would replace the Slinky Movie, the Rubik’s Cube Movie is in development. So this is big news. Hyde Park Entertainment Group and Endeavor Content, which is part of WME, are teaming up for a big feature take on the famed global-selling brand, Rubik’s Cube.

There’s also a game show which is a separate thing, because we don’t make game shows. But we talk about feature. And so in the pitch, “The Rubik’s Cube has sold over 450 million cubes worldwide. Since 2018 amateur professional speed cubers from all over the world have faced each other and battled for the chance to prove their skills in the Rubik’s Cube World Championship Finals in Boston,” which I will say I do want to point out there’s a great short documentary on Netflix.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Love it. So I don’t want to disparage that at all because I think that was a great, great thing.

**Craig:** Beautiful.

**John:** But we need to make fun of the Rubik’s Cube Movie as a feature property.

**Craig:** Well, I’m starting to worry that they’re just listening to this show and waiting for us to come up with the next “stupid idea” and they’ll go well these guys are just pointing us towards gold. So I don’t know what our next thought is going to be. Mop and bucket, or whatever it’s going to be, the Mop and Bucket Movie.

This is not coming from a good place. I’m not going to undermine the people who take the job, especially these days.

**John:** Oh, no, not at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. You need a job, you need work, you do it. But the people who are – Hyde Park Entertainment Group and Endeavor – are engaging in an exercise that is even more cynical than the normal exercise that we all engage in in Hollywood to some extent. It just seems silly. It doesn’t matter. None of what they said matters. I doesn’t matter.

**John:** It doesn’t.

**Craig:** No. I mean, grass. You know what? People know grass more than Rubik’s Cube. Grass covers this much of the planet. 98% of people like grass. Who cares?

**John:** Yeah. So luckily we have the best listeners of any podcast in the world.

**Craig:** Yes, we do.

**John:** And our listeners are professional writers. So at least one but maybe two sets of writers sent in the pitch deck that was being sent to them. So basically when a big property like this is put out there they will contact the agencies and agencies will then go out to their clients and they’ll sort of give this is what they’re looking for.

Here was how the Rubik’s Cube Movie is being framed to writers when they are listening to them to pitch. “Our plan is to find a fresh and innovative way into the IP and develop a mythology that can speak to the scope of the puzzle’s influence. It can be anything from a world-building family adventure like Jumanji, a treasure hunt driven quest like National Treasure, to nostalgia-fueled sci-fi like Ready Player One and Beyond. Just imagine in the time it took to read this paragraph the world record holder could have solved the puzzle twice.”

**Craig:** God.

**John:** There’s also, Craig click through, because there’s a slide show deck.

**Craig:** The slide show is amazing. It’s deeply depressing. I have no problem with corporate robots speaking to each other in corporate robot language. But when they talk to us, for the love of god, this is just not good. So, they say things like “Rubik’s is winning globally,” and then there’s just a bunch of things about brand awareness and retail sales.

Then they have, “Rubik’s DNA.” DNA is a term that non-artists love to through around in front of artists because they think it’ll mean something. So, for instance, here are some of the things that would be meant to entice a writer. “A combination of colors.” Colors, John. It’s colorful. “A striking shape.” It is a cube. “It has key brand values. The key brand values are things like twisting motion. And world famous shape.” I just want to point out that before the Rubik’s Cube was introduced to the world in 1980 there were other cubes. Ice. Not the man, but the actual substance. There were ice cubes.

**John:** Bricks. Bricks are not technically cubes but–

**Craig:** Some.

**John:** They have square edges.

**Craig:** They have squares. They had cubes in all sorts of manners.

**John:** There’s a typo on the slide that you’re looking at right now. “Intelligence buidling.”

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s “intelligence buidling,” which is a bad typo to make. That’s a rough one. And then it says, sorry I’m laughing at this, “Rubik’s, an inspiration to creatives.” That is like saying everyone knows that the election was rigged. You’re just saying it. It’s not true. It’s just not. It’s not.

**John:** It’s not. Again, whoever takes this job–

**Craig:** No, we love you.

**John:** Take this job. Make something great from it. You know what? I hope you make the Lego Movie. I hope you find something that’s so great even though it’s a piece of dumb IP. You can still potentially make a great movie out of it. I don’t hate the player, I hate the game. So that’s a look into–

**Craig:** Yes, support your family. Buy a house. Do something fun with whatever they give you for this. We absolve you completely. In fact, we urge you to take a job that you can take when you need one. But good lord.

**John:** But let’s talk about the process of getting this job. Because right now there are 20, 30 writers or writing teams who are preparing their own pitches for this. And that’s kind of the tragedy. How much wasted work and creative work is going to go into trying to land this dumb job? And that’s what’s a little bit heartbreaking here.

**Craig:** Maybe the best you can sort of think is this is a fascinating exercise for your mind. If you can figure out an interesting solution to this you’re making your story solving muscle a little bit stronger. So nothing is a complete waste of time. But certainly the people who have presented this to you have not helped you with a phrase like “our plan is to find a fresh and innovative way into the IP.” There’s never been a way into the “IP” of this.

So, always fresh and innovative – that’s the part that blows my mind. We’re making a movie about a Rubik’s Cube. That alone should be shocking. Shocking. That’s the movie by the way. That would be my pitch. Like I would be the guy working at the company trying desperately to stop this movie from happening. [laughs] Desperate. Desperate.

**John:** Yes. Desperate.

**Craig:** Desperate.

**John:** So, talking about IP, some of the same people who sent through the pitch deck for this talked about other stuff that they’re getting sent. So there is a Lucky Charms being developed. General Mills, the cereal company, is developing a movie around Lucky the Leprechaun. So at least Lucky the Leprechaun has a face.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** And has a voice.

**Craig:** He’s a person.

**John:** That’s huge progress. So I would pitch for Lucky the Leprechaun over Rubik’s Cube just because there’s actually a character there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** A character who wants something. Who is loss-averse. Like people are stealing his Lucky Charms.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** Why is he so loss-averse? Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, when Chris Miller and Phil Lord approached the task of making the Lego Movie, I mean I’ve never asked them specifically this, but I will. If there were no Legos with faces would this have been doable at all? If it were just bricks what is there to do? But the fact is that a lot of Lego, plural of Lego, have faces, and so there are little mini characters. And therefore there are little mini stories.

**John:** Yeah. But the Lego I grew up with did not have faces. I grew up in a pre-face Lego world.

**Craig:** Ditto. And that’s how I knew that I was not meant to be an architect because I would just assemble the bricks into a larger mega brick. It was disturbing.

**John:** The building but you can’t actually enter it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the other thing we often talked about in terms of what piece of junk IP we can use for the placeholder, we went for the Mr. Clean Movie. Let’s all pitch a Mr. Clean Movie.

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** And so it got me thinking, Procter & Gamble, if General Mills is going to develop a Lucky the Leprechaun Movie, Procter & Gamble, they already make soap operas. They have this character, Mr. Clean. He’s an identifiable brand. He’s got a jingle. It’s unclear to me, Craig, is Mr. Clean a genie or a sailor?

**Craig:** Oh, he’s not a genie. He’s definitely not a genie. He seems too modern. I mean, the ring is going to throw you a little bit I think. But I don’t think he’s a sailor either, to be honest. I think he’s just like a hot guy that loves cleaning.

**John:** He’s a daddy that loves cleaning.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s a daddy that loves cleaning. By the way, at this point I’m getting turned on. And now I want to see the Mr. Clean Movie. The Rubik’s Cube Movie has destroyed the notion that the Mr. Clean Movie is the new bar. We have to go lower than Rubik’s Cube at this point. So now I’m thinking things like–

**John:** I think it’s going to be more on the grass frontier. Everyone in the world loves trees.

**Craig:** I think gravel. Gravel.

**John:** Sand. Sand is a foundation. Without sand you can’t get glass.

**Craig:** I know. Sand is almost too interesting.

**John:** Yeah. Actually the mathematics of sand is really complicated.

**Craig:** Because we know what they’re doing. They’re listening. So, if we seem, yeah, gravel is really boring. But, 99% brand awareness of gravel.

**John:** Everyone knows gravel.

**Craig:** Everyone.

**John:** You got skinned knees. You can use it to weigh stuff down. You can use it in place of a lawn if you’re trying to save.

**Craig:** See?

**John:** Sorry. I’m giving all this stuff away for free.

**Craig:** That’s fresh and innovative what you’re saying. [laughs] You know, the Poochie episode of The Simpsons should have killed all of that language, permanently. Permanently. And it didn’t.

**John:** Didn’t.

**Craig:** It just didn’t.

**John:** Such a good episode.

**Craig:** Edgy and in your face.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Let’s get into our discussion of philosophy for screenwriters. And this is all going to be coming out of a question that got sent in. So if our producer Megana Rao can join us, we have a lot of questions today and we need Megana to ask these questions so we can try to answer them on a philosophical level. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, of course. OK, so Nisario wrote in and he asked, “On Episode 481 you and Craig discussed the ethics of lying as they pertain to blood donations. I couldn’t help but notice that John’s take was siding more toward a deontological approach which is rule-based. Simply, the refusal to lie, even if for the greater good, emphasizes what is right over what is beneficial for the collective. Your blood type is valuable, but the rules are such that you cannot donate, thus you must oblige to the rules of the system in place, not in favor of the rules but because you do not intend to perpetuate a flawed system. It’s a bit Kantian.

“Craig, on the other hand, argues that your lie will maximize the greatest amount of good. Therefore we ought to lie as this benefits the collective. This is consequentialism, utilitarianism, where maximizing the good is the end goal. Teleological ethics. My question is how much thought do you give to your character’s philosophy and beliefs?”

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** Great. So in our bonus segment we’ll talk about specifically the lying and I’ll get more into that, but I think it’s a great question overall because I think it really depends on the project. There have been projects where I’ve hired on a philosophy professor to work with me to figure out character’s philosophical backgrounds, and other stuff I’ve written where like I couldn’t tell you what these characters believe in a general sense.

Craig, talk to me about your writing, how much does a character’s philosophy or belief system, how much do you know about that as you start to write?

**Craig:** Well, I took a good number of philosophy classes when I was in college and I deeply appreciate the distinction between the deontological and the teleological, and Nisario is absolutely correct. I tend towards the teleological in my thinking. I’m kind of a Nietzschean sort of dude when it comes to that. Not like full on bananas, but that’s kind of how I go.

But I think probably when I think about characters it never gets quite so specific and deep. It really stops right where I think most people go. Which is to say I tend to be a practical minded person. I tend to be an idealist. I tend to be somebody that is loyal to a set of beliefs and ethics. I tend to be somebody who shifts and moves depending on what it is I want.

We’re all familiar with people like that in our lives. So, philosophy will take a look at the way humans think and behave and attempt to organize that into analyzable and discussable systems. We don’t have to get that far. We can actually just stop with observing the behavior and then replicating it in characters as we choose. So I do engage in this to an extent, but not quite all the way into full on philosophy.

If I were writing something like The Good Place then I would absolutely need to because philosophy is literally a part of the character of Chidi. He is an ethicist and so that’s a huge part of how he thinks and what he says.

**John:** Yeah. When I said the philosopher I was talking about was Todd May who was the philosophy in residence, or one of the philosophers in residence on The Good Place. And so for the project I was writing it was really important to actually be able to explore some of those things.

Part of what you’re saying though, Craig, is you’re looking at what’s underpinning the motivations of characters. What’s driving them? And there is a balance between psychology and philosophy. And psychology is generally more present for us to explore as a writer because it’s driving people’s behaviors. It’s driving them sort of like moment to moment more clearly. Philosophy I tend to think of as being more deep, overall whether conscious or unconscious goals, a system by which people organize their choices and their life and their kind of moral structure. And most people I know in real life they may have affiliations, they may have belief systems that are because of their group identity, but they couldn’t articulate really their own belief system or their own philosophy in any meaningful way.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a notion that philosophy is – if you think philosophy is teleological in and of itself and has a purpose, which many of the great philosophers agree with, then the purpose of philosophy is to help people live a better life. And thus we define what better means and we present them with a path to follow.

What I suspect often happens – and this is where the philosophers would probably be very upset with me – so we have the a posteriori and the a priori – that people already have an instinct of what they want because of who they are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then various philosophies are presented to them. They pick the one that will naturally satisfy their innate desires and they “follow it.” They’re not following it. The philosophy is following them where they were already going.

**John:** Yeah. And that really is the balance between psychology and philosophy as well. They want to do a thing and then afterwards they’re justifying why they did the thing. But that wasn’t really the cause of stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I want to get back to the group affiliations and beliefs because a lot of times the characters in our stories are going to be a member of a group. A very classic pattern is they are born into a group and then they challenge the assumptions and the beliefs of that group and leave that group and have to discover their own new way of living.

So, their initial group affiliation might be with a religion, so like as a Catholic I believe that life begins at conception they might say. Or political affiliation, so as a progressive I believe all cops are bad. Or I believe in MAGA. I believe the election was stolen by deep state actors. They’re stating beliefs but it’s hard to say to what degree those beliefs are actually innate in that they came to that decision and realization through conscious effort versus they just took a whole bundle of beliefs that came with a group identity.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the unseemly all too human underbelly of all these discussions. People who are hurt and wounded and may simply be truly to manage shame or fear or anxiety are going to naturally drift towards certain things. We know this. It’s not quite as simple as you read a bunch of books and then you go, ah, this one makes the most sense.

For instance, did you ever read Atlas Shrugged?

**John:** Oh my god I read Atlas Shrugged.

**Craig:** Sure you did. Sure you did.

**John:** No, actually, maybe I didn’t actually finish the Atlas Shrugged. I read the Fountainhead and was an asshole for at least four months after reading it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I really thank my college roommates who told me I was being an asshole and got me past it.

**Craig:** Everyone I think of a certain kind like you and me, you’re going to read that stuff. It’s going to hit something instinctive in you that you suspect might be true. And it’s going to reinforce it. And that reinforcement will make you feel good, because the message there is you’re special. Because you’re doing well, you deserve praise. You’re special. And it’s intoxicating.

And then, yeah, and then ideally you grow out of it as fast as you possibly can because it’s also just wrong. It’s wrong philosophically and it’s wrong factually. We just know that. But that’s what a lot of this stuff is doing. It’s just sort of pointing at things and saying does this make you feel good. Well what if I said this. Does this make you feel good? And I think philosophy is an intellectualization and distancing from that process.

What we do I think is far better thought of as just living on that very human level – what makes you feel good? What makes you feel scared? What is it that you want and why? And the characters that overly philosophical in film are usually villains because the villains, we understand our rationalizing and intellectualizing to cover up the all too human truth of why they’re doing what they do.

**John:** What I think Nisario may be reaching for is you want a story, you want a film obviously to ask a question. We talk about what is the central dramatic question. What is the theme of a piece? And that theme idea really is probably a better way of thinking about philosophy. Because you’re asking a philosophical question like, you know, we think of Star Trek, the needs of the many. That question is sort of an important part of that film and that film series. So you may be asking a philosophical question and your characters will be grappling with that philosophical question, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are. So in the conception of the idea there is a philosophy there. There’s something you’re grappling with. And your characters, your protagonists, and your antagonists would naturally be grappling with that as well. But that doesn’t mean that you are necessarily cataloging all of their beliefs and having every decision that character makes really very obviously tied into that philosophy because then you are Ayn Rand and you are writing The Fountainhead. And please don’t do that.

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly right. So what I call the central dramatic argument, people call a theme, it doesn’t matter what you call it, oftentimes is philosophical in nature because there is a very universal interest in these big questions of life. But the delivery system and the execution system is human and the people in the story, the characters you’re creating, are not philosophers. I mean, for instance, what Nisario is pointing out about our discussion about blood donations and your deontological approach and my teleological approach that is literally what is at the heart of The Last of Us, which is what I’m writing right now. That’s it. That’s the heart of it.

And nobody, nobody in this show, none of the characters in the game or the show are ever, ever going to speak philosophically about deontology or teleology because they’re not aware of that. That’s operating, it’s sort of like the history of whatever happens in this show 100 years later, if people are still alive a philosopher will write a history and then analyze it then. But not inside of the story.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a look at what are some philosophical aspects that are useful for a screenwriter to be asking about their characters.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And there’s going to be some natural overlap with psychology because that’s just how it works. But I would say idealism versus pragmatism. And I’m going to broadly talk about idealism. I have this notion of things must work this way and I’m going to stick to my guns on this thing regardless of sort of what the situation is. Versus utilitarianism or pragmatism – pragmatism is probably the better way to describe it – of just do what you can in the situation and make the best of it. Those are psychological approaches but they’re also philosophical approaches. Sort of what is the best use of the current situation that we’re in?

We might ask how concerned is this character about ethics overall. Ethics as a system, how do they deal with ethical questions that come up? Do they care about them? Do they not care about them? One thing I’ve constantly observed in films is that questions of ethics are always being asked of and by men. And you almost never see women grappling with questions of ethics for whatever reason. It’s just not a thing that we see portrayed in film very often.

**Craig:** Hmm. That’s an interesting observation.

**John:** You ask how willing is this character to lie? And how easily do they lie? How worried are they about lies? And where does it rank on their scale of sins or crimes to commit to lie to somebody?

**Craig:** I’m thinking about what you said about men and women and ethical presentations.

**John:** My counterexample which I think stuck out because I hadn’t seen this character before. Tilda Swinton’s character in Michael Clayton is deeply conflicted and flips out over decisions she’s having to make. And I cannot think of another female character in film who is grappling with things that same way. I guess to a degree Meryl Streep’s character in The Post, to a degree. But there aren’t a lot. And maybe that’s because we don’t see a lot of women in control in places where they can make these ethical systemic decisions in our films, but that’s just an observation.

**Craig:** It may also be that we in a tropey way think of men as more – I’ll just say – slightly more sociopathic in that they can be more emotionally detached and therefore intellectualize a situation and analyze it strictly in terms of bloodless value systems or ethics. Whereas the trope is that women are more feeling and connected and human and therefore have an innate morality that doesn’t need to be the product of analysis, but rather just emerges from a wellspring within. That’s an interesting thought.

There is another movie that’s coming to mind that does sort of run against that and it’s Tin Cup. When I think about idealism versus pragmatism, Kevin Costner’s character is such a good example of an idealist. He just has an ideal of what it means to play golf well, or rather correctly. And he sticks to it through the very end. And through his application and connection to that he both loses and wins. Rene Russo is his therapist and she is very much trying to pragmatically help him grow. And she is more concerned about ethics and questions of right and wrong and practicality and growing as a human being.

So, that’s an interesting possible counterpoint. But I think you’re touching on something really interesting that there is a space there for female philosophers I guess that we tend to leave to them out. And we should be bringing them in because there’s a lot of them.

**John:** Yeah. So the team owner in Ted Lasso. Your example of Tin Cup made me think of the team owner in Ted Lasso who starts off doing a very bad thing, an unethical thing, and sort of grapples with it. So there are other examples like that, but it just feels like on the big screen, in the 12 Angry Men kind of way of it, we don’t see that happening very often.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s an opportunity for writers who want to pursue it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m kind of curious. Can you think of an example of that scene that we’ve seen many times where a woman is slowly pacing back and forth in front of a captured hero explaining to him why her plan to destroy the world makes sense? Have you ever seen that?

**John:** I think in a Minions movie, yes. I feel like Sandra Bullock’s character in the Minions movie kind of does a little of that. But I’m really stretching to get there.

**Craig:** I’m going to exclude animation and I’m going to exclude superhero movies. So, you have a little bit of that in–

**John:** No, in a normal live action drama? No. I can’t.

**Craig:** I’m struggling to think of one. And now I want to write one because I feel like women absolutely have the right to be just as sociopathic and insane as men.

**John:** Yeah. We have sociopathic women. We have the Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction. But where she’s justifying her actions based on her perceived wrongs, we have the scorned woman archetype. But that’s not really what you’re describing.

**Craig:** Right. Not necessarily sociopaths. Yeah. Those are like personality disorders. But the kind of bloodless sociopath who wouldn’t even be bothered with sleeping with someone’s husband. Who cares? She has a bigger method.

