Scriptnotes Transcript

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: And this is Episode 448 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. One of our favorite recurring segments on the show is How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories in the news and discuss how to turn them into features. Today we’re going to take a look at the outcome of that process with a new HBO movie Bad Education which is based on actual events and written by our guest, Mike Makowsky.

And in our bonus segment for Premium members Craig and I will talk about our own first Three Page Challenges and why those early pages are so important.

But first we have some follow up. Craig, do you want to start us off?

Craig: Yeah. We got some feedback here from a different Craig, because there are others.

John: There’s one or two more.

Craig: I’m sort of the premier Craig. A different Craig writes, “Last week Craig,” that’s me, “said that the brain is very plastic. He is incredibly correct.” John, I kind of want to just stop there. I feel like that’s the best bit of follow up we could imagine. But I will continue.

John: Not only is Craig correct, he is incredibly correct.

Craig: Incredibly correct. But, you know what? I’ll continue.

John: Although if you think about incredibly, incredible comes from like it’s not believable.

Craig: Like he’s correct in a way that is not credible.

John: Is not believable. Yeah.

Craig: Correct. The different Craig continues. He says, “I suffered a brain injury when I was three and this prevented me from learning how to read and left me with dyslexia. I got through school with a good memory and a basic handle of English. The ability for a PC, meaning a computer, to read text changed the world for me. I spend most of my working day with headphones on. My team knows that’s just me. As you can imagine movies were my life as books weren’t an option. At 50 I decided to give writing screenplays a go. I wasn’t after a career, but I knew how films worked as I had spent years watching them.

“I have sold two specs in the last year. Small indies. Mostly because of the assistance of you both. If people doubt that they can do it, well, they should only see themselves as a barrier. There has never been a time in human history that has allowed for the leveling of so many playing fields. I am not saying that every hurdle can be removed, but effort can be recognized and rewarded. There are mechanisms that can be used. Thank you both again.”

Well that’s lovely.

John: That’s great. So congratulations to other Craig for all the hard work he’s been doing and the ability to use the tools that are out there to sort of move past some barriers that are being put in your way. So that’s very encouraging.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s also good for people who are later on in years. Sounds like the other Craig is about the same age as you and me. You know, if you want to start something there is no time limit on starting. And if you’re not ready right now that’s OK, too, because there’s more time later.

In general, very encouraging note from Craig. So thank you other Craig.

John: Excellent. So another bit of follow up. Last week we spoke about what screenwriting actually is. And after stipulating that you and I are not film historians we said that early screenplays don’t closely resemble what we now think of as screenplays. Elizabeth on Twitter wrote to steer my attention to the book When Women Wrote Hollywood, Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. And I just started reading it and it is a good overview of sort of those early days of the film industry and early days of screenwriting.

And one of the realities is that a lot of people who were writing the initial screenplays were women. And that history has sort of been erased. Kara Green-Epstein also wrote in. She said, “The idea that screenwriting was just short lists until Casablanca is really a narrative that was created originally to discredit the work that female screenwriters were doing and pushed them out of the business once men realized that filmmaking had legs and that it was a money-making industry.”

Craig: Not sure about that one.

John: I’m not entirely sure about every part of that, but what I do think is that as we were very quickly describing the initial things that became screenwriting I think it is important to acknowledge that there were people who were writing those early screenplays and those early screenwriters were often women. And it’s a thing that you see discussed in sort of the history of Hollywood but I don’t think it sort of makes it out into the broader industry awareness too often. So I think it’s good for us to focus on this for a moment.

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely true. It’s a great point. I’m glad that Elizabeth brought that up. What I would say to Kara Green-Epstein is that she is right that there are a number of things that film historians do to overlook the contributions of women. And for our lapse in not bringing that up in our last conversation I do feel regret. I don’t think you or I really meant to imply that screenwriting was just short lists until Casablanca. That’s clearly not the case.

Casablanca comes out after World War II. There are god knows how many brilliant movies that are written in the ‘20s, but really the ‘30s. I mean, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. These obviously had full featured screenplays. They weren’t merely lists. So, I don’t want anyone to think that we think that until Casablanca there weren’t fully featured screenplays. There were tons of them.

John: Yeah. So a thing I want to throw in the show notes is a link to the History of the Screenplay Format by Andrew Gay which really talks through the various kind of formats that were built along the way. The reason why Casablanca is often put down as a dividing line is not because there’s something remarkable about the Casablanca script, although I will put a link to the Casablanca script in there was well. It’s that from that point forward screenplays tended to look very, very similar in terms of what they were describing and they were much less about the continuity. They were much less about the like “this shot and then this shot and then this shot.” They were much more of a literary document.

So it wasn’t that Casablanca was the one that made it a literary document. It’s that pretty much all the scripts you see moving forward after that point were really much more written to be read than to be a shot plan for these are the exact shots that are going to be in the film.

Craig: Yeah. And I just – because now I’m all like, I’m sitting here rather sensitive about the things that I’m saying. I don’t want anyone to think that I think that Casablanca came out in the 1950s. It came out after World War II commenced. Now I’m getting worried that we’re going to get more letters.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Those film historians will come after us. All right, let’s get to our feature topic here which is about features themselves. About how we take things that exist in the real world and turn them into features. It’s a thing we talk about a lot on the show. And our guest today has done just that. His new movie, Bad Education, opens very soon on HBO. And he’s here to talk about the process of getting from true story to movie, to a movie that is now streaming everywhere. Mike Makowsky, welcome to Scriptnotes.

Mike Makowsky: Thank you guys so much for having me. This is so cool.

Craig: It is so cool. I agree. I agree. It’s so cool.

John: Mike, are you actually a Scriptnotes listener?

Mike: I am. Yes.

Craig: Spectacular.

John: So you have listened to us talk through the How Would This Be a Movie segment before. For people who haven’t seen the movie yet talk us through the very generalities of what happened in the real world – what is the true life event that inspired this movie?

Mike: So basically in 2004 at a public school district on Long Island in New York called Roslyn there was an $11.2 million embezzlement scandal perpetrated by the superintendent and a couple of other administrators and was thought to be at the time the largest public school embezzlement scandal in history. And it happened at my school while I was a student there.

John: Great. So you had a very personal connection to it because this was literally the school district that you were going through. But if someone didn’t have that sort of special flash of insight what was the media coverage of this event that a person could have latched onto? What were the stories that were out there that a person could have found out about this event?

Mike: Yeah. So the New York Times was covering it week-to-week as the case went into trial. And the different administrators were arrested and ultimately five people went to prison. It was covered pretty perennially for probably two or three years by media outlets across the country.

John: And when did you first have the decision to like, OK, I’m going to try to make a movie out of this? What was your way into this?

Mike: That came much later. In 2004 I was in 7th grade and was far more concerned about my impending Bar Mitzvah. So, it was not the first thing on my mind. But it was very clear to me even as a 13-year-old who couldn’t kind of fully process the ramifications of what was happening as it was happening that this was a really, really big thing. It’s the biggest thing that had ever happened in my town. And after graduating from college and moving out to LA and making a couple of smaller independent films I had always wanted to try to write a true story. I always wanted to write something that took place on Long Island because it’s a very specific kind of region and upbringing.

Craig: Yeah.

Mike: I was thinking about stories that were close to me or were stories that I knew that other people might not necessarily be aware of. And this came back into my consciousness. And I went back to my hometown to do all the research in 2016. And I spoke with a bunch of my old teachers and parents of friends who were on the PTA and went through all of our local news archives and yearbooks and essentially outlined the whole script out of my high school cafeteria. So it was a really, really insane, cool, surreal experience.

Craig: I mean, that’s amazing that first of all you have the benefit of having lived in the milieu of this movie. So you know the people. You know the places. You’re soaking in all of that. So that’s research you don’t even have to do. It’s also a gift to be able to write something inside of a place, sort of be in a place when you’re referring to it in your own little fictional sub-world of it. But one of the things that we talk about all the time when we do these How Would This Be a Movie segments is, OK, so here are the facts. And, yes, it’s the biggest thing that ever happened in Roslyn, Long Island, but in the end it’s a thing about crime. Right? This lady and this guy stole a bunch of money.

So, at some point you as a writer go, OK, but what’s this really about. And where were you in the process when you kind of landed on what it is about? And if you can articulate for folks listening what you think this is really about?

Mike: Sure. So I think that one of the things that was really, really interesting to me going through the research process and specifically talking about kind of like the primary subject who was this superintendent, a man named Frank Tassone, who had built our school up to this point of national prominence. The year that he was arrested we were ranked the number four public school district in the country by the Wall Street Journal. Because he was such a really, really passionate educator who made a lot of inroads in our community and a lot of kids were getting into Ivy League schools and doing really, really well on their SATs because he was placing this real premium on their higher education and learning.

And the parents were really happy. And the health of the public school district, especially on Long Island, is directly tethered to the property values in the community. So there was a lot actually at stake in our town. A real, real direct relationship between the schools and the continued prosperity of our little suburb on Long Island.

John: Let me jump in here for a sec to explain, because international listeners may be puzzled by why there would be that connection. But in US public schools it’s very often the schools are funded by property taxes, taxes paid by land owners in that area. So it’s a very local kind of thing. And so the more the land is worth the more that school district has. And therefore it becomes this weird cycle where the richer school districts also attract wealthier families which brings up property values and becomes a sort of strange cycle.

So, if you’re listening to this in France you’re like that doesn’t make any sense. But this is a really common way things are structured here in the US.

Mike: Yeah. What the film at least tries to interrogate is this dichotomy between our superintendent who seemingly cared so deeply about the community and the town and the students. And really had a one-to-one relationship with so many – I mean, he ran a Dickens book club on weekends for parents. He was the Roslyn Rotary Club Man of the Year. Like the idea that then he could just sort of turn around and victimize that entire community and steal from the students’ pockets was something that struck a lot of my community as very, very upsetting and maddening. It was a huge betrayal that still has really, really deep-seeded tension to it, even today.

So I was just fundamentally curious about how can good intentions pave the way for something I think a lot more insidious. When I wrote the script in 2016 the college admission scandal had not happened yet.

Craig: Right.

Mike: But I think that this is something that we saw at least a year ago play out on a much broader scale. Just what would bring these parents to compromise their integrity so thoroughly for their children’s benefits. I mean, it just seems to perpetuate itself over and over again. You see these stories every couple of years.

Craig: As a culture we clearly struggle with the notion of assigning value to children based on outcome. And the ultimate outcome for so many people in the United States is where does your child go to college. And it was certainly that way with my parents and me. It’s not that way with me and my kids. But it is with a lot of people.

So, this theme keeps burbling forth throughout this kind of pressure. The idea of education as a function rather than something of value in and of itself. But it does seem to me that you took a surprising angle on this that I don’t think I would have thought of and I’m glad you did, because I appreciated it. And it comes out most clearly in the end really when Hugh Jackman, who does a wonderful job playing Tassone, is sitting there with Ray Romano who plays the head of the school board, and what comes out is a question of class. That there is a wealthy community that expects this man and all of the staff and teachers below him to provide a service that increases the value of their children and the value of their homes, but he’s not one of them. He works for them.

And he is I think in an interesting way as a character who seems fueled by some small amount of resentment or a large amount of resentment. He’s starting to feel like he is underappreciated and underpaid and maybe just nothing more than a glorified janitor to them. And I thought that examination, as the child of public school teachers in the New York City Board of Education system, this is not a foreign thing to me. I’ve heard this kind of resentment over and over and over as a kid at the dinner table. And I thought that was a really interesting angle. The notion that we expect this service class to benefit us but they’re not allowed to actually live well. And that’s seemingly what’s behind his crimes more than anything else.

Mike: It was something that I found very much by accident, and I’m so glad that you remarked on it. I think that the title Bad Education is a bit of a misnomer. I received such a great education at my middle school and high school. Teachers who believed in me and were the first people to really foster my interest in writing. I mean, I remember I had a teacher in 7th grade which was the year that Tassone was arrested. Every day during recess I would just go to his classroom because he was an aspiring novelist and we would just write together and give each other notes. And I think he was just humoring me at the time. But it just meant the world to me that a real adult believed in me and encouraged me.

And it was then sort of cool to be able to go back in the research process and reconnect with a lot of these old teachers that I hadn’t seen in years. And see them more as people and not just these functionaries. Some of them were even my first readers on the script. So you have your English teacher in high school, you know, you’re used to him scrawling notes in the margins of your essays, but it’s a whole other thing when he’s doing it in like a Final Draft document. So it was just a really unexpected outcome of this in that I was able to both reestablish those relationships but also kind of see Tassone more through that lens.

These people saw me through the most formative years of my life and years where I was kind of the worst. And they saw me through it. And it was nice to sort of just be able to go back and in some small way be able to thank them.

Craig: Well, and I think you did. I mean, there’s that moment again near the end where Tassone is talking to an unreasonably complaining mom who is trying to get her child into an accelerated program when it is quite clear that the child does not belong in the accelerated program because the child cannot even read the word accelerated. And what he says in his kind of final breakdown moment is essentially, “You all just use us, get what you want, and then you’re gone. We give you things. We care about things. You expect us to care about all of your kids individually, and we do, and then you leave when you’re done with us. You just toss us aside like a husk and you’re gone forever. And you never come back.”

And, again, it’s that feeling of class, you know.

Mike: These teachers not only remembered like surprising small details about me, but remembered the names and the seating charts of every student that they had. It was something that I felt like it would be irresponsible not to put in the script at least in some form. And it was a way for me to find some sort of window of empathy with Tassone himself, the superintendent, who really, really did care I believe ultimately about the students despite what he did and didn’t do.

John: So Mike let’s get back to the How Would This Be a Movie. So you have your setting, which you know the setting, you grew up in that setting. You have the basic plot. You know that it’s ultimately going to lead to his being found out and being arrested and the consequences of that. How early on in the process and how did come upon the decisions about which characters to feature, which real life people are making it into your story, and which characters you may need to create or do composites? What was the process in terms of figuring out which characters would be in the story and which ones would have storytelling power?

Tassone is a real person. Pam Gluckin is a real person. Is the Ray Romano character an actual person or is that a composite?

Mike: Mostly a composite. I mean, Ray Romano plays the head of the school board. And the school board are basically just parents in the community that have taken a leadership role within the management of the school as well. And ultimately what had happened in real life and in the film was that the school board caught wind of the embezzlement scandal about a year and a half before it was reported and they agreed to sweep it under the rug rather than to report it to the authorities or to the community, partially because they were compromised by not wanting to invite any sort of blight or scandal on the school district that they were directly benefiting from, that their children were benefiting from.

John: Now in the film you establish stakes that there’s going to be an upcoming vote and they don’t want to jeopardize things before the vote. Is that an invention of your story or is that a thing that would have happened in that same timeline?

Mike: It would have happened. Yes, it did. What we do in the film itself is we consolidated to kind of fit one school year just for, you know, simplicity sake. And I don’t think that it compromises the chronology to a [unintelligible]. Every year, every May, the school budget vote is the thing that administrators prepare for and steal the community for. And at the time of the scandal because the school district was doing so well and the students were doing so well the tax payers, the parents in our community, were all too happy to basically give Tassone and his cohorts whatever they asked for every year. So we had one of the highest operating budgets in the country.

We had, in 2004 I believe an $82 or $83 million a year operating budget.

Craig: Wow.

Mike: That was being inflated year by year with very, very little oversight.

Craig: As you’re writing you need to assume I think who a hero is. Who is the protagonist of this movie?

Mike: I like characters that exist in moral gray areas. And I think that there are, you know, some people that are going to watch the movie and root for characters like Tassone and Pam Gluckin who is Allison Janney’s character, two of the let’s call them conspirators in the embezzlement scheme, if only partly because it’s fun and you almost identify I think as a viewer with characters who are trying desperately to bail water out of a leaking boat. One of my big comps was Shattered Glass, which I think that Billy Ray does that so well with Hayden Christensen’s character in that film.

Craig: I mean, just as a side note, the end of your movie feels like a direct homage to Shattered Glass.

Mike: Thank you for calling it an homage and not an outright steal. I appreciate that.

Craig: We’re nothing if not kind.

Mike: But there is also a clear-cut protagonist and audience surrogate in the student reporter character. Her name is Rachel in the script. And in real life another really, really crazy facet of the story is that our high school newspaper was the first to break it. It was then picked up by Newsday and the New York Times but only because the newspaper reporter’s son was a Roslyn student who brought home his copy of the school paper and his dad read it and then reported on it the next day.

With Rachel we really tried to unpack the entire breadth of the crime through her eyes and kind of see each of the different cards fall really through her and kind of have her carry us through the different machinations in the story as best as possible.

John: All right. So you have your central characters here. You have Frank Tassone is arguably a protagonist. He’s the character who we actually see sort of change the most over the course of the story because he’s trying to bail water of this sinking ship. But an interesting thing that you decided to do is to conceal information from us as an audience about this character. And so we’re discovering over the course of the story things that he’s doing and lies that he’s been telling that go beyond the surface scandal of the embezzlement.

Talk about your decision process for that and sort of I suspect in your different drafts you probably made some different choices about when to reveal certain things about this central character.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. Even in the first draft I think I definitely tipped my hand a lot quicker to this guy might not be what he seems and that he is somehow complicit. And it was something to the credit of my director, Cory, that I think we needed to kind of find going through the drafts and how to disseminate information in a way that constantly felt surprising, but also organic. Ultimately the sense of structure that we landed on very much mirrored really the process by which our community in 2004 found out information about both Tassone and the scandal at large through media reportage.

It seemed like almost every week there was some new tidbit or some new salacious detail either about the extent of the grift itself or frankly about Tassone’s own personal life which got kind of really unfortunately ensnared in the reportage in a way that I don’t think was wholly positive or beneficial to anyone.

John: I want to play a clip here. So this is a clip that happens a little past the midpoint of the film. Something that has already been in the trailer so it’s not a huge spoiler here. But this is a group of the school board and Tassone coming in to talk with the Allison Janney character. They decide to label what she’s going through is that she’s a sociopath. And I thought it was such a fascinating term to apply to her. So, let’s take a listen to this clip.

[Clip plays]

Hugh Jackman: You stole from the schools and from the taxpayers, from the kids we’re supposed to serve. I think this kind of behavior goes beyond the bounds of immoral. It’s cruel. It’s heinous. It’s sociopathic even.

Allison Janney: Sociopathic? What?

Hugh: Shameless self-interest. The unstable personality. The parade of rotten marriages.

Allison: Frank—

Hugh: You need help, Pam. Real medical help. You’re a sick woman.

Female Voice: We’re concerned about you, Pam.

[Clip ends]

John: So, Mike, what I love about this scene is that it’s really funny but it also gets to again that thematic question you’re trying to wrestle with. What is their actual motivation? And these characters are performing the script, you can kind of see them as sociopaths. You can read them as they actually have no sort of moral underpinning underneath this. They are just doing whatever they can do to make that money.

Where do you as the writer of the story come down on Tassone being a sociopath, on Pam being a sociopath? What’s your judgment on these characters?

Mike: I don’t think that they’re sociopaths at all. And obviously I think that was what happened in real life, too. It was easy enough to just sort of chalk it up to “oh these people are just mentally disturbed.” I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that these kinds of situations are very complicated. I think as we also saw in the college admissions scandal, right? I don’t think that these are just a matter of good versus evil. I think that that really doesn’t do the complexity of it justice.

There’s another scene in the film, Tassone sort of expounds to Ray Romano’s character on how all of this really began. And I think it was something that I really identified with. He basically says that it started – he went out to a pizza place and ordered a slice of pizza and a coke and he used the wrong expense card by mistake. He used the district credit card instead of his personal card. And he said to himself, OK, Monday morning I’m going to go back into the office, I’m going to reconcile everything. I feel so guilty about it. And then Monday comes and goes, nobody calls him on it, and then on Tuesday he buys a $0.60 bagel. And then before you know it you’re at this $11.2 million price tag in the blink of an eye.

It’s like this frog in boiling water kind of dynamic.

Craig: But he’s saying this to a guy that he also points out lives in this beautiful house. He’s saying in so many words like you all look at this school as a machine to get your kids into the right college so they can be rich. It’s all about being rich. And so why am I not allowed to be rich when I’m doing the best job making everyone rich? It’s just that resentment underneath it. I mean, that’s what I found fascinating about the character and the way you portrayed him was that it wasn’t like he mistakenly became, you know, there was a choice he made on that Monday to not pay back the slice of pizza. And then to go further and further and further.

And obviously his cohort, Pam Gluckin, felt precisely the same. It’s amazing to me that he – I mean, look, it’s always amazing to me that these people think they can get away with stuff. The level of self-delusion there is remarkable. It was the same thing in Shattered Glass. They always remind me of Wile E. Coyote after he runs off the edge of a cliff. For a moment there if you just keep running you’ll be fine. But the moment you stop and look down, that’s it.

Mike: Yeah.

John: Now, so generally in this segment we talk about How Would This Be a Movie and we’re thinking about just the creative decisions. But in this case it’s like how do we get from you’ve written this script to this becoming a movie. So talk us through, you’ve written this script, what are the steps that happen that got us to this movie debuting on HBO?

