Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

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

Nora Garrett: Hi, thanks for having me.

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

Nora: Yes, that is true.

[laughter]

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

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

John: Yes.

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

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

Nora: Yes.

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

Nora: Yes, we sure did.

[laughter]

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

Nora: Of course.

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

Nora: Oh, my gosh. Really?

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

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

John: Boulder, Colorado.

Nora: Oh, my gosh, amazing. Wow.

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

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

John: You’re four. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Of course, she did. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, developing quickly.

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

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

Nora: Yes, exactly. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: Yes.

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

Nora: [laughs]

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

Nora: Oh, sure.

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

Nora: Yes, of course. I mean–

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

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

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

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

John: Slam poet.

Nora: -then everyone’s like, then I–

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

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

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

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

John: Oh yes, of course.

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

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

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

John: No. [chuckles]

Nora: This is literally like a camcorder. Yes.

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

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

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

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

John: That’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: Yes, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: Exactly.

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

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

John: Looking back, what, two years?

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

John: The younger me.

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

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

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

John: You’re on the website now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, so recent.

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

John: What are years?

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: I have a podcast called Schmitschmoats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: I take advantage of that. [chuckles]

John: Next, we’re meeting Maggie Resnick.

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

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

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

John: Next, we have Patricia Engler.

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

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

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

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

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

John: You’re asleep no more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, great.

Nora: Yes.

John: Talk to us about the rehearsal process.

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

John: Is it in New York City?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: Thank you. Thank you so much.

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

Nora: Great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora: I love Ben DeLaCreme.

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

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter. Those are called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.

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

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the ones we referred to and the new one, we’re about to record on day jobs. Nora Garrett, thank you so much for coming on Script Notes.

Nora: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

Nora: Very movie moment, yes.

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

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

John: What kinds of restaurants were you waiting at?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

John: Data analyst. This was at Meta.

Nora: This is at Meta.

John: Was that your last day job?

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

John: Assistant to what kind of person?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Some video editing or some text editing?

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

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

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

John: Cool. Awesome. Thanks for this.

Nora: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

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

Craig: Yes.

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

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

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

Craig: Segue man.

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

Craig: Drew’s a big draw.

John: You can see Drew in person.

Craig: Yes. I think we will–

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

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

Drew Marquardt: Everywhere I go.

[laughter]

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

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

John: I think there is-

Craig: Mayhem?

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

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

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

Craig: It’s crazy.

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

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

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

John: Absolutely.

Craig: You got to do none of that.

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, that’s nice.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: You’ll probably get four or five.

Drew: Just a couple.

Craig: Just a couple.

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

John: Two, yes.

Craig: Easy.

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

Craig: We usually do.

John: We usually do. Someone smart and great.

Craig: Somebody smart.

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

Craig: Sure do.

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

Craig: Very expensive.

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

Craig: Definitely.

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

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

John: Crazy expensive.

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

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

Craig: It’s insurance.

John: It’s insurance.

Craig: It’s insurance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: It really is.

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

John: Thank you to–

Craig: I wrote my name a lot.

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

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

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

Craig: Sorry, you sign checks?

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

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

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

Craig: Wow.

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

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

John: Why does the check exist?

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

John: No. Crazy.

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

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

Craig: They won’t know.

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

Craig: That’s crazy.

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

Craig: That’s a great question.

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

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

John: That’s really cool.

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

John: 500.

Craig: 500 people.

John: 500 distinct people.

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

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

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

John: The projects folder.

Craig: Yes.

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

Craig: Instructive.

John: -instructive to talk about.

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

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

Drew: I’m doing ghost stories this week.

John: All right.

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

Craig: Where’s Blithe Spirit?

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

Craig: You couldn’t find Blithe Spirit?

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

Craig: That’s worth it.

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

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

Drew: Absolutely.

John: If you want to read any of these–

Craig: You always find the one.

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

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

John: Yes, we did.

Craig: That was fun.

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

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

Craig: Thanks a lot, Saleem. God.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Don’t even do that.

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

Craig: Almost certainly it’s in my dock.

John: Everything’s always in your dock.

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

John: You go to the applications folder.

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

John: I will Spotlight it and just start typing.

Craig: I’m a big Finder fan.

John: Not a big Finder fan.

Craig: I love the Finder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: He ruined it.

John: He ruined it.

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

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: I don’t care.

John: How dare you put her on a podcast?

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

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

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

John: Some of it is even recorded.

Craig: This isn’t even that bad.

John: No.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Save my marriage.

[laughter]

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

Craig: We’re comparing it to–

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

Craig: 2015 to 2025.

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

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

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

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

John: One hundred percent.

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

John: We had the mini-series, but–

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

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

Craig: Something like that.

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

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

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

John: For sure.

Craig: The studio won everything.

John: Severance got tremendous attention as well.

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

John: Expensive shows that it seems like nobody watches.

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

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

Craig: There’s a show called Acapulco?

John: That just finished its fourth season.

Craig: No.

John: It is-

Craig: Are you serious?

John: It is a-

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

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

Craig: Oh my God, this is incredible.

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

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

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

Craig: They are coming back around.

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

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

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

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

John: 100%.

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

John: They just put some on the homescreen.

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

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

Craig: There is so much.

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

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

John: The amount of episodes is–

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

John: I think so.

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

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

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

John: Yes.

Craig: We’ll never know.

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

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

John: It does stand out.

Craig: When you do 22 episodes–

John: They were always clunker episodes.

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

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

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

John: That is the difference.

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

John: Yes.

Craig: Or would you rather watch Andor now?

John: I’ll take Andor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: We do.

Craig: That’s what we do.

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

Craig: A hiatus.

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

Craig: That’s not good.

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, yes.

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

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

John: Doctor.

Craig: Or a doctor. Now, my God.

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

Craig: Totally.

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

Craig: That sounds great. I wonder what that’s like.

John: Then you can plan things. You can have setups and payoffs that you actually know are going to work because you planned. I actually think everything was always written. Downsides to that, too, but some pros. I would say a pro is that we now develop things year-round. There used to be one season, you developed all the shows. If you didn’t have a show that was going, you’re screwed. You have to wait until the next season.

Craig: There is no television season. There’s no hiring season. The way the industry functions vis-à-vis writers, that’s a whole other deal. Just for the audience, I think if you put aside your nostalgic yearning and you discount the signal-to-noise and just look at what is the actual quantity of signal, it’s tremendous.

John: Just wrapping this up, ways the TV is worse now as a creator or a staff writer, the short season doesn’t mean you’re always looking for a job. If you’re a staff writer on a show that is a room that’s running for 15, 20 weeks, halfway through that time, you need to start looking for other jobs. That sucks.

Craig: In terms of creators, a lot is worse about this method, so much.

John: We’ve talked on a podcast a lot about how when you divide the writing process from the production process, it’s those creators who end up getting dragged through three years of a show and getting paid for one. It can be exhausting.

Craig: The way it’s disrupted the career. It’s just disrupted the career.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s turned it into this strange–

John: So many writers are completely divorced from the production process and have no ability to basically run a show.

Craig: Which is– Poor feature writers have been dealing with that forever. Like, this is the way it goes. You’re constantly looking for that next job. There is no guarantee. There is no schedule. There is no machinery to support anything. There’s no promotion ladder. There’s nothing. That’s what it’s now become for everyone. In terms of the audience and how they experience TV, I think the part that’s worse is the recap industry.

John: Totally.

Craig: I think the recap industry is a little bit like sports betting. Sports betting diminishes your pure enjoyment of a sporting event. The recap industry turns, particularly the big shows into– It’s almost like it tabloidizes them and again, feeds into outrage and so forth. There’s just so much clickbait on so much of it. I don’t know. I understand why it’s out there. It’s free publicity.

John: Pamela Ribon, who’s been on the show a couple of times, talking about she came up as a TV recapper. She’d watch a show and have to recap it in real time. There was an aspect to it that was actually, it was a kind of celebration in a fandom that was so intoxicating. A chance for people to participate and enjoy the thing they just watched.

Craig: Yes, but also, who are recaps for? They’re for people that didn’t watch it. I feel like we’ve just cliffnoted things so that people can– We used to say, okay, the water cooler, come in on Monday. Hate or love, you get to come in on Monday and talk about it with your friends at work, and hate on it or love on it. Now, you can be like, “I don’t want to watch this again. There’s too much stuff to watch, or I’m going to do something else. I’m just going to read the recap, and then I’ll be like, “Oh, yes. So I heard.”

John: Let’s wrap up this segment on TV, better, worse, or mixed now, 10 years?

Craig: Better.

John: I think mostly better. I think the quality of things you can watch as a viewer are better. I think, from a viewing perspective, I’m probably happier watching TV now than I was 10 years ago. From a person working in television, is it better or worse? I think it’s mixed and probably a little worse. At the bottom of the ladder, I think there’s smaller rooms, meaning fewer jobs, meaning less opportunity to actually see how stuff is working.

Craig: I have nothing to compare it to. My television career has taken place within the last 10 years.

John: My television career started in 1873.

Craig: Do you know I was [crosstalk].

John: 2000, that was when I was doing my disastrous WB show. I would say that if I had no business running a show that was supposed to be a weekly show. That’s completely out of my depth.

Craig: Running a show is hard.

John: It’s really hard. It’s really also hard for a person who’s never been in a TV room.

Craig: Yes, or a room. Running a television show is hard.

John: It’s hard.

Craig: It’s really hard. I like that they have that show runner’s training program. I’m just not sure how you train somebody for this. I get what you can impart, but it’s a little bit like combat training.

John: It is.

Craig: You join the Marines, they teach you how to shoot, they teach you how to move, and then– [screams] Once those bullets are going by, I’m like, “Training?”

John: No plan survives contact with the enemy.

Craig: No. Training is experience, survival.

John: Let’s answer a question or two. I see one here from CW.

Craig: CW.

John: CW.

Craig: Nice.

Drew: CW writes, “I usually am hired for feature projects for screenplays during the development phase, as is the case for most of us, but a new project coming up has a director wanting me to accompany him during table reads with cast and also during principal photography. He states that as the writer, I’m more in sync with the story, and he’ll need my help to chime in during those pre-production and production moments. In my country, the writer is almost never asked or allowed to be on set or reads. We are paid for the written work and cycled out once that is done.

“My question is, how do you rate for these tasks? Have you done this before on your commissioned works, and do you charge with a day rate? While others have opined that it’s a nice perk to be even invited along to do so, as writers generally are not asked to contribute during those phases, I also am aware that these tasks do take time and effort, and since they’re related to story, do they not count as labor as well and therefore to be rated?”

John: It is labor. You’re there not as a friend, but you’re there to be doing work, to be helping out. This is not under the writer’s guild; this is someplace overseas. I think your best place to start is looking for anybody who’s done similar work and seeing if there’s any comp that makes sense for you. Look at what other people are being paid on the production, look in the crew, and make sure you’re charging something that feels like it’s worth your time because ultimately, you are the person who’s going to know whether this is worth your time or not worth your time.