**John:** I think some of the villains, it’s hard to even call them villains, some of the characters in Game of Thrones might have aspects of that as well. But I really want to go for what we’re seeing in movies, I certainly can’t pick one of those.

**Craig:** Yeah. All right. It’s a challenge.

**John:** But let’s talk about heroes where you can identify some philosophical, some sort of belief system that they articulate and will come back to. And sometimes that can be helpful. So Indiana Jones, “That belongs in a museum,” that’s how he distinguishes what he does from other folks who are doing kind of the same thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I think about Miranda Priestly from Devil Wears Prada. And she very clearly articulates a philosophy that beauty has a purpose. And that what she’s doing at this magazine and fashion has meaning, so she’s able to articulate that.

Willy Wonka’s obsession with chocolate. He has that craftsman’s fascination, that artist’s fascination with the meaning that he’s in and he can speak to that very fully. So, those are characters who articulate a philosophy and it’s useful in their films to be able to do that.

So, we’re not saying don’t do that work. We’re saying it can be helpful. But I wouldn’t want – I think what I worry about is writers who would try to write a full philosophical treatise for each of the characters in their films and then struggle to find ways to actually make that fit into the film, or to articulate that in the film when it may just not be natural.

**Craig:** It would be bad. And it also robs your hero, your protagonist, of growth. It’s fine to put characters on either side of them. So, in Chernobyl I put a total pragmatist on one side of Jared Harris’s character, and on the other side I put an absolute idealist. So he gets to be pulled back and forth between them and then finds some sort of synthesis because he can see the value of both sides. And that’s interesting. You’re watching somebody make choices. The problem with philosophers as characters is they’ve already made up their minds and that is remarkably boring to watch in drama.

**John:** It is indeed. Great. Well thank you for this quick talk through some philosophical choices that writers might need to make. Write in with more stuff. I feel like on some future episode we should talk about kind of D&D alignment, because I see people trying to do that a little bit too much.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not really–

**John:** Yeah. Not so good.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t do it.

**John:** So many more questions. I want to sort of get into them. So, Megana, can you talk to us about Zoom?

**Megana:** Great. So this question was suggested by Benjamin Simon. And he asked, “My friend and I have been working on a TV show pitch and hope to ‘take it out’ soon. Checking in with a few friends about their experiences pitching during the pandemic, it seems they’ve had to make adjustments when it comes to pitching on Zoom. For example, using more visuals and slides. I’d love to hear your take.”

**John:** Great. I have done a lot of this during the pandemic, so I actually have some straightforward advice for this. So I’ve had two projects I’ve taken out. I pitched to all the streamers. I’ve also pitched to all the animation places. In a conventional pitch you would go into the room, you would sit down on the couches. You would have a couple minutes of bullshit conversation. And then you’d get into your pitch. And so you might have visuals. You might have boards presented. Or you might just be talking at them. You have to focus on who the most important person is in the room while occasionally doing the lawn sprinkler of sort of making eye contact with everybody else in the room.

On Zoom it’s sort of nice because you don’t have to – eye contact isn’t quite the same thing. Basically you’re looking at the camera and it’s like you’re looking at everybody at the same time. So that is good. I will often put a little sticky note near the camera lens on my computer just to remind me I need to look up there and not look at people’s faces down lower.

Some things I learned really early on. First off, it’s important to practice. So, set up a practice Zoom with your other collaborators, your other writer, or your director, your producers, and just practice through it just to make sure you get all the little things out and who is going to speak when. I found it to be really helpful to join the meeting both from my main computer and also from my laptop. And on the laptop, that’s the one I’ll be sharing slides off of. And that just makes it easier for me to be doing this, my left hand is moving slides around, while I’m still able to focus on the screen in front of me for everything else. So that’s been helpful for me.

If you have sound, like this animation thing had a little animatic that had sound that went with it, make yourself a note that you actually have to turn on sound when – you have to enable sound and screen sharing when you get to that part.

When I was pitching I would tend to have what I was going to say kind of written out in Highland and I would move that up to the top of the screen so that it was close to the camera lens so I wasn’t looking down, I was looking up as I was scrolling through it. And actually really liked pitching on Zoom because we could pitch three places in a day and not drive all over town. So, for that it was great.

The slides were really helpful though because it gave us something to look at while I was talking. It wasn’t just me. Craig, have you had to pitch anything during this time?

**Craig:** Not pitch per se, but I certainly had a number of conversations that had consequences. You know, implied consequences, like are we going to make your how, or should we hire this person. And so there was – I mean, I guess if you define the thing that makes a pitch a pitch is that you’re having a meeting that has a consequence, a potential consequence. So I’ve had those and I, like you, I enjoy them to the extent that I don’t have to drive around. And also there’s a consistency on my end.

So one of the things about the drive around over the course of two days and pitch stuff is you find yourself in different rooms that are too hot, too cold, too small, too dusty. You have a headache all of a sudden. It’s a whole thing. And here you don’t have that problem. You’re in your comfy chair. You’re in your comfy clothes. And you’re doing your best.

I find that one of the nice things about Zoom is that its consistent limitation is that it can’t really handle simultaneous audio very well. We all know that. So, it requires everybody to listen. And the most important advice I could give you, Benjamin, and your friend is don’t be afraid to make space for other people to talk and ask questions. And as you’re pitching build in moments to stop and say, “How are we doing? Any questions?” Because it’s good for people to have a chance, otherwise they feel they’re getting – in a room you can always interrupt. It’s really hard to do it on Zoom. And when they do interrupt it creates this awkward post-interrupt, “Wait. Did you? Sorry. Oh, I. OK.”

So give them moments.

**John:** Absolutely. Build in. That’s why it’s also important to practice is to figure out where are the natural places to stop and ask for feedback, ask for questions. You may have noticed this, too. In pitching to larger rooms I feel like the executives have asked their other people in the Zoom for their questions much more often on Zoom than in real life when I’ve been in a space with other folks. And so that’s been nice, too. I feel like I’ve had more and better conversations with the number two and the number threes in Zoom pitches than in real life. It may just be the projects, but it did feel like it was relevant.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, at some point you want to make sure that the people you’ve asked into the meeting as an employer feel like they’re there for a reason.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it is. It’s good. I like it. You know, you and I have a weird experience, a now decade-long experience, doing something that most people in Hollywood have no experience doing.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** We talk and then we stop and we listen. By the way, most podcasts really struggle with this. It’s one of the reasons I don’t listen to podcasts. You know, I hate the banter. Like the overlapping banter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** See that? See what we just did that? It’s beautiful.

**John:** That big, giant silence? OK, so hopefully that helps out with pitching on Zoom. I see we have an audio question here. This is Lauren from Los Angeles. Let’s listen to what Lauren has to say.

**Lauren:** Hey John and Craig. My name is Lauren and I’m a freshly repped screenwriter from Los Angeles. Believe it or not I signed with my management company on March 13, 2020. Yes, the day of the lockdown. So, every single general meeting I’ve had since has been over Zoom and I’ve never met my agents in person. That’s completely not relevant to my question, but I felt like it was a funny thing you might enjoy.

OK, so my question is this. I’m currently working on two different projects. One is a feature pitch that’s a very commercial YA type rom-com. The other is an indie feature script that is a dark comedy revolving around a mother-daughter relationship. I’m fortunate to say that I have different producers attached on both projects. Despite them being different I have ultimately gotten the same note on both. The note is always, “Don’t leave the protagonist’s point of view.” I’m curious what your opinion is on this because oftentimes I find that I want to leave my protagonist to reveal something happening without them knowing. For example, I will leave my daughter character to show the mother doing something behind her back. Or, in my rom-com I leave my main female character to reveal the love interest setting up something to surprise her.

Many times I’ve found their POV helpful. Nine times out of ten I’ve learned that the moments do in fact hit harder when I reveal the information to the audience through the character’s perspective. So, I’m curious if there’s a time when it’s better to leave the protagonist’s point of view and what your opinions would be on this. Thanks again. I’m a big, big fan. Lauren from Los Angeles. Bye.

**Craig:** I’m a big, big fan of Lauren from Los Angeles’s question. That’s a good question. We’ve talked about perspective a lot, yeah, but I don’t think we’ve ever focused on like when do you leave that perspective.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s a great question. And I like that she half answered her own question. She says that nine times out of ten the producer’s note is correct and she shouldn’t do it. And that would be my instinct as well.

I think you’re making a contract with your audience, with your reader, about POV pretty early on in your script. And if you break POV on page 60 for the first time they’re right to say like, “Wait, that’s not the movie we signed up for.” So it feels like you’re cheating. So either you do it consistently or you don’t do it at all.

Some of my favorite movies will suddenly break POV and it’s exciting and it’s so unexpected when it happens. But they’re unusual when it happens. And, again, they tend to be movies where you go in there expecting for some sort of twist or surprise. And it feels like both of the things you’re describing don’t necessarily merit that break in POV.

**Craig:** Yeah. So first let’s sort of define this. We’re not strictly talking about who your main character, what they can physically see at any given point. But the emphasis of the scene is on your main character and how they’re experiencing something. So what you’re asking the audience to do is identify with your protagonist in this scene or sequence. In television it’s necessary to shift POV as much as possible because you are serving typically multiple storylines. And then inside those storylines there are protagonists. And so that storyline is within that protagonist POV, so it’s essentially staying inside of the notion of staying with POV.

For movies, the villain gets their own POV. You don’t want to spend too much time with the villain.

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** It’s pretty rare to have a movie where you don’t have a scene where the antagonist gets to own it and express their feelings and desires and wants. But, yes, you’re right. It can happen. But very common that you can freely and you want to break POV to give the antagonist a moment. Or two.

There are also times in comedies where side characters later on can have fascinating little POV break points, as long as the scene is brilliant. I’m thinking for instance of one of my favorite movies, In and Out, by Paul Rudnick who, you know, we’re on record as adoring for the Addams Family movies, etc. So there’s a wonderful moment later in the film where Debbie Reynolds who plays Kevin Kline’s mother, and who has been haranguing him to get married the entire time, and who had no scenes inside of her own perspective, always from Kevin Kline’s perspective, suddenly after the whole wedding blows up and he comes out of the closet and everything is crazy there’s a scene where she’s just alone with her old lady friends in the hall where there was going to be a wedding and she’s just bemoaning it all. And it’s a really funny scene where each one of those women just comes out with this fascinating secret. Like they all come out of the closet – it’s not about their own sexuality, but about things in their life. Like they start to reveal things. And it’s brilliant.

And it was a wonderful breath of fresh air because it earned its weight. So, you pick your spots. But just know, Lauren, when you do drift away it’s got to be really good. Because we’re naturally going to be like, wait, why are we over here. What’s happening? Because we know that this isn’t really advancing the story per se. So that’s the key.

**John:** Yeah. So this last week we watched Bridesmaids, or I rewatched Bridesmaids. First time my daughter had seen it. And I was struck by just what a great movie it is. It’s so, so, so well done. So Kristen Wiig’s character, it is from her POV. She is driving really every scene. Another way you may talk about this in a meeting is who has storytelling power. Basically who can drive a scene by themselves where none of the other characters need to be there? But she really is driving basically every scene. But there are notable moments where she’s not in them and so there’s a plane sequence in which we see a lot of other side conversations between characters and we continue to flesh out some characters. I think the reason why it doesn’t feel like you’re breaking POV to have those moments is at any point Kristen Wiig’s character could come in and disrupt those existing conversations.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so they’re in a space where she could still be there. And so sometimes in a script you may kind of walk in the door with another character, but as long as our central character can be there and be part of the scene soon you’re not breaking the rules. It’s not going to feel like you’ve shifted the playing field unfairly.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a question of substance to those moments. I mean, there’s this wonderful moment on the plane where Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone have this incredible interaction.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s off of Kristen Wiig’s POV. It doesn’t advance the story really. Well, it kind of eventually sort of does. But it’s not deeply substantive. If you had a scene in Bridesmaids where Melissa McCarthy’s character was talking to one of the other Bridesmaids, not Kristen Wiig, and they talked about how they wanted to first go to this place to have lunch, but Kristen Wiig apparently wants us to go to a different place, and then we’re going to go over here. We’d be like why is Kristen Wiig not in this conversation? This is the whole point of us being here is to experience this discomfort through her.

So, if there is a lot of substance then, yeah, you probably want to avoid that. If it’s a fun little moment, especially in our YA rom-com, you know, why not?

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. So, our general take home advice is you should absolutely be aware of it. And if you’re getting the note about breaking POV it’s probably because something is not working right. So take a look at what’s not working and POV might be the problem, but it may also be something else that’s not working right and POV is just the thing that’s sticking out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Megana, do we have another question?

**Megana:** Awesome. So, Christina asks, “I’m taking a screenwriter class and the instructor is using the eight-sequence structure. I’ve never heard of it before. It seems to sort of map onto three-act structure, but the protagonist is supposed to have a unique want in each of the eight sequences, AKA every 10-15 pages. Is this eight-sequence structure widely used and should I be applying it to my screenwriting? Or could it possibly be derailing me from three-act structure?”

**John:** Craig, you had never heard of this, had you?

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** It’s not a thing. And I don’t mean to say that your screenwriting instructor is steering you in a dangerous place, but that person is probably doing as good a job as a screenwriting instructor can do. The idea that there are 10-15 page chunks that sort of feel a little bit different, sure. Great. Call them sequences. Call them whatever. I’m always going to push back against this dogmatic belief that there’s some magical clothesline or whatever metaphor for how the story has to hang together and that these shifts have to happen magically.

**Craig:** Christina, you know, you probably knew, somewhere in the back of your head or perhaps in the front of your head, that when you asked this question you were just going to make me insane. There is not eight-sequence structure. It’s not a thing. I mean, I’m sure it is a thing for some people, but it’s not a thing-thing.

By the way, three-act structure which is a thing-thing is also not really a thing in the sense that it’s only useful if it’s useful. But this notion that the protagonist is supposed to have a unique want in each of the eight sequences AKA every 10 to 15 pages is absurd. Your instructor is certainly making his or her way through teaching this class as they have given themselves a structure. And that’s fine. I disagree with it. I don’t think it is applicable or practical or artistically substantive or justified. And maybe if you’re not feeling it this isn’t the class for you. Because I have a feeling that 80% of screenwriting classes – and I’m being charitable – are not for anyone. That’s just my gut.

**John:** I found a link here which talks through what the eight sequences are. So, I’ll read the descriptions of the eight sequences. And it does – I’m curious what you think.

So sequence one is Status Quo and Inciting Incident. OK.

Sequence two is Predicament and Lock In. I get that. So the story gears are engaging.

Sequence three, First Obstacle and Raising the Stakes. That feels kind of generic to me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sequence four, First Combination/Midpoint.

**Craig:** Hmm? That’s my favorite. No, no, I’ve got to stop there. And this is something I talked about in my how to write a movie thing. This I really loathe. It’s a midpoint. Why? Why? It just says, “If the story is a tragedy and our hero dies, then the first culmination (or midpoint) should be a low point for our character.” Why?

**John:** I don’t know. I don’t know.

**Craig:** So the hell are you supposed to write it? It’s so dumb.

**John:** Well sequence five is where you get the Subplot and Rising Action.

**Craig:** Huh? Huh?

**John:** Sequence six is the Main Culmination and it’s the End of Act Two.

**Craig:** What does that mean?

**John:** I don’t know. Well, it explains what it means, but not great. Not in a way that’s meaningful. There’s New Tension and Twist in sequence seven. And then Resolution in sequence eight. So I was like, yeah, you know what it’s the things that are going to happen in a movie are going to happen just like they’re putting numbers on them.

**Craig:** You can feel the tap dancing.

**John:** I hope Christina really what you’re focusing on in this class is learning how to write scenes and scenes work. Because that’s going to be much more important. Because all this stuff about structure we’ve talked about a thousand times. Movies have a natural structure to them. There’s ways that stories want to unfold. But all the structure in the world isn’t going to help you if your scenes don’t work and if your characters are not engaging on the page. That should not be the focus of a class.

**Craig:** You know, everybody who does this stuff they come out of the gate strong on act one. Because act one is super easy to structure. Everybody knows what it means to start a story.

**John:** You got to meet your people.

**Craig:** You got to meet your people.

**John:** Figure out your world.

**Craig:** Something happens. They get stuck. They need to do a thing. They want something. And then in act two there’s just argle-bargle. For instance, this says, “The second act SAG,” that’s in all capitals, as if it’s a thing, “can set in at this point if we don’t have a STRONG,” in all capitals, “subplot to take the ball for a while.” What does that mean?

**John:** It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything.

**Craig:** Subplot? I don’t know what this means.

**John:** If you’re talking about classic one-hour dramas where there’s an A-story and a B-story and a C-story, but that’s not a feature. That’s not how these work.

**Craig:** No. I don’t know what any of this means. And I don’t know why.

**John:** And Christina doesn’t need to worry about it.

**Craig:** No, don’t worry about it. You know what? Write something fun. And by the way if your teacher who is devoted to the eight-sequence structure doesn’t like what you’ve written because it defies the eight-sequence structure, rest easy at night knowing that it doesn’t matter anymore than a 16-year-old 10th or 11th grade student defying the introductory paragraph, three example paragraph, conclusion paragraph structure of an essay, which is a terrible structure. The most boring possible way to write anything, but that’s what they teach.

So, you know, just listen to this show. We’re doing better than this guy.

**John:** All right, this last question may actually be useful and helpful for folks. So, Megana, if you’d get us for this.

**Megana:** OK, so Fulla asks, “What advice do you have for new writers about how to read screenplays as a learning exercise? That is reading screenplays of movies that have already been made. Is it good to just read them and take it all in by osmosis, or is there a particular process for breaking the script down that you would recommend?”

**John:** I have an opinion but Megana I’d actually like to ask your opinion first because you’re at a place now where you’re probably reading a lot of scripts and future screenplays, TV screenplays, when you read a script what do you do?

**Megana:** A part of the reason why I was so curious to hear your guys’ thought is I worry that I’m doing it wrong. But I just read it straight through.

**Craig:** Funny.

**Megana:** And I’m always so impressed and floored and hear my agent friends who read like ten screenplays a day, like how they get through it that quickly. And I think now that I’ve been reading screenplays for a while it’s starting to make more sense to me how to break it down and to be able to flip through and find certain things faster. Or just like keep parts of the story and identify them faster. But I think I’m still sort of reading them from page one on.

**John:** Yeah. And as a person who is trying to learn how good screenplays work, especially if you’re reading screenplays of existing movies that are good screenplays that you want to learn from, that’s how you do it. You read the scripts. And sort of as you’re reading them figure out what impact are they having for you. What’s working for you on the page? What are lessons you can take from it?

The one thing I will say I have learned to do over time is in watching a movie or reading a script I will try to take some notes to myself afterwards about what I learned from it. What I actually took and what’s useful about it. If you can do that, that’s great. But really it comes down to your own taste. And your agents who are reading 10 scripts in an afternoon, they’re skimming. They’re not really reading. And they’re not reading to improve their own writing ability. They’re just reading to plow through stuff. So that’s not really I think a fair standard to try to hold yourself to.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’re doing it right, Megana. Fulla, if you are reading screenplays of movies that have been made, as you say, my advice would be to make sure you’ve seen the movie first. Watch the movie and feel, just like a regular person. Just go in there like a good old audience member. Experience the movie. Just make internal notes of what delighted you, what scared you, what interested you, what bored you. A line that made you lean in and a line that made you roll your eyes. Then read the script.

And as you read the script just start to note how the parts that you loved or hated related to the words on the page. And what you think went right and what you think went wrong. And the most valuable sections are probably the ones where there’s something that you love in the movie, you read it on the page, and you go, wow, OK, so the page, it’s there, and it works in the movie. What do I love about this so much? Why did this make me so happy? What surprised me about it? And just think about it.

The more you get into super-duper analysis breaking down, et cetera, the more you’re drifting out of the zone of somebody that makes things and more into the zone of somebody that analyzes things. The danger is you don’t want to sort of quietly train yourself to be a critic. You want to train yourself to be a creator.

So, always think about that as best you can while you’re doing this. But you’ll be fine.