Mike: So I wrote the script on spec sort of without a net. I thought if I had to ask someone for permission that the person just wouldn’t give me permission, or they would be like, you know, if I brought it up to my agent or manager they’d be like, “Well, it feels like kind of a tiny story.” And fortunately I went ahead and I wrote the story. Sent it first to a producer that I had previously partnered with on one of my independent films, a guy named Fred Berger who is great. And he really believed in it. And together we just sort of started going out and submitting it around.

And I was very fortunate in that the script was received well initially and was on the Black List that year.

John: So this is Black List 20–?

Mike: 2016. Yeah.

John: 2016, great.

Mike: But really what ended up making the difference was finding Cory Finley, our director. The script has a very, very specific tone that I think ultimately on the screen is very execution dependent. So pairing it with a director who could really navigate that darkly comedic tone was really, really important. And in 2017, soon after I wrote the script, you know, Cory’s film Thoroughbreds premiered at Sundance and just had a very, very unique view of the world and depiction of its characters and questionable morality. It felt like a real kind of one-to-one match for him to come onboard.

And suddenly I think people saw it a lot more clearly. And this is crazy, this never happens, but within like a month or two Hugh Jackman had come aboard and we were suddenly in the throes of preproduction.

Craig: That worked nicely.

John: That’s great. And so at this point the film is kind of a classic indie. So there’s money being raised from outside. You have a star, you have a director, you have a script. You’re bringing in Allison Janney. You’re bringing in this cast and you’re making this movie. But you don’t have a place that’s going to – you don’t have a buyer yet. So this is the kind of thing that is made for price and then you’re going to go to a festival and sell it. That’s the plan at this point?

Mike: That was the plan. And, yeah, so we premiered the film at Toronto last year in 2019 but nobody really knew if there was going to be a market. And we were, of course, incredibly nervous. I mean, I was just crawling out of my skin. I also just wanted people to like the movie. And I also felt this tremendous debt to my hometown where I wanted to make sure that I got everything right because if I didn’t and I made this sort of turd then my town would be like, oh, and then he made this bad movie about us.

Ultimately, I mean, HBO has been this incredible partner. And it wasn’t necessarily the way that I thought that all of this was going to go down. But ultimately what you really want is a distributor that cares very, very deeply about your film, that’s passionate about it, and that’s willing to get as many eyeballs on it as possible.

And we found just really like the ideal partner in them. There is a version of the movie that gets perceived as this very small, tiny, secular story about bureaucratic nonsense on Long Island. And frankly, I mean, who knows if people go out to see movies in the movie theater unless they have that sort of four-quadrant appeal anymore. There’s been a lot of skepticism about it. And there certainly was. I think even within the market in Toronto. HBO believed from the outset that this had a bigger appeal. And I’m so, so thankful for them.

John: That’s great. So like an I, Tonya which sold at Toronto this could have been a thing that went that route and it’s billboards and award season campaign and it’s all that. Going to HBO you miss all that, but also you get to miss all that, which is a lovely thing, too. Craig can talk you through the award season stuff for HBO. He’s been through all of that. But it is a different scale of crazy than trying to get Oscar nominations for your two lead actors there would certainly be in the conversation for those things and they will still be in the conversation for Emmys down the road.

So, Mike, what are you working on right now? What’s your next project?

Mike: I am moving definitely more and more into TV, kind of like this darkly comic true stories that can benefit from eight episodes of runway to really develop the subjects and paint a very sort of broad picture. So I’m writing – I’m adapting this series of Texas Monthly articles from the 1970s for Hulu right now. This crazy, crazy murder trial in Texas lore that is both like disturbing and disturbingly funny. It very much kind of I think builds on the tone of something like Bad Education. And I’m really, really excited about it.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. Do you want to stick around with us while we answer some listener questions, because you may have some good answers yourself?

Mike: Sure. Yes.

John: Craig do you want to start us off with Stacy?

Craig: Yeah, sure. Stacy writes, “I recently began work on adapting a book I loved into a film. I didn’t have the rights nor ever expected someone to try and make my script. But I loved the book and wanted to try my hand at adapting. However, very soon after starting I found out that not only have the rights already been purchased but a very well-known writer-director is attached to make it. While this did validate my initial inclination to adapt this slightly plotless, absurdist book into a movie, I’m now wondering whether it makes sense for me to try and write it in the first place. Should I continue working at it or move on to another project?”

John?

John: My advice to Stacy is to move on. So, yeah.

Craig: This is pretty much an easy one, right? A layup to begin with.

John: Here’s what I’ll say though, Stacy. Yes, it should validate your feeling that there is something to be made there. Think back to what is it about that project that would appeal to you, about that book that appealed to you? What is it you have in your own life, in your own brain, that can sort of scratch that same itch? Get to work writing that thing because that will be a thing that you can take out on the town and sell and show as your own work. This thing that you’re doing as a labor of love, it’s going to have a hard time showing up as your work just because it’s based on that book and people know the other version of it. So stop and work on something else.

Mike, anything more to add to Stacy?

Mike; I think you said it beautifully. I think you really, really try to hone in and diagnose just what appealed about it to you in the first place and what feels really, really personal to you. And if you can distill that, build on that foundation but build something wholly original from it, or find a story that has some similarities but is also different enough you should do that. Of course.

John: Yeah. All right, Demi asks, “The thing I struggle with most in writing is theme. Specifically when am I being too explicit with it? Like is it ever OK for a character to directly state/discuss the theme in dialogue, or must it be demonstrated through what happens? If you can put it in dialogue how explicitly can you address it? Do you have any examples or suggestions?”

That feels right to our conversation here because in your film we are talking about these themes of class and who gets to do what. And so Mike what’s your first instinct for Demi here? Do you think stating the theme is OK?

Mike: Yeah. I do. As long as you’re not putting too much of a hat on it and kind of obliquely reference something without making it feel blunt, I guess, if that makes sense.

Craig: I think it depends a little bit on the genre, the kind of movie you’re doing. I mean, The Matrix didn’t need to beat around the bush about its theme. Believe in yourself and you can do anything. So, yeah, some movies you just want to hear it be said. Batman, the Nolan Batman movies were never shy about stating their themes completely. And those were morally complicated films, but still he was just like here it is. This is what it’s about.

And that’s fine. In other movies I think where maybe reality is not pushed in any way, shape, or form you do have to pull back a little bit on that because in movies where people have superpowers or the world is slightly technicolor it’s OK for people to say things like that. No one really talks like that in regular life. So if you’re movie is parroting regular life you probably want to ease off on the theme announcements.

John: I worry that we are mislearning a lesson about not speaking your subtext and trying to bring that over to not speaking the theme, because I think it’s probably a good instinct to actually try to have the character say the theme at some point. I’d say use it and then you can always pull it back, you can always move away from it if it feels like oh my god that’s a giant flashing light there.

Craig is right. Comic book movies, with great power comes great responsibility. They can just announce it there. And you can’t do that in most other movies. But if a character has a moment of discovery and realizes something and articulates that discovery that they’re having. That feels genuine. That feels earned. If they’re whispering it rather than shouting it that feels like the kind of thing that you want to see in movies.

And we’re talking about literary themes, but think about sort of musical themes. Like sometimes you are just actually literally playing the theme music of the film that we’re going to hear at these crucial moments. So think of your theme that way. It is the emotional music that’s underlying all these stuff and sometimes it needs to be in the foreground so don’t be afraid to foreground it at times.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, honestly I pretty said what the theme was of Chernobyl in the first line of dialogue. I wasn’t shy about it. I mean, sometimes it’s just about where it happens. You know, if you say your theme in a big climactic moment where someone turns to the camera and says, “Ahhh,” then you go oh my god it’s the theme moment. But sometimes you can just sort of like slide it on in there and people will kind of get it as they go.

John: Yep.

Craig: All right. We’ve got one more question here.

John: Go for it.

Craig: From Matthew. He writes, “I have a pending option agreement from a two-time Academy-Award winning actress-producer for a screenplay I wrote. And she wants to turn it into a TV series.” Yes please. “This will be my first option ever. Should I have her draw up the option agreement between me as an individual or under my S-corp?”

John: I love the easy questions. It’s your S-corp.

Mike: Oh yeah.

Craig: Yeah. Always. Always.

John: It’s your S-Corp. So we’ll explain very quickly for folks, and I think we’ve probably talked about loan-out corporations.

Craig: We have, yeah.

John: In previous episodes. But either S-corps or C-corps are common in this industry. They’re a way of sort of insulating yourself as the artist so that the studios or other people can hire your company rather than hiring you directly. It makes sense for tax reasons and also for liability reasons. This is an example where you would use that S-corp so that she would be hiring your loan-out corporation rather than hiring you directly. That’s totally appropriate.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t see why you wouldn’t. My guess is that you would realize that when you looked at the option agreement and noticed that she was also using her S-corp. So that’s probably a good sign.

John: Yes. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: Well, you know, I have been struggling John at home with this printer. I’m not going to say which large corporation made it – it’s Hewlett-Packard. What I will say is this laser printer, it was like living with a very unstable girlfriend. There were times where she loved me and there were times where she wouldn’t pay any attention to me at all. There were times where she told me she would do something but didn’t. You’d hit print and just, well, who knows. You wouldn’t know.

And I just gave up. I was so tired of it. So I was looking for a new printer and I came across this Epson brand called EcoTank and honestly they had me at EcoTank. The brilliance of this thing is it doesn’t use the freaking toner cartridges. Oh, what a joy. You just – they give you ink like it’s a bottle of ink. And you just go glug-glug-glug into the little ink holder and that’s it. That alone is so – because the cost of those toner cartridges, it’s like they’re made of plutonium or something. And they’re terribly wasteful to the environment. And lo and behold I said, hey Epson, print. And it went, OK, no problem man. Here you go. That’s what I’m here for.

So, so far so good. Very pleased with the Epson EcoTank ET-4760.

John: All right. We’ll flag that for follow up two years from now and see if you still like that printer. Like, oh, curse this printer.

Craig: Turns out she was also an unstable girlfriend. Argh!

John: Oh, printers. My One Cool Thing is a program #StitchUsBackTogether. It is being run by my friend Jamarah Hayner. What Jamarah has done, she’s an organizer of people and things, she recognized that there is a shortage of gowns for hospitals. So basically – especially in the pandemic when you have healthcare workers interacting with patients they should in theory be changing out their gown between each of those visits so that they’re not spreading stuff around. There’s a shortage of gowns in Los Angeles and in New York and other places across the country.

She’s focusing right now on Los Angeles and she’s basically worked with a bunch of vendors. If you are a person who sews and has a sewing machine and would like to help make these gowns, basically people will show up at your house with the fabric. The patterns are already set. You sew them and other people come and pick up these gowns you’ve sewn and take them off to hospitals who need them.

So, it’s a thing that I’m doing. I’ve been sewing a bunch of masks here at the house for the past couple weeks. I’m going to try my hands sewing these gowns. I’m not great at sewing but I’m OK at sewing.

Craig: You know what? I bet you are great at it.

John: All right, I’m being a little modest. I’m pretty good at sewing.

Craig: I bet. I mean, can you imagine what my gowns would look like?

John: They would not be good. Craig has seen me duct tape a picket sign and he knows I have some pretty good craft skills there.

Craig: It was just these beautiful parallel/diagonal lines. Like he was making a candy cane. And then I was over here, you know, with just tape on a thing. I’ve always struggled with that. If I tried to sew a gown it would have either only one hole or six holes.

John: It would be really good for the three-armed doctors there.

Craig: Correct. Side note, seamster is a word.

John: Yeah. So as I was trying to set this up I was looking whether seamster was the matching word for seamstress and apparently it is.

Craig: It is.

John: So if you are a person who does sew, obviously if you work in this industry in the costume department you may have the ability to do this and actually have a sewing machine that’s sitting idle. There will be a link in the show notes. The hashtag is #StitchUsBackTogether. You may also just have parents or other people in your life are looking for a thing to do that can help. This is a thing that people can do that can help.

So right now in Los Angeles. They’re going to try to expand to New York if they have the capability.

Mike, do you have a One Cool Thing?

Mike: I do. When I wrote Bad Education I optioned the rights to a New York Magazine article that I felt at the time was the most sort of comprehensive and literary portrayal of the scandal. And it was written by a guy named Robert Kolker who released a book about two weeks ago called Hidden Valley Road that I’m in the middle of reading right now. And it is really, really amazing. So amazing in fact that it is now Oprah’s Book Club pick for the month.

John: Oh wow.

Mike: And I can’t recommend it more highly. It’s a nonfiction book about a family of 12 children in Colorado in the 1960s. Six of the 12 were diagnosed schizophrenics. Apparently I guess contributed in large part to how we understand from a medical perspective schizophrenia and mental illness today. I guess that their genes were mapped and studied.

But the book itself is harrowing. It’s probably not the most uplifting content to be recommending in the middle of a global pandemic, but it is just a very, very beautifully written, well researched, and human book. It’s like very, very emotional and cathartic in a way that I hadn’t necessarily expected when I first picked it up. He’s just a brilliant, brilliant writer. The book is awesome.

John: Cool. Excellent. That is our show for this week. So, if you’re a Premium member stick around after the credits because Craig and will be talking about our own three pages. But otherwise that’s the show.

It is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by James Llonch. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered on the show today. But for short questions on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Mike, are you on Twitter?

Mike: I am. I’m @mike_makowsky I believe.

John: Fantastic. So you can tweet at him to tell him how much you enjoyed Bad Education which debuts I think the week that this episode drops, so check that out on HBO.

You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and some bonus segments as well.

Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations on your movie.

Craig: Thanks Mike.

Mike: Thank you guys so much for having me. This is so cool.

Craig: You got it.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right. So, we got a question in that I thought might be a good Premium topic. Aaron writes, “From watching your latest Scriptnotes Episode 447, the live Three Page Challenge, a question occurred to me that might also be of interest to your listeners. What’s your personal favorite first three pages of any screenplay you’ve written or worked on, produced or not?” Which was interesting for me to think about.

So I have a couple of choices, but I also want to spend some time thinking about why we talk about the three pages, the first three pages being so important, and why they’re important to me as a writer.

So, first three pages of stuff I’ve written that has been really meaningful to me. Big Fish, the opening of Big Fish was probably of anything I’ve written in my entire career was the most classically sort of like rip the page out of the typewriter, crumple it into a ball, and start over. It was just very hard to set up all the things I needed to set up in Big Fish about sort of that they’re moving between a fantasy world, a real world, who the characters are, who had voiceover power. All the stuff that had to happen. Once I got that working in those first three pages in really setting up the movie the whole movie became possible. So that was a case where those first three pages were not just to sort of get the audience on board, but they were kind of the key to unlocking here is how I’m going to actually make this movie work.

So, as I looked back on things I’ve written the Big Fish first three pages are probably the most important ones of my career. Craig, do you have anything in your work that you feel like those first three pages are so crucial? I mean, Chernobyl feels like it’s partly – we just talked about in this episode about how sort of speaking the theme of Chernobyl at the start was so important for you there.

Craig: Yeah. Although I’m struggling a little bit Aaron because here’s the funny thing, every first three pages of every script I write is something that I torture myself over repeatedly because I want to get them right. And there are so many things that can go wrong. And there’s also so many opportunities to do good work in those three pages, to establish tone and place and character. To establish a feeling, a kind of emotional truth, and to also create the beginning point of something that will ultimately be revealed to be a circle. It’s degree zero of a 360 degree circle, so therefore it’s degree zero. And it is degree 360.

And so all of them I feel this way about. I can’t look at any particular script and say, oh, this is my favorite first three pages. They’re all my least favorite. I feel like they are all – I failed every time to be perfect in those first three pages, but I do try. I try my best. And I think as time goes on I get a little bit better and a little bit better. And I suppose when I get to that place where I’m no longer getting a little bit better than I realize that the plateau has occurred, followed by the inevitable decline. But, if you’re listening to this and thinking, oh, this may explain why he gets so fussy sometimes when we are reading these three pages, because I beat myself up so furiously over the first three pages. So when we get somebody’s first three pages and there are typos or things that just don’t make much sense or the worst sin of all – wasteful writing.

It’s like being a starving person and looking at somebody throwing food out. I don’t know how else to describe it. The real estate is so precious. I’ve said it so many times. So, mostly my sense memory of writing the first three pages of screenplays is pain and self-recrimination.

John: So, a project I’ve been writing more recently, I’m looking through my Dropbox at more recent stuff, The Shadows which is this movie that has a blind central protagonist, which at some point I hope to go off and direct, but the first three pages of that I think about in two different ways. Because it’s a thriller that has scripted opening title moments that do not involve the central character. So, it basically just sets up the universe and the world. And so the first two pages are really just getting us through those opening titles and sort of setting up the universe a bit. And I think that it’s really good writing, but I don’t consider that really the start of the movie.

Obviously you’re reading those pages to get a sense of the feel, but it’s really I’m so happy with the first three pages in the actual story part of it because I think I do a nice job establishing who this character is and sort of why she is a uniquely interesting character to be following through this story.

So, those are pages that I spent a lot of time on trying to figure out the right way into it. That said, I could completely imagine six months from now recognizing the movie really wants to start a different way and those three pages would not be part of it at all. So those pages were key to me to be able to understand how to write the movie, but they don’t necessarily need to stay the first three pages of the movie that we’re shooting.

Craig: Yeah. There is a certain amount of flexibility that you always have to have. But in movies those first three pages, they’re such a load-bearing wall. That if you are going to change them you almost assuredly are going to have to change other things.

If you can just replace the first three pages without doing any other work like the way a magician pulls the tablecloth away and leaves all the stuff on it, then something is wrong. You have not essentially built this opening in an integral way. Ideally you can’t really pull that Jenga piece it. It is crucial to everything. So when I do look back at those first three pages and make changes I know that the second I’m done with that work I need to go ahead in the script and find the things that this has affected and impacted.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, to kind of make sure that, again, it feels like a circle and not just like a line.

John: That’s fair. And I think back to sort of the idea of scripting opening titles versus just the movie starting. I remember Laura Ziskin, remarkable producer, she made the movie Hero with Dustin Hoffman. And when she showed it to us, we’d read the script and then she showed us the movie, and the script was better than the movie. It just was. And one of the things she pointed out was that they had built this opening title sequence that was not part of the actual script where they do all the opening titles and Dustin Hoffman’s name and basically all the opening credits. And then that first scene afterwards is really boring and slow because it was really intended to have those titles over it. It was intended to be sort of that placeholder thing that sort of got you introduced to the world. And the opening title sequence had really stepped over it in ways that you couldn’t have anticipated.

So even though the script document probably had a great first three pages, as a film they stuck something in front of it that actually hurt those first three pages.

Craig: Well that’s a great point. And this is why I find that television openings are so frequently more interesting and compelling than movie openings. Meaning the opening scenes. Because no one can mess with it. I mean, the writer pours an enormous amount of intention, hopefully, into what that opening scene means and is. And then someone comes along and goes [barfing noise] and they don’t always know that they’re stepping on something important but they do. They just trod on the grass and they step on the flowers and suddenly something is wrong. Because they think, oh my god, we got to open with something exciting and flashy, or whatever it is that they think. It doesn’t matter.

Whereas when you look at the beginnings of – I mean, look at the way Vince Gilligan routinely does his openings. They are little short film masterclasses. And they are above all else so carefully crafted and intentional. And that’s something that’s very rewarding about television that you know that your intention and the craft that you put into this. I mean, this is why with features it’s so – like I say, I beat myself up, I grind myself to a nub to try and make sure that the opening is just gorgeous and perfect and tight and then, you know, who knows. Someone goes, meh, or maybe not. Maybe we’ll do this instead. So anyway I work in TV now.

John: That is the clear explanation. There’s a project I’m working on which I may be able to talk about soon and it would be for TV. And I am very excited honestly about the first three pages and the first three minutes, anticipating, you know, what that is going to feel like and sort of the rocket sled of being able to launch people into the world.

So I do get very excited about those and I recognize from – I’m about to pitch it now, you really are pitching those initial first three pages to sort of get people hooked into the idea and excited to see where the story is going to take them. So, when I see – like you when I see the first three pages people are sending through and they don’t seem to have a clear intention, they just weren’t put together with care and real passion, I can feel it and it makes me less enthusiastic to read the stuff that’s going to happen afterwards.

Craig: No question. No question. And you’re right. If you have conceived of your first three pages correctly then they are exactly mimicking the feeling you want to impart when you’re pitching the beginning of something to somebody. You’re setting a stage. You’re creating a mood. You’re baiting a hook. All of those wonderful things to make people lean forward and you’re also doing a lot of hidden work that they don’t even see. Because we are magicians. So while we’re wowing them with what’s going on in our left hand, our right hand is casually in our pocket, setting something else up. So that’s the fun part of it. But it does require care and effort. So, as you do consider, you at home, sending in your first three pages, listen to what we’re saying here because if you’re not working as hard at them as we are, well, you know, it’s not going to go well.