Craig: In the US, when it is writer’s guild, there’s something called an all-services deal, and that’s what we would apply to this. You get paid an amount of money that would cover the time that you’re working on it, and we protect our minimums by basically looking at the weekly minimum, multiplying it by the amount of time, and that’s the floor for whatever you’re– The nice thing about the all-services deal is you don’t have to bill every week. They don’t have to constantly decide if you’re going to be employed or not. They have bought your time, and then everyone can relax. You can relax and you are free then to write as much or as little as you want or need.

There isn’t this constant– You know, like when you have– I don’t know. You’ve hired somebody to paint your house, and they’re like, “Those shingles are going to be more today and then, oh, I’m going to come back.” Just here, do it. Paint the house and stop asking me. It’s the nickel and dimming that just drives everybody crazy. There is some amount that is reasonable here.

I don’t know what country CW is from, but my guess is he or she has an attorney that negotiated their deal in the first place. That’s the person I would be talking to, and that’s the kind of deal that you’d want to make, especially because you are valuable to the director. It’s not going to be a lot of money, but I would also say that the experience is tremendously important, and as I’ve said many times, you do work well with this director. A director-writer combo is incredibly powerful.

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: That rising tide will lift your boat financially when it’s time for the next one if this movie were successful.

John: CW is saying that in their country, it’s not common for the writer to be around in all parts of the process.

Craig: Same here.

John: Normalize it. Just be the person who’s there. I will say that the movies where I have been more involved have turned out better, and I also think-

Craig: What?

John: I think actors feel excited that you’re there and are an additional person who can help them out. It’s been nice and so on. Go, I was obviously there for every frame shot, but on the Tim Burton movies, where I was in there through pre-production and getting people started, it’s just nice. It really helps things get figured out and solve some problems before they become problems. Set the example, and it sounds like you’re going to– Should have a good experience.

Craig: The director basically told you why it’s a good idea.

John: Yes, do it.

Drew: Dan writes, “I plan to turn my screenplay into an audio drama for Audible, complete with score, sound effects, and professional voice actors. Do you think this has the same merit as making a low-budget feature? I work in podcasting and know I can make the audio drama extremely high quality, and I want to follow the advice of trying to make something myself with friends and not wait around to break in. I have no aspirations toward directing and don’t want to take the time to raise funds for a film feature, especially considering the audio drama can be made right away.”

John: Does it have the same prestige as a film? No. It’s going to get a tiny fraction of the audience for many films. If you know how to do this and you actually really want to do this, you should absolutely do it. If you’re not doing this because you don’t know what else to do, but you’re doing it because you actually really want to do it, that you would listen to this thing yourself, great. I always caution people like, “Don’t do the thing that you yourself would not watch or listen to. You’re wasting your time.”

Craig: This person said they don’t want to direct?

Drew: They don’t want to direct, but they wrote it as a screenplay.

Craig: Who’s going to be directing these voice actors?

John: I feel like Dan maybe feels comfortable doing that, but doesn’t feel comfortable doing the onset blocking and all the other stuff.

Craig: Generally, no. Nobody listens to that. As long as you’re fine with that. It could be that one that people love, but–

John: I hope it is.

Craig: The value for me, first of all, would not spend a lot of money on it. The value would be to make me a better writer. I’ve made this. I’ve listened to it. I’ve experienced it. I’ve edited. That will make you a better writer.

John: I’ll also caution Dan, and Dan, I’m sure you’re aware of this, but audio drama is really hard. It’s a weird format because it’s like, what is this scene? Where are we? All the things you get for free in a visual medium are challenging to do in audio. Just make sure you’re-

Craig: Why have you invited me to this greasy spoon diner?

John: Make sure you’re really thinking through how you’re going to do it and you’re listening for great examples of how other people are doing it.

Craig: And how to not do it.

John: Avoid the bad things.

Craig: Avoid the things that are bad.

John: It is time for one cool thing. Craig, you got a spoiler because I already showed you my one cool thing, which is called Phantom Inc.

Craig: You got me to buy it before we even began recording.

John: Phantom Inc. is a game that we played here in the office last week. It is in the same space as Codenames or Decrypto, where you are in two different teams and you’re trying to get people on your team to guess this thing. There’s one clue-giver, and everyone else is trying to figure out what this is. The mechanic is really, really smart. The narrative idea is that there is a spirit who is trying to describe one object. The two different teams are both trying to describe the same object, but you’re writing one letter at a time. There’s questions that the team can ask. It plays really well. It’s so smart. Phantom Inc. is available everywhere, but we’ll put a link in the show notes to it.

Craig: Love it. You’ve got a game, I’ve got a game. This week, the game, The House of Tesla. This is not referring to anything involving Elon Musk.

John: You know what? I’ve got to say, though, it’s-

Craig: It’s triggering.

John: Yes, it’s triggering.

Craig: It’s triggering. The House of Tesla referring to the scientist, not the overpriced company.

John: This looks like a very classic Craig game.

Craig: It’s a very classic Craig game. It was released on Steam and is not yet out for iOS or Android, but eventually it will be. It’s by a company called Blue Brain Games. They made the House of Da Vinci games. The House of Da Vinci games themselves were barely derivative of the Room games by Fireproof Software. Is this what I would call an A-plus example of the genre? No, but is it well done? Mostly yes.

John: Great.

Craig: I think the visuals are great. The puzzles are very typical for this sort of thing, and the manipulation of objects is fun to do. I’m going to give them a little bit of a ding on the acting.

John: It’s just voice acting, or they’re performing, too?

Craig: They just needed to cast one good voice actor to play Tesla. The way he reads things, I’m fairly certain it’s a man and not AI, but it’s on the edge. It’s so weirdly dead. I don’t know. I’d be curious to see what the deal is there, but it’s not the actor’s fault if it is a human being. It’s theirs, it’s directing matters. Let’s face it, no one’s buying this game for the great voice acting. They’re there for the puzzles and the environment, and there’s some interesting mechanics in it. I think so far, so good on Steam. It’s delivering exactly what I expected it to. The House of Tesla by Blue Brain Games. Sorry for triggering you, John.

John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes has been produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Oh no.

John: Welcome back, Drew. Edited by Matthew Chilelli, outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear perfect for the holiday season. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. Make sure to get your Scriptnotes shirt before Austin Film Festival so we can identify, like, “Oh, you’re a Scriptnotes listener.” You’ll find show notes with links to all the–

Craig: Oh no, Roney. Scriptnotes listeners. [laughs]

John: You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Again, thank you to all our premium subscribers. You guys are the best. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered the book as well. That’s fantastic.

Craig: Put us to work this morning.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Got to sign my name many times.

John: Pretty good stuff. If you want more information about the book, Scriptnotesbook.com is a place that has links out to all the different places where you can pre-order. We’ll probably also put on, if you want one of these special signed ones, to Premiere Collectibles, but we can also put a link on there for that. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on coffee. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thanks, John.

John: Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, before we started signing all these bookplates, we got you a cup of coffee, which is from our Keurig. How would you rate that coffee?

Craig: It’s not my favorite cup of coffee. Keurig, they’re like the Blue Brain Games of– It’s what I expected to get.

John: It’s drinkable, but not your [unintelligible 00:43:41].

Craig: It’s drinkable. I’m a black coffee drinker, so I’m comparing apples to apples. Nothing can’t say, oh, this blends so lovely with the oat foam. I’m just–

John: When did you start drinking coffee?

Craig: I know exactly when I started drinking coffee. This is a weird story, actually. I think I’ve talked about this before. When I was in high school and I knew I wanted to be a doctor, and I knew I was going to be pre-med in college, I did a summer internship between my junior and senior year with the Monmouth County Medical Examiner’s Office. Every day, I would go to the morgue at the hospital and assist with autopsies. It was early. I was 16. They let a 16-year-old assist with autopsies. It was a different time, but it was really early. It started early.

I was a teenager, and I’m not waking up early. Plus, it was the summer, so I was hanging out with my friends. When the alarm would go off at 7:00, I was like, “Oh my God.” I would get to the hospital and I was really bleary. There’s the first body already. It’s like, “I’ve got to cut open another body.” They had a coffee– It was morgue coffee. It is a Mr. Coffee, that marble glass pot.

John: That has never been cleaned.

Craig: Ever. They had styrofoam cups, those old, nasty styrofoam cups. They didn’t even have milk or sugar or anything because they were like, “Whatever, we do autopsies. No one’s got time for that.” I drank this horrible coffee out of a horrible styrofoam cup in a room with dead people. That, my friend, is how you grow some hair on your chest.

[laughter]

Craig: It was terrible, and it woke me up. That’s how I started each day.

John: Caffeine.

Craig: Then I would turn and go, “What do we got, boys?” “Crush injury.” “All right, here we go.” I was also smoking in the room. No, I wasn’t. I don’t know if it’d be great, but it’s like Quincy. You don’t know what Quincy is.

John: I don’t know Quincy at all.

Craig: You remember Quincy.

John: Quincy medical examiner, yes.

Craig: Quincy, Jack Klugman played a medical examiner in the-

John: Several times.

Craig: -’70s, and he was awesome.

John: My first coffee was in college at some point, so never in high school. I don’t think I ever had coffee. My mom always had coffee, and I tasted it, but I never willingly drank coffee. My friend George and I had driven from Des Moines to Chicago because we wanted to see Naked Lunch, which was only screening in Chicago. It was so effing cold, and George was like, “Let’s get coffee.” I’m like, “Sure.” There was a Starbucks. First time I’d ever seen a Starbucks.

Craig: No.

John: In Starbucks, I got something and probably a lot of milk in it.

Craig: Give me something.

John: Maybe I asked for a latte or a cappuccino or whatever it was, but that was my first time having coffee. It was good, but it didn’t enamor me to coffee. It wasn’t until I moved out to Los Angeles post-college that I started drinking coffee a little bit more regularly. At some point, I got a coffee maker and just started drinking coffee in the mornings, but that was the turning point.

Craig: You find your way to it. It’s just like nice cocaine. I’ve never used cocaine, but I feel like coffee’s like nice cocaine. Like cigarettes, I feel like more.

John: You’re not drinking coffee right now, but you grew up drinking it.

Craig: Yes.

John: When did you start coffee?

Craig: As a little child, like a two-year-old?

Drew: I think I was probably like seven or eight. Just sitting there with like a hot cup of coffee. Tennis lessons in the summer, I would get a blueberry bagel and a little coffee with a lot of cream and sugar.

Craig: Oh, so you had milk-

Drew: I had milk.

Craig: -with some coffee. You had coffee ice cream.

Drew: Basically. I do think iced coffee was probably the gateway for a lot of my generation.

John: I’m sure for the next generation because iced coffee was not a thing in our years.