**John:** I totally agree about not becoming a critic of things. And so if you are going to break stuff down, I would say break it down, like a scene, look at how that writer got into and out of that scene and sort of the choices that writer made about how they’re going to get that information out. That is so helpful to see the craftsman there. Imagine you’re looking at an amazing piece of furniture and you’re able to deconstruct it to see how the joinery works. That’s useful.

But don’t engage in film criticism. I think Craig’s exercise is great in terms of seeing the movie then reading the script. After you do that a few times I say flip it. And if there’s a movie that you haven’t seen but you can find the screenplay for read the screenplay and see what movie are you building in your head based on the screenplay. And then you can compare it to how it actually turned out. That’s a good counterexample. A realization of like how much of the movie you saw really was first reflected on that page.

So just read a lot. And I think Fulla, you versus Christina, if all the time Christina spends in that class learning about eight-sequence structure, she was instead reading a bunch of screenplays, she’s going to come out ahead.

**Craig:** No question. And pretty sure it’s a lot cheaper.

**John:** Yeah. It is cheaper. Especially now. I remember when I went to USC for film school, one of the big draws is they had a big script library so you could check out two scripts at a time and read these scripts. And it was so helpful and so useful. And now we have the Internet and just all those scripts that are there which were such a valuable resource, they are free for everybody and that’s better. That’s how it should be.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. All right, Megana, thank you so much for these questions.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you, guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing oddly is self-serving. I generally don’t do a One Cool Thing that’s actually something I wrote, but this year I wrote up my 2020 sort of year in review. Basically I wanted to take a look at sort of all the stuff I did in 2020, for my writing stuff, for the apps we build. Sort of personal stuff. You know, health and such. And actually just take an accounting of what happened in 2020. Because while the year was obviously bizarre, there were a lot of things that were still under my control and I wanted to be sort of accountable for the things I could control.

So I did sort of year-end review. It ended up being a super, super long blog post, which I hadn’t intended. But from it I was trying to really ask three questions. What went well? What didn’t go so well? And what did I learn? And it’s the what did I learn is probably the most important things, because that’s the stuff that helps inform the choices I make for 2021. So, take a look at it. If you’re inspired to, it’s not too late into January to be thinking about what you did in 2020 and really looking forward to what you want to do in 2021.

**Craig:** I assume a big chunk of that review is just about how you treated me poorly and how you’re going to get better?

**John:** How I could treat Craig better is really a part of it. I also want to credit Megana Rao, our producer, because she did a review of what happened in 2020 as well and it got me thinking like, oh wow, I tend to discount all the things that happened over the course of the year. And so when she did her listing of things like, oh yeah, that was a lot.

**Craig:** You know, that’s the thing. You forget. It’s true. You get a lot done. You get more done than you think. So always good to give yourself a little bit of a hug at the end of a hard year and man was this a hard one.

Here’s my One Cool Thing, and this is a wonderful hug you can give yourself. I every now and then will recommend a game on the iPad. Usually it’s because I found it to be a fun diversion. This one I truly love. I love this game. I love it on the level of loving The Room and stuff like that, although it’s very different. It’s called There is No Game. And it is an independent game that’s kind of done in the sort of ‘90s pixel style which generally I just don’t like, because I’m like we have lived through that. I don’t want to still do that again.

But it’s purposeful here. It’s very purposeful here. This is a fascinating exercise in meta-analysis of games while playing a game, and it’s also very beautiful, and then becomes rather touching. And it is also mostly narrated by its creator, Pascal Cammisotto, who is French and so you’re basically being led through this by a man with a very strong accent, which at first you’re like I’m struggling to understand a few of these words. And then by the time you’re well into it you are absolutely in love with him and his accent. And the fact that he’s making fun of his accent. And the game is making fun of his accent.

It’s brilliant. I think this game is absolutely brilliant. And I urge you to go and spend the whatever it is, the $3 or something that it is to play it. I just loved it. Really fun.

So, again, There is No Game. Technology the full title is There is No Game: Wrong Dimension. It’s wonderful.

**John:** And you’d recommend we play it on iPad if that’s possible?

**Craig:** Yes, absolutely. iPad. Well, you can play it I think via Steam. You can play it on Mac as well. But it was released for Android, which I don’t care about, and iOS just a couple of weeks ago on December 17.

**John:** Excellent. I look forward to checking that out.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Rajesh Naroth. Oh, Craig, you’re going to want to listen to this one. It’s a good Mandalorian riff.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**John:** 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 like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can get them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. Plus you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has a lot of links to things we talk about on the show.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. That’s where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record online. Craig, I would not be lying if I didn’t say that this was a good episode.

**Craig:** [laughs] I have to go through the layers of negatives.

**John:** I have no idea how that actually comes out.

**Craig:** I think you said that it was a good episode. I agree.

**John:** Good. Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. Our bonus topic is on lying. And so the question that we had earlier from Nisario was follow up really on our discussion we had in the random advice episode where a listener had written in saying like, “Hey John, how do you feel about gay people not being allowed to donate blood and would you lie about being gay so that you could donate blood?” And Craig you said that if I had that rare blood type, if I had O-negative you would recommend that I do lie.

**Craig:** Strongly. Yes. I think what I said was that I would not only recommend it but I would bother you about it almost daily.

**John:** Yeah. And so I found that actually genuinely fascinating. I didn’t want to hijack the whole episode, just have a long discussion about that, but it’s a bonus segment so we can do whatever we want in a bonus segment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I found that really fascinating. And particularly coming from a guy who like the first episode of Chernobyl starts a line, “What is the cost of lies?”

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so I think there is a cost to it. And I sort of wanted to piece through this because I don’t come to it from a religious perspective. I don’t believe in a Saint Augustine kind of way I’m going to lose my immortal soul for that lie. But to me it really was important to not lie about that. And so I wanted to sort of pick through that a little bit more if we could.

**Craig:** Sure. So, the simplest way of looking at it is that lying does have a cost. One of the things that I said in the podcast we did for Chernobyl was that after thinking about this and working on that show and running over the various thought experiments in my mind, it seems to me that there is a certain amount of lying that is just built into how we exist. We actually cannot function neurologically without a certain amount of lying.

**John:** And let’s define lying. So is lying any deception? Or is it knowingly telling a falsehood? What is lying in that definition?

**Craig:** I would make it as broad as possible. I think we need a little bit of denial to be able to get through the day. Some of us need a lot of denial to get through the day, which is a kind of lying. It’s essentially a refutation of fact. Like for instance if our own mortality were on the forefront of our minds then I don’t know how we would get through it. We are engaged in a steady passive denial of our mortality all the time.

And also there is a general lying to get through the day just to be polite and kind, and to not hurt people’s feelings. When you see somebody and you don’t like what they’re wearing and they’re like, “Oh my god, what do you think?” Why? Truly it would be damaging to everyone if we just opened our brains up and spilled it all out. It’s one of the reasons why the Internet, particularly social media, has been so toxic. It’s not because social media makes people bad. It’s because social media stops them sometimes from lying. They feel free to just say exactly what they think or feel and then we begin to corrode.

So there is a certain baseline that is required. The lies that we talk about in the show are the malicious lies that are designed to give us comfort even when we must address the danger. If a doctor says to you, “You have,” like a doctor said to Steve Jobs, “Steve, you have pancreatic cancer.” And he engaged in a series of lies to himself about what that meant and about what kind of treatment would work. And he paid the price. And he found out what the cost of those lies were, which is death. And that’s the kind of stuff that worries me.

When we talk about the rules surrounding the donation of blood and gay people, that rule is based on a lie. And the lie is that the blood of gay men is dangerous. It is not. And also our ability to screen blood for things like HIV, which is why that rule came about in the first place, is very good. So it’s just based on a kind of lie. We don’t want to deal with the notion that somehow we should just proceed towards scientific truth there. Specifically scientific truth is the truth that is most concerning to me and the one that we really can’t afford to lie about.

So that’s why that’s my position on the blood donation. It’s just scientific truth that we cannot ignore or lie about. And it hurts people. That’s the cost.

**John:** Exactly. So you can frame that either way. What is the good you’re trying to do? You’re trying to save someone’s life by donating blood. And it is good to save someone’s life. Absolutely established that. And we’re talking about what is the cost of it. As I said at the start, I’m not worried about lying in the sense of like it’s going to cost me my mortal soul. I don’t believe that’s a thing.

But I do think there are other costs that you may not be accounting for. And I sort of want to talk through a little bit of that, because we’ve had other discussions even prior to Scriptnotes that involve some of this stuff. So I think that in telling a lie, in telling this specific lie saying that I am not – checking the box that I am not a gay man or have not had sex or whatever, I’m undermining trust in the blood system itself. Because if I’m willing to say, to lie on this checkbox, what does it mean that – what is to stop me from lying about the other checkboxes, or things that could be more important?

Why is the choice about what’s important to lie about and not lie about left to me, a person who is not a scientist, versus the science? You and I both agree that this ban should be taken down. The proper solution is to get rid of the ban.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But I think even the interim step of me lying on this checkbox is undermining trust in the system because if we’re saying it’s OK for gay men to lie on that checkbox well is it OK for people with other serious blood-borne diseases to be lying on that checkbox. I think it naturally undermines trust in the way that lies undermine trust.

That’s one of my objections.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that is reasonable. And there are certain systems where I think you’re right. If there is a sense that there is a mass jury negation going on then, yes, we are going to lose faith in the system. In the case of blood donations, it’s a little bit like the security question you get at the airport. Did you pack your bags yourself? Well, that’s actually of no value. It does not matter if people say yes or no. The system really can’t rely on the self-reporting of truth. It needs to independently screen. There is no reason that we should be asking anybody whether or not they engage in behaviors that might lead to their blood having a virus in it any more than they should be asking us when we walk through the airport if we’re carrying a weapon. They should just make us go through the freaking metal detector. And the same thing does – it should and also does – happen with blood, which is why the question itself is stupid.

It is putting an unfair moral burden on you that is both unnecessary and dangerous for the overall health of our society.

**John:** Absolutely. And so I think my second objection is that in telling the lie that you’re asking me to tell I’m actually perpetuating a broken system rather than fixing it. I’m allowing the system to keep going and I’m bearing the cost of the broken system rather than the system being fixed. And so I think that is – I raise that objection that it’s prolonging the system going on in its broken state.

**Craig:** 100 percent. That is a real objection, too. And I’ve got to say, if it were me, I think what I would do, if I were O-negative and gay, I think I would try and find somebody that would work with me to essentially get around the nonsense. The way that people for instance literally on a daily basis, on a minute-by-minute basis work around the euthanasia laws in our country to die peacefully and willfully. All the time. Because we should be able to. It’s ridiculous that we can’t, and so we do.

So I would try and figure out how to get around it while also fighting the system. But be able to fight the system and change it. That would be my moral compromise.

**John:** So two other points I want to make. So in telling a lie I feel like, and me having to tell this lie every time I donate blood I feel like I’m normalizing lying. That it basically – and we talk about deception and obviously some deception is naturally part of life, but if we’re saying that I should systematically check this check box that I know is untrue to do a thing it’s making lying more acceptable as a choice overall in society for function. And that that does not feel great.

The same way that cheating overall, once you see people start cheating people are more likely to cheat. I feel like lying is the same kind of thing. But I really want to focus back on myself though because you said if I were a gay man I would do these things, and I want to talk about sort of like – I don’t want to normalize lying for myself. In telling a lie I would be normalizing lying for myself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So every time you choose to lie you’re telling yourself to be comfortable being a liar. It’s like a tax on your self-esteem I think. And you’re always worried about being caught. Because here’s the thing that could happen. Let’s say I say like, oh, sorry, I was late. I was donating blood. And someone would say like, “Wait, I thought you couldn’t donate blood because you’re gay.” And it’s like, oh, sorry. Guess I’m a liar. That sucks. And that experience is an experience I’ve had through so much of my life that you haven’t had because as a gay man I’ve been asked to sustain a lie and be in the closet for the first 23 years of my life. And that really is a tremendous burden to sort of carry along.

And so I think part of my reason for why I won’t check that box is because I know how much that sucks. And how bad that is.

**Craig:** Well, that’s a great point. You have carried the burden of being forced to lie unfairly for a long time and therefore whatever additional burden you might be able to make an ethical argument in favor of is going to hurt you way more than it would hurt me. And that’s real. I mean, I would still bother you all the time, because that’s me, because I’m an asshole. And just thinking about people that need blood. But that would be kind of like, OK, you would always have your ethic—

What we’re doing right now is engaging in a really interesting bioethical debate. The only reason that we have bioethics is because there is no answer to this. There is only a weighing. There is only a balance. And your personal experience is absolutely part of the balance. No question. Has to be.

**John:** So, anyway, there’s not going to be a clear resolution to this, but I feel like in more fully airing what happens being this I would say that the experience I’ve had in terms of donating blood there’s been other situations where I’ve been asked to sort of play along with sort of like this is how we do it, and I’m always questioning the just play along with it. Because I had such a negative experience with having to carry – having to live within a lie 24/7.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That you feel it differently. So it’s a case where a person’s personal experience does impact sort of the choices that they make.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. And even if you haven’t had the burden of living in the closet, which I haven’t had to have, it’s really important for anybody who has kind of had the privilege of blithely going through life saying, oh, this is who I am, to also still question and stress test every time you are contemplating lying. And asking yourself why. And forcing that ethical debate in your head to be true. And relying on your inner sense of guilt or concern.

It’s a bioethical debate. It’s a really interesting question of what you do when you’re living in an unfair system with an unfair law that is based on absolutely no valid science whatsoever. What do you do?

And this is an interesting one. I’m kind of fascinated to see what people think.

**John:** Yeah. Just so I don’t come across as the idealist who would never, ever tell a lie, I will say one of the things that annoys Mike so much about me is that I am very good at sort of the convenience sort of short-cutting lie where if I have to talk to a customer service person I will create the crafted shorter version of the thing that actually – I will describe a scenario that gets me sort of what I need to have happen rather than the actual thing that actually has happened. So I am kind of a fabulist in that way. I will pretend that a certain circumstance has passed so that I can get to the resolution I need to get to.

**Craig:** You’re an awful person. [laughs] What you’re saying is that in your house you’re actually the least ethical one.

**John:** Yeah. I’m actually probably the Edward Bloom of our house.

**Craig:** Wow. Oh my god. So Mike is really hard core.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Geez. Well I hope he’s not O-negative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ve got to worry about that now.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGA Rejects WME Deal](https://deadline.com/2020/12/wga-rejects-wme-deal-agency-grapple-conflicts-of-interest-1234662648/), [Judge Rejects Injunction](https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/wme-wga-lawsuit-injunction-deny-writers-1234876988/)
* [Rubik’s Cube](https://www.dropbox.com/s/yjg9nfr506axedo/RUBIK%27S%20CUBE%20-%20HP%20%26%20EC%20Visual%20Presentation%5B3%5D.pdf?dl=0)
* [Mr. Clean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Clean): a sailor? A genie? Both?
* [Eight Sequence Structure](https://thescriptlab.com/screenwriting/structure/the-sequence/45-the-eight-sequences/)
* [John’s 2020 Year in Review](https://johnaugust.com/2021/2020-annual-review)
* [There is No Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Game:_Wrong_Dimension)
* [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/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/483standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/time-lords).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has one bit of swearing, so just a warning if you’re in the car with your kids.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 484 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re going to look at the many ways screenwriters compress, twist, and otherwise manipulate time in their scripts and strategies for doing it effectively. Then we’ll discuss dialogue, both in terms of subtext and continuity. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss which moment in history or prehistory we’d most like to visit and why.

**Craig:** Exciting stuff.

**John:** It’s potentially a flashback episode.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** We could even weave in a Stuart Special.

**Craig:** We’ve actually had a little bit of a pre-discussion about this time thing with our D&D group, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out in our bonus episode for everyone else.

**John:** Yes. Little bits of news. So this sort of snuck in under the wire. This was a December 31st announcement that the DGA sent a letter to WME telling it to get rid of its conflicts. Basically the head of the DGA sent this letter to the head of WME, Ari Greenberg, and said “we believe now is the right time to communicate our strong support for DGA’s efforts to remedy the affiliated production company issue.” So, Craig, I feel torn about this in ways that, I don’t know–

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m not.

**John:** We always reach for ways, you know, of German should have a word for it. But it’s not really German. I feel like the Swedish might have the right word for this feeling of like, yes, it’s the right thing, but it’s not kind of the way you want it to happen.

**Craig:** I’m going to quote this – I don’t know if you saw this amazing interview with this Capitol Hill police officer who had been attacked by the mob.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. And the last bit of it was amazing.

**Craig:** The last bit of it was amazing. And I will go ahead and I guess this will earn us a language warning. But he said some of the people in that mob, realizing that he was in danger of being killed, finally sort of surrounded him and tried to protect him from further harm. And to those people he said, “Thank you but also fuck you for being there.” [laughs] And that’s how I feel about this. I mean, what an enormous expenditure of political capital for the DGA to just show up in the final seconds of the war to announce that they’re in support of the losing side losing. I mean, this is pointless. I don’t quite even – the only thing I think they get out of this is maybe once again earning some sort of respect from the companies for restraint?

And when I say companies I mean the agencies at this point. I don’t know what the point of this is exactly.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t know where this message actually came from, whether it was directors in the guild saying, hey, we also want this resolved, or where this came from. I want to be an optimist. And so in being an optimist I want to say that one of my great frustrations for two decades has been how little the three guilds have been willing to work together on issues of obvious multiple guild concern. And this was one of them. And the WGA did it all by itself. OK, fine.

But as we head forward into this next decade the role of the streamers and residuals and what that all looks like, we all care about that. It all has to be figured out as sort of one thing. So, maybe this is a small opening, a small glimmer of hope that we can actually coordinate some of our efforts in trying to address the challenges ahead here.

**Craig:** Over here in the pessimist’s corner I think that the DGA has always been more than happy to strategically allow the Writers Guild to be the crazy ones and the aggressive ones and the militant ones. And then pick up the spoils after the battle is over. That’s kind of how it works. They let us go into the coal mine. They don’t have to do stuff. They didn’t like some of this packaging stuff or affiliated production any more than we did, but they also didn’t have to spend anything. Not one of their members had to fire an agent. They just waited for us to take all the body blows, to go through two years or whatever long, a year and a half, or however long this was. Or continues to be. And now, you know, when it’s basically over now they can come in and try and earn some sort of, I don’t know, labor solidarity chit. That’s C-H-I-T.

I don’t see them abandoning that strategy any time soon. Honestly, you know, tip of the hat to them. It’s worked for them for decades. I don’t see them changing.

**John:** Yeah. So basically Craig Mazin maintains his WGA militancy as always. He’s always the one banging that gong, that WGA gong, over all sort of reason and order.

**Craig:** Well, I would say relative to the DGA I am militant. But, yeah, I’m doomed to be caught between the Writers Guild and the DGA. And then there’s SAG. By the way, I’m a member of all three of these unions, so I’m sure someone is going to be yelling at me soon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I don’t know, SAG doesn’t seem to – they just seem to be so inwardly focused. That’s no comment on actors in any way, shape, or form. [laughs] But it just seems so navel-gazey about things. And they have their own issues.

The Writers Guild and the Directors Guild should be allied. Just naturally they should be. The fact that they’re not is…[sighs]

**John:** Yeah. At some point we should probably schedule an episode where we really talk through that because it’s got to be so confusing to anybody who has not been immersed in this for two decades to understand why things are the way they are and how we got to this place.

**Craig:** Well, let’s schedule three episodes to explain why there’s a Writers Guild East and West.

**John:** That’s an easier one, but yes, that same episode or a different episode can talk about the East and the West and how luckily there’s not conflict there.

**Craig:** Anymore.

**John:** They’re doing different things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Some housekeeping, sort of follow up stuff. So many of you are members of the Premium program which is awesome. Thank you for being Premium subscribers. We just added a $49 price point, so you can either go monthly, but some people asked, hey, what if there was an annual price and it would be cheaper. So, sure. So you can get 12 months for the price of 10. If you go to Scripnotes.net you can sign up for that. But thank you for all the folks who do that.