John: In the cases where we have just really gone crazy over those first three pages it’s because they did show such real attention to what they were trying to do and made us so excited to keep reading that movie. So that’s what you’re always looking for.

Craig: Correct.

John: Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Bad Education on HBO April 25th, 2020
• Elizabeth on Twitter wrote to steer my attention to the book When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry
• Casablance script
• History of the Screenplay Format by Andrew Gay
• Bad Education True Story
• #StitchUsBackTogether organized by Jamarah Hayner
• Epson EcoTank ET-4760
• Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here.
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• Mike Makowsky on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by James Llonch (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

 

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This episode does contain some strong language so put in those ear buds, put on those headphones. Keep those children safe.

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

**Craig:** Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 447 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at the first three pages of listener’s scripts and look at what’s working and what could be improved. And because we are live on Zoom we will be talking to those writers in person. To help us out we have a very special guest. Dana Fox is a screenwriter and TV writer-producer whose credits include – Dana, I did not preapprove these with you, so let’s see.

**Dana Fox:** You know what? Let’s not.

**John:** Her credits include Ben and Kate, Couples Retreat, What Happens in Vegas, and the brand new show on Apple TV+, Home Before Dark, which was co-created with another Scriptnotes producer, Dara Resnik. Dana Fox, welcome to the show.

**Dana:** Hi! I’m so happy to be here, mostly because I miss your faces.

**Craig:** Ooh. We were talking about your beautiful shade of lipstick and the fact that you put lipstick on because you read that people need to have lipstick on or else you can’t see your mouth moving on Zoom.

**Dana:** The fact that I somehow fell for this ad – I’m sure it was an ad.

**Craig:** It was an ad. It was the lipstick industry that put that rumor out. No question. Because otherwise if you’re not wearing lipstick it’s just like where is their voice coming from. Their ear?

**Dana:** I see their face moving, but what?

**John:** Yeah. The beauty industry must really be suffering in this time of staying in home, because people are not using as much makeup as they would otherwise be using.

**Dana:** You would think that. But I have so much more time. It used to be that I did not wear makeup at all because I had no time and now I’m just in my house, opening drawers, trying things on. I’m not buying new things, so yes you’re right. The beauty industry is not benefiting from it. Oh boy, guys.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Boy.

**John:** Dana, you were the first person we’ve talked to who has actually had to launch a show in the middle of a stay at home pandemic.

**Dana:** Super fun.

**John:** So talk to us about your show Home Before Dark. I was recalling this morning that I had a long conversation with you about this almost two years ago. It was summer. I was in New York. I was unpacking a bag and we had like a 45-minute conversation about the difficult deal-making you were going through on your show. So, it’s now finally here, but it’s been a very long road.

**Dana:** It’s been like 2.5 years or so, or three years. I can’t remember when I first started talking to Joy Gorman about it. She’s our amazing producer. But it was a very long time ago. Feels like 500 years at this point.

The show is a labor of love by a lot of awesome people, Joy Gorman, Dara Resnik as you said, John Chu, amazing. We wanted to try to do something that we had never seen before which is like a very sophisticated show that felt like a four-quadrant movie but that starred a young girl that took her really seriously, that gave her a stage as big as any Amblin movie would have given a young male character. And that was something that we had never seen before.

And it sounds like sort of obvious, but along the way it was very, very hard to convince people that it was going to work. Because everybody was like, “But who is it for?” And we just didn’t say–

**Craig:** What is that? Who is it for…?

**Dana:** We just kept saying it’s for everybody.

**Craig:** It’s for human beings. I don’t understand.

**Dana:** It’s for humans. Yeah. “But why will men care?” And I’m like, well, because it’s good. We’re hoping.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also do you need to have 50-year-old guys watching this show for it to be successful? I don’t understand.

**Dana:** I mean, you know that they’re the only ones whose attention I truly crave. [laughs] Dad?

**Craig:** Daddy.

**Dana:** Daddy, tell me I did it.

**Craig:** Daddy, I’m here. [Unintelligible] I’m here.

**John:** Now Dana when you were pitching the show did you say Amblin a lot because having watched the show like Amblin is a really good vibe for it. Because even though it’s present day it does feel like early Spielberg. It just has that kind of spirit. Was that a word you said a lot in pitching it?

**Dana:** It was. We said it a lot in pitching it. John Chu and I put together this crazy, incredibly visual presentation that had so much information in it and a lot of specific visual imagery because we wanted it to feel like an Amblin movie but we wanted it to be through the lens of today and who we are today so that it felt fresh, while at the same time feeling kind of timeless. I’m sort of obsessed in movies or TV not having people dressed or like have weird hair or things that are going to make things feel very dated. So, you know, on our show you’re like when is this? And, you know, that’s purposeful. It’s partly because I just want – god-willing we’re lucky enough to have people still like this show and want to watch it in five years you don’t want them to go, oh, that feels old. I mean, like for example I was just rewatching The West Wing and it’s like it could be today. Everybody is just wearing suits. It kind of looks like today.

And so it feels like it’s relevant still. So that was one of the things we really cared about. And I just wanted to get that feeling back honestly. I think TV is very much about a feeling. It’s what you want to feel. I don’t choose things based on who is in them. I don’t choose things to watch the way that I think executives think people choose things to watch. I just go what do I want to feel tonight and what is going to make me feel that?

**Craig:** Does anyone do anything the way that executives think they’re going to do it? I mean, does anyone behave that way?

**Dana:** It would be funny to get a camera in an executive’s house.

**Craig:** Right. Like they get home and they pull their human suit off and underneath is this “we are studying humanity.”

**Dana:** And they put three kinds of cereal in front of their children and investigate how their kids choose which cereal.

**John:** They turn the little knob. How much are you enjoying this cereal? Now, Dana, before the show even launched you got an order for a second season. So you were writing scripts, you were starting to shoot things, and then you all had to stop production because of everything that’s going on right now. So how far were you into your second season when you had to pull the plug?

**Dana:** We were so lucky to get the second season before anyone had even laid eyes on the show. So it’s so exciting that people actually like the show. I was like phew. And I’m sure Apple was feeling that was well. They were amazing to even give it to us. But we had written about eight of our episodes. We had a ninth one that I was sort of working on and hadn’t handed in yet. And we had just finished shooting our third episode. We were two days into our second episode. And I remember when it became very clear what was going to happen and we were sort of trying to figure out the exact moment. I didn’t really know that far in advance because we were on the pandemic’s timeline, as well we should be.

So nobody had information and wasn’t telling you. It was just kind of like when are these cities going to shut down. Sort of a city by city thing. And I remember finding out about an hour before we ended up telling people. And we were trying to figure out exactly when to say stuff because it’s like obviously no one was going to get coronavirus from an extra four minutes of shooting, so we were just trying to figure out when to do it.

**Craig:** Well, but they could.

**Dana:** There was a scene we were shooting and they finished the scene and they were going to start rehearsing the next scene but they were going to go to lunch and then start the other scene after lunch. And I was like maybe don’t make them rehearse the other scene. Because it’s going to be 42 years until they get to do that scene. So, we’ll rehearse it in 42 years. So we just said, “We’re done.”

**John:** You also have a young star who is probably growing every day.

**Dana:** She’s 142. I FaceTime with her all the time and I’m like she’s a full-blown adult. We’re going to have some really weird continuity issues in that one episode where we have the two days shot. It’s going to be like, oh, look at Brooklynn Prince, this extraordinary nine-year-old, and then it’s going to be in another scene she’s going to be 42, and then nine, and then 42, with the martini.

**John:** Yeah. Little CG action. Little Benjamin Button happening.

**Dana:** Haggard, gray-haired lady. I know. Ugh, she’s so incredible though. I’m really just–

**Craig:** She’s nine?

**Dana:** She was eight years old the whole first season that we shot. And, Craig, you know, and John I was talking to you about it, and I’m sure Dara was talking to you about it as well, John. Like while we were shooting I was just going I have to tell people about this girl. Like Craig I called you and I was like I’ve met the best actress on planet earth.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, The Florida Project was incredible. But you never know if somebody can replicate that or was that just a very specific thing. But I’ve just seen interviews with her where I just think – it’s that same thing with Millie Bobby Brown or Emily Watson had it where you’re like you seem like you were finished by eight.

**Dana:** When you came out. Yeah, when you came out of your mom’s vag. It was just done.

**Craig:** Can we say that? Are we allowed to say that? Yeah, we can say that.

**Dana:** Are we allowed to say that? I don’t know.

**John:** Sure, yeah.

**Dana:** Am I allowed to swear on YouTube? What’s that?

**John:** Yeah, you can.

**Craig:** We decided last time that you could.

**Dana:** OK. Because that would have been hard for me, because you know I swear like—

**Craig:** Vag is not a swear. That’s a perfectly good part of the body.

**Dana:** It’s a beautiful anatomical thing.

**Craig:** Delivery system.

**Dana:** [laughs] Both intake and output.

**Craig:** You have 12 kids we just want to remind everybody.

**Dana:** Yeah, Brooklynn, she has this incredibly empathetic soul. She’s so deeply feeling that when you talk to her about what her character would be going through or you sort of try and describe what you think she’s feeling in that moment you don’t even have to talk to her about what she’s feeling. I just say to her I don’t want you to cry on purpose. I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to just think about who Hilde is to you – to you, Brooklynn – and do the scene.

And she is so good that whatever the thing is that comes out of her it’s her real feelings. She’s feeling them on camera. And so you’re not watching, you know, an actress try to show you what a feeling would look like. You’re watching an actress feel a feeling in front of you. It’s a miracle to me that she can even memorize her lines. And her mom is so amazing.

**Craig:** I know. Memorizing is hard.

**Dana:** I think it’s so hard. It’s what I talk to you about, Craig, because you’re like a famous actor now.

**Craig:** Right.

**Dana:** And so I have to talk to you about how do you memorize the stuff. I think I’d be like—

**Craig:** It’s hard.

**Dana:** I’d be out there. I’d be trying to Tina Fey myself if I could memorize more than three things. I’d try. But I can’t.

**Craig:** No, but you could. You know you could.

**Dana:** No, I cannot. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** You know what? Jason Bateman has a great system.

**Dana:** What does he do?

**Craig:** It’s something like the first word, the last word. He’s got some system. I didn’t really study it that much.

**Dana:** You’re such a good listener, Craig.

**Craig:** I use my own system. He said something literally and then I fell asleep and when I woke up I remembered that he said something.

**Dana:** Is it weird to like plug another podcast on your podcast?

**Craig:** No, do it.

**Dana:** Because I started listening to the Oh Hello podcast. And if anybody needs to learn how to laugh again, like this pandemic made it very challenging for me to laugh. And I found the podcast. And they’re very short. And it’s Nick Kroll and John What’s-his-face?

**John:** Mulaney.

**Dana:** Oh, I love them so much. And please–

**Craig:** Not enough to know his name, but OK.

**Dana:** Not enough to learn how to say – this is what I’m saying, Craig. This is why I couldn’t be an actor.

**Craig:** You got a point. You know what? I take it back. You can’t be.

**Dana:** I’ve seen the name so many times written and I’m like that’s a read-only for me. I can’t say that.

**Craig:** Right. That’s different. Remembering is different than memorizing. You can’t do either of those which is sad.

**Dana:** I want to be out of my own skin right now. Yes. Can you tell that I haven’t been around humans much lately?

**Craig:** This is exciting.

**John:** You are the parent of three small children as well, so that’s got to be a factor in your mental state at this moment as well.

**Dana:** I have too many kids. Mistakes were made. I love them so much. They’re all so young. I have 7, 5, and 4. And as it turns out you would think – I’m so dorky, I went to college, I went to another college, I got all the degrees. You would think I’d be good at home schooling because I like school so much and I’m such a nerd and such a dork. I’m so bad at it. Because day one I was like, oh, this is the day I figure out my kids are a little dumb, or have no attention span. I can’t figure out how to get them to focus.

I’m like, you guys, back to the thing. We’ve got to do the thing. But then I remember they’re small children. So teachers are angels.

**Craig:** Well, it doesn’t help that you’ve got your three kids and you can’t get them to do anything and then you know this other nine-year-old who can do everything.

**Dana:** Literally.

**Craig:** Everything.

**Dana:** I’m like you guys can’t sit at the dinner table. This girl just memorized four pages of dialogue for me. Like you can’t sit?

**Craig:** Good dialogue.

**Dana:** And by the way hit her marks and crushed it. [laughs] Yeah, but these idiots, they can’t remember to watch their hands after they go to the bathroom.

**Craig:** Why can’t you be more like that television star that mommy loves more than you.

**Dana:** But by the way they love her so much. And that’s the other thing about Brooklynn is like during the pandemic she just FaceTime’s our children and tries to make them happy, because she’s such a good person. I love this human child.

**John:** Now Dana you are a good person as well because this last week you were helping to promote the It Takes Our Village campaign which is to raise money for crews that are out of work because of this pandemic. Can you briefly hype what It Takes Our Village is about?

**Dana:** Thank you so much, John. You’re an angel. Yes. So part of the way that I’m trying to deal with this weird time is to spend a lot of time trying to help other people because it takes me out of my own skin. So, if you can get on let’s say GoFundMe and look up It Takes Our Village. There is an amazing fundraising effort that we put together with a bunch of cool people. Bruno Papandrea is who – and yet that last name I can say. Not John Mulaney. Bruno Papandrea, no problem. So obviously I’m choosing to not say John’s last name.

So we put it together. We’re trying to raise money for crews. Crews are the people that are there the earliest. They’re out the latest. It’s like I show up. I’m a disaster because in my mind it’s early. I have coffee. I have been rolling out of bed. And I’m showing up and I look around me and there’s people who have been there for like two hours before the incredibly early time that I got there.

And then at the end of the day when I’m completely exhausted and I think I can’t stand up anymore, I can’t talk to anyone anymore, my back is killing me, I’m dying, I say good night to everybody. And then they pack up all of the stuff and they’re still there for more hours. So these are really the people that need to feel our love and support right now because they’re the ones that crush everything that anybody is watching right now on television to keep them from going completely insane. These are the people that actually make it possible and make it happen. And they will not have a job until we get back into production again.

There are people in the business who can make money during this time period. These people cannot. So, for me it’s sort of a moral imperative that we help them. And any amount that you can give would be amazing. Some people have given some really big donations which is really exciting. And we’re trying to get to $2.5 million so that we can give individual crew members $1,000 to help support them with their bills. And we’re going to try to keep it going as long as we can.

**John:** Cool.
**Dana:** So please help. That would be amazing.

**John:** It Takes Our Village is the GoFundMe and we’ll have a link to that in our show notes.

**Dana:** Ah, love you.

**Craig:** Good cause.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our Three Page Challenge. So for folks who are new listeners we occasionally do this segment called Three Page Challenge where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script. It could be a pilot. It could be a screenplay. We look through of all of them. Megana and I went through 160 entries this week to pick four that we thought were really interesting that we could talk about.

This isn’t the four best things we read but probably the scripts that had the most interesting things for us to discuss and we can actually have these people join us here and we can talk to them about what they wrote and why they wrote it and it’s exciting. So we’re going to start off with one of these. Let’s begin with Hampton by Ali Imran Zaidi.

I’m going to give you a quick summary here. But if you want to read these things they’re already up at johnaugust.com. It’s the first post that you will see there. So you can download the PDF and read through them with us.

So we’re going to start with Hampton. Here’s a quick summary. We start with a phone call to 911. There’s been a major accident on the highway. We see scenes of the first responders mobilizing. We then cut to Kamal Shah. He’s sorting oxy in a dimly lit bedroom. He answers his radio and it’s clear that he works in emergency services. He’s talking with a woman named Mina who tells him there’s been this accident and he confirms his post.

We see that Nat is this woman lying next to Kamal. She runs his hand down his chest. Kamal says he’s going off to work. And he gives Nat a last bit of drugs.

We cut to the alleged accident but it turns out there really wasn’t an accident. It was all a hoax. And the firefighters and paramedics are packing up. We cut back to Kamal as he finds his way to his police car. But before Kamal can get the engine started a shadowy figure appears and shoots him through the dashboard. And then the car backs up into a mailbox and that’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

Craig, could you start us off with your first take on Hampton by Ali Imran Zaidi?

**Craig:** It’s garbage! No. I thought this was really good. I had a good time reading it. And I thought it did a ton of stuff in three pages. So I’m a big fan of using the real estate of the first three pages, the first ten pages I think are the most precious real estate you have. And a lot of times we get these things and I just feel like people are squandering it. Like they don’t realize they’re wasting the most precious opportunity.

So in the first three pages you need to establish tone and you need to establish a certain kind of visual setting and a pace. And so the good news is that Ali does all of that. The dispatcher – there’s a bit of confusion in the beginning that I think is an easy confusion to solve. The very first person who speaks is Mina/Dispatcher. Our eyes will probably go past that. So what we’ll see is just Dispatcher and we’ll see, “911, what’s your emergency?” Because we’re not used to noticing or caring about what a dispatcher’s name is. But as it turns out the dispatcher is actually going to come back and be important.

So, one suggestion is to just have that be Mina (VO), “911, what’s your emergency.” Or say dispatcher and then when Mina calls in down the page say it’s the same voice as the dispatcher, or she was the dispatcher. Just make a point of that. But what I think is really good is when we meet – this is the way you meet somebody, right? It’s like introductions are important. And a lot of times we’ll meet people and they’re just sitting there, or they’re walking somewhere. This guy is crushing and snorting oxy. He’s high. Love these descriptions.

“Sexy hands glide down his chest, leading to a not-as-sexy face and dirty blonde hair.” There’s your hair. “He NUDGES her off to GRAB THE RADIO from a hanging, dark green POLICE SHIRT. She snags the leftover Oxy, spilling some on her Hulk Hogan Tee.” There’s your wardrobe. Love the Hulk Hogan tee. Says a lot about what’s going on there. Their relationship is interesting. And just a nice way to kind of introduce that Kamal is, A, a bad police officer, B, a drug addict, C, cheating on his girlfriend/wife who happens to be the dispatcher. All of this is happening without him making a point of telling us any of it. We’re just learning it as we go. He has this really interesting – Nat, who I hope stays in the picture as this drug-addicted girlfriend of his. Could just be a drug-addicted girlfriend number two. And, in fact, she’s really interesting.

She quotes Babe which is the weirdest thing to do.

**Dana:** The best thing ever. I love it.

**Craig:** So cool. And then there’s the surprise that it was a fake 911 call which I wasn’t expecting. And what a great contrast to go from fake 911 call to very real murder. I have nothing to complain about here. I thought these were really tight, really good pages. I liked the way they looked on the page. There was space between things. The way the gunshot happened was exciting and read viscerally.

I think it was really good. I’m disappointed in how happy I am with this.

**John:** I agree with Craig. I really did enjoy this and I felt like Imran did a lot of great stuff in these three pages. The three pages open with On Black and we hear this voiceover before we get to the first image. You see On Black in screenplays a lot. I think you don’t actually see it that often in movies and TV shows because I think we realize that like, wow, looking at nothing is actually not that interesting. And so I think you’re going to want to find some sort of image to open this, rather than just being on black. That’s my guess.

You know, obviously we don’t want to portray the caller because we don’t want to set up that this is a fake thing, but On Black is sometimes a problem.

I love how Imran’s scene description is short and punchy. “Sirens burst to life. An ambulance roars through a stop sign.” Everything is quick and there. There’s no extra adjectives that you don’t need there.

Where I did think we had an opportunity here was between the hospital and the bedroom. We have all this like quick-paced stuff. We have vehicles moving and stuff like that. And then we’re cutting to “a scarf over a lamp bathes the room in red.” There’s nothing active there. It’s just scene description. I felt like if you were to start with crushing pills and lines and snorting, to have some action to start that thing could keep the momentum going. Keep this feel.

Move the scarf back a few lines so that then you’re setting up what the space is. But if we’re in action keep that action happening in parallel.

I got a little confused about Kamal, who he was talking to at the start. I just needed to have a parenthetical to say like “on radio” basically to tell us that he is not talking to the woman in the room, but that he’s talking on the radio. What I loved most about these three pages is I got a sense of what this world was like. I got a sense of who the characters I was supposed to be following. And then at the end of three pages I was really surprised that the guy I thought was going to be the protagonist is apparently dead. And so that’s exciting for me.

Dana, talk us through what you saw in these three pages.

**Dana:** So I thought all of your comments were great. I had similar ones. I think maybe one of the ways to solve the On Black, I would say Over Black, but then I don’t usually use it so I might be wrong. But I think maybe the way to solve it is to just have “911, what’s your emergency” be the only thing over black. Because that’s basically how much black time you’re going to want. And then I would get into this other bit and hearing this over this other bit.

I think that the introduction to Nat, you know, the fact that the “sexy hands glide down his chest leading to a not-as-sexy face” and that reveals Nat, that’s like the good version of giving camera direction, not the bad version. That showed me what I was going to be seeing in a way that I thought was filmic but not sort of hitting you over the head. So I really loved that about it. He nudges her off and grabs the radio from a hanging dark green police shirt. Full disclosure, I think I might be a little dyslexic and have like a little bit of a learning disability, so take this with a grain of salt. But I don’t like anything in scripts that stops my brain for one second, because it takes me a long time to restart my brain. So I would just say CB radio or police radio. Because I didn’t understand the word radio until I got to police shirt. And then I had to go back.