Craig: Honestly, I say this as this grouchy black coffee drinker so much, and I’m like, “That’s not coffee. That’s something else. That’s coffee-flavored milk. That’s coffee-flavored something else.” What I do, actually, my standard order is not just pure, pure black, actually. Standard order is short Americano. What does that mean? Tiny, small? Why don’t they just call it small? Small americano, two or three shots, and one pump of mocha.

It’s not a lot. Just a tiny bit of sweetness and a little bit of chocolate to mellow out what can be sometimes a little bit of a bitter awakening. Most of that mocha never makes it into the coffee, by the way. It goes in and just drops to the bottom, so when I’m done, there’s a sludge at the bottom that I never touch. It’s just that little hint, but that’s every morning. Starbucks. I wish I didn’t like it so much, but I do.

John: We grew up at a time before Starbucks and before Peet’s. Before there was nice coffee or consistent coffee.

Craig: Just diner coffee.

John: Yes. Diner coffee is generally just awful.

Craig: Horrible.

John: We’ll go to IHOP, and IHOP has just notoriously the worst coffee.

Craig: Terrible.

John: It seems like it’ll be so simple to get good coffee.

Craig: It’s terrible. Also, if you get a cup of coffee there, I’ll deal with it. Fine. I’m halfway through it. Let’s say you are somebody that drinks coffee with milk. You’re halfway through it. They come by, and they’re like, “Let me freshen that up.” They fill the rest of it, and looking like, “Now I don’t know what this coffee is anymore. There’s no sensible portion to this.” It’s insane.

John: The math formula is for adding two liquids together.

Craig: It’s madness.

John: It’s madness.

Craig: It’s absolute madness. Then there’s that blue coffee cup in New York, the green-style coffee cup, that coffee is horrible. I do remember Mr. Coffee.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: My parents had a Mr. Coffee, which Joe DiMaggio advertised.

John: That’s the glass carafe and plastic thing on top, and you put the paper filter in and load it in. The challenge with Mr. Coffee was, you can make a decent cup of coffee with Mr. Coffee, but you’re making three cups of coffee. If you only want one, you’re making too much. I had a little Mr. Coffee, but the math just doesn’t work right. It didn’t work right for making one.

Craig: When I wasn’t doing autopsies, I was working at a Wawa, which is our New Jersey, Pennsylvania-area convenience store chain. One of the things I had to do was, every seven hours, change the coffee out because we have those coffee pots. By the time you get to the end of that shift, it is just hot dirt.

John: Yes, hot dirt.

Craig: When people pour it, they would spill it, and it would sizzle and burn on the plate below it and stank.

John: Gross. Did those coffee pots ever get washed out?

Craig: [laughs] I’ve heard from a flight attendant that coffee pots on an airplane never get cleaned.

John: I’m not sure why you do need to wash them out. What’s in there?

Craig: I guess not. It’s just hot liquid, and then you’re going to rinse it out with more hot liquid to put the same hot liquid back in. If there were anything that could spoil inside of it, but coffee is just bean-flavored water. There’s definitely not a lot.

John: Until someone’s drunk from it or if there’s milk in there, that could do a thing.

Craig: You never put milk in the coffee pot.

John: No, not in the coffee pot.

Craig: Actually, it’s like a self-cleaning thing, like a dog’s mouth. It turns out that’s an urban myth, by the way. You explored that.

John: Urban myth. Filthy, filthy mouth.

Craig: They’re disgusting.

John: My current coffee situation is I do Aeropress coffee. Aeropress is you do one cup at a time. It’s a little bit of a hassle, but it’s pretty simple, and it’s very consistent. I’m weighing my 16 ounces of coffee on the scale, and it’s consistent. I know exactly what it’s going to taste like. I’m half-caf in the morning, and I’m just full-decaf after that. I can only have very little caffeine over the course of the day.

Craig: I cut myself off caffeine-wise, but I think 2:00 PM is my absolute limit. I thought about investing in– Really, what I drink is espresso. I’ll get an Americano just because the thing about espresso is it’s like, boom, gone, done, which I’ll do. Even Americanos made with espresso, I thought about investing in a really nice machine. The problem is it’s not as good as what they got at any coffee spot.

John: We had a JURA, which is the one where it grinds and it does it all itself. It’s okay, but it’s not great. Honestly, Aeropress is much better than that is.

Craig: I will say that in my– not the place we live in now, but our prior home had that Miele coffee thing built in, and that thing was incredible because it would really make complicated stuff. It was pretty cool.

John: Circling back the conversation around to the Keurig that we had, we call that machine Little Stew. Little Stew is good for just making that cup of coffee at a time. I will find that if we have people over for a game night or we’re eating desserts, it’s like, “Who wants coffee?” That’s much more handy than me trying to make individual things. We don’t have a Mr. Coffee anymore. We’re making coffee in that.

Craig: It’s a perfectly good way to go about it. Keurig, notoriously horrible for the environment.

John: Little plastic pots.

Craig: Yes. I’ve never had a cup of coffee from a Keurig that made me go, “Wow, good.” It’s always been like, “I need this liquid to put caffeine chemical in my brain.”

John: Instant coffee has actually gotten noticeably better over the years. You wouldn’t think so, but there’s many cases where instant coffee is much better than IHOP coffee. The good instant coffee.

Craig: Sure. I have this sense memory of my parents dinging a spoon inside of a mug, ding, ding, ding, because they put those older’s crystals in there. No, Sanka is for the elderly because they can’t have caffeine. Also, Sanka isn’t even coffee. What is Sanka? What comprises Sanka? I don’t even know.

John: Don’t know.

Craig: Let’s find out.

John: What is Sanka?

Craig: I feel like it’s made of mica chips and bone dust.

John: While we’re looking that up, I’m going to pull up the ad for High Point Coffee, which is the perfect way to end this segment. Let me see if I can find the video here. What is Sanka?

Craig: It says it is coffee. It’s just decaffeinated, but I don’t know. I always thought it was made of some other stuff. Oh, this is interesting. The name Sanka is a portmanteau of sans and ca for caffeine.

John: Sans ca.

Craig: Sans ca.

John: That feels like something you could be using in a puzzle at some point.

Craig: Absolutely. Sanka is nasty.

John: Let’s end this segment with the incredible Lauren Bacall and an ad for High Point Coffee.

Craig: Oh, no, it’s Lauren Bacall, not Katherine Hepburn. Different.

Lauren Bacall: It’s very nice.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Lauren: One rehearsal, four actors, and 20 coffee cups.

Craig: Oh, I’ve seen this. It’s great. It’s amazing.

Lauren: Around here, we don’t like coffee. We love it. I look forward to my sixth cup as much as my first one. That’s because my coffee’s High Point decaffeinated. I don’t need caffeine. I’m active enough, thank you. That’s just one reason this coffee lover chooses High Point. Oh, that aroma’s wonderful. Just look at this deep, rich color. You know what really matters to coffee lovers? This. Deep and rich. Flavor this good has to be deep-brewed into a coffee.

Speaker 2: Try High Point. The coffee lover’s decaffeinated.

Lauren: Deep-brewed flavor. I think you’ll really go for it.

Craig: Lauren Bacall is from some spot in the ocean between New York and London.

John: Which is fantastic.

Craig: Incredible.

John: I love the Mid-Atlantic accent.

Craig: We had left that so far behind by this point. She doesn’t care.

John: Doesn’t care. The Trans-Atlantic accent.

Craig: She’s like, “I love my–“ That commercial’s made for drag queens to re-perform.

John: That’s what it is.

Craig: I love a cup of coffee.

John: As do I.

Craig: It’s my sixth cup. I’m like, oh, Jesus. Slow down.” It doesn’t matter. She’s going to be peeing constantly. “Where’s Ms. Bacall?” “10-1.” “How many cups of High Point did you give her?” “12.”

[laughter]

John: She’s now mostly High Point.

Craig: Also, 12 cups of High Point at some point will equal 4 cups. They’re still caffeinated. She’s like, “I love my High Point and this line of cocaine.”

John: That’s so good. Drew Craig, thanks much.

Craig: Thank you.

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 704 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you construct and communicate the geography for where your story is taking place, and how does that translate onto the screen? We’ll look at examples from our own work and others. Then we answer listener emails on a plethora of topics, from imposter syndrome to revisions to disappearing agents. To help us do all this, welcome back returning champion, Liz Hannah.

Liz Hannah: Wooo.

John: Oh my gosh, Liz, it’s so nice to have you here.

Liz: Thank you. Do I get a T-shirt? I feel like a five-timers club or something T-shirt is necessary.

John: Absolutely. We’re getting the robes made. It’s going to be so good.

Liz: Merch. Get me with the merch.

John: Hey, Liz, how do you talk about yourself as a writer? Are you a feature writer or a TV writer at this point? You have several amazing feature credits, but the most recent two things I associate you with are limited series. Are you feature land, TV land? What do you think about yourself as?

Liz: I often just say writer, and then if anybody asks, I’d say feature and television. I definitely avoid defining myself in any way. I don’t know. It’s a really good question. I feel bifurcated in my brain. I don’t feel one way or the other.

John: When you talk to your team, to your agents, and I assume you have a manager as well, what is the split in terms of the projects you’re pursuing? How are you talking to them about bring me these things, reach out with these things?

Liz: What I look for in features is much smaller now in terms of what I feel like I want to do that I haven’t done. I haven’t done a big four-quadrant movie. I’ve done rewrites on them, but I’ve never originated one. That’s a bucket list type of– at least for me, my favorite movie growing up and the movie that made me want to be a writer is Raiders. Wanting to do something like that is always in there. I’ve always flirted with it and never found the right one. That’s always one.

Then it really is, for me, filmmaker, team-based. That could be director, that could be producer, that could be whomever is involved that’s originating it. That is, I’m very now experience-based and I want to have a good experience. I don’t want to work with people that will make it not good. That is really how I– I talk about it really much more, I think, holistically in that way.

I’m also focused on directing now in features that I’m generating a lot of that material myself. By a lot, I mean slowly over the course of many years, there will be potentially one.

It’s a much more, I think, organic conversation of just, “Where do we want to go? What are we looking for?” and then also having the ability to be flexible. If a filmmaker comes up that I really like, that I have a relationship with, that I want to work with, then it goes there.

John: I changed reps about a year ago, a year-and-a-half ago. Time is a void into which all reason disappears.

Liz: I was at the chiropractor the other day and I was like, “I can’t believe it’s September 8th.” She was like, “It’s September 9th.” I was like, “Great.”

John: Great, love it. As I was changing reps, I had to make a list of these are the things I want to do, these are my priorities. I’ve mostly stuck to that. It’s interesting because I think people perceive me as just a features guy because all my credits are features for the last 20 years. The money I’ve actually been making and the things I’ve been doing have actually been on the episodic side. It’s just that there’s no visible evidence of that yet. I say that I’m mostly a features person, but that’s actually not entirely true given what I’ve been doing.