Some people are also confused about the back episodes. So the back episodes are available through Scriptnotes.net. That’s through the new Premium service, so it’s not Libsyn where stuff used to be. It’s all this new thing. So we used to have Premium episodes through Libsyn. Now they’re all through this new service called Supporting Cast. We’ve been on it for a year. It’s gone really well. So thank you for everyone who has joined us over there.

But if you’re writing in with concerns about like, oh, I was looking for this thing on Libsyn, that’s why it’s not there anymore because it’s all moved over to this new service.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Yeah. And some follow up about bad IP, suggestions for – obviously we have the Rubik’s Cube Movie, the Slinky Movie. We’re always searching for a new thing. Dwayne from Edmonton, Canada wrote in to say, “Yes, I was listening in the shower, but the Showerhead Movie.” And then someone else had a suggestion for the Loofah Movie. I like Loofah Movie more than the Showerhead Movie because Showerhead actually has a function and a purpose. Loofah has some sense of like it’s tough but it’s soft. There’s a little texture to the Loofah.

**Craig:** I don’t love either one of them. Because they feel like–

**John:** I don’t love them either.

**Craig:** They have to live within the realm of possibility. That some thickheaded dingbat in the ancillary IP department of a large corporation might actually say, “You know what? We should make a movie out of this. It has to be something that is theoretically possible. Theoretically.

**John:** And really IP is intellectual property. And the thing about Lucky the Leprechaun is there is intellectual property there. There’s a copyright. There’s a protectable thing that no one else can make that movie. It’s a struggle we have, like you go in and talk to – I went in to talk to a studio a year ago and they’re like, “Oh, we really want to develop blank.” And it’s like, great, that is public IP. That’s not a protectable thing. So what is your plan for going in to do that?

Like Jack and the Beanstalk is public IP. And so anyone can make that, so would you make that? You don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it has to be something that is possess-able and ownable and exploitable. That’s the crux of the whole awful affair is that something is being exploited in the most cynical manner. So there has to be an exploitable object.

**John:** Speaking of exploitable objects, Beau Willimon, who is head of the WGA East.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** This week signed on to do the Risk movie which is based on a Hasbro property.

**Craig:** There you go. Right.

**John:** And would classically be the kind of thing that we make fun of on the show, because Risk has no characters. It has kind of a general scenario of world domination and archaic names for countries and strategies which are obvious but also crucial to understand of, you know, as a child you might start with an Australia strategy, but any adult who has played the game knows that the South American strategy is better.

**Craig:** Of course, the Venezuelan gambit. Always. Just, yeah. It is strange how the Risk board does sort of undermine what we understand to be where military and strategic value actually is located. The thing about Risk, it’s similar I guess to what they were doing with Battleship, not that it will turn out the same way. They’re just taking a game that was already based on something real and kind of echoing back to the thing it was based on. So Risk was just a board game version of a large WWI style battle for global dominance.

So my guess is that’s what the movie will – I don’t know. Actually I have no idea what the movie will be.

**John:** We’ll talk to Beau about it at some point. There was a vague plan on Twitter for us to be playing an online game of Risk to talk through it. So, who knows? Maybe that will actually happen and we’ll find some good charitable cause to play Risk online so we can celebrate this exploitation of an IP and hopefully do some good in the world.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** Exactly. All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. So explaining sort of how the sausage is made. We are looking at a shared outline document. I put stuff on as I’m sort of helping to organize this episode. Megana put stuff on and we sort of try to group it together and have it make some sense.

Generally the topic for the week comes out of something either I was working on during the week or something I saw this week. Or Craig will suggest a topic and we’ll sort of flesh it out. In this case it was something I was writing and something I was watching. One scene that I was working on this week it was just too long. And it was clear that it needed to be cut into two scenes. Basically I needed to cut the middle out of it. And cutting the middle out of it is really common craft work that screenwriters need to do. And we haven’t talked very much about that. But basically we need to do a time compression in the middle of it.

There was also a sequence I was working on that I had scenes that were back to back A-B-C, but there was going to be a really significant time jump. So, you know, I was sort of changing the rules of the movie part way through where it had been sort of like scenes were very naturally flowing, like were all within one day, and then suddenly we’re jumping forward weeks. And that’s a thing we haven’t talked about.

So that’s part of why I want to talk about this, but also the movies I watched this week all dealt with time in interesting ways. So Nomadland, which was great, people should see it, has a kind of weird cyclical time thing to it. It uses time really strangely. Tenet has this weird time version. The Lego Movie seemed to take place in this continuous present. It’s just like hyperactively present. The Crown has these giant jumps forward in time between episodes. And we also watched Edge of Tomorrow which is an even better movie than I remember it being.

**Craig:** I love that movie.

**John:** Which is all about sort of looping time. So, time is just a thing that screenwriters do and it’s probably the resource that screenwriters have to control kind of most carefully. So I thought we’d just spend our main topic here just talking about time as screenwriters use it.

**Craig:** We have this craft over here, just been thinking about this because I was talking with somebody who works in plays, so she’s a playwright, and all of her work is on stage. And on stage even though there may be cheats of how time functions, it is all unfolding kind of in real time in front of you because you are actually in the room with these people. You are present in their reality, so you’re all experiencing the tick-tick of time together.

But onscreen we don’t. And in fact the entire exercise of telling a story cinematically is one that involves the manipulation of time. The very notion going all the way back to simple concept of editorial montage. I look at this, and then the camera looks over here, and we understand that there may have been time that passed. It just happens in the blink of an eye like that.

So, it’s not even something that we can sometimes choose to do or dwell on. We are always doing it in every movie no matter what. And that’s separate and apart from the theme of time. Because obviously some movies are about time itself and how it functions. And you have Looper and Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow and things like that. But in any movie, in any movie, I mean, how many times have you sat there and gone, OK, they’re in a space and this scene has concluded, but they must still be in this space again to start a new movement of the scene, meaning time has gone by. But how and why? What do I do to show that there’s been this lapse of time?

**John:** Yeah. And you think like, oh, well here’s ten tricks for doing it. Like sure, maybe there are a list of like you zoom out and you start in a close up of this thing and as you pull back out some more time has passed. Or you’re focused on this thing. There’s tricks, but it’s all hard work.

And before we even get into the jumping forward in time, we should call there are movies that try to take away that grammar. And they stick out because they are so unusual. There’s things like 12 Angry Men which is based on a play which is basically a filmed play which has sort of continuous time because it’s a play. But things like – do you remember the movie Timecode, the Mike Figgis movie that it’s quadrants and they’re all in real time.

1917 has the illusion of real time buried. Clue. Phone Booth. Dog Day Afternoon. United 93. Russian Arc. Where you’re sort of generally moving continuously through a space, and the whole gimmick, the conceit is that you’re not cutting. But those are the exceptions. And most times in cinematic storytelling you are cutting, you are jumping forward in time. And just learn as an audience to accept that as a thing that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. We know when we’re watching these things inherently that we’re going to get a compressed version of time because it’s dramatic. It’s exciting. If it weren’t we wouldn’t go. I mean, 12 Angry Men is a wonderful play and it’s a terrific film. And if it was actually presented in the way a jury deliberation would go it would be profoundly boring. Profoundly boring. With side discussions of irrelevance and people leaving to go to the bathroom and coming back. It just doesn’t work.

We are always twisting it and turning it. And so one of the things that you have to decide tonally is are you going to be naturalistic about it, meaning are you going to kind of hide the seams in between the time jumps, or are you going to have fun with it. Is it going to be something you wear on your sleeve? Like in Go, for instance, the way you move time around, you’re not hiding it, you’re making a virtue of it. But then that is a tone, right? So then the movie is sort of like an elevated heightened reality.

You have to make those decisions upfront about what you’re doing with this stuff. But what you can’t do is just ignore it. You need to be a craftswoman or man when it comes to presenting the disruptions of time to the audience.

**John:** Yeah. So what you’re saying is that you may not write down your plan for how time works in your movie. It’s very unlikely you are going to have a specific time plan. But you are establishing rules very early on in your script for how time works in your movie. Both how it works inside scenes and between scenes. And so let’s talk about some of those rules and assumptions that are going to be there and what you need to think through.

So, an obvious example is like is it continuous. Basically are we existing in real time or the illusion of real time? That you’re never jumping ahead. How big of jumps can you make? Can you jump to later that same day, or the next week? Or can you jump forward a few years. And that’s a very different kind of storytelling if you’re able to jump bigger jumps along the way.

How many clocks have you started ticking? And so I’m thinking back to your movie Identity Thief. And there is a timeline. You’re having characters say aloud that they need to get from here to there in a certain period of time. You’re setting expectations. Different kinds of movies are going to have different clocks ticking. But you’re generally going to set some kind of framework for what needs to happen by what point.

In Big Fish you don’t know when Edward Bloom is going to die, but you know he’s going to die. And so that is the ticking clock where you get the dramatic question of the movie answered before that alarm goes off.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I like outlining, to be honest with you. Because when you outline you are confronted by those disconnects of time. And you feel them and they literally help you outline. That’s how you suddenly go, OK, I think that this index card consists of these things that occur. And then it’s time for a new index card, or a new paragraph, or however you’re doing it. Because time is broken. There’s a snap. And I want to justify it. And I want to play around with it. And I also am aware that if I announce a certain kind of timeline that leads to a certain kind of pressure I need everything that follows to fall in line with it.

This is why Chernobyl is only five episodes and not six. Because as I was working on episode two it seemed that the timeline that the story had presented required a certain kind of speed. And even though the events that take place over the course of episode two went over the course of a week, into an hour, if they had gone into two hours of television it would have felt like two or three weeks, which would have felt wrong.

So you just have to have this weird internal fake chronometer that is aligned with what you think people’s experience of the time flow will be as they watch.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s drill into a little bit more on this, because we talked about Chernobyl in the sense of time to a limited degree. But each episode of Chernobyl changes its scale of time a little bit. So that first episode feels close to real time. You’re not slavishly real time. But it’s very, very present tense all the way through it.

The second episode, if everything took place in a matter of hours in the first episode, then you’re a matter of two days in the second episode, and then several weeks, and then months. It kaleidoscopes out. And that was a very deliberate choice really, I assume, from the conception?

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, you know, of note the first episode which does cover, I mean, the flow of events once you get out of the little prologue starts at 1:23 in the morning and it ends roughly at sunrise. That unfolds over about 50 minutes. It feels – so that’s the other thing – even though it feels like real time, it is absolutely not. And juggling some of that stuff and being really specific about it was important because I’m aware that there’s – it’s a funny thing. If you say to people, OK, this is happening at 1:30 in the morning, and then you show them something else happening at 4am, in their minds they’re like that’s really close together. It’s the middle of the night. Not a lot of stuff happening in the middle of the night, therefore it’s like those things are right after another.

If it’s in the middle of a day and it’s 10am and then it’s 2pm, that’s a different vibe. And suddenly you feel like a lot of time has passed. Things have happened. What went on in between those things? You just have to kind of have that weird sense of it.

**John:** Yeah. What you’re describing is time is relative. And not in any special relativity way, but in the sense of general relativity there’s an observer. And time flows according to what the observer sees, in this case what the audience sees. And it’s the audience that sees that two events that happened in the middle of the night are closer together than two events that happen in the middle of the day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And often one of the things we encounter as screenwriters and as filmmakers is the big shift is like a day scene versus a night scene. A bunch happens between the two of those. And even if they’re back to back in the day scene and night scene that is a challenge.

A thing we often encounter with stories that are happening on multiple coasts is like it’s night in New York but it’s still maybe daytime in Los Angeles or in Australia. That’s confusing. That’s weird to see. And you try to avoid those situations because it just feels weird and wrong for the audience.

We know that they’re in different time zones, and yet if two characters are having a conversation they should both be in daylight or at nighttime they shouldn’t be split between the two of them.

**Craig:** Isn’t that funny? And there are times where people, it’s like spy movies and such where you have people in Washington, DC talking to an operative in Malaysia. Well, that’s about 12 hours apart. That’s like flip AM and PM. You will almost always see one of those people inside. Because you don’t want to see the light/dark thing. You don’t want to see somebody going night to – it is really confusing to us. Like the way our own circadian rhythms get biologically confused by jetlag. We just can’t handle it. It feels wrong and it takes us out of the moment, which is of course the thing we’re always trying to not do.

**John:** One of the other rules you’re establishing in whatever you’re creating is travel time. And so a show I loved deeply as I watched it is Alias. And as the series went along suddenly she could be kind of anywhere magically right away. They never showed her traveling someplace, so it’s like she’s in Los Angeles. She’s in Europe. She’s back. And somehow it’s still the same day. Travel time just sort of went away. And early seasons of Game of Thrones I felt like it just took forever to get from Winterfell down to King’s Landing. And then suddenly like, oh, you’re just there.

And, you know, in some ways that is just the collision of all the transitional scenes. Weeks could have been passing during that time. But it also just felt like they changed the rules in terms of how quickly you could move from place to place because they didn’t – it wasn’t serving them to show the travel time that would be involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that there is a boredom factor to repeating the kind of expanded time. So, it is interesting to watch a slow journey if it’s new to you. If it’s not, I’m all in favor of just like skip ahead, skip ahead. Fast forward. So I don’t have to watch the same boring journey again. No question, in the early seasons of Game of Thrones getting to The Wall took forever, which felt right. And traveling, it seemed impossible to get from Essos to Westeros. It was like a massive amount of land and ocean to cover. And as you got deeper in and closer to the end then things started going faster because you had experienced the journeys already.

And, yeah, was there some time things where you’re like on paper you have broken your own time travel rules? Yes. And you just kind of have to sometimes take those hits because when you are as deep into that world as those guys were after whatever it was, 80 episodes, it’s really hard to stay consistent and keep the story moving. It’s just hard to keep that timeline consistent.

**John:** Now so a lot of what we’ve been talking about so far has been scene-by-scene, or sequence-by-sequence, and sort of the stuff that you can look at in an outline form and figure out, OK, this is how we’re handling time. But let’s zoom in and talk about time within a scene. Because even as we’re talking to a playwright, a playwright is optimizing dialogue and moments within a scene so that things that would normally take place over four hours are happening in ten minutes. There’s an optimization that’s natural to any kind of dramatic writing where you’re sort of getting the tightest, best version of these things.

What I find to be so different as a screenwriter than other forms of writing is that we have this expectation of just how long a scene can be and how much has to be accomplished, and so often we have to be doing really delicate surgery to cut out half a page, to jump over some natural moments that might happens so we can get to that next thing. We’re always just trying to take out the stitches and see if we can just sew a little bit tighter. And that is part of it.

One of the things I’ve learned to do much better over the course of 20 years of doing this is recognizing when I can’t actually just make this – when I can’t tighten it and when I need to just actually get rid of this scene or approach it from a completely different way because there’s no short version of this scene that’s going to handle what I needed to do.

**Craig:** This is why the classes that aspiring screenwriters should be taking are not, in my opinion, screenwriting classes. Are we going to talk by the way about the crazy QAnon screen guy? Maybe next week. Because that was something else.

**John:** Oh yeah. When we have a little bit more about that we’ll do some of that.

**Craig:** We’ll get around to him next week. But I think the classes that screenwriters or aspiring screenwriters should be taking are editing classes. Because editing is where the time compression and expansion rubber meets the road. And you begin to see exactly how flexible or inflexible something is. There is a point where the material will snap. And it will not feel correct in terms of the manipulation of time. And that tensile strength, that flexibility, is different depending on tone and pace. But you’ll see it in there.

And the more you can get a rhythm of how that functions in an edit the more you will be able to anticipate that as you’re writing ahead of the edit. You will know that you can get away with certain things and you will also know you can’t get away with certain things.

I’ve spent so much time in editing rooms. So much time in editing rooms. If there’s one thing I can point to that has made me a better writer than I used to be over the years it’s the amount of time editing scenes of things I wrote.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And recognizing like, oh, I thought I needed that or basically you have to acknowledge that like it made sense why you did that on the page. And then when you actually see it with physical people in the blocking that they have, that moment just can’t last. We don’t have space for that in the movie we actually made. So therefore we need to come into that scene later or leave earlier.

So let’s talk about some of the classic techniques we do use for trimming time, which is also trimming pages. Because how we sort of measure our time is pages. Come in as late as you can. Leave as early as you can. So basically what is the latest moment you could start this scene. Can you start the scene with the person answering the question rather than the question being asked? Can you get out on a look rather than on that last line? What is the moment you can jump out of this thing? How can you not ask the question that a person would naturally ask? How can you get from A to B as cleanly as possible and still have an interesting scene?

Some of the challenges we face though is you can optimize a scene so much that it’s just not interesting. It’s quick. The story has made forward progress but there’s nothing interesting in that scene itself.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that, while the “get in as late as you can, leave as early as you can” advice is probably very good advice for early screenwriters who tend to overwrite, once you are getting better at things it’s dangerous. Because there are human moments in the beginnings and ends of things. Sometimes just the way somebody walks up to somebody else in and of itself is dramatic and sad or exciting. And it allows you to set a context for what comes next so that you don’t feel like you’re just kind of getting the choruses of the hit songs on the album, but that you’re getting something a little bit more rich.

Shoe leather is the term we use in production for people that are walking.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Traveling pointlessly from one spot to another is considered the cardinal sin. There’s a moment in Chernobyl that we looked at a billion times where Jared Harris has, they’ve taken a break in the trial and he sees Shcherbina is sitting a bit a ways away on a bench and he walks over to him. And the question was how much walking do we need. I think initially in Johan’s first cut he just sort of materialized next to him and I was like, well, no. We can’t do that.

But, on the other hand, do we actually want to show him doing the full freaking walk? No. So can we show some of the walk that feels meaningful and weighty and just trust that the kind of, I don’t know, human aspect of his little travel there will be enough to kind of cover the manipulation of time? And it seemed like it was.

But there is definitely a screenwriting class version of that scene that begins with those two guys just sitting next to each other already. Like they went out there. They’re sitting next to each other. There’s a pause. And then one of them starts talking. But, you know, I like a little windup. What can I say? I’m a windup kind of guy.

**John:** Yeah. But you have to really make that decision. Does seeing one character sit down next to the next character change the dynamics of the scene?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If it does, then yes, you should write it and you should aim to shoot it that way. If it doesn’t really matter then maybe you do just have him sitting there because you don’t think about sort of the editorial work that the reader is doing. But just that sentence of like “walks over and sits down next to the person,” we’re filming that in our minds and it’s changing our perception of what is the urgency, what’s actually happening. Getting to that moment more quickly may be the right choice.

Definitely I think you and I are both urging writers to write like it’s the edit. And write the version of the movie that you’re actually seeing in your head. And you may make different decisions working with a director. You may decide to make some different decisions. But as close as you can come to this best version you can make inside your head and get that on paper the more likely you’re going to have a successful version of that scene and hopefully you’re whole movie.

**Craig:** Yup. It is one of those places where you get to show off a little bit of creative freedom. A little bit of chaos. Even shows that you might think of as very well organized temporally like say Breaking Bad is full of time tricks. Full of them. There’s that one season where multiple show openings were of a pool and a teddy bear floating in it. And you didn’t know why. And none of it made sense until the end when it was revealed to be a function of something that hadn’t even yet occurred at the first episode of that season. Because they had no problem messing with time and being creatively chaotic with it.

But it’s got to pay off. It’s got to be worth it in the end.

**John:** Yeah. You have to have confidence and you have to – that confidence has to be built out of trust in your audience and your audience trusting you. We always talk about the social contract between the writer and the reader. It’s like give me your attention and I will make it worth your while. And time and use of time well is one of those aspects of trust.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to some listener questions because some of our questions actually do tie into this topic. Here is where we bring on our producer, Megana Rao, who asks the questions that our listeners write in with. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

**Megana Rao:** All right. So first up, Don writes, “I know you’ve talked about continuous dialogue before, but I wanted to take a crack at changing your minds.”

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**Megana:** “Wouldn’t it just be easier for everyone to stop using continuous dialogue altogether? Does it really help that much? I can understand the argument that is useful at the start of a new page, but I can’t seem to find any usefulness outside of that. Even if the dialogue is broken up by action, I assume the average person doesn’t get totally lost without the use of CONT’D. Continued.”

**Craig:** I must admit, Don, I’m a little confused. Because you don’t have to change my mind at all. I don’t use CONT’D for dialogue, for continuous dialogue. I haven’t used it ten years.