**John:** Yeah. And I got confused what I was actually seeing there. I’m just seeing the handset piece of that or the actual bulk of it. Because the handset piece I can see being attached to the shirt, but I got confused what I was looking at.

**Dana:** Then I’m like where is the bottom part? Where the thing or what’s it connected to? He took off his shirt. Where’s the radio? So, yeah, I think just a skosh more detail there. And then what I loved about this whole piece, you know, the oxy and the police shirt being the reveal and the girl and what not, I thought this told a much bigger story with really small details. I loved that about it. There’s like a Hemingway quote or something about showing the thing. You don’t have to show the whole shark. I forget what the thing is. But this is the perfect example of showing just enough that I felt like—

**Craig:** That was it. It was just you don’t have to show the whole shark. You don’t have to.

**Dana:** Yeah. [gives impression] If you just show the tip of the fin we know the shark is down there. You know, that famous quote.

**Craig:** Right. Hemingway is now an old Jew.

**Dana:** Somebody please look that up online.

**John:** Dana, can you do more Hemingway impersonations because I really think your Hemingway impression is ideal. I can really see him sitting in that café in Pamplona—

**Dana:** Welcome to my show about writing books in Havana.

No, that was really not an impression. It was a very bad impression. But if one of you guys could look up that quote just to–

**Craig:** I’ll do it right now.

**Dana:** Just to save me from myself. That would be great.

Yeah, so I loved that it told such an evocative longer story. I felt like I got both backstory and story out of just your lines of description there which I loved. I also really loved the line when he’s talking to her on the dispatch thing. He says, “I’m sorry Mina.” And then he says, “Code red.” And she replies, “I love you, too.” I also thought that was weirdly evocative. I didn’t totally understand it but I liked it. I thought maybe it implied that he was undercover so that kind of piqued my interest that he can’t say I love you maybe meant he was undercover. Maybe it didn’t. But I just liked that about it. And also I thought “That’ll do, pig” was amazing.

A vibrator kicks on behind him. I just wanted it to be like “clicks on” or something. Because again that was one of those moments my brain stopped and was like, wait, what is this saying? And I was like, oh, she’s turning on the vibrator. And I loved it but my brain went “kicks on?” What? And then I went back. So maybe clicks on, or just a different way of describing that.

And I got to the end and I was like, oh, end of page three and I would completely keep reading. I want to know what happened next. I don’t understand some of the stuff, but I’m totally intrigued by it. This feels like a very lean in and yet there’s a lot of momentum to it and yet I’m leaning in which is sometimes hard to do when things are kind of fast paced. You don’t lean in quite as much.

But this does both, so I loved it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This was really well orchestrated. It was well balanced. There was harmony between things. Things were feeding into each other.

I do have a quote from Hemingway.

**Dana:** Oh, OK.

**Craig:** It says show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

**Dana:** Yeah, fuck. That’s not it. Somebody else said the thing.

**Craig:** Show the readers everything. Tell them nothing.

**Dana:** And he talked with the cigar.

**Craig:** [makes cartoon noises]

**John:** I do want to show one thing on page three here. “Kamal walks out under flickering amber lamp light.” I think that lamplight should probably be a streetlight. But the amber gets used again about six lines later. So, amber is such a specific word. If amber light is being used twice – just you don’t need it the second time.

**Dana:** I think that’s important because it makes people feel – I always say I don’t want to feel the writing. You don’t want to be feeling somebody going like click-clack-click-clack. And so the repetitions of words you sometimes notice and go, oh, someone wrote this. Blech.

**Craig:** I mean, you can connect these things together if you want. You just have to be a little bit more purposeful about it so you can say Kamal walks out under the flickering street lamp, or the flickering amber streetlight. And then a shiny pistol and glove hand twinkles under the amber light of the street lamp, or under the street lamps. If you wanted to make a point of it. Because I don’t know if that’s important or not.

**John:** Yeah. I can’t imagine it’s – it doesn’t feel like it’s especially important or you’d underline it. You’d highlight in some other way if it really were important. I just feel like in both cases probably you’re feeling like, oh, this light should be this color and you forgot that you actually just a few lines above used that same color.

**Craig:** That may very well be the case.

**John:** Here’s an example of a recognition that’s so important is “Blood splatters on that CANVAS ZIP BAG now sitting shotgun.” Just using that rather than the canvas zip bag just reminded like, oh yeah, I did call that out a page before and this is a reward for having noticed that I called it out. So really nicely done.

Let’s invite Imran on to talk about this. Imran, if you could please join us here on stage.

**Ali Imran Zaidi:** Hello.

**John:** Hello.

**Craig:** Hey man, sorry about the way we just beat you up there. I mean, geez, did you enjoy that? God.

**Imran:** Man, I was sweating, but thank you so much.

**John:** So talk to us about who you are and how you came to write this.

**Craig:** Who are you?

**Imran:** So I used to – this is set in a real town called Hampton, Florida in North Florida. The pilot’s name is Got to Go North to Go South because that’s kind of the thing about Florida. You go north to go to the south. And I used to travel to a lot of these kinds of towns. And then at one point I read about this town and all the kind of underpinnings of the crime going on are real. They’re true. I read the state’s forensics report analysis about everything that this town was up to.

You know, it’s a story that in a weird way appealed to me as like a brown immigrant in Florida, the experiences I had I kind of in a way I’ve translated into what Kamal is going to go through in this place where he’s somewhere he really shouldn’t be. A South Asian guy in North Florida is not a common sight. And so it just personally really appealed to me.

And I love genre storytelling. You know, honestly when I take generals and stuff a lot of times I feel like I get the meeting where, you know, what’s the brown family story you can tell, which those are fine but I’m not really interested in family stories really. I’m interested in sci-fi and crime and things like that. So, I try to un-gentrify genre storytelling with what I do. So that’s basically why I wrote Hampton.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Talk to us about what happens in the rest of this pilot and sort of what is the franchise you’re sort of setting up out of here.

**Imran:** Essentially this town, Hampton, in a weird sort of way it’s sort of like that idea of Fargo, but it’s one specific town and one specific story. There’s a lot of people who are not very bright in this town. This is the kind of town, and we see it later, where the police department, the water, and like city hall are all like one small office building which is like a converted house. And so there’s a lot of this kind of – essentially Hampton created a speed trap that started out the money coming in, an illegal speed trap. They annexed a piece of land on a passing highway which is shown at the beginning. And they basically started taking in that money.

And then of course you need to funnel money which means you need to launder it somehow and you need to find other ways to bring in money into this system. And so they took control and they required cash payments from water because the city was providing water. So anyway it goes kind of deep.

So the idea of this is Kamal and his wife are basically helping them launder, because they themselves are not necessarily that good at this whole, you know, the numbers game of this whole thing. And so I follow Kamal and then also his wife gradually through the series who is really – his wife who is a dispatcher, because everybody has multiple jobs in this town. She’s actually helping launder this money. And, of course, they’re trying to get out of it and they’re also at the same time because of the racial implications of the town they’re essentially being scapegoated. And so what I’m trying to do in the version of this story is I’m kind of putting fiction in the dark corners of this story that don’t exist to tell the story of the people that – because a lot of money went missing. And I’m trying to show with my version of this story, this fictional aspect, of what happened to the million some dollars that kind of somehow disappeared out of the town.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool.

**Dana:** For you, what are the touchstones? What are the shows that you loved watching as just an audience member?

**Imran:** I mean lately, obviously, I love Ozark. I’m tearing through the new season that just dropped. I love the rural town kind of story. Like I just love that. I watch a lot of crime – I mean, whether it’s something like Fargo which I thought was amazing, like beyond amazing. As far as crime goes those are like my – whether it’s the old feature Fargo, the original Coen Fargo, or the new one.

What the Coen brothers do where they kind of somehow balance something that makes dramatic sense while at the same time you find yourself laughing at some of these idiot characters that kind of go along the way. And that’s the kind of thing that I really love. Because we’re all kind of geniuses and idiots depending on the day. And so that’s kind of what I like exploring. Like when are we at our best and when are we at our worst.

**Craig:** Great. Well thank you.

**John:** And Imran, where are you at in your career? So you say you’re taking generals and I also saw on IMDb that you’ve worked as a cinematographer. Where are you at right now?

**Imran:** I mean, essentially I’m at the place where I am taking staffing meetings now and then to try to get stuff, because I have not been staffed. I was writing features more before, but obviously because the way the world has turned, you know, it became more about television. So I’ve been working on more television pilots and I haven’t been staffed. That’s basically my next step. I’m trying to get there. Of course, there’s the Catch-22 of if you haven’t been in a room sometimes you can’t get in a room. So, I’m trying to work that as best I can.

**John:** Great. I think people will read your script. I think you’re going to get more of those meetings. So good luck.

**Imran:** Thank you.

**John:** Great. Thank you very much for sending in your pages.

**Craig:** Good work. Thanks Imran.

**Imran:** Thank you so much.

**Dana:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks.

**Imran:** Bye.

**John:** All right. Let us go next to Sunbeam by Heidi Lewis. I’ll give you a quick summary for people who don’t have it in front of them. We hear a deep breath as we open on 12-year-old Mabel in Normanhurst House, Victorian England. She’s standing on a landing and Mabel watches as a horse-drawn carriage arrives with two doctors. The butler greets the doctors. As a child cries for air, the doctors rush up the stairs past the butler and Mabel. We watch the scene from Mabel’s point of view as she looks into a bedroom and watches an elegantly dressed couple, apparently her parents. Lady Anna and Lord Thomas tend to a feverish girl. The couple and the doctors debate whether Lady Anna should stay in the room and what is the best course of treatment for the girl. Cupping? Or arsenic and bleeding?

Meanwhile the little girl struggles for air until she’s finally propped up, just in time for the child to draw her last breath and for the audience to see the girl, Sunbeam, for the first time. That’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Dana, can you tell us your first impressions on this?

**Dana:** So, I really liked this. I’m big fan of sort of period pieces, especially in the world that we’re living in. I kind of want to think about other time periods.

**John:** Where people could touch each other?

**Dana:** Where everyone can touch each other and cough on each other. And open doors, you know, just with the handles. Just open them. Just go right for it.

**John:** No elbows required, yeah.

**Dana:** So I long for that. So I really love a period piece. I love a costume thing. This was just a fun kind of world to feel like I was in for – especially I loved the detail of the feeling of the snow falling and then you realize that that’s the feathers in the pillow. I thought that was really beautiful. Really evocative. I can imagine a filmmaker really wanting to make a meal out of that, which is good. And, you know, my only question was is there a way to a little earlier, you know, we started with the 12-year-old girl in a night dress. And I think this is a good lesson. I’m a really good reader and I skipped the first slug line somehow. Like I just didn’t read it.

So, I was like on the 12-year-old girl in the nightdress holding her breath. I’m like I’m in, I love this. And then there wasn’t a period detail in that first section. So I didn’t realize it was a period piece until the four black horses came and the coach came. So I was wondering if – in a way there’s an opportunity there to reveal the period in an interesting way.

You know, period pieces and costume dramas, they’ve been done so many times before that you sort of have to ask yourself what do you want to do that’s either different or if it’s the same as what’s been done before maybe that feels like something that won’t get you as much notice if you’re starting out your career. So I might sort of look at this and say, OK, what makes this different? Are the people talking in a way that I wasn’t expecting? Does it surprise me in that way that Hamilton did because it was a mashup of genres that I wasn’t expecting?

This feels a little bit more straightforward and so if it’s going to be straightforward I think it has to make itself known a little bit more clearly what it’s doing in these first three pages. Because I was just not quite sure what I was reading. But I liked it and I was like I’m on board. This person can clearly write. I’m excited. I want to read more. I feel like if there is a way to think more meta. I like to kind of step back from it a second and sort of go you know how to write, you’re a good writer, that’s great. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to do this particularly? And let’s dig in maybe when we get to the talking directly to you part of it about what do you love about period pieces, why do you feel that you’re the person that has to tell the period piece story.

Just for me personally, you know, I am obsessed with World War II stuff. It’s like 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell psychotic reading of stories about that. But for me it’s very specific. I want a story about a woman who is a spy in like a very specific time period. I’m like, ooh, let me get my hands on that 1946. Oh yeah.

So, I have some stories that I’ve been toying around with doing and for me it’s not like, oh, I want to talk about World War II because it’s like, yeah, but why, everybody has talked about World War II. It’s like I want to talk about a time period when women were allowed to work and then could fall in love with something and fall in love and get passionate about their work. And then the minute the war is over everybody says, great, we fought for you to be able to go back to the kitchen and take your shoes off and be pregnant again. And I’m like but what about my work? I’m in love with my work. And they’re like, yeah, well you can’t do that anymore.

So, for me that’s why I’m interested in that particular story and that’s why I want to tell that particular story. And so I’m interested in talking to you about why you want to tell that particular story and then trying to help you kind of bring more of that into these pages.

**John:** Craig, what was your read on these three pages?

**Craig:** Well, I quite liked them.

**Dana:** Oh, oh, you quite like them?

**Craig:** I quite liked them.

**Dana:** Shall I light you a candle?

**Craig:** It’s 1946.

**Dana:** I quite like this Victorian story.

**Craig:** I got to go back into the kitchen and take my shoes off.

**Dana:** Where they can’t even just turn on the light switches. They got to light a candle.

**Craig:** I quite like – but it’s funny that you mention turn on light switches and light a candle, because that’s exactly what I want to talk about. It’s the very first thing. I had the same moment that you did where I was a little bit confused about period because like you I kind of sort of glided past Victorian England. But it’s night. Now it’s night in a mansion in Victorian England. I suspect that we’re dealing with candlelight here. The butler later is going to have a candle in hand.

A 12-year-old girl in a night dress stands in a shadowy landing holding her breath. How do I see her? Is she holding a candle? Is there a lit candle? Do we start on the candle?

**John:** Is there moonlight?

**Craig:** Is there moonlight? Do we see a match light a candle? I mean, somehow or another I think that’s a great way to kind of bring us in. Look, it’s a preference thing with me that I’m not a big fan of “right now she’s wondering what it’s like to have no more air in her lungs like a sailboat has gone flat.” It’s a little bit of a purple prose thing. And I can’t shoot it. And no one can act it. So, I’m not sure what the great value is of that kind of thing.

But I’m just kind of wondering what is she doing there. Is she just standing randomly on a balcony? She is thoughtful and curious and she is wondering about air, but why is she there? Is she waiting? That’s a different thing. If she’s waiting then–

**John:** I think she’s at the window. Because when she exhales her hot breath fogs the frosty pain. But I didn’t know she was at a window. So if she’s at a window waiting for the doctors to arrive and that actually tracks and makes sense. But I didn’t get that from the initial image.

**Craig:** Well, because she’s not doing what waiting people do. Because waiting people aren’t thinking about what it’s like to have no more air in their lungs. What waiting people are doing is looking and waiting and hoping. So that’s a different kind of anticipation. That’s the kind of thing where if you breathe you wipe it away because you need to see. They’re not there. You breathe again. You wipe it away again. These are things that you can do.

We get these doctors coming out. They come on in. Pearson, now, OK, just a general dialogue note. A lot of this fell into the category of this is how TV or movies make us think these people spoke. But then there are other examples. I’m thinking of Taboo for instance, the Tom Hardy series, where you go they didn’t talk like this. This all feels a little too Downton Abby. A little too precious and formal for these things.

“She seems so discomforted! Is there nothing you can do for her?” doesn’t seem like panic to me. It seems very rigid and formal. I love the down pillow snow thing, but I don’t know why the pillow has been exploded. Did the girl rip it apart in a feverish fit? I just didn’t understand why that was that way.

Similarly the doctors do this thing that I call bad man speech. So bad man speech is, “My dear woman, you are merely a woman. I am a man. Step aside for in this year women have no rights.” And there is a more interesting way to get across the kind of endemic sexism of a time. And it’s particularly important because you have Anna doing what I think is the “no, no, no, I am a woman and I will not take that crap, sir” speech. And similarly “yet I shall not set one foot from this chamber until I’ve seen her through the worst of it.” It’s like, ma’am, stop giving speeches. Grab somebody. Your child is literally a breath away from dying. Everybody is talking so much.

And I love, I am such a sucker for old medicine. Old failure medicine I call it. It’s wonderful. I love failure medicine. But that’s all anyone ever knew. So, she would be like where are the leeches? Or do the thing? Or do you have arsenic? And everyone is like scrambling and trying to do something because she’s literally dying in front of them.

A child dying in front of you is what I call an overwhelmer. When you have an overwhelmer in a scene everyone has to shut up and no one can talk about anything else. There’s no time to talk about what you want to do, how you feel about your rights as a woman. Your disagreement with another doctor. A child is dying. So there’s just panic. And when she does die, Thomas – who is Thomas? Oh, is the husband. I forgot the husband was there. And here’s why. Because the husband, by the way, he’s in a formal white tie which is spectacular because his child is dying.

Again, I don’t quite get that. But he says, “Dr. North, Hughes,” his daughter is dying. And then he doesn’t say anything? Or do anything ever again. Which is crazy, to me.

So, overwhelmers have to really be respected. However, where we end is really beautiful I think. Because it’s hard to make a kid die and make me go, ooh, because they died. And I went, ooh, because I saw this and I liked that Mabel was there. I think there’s a point of view problem here because the point of view doesn’t really feel like it’s Mabel’s point of view. It feels like it’s more Anna’s point of view. But this dawn comes in and we have our first clear view of the child. And she has golden curls, dimple chin, cherubic. Her name is Sunbeam. She’s dead, or is she? Ooh.

So, anyway, I loved where it ended up. I think there’s really good visuals involved. I think you have an overwhelmer problem that you have to deal with and I think you’ve got to dial down the sort of written period of it all and just get more into humans, because we actually only care about the human part, not so much the stilted stuff.

**John:** I agree with especially the emphasis on the images, because the images are what really worked for me. So as I went through the script I found myself scratching out lines that I felt we didn’t need. And in those omissions I thought we actually could make some progress. So, like you I cut “right now she’s wondering what it’s like to have no more air in her lungs.” I cut out the door chimes. I cut out Dr. North’s dialogue in a lot of places. Basically just getting to the next thing, because in these moments of crisis people don’t stop to say those lines. They just actually rush through to the next thing.

There’s even moments for when you’re taking out blocks of dialogue very naturally you got to the next thing and people just said the thing that has to happen. A bigger thing that we haven’t discussed really is that this is all from Mabel’s point of view but I don’t know anything about Mabel in the course of this. And I feel like at the end of three pages if she is our character I want to know something specific about her. Why we’re entering this story from her point of view.

And so giving us some image or some connection between her parents, between apparently that’s her sister, what it is that she’s here rather than just being a camera through which we’re watching all this. And so by the end of three pages I wanted to have a little bit better sense of why we’re experiencing this through Mabel.

Luckily because we’re doing this with Heidi here she can come on and answer these questions because generally we couldn’t do this. Heidi, step out on stage here and talk to us about what you’ve written here.

**Heidi Lewis:** Hi.

**John:** Heidi, hi.

**Craig:** Hey. Hey.

**Heidi:** Thank you so much.

**Craig:** All right. No problem. You took a couple of shots there. You took a couple of shots, so hopefully you’re not feeling too rattled.

**Dana:** By the way, that’s like all of trying to do this job. [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s literally all we experience all day.

**Dana:** It’s 100% that all day long. No matter whether it works out or not, you’re just like, oh, everyone is saying horrible shit to me all the time.

**Heidi:** You’re generous. I mean, this is generosity because your knowledge is so helpful. So, what I love about this story is that this is a true story. It’s a little – do you want me to go into the background?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, just tell us what it is.

**John:** Please, please.

**Heidi:** So, I was at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England a few years ago and I saw this massive golden figurehead. And it was the image of a child. It was just haunting. It was so beautiful. And I went over and looked at the little plaque and all it said was this belonged to the ship the Sunbeam. The first family to sail around the world in 1856 went on this ship and I went down this whole rabbit hole studying all of the journals that they wrote. And Anna Brassey, the mom, was this like – she was this strong explorer naturalist adventurer.

And then her daughter dies. And so they decided to build this ship and sail around the world. And the thing that interested me about it was that grief is just something that’s universal, first of all, and that this family went to such great lengths to escape their grief. And they actually brought the daughter with them who died in the form of this figurehead in the name of the ship.

And so it is a ghost story.

**Craig:** Ah, good.

**Heidi:** Yeah, so it’s a ghost story where, I don’t know, I was just kind of looking at how all of us in a family might approach grief. Maybe the mother is distracted and Mabel, the surviving daughter, just when she needs her mom the most has her mom completely just separate from her. So that’s what the story is. It’s a ghost adventure story, true story. And a female story, because it’s the mom and the daughter. So, yeah.