Liz: I think it’s interesting because pre-strike and post-strike, my business has mostly been in television. That’s where I’ve definitely had the most consistency. Also, post-strike, it’s so hard to make anything, that it is one of those things that, like, I swear I’ve been working for three years.

John: Yes, same here. We’ll get into some of that. Also, in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss how we talk to our kids, other people’s kids, about what it is that we actually do for a living. There’s so many jobs which is like, “I’m a police officer, I’m a firefighter, I’m a baker,” where it’s just really clear versus what we do is, like, “I write things, but not things you can read, not books.” We’ll just talk about age-appropriate ways to talk to kids about what it is that we do for a living, be it features, or TV, or some murky middle that we can’t quite even articulate to ourselves.

Liz: Love it.

John: Love it. We have some news. The Scriptnotes book, which I don’t know if you’ve seen the Scriptnotes book. This is the galley-

Liz: So exciting. Love it.

John: -of the Scriptnotes book. We got our first review. This is in Booklist, which is a trade publication, which is one of the first people to put out reviews of things because it helps signal to booksellers, “Oh, this is a book you want to check out. We got a great review.” We’ll be able to link to the real one in October, but we got the advance of it. The last sentence in the review is, “Bound to be a staple, this guy, just like the podcast, is accessible, engaging, and informative,” which is nice. Also, they tagged us for young adult, which means that we could also be on the list for younger people to read it. We were pretty careful with the language in it so that it actually feels good for anyone 13 and up to be able to read this book.

Liz: Love it. I’m so excited to read it.

John: Yes, excited to send it to you. Reminder that the book is available for pre-order everywhere you buy books. You can just go to scriptnotesbook.com and see where it is in your market, UK, Australia, US. If you’re in another country overseas, wherever you buy English books, they’ll probably have it. Just check there. If you do pre-order it, send your receipt to Drew at ask@johnaugust.com, and we’ll be emailing you something very cool very soon. Send that through.
Drew has a very long list of people who’ve sent through those pre-orders, so it’s exciting. Liz Hannah, do you do Connections on New York Times?

Liz: I do. I do Connections.

John: We were talking about it two weeks ago, and we were commenting on how much we loved it and how great Wyna Liu is. I mispronounced her name as Wyna Liu, and I know that because she actually wrote us in. She wrote back to us and said that she’d listened to the episode in which we mentioned her. Drew, what did she say?

Drew Marquardt: Hi, John and Craig. Thanks so much for the shout-out in your Connections episode. It was so kind of you, and I’m thrilled you liked the game. It was my first time hearing your show, and I really enjoyed it. Glad to have something new in the rotation. Hope you’re doing well.

John: We’re doing very well to know that Wyna Liu is listening to Scriptnotes. Hi, Wyna, and thank you. Sorry I mispronounced your name. We’ll pronounce it right from now on because we’re probably going to mention it a lot because we love Connections so much.

Liz: It’s the best.

John: It’s the best. Liz Hannah, have you ever worked on Bob: The Musical?

Liz: I have not.

John: Did you know about Bob: The Musical?

Liz: I didn’t until this morning.

John: Bob: The Musical is a very long development project at Disney. I’ve worked on it. Craig, I think, didn’t work on it, but knew of it. Everyone in town has worked on it. It must have millions of dollars worth of scripts against it. There’s finally a director announced for it. Randy Mancuso is set to helm Disney’s long-awaited Bob: The Musical. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the Deadline article. Just a thing to track. It would be just a nice thing to tick off that, “Oh, this thing actually happened.” It’s sort of, “How would this be a movie that’s actually been in development for forever?”

Liz: Is it good, is always a question.

John: I hope it’s fantastic.

Liz: I hope so.

John: You know the premise of it, right?

Liz: I do. I read the premise. I was like, “This is great.”

John: That’s a great idea for a movie. That’s why it’s been in development for forever.

Liz: Totally.

John: Also, you’ve got to hit it just right and moves change. Within the concept of a man who hates musical wakes up in a musical, there’s a lot of ways to go with that. I’m sure the drafts have gone through all these things. I have no recollection of all of what I wrote on that script. [laughter] Liz Hannah, have you seen Showgirls?

Liz: I have.

John: What is your impression of Showgirls? When did you see it? How did it land for you?

Liz: I saw it probably when I was younger at a sleepover or something like that, and then actually saw it in college. Then watched it again as an adult probably not that long ago, like 10 years ago or something like that. My impression is that it only got better with every rewatch as I aged into it. The appreciation I have of it and what it did at the time and what it was trying to do only grows. I’m happy for it– I saw it played at Vidiots recently or is going to play at Vidiots, and I’m happy for its renaissance.

John: I saw it screening over at the Academy as part of their summer camp series. It is an incredibly enjoyable movie until it gets to a horrifying rate that completely ruins your ability to laugh at and with the movie, completely falls apart. We were talking a few episodes ago about Joe Eszterhas and his career as a screenwriter and just all the things he wrote. Craig was saying, “Oh, we should have him on.” Several people wrote in to say that Joe Eszterhas actually has three to four autobiographies. Can you imagine writing one autobiography, much less three or four autobiographies, Liz Hannah?

Liz: He has three or four autobiographies that he wrote about himself.

John: About himself.

Liz: He didn’t ghostwrite other people’s autobiographies.

John: No, they’re his.

Liz: I would only be so lucky to live a life where I could write three to four biographies. I feel like, “Could you write one?”

John: Here’s how he did it. The first one is Hollywood Animal. That’s 2004, which my Amazon purchases shows that I must have bought at some point. I don’t recall. I don’t have that book.

Liz: Obsessed with that.

John: Obsessed. I don’t think I read it. 754 pages. That’s a long autobiography there.

Liz: That is almost as long as the tome about Che Guevara.

John: Exactly.

Liz: That is like 900 pages.

John: A similar career.

Liz: Same, by the way. Similar people.

John: Similar people, just the same. Devil’s Guide to Hollywood was in 2006. Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith about his return to Catholicism was 2008. Then he has– the fourth book is Heaven and Mel, which was a Kindle single actually, but it counts. 2012, which is about his experience working with Mel Gibson on the Maccabees movie, which never shot.

Liz: First of all, Heaven and Mel, iconic.

John: Great.

Liz: How have we not gotten there yet? Really elite title. I feel like it would be funny if he wrote about a biography with each generational iteration of somebody watching Showgirls and how it’s interpreted. It’s like with each generation, the first generation hates it, the second generation loves it and thinks it’s regarded incorrectly, and now the third generation is like, “There’s some really tough stuff in it, but there’s some really good stuff in it.” That would be fun. The first one, it being that long, feels like he can maybe cover it all. Also, how old was he when he wrote his first one?

John: I don’t know. 2004. We can do the math to figure out how old he was. He was not a young person as he was writing Basic Instinct or Showgirls or any of these things. I feel like you only get to write the screenwriter autobiography when you’re like, “Okay, I’m done with my career,” because you’re inevitably going to just burn a lot of bridges and talk about the things. The movies I’ve worked on that I could talk about that would actually be good stories would also make me unpopular with the people who I needed to write about.

Liz: Unhireable.

John: Unhireable, that’s really what we’ll say.

Liz: I think any autobiography or memoir, you have to be very conscious that people will, even if you’re telling, from your perspective, stories that are complementary, they might not be interpreted that way. You have to be conscious that anything that you’re divulging is something that somebody else doesn’t want out there. To write three of those, including one about Mel Gibson, who has such a great reputation, it’s fascinating.

John: It is. Choices that we could make, but have not chosen to make.

Liz: Hey, who knows?

John: Absolutely. The year’s young. [chuckles]

Liz: The year’s young, the world’s on fire. Let’s see what happens in 2026.

John: People ask, “Liz Hannah, do you write mostly features or TV?” It’s like, “I write autobiographies.”

Liz: Yes, that’s right. Memoirs [crosstalk].

John: Memoirs. It’s a memoirist.

Liz: Thank you.

John: In episode 702, we talked about Last Looks, and we had a couple people write in about Last Looks. Before we start with these emails, Liz, what is your process for Last Looks? What are the things you’d like to do before you hand in a script?

Liz: I’ve totally stolen this from Sorkin, which is I do a– I think we–

John: We talked about this. We were talking about transition pass.

Liz: You and I recently talked about this at the Sundance Lab, which is I do a full transcription pass. I basically have a blank page in final draft. I have my final “draft” of my script on the right, and I just type it up. I try not to think about it as I’m typing it up, and try to just let it flow. Inevitably, there will always be things where I’m like, “This action line is taking too long,” or, “This dialogue is bad,” or you’ll organically come to it, but it really is a final pass.

John: You’re really doing that on most of your projects where you are side-by-side.

Liz: Yes.

John: Wow. How long does that take you to type up a full script?

Liz: It’s like two hours. It’s the time of a movie. It doesn’t take very long.

John: Very good typist.

Liz: Thank you to Bedford Middle School for teaching me that. It doesn’t take very long because also at that point, I do feel quite burned out by my own script, so it’s the only way for me to, I think– For me, it’s the way to read things that I tend to gloss over when I’m going through those final passes. Sometimes it’s fine to do that because you’re like, “It’s done. It’s set. I need other people to read this at this point.” Sorkin says he does it for every feature. I stole it with The Post, and I’ve done it ever since.

John: We had two people write in with suggestions. Drew, help us with that.

Drew: Tom in Cheltenham writes, “My very final last look is now always on Weekend Read. Once I have endlessly polished and tweaked a draft and read through on my computer, I export to Weekend Read. I then read through it on my phone, not my iPad, and the amount of stuff I catch is unbelievable. Maybe it’s just the way my brain works, but there’s something about seeing the text laid out differently with different line breaks that allows me to actually read it fresh.

This isn’t about typos or orphans or widows or page breaks. I’ve caught all those by now. This is about pure readability. It’s about catching sentences that don’t quite flow or could be improved or extraneous words that simply don’t need to be there. I get so used to seeing the exact same text and the same pages laid out the same way that at some point I stop actually reading it. Weekend Read is as close to reading your own script for the first time as you can get.”

John: It’s a good point. When you see things in a different format, it’s the same reason why back in the day when we used to print scripts and you’d pull a page at a time, you’d catch things just as in print on the first time and you’d see things that are different. That tracks to make sense. It’s not the intention of Weekend Read, but it certainly is a good use of it.

Liz: I also think that everyone should alleviate themselves from the stress of having a typo-free draft. It will literally never happen. Just to make everybody feel better, there’s a typo on the first page in the third sentence of The Post in the draft that went everywhere, and it’s still there. I will never recover.

John: Absolutely.

Liz: It just is what it is.

John: It broke the film. Absolutely.

Liz: It broke it. Everything.

John: It ruined everything. It all collapsed.

Liz: It is funny because it’s Chiron is misspelled, and so it’s also in bold and underlined very explicitly. There you go.

John: Fancy. One more suggestion here from John.