**John:** Yeah. So CONT’D is a convention that I kind of feel is going away to a degree, but there’s two kinds of CONT’Ds to talk about. And it’s a thing that we encounter a lot with Highland because Highland does one kind and doesn’t do another kind. So let’s talk about what the difference is.

There’s CONT’D if a character is talking at the bottom of a page. Let’s say they have a long speech and it jumps to the next page. Software will automatically mark it CONT’D there to make it clear that it’s one block of dialogue that just got split between two different pages. That I have no problem with. I think Craig you don’t have a problem, too.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because it’s referring to like it’s just the software doing a thing to make it clear that this really is all one block of dialogue.

**Craig:** If you didn’t put it there you would not know that the next bit of dialogue was meant to be part of a continuous speech.

**John:** Yeah. So that – no one really has big issues with that.

**Craig:** That’s all good.

**John:** What we’re talking about though is Craig starts talking and then there’s a scene description line and then Craig keeps talking after that. And Highland does not automatically put that CONT’D in there. Final Draft does want to put that CONT’D in there. That was just a philosophical point from my side, because software wise we could do that. It’s just so often I’ve had to manually delete those back when I was using Final Draft because it really wasn’t the same idea, it wasn’t the same thought. I didn’t mean for it to be one continuous thing.

So, if I meant it to be one continuous thing I could type the CONT’D there to show that it really was one thought. But sometimes three different things happen between those two, so it really is not the same line, the same thought. It shouldn’t be continuous.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t matter. Basically, Don, what I’m saying is you’re right. I don’t see the value in it. It feels very format-y to me. Something that just was sort of vaguely secretarial in the creation of the classic Warner Bros screenplay format or whatever, the [unintelligible] format was. To me it’s literally changing the character’s name. I hate it. Just let them talk. They’re saying something, then a thing happens, and then they say something. And it isn’t continuous. If it were continuous I would make the choice to not break the dialogue up. There is some sort of natural pause, break, or change that has occurred in between those two things.

So, I don’t use CONT’D myself. And so you don’t have to fight me on it.

**John:** Nope. I will say there have been times, because I don’t use it, there have times in table readings where I’ve noticed that an actor doesn’t get their next line because they’re expecting like, oh, if there’s another line of dialogue it wouldn’t be my line of dialogue. But they can get over that. Or they can highlight their own script. It’s fine. It’s not a big deal.

**Craig:** They can figure it out.

**John:** Megana, what do we have next?

**Megana:** Danielle asks, “I would love any feedback on how much to include in therapy scenes. My protagonist seeks professional through a three-month rehab program in the third act which greatly moves them forward in their healing journey. I have plenty of dialogue that navigates what healed them, but not sure how much to include and when is too much.”

**John:** So this is, again, a question of time. How are you using your limited resources of pages to show this three months? And you’re going to make elisions and choices about sort of what we’re seeing. Are sessions individualized? Is dialogue being stretched out over the course of multiple sessions? Is the dialogue extending over other scenes that show passages of time? There’s a lot going on here. Craig, what tips would you offer for Danielle as she’s thinking about how to do this?

**Craig:** Well, I think first of all I would need to know what the nature is of the relationship between the patient and the therapist, or the rehab specialist. Because if it’s a very important relationship then I want to see more of it. There are movies where that relationship is central like Ordinary People or Good Will Hunting. Then there are situations where those relationships aren’t as important, but they are kind of backgrounded and they are used as these sort of subtle markers of progress. In Honey Boy, for instance, there are some therapy scenes. They’re very, very truncated and they’re really meant to just show where a character is in a given moment in his journey.

So, it depends on what you want us to focus on and listen to. The thing about therapy scenes is they’re always, of course, there are great examples, even better than a jury deliberating, which is usually very, very boring and then we just show the good parts, same with therapy. Therapy is circular. It can be boring. It can go backwards. It can be frustrating. And when a movie show – they show this kind of glamorized highlight reel of it all that often concludes with someone saying the one thing that makes everybody go, “Oh my god, I get it now. I’m healed.” Which is not what therapy actually is.

But there could be some key moments or some big reveals or things. So, I guess my only advice would be tailor the length to the significance of the relationship between the patient and the therapist. And try and avoid over-glamorize pitfalls if you can.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not technically therapy, but I go back to Marriage Story and the scene with Scarlett Johansson and Laura Dern which is a long scene and plays in continuous time. But the choice to have that be one scene rather than a bunch of little small scenes that add up to that scene was so smart and so well done because it allowed for a continuous emotional progression within a scene. It made it its own moment and would not have worked so successfully had it been broken into smaller bits.

And so I’m going to throw two contrasting bits of suggestions here. One is to look at sort of like if you sort of shatter it apart and just take the pieces and thread them through a period that covers time, where we can see progress of the character, where you’re not sort of in one scene for a lot of it, that’s a possibility. Or to do this Marriage Story approach where you really anchor it around one central scene that is really doing the work of this thing and not try to break it into three scenes of equal length which I suspect is going to be the least effective way to handle it.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** What’s next, Megana?

**Megana:** Great. So Ash from London asks, “My writing and directing partner and I are 99% in synch. But recently we have both noticed that we might read the same dialogue in a totally different way, inferring different subtext, tone, or intended performance in ways that are quite drastic and effect the interpretation of the scene. It’s a bit like the relationship between reading the lyrics to a song which seem mundane and flat on the page and then listening to the final piece of music. I feel like I’ve suddenly become aware of a massive limitation of the medium and I find myself panicking about people reading the dialogue I write in the worst possible way. What’s happening here? Am I OK? Am I having some kind of existential crisis? Or am I struggling with something that everyone struggles with?”

**Craig:** No, Ash, you’re not OK. This is all you. Of course, what are you discovering, you’re discovering that this is what we are. This is part of our humanity is that we will interpret things in different ways. And it’s actually good news. It means that this stuff is more extensible than you think it is. It’s more rich than you might have thought it was. Yes, it is possible and it happens all the time that people read a line and go, “Why would you – this is so dumb.” And you’re befuddled by that reaction and you say what do you mean. And they say, “Because of this.” And you go, oh, no, no, no, you don’t understand. My apologies. It means this. This is the intention. And then then go, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, OK.”

That will happen to you a thousand times. So, in a weird way kind of almost enjoy it when it happens. Like my whole thing is I let people just keep talking. I swear to god. I do. It’s mean, but I just let them keep going until they finally exhaust themselves with their complaining. And then I say, well, it actually meant this. You were just stressing the wrong word. I would stress this word. And then they go, “Oh, oh, OK. Oh god.” And then I can see that they’re embarrassed. And I like that. Because I’m bad.

**John:** Ash, one thing that will help you is at some point you will be in casting for a project and you will see 30 actors read the same scene. And you’ll recognize, oh wow, there are so many different ways to read those exact same lines of dialogue. And you can tell which ones match your expectations and which ones don’t match your expectations and which ones are even better and cooler than your expectations. That’s great. That’s actually performance.

The writing is a plan. It’s a guideline for things that actors are actually going to say. And their performance does really matter. And their intention really does matter. So, there’s nothing wrong with what’s happening. It is super common.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s good. I like it. When somebody something and it’s better than what you imagined, that’s a wonderful surprise. And it also jogs the material out of the expected. Because if it can surprise you, imagine what it’s going to do to the audience.

**John:** So I will tell you, my first experience with this was with Go. And we were having a very hard time casting the role of Gaines, the drug dealer, Todd Gaines the drug dealer. To the point where I was sitting through all these auditions like did I just write a bad scene? Is this a bad character? Can this not work? And then Timothy Olyphant came in and read it. It was like, oh, that’s what it’s supposed to be. That is actually – it does actually make sense as a character because this person in front of me was able to do this role and it does actually track and make sense.

So, don’t worry too much about it. That said, you and your writing partner who are theoretically writing the same thing disagree on sort of what these lines are supposed to be, there may be something that’s not happening right in your communication with each other, in how you’re establishing the voices of these characters to begin with. Because as you’re reading through a script if a character has an established voice it should be pretty unambiguous how a given line is going to sound or what the intention of a given line should be. So, watch for that. Maybe you’re not establishing voices especially clearly.

And then I’d say one technique to look at, and this is a thing I see a lot in J.J. Abrams scripts, is in the parenthetical there will be quotes with a line for what the line is meant to say. So if the line was, “You’re stupid,” but in the parenthetical it says, “I love you so much.” Just basically giving kind of like a line reading in the parenthetical. It’s a thing you see more in TV than you do in features, but it’s available as an option if there’s a specific line that is really not what it seems like it is just texturally on the page.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. Let’s do one more question, Megana.

**Megana:** All right. Great. So, Lawant from the Netherlands writes, “What makes a story more suitable to live action versus animation? I know the way the screenplay gets written is often a little dissimilar to the way a live action screenplay does. I also know that there are often logistics and economics at play. So do you feel that there are certain stories that inherently lend themselves better to one medium or the other?”

**John:** Yeah. So the obvious thing is if most of the characters in your story are human beings, live action is a really natural good choice. If most of them are not human beings, they are animals, they are other kinds of creatures, animation is a better choice.

Obviously we can do things in sort of hybrid ways that are between the two that are new, and exciting, and different. We can redo The Lion King in “live action.” But we all know what we’re talking about. If it can be filmed with human actors, then it should probably be live action.

But that said, the nature of certain kinds of stories that we tend to do more often in animation than in live action. So, mythic stories, simple fairy tale kind of things. Things that feel like they should have Disney songs in them are generally better off to be thought of as animation. But just this past year there was a project that we took out which was going to be live action, it was going to be sort of Mandalorian-y kind of shot, and ultimately the decision was, you know what, this is probably going to be animation instead just for the logistics of it all. And it was the kind of story where you could kind of go either way and we decided to go into animation.

So, I don’t have hard and fast rules, but the characters and the world are what’s going to dictate whether it’s live action or animation to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only other consideration may, Lawant, is that if your story is what I would call pure story, meaning it is so connected to a really sharply engineered super high concept plot, then it might be better suited for animation. Because in animation you can do anything. You can show anywhere and do anything. So if you have this pure story that really requires very specific plotting and structure, you might want to think about it as an animated tale because you’ll just have more latitude.

**John:** There are Pixar movies that you could do live action, but they really kind of wouldn’t work the same way. There’s certain formulas and there’s certain heroic journey stuff that it just feels better in animation than it feels in live action. And so really just be honest with yourself about the character goals and sort of what the story wants to be and you probably will feel if it’s animation or if it’s live action.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Megana:** Great. Thank you guys so much.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Before I get to my One Cool Thing I have to do follow up on Craig’s One Cool Thing from last week which was There is No Game which is a terrific – it’s a game, spoiler, it’s a game. But really, really well done. I haven’t finished it yet, but do check that out because Craig was actually right this time.

**Craig:** Actually.

**John:** I don’t play all of the games that he recommends, but this time I thought it really was terrific.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Two small things for me to recommend this week. First is Some Kind of Heaven, which is a new documentary that came out this past week. It’s about The Villages in Florida which is this retirement community. And it is a great documentary following several people who live at The Villages. Again, I don’t want to do spoilers. But we’ll put a link to the trailer. But if you went in cold I think it would honestly be the best exposure to it because it’s great. I want to have the filmmaker on at some point to talk through his use of characters and how you create detailed character moments and arcs when you only have these real people for limited periods of time. It’s just really well done. So, I’d urge you to check that out.

But my general One Cool Thing if you want to waste some time is Microsimulation of Traffic which is this German website. And it basically – it’s this animation where you have all these cars in this highway system and you can drag in little obstacles. You can sort of see how the traffic flow goes. I’ve always been really curious sort of how you optimize cars getting from point A to point B. And it’s just a really smartly done version of that. So it’s not Sim City. It’s very much more sort of mathematically-driven in terms of how you optimize traffic flow. And I wasted a good hour on it. And I think you will enjoy it.

**Craig:** There was an article years ago that someone did about traffic in Southern California and what causes traffic and what would alleviate traffic on the freeways. And one of the things that kind of blew my mind was he said one of the biggest impacts on traffic flow is sun.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So you’re kind of going down a hill or something and there’s sunlight in your eyes. You will slow down. And everybody that slows down a little bit causes this ripple effect in the back. The other one is how many cars can you see ahead of you. If you can see a lot of cars ahead of you a lot of times it seems like there’s more traffic, so you slow down. And if you can’t, it doesn’t, and you speed up. It was just like we suck is basically – it was just another one of those your brains are bad stories.

**John:** Yeah. I will say a thing I’ve always read about and never sort of seen until I tried this on the traffic simulator is ghost crashes. Basically there will be an accident or something and then there’s a bump in the rug and there’s this traffic jam that persists for hours after an accident has been cleared. And this simulator makes it really clear why that’s there and why running traffic breaks, which is where the police cars turn their lights and very slowly do these S shapes to sort of slow down all the traffic clears the break.

And so it was fun to see that like, oh, it is actually just jams are sometimes just the echoes of things that happened a long time before.

**Craig:** Exactly. I like that. Ghost crashes. A couple of One Cool Things this week. This one is sort of a cool thing. They’re related. The first one is definitely cool. We announced, The Hollywood Reporter announced, that The Last of Us has its pilot director. Originally we were going to be doing this with Johan Renck who I did Chernobyl with. Johan, like so many people who is working on things, had a movie that got delayed by Covid and so suddenly the schedules couldn’t line up. So some big shoes to fill in terms of where to go and who to talk to.

And there is a film, this is, by the way, again not to be like – I don’t want to sound like a butt-kisser here, but HBO is pretty cool. Like we’re making this big show. It costs a lot of money. And we come to them and say, “You know who we want? We want a guy named Kantemir Balagov who had made a small film called Beanpole in Russian, in Russia.” And they were like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

It’s awesome. Beanpole is beautiful. I’m 99% certain that we are also going to be using the cinematographer that Kantemir partnered with. She is also remarkable. Her name is Kseniya Sereda. And it is stunning and heartbreaking and gorgeous. It showed up on a ton of Top 20 of 2020 lists. I’m not a huge list person as everybody knows, but the Top 20 of 2020 lists have been fascinating because so few movies came out that almost all of them are these really obscure and very cool little movies.

So, we’re very happy about that. Kantemir is a fantastic guy. Super talented guy. And he speaks English. But, he speaks Russian better than he speaks English. So, as we’ve been communicating I’ve been trying to find a translation solution, sort of an inline translation solution. I mean, ideally I would be writing an email and something would be mirroring in another window in Russian. That would be incredible. Not quite that simple. I mean, I can sort of go on Google and type it into that window and see what happens.

What I’m using now is something called Mate. M-A-T-E. Which is kind of like an integrated translation system. Its interface is a little funky at times. Sometimes the formatting goes away. And sometimes it comes back. So I’m just – it’s a pretty cool thing. It’s a pretty cool thing. But if somebody out there has an awesome translation solution, sort of a frictionless translation solution for me for English to Russian and Russian to English I’d love to hear about it.

**John:** Nice. Yeah. Send those suggestions in. And that’s our show for this week. So, as always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Timothy Vajda. We could use some more outros. And so a reminder of what an outro is, because I was looking through the folder and there’s a bunch of pieces of music that are good that really have nothing to do with Scriptnotes at all. So, the only requirement we give is that they be cool and they somehow go Bum-bum-bum-bum-bump, or the minor version of that. But there’s pieces in there that like that’s a cool piece of music but it has nothing to do with Scriptnotes. It does not have our theme. So the only requirement is it has to use the theme in some way. And I want you to keep pursuing excellence and giving us great outros because we really appreciate it.

You can send us links to those outros at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. You can get them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish 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 time travel.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, Craig, this is very much a dorm room stoner question.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** But if you could travel back to any point in history, or pre-history, and go there as a tourist, so we’ll start with the tourist rules where you go and you know you can come back to the present time. What are some places you’d like to visit in history and why?

**Craig:** Yeah. So we put this to our D&D, or you put it to our D&D group as well, and immediately because it’s a D&D group, which is just obsessed with the details and potential loop holes and possible ways to gain the system, there were certain questions in there, but they were reasonable. So let’s also presume that I’m not going to be suffering. There’s not going to be a bad case of bubonic plague or something like that. I’m not going to be immediately burned as a witch because of my clothing and so on and so forth.

So then the question is where do you go back in time. What are you most interested in seeing? And, you know, I don’t know how much of this reflects on who I am or what my interests are, but I suppose – and again let’s also presume you can understand every language.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Maybe because my dad was an American history teacher and that was the bulk of the history that I was taught, I think I would want to go back to those very hot days in July, late June and early July, where Americans were debating whether or not they should be declaring independency from Great Britain in Philadelphia. Because in that discussion there was not only the momentous occasion of our independence, but there was also the first real consequential debate over slavery. It had begun already. And it wasn’t going to get any better or any less complicated or any less morally repugnant. And would ultimately fester and explode into the Civil War and then into Jim Crow and then of course we still are struggling with its legacy today.

So all of that’s there plus Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. It’s pretty – I think I would like it. That’s where I would go.

**John:** Absolutely. So both around the Declaration of Independence, but also figuring out the Constitution are just, are just such seminal moments and we have many accounts of it, but we have no one who can sort of tell us what it’s like to be there and sort of look at it with modern eyes in ways that, you know, just to actually physically be there would be great.

And I guess we’re sort of playing – we’re not playing Terminator rules, so you can’t go back and change a thing. You can just sort of go back and witness it and really see what it was like.

**Craig:** Fly on the wall.

**John:** Fly on the wall. And so fly on the wall, two points in history and prehistory that I’m really curious to see. Everything happening around Jesus’s time. And sort of like what Jesus was like in his time. What the sense of this small little group was like and did it feel like it was the start of something bigger because I guess I just always wondered to what degree civilization was primed and ready to have this explosion of a religion that would take over everything, or it just was lucky.

And to what degree, who he was individually and how charismatic. And sort of what it felt like in that time would be fascinating. So, that’s one thing, but I would also really be curious to come to North American continent in a time before European settlers arrive and just see what it was like because I think I was definitely raised on this myth that North America was just sort of this empty continent, that there really wasn’t anybody here. And that clearly was not the case. It was actually a pretty busy and full place. And the myth of it being empty was sort of foisted upon us.

So while there weren’t permanently built cities in the way that we saw in Europe, there were actually a lot of people here. And I was just really curious what that was like. And we sort of lost all of that because there wasn’t written language just in that sense of what it felt like here before the Europeans came.

**Craig:** Cleaner.

**John:** Yeah. Probably cleaner.

**Craig:** Much, much cleaner.

**John:** Yeah. We made a mess of things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, changing the rules a little bit, if you could go back to one moment in your life, so we’ve always gone back pre-us, but is there a moment in your life where you’d like to look at yourself?

**Craig:** Oh, oh god. I mean, no. I don’t want to see any of that.

**John:** I don’t know that I want to see any of that either. Because I think I would just – it would just be very wincey to sort of see the dumb choices you make. One of the reasons why I like the show Pen15 so much is that you have these really talented actors going back to play themselves at 15 years old and just how unbearably awkward you are those early ages. And so if I couldn’t change stuff, if I couldn’t encourage the younger version of me to do the things that are so obvious to do in retrospect, I guess I wouldn’t go back and want to watch any of it.

**Craig:** No. I’m embarrassed by all of it. Everything. Everything up to this moment. It’s a tragedy.

**John:** I will say having lost my mom last month there are definitely moments in my mom’s life and in my dad’s life that they’ve given me some reporting on, but I just don’t really have a very good sense of who they were at different moments. So the sort of Back to the Future fantasy of like getting to see your parents when they were teenagers or early 20-somethings would be neat. It’s not Jesus in his time neat. But it would be illuminating.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always feel like if you could get a good look at your parents when they were young it would be a little bit like getting a peek into the cockpit of a plane and seeing how drunk the pilot was. It would give you a bad feeling. Like there but for the grace of god. Like this person should not have been in charge of me at all. At all. Who put this guy behind the seat of an airplane or the wheel of an airplane or whatever you call it, the helm? Who put this guy behind the helm of an airplane? And who put this guy in charge of a child?