**Dana:** Can I jump in and you can take any of this for what it’s worth. But I love what you’re saying there and I think that you have the potential for a really, really cool story. Maybe think about, sometimes what I do with my stuff is like I write the kind of linear version of it and I look at it and I go there’s something not quite working here. This is the sort of like this is what happened version of it. And I realize like, oh, there’s this thing that in my mind is backstory and it has to become story. So I end up moving around pieces.

I think maybe this isn’t the right way to start your story. I think maybe if you started the story on the ship with the family and you’re with these people and they’re out there and you’re like what the fuck are they doing out there. That’s crazy. And you see the thing on the figurehead, the masthead. And then you basically use the daughter’s death as a mystery that you’re solving to kind of explain why the behavior of them present day is what it is. That could be an interesting way of thinking about it. And, again, you can throw all this away if you don’t like it. But that’s something that’s sort of appealing to me because I know somebody whose child did die and it gave me a window into that profound deep grief of like a mother over their child. And like Craig said, it’s all encompassing. It smashes everything in the room. Like there’s no version of people being like, “We’re talking about stuff.”

But what I found so fascinating about it was as she started to go through it like it was a mystery – it was like a mystery she had to solve. Because her brain could not process it and get over it until she understood every single piece that led up to it. How it happened. Why it happened. Who was there? When the thing? How they got the thing?

So, maybe it’s an interesting way of looking at it as more of like the death is more of a mystery because right now we’re experiencing and we don’t care about the characters yet, so we of course care about a child dying because everybody does. You intuitively sort of know that. But it just might be a slightly more interesting way into it so that if I meet them and I know them and then you bring me back to this and I get to see for example Mabel in happier times. Like I’d go even further back, you know. And Mabel in happier times being a completely different person than the Mabel I’m watching in present day. Then I sort of care about both time periods in a way that could be kind of interesting.

I don’t know. John and Craig, is that terrible advice or is that–?

**John:** I think it’s actually really good advice. Because what you’re doing is you’re trying to find a way to make sure that the franchise of the show, which is really sort of what we’re emotionally invested in, is set up very early on. We’re sort of establishing what kind of show it is that we’re watching which is not going to be a haunted house. It’s not going to be a Victorian house show. It’s going to be a cool ship show. And the mystery of like we won’t know at the start of the show that she’s actually died. And that could be really compelling.

And if this were kind of the last scene of the first episode that would be really cool. Like we didn’t know that this girl who we’ve been following over the course of the story is actually already dead. That’s kind of neat.

**Dana:** Yeah, then I’d be like, ooh, I’m hooked, I’ve got to watch the second episode.

**Craig:** Yeah. These are great ideas. I think that Heidi what Dana and John are suggesting is a kind of advice that helps you take a little bit of the I’ve seen it before kind of feeling off of this. Because while grief is a profound emotion and human condition that we do empathize with and feel and need to discuss and understand through art, when you serve it up straight ahead it’s just – it feels a little kind of like, oh, right. She’s going to have to go through the stages of grief.

And then they will be over. So I guess I’ll be watching that thing. Do you know what I mean?

**Heidi:** Yeah.

**Craig:** and how you begin things really does frame how this can evolve. I mean, you’ve probably seen the Nicole Kidman film The Others?

**Heidi:** Yes. Definitely.

**Craig:** So that’s a fascinating exploration of grief and it does so in a way that does not say, right, first a kid dies, then [unintelligible] dies, then you get sad, then you – do you know what I mean? So you don’t have to do any of the things that Dana and John are suggesting. And, in fact, you could even start in the house if you wanted. But what you do need to do is say how can I surprise people who are going to think, oh, OK, so this is going to be a this – how do I surprise them? How do I keep them off-balance so that when the emotion comes it comes in an unexpected way, in an unexpected direction because that’s what grabs us.

The audience, see, people are protective of their hearts. They will try and protect their heart from you. As somebody who is trying to break it, so you have to surprise them.

**Heidi:** Yeah. I love that. I think it’s great advice. It gives me a lot to think about. I love it.

**Craig:** Awesome. Well thank you.

**John:** Heidi, thank you so much for sending these pages in and for joining us.

**Craig:** Thank you, Heidi.

**Heidi:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. Next let’s look at Find Him by Dylan Guerra. This is episode one, Atlas Didn’t Shrug He Actually Had a Pretty Strong Opinion.

We start in a rundown apartment building in Harlem in the middle of a thunderstorm. Dylan, our main character narrator, desperately bangs on a door. Dylan calls for David, begging him to open up. They open up the door. Then through voiceover Dylan steps back and lets us know that the scene didn’t actually happen this way at all. Instead Dylan takes us to his apartment where he sits in his underwear and types David a series of increasingly passive-aggressive texts. Dylan takes us back and forth between the scene in the hallway and to his bedroom.

Until we arrive at a happy medium with Dylan wearing clothes and texting David from his bed. Dylan admits to the audience that he struggles with being clear. Dylan realizes that he hasn’t yet given us enough context on the scene so he shows us David’s dating profile and describes David through the description on the profile. Dylan steps through the scene and addresses the audience directly telling us that this is the story of David, a guy he met and sort of dated who then went missing and this is Dylan’s search for him.

Let me start off with this because I really dug a lot of what I read in Dylan’s script for Find Him. This script as we look at it has the most formatting issues. It feels like the least screenplay ready of all of these. I liked the control over the writing that Dylan really showed and his ability to inhabit the space and really have a clear point of view and tone that came through from the very start.

So, we had Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the show last week and so she is a character who is turning to the character and addressing us directly. That’s a thing that Dylan is doing. Mostly it’s working really, really well.

On the bottom of page one when we switch to more of what really happened there’s a lot of texting. We’ve talked about texting on the show before and it can be a tricky thing to show. This is just a big block of text which is not going to really work. I think you’re going to want to break it up into some different ways so that we can really sense like this is what we’re actually seeing on screen. This is the flow of how we’re getting to this stuff.

As we’re going back and forth between the various incarnations of this it felt – I can picture it. I can imagine what this is going to feel like as we’re seeing these shifting realities of sort of what actually happened here. If I could change a few things, I might sort of move the tenses a little bit. Right now on page three it says, “And David is important because he went missing.” Well, we’ll talk to Dylan about this, but David is missing. I feel like when you say “went missing” it felt like well this was a thing that all happened in the past.

I want a sense that this is a thing that is still ongoing as we’re setting up the story. If it’s at all possible I would love for David to have a different name because Dylan and David gets so confusing to have two D-words. So if we could rename that character. But I would say I’m very curious to see what happens next at the end of three pages.

Craig or Dana, what did you take out of these pages?

**Craig:** I enjoyed them as well. These are all about Dylan and about his tone. So either you’re going to enjoy the Dylan ride, or you’re not. By the way, I agree with you on the David thing. We do need to change one of their names. And since Dylan has written this I’m going to say Dylan keep your name and change David’s name.

It’s exciting to read things like this when you think, OK, I’m never going to quite know where I stand with my unreliable narrator. They’re going to keep pulling the rug out from under me. For a bit. And then it’s going to become an issue.

So talking to the audience and side comments and contradicting yourself, all of that I think is interesting and fine. I’m a little nervous about what happens on page three. When you actually now start talking about the techniques of the film that you’re in, or the show that you’re in. “That was cool right? The screen blacked out and I then I stepped into it. You thought you were staring at an image and then the image went out and I stepped into the darkness.”

So that is clever, but it’s annoying. It’s annoying because it’s unfair. You’re kind of cheating. In a sense that like I like it – I don’t mind being fooled as an audience member, I just mind being fooled and then having you say, “Ha, I fooled. Did you notice that I fooled you? Wasn’t that interesting how I fooled you?” That can get a little annoying because you are going to start to disconnect a little bit. So that’s always the danger of the fourth wall.

We talked about it on our last live show with Phoebe and with Ryan. That’s the area where you’ve got to be careful. One of the things that Phoebe did so brilliantly was use her moments to the camera – sometimes they were just a quick glance without a single word. But they never said, OK, actually what you just saw, wasn’t that an interesting camera angle? Because then I start to get a little too deconstructed.

It’s OK to do – I’m not saying you can’t do it. Just be aware that a little bit of that in particular goes a massively long way.

And I’m kind of fascinated to see, OK, will I want to keep watching Dylan? Especially if Dylan is narrating his own story. It’s hard for me to say, but I definitely enjoyed the shit out of him for three pages. So, I mean, I’m on board. Given that you can do anything, the only other challenge is you’re going to have to keep that up. Right? You can’t do all these fun tricks in three minutes and then just get bored with them and just start doing your regular linear story. So lots of challenges here.

But, I mean, it was funny. And he was so specific. And I think it might be, so that helps. The voice was consistent. So well done.

**John:** Dana, what did you think?

**Dana:** I really liked it a lot. I had a lot of little check marks, which that just means I’m happy, on a little different lines. And there wasn’t a thunderstorm. And I don’t remember what I was wearing. And he changes outfits and the thing. I was down with it.

I’m always intrigued by things where people are missing, because I think it drives you. It feels like it has a cool, forward momentum to it.

My thing is very much your same thing that you guys were talking about which is kind of like I definitely want to know more. I wanted to be a little more sure of what the tone was of this, in the sense of like are you going for streaming or are you going for broadcast? Because right now I kind of can’t tell and I think it’s important that you make it very clear in the first three pages who you’re for at this particular time.

**Craig:** Isn’t everybody going for streaming? Does anybody go network at this point?

**John:** There’s no such thing as network anymore.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. Like, unless you’re a procedural. I just don’t think so.

**Dana:** On the TV, where they watch the TV? I don’t know how the people do it on the TV.

**Craig:** The TV.

**John:** Derek Haas has all the remaining broadcast shows and everything else is streaming.

**Craig:** Everything else is streaming. Exactly.

**Dana:** But I guess to that end, if this is definitely streaming, which you know I think it’s super fun and you should lean a little bit more into that in the sense that like, you know, Phoebe, you guys were talking about her. I can’t even believe we’re just using her first name like that, like all cas [casual] like. She made a pretty R-rated version of the direct-to-camera address stuff and the stuff that she’s saying is pretty hardcore. Like there’s a lot of sexual stuff in it. And it was super funny because it sort of leaned into tone a little bit more.

This felt like kind of in between like a thing I would expect to see on NBC and a thing I would expect to see on streaming. So I would kind of go a little bit more heavily into that direction if streaming is what you’re thinking of.

You know, the line on page one where it says, “Is Dylan the real Dylan? The Dylan who wrote this script?” That kind of stuff I usually absolutely hate, like with every fiber of my being. And the reason I usually hate it, and I didn’t actually hate it here, so yay, but what it did make me think is number one do you want to star in this, which is going to be in my head the whole time. Does this guy want to star in this? What are we talking about? Who is this guy?

So I don’t know that you want to do that. It gave me pause in sort of not a good way. I might take that line out. I don’t know. Those kinds of like cocky lines that we sometimes want to write in these lines of description, your script better be an A++ or else I’m annoyed that I’ve seen it in the script. So, when I get stuff from writers that has like a cheeky like, “Yeah, because we’re going to get a season three for sure,” I’m like [groans] take it out. It just really bugs me.

Again, because it makes me go like this better be A+ in order for that cheeky tone to pay off. So I’d be a little careful with that. And then I also have a thing on page two, “Why I was banging on this door, which again I didn’t do. Let me explain.” I have a weird rule which is like don’t say anything the audience might actually be thinking. So if a character of yours is saying something like, “Ugh, I’m getting really bored by talking to you right now.” No. Don’t say that. Because the audience might be like, yeah, I’m getting really bored watching you talk to him right now.

So if you’re saying that you have a problem. This was one of those moments where I was like that started to get into what Craig is talking about in terms of like don’t remind me so much that I’m watching a thing that is made by people because I’m trying to get into the thing that is made by people that you’re doing really well. So, let me get into it. Stop reminding me that there are people making it.

Yeah. But I really liked it. And I’m pushing hard on it because I really liked it and because I think you’re close. And I’d love to hear from you where the rest of it goes and if this kind of conceit is going on like Craig said for the whole thing. And how you’re going to do your storytelling in terms of how we’re going to understand the mystery of where this guy went. But I was in. I liked it a lot. I thought it was great.

**John:** Dylan, come up on stage and let’s answer these questions.

**Dana:** Dylan! Dylan!

**John:** Dylan.

**Dylan Guerra:** Hi.

**Dana:** Woohoo. Hi.

**John:** Hi Dylan.

**Dana:** Yay Dylan.

**Dylan:** Thank you.

**Dana:** Great Job.

**John:** So I’m going to disagree with Craig here a bit in terms of some of the tone and the talking to the audience. What I enjoyed about this is that I thought you were kind of deconstructing in some ways the actual talking to the audience of it all. It reminded me a little bit of the pilot for Mr. Robot which sets up this weird relationship between the central character and the audience. And so it’s like your character that seems very eager to please, but also a little cocky. And that combination is actually fascinating.

So, tell us about the origin of this. Because from what I was quickly able to Google it sounded like this was a play before this was something you were writing here. Tell us about this.

**Dylan:** So Find Him, it’s all a true story, which also a big I have with the show in general is to sort of also deconstruct what it means for something to be a true story. Is the reality we construct for ourselves more real than the reality that we actually experienced? And that’s sort of the ongoing theme and sort of why the camera interruptions happened.

So it started because it was a true story. And then I turned it into a one-person show and I’ve been doing it periodically at Ars Nova and some other theaters in New York City. And then I wanted to continue to sort of push the boundary of the narrative that the story was able to tell. And so I crafted it into a pilot. And so the deconstructing aspect or the hyper-awareness is sort of like the thing that will maintain throughout the show.

**John:** Now, the pilot that we’re reading, the first three pages we’re reading of this, is it a 30-minute pilot? A 60-minute?

**Dylan:** It’s a 30-minute.

**John:** So in some ways this reminded me of Search Party—

**Dana:** So great.

**John:** Which was a show I love which is about a bunch of 20-somethings who are ostensibly looking for this missing girl but really it’s just an excuse to have anything interesting happening in their lives. And it does feel like there’s an aspect of that to this story, too. Which is that you’re trying to figure out what this whole story means to yourself as you’re trying to do this investigation.

**Dylan:** Yeah. Totally. And I think throughout the pilot what starts to happen is you sort of – the end of the pilot episode you find out that I don’t actually have as much control of the situation as I thought I did. So the screen blacking out, like what begins to happen towards the end is scenes start to be shown that I don’t intend to show.

**Dana:** I really like that.

**Dylan:** Thank you. I do hear and it is always a concern is that I don’t want it to come across – it is written for me be the main person in because it’s a true story and I’m trying deconstruct true narratives. And so the most heightened that I feel like I can get that is if I was playing myself. And I do come from a wholly theatrical background. So I feel like I’m still trying to figure out the formatting in the way – it’s my nightmare for someone to read this and to be like, “Oh, this guy sucks.”

**Craig:** No, no, nobody would – it’s really good. I’m actually glad to know that it came from a stage background. It’s starting to explain a lot. But all the more reason then – I’m even more concerned in a little bit of a way because there is an experience that you can have as an artist on stage with an audience that is very different from being on a television screen. Because when you are there performing it you are there. It is happening. So the moments where you’re like, “Oh did you see that, the lights just went off, or did you see this, you thought it was this but it’s this,” they’re with you in it. They’re experiencing it with you.

When we watch television we understand somebody sat down, thought of it, contrived it, shot it, did five takes, edited it, and put it on there. It’s sort of the difference between watching a magician do magic in front of you and watching one of those things like a magic special where it’s so rigged. It’s harder when it’s rigged.

So, that’s number one to just think about. And number two, I love the idea that you’re going to start to lose control over this thing that you think you’re in control over. It’s very Pirandello. I love this. All the more reason to be sparing about how much you do in the beginning because if you don’t establish a certain kind of rules in the beginning, like OK, I can tell, OK, I liked about this, I lied about this. But the more you break down in the beginning the less shocking it will be when we find out later that you’re not completely in control of it. It’s like you showed too many tricks early.

So, I think Six Characters in Search of an Author do not understand they’re in a play in the beginning of the play. They come to understand they’re in a play. So, it’s different obviously here. But just think about that dial because that’s such a fascinating concept. And I want you to blow people’s minds with it as opposed to them going, oh, geez, another trick. Do you know what I mean? That’s the difference, right? So that’s the thing to keep in mind as you go because the medium – it’s different. It’s different. And I like the fact that you’re transporting it, but as you transport it you are going to have to do some things.

**Dana:** One of the things that’s great about you when I get to like see your face and talk to you is this – I can tell you that you can bring a sense of intimacy to this. And so I would also hope that there would be a moment where you are actually real in the pilot. So that all of the sort of the sort of artifice means something to me. Like that’s one of the things that I think I loved so much about Fleabag is it’s like taking on this ride and it’s funny and fun and cool and cocky, and then all of a sudden you’re like I have the feelings. I hurt – my heart and also my stomach. Oh god. And I’m sobbing.

And then I’m so onboard for any of the other stuff because I know that this character is actually feeling real feelings and is capable of feeling pain or being hurt. To me, you know, all comedy comes from pain, personally just to me that’s how it’s always been. So I always want to know that there’s some pain underlying the comedy or the breeziness or the fun or the crazy, because then I’m like 100% onboard for the other stuff.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Dylan, thank you so much for sending these pages in.

**Craig:** Good job.

**Dylan:** Thank you so much.

**John:** You’re going to see what happens next. Cool. All right, our last script is by a familiar name. James Llonch has written many of the outros for Scriptnotes, but we’ve never actually met him. And so he sent through these pages and they were a delight. So let me give you a quick synopsis of Nights Never Over. We met Lett, a European woman in her late 20s, as she leafs through her sketch book on a flight to New York. While everyone else on the flight watches breaking news about an event in Times Square, Lett reviews a mug shot of a nun and an old map of New York City. The map is overlaid with symbols and sigils.

A Frenchman unsuccessfully tries to flirt with her. Then as the New York skyline comes into view outside the flight we see a nine-foot-tall shadow demon sitting a few rows behind Lett. As we watch Lett walk through customs and get a taxi we hear snippets from talking heads on the news. They debate Article Eight. Through conversations on the news we learn that the country has been divided into domains and murder rituals are acceptable. The shadow demon follows Lett until she gets into her taxi. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

Craig, do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. Well, I’m a sucker for this genre. One of the world’s great fans of Constantine. I love the movie Constantine. I assume that this is Constantine-ish in that it appears that–

**John:** Is it Constantinople?

**Craig:** It’s Constantinoples in that the demon world seems to meshing with our world. I’m not quite sure who knows it and who doesn’t know it. This was my big confusion because – so she is clearly looking at something and she has some sort of magical access to something. The mug shot that she’s looking at with the skull and gate seal seems very arcane and occult-ish.

The guy next to her can’t see what she sees. All he sees is sketches of flowers. So there’s some sort of glamoring or magic going on there. There is also a demon sitting ten rows behind them which no one seems to notice or care about. And I’m not sure if it’s notice or care about. I don’t know if she knows that he’s back there. I don’t know, but that’s fine.

There is a lot of talking head debate as we’re moving through an airport and I think the talking head debate is basically referring to – it seems like it’s referring to some sort of law that governed the meshing of the demon domain with ours. That’s my guess. Otherwise I don’t understand what it is. But on the other hand I still don’t know if anybody else notices this other demon moving around, so I’m confused. Can they or can they not see the demons? Are the demons here or are they not here? I am so onboard for a show where it’s District 9 but it’s demons instead of aliens. I’m so onboard with that.

I am so confused by who knows what based on the presentation here. And I am generally concerned about using the talking heads in the background format to deliver exposition. It just never feels good. And I’m not sure it’s super necessary anyway.

**John:** Yeah. As I went through page two and page three I found myself scratching out a lot of lines in the talking heads and you just didn’t need them. Giving us less gave us a better sense of what was going on. James has really good branded ads we’re seeing in the background for In-Mind Retreats, Inter-generational séances, 5th Domain luxury living. I sense that this world is heightened in a way that feels really great. I think the District 9 comparison is really apt here in terms of the demon world stuff.

I mostly picked this one because of the world building and sort of just like establishing the rules for a new world and a new universe. And I think it’s done really, really well in these first three pages. I’m very much intrigued.

One of the consequences though, there’s so much world-building happening here I really didn’t know anything about Lett, this main character we’re following, except that she’s in this cool, strange world. And so that is one of the real challenges of these kind of situations is that you’re doing so much work to establish what this universe is like that we’re not spending time understanding what is special about our central character that we’re meeting here. Because really all we’ve seen her do is look through a notebook, go through customs, and get in a taxi by the end of these three pages.

Dana, what was your instinct on what we just—

**Dana:** I agree with a lot of what you guys were saying. I mean, because I don’t read a lot of stuff like this. You guys probably read a lot more stuff like this. I was just overall kind of confused about the rules of the world as Craig was saying. Like if the demon can pass through people at the airport why is he going above customs and down, like just walk through customs because nobody could see you.

On the airplane when we see the demon, I loved that reveal. I was like, ooh, fun. And yet I didn’t cut to a stewardess walking by and then we see there’s nothing there, so that we know that nobody else can see. And then I think even if you reveal that there you definitely have to also reveal somewhere whether Lett can see that person, the demon or not.