Drew: He says, “To have Weekend Read or WriterDuet read the script for you. It’s the one step I never skip. I don’t want to do it because I’ve spent so much time going over the script again and again, but it finds something every time. Repeated words, misspelling, something wonky from a copy and paste. The voices are pretty robotic, but performance doesn’t really matter, and it’s better than reading it out loud myself as my brain will skip things that I’ve read 100 times.

John: When you hear it read aloud, you definitely notice it. That’s why table readings are so mortifying for us because, “Oh God, there’s a word left out of that dialogue block, and I never knew it until this actor was sitting around the table.” Very publicly, everyone says, “Oh, yes, the writer screwed up here.” Drew, you do the most work in Weekend Read because each week you are curating the list of Weekend Read scripts that we’re putting in there. What is this week’s collection of scripts?

Drew: As we’re recording it, this week’s collection of scripts is Witches because I think we’re going off of the last Scriptnotes. As this comes out, the feature Friday to come is creator-driven comedies, so it’s all writer stars.

Liz: Ooh.

John: What are some of the things in that collection?

Drew: We’ve got Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, 30 Rock, Abbott Elementary, Atlanta, Feel Good, Fleabag, Girls, Insecure, Master of None, Pen15, Rami, Workaholics. There’s just a few.

John: That’s great. That’s actually a good grouping of things that I wouldn’t have actually thought of that being a creator-driven comedy, but where the person who created the show is the star of the show, and it’s all centered on them. That’s great.

Liz: Love that.

John: Reminder, Weekend Read is in the App Store. It’s free to download, so check that out. Each week, Drew will have new scripts for you to read. In Episode 702, we talked about Accountability Groups, and we had two people write in with their experiences with accountability groups.

Drew: Bill says, “I’ve found accountability groups to be a silver bullet. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I had to email five pages by 5:00 PM. No one had to read them. I just needed to send the pages. One strike for every day that five or more pages weren’t handed in on time. Three strikes, and you’re kicked out of the group. I had a first draft in what was, for me, record time. It costs nothing to be on the receiving end of an email that doesn’t require a response, but being there for each other in that capacity meant everything. It manufactured the kind of structure and deadlines that writing, especially on spec, especially a first draft, often requires.”

John: Wow. That’s great. In that sense of you’re out of the group, there’s not a financial penalty, but there’s a social pressure to stay in there. What did Ethan have to say here?

Drew: “For my last script, I set hard deadlines and a goal of writing three hours a day. Only words on the page counted to my time. I used a stopwatch and writing log to track the hours and minutes. For every three hours, I paid myself with a Magic the Gathering booster pack. I successfully finished a polished script in 12 weeks. Pay yourself for your work, and you associate the work with payment.”

John: All right. These are examples of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Basically, it’s ways to get yourself to do things. Paying yourself with Magic the Gathering cards, it rewards that little pleasure center in your brain until you start to feel like, “Oh, actually, maybe the writing is actually the pleasure center.” It becomes less about the Magic the Gathering cards to do it. I don’t know. I think these are good things to try if you’re looking for ways to actually get stuff done and get out of your way in terms of the habits that are stopping you from doing stuff. Liz, have you tried either of these methods or anything like this?

Liz: I haven’t personally. I will say, and I really don’t mean this in a dismissive way, but it made me laugh because I was like, I’m currently, over the course of the last 10 months, been potty training my child, and we are doing a potty training chart. He gets a sticker, and then at the very end, he gets a car. Let me tell you, every book tells you not to do it. Every podcast, everybody, every mom is like, “Oh, they’ll just do it.” It’s the only way. It’s the only way. I will buy him an actual car when he’s 16 if he’s still doing this. I don’t care. This is the way.

It is interesting psychologically how it works, and it does make me think about, and has in the past, even prior to this email, made me consider a reward base for myself of completing pages. I think I would be too tricky for myself and still buy myself Sugarfish at the end of the day, even if I didn’t do the pages. I think it’s whatever works for anyone is what you should do. It’s hard to self-motivate to write, particularly when you’re writing a spec. However you can motivate yourself to do that, be it a sweet treat or be it FOMO of not being in a club, if you don’t tend your pages in a time, then great, do it.

John: We have a screenwriter coming on in a couple weeks, and she was talking about getting her first script written. She went through a 12-week bootcamp-y situation. Yes, you’re learning something in that, but it’s mostly the accountability. It’s mostly like, “I am blocking out this amount of time, and this is the [unintelligible 00:19:53] and my identity for these next 12 weeks is the person who’s writing this script,” and that’s really meaningful.

I would say over the course of a 20-year career, I’ve been more productive, less productive, but you’re deep enough into it, you know you can get stuff written. Eventually, you’ll get out of your own way, you’ll get stuff done. If there’s weeks where I’m like, “Oh, I cranked through a bunch of stuff in weeks I didn’t–” You give yourself a little bit more grace because you just know what you can do and you know when you need to change things up and when it’s just normal.

Liz: I think the reward of having a first draft is the best reward possible for me. Being able to say that there is a completed draft of a screenplay that I can then rewrite and make better and it will never be as bad as it is in this moment is truly the greatest relief there is.

John: Honestly, for me, one of the greatest feelings is sending in a script, just getting it off of mind and just knowing, “Oh, I should have this freedom, I just have this lightness,” of like, “Oh, I don’t have this thing hovering over me.” As we’re recording this, everything is turned in at the moment. There’s some stuff I got for Drew, but everything else is done and it is nice to just like, “Oh, I could do anything.” I saw a movie at 10:00 in the morning. It was–

Liz: Oh, love attending a movie.

John: Yes, so good.

Liz: It’s the best.

John: Next up, let’s talk and follow up Three Page Challenges. Episode 702 was a Three Page Challenge, and we had two folks write in with their feedback on the Three Page Challenge.

Drew: Jason writes, “In the most recent Three Page Challenge, you questioned a writer’s choice to have a male character call his female friend a bitch during a scene. The consensus was that it was too aggressive. While I do agree with you, I did wonder something. Did we all assume that the male character was straight? I’m sure you’d agree that the levity of the exchange is different if it’s a cis gay man versus a cis straight man. What’s the most elegant way to deal with this default cis straight issue?”

John: I think Jason’s asking a fair question. As we were recording this, Craig pulled out the bitch and I did stick a little bit on, we don’t know enough about this character to know whether it’s actually okay for him to be saying it. The fact that he was saying it tipped me towards the idea that he could be gay or that it might be reasonable in his vocabulary to say this thing. In terms of overall, I just feel like–

Imagine a scene where we are introduced to a male character and we’re not told anything about him. If it’s not actually relevant in the scene, it feels really forced to try to put it in there because in that initial description for the character, something about the way he’s presenting, so what we’re seeing, what his behavior is like, that is useful. If it’s not relevant to the scene, it feels forced to try to jam it in there. Liz, what’s your instinct on identifying someone’s not just gender but sexuality when they’re first introduced?

Liz: I think to me, it goes to the authenticity of the read and the authenticity of the character and making sure that the character and your intentions are being interpreted in the way that you want them to be. If that character has any quality about them that would change the interpretation of their words, then I think it’s important to call that out. I would want to make sure the importance of that attribute, whatever it is not just for one scene and for intentionally creating an authentic character that lives in the world and is presenting in the world as a certain way.

Be that a cis straight white guy, then if it’s important to this character for that to be there and for him to be interpreted in the way, then that’s an important thing for me to read into it. If it’s not, then I don’t need to know that. I don’t think making choices about characters for one scene, for them to be a certain way is right.

John: Yes, I agree with you. I now want to go back and look through my scripts where I do have gay characters and see, “Did I call that out right away?” Obviously, in Go, that information is pushed back and hidden, so I’m sure I didn’t do it in that. In other things, I wonder if I did call it out from the start or whether the genre we’re in, we’re just going to assume that this character’s gay.

Liz: There’s a script that I wrote where it’s very important that there’s a character that’s not white because of the circumstances of the entirety of the script. I called it out in his character description because I didn’t want there to be any misinterpretation about the read. I think that is, whereas other characters in the script, it was not important to call out who they are. I don’t think you need to, because you define one character, define every character necessarily. You can, obviously, but I think it’s important. If it’s important to the character and to the read, to define them.

John: As we were talking here, I pulled up my script for The Nines. “Gavin Taylor, 30, walks into a meeting with his laptop bag over his shoulder. He’s a tidy, banana republic sensibility and an easy smile that belies his manic schedule.” I’m not calling him out as gay from the start, although it just feels like you’re going to see behavior pretty quickly that lets you know that he’s gay. We also had, specifically about episode 702, someone wrote in about loose part. There’s a location described as loose park, and we’re like, “What is that?” It bumped for us.

Drew: Tara wrote in that loose park is actually a famous park in Kansas City, Missouri.

John: Saying that, it bumped for us because we were like, “I don’t know what this is,” and yet it is appropriate to the thing. It’s one of those weird things where it bumps on the page. It’s not going to bump for anyone watching the movie. For somebody who knows Kansas City, it makes sense for that. To me, it’s being aware of what information your reader probably has and is going to assume. Liz, you’ve run into this, I’m sure.

Liz: Yes. When I wrote The Post, for instance, it takes place entirely in DC. There were major monuments and things like that where scenes had to take place. I just anticipated that we would Google if we didn’t know what they were. In other scripts I’ve written, it’s not important where it takes place. In a lot of scripts, I feel like I don’t necessarily have a defined base or area. It’s more general because you just don’t ever know. It reminds me of the previous question. I think unless it’s really important to the scene work or to the script, then I wouldn’t necessarily be that specific.

John: The other case for specificity is that if it was MacArthur Park, if it was Genesee Park, or whatever thing, I think because the word loose just feels like a normal English word, then we’re simply like, “Wait, it’s a loose park? What is a loose park? Is it like I’m not [unintelligible 00:26:28]?”

Liz: Was it capitalized?

John: It was all uppercase because it was the scene description. It was the scene header.

Liz: Oh, got it.

John: Because of that, we’re like, “Wait, what is a loose park as opposed to a tight park?”

Liz: Totally.

John: Totally.

Liz: Obviously, didn’t you know?

John: No. Show all revision sets. We also talked about this in Episode 702. Liz, as you’re going through revisions, do you tend to just switch to the next revision, color, and keep it in the same file? Are you making a new file? What is your preferred way?

Liz: The idea of show all revision sets just made me break into a sweat. That is terrifying. I keep it all in the same file. I live in blue. We’re talking about features that I’m just at this point revising myself. We’re not talking about production or anything. I just keep it in blue, and I clear, and I save a file that says which day it was and that has the revisions. I use Scriptation to do my notes for every draft for myself. I also have the PDF of my handwritten notes for each draft of the revision saved with those files.

That’s often more what I reference than if I go back and look at the revision set because the revision set is only a half thought because you can’t really see like, what did I strike out? What did I cut? I don’t really remember.