And if my kids could look back and see how absolutely clueless I was at so many points they would probably feel exactly the same.

**John:** So a thing I noticed this last year is that as I look back at photos of my daughter there’s continuities and there’s also discontinuities. And I don’t perceive sort of one continuous evolution of a kid from point A to where she is right now. There’s stages. And of course there were small shifts – there were shifts between those stages and there were transition points, but it’s almost like she’s a whole different species than who she was as a younger child.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And sometimes I feel lost for – I look over these photos and I feel lost for who that kid was. And obviously she’s still right in front of you, but she’s not really right in front of me. That younger toddler who was so neat in her own specific way is gone.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is the tragedy of watching your kids grow up. There is a progression that you can see. And you can follow it with a line. And to tie back into our topic in the main show about time and how time can sometimes just break, there is an end of childhood and there’s the beginning of this other thing and there’s a break. And that break is traumatic for everybody. But what happens on the other side of it is a different person entirely emerges. Just a different human being. And it is a struggle sometimes for everyone to wrap their minds around the fact that your kid is gone.

I mean, memory and time claim all children. All of them. And what is left in their place you have to come to accept. And if you can, then there’s this whole other potentially wonderful relationship with them for the rest of your life. But sometimes you have this kid and everything is great and there’s the jump and then they come out on the other side a person and some children and parents don’t like each other anymore after that point and they go their separate ways. It happens.

**John:** And a huge source of tension between parents and kids is the parent not willing to acknowledge that it’s not their small child anymore.

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s been a change.

**John:** It’s reality. And tying this back to sense of time and screenwriters as being masters of time, if you haven’t seen Boyhood, the Richard Linklater movie, this is a great opportunity to see Boyhood because that is an experiment in which you follow a kid through this difficult time and you see both the continuities and discontinuities of a kid aging. And a great example of approaching a project with a plan, with an intention, and then having to adjust based on the actual realities of what happens.

So, I loved Boyhood. I thought it was just terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Cool. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [DGA tells WME to get rid of its conflicts](https://deadline.com/2021/01/dga-sides-with-writers-guild-in-its-dispute-with-wme-over-endeavor-content-1234672501/)
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium at [Scriptnotes.net](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/), with a new annual pass for $49!
* [Some Kind of Heaven](https://www.somekindofheaven.com/)
* [Microsimulation of Traffic Flow](https://traffic-simulation.de/roundabout.html)
* [Beanpole](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10199640/) film
* [Mate](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/language-translator-by-mate/id1073473333) translation app integration
* [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/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/484standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-wedding-episode).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 480 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we talk weddings. More specifically we talk about wedding scenes in film and television, the tropes, the challenges, and what we can learn. We’ll also answer listener questions about the weather and bombing a pitch. And in our bonus segment for premium members we’ll discuss our post-vaccination hopes and plans.

With so much on our plate we need to welcome back our very own Aline Brosh McKenna. Aline, welcome back.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Oh my god. I’m like so happy to be here.

**Craig:** Oh. My. God.

**John:** Oh! We started talking about weddings and there was no one I want to talk more about weddings than you.

**Aline:** Mm.

**John:** So you have written at least one wedding movie, so 27 Dresses is obviously a wedding movie, but you’ve written wedding scenes in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. You know your way around a wedding scene, correct?

**Aline:** Indeed. And I was thinking after you mentioned this topic that of the four season finales that I directed three of them had weddings in them. And the first thing I ever directed, that first episode that I directed, had a giant, giant wedding. And they’re pretty hellish to shoot.

**John:** So we’ll talk about the practicalities of shooting them, but also as I started digging into it I realized that there’s not one thing that is a wedding scene, so there’s just a lot to dig into. And there are so many universal things. So many specific things. So we’ll get into all of that.

But most crucially as we head into this holiday season I was thinking like what kind of gift could I get for my friends, for Aline and for Craig–

**Craig:** What did you get us?

**John:** And I thought maybe what I can get you guys that you would really, really want, that could really be good for you would be to get you guys agents.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And so I got you guys some agents. So CAA right as we were about to hit the record button signed a deal with the WGA, bringing closure to their part in the agency campaign.

**Craig:** [sighs heavily]

**John:** That’s the relief you hear on the air.

**Craig:** It’s just like, ooh.

**Aline:** [sighs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Aline:** I mean, here’s the thing. You know, I think you guys have talked about this a lot and I’ve talked to a lot of writers obviously during this, and I think part of this might be generational, but agents have been really, really important in my career, really important relationships. People I really relied on. And in the last few years I’ve had agents that I really loved and really relied on. And I, having done the TV show, I sort of didn’t have a lot of access to them because I was busy sort of doing the one thing and had been looking forward to working with them. And then this thing started.

So, I’ve really missed them. And, you know, my agents really have always been – I’ve never had a manager. And I like to, you know, as I often say quoting Mike Newell, I think with my mouth open, and so I like to have people to talk to. And agents have really been key for me in strategy and in understanding what my potential was, or could be. And so I’m just really happy and I’m really proud to work with the folks that I’ve been working with. So I’m very happy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ditto.

**John:** So you guys have not read through any of this stuff yet, but you don’t have to actually read all that much because the deal with CAA is exactly the same as the deal with ICM. There’s a four-page side letter which goes into all the specifics and disclosures about the sale of Wiip, which is the independent production arm and the blind trust about–

**Craig:** I actually have a question about that. Did they build in – did they, I mean did the guild or them in combination – build in some sort of window? Was that the compromise there?

**John:** So it’s both a window in time but also disclosures and transparencies about what’s actually happening and that it’s not strictly about CAA but it’s also TPG which is the company that owns Wiip and CAA.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that was the complicated stuff which took a lot of time and negotiation to sort through, but has apparently now been sorted through to both sides’ satisfaction. So it ends the lawsuit on CAA’s thing. I was facing a deposition from CAA and sort of other disclosures.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I’m just delighted that that part of this whole campaign is behind us, leaving only WME as the hold out among agencies in this campaign.

**Craig:** I suppose there is a template now for them to follow in theory.

**John:** It seems like it will be a very similar kind of discussion.

**Craig:** Yes. Good. Well, regardless of how we got there or any of that stuff the thing that – when we started talking about this, John, was way, way back with Chris Keyser–

**John:** Oh yeah. Chris Keyser.

**Craig:** Whenever it was, a year and a half ago. If people go back and listen to that episode they’ll hear plenty of umbrage on my part about packaging, which has always just been this awful stone in our collective shoe. And we’ve gotten rid of it. I mean, I’m perfectly cool with the fact that they’re divesting from Wiip since as I mentioned many times I’ve been a CAA client for whatever how many years, and they’ve never even mentioned it to me. So, it was not anything that was part of my life. But packaging was apparently thrust upon me. And so I’m glad that we have arrived at this place at long last. And now I can get my agent back. And believe me, the texts have been coming in. [laughs]

It’s a bit like Jerry Maguire where suddenly an agent gets fired and they have to start calling all their clients to bring them with them. It’s like, OK, we can all be I guess re-hiring them back. And so, yeah, a lot of texts, a lot of phone calls. And it’s good. I’m glad.

**John:** All right. In a bit of follow up, way back in Episode 348 we did a How Would This Be a Movie where we discussed this Japanese Rent-A-Family business. So it was an article that was in the New Yorker. It ended up winning the National Magazine Award in 2019. But basically you could hire these actors to come in and pretend to be your family. And so for like a lonely man on the holidays you could pretend to have a family that was with him.

But it turns out that the subjects that they interviewed in the story, they were lying. They were not disclosing who they actually were. Some of them actually worked for the company in ways that were not clear. So there’s an editor’s note at the start of that article now sort of talking through what’s not been able to be verified or what’s not been true. And it calls into question sort of how much of the story, or even this industry, actually exists.

Philip from LA, a listener, wrote in to say, “I wonder if this could be its own twist on the story where the story of a fake family for rent in order to drum up publicity becomes something like The Producers set in the modern viral online era with touches of the balloon boy story, or the dark edge of a crisis actor conspiracy theory if things go too far awry for the hapless hoaxers.”

And it is an interesting point. It was like a con within a con. It was like a fake-fake family. It’s just a weird place for this to be at.

**Aline:** I just wonder how much of this movie would have been dependent on like “no guys this really happened.” Because when you first read the article it seemed like, wow, this is unusual. And it feels like if you tell a story that could exist, or it could just be a Black Mirror thing where you have an app and you can get a family. And if you build a great story and an interesting, engaging story I don’t know that – it doesn’t seem like the kind of movie that you’re showing up looking for tons of historical accuracy in that one. You’re looking for relationships to follow. It just seems like it is a fun, interesting, engaging idea that makes people smile and you kind of see the narrative opportunities opening up.

But I agree there’s something also funny in the idea of guys who are launching a business and so they manage to get this article placed in some fancy publication to try and publicize their business. That’s the sort of Shattered Glass version. But I think that the idea of renting relatives, it feels like you could do a lot of variants of that that would point to kind of the funniness of families, especially around the holidays. And it doesn’t need to be – you don’t need to have to fact check it in that sense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m just excited that any fact checking still happens at all. The gap between I guess what I would call journalistic scruples and political scruples is about, I don’t know, one light year wide. Because here they are sort of – and in a great way – tripping over themselves to say we are holding ourselves accountable. And we’re saying literally we don’t even think this story is false per se, but there is a little bit of this issue of perhaps one or three bad apples are ruining the bunch, so we’re going to tell you about this. As opposed to the rest of the world which is like we’re just going to say nonsense and repeat it over and over and deny.

So it’s nice to see that anyone still gives a damn.

**John:** Well, I think Aline’s point is the difference between there is journalism, which this is part of. And that journalism can be the spring board for a movie. But in many ways the movie doesn’t rely on that underlying story being true. It creates a story area, a story space. And even as we were talking about this in Episode 353 we did follow up where we talked about the different producers who are fighting for the rights over this thing, we wondering how important was it to actually have this actual story, to have this actual Japanese company. Is it really just an area for which you might want to build this fake family?

You think of the movies like We’re the Millers which is about a fake family to hide drug smuggling. Or Dana Fox’s movie, The Wedding Date, where it’s like someone is hiring on a fake boyfriend to go to a wedding. It’s a premise and therefore maybe you don’t really need the underlying details of that story to be true.

**Aline:** Right. The New Yorker obviously has a different standard, because they’re doing journalism. It’s been interesting also there’s been a lot of kerfuffle around this season of The Crown. And people who wanted a disclaimer. But I think people who are watching fictionalized pieces, pieces of history, understand that there is – you’re writing scenes you didn’t witness with characters you don’t know. I wonder, you know, I think that with The Crown it’s because a lot of the people who lived through that are alive today, or still in the public eye today, and so that’s why there’s been sort of a greater call for people wanting the historical record to be completely verified.

I wonder what you guys thought about that.

**John:** Yeah. This season of The Crown I thought was spectacular. And I did find myself because this was part of my own life story, like the wedding of Charles and Diana was a thing I actually remember seeing, I did take this as being, I don’t know, it felt more uncomfortably close to reality. And I did feel bad for some of these people.

Like I don’t know any of the people who are portrayed in this season of The Crown personally, but some of them are friends of friends which is just an odd place to be at. I’m not sure I wanted a disclaimer there, but I did start to wonder about what was true and what was not true. Craig?

**Craig:** I had a very specific opinion about this when I was doing a fictionalized show about historical events. I don’t really say fictionalized, I say dramatized. And I’m trying to dramatize what happened. So, I did, but, you know, just as a basic premise if you’re trying to cover a year of events in one hour, or five hours, or a hundred hours, you are taking license with reality. You have to. There’s no way to do it otherwise. But I personally felt it was important to be as transparent as I could be about those changes and those adjustments via a podcast because I do think if you don’t say anything the presumption that people are going to have is that you did your research and that’s accurate to history.

And I think it would be better for shows to be honest about those changes. You’ll get way more credit, frankly, for the dramatization that you do if you’re just open about it.

**Aline:** But I think most shows, I can’t speak for The Crown because I don’t know what Peter has said publicly about that, but I think that he’s never pretended, as far as I can tell, that it’s word-for-word. It’s a dramatic rendering. And it’s heavily thematic. It deals with, you know, every episode has a different sort of angle. And so I think what people were suggesting was you put a warning on that says this is not exactly historically accurate.

**Craig:** No. That’s dumb.

**Aline:** And I think about all the movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s that are like biopics of people which are just–

**Craig:** You would have to put a warning in front of everything.

**John:** Titanic.

**Craig:** There is no such thing as a dramatization of history that is perfectly accurate to history. I guess all I’m suggesting is that is that if there are significant deviations that have occurred it’s good to just have a forum in which you can acknowledge those and explain why. Because if you don’t I think people will find out and then get grouchy about it. I mean that’s for instance one of the reasons why not only forget the podcast, we literally put in type onscreen that a character in Chernobyl was a composite character. Because I just didn’t feel comfortable having them watch this whole thing and then find out three weeks later that she wasn’t real. It just felt manipulative to not acknowledge what we had done and why.

And you know what? It doesn’t undermine anything as far as I can tell.

**John:** Yeah. So I think what I’m hearing from this is that we need to have companion podcasts for all these shows.

**Craig:** Basically.

**John:** And Craig, I mean, honestly that was a good innovation for Chernobyl and for Watchmen. And I think it only helps them. We should probably try to have Peter Morgan come on the show.

**Aline:** Because he’s done a lot. He did Frost/Nixon and The Queen. He’s delved in that realm a lot. But I think in a certain way it feels to me like he approaches it as a playwright. So, he finds these situations and he’s building the dialogue that he – but, you know, these things are – I feel this way about podcasts, too, where sometimes podcasts now are being put out as sort of a definitive, factual version because that format makes people feel like they’re in a fact zone. And the fact of the matter is like, yeah, newspapers, journalism, they have fact checkers, or they’re responsible to a very literal standard. And it doesn’t feel to me like The Crown, that’s what The Crown is trying to do. It’s not trying to document.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Let’s get onto our marquee topic because I’m very excited to talk about weddings. I’ve had weddings on the brain for a bit because last week I officiated my first every wedding.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** It was on Zoom, but it still counts.

**Craig:** Under what church are you ordained?

**John:** I was the Church of Universal Life.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** It’s the one that everyone just goes to.

**Craig:** That’s me. We are both priests or reverends in the Universal Church of Life. [laughs]

**John:** Yes. And so–

**Craig:** Sounds like a Star Wars church.

**John:** It does. It really does sound like life day celebrations are my specialty.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So just so people can fit this into the chronology, the wedding I officiated was on the same day my mom died, which seem could either be a great tragedy or a great comedy. But it ended up being actually a really nice thing to be able to have a structured celebration on this day that would otherwise be just incredibly sad. So it was nice to have something ceremonial that I could do on that day and sort of commemorate the beginning of someone’s new life rather than just the end of somebody’s life.

Anyway, that’s a really depressing way to get into something I’ve always really been interested in, because I’ve written some weddings scenes, and the script I’m writing right now has a wedding scene in it. But the more I thought about it there’s really no such thing as a wedding scene. Because really what weddings are is a whole constellation of events which you can chose to have become scenes in your story, but don’t necessarily have to do that. And I think weddings are also a really unique opportunity to show what is special and unique about those characters, the relationships between those characters, and what is culturally specific to this group versus any other group. So there’s so many great examples I can think of of ways to explore dynamics because of a wedding, because there is a set form to them that we can dive into and explore.

So, I want to start with Aline. Let’s say you’re writing something that is going to have a wedding, what are the events around a wedding that could become scenes to you? What are some of the moments that you could chose to make into scenes?

**Aline:** Well, I’m actually really glad that you mentioned this because I think that a lot of beginning writers choose a wedding as their first movie because it feels like an identifiable process with component parts. But I have found them brutal to write. I mean, it sounds funny to say about a movie like 27 Dresses, which is, you know, it’s not [unintelligible], but like it was very challenging to write because the way I think of weddings is like you know when you have a baby and you get that set of nesting cups? If you turn them over and you go from big to small you can make a tower, right, because they’re ascending.

Writing a wedding is like the cups are facing up and when you stack them they stay flat. There is nothing in those wedding events that is necessary escalation. If you’re writing a sports movie it’s like the beginning of the season, will they get into the playoffs, they get into the playoffs, they’re in the last game. I mean, it has a progression built into it. A war movie. An action movie. They have a natural progression. You’re trying to get the nuclear briefcase.

Wedding events are just parties. And obviously one of the things that’s really fun about weddings is that every culture has a slightly different one, and I think we’ve seen, you know, people love Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Crazy Rich Asians. And there’s Best Friend’s Wedding. I mean, there’s tons. But they’re actually so – I found it so, so difficult to write in 27 Dresses because it was like what is the difference stakes wise between the shower and the rehearsal dinner? I mean, I don’t know.

**John:** Nothing.

**Aline:** And –and – they’re huge gloms of people, so when you’re writing those scenes if you’re trying to focus on a few people but you don’t want to be in a setting with every single one of your main characters and just have a scene with two people in it, what’s the point of that? And so how are you servicing everyone’s story moving forward? It’s kind of like those nightmare scenes where you have every character together but you’ve got a whole bunch of them and one doesn’t escalate off the other one. And so it’s kind of important in those movies to embed another – you’ll find that most of those movies have another deadline, another kind of process they need – an arc – that is outside of just the getting married.

And it’s also, you know, I think of Shakespeare a lot when I’m working on wedding stuff because I think there’s an expectation with weddings that like there’ll be some sort of minuet with the characters and then they’ll land in the right place. And so there are some sort of formal expectations, but they’re not narrative expectations. And so it’s actually kind of a tough one.

And I’ve read a lot of early screenwriter’s scripts where I see them get into that cul-de-sac where it’s a little bit – their car is a little big for it and they end up doing a K-turn that’s, you know, has 17 backs and forths to it, because it’s very hard to get that forward motion.

**John:** Aline, I want to go back to really underlining a point you made is that with weddings and wedding sequences they have an order. They have a flow to them chronologically how they’re supposed to go. But you’re so right. There’s no natural escalation. There’s no greater stakes because it’s the next part of this thing. And so it really relies on an outside force to create what is going to be the further complication from this stage to this stage to this stage. Because otherwise it’s just you have dress shopping, and scouting venues, and the seating chart, and the bridal party, and the bachelor party. It doesn’t matter.

Unless there’s something else actually happening those are just one-off events. And it can feel very episodic because of that.

**Aline:** That’s exactly right.

**Craig:** Yeah. They are a bit of a trap. The plus side is that you have a rite, and rites are parts of the universal human experience we all understand. Almost everybody has been to a wedding, whether it’s as a child or as a participant, as a parent. So we all have a way in and out. We all understand what it is. There’s a bunch of stuff that you don’t need to explain. So if I need to get all of my characters together in a room to have an argument, or to conclude an argument, a wedding is a great way to do it without having to deal with any plot bending or contortions because everybody gets it. Of course, they have to go, it’s a wedding. And your costume is solved. The space is solved. You don’t have to really think too hard about what it looks like. It’s just really some version of a wedding.

All of these questions that normally drive us crazy are answered by the wedding. But that of course is the other edge of the sword that says that this is very well-trodden ground. So you’re not going to get something particularly new. We know there’s likely going to be somebody going to be somebody walking down an aisle. There’s likely going to be a speech. Those speeches are either amazing or disastrous. There’s going to be a crying parent or there’s going to be a rift. Someone is going to run away.

We’ve seen almost every permutation of what a wedding can do. But the kernel of it, which I think is useful still, is as a ritual and probably I’m curious maybe there’s a version of this where it doesn’t happen where a wedding is either the beginning or the ending of something important in your story. It’s pretty rare that you have a wedding in the middle that matters. And if you do have a wedding just right in the middle then it’s about two other people who are having a relationship and the wedding is a background, a very expensive background for that relationship.

**John:** And that’s exactly, the movie I’m writing right now has a wedding in the middle which is an important turning point in a relationship but also it’s not their wedding. And that becomes sort of a crucial thing.

I want to revisit something you said and shade it a little bit differently because you said you don’t have to think too much about what the venue is like, you don’t have to think too much about what characters are wearing. As the writer you probably are thinking about that because there’s going to be some stuff that’s going to be specific and different to your – so you’re going to be aware that it is so tropey.