I actually didn’t understand the magical thing Craig that you were talking about. I literally thought it was just that from his perspective the only thing he had a view of was drawings – that he saw something from his perspective that was different than what she was seeing. So I would just say, normally I’m not a fan of, as Craig calls it, like writing something you can’t shoot. But I think in these situations it’s helpful to kind of like ground me a little bit. You know, at some point when we land in the terminal I wouldn’t mind hearing it’s clear we’re in a dystopian…just say maybe one line about what it is that I’m in, this world that I’m in.

Even if it’s like a world that’s 20 degrees off from our own where we see demons and blah-blah-blah living in the blah-blah-blah. Like that would have helped me a little bit.

**John:** Dana, back to that moment. I misread the French guy looking at her notebook the same way, too. And what I really needed was just some underlining or some sort of bolding to sort of say like he sees something different than what we just saw. And that’s what – I just needed some clarity right there.

**Craig:** Unless I’m wrong. I mean, I could be wrong.

**Dana:** Or a description. And we’re going to get it.

**John:** Oh, I think you’re right.

**Dana:** I think you might be right.

**John:** We’ll ask him.

**Dana:** Or even just a description of what the actual visual effect is going to look like. Like what am I going to see when I’m watching it? That would have helped me.

I agreed with John and Craig. I’d cut out all of the righteous anger talking point talking head stuff. I basically took out all of it except for maybe the very last sentence about “make all the morality arguments you want, the founding fathers never intended murder rituals to be welcomed within our border” because that was like, oh, now I sort of understand what this world is that I’m in.

The thing about the demon going over the ceiling and looking down was – it was a very cool idea, but the way it was written was kind of confusing. I think you have to think about if you’re going to be shifting perspectives, if I’m in Lett and I’m a normal world customs agent, then you’re going to take me to the ceiling and I’m looking down from the POV of the demon, you have to make it a little more clear that I’m in demon POV. Because I had to read that a couple times to kind of go, oh, I’m up there looking down. OK, that’s cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a weird phrasing here. Shadow Black eyes Lett. So eyes is a really tough verb generally to throw in there like that as a transitive verb, because we look at it as a noun usually, especially with Shadow Black eyes. But Shadow Black watches Lett from above as its face skims across the terminal ceiling. If its face is skimming across the ceiling then–

**Dana:** And I’m looking at it, not—

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly. It’s looking up at the ceiling, not looking down. As it skims across – skims is also a strange verb there, too. It’s tricky. These things seem so tiny and dinky compared to the larger things, except that when people are confused, especially in something like this where a lot of it you know is going to be sort of novel and world-building you have to be so careful about how people are taking it in and how much they’re capable of taking in. The talking points, the problem with the talking points thing is that it’s a setup. It’s obviously a setup.

Oh, so we happen to be watching this in the background? If you started the show with just these two guys talking, then I would go, OK, fine. The point is we’re watching a show and these two guys are talking and this is what they’re debating. But when you throw it all in the background while Lett is walking by and you’re like, oh, how convenient that in the background of this other scene there’s the world’s most expository discussion happening on TV. That’s the problem.

**Dana:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s welcome James on stage and we can talk about what he’s written and where it came from.

James Llonch: Hey everybody, hey.

**Craig:** Hello.

**Dana:** Hi.

**Craig:** How much of that is going to become an outro, by the way? [laughs]

**James:** Quite a bit. Quite a bit.

**John:** James, tell us about the origin of this story.

**James:** Well, I always wanted to place a high fantasy show in New York City. I mean, through the three pages, I mean, you can’t pick up on it through the three pages, but the domains are relegated strictly to Manhattan Island. So there’s 13 domains within Manhattan Island.

**John:** So like boroughs but like—?

**James:** Right. Much smaller. And various supernatural groups kind of have control of these domains and they act as sovereign entities within the state and the country.

**Craig:** Got it. So like reservations for demons, vampires, werewolves, whatever it may be?

**James:** Yes. And there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on in the domains.

**Craig:** Clearly. Clearly. Some questions that we had, I’m curious if you could clear up for us. Is Lett aware of the demon on the plane?

**James:** Yes. That’s actually a sort of coworker.

**Craig:** Oh.

**James:** An antagonistic coworker that she is not very fond of. That’s why she’s not sitting with it.

**Craig:** OK. Well there’s a huge opportunity there.

**Dana:** That’s a super fun idea. It’s not coming through, but I love it.

**Craig:** Right. So a demon is stalking a woman and then finally she turns to him and says, “I just spent three days with you in meetings. I’m going home now. Why don’t you go that way? I’m going that way. No, we’re not sharing a cab, how about that?” And then she goes away. And then I go, wow, I was not expecting that that was the relationship going on here.

So, because the way it’s set up he’s stalking her in such a manner that we think she cannot see him. Can everybody else see him?

**James:** No. Lett is a witch, so only witches can see him.

**Craig:** Got it. OK.

**James:** Everybody in the terminals, they can’t see him.

**John:** That clarifies then the French guy, he couldn’t see the stuff in the notebook because it was a charm. It was like a magic thing that happens, right?

**James:** Exactly. But I will say, Dana, I know – the paint is a little wet on this draft. I knew that I cheated at that reveal and that’s like on my list of things to change. But thank you for pointing that out again.

**Dana:** Oh, please, don’t worry. This is all just fun. So the thing I was going to say is what it feels like it wants to be in this first chunk, so the Air France flight, what I loved was starting off and having everybody be watching something on their TVs that seems sort of awful. So I would get rid of all the language and I would show what it is that you want people to see. Because this is a visual medium. So you have the opportunity for there.

And by the way there’s no sound because everyone just has their fucking TVs on. So that’s cool, too. That works for you. And that means you can have a map of Manhattan. You can see the districts. You can see how it’s illustrated and what’s going on.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea.

**Dana:** And watch some of the chaos and the madness. What I loved about this was I’ve been on planes where I’m like, you know, something bad is happening on earth and you’re on a plane and it’s a really fucking disconcerting feeling. That’s like a cool, fun energy. And so what I think you want to do is I think you want to start out in a few lines here. We meet Lett. She’s doing this thing. We think she’s just in like normal human world, on a plane, and then we’re like, oh, something is going on down on earth. That’s disconcerting. Everybody else seems to be stressed out about it except for her. That makes her different from everybody else and I’m going like, ooh, now I know why I’m watching this specific lady.

And then you kind of want to have a normal human moment, which is like more drink, more drink. I need more vodka, let’s go. And then vodka comes and then it’s like reveal demon and I’m like what am I watching? I love this show. And, you know, do the Craig thing where she turns to him and is like, “Bob, I’m not fucking talking to you anymore. We went through meetings. It’s like you’re always talking over me. You demon-splained me through that whole meeting.” Or whatever that thing is that’s within your tone. And then I’m like 100% onboard. And just make it very clear that this moment is magic. She is a witch and that what she’s writing and doing nobody else can see. And so the guy looks and we watch it change before our very eyes. It turns into a…

I think all of this can be really great.

**Craig:** James, think of a trailer for this thing and think of the little tiny moments that have no words to them that tell you so much. So like you’re on a plane and all of these people are staring at their screens. They’re all watching the same thing. There’s no audio. But we can tell it’s a tragedy. Someone is even like getting teary. And then there’s one woman who just glances over and rolls her eyes and then just goes back to what she’s doing. Rolls her eyes.

If everybody was watching 9/11 on their screens and someone was like, ugh, idiots, you’d be like who are you and what is your deal and what do you know, and where are you from?

**James:** Right.

**Craig:** So little things that draw character out and put us – so that rather than facts coming through we get humanity/character coming through that helps juxtapose how things are.

The demon is stalking her because as it turns out he does not want to spend money on his own Uber. He wants to share the Uber. He always does. He’s cheap. She doesn’t want to have it. If you’re saving the reveal for later of what their relationship is, the problem is that you’ve cheated here because you’re getting fake suspense out of us. And then later saying, “Oh, that wasn’t really suspense.” You have to undermine it in the same movement or it’s cheating.

**James:** Right. OK, I mean, I reveal their relationship maybe ten pages later, 12 pages later.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s cheating here because he was stalking her and then it turns out he wasn’t stalking her. So you get the freebie of him stalking her. What will happen later is people are going to be like, well, why did you make me think that? That doesn’t even – why was he even doing that? You know what I mean?

**James:** I actually do the same exact thing again 12 pages later. But then I like reveal–

**Craig:** Stop cheating.

**Dana:** Well I think that’s one of the things that I think is good to say to yourself for all of the people that we’ve talked to today. One of the things I always try to say to myself is what would really happen. It doesn’t matter what you’re actually showing or what world you’re in, or even if you’re in demon world. Because if you’re in demon world what would really happen given your rules and your world? What would really actually happen?

And what would actually happen is that she would turn to him and say something to him at some point. Or she would see him or acknowledge him or whatever. And so you’ve got to do that, because that’s the world you’ve set up.

**James:** OK.

**Craig:** Awesome work, man. Thank you.

**John:** James, thank you so much for sending this in and thank you for all of the outros.

**Craig:** Yeah, seriously. And honestly I’ll watch this because – I’m serious – I love the genre.

**James:** Yeah, I have some crazy shit in this.

**Craig:** Good. I love crazy shit.

**John:** Thanks. This is normally the time on the show when we would do our One Cool Things but the show has been going on for about 19 years. And so I propose we cut One Cool Things, unless you had something you especially wanted to share?

**Craig:** No.

**Dana:** No, last time I did my breast pump. So, I really don’t feel like I can top that.

**Craig:** Oh, and that was mine for this time was breast pump.

**Dana:** OK, perfect.

**Craig:** We’re covered.

**John:** It’s crucial. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks this week to Nima Yousefi and Dustin Box and especially Quinn Emmitt for helping us out.

**Dana:** My baby.

**John:** Our outro this week is by James Llonch.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Dana, you are @inthehenhouse.

**Dana:** Oh my god, you’re amazing. Yes. And please give to the support our crews fund.

**John:** Absolutely. So the support our crews fund, just search GoFundMe. It is It Takes Our Village. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’re find the three pages that our four wonderful people sent in. If you want to send in your own three pages you can do it. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage. It’s all spelled out.

You’ll find the transcripts up about four days after we get the episode up on the air.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes, bonus segments, and if you’re in this situation you had to be a Premium member to send in your three pages, so thank you to all 160 who sent in for that.

Craig, Dana, thank you so very much.

**Dana:** I love you guys so much.

**Craig:** Thanks guy. We love you, too.

**John:** And thank you to our entrants. Thank you so much. Bye.

**Dana:** Bye.

Links:

* [Home Before Dark](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/home-before-dark/umc.cmc.5yqy2wv4w7l0v4x5mn3le8l1y)
* [It Takes Our Village Campaign](https://www.gofundme.com/f/ittakesourvillage)
* [Hampton](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/AliImranZaidi.Hampton-Hampton.pdf) by Ali Imran Zaidi
* [Sunbeam](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Heidi-Lewis-THE-SUNBEAM.pdf) by Heidi Lewis
* [Nights Never Over](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/James-Llonch-Carry-On.pdf) by Jim Llonch
* [Find Him](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Dylan-Guerra-FIND-HIM.pdf) by Dylan Guerra
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/447.mp3).

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: And this is Episode 444 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program it’s a deep dive on one of my favorite movies of all time, 1995’s Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling. And that is all we are going to talk about today. These deep dive episodes are standalone, so if you’re listening to this is in 2033 we will not be referencing the current situation that we’re in. As far as you know everything is fine.

Craig: Everything is fine.

John: We’re just talking about Clueless.

Craig: It’s a normal day. It’s a Clueless day.

John: And for Premium members we are going to have a bonus segment where Craig and I talk about learning to drive which is of course a key plot point in the film Clueless.

Craig: Indeed.

John: Indeed. Craig, let’s set the table about why we are talking about Clueless. Because you just re-watched it. I know this movie from watching it a thousand times. To me this movie is a masterclass in many things that we want to let our listeners really appreciate. I really think about tone and POV in this movie and sort of how well it does everything. The narration we’ll get into. This is a movie that would not be possible without its narrator, without being able to see inside Cher’s head.

I’m always in awe of the denseness of its comedy. Like just the way it’s joke-joke-joke. There are no scenes that are joke-less. And it’s also just a terrific adaptation. So, Clueless is of course based on Jane Austen’s Emma. It is a weirdly faithful adaptation and yet such a smart adaptation. So as we look at updating old projects, Clueless is a great model.

Craig: Well, to talk about why the tone of Clueless and the comedy of Clueless and the characters of Clueless work so well, I think you have to start with one of the great heroes of American film comedy, Amy Heckerling.

John: Yeah.

Craig: In a just world Amy Heckerling is mentioned right up there with Billy Wilder, and Harold Ramis, and every great male director of comedy ever because she’s that important. I think so.

John: Yeah. So as a writer and a director, just phenomenal work throughout this. And also you look at the impact this film has had. I think it would be hard to imagine a Wicked or a Glee without Clueless tilling some soil ahead of them. You look at Glinda in Wicked and there is a template being forged by Cher in Clueless that is so I think relevant to this in terms of having a central character who is charming and popular and yet still needs to grow. And that feels like an obvious thing.

And of course the way it sort of revitalized how we do a high school comedy is another way that Clueless is so important. That these are characters who do speak like they are much more educated than they really would be. That to me was incredibly important to a whole generation of high school comedies.

Craig: Right. And it was the second time that Amy Heckerling did this. I mean, the first time was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Amy Heckerling is such a good writer and such a good director it kind of blows my mind. So she made Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982 which was well before Clueless. And that was a kind of early definer of what a high school comedy should be. It sort of blew the doors off of what high school portrayal was and also launched the career of Cameron Crowe. Johnny Dangerously is a terribly underrated and so therefore vastly awesome spoof movie that happened – it just didn’t connect at the time in the theaters but it has since become a rightful cult classic.

So there’s your laugh-a-minute vibe. And she’s just kind of amazing at portraying families together, portraying young adults. And you’re absolutely right. The template that Cher creates has gone on forward now. When you say Glinda from Wicked it’s so true, because Glinda and Cher have this thing which is they’re incredibly popular, they’re incredibly beautiful, they’re self-involved, they are superficial, but they’re not bad.

John: No.

Craig: And that’s the most – that’s the thing about Cher that’s so fascinating is that she wore the kind of accoutrement of a bad person except she wasn’t bad. She just hadn’t yet had her eyes opened.

John: Exactly. So, this movie has been important for me for two different reasons. So this was a movie that I first saw when I came out and I remember seeing it in the theater, but I most remember seeing it the second time. So, I had driven out to Los Angeles in rusted out Honda Accord and by the time I was living in my third apartment in Los Angeles I had gotten hired to write the adaptation of How to Eat Fried Worms. I may have already started working on A Wrinkle in Time. And so I had enough money coming in that I was able to buy myself, lease myself a Volkswagen Jetta, which everybody in Los Angeles at that time leased the exact same Volkswagen Jetta. They were really cheap.

And that meant I could sell my old Honda Accord. And so on one Saturday morning I sold my Honda Accord for like $1,500 and it was cash. And I had never held that much cash in my hand at one time. And I decided to use some of that money to take all my friends to see Clueless with me again. So, it was one of those rare movies where I saw it twice in a weekend. And I just remember taking that Honda Accord money to see that movie.

The second point of connection to Clueless for me was in 2010 I was asked by Outfest, the Gay and Lesbian film festival in Los Angeles, if I wanted to screen a classic gay movie and give a talk about it. And so I picked Clueless which seems like a weird movie to pick because it’s not on its surface a gay movie, but what I argued in the show notes for it is that true to its title Clueless doesn’t know how gay it is. Amy Heckerling’s 1995 clever reworking of Jane Austen’s Emma gives us Alicia Silverstone as the stylish but shallow Cher Horowitz whose well-intentioned meddling leads her to deeper revelations about friendship and forbidden love, her ex-step-brother, the dreamy Paul Rudd. Along the way she falls for the gay guy, pursues the jerk, and gives her soul a makeover. Clueless is a blast of queer-adjacent sunshine.

Craig: Aw.

John: So, to me it is a very important movie for a whole generation of gay men as well. So, that’s another sort of big point of connection for Clueless for me.

Craig: Yeah. And as a straight guy, I do remember when I saw the movie when it came out, of course, and so I was – we’re pretty much the same age – so I was 23. And I remember thinking that this was maybe the first portrayal of a teenage gay young man that wasn’t “the gay.” Do you know what I mean?

John: Yeah.

Craig: He was just a guy.

John: Yeah.

Craig: He was a guy.

John: It came at a very right angle. And so we’ll talk about the Christian character. But they set him up in a way that once you understand that he’s gay it’s like, oh, I see what she was doing and I see what he was doing, but it wasn’t sort of the stereotypically gay character.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So let’s talk about how this script came to be. So, when we refer to the script, the best script I’ve been able to find is an August 1994 script. It’s 123 pages. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. It very closely approximates what the final script is. There’s a lot of transcripts online and transcripts are useless. Never look at transcripts. Only look at actual screenplays that writers have written.

The backstory on this is Heckerling apparently wrote this as a TV pilot for a TV show called No Worries that was later retitled I Was a Teenage Teenager. And it was the Cher character. It was all the characters that are in the story but it wasn’t Emma, surprisingly. So, she writes, “It was about this girl that was completely happy no matter what happened. And I was really getting into that kind of character but nothing happened with it. Fox passed on it. They didn’t get it. And things were falling through. I got very frustrated.”

And so she started thinking about the larger context of rose-colored glasses that nothing could go wrong and she went back to Emma which she had read in college. She took it out, reread it, and she said, “Unconsciously I’ve been writing an Emma-like character.” And then she took basically what she had already sort of planned out for this No Worries and sort of really made Cher an Emma character and sort of built Emma around it and it worked just so brilliantly.

Craig: Yeah. And this would become the first of a long series of such adaptations. This kind of kicked off a craze that led to lots of Shakespeare for instance being–

John: Yeah. Ten Things I Hate About You.

Craig: Correct. Lots of things being turned into teenage comedies. But this was the first and I would argue the best. And again there’s this stroke of genius here where Heckerling, she has a vision of something. And I love that nobody else saw it. This is one of these movies where as we get into the specifics of it we’ll see this come up over and over. It’s such a great example of what I call a movie consistent to itself. It does not follow rules all the time. In fact, lots of times it seems to break a lot of rules. It can be episodic as hell. It doesn’t matter. It is true to itself. It’s such a thing unto itself.

And so I’m not surprised that for a while people were looking at this character or this kind of story even and thinking what is this. But she knew. I mean, again, hat’s off to Amy Heckerling. Unbelievable.

John: Absolutely. So the movie opened at $10 million its opening weekend. It went on to make $56 million at the box office, which is good. It did really well. But I think it’s had a much longer life since that time because you watch the movie now and it doesn’t feel dated in the way you’d expect a movie from that era to feel dated. Other than the phones being wrong it really reads as a very contemporary movie.

Craig: Yeah. It’s actually remarkable how you can look at this movie through the lens of woke 2020. And you know what? Hey, here’s a big shock. Because it was written and directed by a woman. [laughs] And so remarkably it is not soaking in any kind of misogynistic horseshit.

John: Yeah. And it’s also based on a Jane Austen novel written by a woman. So it has a sensibility that is both timeless and timely. It works really, really well.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So let’s quickly go through how this movie maps up to Emma. And there’s also a new adaptation of Emma that people can check out as well which I have not seen. I’m really going to be curious to see how Clueless influences that adaptation of Emma. The Cher Horowitz character matches to Emma Woodhouse. She’s the central character. She’s charming, she’s beautiful, she’s popular. She can read as selfish which becomes a thing. But she is able to grow. And as we were talking about with Glinda she’s a character that starts with a – she sort of seems to have everything and then she recognizes what she doesn’t have and that is sort of the crisis that she faces over the course of the story.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, this is a great example of a character that’s like a coiled spring. And the coiled spring of Emma or Cher is that she is beautiful, and she is a good person at her core, and clearly is deserving of love, and yet spends all of her time getting other people together in love, which is in its own way an interesting kind of defense mechanism. I’m going to work on making you happy and this way I don’t have to have any vulnerability for myself. But that’s a wonderful coiled spring.

We all know from the beginning how that will end. It doesn’t matter. See, people get confused. They think that predictability is bad. Predictability isn’t the problem. The problem is that sometimes something is predictable and also we have no interest in watching the coil uncoil. But in this we want to see it uncoil. We want to see that pop open and of course we get to.

John: Yeah. Now, next up we have Josh who matches up to Mr. Knightly. So this is the love interest who has to seem like it’s not a possible love interest at the start. And so in Emma it’s like he’s a brother-like character, he’s like a close family friend, so therefore would not be appropriate. In this movie he is her step-brother from a marriage that was over five years ago.