John: The stars and the margins, they are useful for showing what literally changed, but they don’t show intention at all. You don’t know why they have been changed. Sometimes it’s like you deleted an extra space, but was there a word there? Why was that there?

Liz: It’s funny because I have opposing arguments where it’s like when I’m turning in a starred draft, I actually don’t want them to have as much information of why I’ve made these decisions because I want them to know that I heard the note and I made an executive choice of how to do that. Hopefully, they agree. I think if we go into it becomes more by committee of making a decision of how we do this.

Whereas for myself, I want to be able to go back into my brain and be like, “Now why did I make this decision that this has to go here?” I recently rebroke a pilot into a feature, and going into my notes to myself in my earlier drafts was really helpful in being like, “I think I cut some scenes. What scenes did I cut?” Finding out how characters moved around and stuff was helpful.

John: We had a listener write in talking about how they use show all revision sets. That was actually helpful for them.

Liz: Good for them.

Drew: Happy in LA writes, “Because my wife and I tag team a draft, we often write on top of each other’s work. Revisions stack up quickly, so we found it clearest to change the color each time one of us takes a pass. Sure, the result can be a rainbow of colors, but it makes the progression easy to track. Once a sequence feels solid, we’ll flatten it with a clear revised for just those sections. Anywho, that’s just how we’ve fallen into writing together, and it really works for us.”

John: That absolutely makes sense. If that’s a thing that you as a team works for you, that’s awesome. That’s great. It’s always going to be challenging to figure out what is the right workflow for people, and you just have to experiment to see what it is that works.

Liz: I think it’s also really specific when you’re talking about working with a writing partner versus writing with yourself solo. Writing for yourself solo, who knows what’s going on inside my brain and nobody else does need to know. When you’re working with another partner, you actually do have to show proof of product and proof of thought in a lot of things. I’m working with somebody on something right now, and we do the same shared revision set, but we strike through things rather than just cut them so that we can show, this is my pitch for what we should lose, or this is my thought of where this could move to, and things like that, so that there’s a little bit more of a blueprint to how to get to those stars.

John: For the work you’re doing with somebody else here, are you just passing a file back and forth? How are you collaborating?

Liz: We take turns. On first drafts, we break out acts. It’s a series, so we’ll break out acts and separate them and then we’ll swap. In revisions, we’ll do it just different. She’ll take a pass and I’ll take a pass or vice versa.

John: I feel like there’s a missing, not missing solution, but the problem set that we’re trying to solve isn’t really addressed by the two cursors on the same screen at the same time problem, which is the classic shared script, nor is it really well resolved by passing a file back and forth because then you’re just duplicating files and stuff like that. There’s a middle ground. The late night shows, many of them are using Scripto, which is very much set up for this kind of thing and has a more robust checking in and putting stuff together, which is probably overkill for two little teams, but I think it is a good problem space to be tackling.

Liz: There’s definitely– I’ve written a lot with partners in my career, and there definitely feels like at least once in every single one, one of us is like, “Who has the draft? What draft are we on? Am I doing the pass first?” Just having an ability to streamline that conversation and not rely on my having dated it perfectly. Also, sometimes you’re doing multiple drafts in one day and keeping track of those. Yes, John, I think you should do this. That sounds great.

John: Absolutely. We’ll work on it.

Liz: Thanks, John.

John: Last bit of follow-up. In Episode 701, I talked about how Do, Re, Mi– in the US we have it as a movable system. In other parts of the world, it’s a fixed system. Craig then made an absolute slander saying there are no good French composers. In the moment, I said Debussy, but I said, “There must also be a lot more.” Our listeners wrote in to contribute, Charles Gounod, Berlioz, Poulenc, Duparc, Jacques Offenbach, and the list goes on. There are many good French composers and Craig was being stupid.

Liz: Of course, Craig’s not here to receive that. We will make sure he hears about it.

John: Let’s get on to our marquee topic, which actually does come from a listener question, but I think we can build it out to a bigger thing. Can you read Richard’s question for us, Drew?

Drew: “I just had my first movie made, which was so cool, but we did come into problems when the crew began building the set, notably, the house where 70% of this film takes place. I had to admit, with much embarrassment, that the layout in the script just didn’t make sense. We lost a bit of time restructuring the scripts so that the geography was coherent, i.e., whose bedrooms were where, how the kitchen links to the living room, where the stairs led, et cetera. How early do you guys think about the physicality of an interior space? Do you try and create floor plans and maps? How would you advise writers to avoid getting into these sorts of issues?”

John: This is a great question. I think actually a great topic. The project I just handed in, there are scenes that take place in a house where we need to– it’s not quite continuous shot through the house, but we need to be able to feel like, from the front door up into her bedroom, you could do that as a continuous shot. I had to really think through like, “What would this house be like and how would this fit?”

To be honest, there were rooms that I did not need. I didn’t need to know where the mother’s bedroom was. I couldn’t tell you where in the house that was. I feel like I’m always trying to be able to move the camera around and find where people are at in a space, interior and exterior as well. If there’s characters who are walking along a path in the forest and having two separate conversations, I need to be able to think about, “How far apart would they be? What would it actually feel like to be in this space with them?” Liz, as you’re working through projects, and especially if you’re collaborating with somebody on a project– another writer on a project, how often are you having conversations about the places themselves and the layouts of things?

Liz: I think it’s a really good question. I think my first instinct always is to be the most economical while being articulate as possible on the page, because I think– which I would just preface before going into anything else. I think if I’m the reader and I’m either thinking too much or too little about it, that’s a problem. I do think going to this question, I will say that– to answer, I think about it a lot in terms of how much I need the audience to know and where I am. There’s a specific project that I’m working on right now where geography is very important. The entire project takes place on a compound of two places that has two home bases. We’ve had many conversations.

We drew out what it looks like. There’s a map of it so that we can be on the same page when we’re describing this. I failed miserably in my first attempt at describing the proximity between these two places. Then we had conversations of how do we have a blanket answer for ourselves that’s a one sentence that we can quickly go to in multiple scripts that tells us the answer to the proximity of the two places. The other thing I would say, and this goes also to, I think is not specific to every writer. I definitely don’t think it’s a blanket statement, but I am generally not precious about most things if they’re not vital to the plot or the characters.

If it’s a preference that I have made, then I’ll probably say that. If we, within conversations with the– If it’s a series and I’m having these conversations with the production designer early on, and they pitch me something and I’m like, “That’s so much better than what it was in my head,” I would rather go into the script and make these adjustments or on the day make these adjustments with the director with blocking than to hold tight to whatever my vision was in my head.

I have a more specific thing of if drama is happening within a scene, let’s say within the house. I’ve written a few different projects where– I wrote one last year where there was a main house where things took place that needed to basically have a two-level central area because a death happened and somebody was pushed off of the top area. I spent a good amount of the first page of the introduction of that house describing the architecture of it and the geography of it, so I never had to go back to it again.

That took me a really long time, legitimately time-wise, to both articulate to myself and then find ways to make it so that it was engaging for an audience to read. Not just like, “And then here’s this room, and here’s this room,” but something that feels emotionally engaging and is telling me something about the characters, like why they live in this house, why it is important not just for the story but for the emotional arc of these characters, before I came here, of like, “This is the reason they bought this house, this is the reason that kid lives in that room, that’s the reason that this kitchen is here,” et cetera, et cetera.

John: There’s a project I wrote where it’s not quite an haunted house movie, but the house is incredibly important. You needed to know a sense of like, from the entrance, there are stairs that lead up, and this is where the dining room is because things will tie together in ways that are important. I needed to, when the characters are introduced to this house, have scenes that are leading them up and through places just so the audience would actually have a sense of how things were connected and what the geography was, and if a person needed to sneak out, how that would work, and how it all fit together.

There’s times where you need to be incredibly specific and explicit about where things are, and there’s times where you can just shorthand it because– especially if they’re in a place and they don’t need to go into or out of that place, it ends up mattering a lot less. You may need to describe what we can see through the windows and sort of how things fit together, but it’s not crucial.

Now, a thing which will still happen even if you’re in one space is the choreography within that space, we need to believe that you, at least the writer understands and the writer sees it and have some faith that like, “Oh, this actually would work and work well together.” The experience that you were describing in terms of like, “Oh, it doesn’t have to exactly match what I see in my head as long as it works.”

In Big Fish, there’s a moment where Will calls home after his father died. It doesn’t work for me watching it because in my head, I put the phone on the other side of the bed. Literally, I’ve seen the scene in my head one way for five years to that point. Then when I saw the cut, I’m like, “That’s wrong.” I was like, “It’s on the wrong side of the bed.” It’s like, “Of course, it doesn’t matter at all.” You can tell when some writers aren’t really putting themselves in the scene. It’s just characters talking, but they’re not physically present in the space with the characters.

Liz: When I was writing Lee, I had gone to Farley Farm, which is where she had lived and where one of the timelines takes place in the film. I remember driving there and being like, “Please let there be a patio outside.” I hadn’t written the script yet, but I had an idea for how I wanted it to end and how I wanted it to take place and to be staged and things like that. I was just like, “Let’s bank on some double doors.” That I was like, “We can get in.” Thankfully, there were. I also feel like early in my career, I blocked too much in my writing, which I think is really typical when you’re starting because you are–

John: talk us through what you mean by blocked. Theater stage blocking.

Liz: Yes, I would theater stage block the characters and where they would be throughout, which, in some ways, is important. For instance, in Lee, she’s drinking a lot and she’s making– Her act of making a cocktail is a breakup of some of the scene work that’s happening. Actions like that were really important for me to write in and to find other moments like that are happening like that. I’m not talking about that.

I’m talking about literally motivated movement that is going to be an actor and a director’s choice on the day, and is frankly just too distracting to read when you’re reading a script. You’re reading something, you’re not watching something. When you’re watching something, they move, and you’re reading something, you should imagine how they move. That should be part of the audience’s interpretation of it. The act of removing that from my vocabulary partially also removed a lot of my tether to having a geography and relying on that.

John: All right. Let’s get on to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Benjamin writes, have any of the entries to the three-page challenge been produced as full movies? I’d love to watch one, listen to the segment of the show where John and Craig talk about it, and then watch the movie again.

John: To my knowledge, none of them have been. Drew, have you been able to find any evidence of ones that have?

Drew: Not that I know of, but I’m really curious about this. I’d love if people could write in.

John: If you were in a three-page challenge and the thing since that point has, Shawn, please let us know. I can half remember, I feel like there’s one three-page challenge where it was a scene of two people in a car, and there was a pack of cigarettes, and I feel like they ended up going through and shooting it as a short film. I think something like that has happened, but to my knowledge, none of these have been features or pilots of shows. That may be appropriate because a lot of times, what people are sending in through the previous challenges are like, “This is just a test of my writing. This is an example.”