**Aline:** Yeah. I was going to jump in on that, too. Because there is a cultural obsession now with weddings, is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. I mean, it only gets more and more. And I think social media has greatly contributed to that. But I think for a certain audience those differences between what the bridesmaids are wearing, what the venue is, there are so many specific social and cultural signifiers. And obviously the main steps that we have of what a wedding looks like is basically a Christian wedding. And I in addition to being Jewish, my parents are immigrants. We didn’t have a big extended family.

I hadn’t been to a lot of weddings kind of in my life, until I started going to weddings. And so I hear what you’re saying Craig which is like it’s a bride, there’s going to be some – even if she’s wearing a different cultural costume, some of the, yeah, the feel–

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s dressed up. And even then like the—

**Aline:** And the parents have an investment in the relationship. And what are the friends doing? Right. It is, but I really, to me, speaks to somehow we imbibe these tropes and we kind of understand what they are. And I think there’s a loop now where weddings are looking like movies that were about weddings.

**John:** Oh yeah. There’s a feedback to it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And going back to what Craig originally said it’s like even though you as the writer have to do that work to sort of make this wedding specific and unique, you don’t have to explain to the audience what a wedding is. Everyone is ready to accept like, OK, there’s going to be some bride and they’re going to walk down an aisle. They have a sense of the kinds of things that happen.

And so some of the movies we’re going to talk through are Crazy Rich Asians or The Farewell and one of the things I love about, or Unorthodox is another TV show that Aline and I talked about, what I loved about the wedding in Unorthodox is I kind of had no idea what was going on for parts of it, but no one had to explain to me what was happening because I could sort of puzzle it out and it was great for that reason.

But, an argument for why weddings are such good material for our stories and why they’re a great place to set scenes is that you have families coming together and there’s a natural emotion, a heightened emotion, and conflict. So, characters are ready to be emotional. And that so often one of the struggles we’ve run into in film and TV writing is realistically people would sort of suppress their emotions and they would keep it level and calm. And weddings are an opportunity to sort of rise up and be heightened. Be a little bit more traumatic than they would be on a normal day.

People are trying to act a little idealized in ways that can be great for us as writers.

Let’s start by taking a look at a scene from Crazy Rich Asians. So this is a screenplay by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim based on the novel by Kevin Kwan. And I picked something very late in the story, this is the actual wedding that they’re going to go see, and it’s not our central characters’ wedding. They are just guests at this wedding. But this is an example of an incredibly expensive wedding, an expensive sequence.

**Aline:** That’s a good example of what we were talking about with Craig which is like it’s a wedding, yes, we understand all the signifiers of the basic things of what’s happening, a man and woman coming together. But the details of that were so rich and interesting. And it had a walk down the aisle I had never seen before, which I had a little bit of glee in my soul when I saw that.

**John:** Yeah. So we’re looking at page 113, so we’ll have links to this in the show notes, PDFs for this. So, page 113, “a HUSH falls over the crowd. Eyes turn to: KINA GRANNIS, who takes the stage.” As you read through these pages it’s really specific. I mean, people, again, it’s very directed from the page in ways that the screenwriting experts tell you you’re not supposed to be doing, but of course you should be doing.

It goes into a montage with the flower girls, the ring-bearer boy. You’re seeing all the little moments. And it’s so crucial that the screenwriters here are choosing to show you exactly what these moments are because otherwise you might just aim the camera at the bride and groom who we don’t care about at all. Our actual real interest is in Nick and Rachel and the mother, Eleanor, and really that is the central relationship. And we’re charting their reactions over the course of this while this bigger wedding is happening.

It’s a great example of how you might think a wedding is about the people being married, but it’s really about, in this case, the characters we’ve established our time with and what their reaction is to this thing that we’re all seeing together.

**Aline:** Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things that this wedding was really particularly beautiful I thought. There’s a sort of a fantasy here. She says it’s a wedding fantasy come to life. As I said, you know, there’s a Shakespearean element to weddings, but there are also – one of the things I’ve experienced in my career is that because I’ve written a lot of stuff that has to do with romance, or weddings, or relationships, or characters, or sort of those smaller moments I have felt a snobbery. I have felt in moments where I’ve been in groups of my peers, male peers, where it’s sort of like a little patty on the head. But we’re all here because a man and a woman decided to join their life in whatever way, shape, or form, whether they were married or not.

I’ve been watching a ton of Finding Your Roots, the Henry Gates show on PBS, which I enjoy so, so much. And you realize there are all these people that had to come together, find each other, and make a baby to make us, to make Craig, and make Baby Craig, and make Baby John.

**Craig:** [laughs] Gross. So gross.

**Aline:** And that is – but it’s true. It’s like all those sperms and eggs had to find a way towards each other.

**Craig:** Oh, come on. No.

**Aline:** And it’s a very primal, so I think weddings–

**Craig:** John wasn’t made like that. John was manufactured.

**Aline:** There were very important semiconductors and robotic arms that had to come together–

**Craig:** There we go. Thank you. Much cleaner.

**Aline:** But I think it is interesting, you know, I always think about the fact that the first movie to win Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay was It Happened One Night.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And that would be like an $8 million Netflix movie at this point. You know, and so–

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** We used to understand as a culture the importance and the value of what it takes when a man and a woman, or a woman and a woman, or a man and a man, or gender fluid, or whoever is uniting themselves that there are families that result from that. And that we all come from that. And there is a sanctity to that that I think we all feel and it’s in those unions. And it’s just interesting that as a culture we have a primacy now on other kinds of storytelling. And it feels like all those comedies and by that I don’t mean like funny stuff but things or stories where things work out in kind of an elegant fashion are considered sort of might I say jejune.

**Craig:** You might.

**Aline:** But there are important reasons and for centuries they’re the reasons that we are the humans that we are because of those genetic unions most of which were sanctified in some sort of ritual.

**Craig:** I mean, the ritual part of it is what you feel here and in all three of these. There are very rituals left. We have birth, we have welcome to adulthood, we have wedding, we have death. Those weirdly are the rituals that are left.

**John:** Graduation.

**Craig:** Graduation. You know what? Graduation-ish. But truly, nah. Like Graduation is sort of like you made it through a bureaucratic thing, so if you’re just standing here you got it. These are different ones. These are sort of like the life impact rituals that are left for us in the west. And I guess this is also the case as we start to see cultural representations of other cultures, it’s through these rituals, we start to see how weirdly uniform the rituals are as we move away from the west into the east and elsewhere. There are always differences.

But the differences sort of serve to accentuate how there are not differences. And in this, these pages from Crazy Rich Asians, this is something that you do see frequently – when I say frequently I don’t mean like, oh, it’s a trope. I just mean this is – because we don’t say like shooting guns is a trope, or I don’t know, punching someone in a bar. These are things that happen frequently at weddings, where the wedding serves as a substrate, a context for people who are on the edge of a thing. And being exposed to a ritual and being confronted by a ritual they understand that a certain path is now available to them. It becomes real.

I think this actually happens in life. I do. I don’t think this is fantasy. I think people go to weddings and then they walk away, I think the amount of breakups that happen immediately after a wedding is probably rather high compared to after like a bar mitzvah. Do you know what I mean? Because you’re confronted by the ritual. And I like the way that they’re confronted here.

**John:** Let’s turn our attention to Palm Springs, which is one of my favorite movies from this past year.

**Aline:** It was great.

**John:** It was a terrific movie. Premise-y wise there’s a Groundhog Day thing happening, but you come upon a character who is already deep, deep, deep into his Groundhog Day-ish-ness. But we start at this wedding. It’s a wedding toast. And we’ve seen bad wedding toasts before, like bridesmaids’ toasts before. This is a particularly a good one. I think Plus One also did a great job with this this past year, with the trope of the wedding toast and sort of how many bad versions of it there are.

What I really liked, this page three I’m starting to look at here. We’re starting in the middle of a terrible bridesmaid’s toast. But then we’re following our other two central characters who we’re going to realize are the central characters, Sarah, who is the sister, who is getting very drunk, and then Nyles who is going to be taking over the mic and giving the speech. We have an expectation it’s going to be an embarrassing speech and then he ends up just saving it in ways that are just remarkable and we’ll realize this because he’s been going through this hundreds of times before this.

A really smart, funny job. So much is being set up in these pages. And it’s so nicely focused on who is important versus who is not important. It’s doing a lot of really good story work while staying very, very funny. Really a great version of this kind of scene.

**Aline:** I also really like the way this is written. It’s very clear, and lively, and easy to follow. Doesn’t have lots of bulky description. I just like the writing style of this piece.

**John:** Yeah. It’s very dialogue forward and just enough stuff to give you a sense of what’s happening in this space and really what the important beats are. Really short scene description, action lines that don’t have to be full sentences. Just enough to get the flow of how the dialogue is driving the scene.

**Aline:** Yeah. Like “All eyes land on Sarah — caught mid wine sip.” And she says, “Uh.” You know what that is. And he doesn’t over-explain that.

**John:** Yeah. So this is written Andy Siara. Story by Andy Siara and Max Barbakow.

**Aline:** We’re all old enough, we’ve passed through the wedding phase, the baby phase.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** We’re deep in the cancer phase, who has cancer phase.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** When I went to weddings I would just love a drunken toast. I mean, man, that just livens up the evening. When somebody gets up and you know. And, you know, most people don’t do a lot of speaking. And most people are not prepared, so extemporaneous speech when they’re exhausted and they’re holding a glass of booze. It’s going to be fun stuff.

**John:** The other thing I’d recommend people look at these pages for is that this is a four-page dialogue driven scene which would feel too long normally. But what the writer is doing, which all writers need to learn how to do, is when you’re in a bigger space how you break that up into smaller moments. And how even though it is one continuous scene there are moments and smaller areas within that scene so that it doesn’t just feel like one monolith of a scene. If it had been sort of like in a wide shot that whole time it would have been torture. But because it’s being broken into smaller little moments it doesn’t feel like you’re trapped in this space for a long time.

All right, lastly I want to look at The Farewell which was one of my favorite movies in its year. We had Lulu Wang when she had this movie come out. What I love about this is so our central character, Billi, she’s come to China because her grandmother is dying. She’s very upset about this. But they’re not telling the grandmother that she’d dying, and so she has to maintain this secret. And this wedding is really all a pretense for one last gathering to see grandma before she dies.

And so the actual wedding itself Billi is not really a part of, and so she’s just a spectator at the wedding the way that we as an audience are just sort of a spectator watching all this stuff. And yet what Lulu does so well in this sequence is really letting us focus on Billi even while all this expensive wedding is happening around her. And, again, one of the things I really appreciate about this is Lulu Wang never explains how a wedding is going to work. There’s no outside character who is new to all of this who gets talked through it all. It just happens. And we sort of piece together what the sequence of events must be which is really nicely done.

So let’s take a look at these pages. One of the things I really appreciate about this is recognizing that for most individuals a wedding is a once in a lifetime experience, or they’re a guest at multiple weddings, but for some people a wedding is an everyday thing. And so I like that Lulu shows us the waiters and the other folks who are sort of on break. They do this every day. There’s nothing unusual or remarkable about this day. This is just their daily, ordinary life. And so there’s moments here where she has people on a cigarette break while the wedding is happening around them. I just love that it’s routine for some of the people in this scene.

**Aline:** What I thought was cool about this movie was that even though it’s dealing with this wedding and bringing the family together it didn’t at any point veer into the tropes. It maintained its point of view through the lead character’s eyes in an incredible way through the whole story. So even when you’re in stuff that could take you to tropey land in weddings, which that’s another thing about wedding stories is they kind of have this pull where they will try and drag you towards more kind of expected things, and what I loved about her writing here is that she always maintained her point of view and her tone even through these things which, you know, it’s sort of like in a courtroom piece where you can sort of turn your brain off because you feel like you understand the flow of something. And in here she really maintains the tone. And a lot of it was in the way she shot it, so that you understand that you’re always keeping track of the main character and sort of her issues around her identity and responsibility and what she owes to her family and how she feels. And I thought that was really cool.

So it doesn’t kind of verge into that like wedding comedy space.

**John:** Yeah. In prose fiction there’s a discussion of first person versus third person. And so first person being the I narrator, versus third person is the third party narrator, watching the person. And especially in middle grade fiction they call it a close third person where you are literally like kind of right over the shoulder of that character. And that’s kind of what I feel like here is that we’re basically only getting information that Billi gets, and so we’re never cutting away to things that Billi would not be aware of.

**Aline:** Right. Right.

**John:** And that’s what keeps it very much centered in her experience even as we’re seeing stuff around the edges. It’s very much her experience of this wedding versus the bride and groom’s experience of the wedding. And I remember when Lulu came on the show I said like, listen, I would love to see a companion movie which is just about this bride and groom who have been sort of forced to get married too early and too soon. And I understand why you didn’t want to do that in this movie, but I’m so curious to learn more about them because their story feels really interesting, too.

So it’s an opportunity to – by focusing your narrative lens on your central character you still can paint out the sense that there would be fascinating stories and real life people inhabiting these other roles even though we don’t get to see too much of it in the course of the two hours that we’re following.

**Aline:** Yeah, that was basically the idea of 27 Dresses, which is to tell a wedding movie from the perspective of a bridesmaid. You know, it’s an “always a bridesmaid” movie. I was kind of surprised when I pitched and wrote it that there hadn’t been tons of those. I mean, obviously then there’s Bridesmaids. But 27 Dresses, which was before that, which was really about the type of person who gets asked to be in everyone’s wedding and there’s sort of a personality type. So it actually was an outgrowth of an idea that I had had long, long before that, which is I wanted to do a Cinderella movie from the perspective of the step sisters, who are like, you know, they have a point of view on it and it’s like they’re being told their feet are fat and gross. It seems like there’s another version of that story.

And so that had always stuck with me. And then it’s based on this friend of mine who has been in so many, many weddings. There are characters that populate a wedding movie that you can kind of shift your focus or different type of wedding. So it is a rich area, but, you know, again, I would say from the crafty point of view find something you can hitch your wagon to that’s pulling you through, as is The Farewell obviously. That can pull you through so that you’re not completely just dependent on like, you know, and now they have the bachelorette party or whatever.

**John:** Exactly. So I think our takeaways are it’s nice that there is a structure. There’s a sequence to it. But I think the point that Aline made early on which is that just because there’s a sequence doesn’t mean there’s an escalation. So you are responsible for the escalation and the increasing stakes over the course of these events. It’s nice that people have expectations and you don’t have to teach them what a wedding is. That’s great. But within that you do have to be thinking about sort of what is unique and special about this wedding versus all other weddings.

So, those details are probably even more important for this because otherwise it’s just going to shade back towards generic wedding. And just always make sure you’re keeping your narrative camera aimed at what’s actually important. Because this is something I found just even in a scene I wrote yesterday, which was not a wedding scene, but there was this big moment that happened, this big sort of set piece happened and then I realized like, oh, that set piece is really cool but my protagonist, my actual central hero, isn’t really the focus of it. And so my work today was to rethink that set piece to keep my protagonist really more central focused within it. Because it just doesn’t matter if it’s not about my character.

So, a wedding is like one of those big action set pieces and it can be really impressive, but it doesn’t matter if it’s not about your characters.

**Aline:** Yeah. And that is where boring lives. One of the things that I always think is like one of my hidden weird reverse traits as a writer is like I get bored very easily, even by my own stuff, and I will get bored by a story. And so a lot of times when I find like, geez, I’m boing myself, it’s that I’ve lost kind of the character and I’ve lost the point of view of the character and what’s pulling me in and why I care. And it is – you can get sort of distracted by arranging the tchotchkes on a coffee table and then just forget – you just don’t have a coffee table. You’re just moving ashtrays and candles around on the floor.

So it is always important to – I think, you know, there is a lot of busywork that can come up when you’re writing where you feel like you’re writing stuff down or doing things, to do lists, especially if you’re writing something with an action component or a lot of “business” where your audience showed up to see a story about a person or people that they can connect to. And they came to see characters and to live through characters. And so it’s important to make sure that you’re clearing out all the other bric-a-brac so that’s what you’re doing.

**John:** Yup. So full disclosure, Craig actually had to step away in the middle of that conversation so that’s why he didn’t resolve his feelings about weddings. Craig is back now, though, so Craig–

**Craig:** I’m back.

**John:** Tell us one last takeaway you have for wedding scenes.

**Craig:** OK. I think that wedding scenes are an opportunity to have wish fulfillment in a beautiful way because they are a moment where everybody in life stops and does something special. We literally dress up together and it’s happy. Usually when we’re dressing up together it’s a funeral. So this is nice. It’s a beautiful moment, but don’t think that that’s going to carry you through. It’s not. Even if you’re doing a kind of wedding that people generally don’t see, and there are different colors, and there’s different music, and there’s different food, doesn’t matter. That’s not going to carry you through. What’s going to carry you through is the same thing that carries you through every other scene ever. Relationships.

So use the wedding to leverage relationships as you want unless it is at the end of a movie and it is the conclusion of something in which case it’s the locker room celebration and then just have fun. Just have fun. But relationships.

**Aline:** When I got married, I like a fair bit of attention, but maybe not to be like the center-center of attention. And when you’re a bride it’s the closest that you get to being a celebrity because you’re the person that invited all the people and they all want to talk to you. And I felt the eyeballs on me when I was walking down the aisle. And so the expression I was so nervous that my knees were knocking against each other, I had never actually – I thought that was like hyperbole. But I was walking down the aisle and it was a billion degrees, shvitzing, but with my knees – actually when I stood next to Will my knees where actually banging together to the point where I thought people are going to be able to hear this. It was weirdly the most nervous I’d ever been. And I wasn’t doing anything.

But it was like the fact that – I think one of the reasons this is so bewitching for women is like it is the only moment in my life where I was ever like that person that everybody wanted to talk to, dance with, look at, talk about my outfit. So, I think that’s one of the reasons that it has this enduring appeal. And I got so nervous that I was like knock-kneed.

**John:** Literally.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Nice. All right. It has come to the time where we bring on our producer, Megana Rao, to open up the mailbag and ask the questions that our listeners have asked us. Megana, what do you have for us today?

**Craig:** Hey Megana, before you ask the first question, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Megana.

**Megana Rao:** Oh, Merry Christmas.

**Craig:** You know, right? Because we’re allowed to say Merry Christmas again. [laughs] I am a Jew that has been saying Merry Christmas literally my whole life. I have no idea what’s going on out there.

**Megana:** Oh, Merry Christmas. This was such a great discussion as someone who is like 28 and had 10 weddings to go to this year.

**Craig:** Yes, you’re in that zone.

**Aline:** And so expensive.

**Megana:** Yes. And normally it’s something I dread, but the Zoom weddings and hearing you guys talk about it I’m like very nostalgic for that.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Now, Megana, when we were prepping this topic you also mentioned a show that you’re watching that you really liked. So tell us what that was.

**Megana:** Yes. So there’s this show called Made in Heaven and it is about these two wedding planners in India. And in Hinduism there’s this idea that all of the matches are made in heaven, so that’s where the title comes from. And it’s really interesting because it’s sort of a procedural where they take on a wedding of the week and they use it to talk about class issues and all the other factors that come into play in an Indian wedding. And some of the I guess antiquated traditions that still exist.

**Craig:** Where would I see this if I wanted to stream this? Yeah, where it at?

**Megana:** So it’s on Amazon. It’s great. I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** Maid of the Week?

**Megana:** Made in Heaven.

**Craig:** Oh, I wasn’t even close. I literally was a million miles away. And you’ve said in Hinduism we think, OK, and I said, no, you know what, I’m changing it to Maid of the Week which is terrible, is the worst title in history. All right, so what do have going in our mailbag?

**Megana:** OK, so Flores from Australia asks, “How important do you think it is to describe the weather conditions of a scene? I like to think that the intervention of nature can help propel the conflict of a scene. For example, a torrential rainfall could increase the danger of a car chase, or a blanket of gray clouds may reflect the grim state of mind of a character. The trouble is that on shoot day the weather rarely plays along. The description in a short film I once directed had started with, ‘It’s high noon as the sun’s warmth fills a cloudless blue sky.’ But on the day of the shoot we were hiding under umbrellas.