It’s interesting that my daughter as I said we were going to record this she’s like, “Yeah, but she falls for her step-brother. That’s just weird.” But that’s actually one of the most daring things about this movie and also in rewatching it you recognize how carefully Heckerling planted the seeds for this so that you weren’t ahead of it but you were actually fine with it when it happened. And also how smartly written and how smartly played Josh’s character is. It tracks well in terms of where he’s at. You can sort of see the story from his point of view even though he doesn’t have point of view scenes. The whole movie is from Cher’s point of view essentially, but in the scenes we get with him we can see what his progress is.

Craig: Yeah. She’ll give us glimpses from his point of view. And the glimpses are usually him noticing – essentially he catches Cher being good. He notices – I mean, there’s a great moment where Cher outwits the college girl and/or out-knows the college girl. And that’s a moment where Amy shifts her camera over to Paul Rudd to see him noticing and letting that in, which is smart. By the way, Paul Rudd, I mean, people have talked about the fact that he doesn’t age. But legitimately, what the hell?

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s actually kind of terrifying.

John: Yeah. I mean, looking at this movie again today it looks like he’s smoothed a bit. As you look at Clueless it looks like he had a little bit of a gauzy filter put on him, but otherwise it is exactly the same person.

Craig: [laughs] It’s terrifying. And I think actually one of the things that’s interesting is I don’t know how old he was when he was in Clueless, but he seems older looking than he should. I think what happened was Paul Rudd was born at the age of 35 but will always be 35. Terrifying.

John: It’s a good choice to make, I think.

Craig: It’s wonderful to watch the two of them together. Look, there is a very strange premise that’s put forth and Amy does something that a lot of movies do where she essentially – these are not the droids you’re looking for to the audience. So, Dan Hedaya plays Cher’s dad. Cher’s mother died many, many years ago before Cher even knew her. And then apparently Cher’s dad gets married to some lady and that marriage ends five years before this movie even starts. But for some reason he still likes having his stepson come over because as he says, “You divorce the woman, not the child.”

Sure. But like really? I mean, I’m sure that happens, but it goes by very quickly to the point where honestly I was a little – I had to piece it together exactly to see what was going on. But once you kind of buy it, which is not a huge buy, you’re good. Everything is fine.

John: Absolutely. Characters who are also brought through from Emma. There is the woman who she sets up in a love relationship, so that’s Ms. Geist who is Miss Taylor/Mrs. Weston in Emma. There’s the object of her makeover, so that’s Tai or Harriot Smith played by Brittany Murphy who is just phenomenal in this part.

There’s the Travis character, Breckin Meyer’s character – Breckin is fantastic in this.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And this was before we cast him in Go and he’s so different and so great in both the parts. There’s an equivalent character in Emma which was Robert Martin. There’s Elton whose character’s name is Philip Elton in Emma. This is actually one of the characters that actually feels the most like aristocracy snobbery. It’s one of the characters who most comes across like, oh, you’re just an asshole from the start.

Craig: Yeah. He’s clearly a bad guy.

John: And then Christian’s character is probably closest matched up to Frank Churchill. Again, it is the subject of infatuation and love and the person she’s going after who is not going to be available. And is a frustration to the Emma/Cher character. But someone who seems like, again, it’s the person who seems like the appropriate love interest so that we aren’t aware of who she should really be going for.

Craig: Yeah. And that’s a very smart kind of updating because the kernel of that is, again, exploring why somebody is opting for unavailable people, or is opting to put other people in love together, like for instance in this story the wonderful couple of teachers. And it just keeps tensioning that coil. It’s hard for her to make herself available to somebody that is available to her. So, it’s all very smart updating. Because in the book, and I’m cheating off of your notes here because I haven’t read it in forever, the character that Christian is taken from was engaged. So that’s why he was not available. I think gay is a much better choice for a film in 1995.

John: Yes. So, before we get into a sequence breakdown of Clueless, let’s talk about how the movie works overall sort of on a macro level. And let’s talk about Cher as our point of view character and especially her voiceover, here narration. Because to try to imagine this movie without the narration is just a completely different experience. If you don’t have the insight into what the character is actually thinking she seems like a monster.

But when you see what’s actually going on inside you realize like, oh, she’s not mean at all. She’s actually so generous. She’s trying so hard. What I noticed this last time watching through it is the narration is all told in the past. These are things that did happen. So she’s in the past tense. Except that as she’s narrating she’s aware of things that are right in front of her. So she might say, “Oh, I wonder if they have that in my size.”

Craig: Right. So funny.

John: So it’s a really interesting choice that kind of shouldn’t work and yet it works great. And so it’s like she’s kind of watching the story with you. She’s in the moment with you as she’s narrating.

Craig: Yeah. So her voiceover typically will explain why a scene you’re about to see is happening. So she’ll say, “I decided I would go to the mall to make myself feel better.” Then we’re at the mall. Or she will be talking about something after it happened. “After the experiment with so-and-so failed I felt that blah-blah-blah.” So it’s like she’s kind of bookending these moments.

The breaking of the fourth wall with “Oh, I wonder if they have that in my size” will be no surprise to anybody who is a Heckerling fan and who has seen Johnny Dangerously, because she’s so good at that sort of thing. And it’s very easy to overdo it or to do it wrongly. And she did it beautifully there. I loved it.

John: Absolutely. So, even as the camera is pushing through a place she might linger on a Snickers bar because Cher is hungry. So the whole movie is her point of view and so even if the camera is moving through a space it’s essentially Cher’s point of view which is nice.

Craig: Yeah. It’s kind of a Lord and Miller meta style, except 20 years earlier.

John: Yep. Now, what’s important to know about Cher is that she’s naïve but she’s not dumb. And I think that’s one of the most important things that carries through from Emma to this update is that she has a very sophisticated vocabulary. She will occasionally use words incorrectly, but overall she has an unrealistically really robust command of language both in her voiceover and in how she’s actually speaking.

But she’s also good at reading people. Like she’ll miss some things. She’ll obviously miss Christian being gay, but she does have a sense of interpersonal dynamics. When she’s trying to set up Ms. Geist with Mr. Hall she really does have a sense of what’s going to work with people. So she has an emotional intelligence for other people that she doesn’t have for herself.

Craig: Yeah. And that is an interesting line that Amy walks with Cher. Because at times she does show that Cher is ignorant, which is different than dumb. It’s pretty clear that as the daughter of this hard-charging Beverly Hills attorney that she’s inherited quite a bit of this negotiation wisdom. She’s got kind of a steel trap mind. I mean, when she gets up and does her little oral reports in class they’re not – so what they are is they’re ignorant. She has not done the reading, right? She hasn’t. But the arguments themselves are actually quite clever. They’re quite interesting.

So she may not know that Bosnia, for instance, is not in the Middle East, but she does know quite a bit. And it seems that a lot of the lessons that she’s learned in the past, they’re coming forth. And she is learning. She expresses a desire to learn.

It’s very interesting. In the beginning of the movie Heckerling does a really smart thing with the distribution of report cards. So Cher has gotten a C in Mr. Hall’s class. But that’s the C that she’s gotten. The implication is the other grades are great and she’s going to argue about that grade and get it up. But she’s already getting an A in geometry for instance. She is a smart person. That’s a really clever choice on Amy’s part. Because what we don’t like is somebody that is superficial and literally dumb in the sense that they don’t have the capacity to get better or to blossom into somebody wonderful. That is a limp spring to watch uncoil.

John: Indeed. Now, we talked about this a little bit at the start, but what is so different about this character versus a classic character in a high school comedy is that she is an extrovert. She is completely forward outward facing. She is not this misunderstood kid who is overlooked by others. She is not pretty when she takes her glasses off. She’s beautiful from frame one and she’s popular from frame one. And even starting with all those advantages she still struggles. And that’s a very different choice than you see in most high school comedies before this point.

So, we always have to remember even from the inception how different this character is than what we usually would find this kind of story.

Craig: And what you continue to find after it came out. That’s kind of the story of Amy Heckerling’s career. I mean, she always seemed to be ahead of the ball.

John: Yeah. Let’s talk about setting up the conflicts and establishing the world. As we get into sequences we’ll talk about how quickly she’s able to establish this world. But it’s important we understand that Cher sees herself in a certain place in the hierarchy of the school. She defines herself in relationship to Dionne and Murray’s relationship. She sees herself above all these other boys. She has this fascination with Christian. She’s very much aware of her social standing in her milieu. But she aspires to something higher. She wants a college boy. She perceives herself as being above these other things. And so that’s a crucial thing to understand about her. And Heckerling does a great job setting it up right from the get go.

Craig: Yeah. And she’s also letting us into a world that in theory we’re not familiar with. So, she recognizes that Cher has to be an ambassador for Beverly Hills 1995 where all the students have had nose jobs or are driving ridiculously fancy cars. And life is different there. So part of the comedy is just the fact that we’re in this strange place. In that regard it’s kind of continuing what you saw in Beverly Hills Cop. Like take a guy from Detroit, put him in Beverly Hills, he’s going to look around and go “what the hell is the crap?”

So she’s doing that but she’s doing that with somebody that’s part of it. And that’s interesting. It’s not a fish out of water. It’s a fish in water and the fish in water is showing us what the water is like.

John: Absolutely. So I always like to imagine what if this were a musical. What would the songs be? And so it’s very easy to imagine the Welcome to the World song. The first song in most movie musicals is the let’s set up the world. And Heckerling does a great job of setting up this is Beverly Hills. This is the high school. This is the world and her friends.

The next song would generally be her I Want song. And Cher’s I Want song isn’t that she wants love, isn’t that she wants popularity. It’s that she wants to fix everything and fix everybody. She wants to make everything happy. And so she just has this desire to bring joy to all the people around her. So her father. Tai when she meets her. That’s sort of her thing. And the realization that she’s going to get to is that she actually needs to direct some of that fixing towards herself rather than always outside.

Craig: That’s a really good way of thinking about this. That’s exactly how the musical would go. There would be a song called Beverly Hills, which would be all about the insanity of it. And then she would sing a song about all the things that she wants to make better. Because that’s what she does. Because she’s a happy, wonderful person. She’s like a Mary Poppins looking for a family.

And, yes, one of those things is that she does not want to see. And if I were to write the lyrics to this song she would talk about how she wanted to make her dad happy and she wanted to bring these two teachers together. And she wanted to make this new girl as popular as she is. And she wants to fix her, see. And she would keep coming back to “and I want to fix my see.” Because she’s also got this self-interest. It’s there. And it is admirable. I like it. So she’s not as simple as just I’m Joan of Arc or something. It’s all wrapped up in a kind of very real will to power.

And, of course, and Nietzsche shows up later which makes me so happy.

John: Honestly her I Want song could as well be Popular from Wicked. I mean, essentially that’s what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to elevate the status of someone around her and transform somebody else rather than transforming herself.

Craig: Exactly.

John: All right. So let’s take a look at how Clueless works on sort of a sequence level. Because watching the movie again I was really struck by how you can take a look at Clueless as chunks of movie, chunks of sequences. And really there’s a very clear goal for what Cher is trying to do in each of these sequences.

So at moments it can feel like, oh, it’s episodic, but there really is a very careful plan behind what’s going here. So, start with the first ten minutes. So much gets set up in the first ten minutes. It’s just a masterclass in getting information out there.

We start in Cher’s house. We see her fashion sense. We meet her dad. We set up the idea of Josh, even though Josh is not around. She says, “But you were hardly even married to his mother and that was five years ago.” We set up her housekeeper.

From there we are driving. We set up her jeep. We set up Dionne, her best friend. “She’s my friend because we both know what it’s like to have people be jealous of us.”

We get to school. At school we meet Murray. We meet Wallace Shawn playing Mr. Hall. We meet Elton, Travis, Amber. We establish that Christian is a student there, even though Christian is not going to show up yet.

Craig: Right.

John: So smartly done.

Craig: Really smart.

John: So it’s not just out of the blue. We come back to the house. We set up her dead mom. We set up Josh. We meet Josh for the first time. We really establish that she has no idea what’s going on in the world overall. And at the end of that first ten minutes we have her first mission statement which is to improve her grades. And that’s how it’s going to set up our first montage of her trying to get her grades up when she gets her report card.

Craig: It’s a great first ten minutes. It doesn’t stop. There’s no sense of confusion or wondering where you are. For all of the brilliant screenwriting gurus out there who are charging you money for their dumb books and their stupid advice, let us point out that one of the things that they say over and over is “don’t use voiceover.” Well, how about this voiceover is constant. This movie is wall-to-wall voiceover and when done well as in this case not only is voiceover entertaining but it is such a good way to compress information quickly.

You can learn so much from these ten minutes because she’s literally telling it to you. And doing so in a fun way. You also get a hint from this first ten minutes that she has a problem. She doesn’t know she has a problem. But you know she has a problem. Her life as far as she’s concerned is perfect. So this is the acceptable imperfection I like to talk about. She’s in stasis. Everything is fine.

But we know she has a problem. The problem that she has is that she is not necessarily seeing the world as it actually is. Her eyes are a little closed and willfully so.

John: Absolutely. Her voiceover as you set up the start of the podcast, a lot of times it is to set up where we’re going or where we came from, or what the next action will be. But there’s a moment at the school early on where she’s walking with Dionne and Dionne’s audio fades and we go into her voiceover. We sort of hear her thoughts about stuff, which is so important. That two things can be happening at once. We can be seeing a scene in front of us, but also be hearing her perspective on things. And that becomes an important tool that Heckerling uses throughout this movie. But she has to do it early on so that it’s not weird when it happens later on.

Craig: Yeah. And there’s a kind of an iconic moment where she’s talking about, and kind of delivering to you at home or in the theater, what her problem is. She’s saying I don’t want to date any of these boys here. They’re not good enough for me. Which is probably more about her just not – just being scared. There’s something off with that. But then of course one of the [doofy] boys comes in to try to put her arm around her and she pushes him away, out of frame, and says, “As if.”

So there is one of the great cinema moments. I mean, it’s just burned in all of our brains.

John: Yeah. So, an incredibly great first ten minutes getting stuff set up. Then her first real mission is to get her grades up. So this is the first problem that has been presented to our character. This is a mission she has to undertake. Her quest is to get her grades improved. And not to actually doing extra work, but just to argue her way up. And so we start a montage where she’s talking to her teachers about what’s going on in her life. So she’s talking to Julie Brown playing her PE teacher. She’s talking to Ms. Geist. She’s trying to convince Mr. Hall that she deserves better grades. And she’s looking for a way to get Mr. Hall to budge who seems to be the most difficult person. And that’s where they have the idea of, OK, how do we get Mr. Hall to be overwhelmingly happy so that his mood will improve and therefore I can raise my grades.

So it is what seems like a noble goal is to make this person fall in love has a selfish motive underneath it which is so that my grades will improve.

Craig: Correct. There’s almost something cynical about her approach to love. It’s the way she matches clothes together in the morning in her curiously visionary touchscreen. So there is something a little cynical. It’s easy for her, right? The world actually is very easy for her. She’s got it all figured out. And in a very smart dramatic way what Amy does here is give Cher another easy victory.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because the easier the victory seems the more shocking and distressing it will be when she doesn’t get a victory.

John: Absolutely. When her normal tricks stop working.

Craig: Right.

John: That will be devastating. So, yes, if this were a superhero movie this would be where you would see the superhero easily defeat an early villain. It’s where you see them just being incredibly competent at their job so that when things fall apart later on you understand, oh, this is really remarkable that this thing that should work does not work anymore.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Now, next we get into driving lessons and Josh. So this is starting about 15 minutes into the movie. He says, he actually articulates a key theme here, “I’ve never seen you do anything that isn’t 90% selfish.” And then that resonates with her. And then she asks Dionne the next day at school, “Would you call me selfish?” “Not to your face.”

Craig: [laughs]

John: And so while she’s starting to question like why she’s doing what she’s doing, she actually does have success. And she’s hailed as a hero at her school. This was a pretty easy thing for her to do. Her grades improved. Her father is proud of her that she was able to get her grades up without doing extra work, strictly through the merits of her arguing.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, simple kind of dramatic stuff here. This is somebody who only does good things for purposes that accrue to her own benefit. It’s not that she’s mean about it. I mean, the things that she does are good. She does a beautiful thing for Mr. Hall and Ms. Geist. But just so that, you know, their grades will improve. It’s about her. And there is this other notion that maybe you could do good things when it doesn’t accrue to your benefit at all.

John: Which is when we introduce Tai. So Tai is the new project. Cher gets nothing out of helping Tai. She doesn’t set out to help Tai because it’s going to improve her social standing. She sort of pities her and wants to improve her social standing.

So, this is the Brittany Murphy character arriving. An interesting moment that happens with Brittany Murphy’s character is that she has a scene with Travis, Breckin Meyer, it’s one of the few sort of breaking POV scenes. Where they have this little brief moment together in the cafeteria line and we establish, oh OK, they actually probably do belong together. And we as an audience are told this and Cher does not see it.

Craig: Yeah. And I think that this is still – I would argue this is still in the general area of not totally charitable charity. Because it is a project. It is fun. The idea here is a little Pygmalion esque. I’m going to rescue you and make you wonderful because that’s what I can do. And Josh does essentially say, says exactly to her, that Cher is treating Tai like she was a Barbie doll. And I think that’s right. But at the same time Cher also is the one person willing to do that as opposed to the meaner girls like Amber who just want to reject her.

So, again, this fascinating line that Amy walks with Cher. She’s not bad, but she’s not yet totally good. And it’s really smartly done.

John: Yeah. So when she says, “No respectable girl actually dates them,” talking about stoners like Travis, Dionne says, “It gives her a sense of control in a world filled with chaos.” So that’s why she’s trying to do the makeover is for that sense of control. And it is Josh who says, you know, “You’ve never had a mother so you’re acting out on that poor girl like she was your Barbie doll.” So I think, again, so smart to tie it to the mother who is not a character but establishes like an ideal, a paragon that Cher aspires to be like.

She’s taking care of her father the way she imagines her mother would be taking care of the dad. So, again, she’s aspiring to something but kind of falling short.

Craig: She’s aspiring to something and yet also there is a kernel of fear there. And you see it come up again, well, no respectable girl dates them. Well, OK, well who does the respectable girl date in this school? Because, Cher, you’re not dating any of them. And you’ve written all of them off as idiots and that there must be better guys that aren’t high school guys but you’re not necessarily looking for them either. It’s more like you’re not quite ready to bear your heart to someone.

John: Exactly. So, they conspire to try to set up Tai with Elton. We as an audience see that Elton really has no interest in Tai at all. That he’s just playing along because he’s really interested in Cher. We don’t know at the start how big of a creep he is. He’s really quite a creep.

This sequence takes us to the house party, so this is where we establish what again normal life is like for these kids at a Valley party. Watching this now it strikes me that, again, I’m looking at this as a dad, but the drinking and the pot use would be harder things I think to get through in a PG-13 movie now than they were for Heckerling back in 1995.

Craig: Yeah. I’m not sure how that works exactly now, but it did strike me again that Heckerling who was always such a great anthropologist, she sat in classes at Beverly Hills High School to immerse herself in that. The way that she had the benefit of Cameron Crow and Ridgemont High. So, she’s presented this and it seems honestly that if you changed the music and the clothes the party is not far off from what it would be now. There is a vaguely casual pot use. No one really is like, “Oh my god, pot!” And people are drinking. And no one is like, “Oh my god, drinking!” It’s fascinating how good she is at that.

John: Agreed. So what’s important about the party is that again we’re seeing stuff get out of her control. And so Elton outsmarts her in terms of figuring out who is going to ride with who. And he makes moves on her. She rejects him. Gets out of the car. Gets robbed at gunpoint. So, she has little victories and then some big defeats. She ultimately has to call Josh to pick her up. In the car she is annoyed by this girl that Josh is dating. She gets to make her Hamlet reference and prove this girl wrong.

From the car she watches Josh kiss the girlfriend and feels weird about it. And so we’re establishing that there’s a lot of things happening in that sequence.

Craig: Well, so it’s fascinating when – and it’s a really smart choice – when the chips are down, because Cher’s life is wonderful. Nothing ever goes wrong. Even the fact that she’s driving around without a license and smashing into fire hydrants, nobody ever pulls her over. I mean, she gets away with everything.

John: She has white privilege.

Craig: Literally she is the embodiment of privilege. If you made the movie now you could call it Privilege because that’s what she is. She’s rich and white and everything – and beautiful. And everything goes great for her.

And here something has gone terribly wrong. And what does she do? She instinctively goes for Josh. And that’s a sign already. Now, if anybody at that moment watching this movie doesn’t know that these two are going to end up together they need to go home. Right? Because it’s obvious.

What happens in the car and that little moment where Amy shifts the POV to Paul Rudd and he appreciates that Cher has corrected his girlfriend on the Hamlet reference you know what’s going to happen. The fact that Cher is looking at them as they kiss and having this weird feeling that she doesn’t understand, you know what’s going to happen. And this is the sign of really good movies, and particularly really good romances. It doesn’t matter that we know. What matters is how bad we want to see it happen.

And Amy Heckerling is doing such a brilliant job of slowly increasing our desire to want to see it happen. If it happened here we’d be like, oh, OK, not good enough. But we want it to happen later.