We’re not picking for the things like, “Oh my God, but that is 100% going to be a movie that’s going to happen.” We’re picking examples that show interesting things for our listeners to focus in on. It could be things that are being done really well, but more often like, “These are things that are bumping for us, and here’s how we would address those.” I’ll be curious to see if anything has been made, but again, this isn’t the Blacklist. You would expect that many of those Blacklist scripts will shoot at some point; three-page challenge is not the Blacklist. What do we have next?

Drew: Clara writes, “Revising is so hard and intimidating. I found it so challenging that in my early career, I basically tried to avoid having to revise it all. Instead, I’d attempt to get it right with my first drafts. So many of us feel stumped or totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of threads that we have to track unweave, and reweave in order to properly fix a script. Have you ever felt this way about revising, intimidated, not sure where to start, lost without a map? How have you overcome this both from a craft and from a mindset perspective?”

John: I’m sympathetic, but also I think revising is easier than the first draft sometimes because you have something to work off of. It’s like you’ve made some choices and you have to unmake some choices, but you also know who the characters are, you know what the places are. You, hopefully, have a sense of what’s not working and what you want to fix. My first bit of advice to Clara would really just be to, on a separate document, make a list of like, “These are the things I want to do. These are the things I want to change. These are my goals with this next set of revisions.”

Then once you have that list, then you can really look at the draft. It’s like, “Okay, what needs to change in order to make these things happen?” I’ve said this on the podcast a bunch, but my instinct is if you’re making some serious changes, it may make more sense to write the stuff that is new that’s going to change and then only bring into a new document the stuff that you can take from the original script rather than just try to open the old script and futz around with it because you probably won’t do as much as you should be doing. You should be doing a little bit more of what Liz Hannah does, it’s just retype the whole damn thing.

Liz: I have felt this way in a page 1 situation where, first of all, I’d send out a lot of admiration for somebody who can feel like they can get it on the first draft, because just even the pressure of that would make me never finish anything. The only way that I can ever finish a first draft is knowing that I’m going to be able to go back and make it better. The stress of that, if that’s something that drives you, great, but also maybe let’s find new tools so you don’t have that stress because that feels really difficult.

My thing is, I definitely have been in those situations where I’ve been so happy to have a first draft done only to realize that actually the story should be from a different character’s perspective, or that the tone isn’t right, or that it just didn’t work, and I have to go back to the beginning. It’s really overwhelming when that happens. I do something very similar to what John is suggesting, which is I make a list of the things that do work. I make a list of the things that I really like. It’s like positive talking, it’s like self-talk of like, “What do I like about myself?”

I recommend the episode where you guys were like, “Executives, this is how you should give notes.” That, I think, is how you should also give yourself notes, is to be kind to yourself first. Then rip it apart and make some very significant choices. On those page 1s that feel really overwhelming, I just do the big stuff. If it’s like I’m changing a point of view character or I’m adding in a massive storyline, which is something I just did to a script, then that’s the only thing I focus on on that draft. I do not try and do everything at once.

Even if I know there’s eight more things to come and eight more drafts, to try and do them all at once is just impossible for me. I just tackle one at a time and then that’s this character draft, and then I do the next one and the next one. Sometimes when you do those big things, you lose the other notes.

Sometimes the tone will change if you make it from a different character’s point of view, or the plot feels more propulsive, or feels more engaging, or anything. I would just say take it one draft at a time. Take it one step at a time. Take it one note at a time.

John: That makes a lot of sense. There’s a project which we’re maybe dusting off that’s like 10 years old, and there’s something I wrote. It was great to go back through the script and let you read it. It’s like, “Oh, I actually still really like this. This is mostly working really, really well,” but what’s challenging to think about it is that the scenes are very tight and the scenes fit together in a very tight way. It’s intimidating to try to make many changes to it because I do know the domino effect of making one change is going to ripple through a lot.

It’s multiple characters’ point of views and they are like, “Each transition is really important to get from one place to the next.” I just know it’s going to be an intimidating amount of work. Doing what we’re talking about here, which is really making a list of like, “These are the things I’m trying to do. These are the big changes I’m trying to make,” and picking one and letting that be this next bit of work and the next draft and then the next thing and the next thing. You’re right that sometimes these things, which were lower on the list, just get scratched off because those scenes aren’t there anymore.
The problems that you were trying to solve, they’re just not there anymore because everything has been shifted around in the script.

Liz: I think the other thing is that, sometimes you have a script and you’re like, “It just doesn’t work and I don’t know why.” I know the plot doesn’t work, or I like it, but I don’t love it. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this on this podcast before, but on Plainville, we did something called Crazy Idea Hour on every Friday. At the end of the day, we would do about an hour, and anybody could pitch on anything. You could pitch on a character, you could pitch on a story, you could pitch him needle drop, you could really pitch anything.

It was a way for us to step out of the very typical, “Oh, we’re breaking this episode and we only have eight or we only have however many and we have to tell the story, and just remind you to be creative and to use your imagination and to find fun ways, at least for me, to tackle problems that you don’t sometimes think of. Sometimes you’re looking at something from North and you need to be looking at it from East. On this other script recently, I had this like, “I really like it, but it’s not working, and I don’t know why.”

I just did one of those, I spent two days and just watched a bunch of movies and I listened to a bunch of music and then I was driving in my car, and I had a totally batshit crazy idea. I was like, “What if I did this?” The initial thought I had was, “This will be a lot of work and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do that because it’s so much work,” but then I put the script back on cards, I looked at it and I was like, “I think I can do this this way pretty economically.” It ended up really helping me-

John: That’s great.

Liz: -with the script. I think sometimes we can have blinders on of this is the way to fix it. I just suggest rooting yourself in a different place to think about it.

John: Remind me, you called it your Friday session or your Friday one-hour session?

Liz: Crazy Idea Hour.

John: Crazy Idea Hour. It’s very smart. I’ve not heard other people talking about it, but listening to showrunners talk about putting their seasons together, they tend to start with a week of blue sky and stuff like that. It sounds like it’s a way to bring the blue sky back in on a regular basis so that it’s not so focused on like, “Oh, crap. How do we move between these two scenes?” It’s more like, “What if we threw a grenade in there?”

Liz: Right. Blue sky, I think, at least for me, is both the most fun and the most stressful because I’m like, “Well, but eventually I’m going to have to actually make this television show.” Like, “It’s so fun to talk about all these things, but like, “No, I don’t know how a Glee musical sequence will make its way into the television show.” When you have a refresh of Crazy Idea Hour, it’s also fun because I think at least when you’re doing it yourself for your own feature, you can have–
I have post-it notes on my computer of things that I want to remember about a script or a feeling I have, or I haven’t been able to put this in the movie, but I want to think about a way to do it and that’s my touchstone for a Crazy Idea Hour for myself. In a writer’s room, I think also is very freeing to your staff to be able to be like, “I know you love this idea and you haven’t been able to figure out how to put it in the television show, now here’s an opportunity for us to workshop it with no rules or consequences for 15 minutes a week and see if we can get there.”

In Plainville, one of our writers was pitching this fantastic writer named Ashley Michel Hoban, who has gone on to run her own show. She pitched a scene in an indiscriminate episode, but a scene where we were trying to figure out how to have the tension of their text messages between Michelle and Coco really reach its echelon. She pitched something very similar to the Tango in Moulin Rouge, and so that it was like a musical sequence that– I will say that musical sequences were a part of the vocabulary of the show, so it wasn’t totally batshit crazy that she pitched us.

She pitched it the first week, and it didn’t work. There’s typically a rule in a writer’s room that if you pitch something once, you don’t pitch it again, and it’s shut down. I would say that’s correct. I always have that, I would say, restriction in a room, but in Crazy Idea Hour, if you pitch it differently and you’ve developed it, then it can come back, and so she brought it back every week for 20 weeks, and it never made its way into the show. Then the room had wrapped. I was writing Episode 7, and I was breaking it, and I was moving at the time and I was listening to this playlist that we had created for the show.

I was driving back and forth, and this one song came on, and it just laid on top of her idea. I called her and I was like, “I think I know how to do it. In this episode, can you just write me a paragraph of this song and figure out how we can make it?” She did, and we made it work, and it’s in the show.

John: That’s awesome. All right. Let’s do one last question here from Becca.

Drew: “I signed with my manager in 2021. He’s friends with agents at a reputable agency, and they signed me as well for both TV and film. He emailed me today and told me we were parting ways because the industry is tough right now, and they want to focus on clients whose scripts are ready to sell, which is understandable. No hard feelings there. Should I not contact any of the people that they connected me to that I had general meetings with? Agents as well? Because I’m assuming I’ve also been let go by them. Am I able to send a script out that they already sent out, or do I shelve it? Not sure of the etiquette in these situations.”

John: Oh, Becca. All right. First off, I want to clarify. It sounds like– so your manager says, “We are dropping you. We’re no longer repping you,” but you’ve not had any contact with the agents about what’s happened here, too. Becca, it seems like you feel like “you are a member of Hollywood card” has been pulled, and that you’re no longer able to do things, so that it’s simply not the case. I’m sorry that your manager dropped you. It does happen. I’ve heard that happening a lot more recently as things have tightened down a bit, but the agents are free to do whatever they want to do, and I wouldn’t assume that they have disappeared on you.

My advice, Becca, is you are going to email the agents, who are your agents, and talk to them about like, “These are the things I’m working on. This is what I want to be doing next.” I don’t know if they even necessarily need to acknowledge that you’re no longer working with that manager, but see where that is, and just don’t make an assumption at this moment that they’ve dropped you. In terms of the other people you’ve met, good lord, you’ve met those people, the other executives, all the people you’ve had general meetings with.

That’s why you try to get their contact information in those moments so that you can also continue to reach out with them and talk with them and continue to develop stuff. You are not required to have a manager in this town. You’re not required to have an agent in this town. Most of the work you’re going to get for yourself, it’s really the work you’re going to get for yourself, and so I think, yes, you do need to look for a new manager, but you also need to continue writing and continue trying to find places where they want to hire you to do stuff.

Liz: 100%, no notes.

John: All right. Great. That is resolved. Let’s go onto our One Cool Things. Liz Hannah, what is your One Cool Thing other than the wasp I see flying around you?

Liz: There’s a wasp in my office. It’s cool. He’s not cool.

John: No.

Liz: He and I are going to have a conversation in a little bit that will end with, I’m sorry to say, a death.

John: Not yours. Liz, it’s not going to be you. Not today.

Liz: Fingers crossed. My one cool thing is a candle company, which is called Dehv Candle Company, D-E-H-V. I love these candles. They’re hand-poured, they’re non-GMO, they’re lead-free. It is a female-owned LA business. They are in these concrete jars that once the candles run out, they comes with a botanical biodegradable thing where you can grow flowers, you can put seeds in it, you can grow anything in it. I love them. There’s one scent in particular that I just lit the other day because it’s September and I would like it to be fall, which is called Northeast. It’s a very fall, not overbearing scent. Check out Dehv Candle Company, local business. We love it.