“Do you think describing weather is necessary?”

**John:** All right. I think weather is necessary when it’s necessary. And so if you look through my scripts I’m not talking about the weather very often, but when I do bring it up there’s a reason why I’m bringing it up because it’s actually important to the scene.

So I look at there’s a sequence in Go where Sarah Polley’s character gets hit by a car and is in a ditch. And it really does need to be raining for that. It just doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t track for it to not be raining like that.

But I do also read scripts sometimes that are just like way too filled with the weather and blue skies and clouds and such in ways that are not reflective of the reality of production or what’s actually important in the scene. What do you guys think?

**Aline:** I think when you’re writing it you can do that if you want to if it’s important to the story. And then when you get to actually making it you can decide how important it is. But I will say I always try – when I’m doing this podcast I always try and think of beginning writers because I always recommend this show to beginning writers. There’s almost always too much stuff in people’s scripts, not too little. I would say the distribution is probably 70% of people write too much stuff, and 30% write too little.

Your weather thing might be the thing you want to cut. You probably don’t need as much of it as you think you do. Because I think when you’re first writing you feel a need – you know, as Craig always says, you’ve already seen the movie. And I think when you’re first writing you have a tendency to want to write down every single little bitty bob of that because you’re so excited that you see it.

Weather might be something that can go.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes it matters. And rain, always think of this, Flores. Rain you can make. No problem. You can’t unmake it. It’s really hard to do that. But you can make it. Now, when you make it it’s super annoying. So, you know, you’ve got your truck that’s pumping the water. The actors are angry. Everyone is angry. The water is often cold. And it takes time. It just takes time. It messes things up.

That said, sometimes you want rain. Rain is one of the best ways to show onscreen that a roof doesn’t work very well. There are all these little interesting things that rain can do.

But what I would definitely avoid is what I would call unremarkable weather commenting because we have a state of default fine, you know. If I need to see your breath that’s remarkable. If it’s raining that is remarkable, meaning I’m remarking. Otherwise, neutral weather, that’s what we presume. And if you could please try and avoid overly purple discussion and descriptions of normal weather, like the sun. We do – in our Three Page Challenges we have occasionally seen people waxing poetic about the sun. And my whole thing is like, yeah, you know, we’re not going to be staring at the sun. It’s just not going to happen, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.

**John:** We’re never going to aim that high.

**Aline:** Can I ask you guys also a question, because in movies routinely, and this just might be me, people in movies routinely have lengthy, lengthy conversations in the rain.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** I’m always running through the rain. I’m getting out of the rain. I don’t want the rain. I don’t stand there and talk. I’ve never had a conversation in the rain voluntarily.

**Craig:** Well, actually that’s one of the values of rain.

**Aline:** Have you?

**Craig:** Is that if you put people standing in the rain talking you know that they are in a state. What they’re discussing is so important they actually have to take the hit of the rain. And so I’m breaking up with you. I love you. We’re being shot at. Whatever that is, sure. But you’re absolutely right. If they’re just chit-chatting in the rain? Hell no. Nobody does that.

**Aline:** But those, like if you’re breaking up I would be like I get it, you’re dumping me, can we step to the side?

**Craig:** You would.

**Aline:** I just don’t want to be wet. I don’t want to ruin my hair on top of this.

**Craig:** That is a choice. By the way, a total valid choice for a character, but not all characters. [laughs]

**John:** One other thing I would recommend people think about is the difference between weather and climate. If you’re setting your story in a place that has a specific climate that we might not immediately grasp, it’s worth noting that. So I’m thinking back to Wide Sargasso Sea, which is an indie film from a zillion years ago, and it was just a very sweaty, lush, tropical place. And I needed to feel that. And obviously I’m going to see that on the screen. I’m going to get that and people are sweaty. But I need to feel that on the page as well.

So, in that kind of situation, if the normal is something kind of remarkable make sure we know that early on in the story to get a sense of what it feels like. Tennessee Williams stories are basically always in hot, sweaty Southern places. So that’s worth noting so we can have a sense of what it feels like, because that’s going to inform not just character’s actions but costume and everything else around it.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**Aline:** Well be aware that whatever you stipulate the opposite will be happening on the day.

**Craig:** Always. Always.

**Megana:** Great. Do we have time for one more from Brendan?

**John:** Sure.

**Megana:** Cool. So, Brendan asks, “Have you ever completely bombed a pitch? I’m a student at a university and I recently crashed and burned while giving a pitch to my classmates. From my point of view it was ugly. I got completely turned around in my notes, was rushed, and all my preparation seemed to disappear. The professor was nice enough to stop and give me an extra week to prepare. And many of classmates were kind enough to send me some words of encouragement. Has this ever happened to either of you?”

**John:** Yes. I have bombed pitches. And I’m trying to think, you know, one that I’ve talked about before was pitching Catwoman at Warner Bros. And I pitched it actually probably pretty well, but the executive was just not at all interested in my version of Catwoman at all. And just basically decimated it in front of me. And that sucked.

But there’s also been times where I couldn’t really connect the pieces very well. Or I could sort of feel it unraveling as I was talking. And that’s disheartening, but it does happen. And it happens more often early in your career just because you don’t have the practice in terms of kind of knowing what a pitch needs to be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I mean, the one that I think of is I had to pitch a movie across a rather slender table to a gentleman who was eating a rather large sandwich.

**Craig:** Ew, I’ve had that. I’ve been there.

**Aline:** And I get it, he’s very busy. It happens. But it wasn’t like we were in production and we were working on something. It was just like I was maybe 27 and I was pitching something from scratch to a very important man and just as we sit down this giant Dagwood appears in front of him. And it’s sliced in half and he kind of rotates the pieces to face himself and sort of inspects them and picks one up. And he’s a very, very high prominent – he’s now since rocketed through the corporate structure. And when his name comes up all I can do is picture him eating this giant ham sandwich with pieces of lettuce.

And I don’t know if I did bad or well. Something about that I kind of exited my body and flapped my lips until the thing was over.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ve definitely experienced that, too. I don’t think I’ve ever bombed a pitch because I’m a pretty good yada-dada-dada guy. I’m a good improviser. And I try and prepare so that I’m not kind of figuring the pitch out as I’m there. But I have definitely been in pitches that didn’t go well. And that’s not necessarily a bomb as much as when you’re early in your career – first of all, pitching without context is brutal. It’s the difference between somebody coming in to a show room and saying we would like to buy a washing machine and you go well let me show you our models. As opposed to knock-knock, I’ve got washing machines. How is your washing machine? It’s just so sweaty and miserable. And a lot of times because of that the people you’re sitting in front of aren’t that high up the food chain yet and so they often are bored and you can feel bad about it. It’s rough.

But I will say, Brendan, you’re a student. Therefore you did not crash and burn. You did not bomb. You’re merely experiencing and learning. That’s the point. You should be thrilled that this happened there. That’s why you’re there.

And I love the fact that your classmates gave you words of encouragement, because they’re all in the same spot. And guess what?

**Aline:** That’s very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like a perfectly prepared delivered pitch of a boring movie is less of a success story than a crashing, burning, bumbling, confused pitch of something that has something fascinating at its core. We think we’re in control of this. We’re not. So, don’t freak out. Don’t worry. You’re learning. Crash and burn a few more times. Get a little bit better at it. Feel a little bit more confident. And then we’ll hit the eject button and land in LA and start it over again.

**Aline:** I’ve got another hideous meeting beginning, which doesn’t have to do with pitching, but was a general meeting. I was going to meet, again, really early in my career, I was going to meet a producer and the development lady is walking me with great, great brio. We’re sailing into the room. And she says to her boss, “Do you have time for this – are you ready for this meeting? Are you too busy for this meeting? Are you ready for this meeting?” Something like that. And he says, “Of course I have time for my favorite new writer, Jenny Bicks.”

**Craig:** Oh no!

**John:** Oh no!

**Craig:** Jenny Bicks is really good though. [laughs]

**Aline:** She’s a good writer. And then we all stood there for a minute. And then the wonderful lady said, “This is actually not Jenny.” And then we all died a little.

**Craig:** Yup. That’s rough. That’s a rough one. That’s the them version of us sitting down in a room and having some general chit chat before we start pitching and we mention a movie that we hate and then you–

**John:** Oh…

**Aline:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Then you notice the poster.

**John:** Done that.

**Aline:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, that’s why I don’t talk about any movies or television shows with anyone.

**John:** Yes. Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you all. It was so encouraging.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two very related One Cool Things. My first one is The Simpsons Christmas episode from this last week. It was called A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas, which is a parody of Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies. But just really well done. And just a thorough sort of dissection of that form, but also a version of that form. So essentially Hallmark comes to shoot a Christmas movie in the summer in Springfield and everything that should happen in a Christmas movie does happen. Really good version of it.

And then back-to-back I watched that with Lifetime’s The Christmas Set Up which is the gay Christmas movie that Lifetime did this year, which was also delightful, which stars Fran Drescher as a mom trying to set up her gay son with this other guy at Christmas. It is both completely the formula for the Christmas movie and a pretty good version of that with some lovely little performances. So it was just nice to see both the parody of it and the actual version of it back-to-back. So I recommend people check out both of those.

**Aline:** I’m going to cheat also. I have more than one. I’m just going to say watch the Bee Gees documentary. Just watch it. And then my One Cool Thing or Two Cool Things that are sort of related. Merill Markoe who has long been one of my writing heroes who was the head writer of early Letterman Show and has written a lot of amazing books and articles and essays, and she’s incredibly funny, and was a real role model for me, she has written a graphic novel that she also did the illustrations for. And it’s based on her childhood diaries. And it’s called We Saw Scenery, which is when she was a kid and they would go and visit someplace and she would write in her diary “we saw scenery.”

The art is incredible. The story is great. It’s really funny, as are all things Merill Markoe. I highly, highly recommend it. Graphic novels are great for Christmas gifts. They’re easy to read quickly. And I just – I really love the book and it really captured all the things I love about Merill.

And then similarly Rachel Bloom, our friend, friend of mine, friend of the podcast, has a memoir out now called I Want to be Where the Normal People Are. And although I am not in any way an unbiased reader of Rachel’s stuff, it’s so funny. It’s so fresh. It is like hanging out with Rachel. It is a very fast read. And it’s something that you can sort of pick up over the holidays and have a ball reading. And it really, really captures her voice, her humor.

And, We Saw Scenery and I Want to be Where the Normal People Are have a very interesting connection point which is that they both had relationships with boys in elementary school, flirtations, that we’re related to the boys being anti-Semitic and invoking Nazi stuff to flirt. Very disturbing.

**John:** Wow.

**Aline:** But they’re both great. So those are my recommendations.

**John:** Excellent. Craig, what do you got?

**Craig:** Well, it’s a little late to buy a Christmas present for your loved one, but why don’t you buy one for yourself. It doesn’t have to show up on Christmas. And I’m not going to rich guy you. This costs – are you ready – $14.

I derive so much pleasure from things I use all the time that work right. And here’s something I had. A little pan that I was using to make scrambled eggs. And it just didn’t work right. There was always an egg that would adhere. Just terrible.

Anyway, so found this little pan called the Carote. Carote Nonstick Skillet for – and mostly it’s for eggs. And the weird thing about it is the coating is rough. It’s not smooth. And somehow it works. And the eggs just sort of slide around on it. It’s amazing. I love it.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** So, super cheap. You can use it on any stove. $14. Do not write in complaining about toxins. I will punish you. It’s just not a concern.

And, yeah.

**Aline:** You can get the toxins out with crystals, right?

**Craig:** Yes. If you ingest enough crystals and colloidal silver you will detoxify by ceasing your life. You will no longer have to worry about toxins.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Frying pan.

**John:** And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced, as always, by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** 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 am @johnaugust. Aline, you are?

**Aline:** It’s @alinebmckenna.

**John:** @alinebmckenna. We have t-shirts and they’re lovely. 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 find the transcripts. There you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has links to lots of 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. If you’re looking for that last minute Christmas gift you can actually give a gift membership to Scriptnotes, which is lovely, a little stocking stuffer for somebody who listens to the show but is not a Premium member. You can give them a gift of being a Premium member if you’d like to.

Aline, thank you for coming by to talk about weddings.

**Aline:** Aw, thanks for having me guys. I miss you.

**Craig:** Thanks Aline. Merry Christmas.

**Aline:** I’m going to hug you guys so hard I’m going to break some ribs.

**John:** Aw. That’ll be nice.

**Craig:** Once we are all vaccinated.

**Aline:** Oh man, I’m going to hug you real hard, Craig. Just get ready.

**Craig:** I’m going to bring my ribs to you.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah!

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, and we’re back. So, Aline has threatened to hug us all a lot when we are all vaccinated, but that is our main topic is sort of what are our hopes and our plans for a post-vaccination life? Because I’ve been thinking now that vaccinations are actually rolling out it does look like this pandemic will end. So I’ve started thinking about what are some of my first priorities of things I want to do once I can actually safely do them again.

So, I’m curious. Aline, we’ll start with you since you’re the guest.

**Aline:** We all are going to have to live in a world where I didn’t realize how much I was spitting on people and being spat on before. I didn’t realize that when I was sitting in Paris in a little restaurant that’s a little blot that the guy sitting next to me had fully spat all over my coq au vin.

**Craig:** Oui oui.

**Aline:** We are now going to be processing that. I mean, I got to be honest I’m like still very immersed in the trauma of the whole thing.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Aline:** And I feel like it is so immense. The amount of death is so immense. And every day where you turn on and you see the count and you see just the devastation that’s happening in our country and around the world. There’s many, many, many things I’m excited to do – go to the movies, go to dinner, hug my friends, break some ribs – but I’m also feeling like the after effects of this on all of us are going to reverberate for years. You know?

And so obviously none of us will ever blow out a candle on a birthday cake. Just if you do, that’s fine, I’m just not having any. But also I just think people have lost so much and sacrificed so much in terms of the mortality and the job loss and the economic implications. So I sort of feel like I ricochet between actually processing or trying to process what’s happening and then just being excited to go, you know, to a vintage clothing store and just, you know.

**Craig:** That’s what I’m waiting for.

**Aline:** Squeeze in among other people.

**Craig:** I’m waiting to go to the vintage clothing stores. [laughs]

**John:** Craig loves thrifting.

**Aline:** They have J. Crew. You can get J. Crew there.

**Craig:** Oh, my new thing is Vans. I like a nice Vans shirt now. That’s my new jam.

I believe that following vaccination, widespread vaccination, there is going to be a natural human release of pent up need. We are going to be around each other a lot. And it’s going to be very exciting. And there’s going to be parties. And there’s going to be dinner. And there’s going to be lunches. And we’re going to spend time with each other because we can. It’s going to happen.

And in that sort of burst of exuberance it will be tempting to wet blanket it all and say but look what’s happened. The problem is the exuberance is not really within our control. I think we should allow it. We should experience the exuberance that is coming, because it’s coming. And then following the natural cessation of the exuberance we need to go about doing the work of memorializing the people we’ve lost. Because we just lost more people than we did in World War II and Vietnam and Korea combined. That’s what’s happened.

So we have to memorialize this. And similarly I think we have to now hopefully pursue collectively an improved bolstered healthcare system for all Americans. Because we don’t have it. And the system didn’t just break, but it never even was a system. We didn’t have one. Clearly. At least in this administration. There was nothing there. We just had a house that had no door. Forget the weather stripping. There was no door. So, we have to go about doing that.

But I fully intend to welcome the exuberance with open arms and feel it as best I can and, yeah, some ribs are going to get crushed. And you know what? I’m not a kissy guy, but yeah. I’ll give people a little kiss. Yeah.

**John:** So I want to acknowledge that the collective trauma that we’ve all experienced and sort of the need to deal with the grief of it all and memorialize it is super important. And the collective part of that is really important.

Just thinking sort of individually and selfishly like what am I looking forward to being able to do soon – or not soon – in six months from now hopefully that I can’t do right now. Even watching this Lifetime Christmas movie, they kept showing – because we were watching it through the Lifetime app they kept showing the same ad again, and again, and again for Disneyworld. And like I really want to Disneyland again. I want to do that stupid stuff where it’s I’m in a space and the experience of being in that space is actually unique and different.

So, I want to go to Disneyland. I definitely need to go back to Paris. I haven’t been to Paris in far too long. I’m looking forward to dinners with friends and hanging out. But I also recognize that I can’t even fathom leaving the house after dark anymore. I’ve just become such a homebody and sort of so – like the idea of going someplace at 8pm feels just unfathomable to me. So, that’s going to take some time to sort of get used to.

**Craig:** We’ll get you out there.

**John:** A place I want to get back to is this climbing gym I started going to before the pandemic. And I really miss it. And so there’s so many things I can do working out at home, but a climbing gym is a unique place and I’m looking forward to being able to go back there safely and just do that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Fun.

**Aline:** Yeah. One of my big New Year’s resolution for 2020 was like, you know what, I like massages and I think I’m going to get a massage once a week. Why not? I will treat myself.

**John:** [laughs]

**Aline:** And I will do that for just a few weeks and then I won’t have any massages for the rest of the year.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Aline:** And I will just sit between my husband’s legs while we’re watching Homeland and go, “More!”

**John:** Yeah, so all those sort of services like the chiropractor, like the places where you go someplace and they actually have to touch you to do stuff. All that has gone away. So I will look forward to that coming back.

**Craig:** Yeah. I must admit my life has not changed dramatically. Because I’ve always been—

**Aline:** It’s so funny.

**Craig:** Because I’ve always been a bit of a hermit-y shut-in. But even I – I’ll tell you the thing – OK here’s my indulgence. The thing that I really, really, really cannot wait to get back to…Escape Rooms.

**John:** Yes. Had to be a location to go there.

**Craig:** I’ve done a bunch of the virtual ones. They are decent. They’re trying. God bless them for trying to keep their businesses going and keep their employees working. It just doesn’t quite connect the way you would want it to. So, I’m really excited for that.

**John:** It was one year ago that we took both of our, my company, your company, we had a joint Christmas party and Escape Room.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I would like to–

**John:** Who knew?

**Craig:** Yeah, god, that was right before the darkness. The darkness fell. I wonder who is going to be president. [laughs]

**John:** And I want to go skiing. Yeah.

**Craig:** No, I’m not interested in skiing. Absolutely not.

**John:** That’s a me thing. All right, thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Aline:** Appreciate it.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [CAA and WGA Agreement](https://deadline.com/2020/12/caa-wga-reach-deal-that-will-bring-writers-back-into-agency-fold-1234657859/)
* [Japanese Rent A Family on Twitter](https://twitter.com/HirokoTabuchi/status/1338703517465382912)
* [Japan’s Rent A Family Industry](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry) by Elif Bautman for the New Yorker
* [Crazy Rich Asians Script](https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/crazy-rich-asians-2018.pdf) script by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim
* [Palm Springs](https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/palm-springs-2020.pdf) script written by Andy Siara (Story by Andy Siara and Max Barbakow)
* [The Farewell](https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/the-farewell-2019.pdf) script by Lulu Wang
* [Made in Heaven](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P75SHR6) on Amazon Prime
* [Simpsons Christmas Movie episode](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-simpsons-season-32-episode-10-review-a-springfield-summer-christmas-for-christmas/)
* [Lifetime’s Christmas Set Up](https://www.mylifetime.com/movies/the-christmas-setup)
* [Carote 8 Inch Nonstick Skillet Frying Pan Egg Skillet Omelet Pan](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0732NXYNS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
* [We Saw Scenery by Merill Markoe](https://www.amazon.com/We-Saw-Scenery-Diaries-Merrill/dp/1616209038/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1XPZEDZMH4S35&dchild=1&keywords=merill+markoe&qid=1608160454&sprefix=merill+mark%2Cgarden%2C198&sr=8-1)
* [I Want to be Where the Normal People Are](https://www.amazon.com/Want-Where-Normal-People-Are/dp/1538745356/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=rachel+bloom&qid=1608160497&sr=8-1) by Rachel Bloom
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](https://twitter.com/alinebmckenna?lang=en) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Heidi Lauren Duke ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/480standard.mp3).