John: Excellent. Mine is also a physical thing, so I make my scrambled eggs every morning, and I’ve been using this really good nonstick thing. It works well on our induction cooktop and I’ve loved it, but non-stick services of all kinds are not great for the world, the chemicals that are used to make it. I know this largely because Drew’s wife, Heather, is a chemist who studies these kinds of things. It’d be great if we’d had fewer of these forever chemicals in our lives. I’ve been trying out a new fry pan from OXO. It’s a carbon steel pan.

Carbon steel is light cast iron, but doesn’t weigh 10,000 pounds. Basically has its own natural coating on it [unintelligible 00:55:18] oil that sticks to it. It’s non-stick as long as you treat it properly and treat it right. So far, knock wood, it’s worked really well. It works really fast on induction cooking. I’ve actually had to turn down the heat on that because it just transfers the heat so well, and so eggs go a little too quick if you don’t turn down the heat a bit, but so far it’s been really good. You just wipe it out. You never wash it. I’m enjoying using my OXO carbon steel pan. They’re not expensive, so if you’re looking for a fry pan, I would urge you to check it out.

Liz: Love this. I need a new one.

John: All right. That is our show for this week. Script is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place we can send questions like the ones Liz and I answered today. You’ll find transcripts @johnaugust.com, along with a signup for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find the clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow while you’re there.

You can also follow us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all of our premium subscribers and the folks who’ve sent through their receipts for pre-ordering the Scriptnotes book. If you’ve ordered the Scriptnotes book, make sure to send that receipt to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, because we’re about to send out something really cool that we are going to be doing as we’re signing books, so you get to see what we’re doing there.

You can sign to become our premium member @scriptnotes.net. You get all the backup episodes and bonus segments, all the Liz Hannah episodes, the other four or five. You’ve been on a fair amount?

Liz: I’ve been on a few times.

John: More than once or twice?

Liz: I need that merch, need that belt.

John: We’re about to record a new one on talking to your kids about what you do for a living. Liz Hannah, it’s always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back on Scriptnotes.

Liz: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. You and I are both film and TV writers. It’s a little bit hard to explain to a kid what we do. Your kid is being potty-trained, so three, four?

Liz: He’s three and a half.

John: All right. Does he have a sense that you go someplace, you do a thing, but does he have a sense of what Mama does for work?

Liz: No, not at all. He knows that I go to an office and that he’s been to my office, but he does not know what I do. Maybe he knows I think that we write. I don’t think he would know enough to say we’re writers, but my husband, who is also a writer, works from home and has a home office, and so he knows that the computer is a thing that we work on.

John: My daughter growing up, we filmed a movie at the house, but she was too young to know that was there. She got to see a lot of big fish for Broadway. She got to see all the rehearsals for that. She really had a very good sense of like, “Papa works on this show,” and she got to see how it all fits together, and that was great. It’s like, bringing a kid to set gives a sense of like, “Oh, this is a whole thing to do.” Then she could see the show and see how it all developed. In terms of me putting words together and being paid to do that, it’s a hard thing to explain.

For a while, I had an office outside of the house, and then I moved to this room over the garage. I’ve talked about it on the show before, how for several years, it was like, “Papa’s going off to work.” I would leave. She didn’t know that it was actually just upstairs in the office, and so–

Liz: Son of a bitch. There he is. Get out of here. Hang on. This is the most exciting Scriptnotes [inaudible 00:59:01].

John: 100%. An element of danger that’s lacking in most Scriptnotes episodes.

Liz: I see you. Land. Break the window. Got him. Oh my gosh.

John: Nice. A murder happened live on podcast.

[laughter]

Liz: Woo. All right. I feel alive. This is, I will say, the second wasp that has appeared in my office, which is a problem.

John: That is a problem.

Drew: I was about to say I feel like–

Liz: We’re going to have to deal with this.

John: If it’s three, then it’s officially a trend.

Liz: This is an issue.

John: All right. Wasps come from someplace, so if you track down the source, you could maybe get rid of the wasps.

Liz: Or just maybe they should spread to their brethren that this is not free to come to live.

John: A deadly place. Stay away from that office. My daughter had no sense that I was actually working upstairs over the garage, but she would come in to see Matt, my assistant at the time, who worked downstairs. I talked to Matt not knowing I was upstairs. Once she finally figured out that I wasn’t going someplace, because she was asking for a while, like, “Why is Papa’s car still here?” It’s like, “Oh, he must have walked to work, which is not a lie. I did walk to work. Once she discovered I worked upstairs, I just sort of laid down the law, like, “You can never come out here while I’m working. I’ll be really upset if you come out here while I’m working. That lasted for a couple years. I actually got some years of quiet.

Liz: Productivity out of it.

John: Then at some point, kids stop caring about what you do and don’t want to be in your presence. Then she was not interrupting me for very much at all.

Liz: When I work from home, I often will just work in bed because I’ll just be writing. That really doesn’t help him think that I have a job because it also doesn’t help when part of my job is to watch things because then he’s just– it’s just really confusing. I had to explain to my niece recently what I did. Well, I didn’t have to, but she was at the house and she was doing some homework. Her homework was writing, and she was not pleased that this was a thing that she was doing. I was like, “Me and Uncle Brian, our job is basically homework.”

She just looked at me, and her mother was like, “Yes, I was explaining to you, they are writers, this is what they do.” I just truly felt like she was like, “Why would you do this to yourself? Did you lose a bet? This is a terrible idea.” I will say that, as an adult who I’m very thankful for my career, but I did really come to a realization about five years ago that I was like, “I decided to do homework forever.” That’s what I chose to do as a career.

John: Choices. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, at least there was a physical thing I could show a person like, “Okay, I wrote all the words that are in this book,” and that was helpful to see. When we were writing a movie, it’s like, “We’re writing the plan for the thing, but they’re not going to want to read this script for a thing, and that’s not interesting to them.”

Liz: I think going into production is fun for them to have a sense of process of it. I wasn’t shooting something, but my friends were shooting something legitimately around the corner from my house for the last six months. I took him and he went on set. He couldn’t process that he was seeing one of his aunts basically on screen and that she was working, but he was also engrossed by it because he loves watching things. He had a great time.

John: He just got into trucks and vehicles because there’s trucks and vehicles that are great.

Liz: Are you kidding? What are you talking about? Literally the dream. If I drove a truck for a living, I would be a hero. That would be it.

John: Liz, you’ve got to do a Fast and the Furious movie so your kids can see it.

Liz: I know. Did you ever have– because this is something I think about a lot, did you ever have a moment where you were like, “I want to make something that my child can watch? Did you have that period?”

John: I’ve done that. Of course, I did.

John: Yes, you have done that. My experience was, and again, I probably have told this on the air before, we were shooting Frankenweenie. We were in London, me and my husband and my daughter were in London, and we’re touring the sets for the stop-motion Frankenweenie. They’re so impressive, so amazing. To scale, that’s just really cool. Then at some point, she realized that Sparky the dog dies. She sat down on the floor and would not move until I explained that Sparky comes back through magic and everything is okay. Everything is fine. To this day, she’s not seeing Frankenweenie because she’s just been so traumatized by that memory of like-

Liz: You’re like, “I made this movie for you.” [laughs] I think it’ll take him a while to see the post. That’s going to be up his alley for a while. Long Shot might actually come closer for him to watch more recently. I do often think about making something for him to watch, but then there’s a finite time of him thinking I’m cool, so I really have to make it now.

John: By the time Aladdin came out, my daughter had no interest in Aladdin at all. She’s actually never seen Aladdin.

Liz: I’m very excited to show my son Aladdin. We’re deep in Cars right now, so that’s a big one.

John: Cars was not a big movie in our household, and I’m grateful for that. Cars is just that thing that never fit my brain well.

Liz: It’s funny because then I have friends who have girls and they’re watching all the princess things. For me, it’s a hard no. I would just not function in that world. The Cars world, I’m thrived. Truly, in this moment. Although I will say that Batwheels was recently introduced to my house, and that really broke me. There’s an overstimulation and sound thing that I can’t handle. We really do generally live in a Pixar world in our house, which I think is just great for everybody.

John: Sure. Absolutely.

Liz: It’s like Pixar and Disney animation, you really can’t go wrong. It’s really meant for everyone, and it’s very accessible. For me, who basically gets overstimulated by two people talking at once, having too many flashing lights was really enough.

John: The thing you get to look forward on your behalf for is, at a certain point, you’re like, okay, now we’ll start Star Wars. Every weekend, watch one of the Star Wars and pick the right order for it, which is great. You’ll be just astonished how much little kids love the prequels. They love them.

Liz: Oh, yes.

John: They love them.

Liz: Less excited for. I will say that Back to the Future made its way into my house. My son went through at least six weeks where he dressed like Marty McFly every single day.

John: There’s a DeLorean in it.

Liz: It was a dream. When we went to visit my friends on set, they were shooting on the Universal lot, and he dressed like Marty and brought a tiny DeLorean. Then we went and saw the clock tower.

John: Incredible.

Liz: It was life-changing for every adult that was present and him, though he won’t remember it. We are going to see– Back to the Future is coming back to theaters for Halloween, so we are going to see it.

John: A thing you also get to do is he will have some TV show that he loves, and you will pull a connection and get to visit a set of that TV show, and that will blow his mind. My daughter loved– I don’t even remember the name of the show, some Nickelodeon superhero show. I was like, “I bet I know somebody who works on the show.” We went to visit the thing, and you saw how incredibly tiny the sets were and how minimal everything was. She was still like, her mind blown. She said, like, “Papa, can we fly to Hollywood?” Like, “Honey, we live in Hollywood.”

Liz: Girl, we live there.

John: This is our town.

Liz: That’s so funny.

John: She always saw Hollywood as that thing off there. It’s something like American Idol. You’re going to Hollywood. It’s like, “No, no, we live there. This is what it is.”

Liz: That’s so funny. We were with Dan Fogelman recently, which it’s like when I think you have a teenager or something like that, and you’re like, “Here’s the showrunner.” They’re like, “I don’t give a shit who the showrunner is. What does that mean?” Having to really restrain myself from telling my three-year-old who’s obsessed with cars like, “This is the guy who created it all.” He’s just like, “Where’s lightning?” I was like, “Yes, it doesn’t compute necessarily the same thing.”

John: I guess what I’m looking forward to is there’s going to be a tipping point where like, “Oh, my parents do something that’s cool, that’s actually great.”

Liz: Yes. I’m very excited for that.

John: Then they’ll resent you for it, and then they’ll go to college.

Liz: It’s like a flash in a pan a few years where I’m cool. I’m documenting all of the things so that he does know that I was cool at one point and did take him to cool things when he hates me. Then I can show them to a therapist and be like, “I actually did do things.”

John: I have evidence. I have receipts. I did the good things.

Liz: FYI, he did have fun doing these things.

John: All right. We had a very fun time chatting with you. Liz Hannah, thank you again for coming back on Scriptnotes.

Liz: Thank you.

John: All right.

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