John: We’re establishing that Cher may ultimately have romantic feelings. But before she has romantic feelings she also has sexual feelings. And this is the sequence starting at page 45, 45 to 65, where we’re actually talking about sex. And we establish that Cher is a virgin. We have the arrival of Christian who becomes, well, this is obviously who she should be in love with because he is fascinating and unusual and doesn’t feel like a high school boy at all.

Again, we’re sort of doing limited breaks of POV. We see Josh watching Cher come down and it’s recognizing that she is a sexual character within this story. That she’s not just this sort of fairy tale princess. She’s actually a sexual character who wants to have sex. And that is, again, a ground-breaking thing for a young woman to be the one who is trying to initiate sexual activity. And not because she’s desperate or because she’s ugly or that there’s obstacles in the way of her having that. She could at any point have done this, but now she suddenly wants it.

Craig: Yeah. There was a storyline in the television show Beverly Hills, 90210, and I’m going to assume it pre-dates this movie, where there was a whole discussion about prom night and sex. And it was really interesting because it wasn’t in the usual format of guy wants sex, girl is like yeah. So it was happening. There’s that certain refreshing frankness about how it happens here. It’s a really interesting choice to have Tai not be a virgin at all.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And have Cher be the virgin. And also Cher is like, “What’s so bad about being a virgin?” She’s not hugely defensive about it. It just veers off of the normal path of how all of those scenes go. There are a thousand bad scenes there and Amy didn’t write one. She wrote a really good scene. I mean, look, the girl walks down the stairs in the dress, I’m not sure in that moment why Paul Rudd suddenly goes, “Oh wow, look at her.” Alicia Silverstone is so beautiful, she’s so mind-numbingly beautiful in this movie. And she’s always hot. Like every outfit is out. Every single one.

So I wasn’t quite sure what was going on there exactly, other than say, yeah, you know, OK fine.

John: I think the argument would be that it caught him by surprise in that it was a more grown up beauty than sort of the cute beauty that she is normally wearing. So she’s always wearing short skirts, but this is in the white Calvin Klein dress, it’s a look that he had not seen before. If I’m being generous. But it’s also movie logic.

Craig: That is not how straight men work. Oh, oh, oh, a Calvin Klein dress? Oh, well now. [laughs] I mean, she’s so, again, literally mind-boggling beautiful in this movie. It’s just a remarkable thing.

John: And so here is his raptors testing the fences line. “How much fun would it be to have a brother type tagging along?” “Josh, you are not my brother.”

Craig: Right. Right.

John: Again, so this couplet does two things. One, it establishes that while it’s a little problematic for them to be together, it’s not technically wrong for them to be together. But more importantly we see that Josh actually is interested. And she can’t read that at all. And so it’s smart.

Craig: It is smart. And when he says, “How much fun would it be to have a brother type tag along,” what he’s really saying is, “you don’t see me as a brother only, right? I’m not technically a brother to you, am I? Because if I am then, uh-oh.” And so he gets the answer he wants. The fact that he’s even asking the question means that he doesn’t feel about her like she’s a sister.

John: Yep. This sequence I will call “an overwhelming sense of ickiness,” which is the line she says.

Craig: Yes.

John: But it’s such a crucial point. And this is what Aline would describe as like the rocky shoals. This is sometimes a very difficult sequence in the movie because you’re not at the end of the second act yet, but there’s a lot of stuff going on. This movie does this all so, so well.

So there’s a sequence which is often – a clip that often gets out there which is Dionne and Murray and Cher in the car and Dionne is driving and they accidentally get on the freeway. And you remember it as like, ah, we’re on the freeway by accident! And it is sort of like a very natural panic for these people. But that scene is actually really important completely independent of the driving which is Murray is like, “Oh no, Christian is gay. How can you not see this?” And basically pointing out that Cher has missed a crucial fundamental thing about this. And the lightbulb going off, oh that’s right, it does make a lot of sense.

That scene could have happened anywhere, but by staging it in this driving scene there’s just a lot more going on. So it’s taking a conversation that could take place in a high school hallway and giving it a great space to happen in.

Craig: I think it’s the best scene in the movie. I think it’s the best scene in the movie because as you say, A, this interesting revelation comes out which unlocks a certain thing in Cher’s mind. But it flows into a legitimately laugh-out-loud set piece. And then the laugh-out-loud set piece proves why it deserved to be there. That it wasn’t just random noise to make you laugh. The point of it was that her friends are actually in love.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And that’s a huge deal. Then she understands now what love really looks like and what it means which is basically I take care of you. When you are scared and when you’re freaked out I calm you down and I tell you you did a really great job. These two goofs who are, look, it seems like they’re just comic relief side characters. But Dionne and Murray are not just side relief comic characters. They are exemplars because once you strip away all the baloney arguing with each other about who cheated on who or him shaving his head or any of that nonsense they love each other. And that is such a great way to do that. To use comedy to create madness and then use the madness to create feelings. And then have the feelings impact the hero.

John: Yeah. But what Cher is feeling here is jealousy. She’s jealous of their relationship. She envies what they have. And then she envies Tai. Because when Tai has her near death experience where these unrealistically old men are dangling her off the edge of the West Side Pavilion and then she rescues her, she becomes the hero of the school. And Cher suddenly finds herself being shoved aside.

Now, that being shoved aside is sort of a Brady Bunch moment. We’ve seen that moment before. But it’s so specific to what Cher is feeling. So that plus Dionne and Murray and the relationship, she’s suddenly not the queen anymore. She’s not on top. And not only that, she wants things she doesn’t have or she doesn’t know how to get. And that’s a very new place for Cher Horowitz to be at.

Craig: Yeah. Her eyes are opening to what it’s like to not win without even trying. For the first time in the movie she’s walking out the door and there is a guy that she fell for and now not only can she not get him but she feels like an idiot for not realizing it. Her best friends are in love in a way that she’s never known and might never will know. Her little Barbie doll has outstripped her. The pupil has become the master. And she in general feels lost.

She is no longer the person she was. This is sort of the how to make a movie podcast lesson here. She’s not who she was. But she’s not yet ready to be who she is supposed to be. She’s lost. Literally to the point of doing that classic cliché thing of walking around and moping and going what happened to me? You know?

John: Exactly. Well, and crucially right before then the driving test which we established as an important thing that’s going to be coming up, she fails the driving test spectacularly. And she’s failed at something that she couldn’t talk her way out of, too. So her normal skills just don’t work anymore. She comes back home. She sees Tai hanging out with Josh and Tai says like, “Oh, I really like Josh. I think I’m going to start dating Josh.” And that’s just the knife in her. But the actual words given to it are, “You’re a virgin who can’t drive.” And it’s just the most brutal thing a person could say to her at that moment.

Craig: Yeah. And that driving instructor is an important character because he is reality. He might as well be called Mr. Reality. Because she starts in on her thing and he’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, you don’t understand. I’m facts and reality. And you’re not getting what you want. There’s literally nothing in the world that’s going to make that happen.”

By the way, why are there so many New Yorkers just showing up this movie?

John: [laughs]

Craig: Why is this super New Yorky guy doing DMV tests in Beverly Hills? I don’t know.

John: I don’t know.

Craig: I like the choice though. By the way, I forgot to mention, also, just sometimes I pick out weird things that we have changed in terms of the way movies are made. This is just off the topic of the writing. There’s a party scene at the concert. You know, when she’s still trying to seduce Christian and all the rest of it. And it opens on a band and they’re playing. And the classic sort of techno crane pullback to reveal the crowd dancing. And you hear footsteps. They Foley’d in like weird shuffle-y footsteps as if anyone could hear footsteps in the middle of a concert. And it just reminded me like, yeah, they used to do stuff like that because I guess the Foley people were out of their minds and nobody was paying attention. [laughs] It’s amazing. I love stuff like that.

John: And then we get to our last big sequence which is the realization. So, this is now Cher walking through Beverly Hills and suddenly realizing, oh my god, I love Josh. And so this is a moment where the voiceover and reality sort of merge. And what her thoughts in her head actually give voice to that she actually does love Josh. But what does she do with that information? She goes to her father asking for advice, not specifically about Josh but sort of in general, this theoretical guy.

Watching the movie again I was struck by sort of how much the father is aware of the Josh romance from the very, very start.

Craig: From the jump.

John: He sees the whole thing.

Craig: Yeah. He’s like that classic mentor character who has already seen the movie, so he has no problem playing his role. But, I mean, when Josh says, “I’m going to go to that party and make sure she’s OK,” Dan Hedaya gives this little smile after like I know what’s going on. Pretty classic. And also a little weird considering that it’s the stepson but whatever.

John: Whatever. And so Cher’s decision, her resolution, is that this time I’m going to make over my soul, which is kind of – it’s the thing that she needed to realize from the start is that she actually needs to direct that desire to fix and improve people to herself. And to look for the things she can do help other people that have no gain for her own self.

And so it’s still funny because she doesn’t necessarily have a good sense of it. She doesn’t know that these people don’t need her water skis. But she does have a sense of she’s trying to improve herself in ways that we’ve not seen before.

Craig: She is.

John: And she’s trying to make amends as well.

Craig: Right. And she’s not doing it to try and get Josh.

John: Yes.

Craig: She doesn’t expect that she can have Josh. What she considers is that she’s just not been correct. She finally embraces the new way of being and becomes that person. And Travis is doing the same thing. He’s making amends. He’s going to 12 steps. People are growing up and changing. The important thing is that she’s using her powers to fix things that are not going to accrue to her benefit at all. Very much like what Bill Murray is doing in Groundhog Day when he finally accepts it and he just starts taking piano lessons, and helping the elderly. Do you know what I mean? He just starts to do things to help people no matter what, just because.

John: Yep. I think it’s also important the reconciliation with Tai. It’s not all Cher apologizing. Tai recognizes that she messed up, too. And they come to a place in the middle rather than Cher having to go all the way to Tai. Again, smart choices, recognizing these characters are human and are not simply heroes or villains. It’s more complicated between those characters.

And then we finally get to the scene with Josh. So this is the scene on the staircase which is a much longer scene than I remember it being. It’s a long conversation between the two of them, really smartly done, held mostly in close-ups and matching close-ups. Much more naturalistic dialogue than usual.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And finally she like, “Are you saying you care about me?” And they get in for the kiss. And it’s what you’re hoping for. She maintains suspense through it, like you don’t know quite enough how we’re going to get to this kiss. You assume it’s going to happen. And when it finally does happen it is just right.

But then we have our Lindsay Doran moment that it doesn’t just end on the kiss–

Craig: Well, before we go past the kiss I have to say I cried.

John: Aw.

Craig: And the question is why? Why would I cry there? And in thinking about it, it was Alicia Silverstone’s face as she finally understood that she was loved. And that was amazing. And she did such a beautiful job. This is a character who I think appreciated that she was popular. She was liked. Boys were attracted to her. But she was missing love. And she gets it from this guy who she admires so much and who she was not expecting to love her. And it happens after she screws up again.

So there’s this point where – by the way, also, just logically makes no sense. So, they’re helping dad on his lawsuit. He’s not there. So it’s her and it’s Josh and then the world’s worst law associate who yells at her because she’s mislabeled something. Meanwhile I’m like, dude, you work for her dad. Like what are you doing man? You’re calling her an idiot and stupid. You’re not going to have a job tomorrow.

But regardless he’s there to do that so that Josh can defend Cher. But also to bring Cher low. And it’s really important that that happens. Because if not then Josh walks up to her and says, “You know what? I’ve noticed you doing all these wonderful things. You’re great. Let’s kiss.” And then they kiss and you’re like, OK. But he does it when she is at maybe her lowest-lowest. She’s in tears and she’s failed despite trying to do good things. And that’s when he lets her know that he loves her anyway. And to me that’s why I cried.

And her face when she realizes it is so perfect. And her, ah, those big eyes. You just feel for her. It’s such a good scene.

John: It’s really well done. And you’re absolutely right. Without the set up to that stair moment it has a tenth the impact. You don’t see that, oh, the point of a romantic relationship is that person is also there for you when you’re down.

Craig: Right.

John: When you’re Dionne who has just gotten off the freeway. That’s when you need that relationship. And to have somebody who is watching out for you at those moments is so crucial.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So I was going to say the Lindsay Doran moment, her logic is always that it’s not about winning the football game, it’s about the moment after you win the football game where you sort of celebrate the success you’ve had.

Craig: Right. The relationships.

John: So that is this wedding which also ties up other loose ends. So we get to see Mr. Hall and Ms. Geist get married.

Craig: Aw.

John: Yeah. Which is nice. You get to see a normal order restored. So it’s a beautiful party. Everyone looks great. Everyone is dressed up. It’s a quick resolution. She catches the bouquet. It feels like a good kind of dot-dot-dot. It’s not sort of and from this moment forward everything would be perfect. It feels like everyone is where they need to be at the end of this.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, the people who are supposed to be together are together. It’s a very conventional ending.

John: It is.

Craig: It’s not actually adding anything if you think about it. You could have ended the movie on the two of them kissing. But it’s a comedy. And comedies need a little bit of a joke at the end. And so there’s a little bit of a joke. You know, “I’m bugging, too.” Paul Rudd doing his best “I’m a white guy.” And so there’s a little bit of laughter and a kind of way to kind of gently ease you out so that you go out of the theater with a smile and laughing.

Literally I think she gave people a moment to get the hankies out, wipe away the tears, and smile again. And it was a smart choice in that regard. But still end always with the relationship. Final shot the two of them kissing. Perfect. Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling.

John: Such a fantastic movie. So, thank you, Craig, for this nice deep dive on Clueless.

Craig: Thank you.

John: It will remain one of my favorite movies. I suspect when you look at this 10 years, 20 years down the road it will still hold up as just a really great – not even a time capsule. It doesn’t feel so ’95. It just feels like this is this kind of relationship story. And we’ll have the same lessons no matter when you’re listening to this podcast.

Craig: I mean, if it can hold up after 25 years I think it’s a permanent hold up.

John: I agree. I do have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing, it’s in the folder Craig so you can take a listen to it. Have you heard of 8D sound? Do you know about 8D sound?

Craig: No.

John: So 8D sound is a way of mixing sound so that it feels like it’s spatially-oriented in a very different way. So the same way that augmented reality will give you a sense of place and space, this does it for sound. So take a listen to the clip I have in there. It’s actually a sample from a Billie Eilish. And we’re going to play a sample of it right now.

[Sample plays]

Craig: OK. Wow.

John: Craig, what did you think?

Craig: I mean, that’s astonishing.

John: Isn’t it?

Craig: Wow.

John: So, Ryan Knighton who is a frequent Scriptnotes guest sent me that clip. And Ryan is blind and he said like it was a really amazing experience for him because he felt his eyes tracking to sort of follow the sound. So, in a way it feels like cheating because sometimes it is just panning things from one side to another side. But you only have two ears. So you ultimately are doing that all the time and your brain is figuring out where things must be in space based on the timing between when different ears hear things.

So, again, this probably only works in headphones so if people are listening to this in your car it probably isn’t doing quite the same thing.

Craig: Right.

John: But it is just remarkable.

Craig: That is amazing. The panning part is the panning part, but what that does that I’ve never experienced before is create distance.

John: Yes.

Craig: Without reducing volume.

John: Yeah. When I first played it thought like, oh no, I must be playing this through my phone rather than through my headphones because like I could hear it off in the distance. And like, oh wait, no, it’s here in my head.

Craig: Yeah. So it feels like you’re hearing something at full volume but that full volume is halfway across the room. That is weird.

John: Isn’t that wild?

Craig: Like how it places it psychologically far from you. That’s the part that is just kind of mind-blowing. That is cool.

John: Yeah. So obviously we work in Hollywood and we work with some of the greatest sound designers and technicians. So this kind of stuff is not new to them. And if you look at like Alfonso Cuarón’s recent films he does this kind of stuff where he puts things in really interesting places in the room. But I just never heard it in something in my headphones done so remarkably well.

Craig: Wow. Great.

John: Just a great technique.

Craig: Beautiful. Well I have Two Cool Things this week. Not one but Two Cool Things. Which is normally I have zero, so this is a big deal for me.

One of them is something that anyone can get and one of them is something that only a few people can get, so hence Two Cool Things. We’ll start with the easy one that anyone can get. John, how are your hands doing?

John: My hands are dry. I have a hand cream that is in front of me now that I’ll apply while you tell me about your solution.

Craig: OK. So everyone’s hands are getting battered. The backs of my hands – because I’m thinking that over the course of my life I maybe washed the backs of my hands thoroughly about twice. Right? Like never knew that that was part of the whole thing. But now of course we have to. They were getting super itchy and sort of rashy to the point that I was dreading washing my hands which obviously is not an option right now.

So I went poking around looking for good solutions and I landed on a product called O’Keefe’s Working Hands Hand Cream. It is for sale on the Amazon. And that’s O’Keefe’s Working Hands Hand Cream. Here’s why I love this stuff so much. A, it has no smell. None. Zero. It smells like air. That is so important to me. I hate the stuff that smells. I hate it when it smells and I hate it when it doesn’t have added perfume, it just smells like weird goop. No smell.

Two, you use very little of it and it’s not a squirty cream. I am so grossed out by anything that feels oily and kind of lotion-y. This stuff is the texture more of like an Oreo filling kind of. So you take just a little bit and you rub it in and it disappears pretty quickly. It doesn’t leave you all greasy and nasty. It doesn’t have a smell. It literally just disappears. And the next morning, perfect. Like cured.

John: Nice.

Craig: And so I do this once every night. It works so well. I love it so much. So, if you’re having trouble with your hands and you’re looking for a solution, O’Keefe’s Working Hands Hand Cream. It costs $12.33. And given the – oh, and that’s for a two-pack. And given the amount that you use which is tiny I think it should last you a lifetime.

John: So I think I’m going to try yours, but I also want to recommend – this was going to be my One Cool Thing and I forgot to mention it last time. My friends Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi recommended this hand cream months ago, so I already had it before I needed to wash my hands all the time. It’s this fancy French thing. It’s called Creme Mains Hydratante Extra Pur. And it does have some smell to it. It’s Mediterranean, so it has this really slight ocean smell to it, which I actually really like a lot. So, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Craig: Excellent. Either way your hands will be covered. OK, now for the very few of you that have a VR headset. I mentioned The Quest I think on here, right? The Oculus Quest?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Was that one of my One Cool Things?

John: It was.

Craig: So it’s fun. I like playing Beat Saver. It’s very cool. There’s some cool things like, oh you know, the rollercoaster thing which makes me want to puke and so I turn it off. But it’s pretty cool. But it’s not like the kind of thing where I’ve been like, oh, I can’t wait to get my Oculus Quest on my head.

Until now. Oh my god.

John, do you know who has made a game for the Oculus?

John: I do not. Is it South Park? Who is it?

Craig: Fireproof Games.

John: Oh nice.

Craig: And they make The Room which as everyone knows is my favorite. So, The Room VR A Dark Matter.

John: Great.

Craig: This thing blows me away. I’ve only played two chapters so far. It is mind-bogglingly beautiful. The game play is just classic Room game play. So it’s very clever. It’s puzzles. It’s fun to reach out with your hand and pull a lever as opposed to like pressing a thing to pull a lever. But what blows my mind is how real it is. It is disturbing. And this little touch is the thing that kind of freaks me out the most. You get notes. Little handwritten notes on a piece of paper. And you pick it up with your hand and lift it to your face to read it. Just like a regular note. And it looks so real and the paper flutters as you move it back and forth. And there’s like a water mark in the paper if you look close enough. It’s so mind-blowingly incredibly real and it just – for the first time I go, OK, this is where it will all be.

It’s going to be fits and starts. There’s going to be blind alleys. There’s going to be mistakes. But eventually this is going to be it. We’re going to be inside of things. It’s just too compelling and too remarkable. So, anyway, if you have a VR headset for the love of god download The Room VR Dark Matter immédiatement.

John: Great. Well that is our show for this week. Stick around after the credits because we will be doing a special feature on how we learned to drive or teaching people to drive for our Premium members. But Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Ryan Dunn. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. 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.

Craig, thank you for talking about Clueless with me.

Craig: Thank you, John. It was a pleasure.

[Bonus segment]

John: Craig, so a crucial plot point in this movie was learning to drive. And so it took me back to as I learned to drive and also I have a 14-year-old daughter who is going to start learning to drive soon. You’ve already been through driving lessons. So, tell me about your experiences of driving lessons, both yourself and with a kid.

Craig: So, couldn’t be more timely because my daughter is 15 and given the state of things right now it’s never been easier for me to take her out to a parking lot, empty, and let her kind of wheel around a little bit with me. So that’s on the docket for the next week or two.

I learned how to drive pretty much the old fashioned way and it’s kind of the way everybody still learns how to drive. Somebody that shouldn’t be your parent for like the proper lessons gets in a car and puts you behind the seat and says, “OK, let’s talk about how a few of these things work. And now let’s start to drive.” And you do.

I remember very clearly being terrified. I remember that the driver that I had, the driving instructor, had put in his car little tape marks in the rear passenger side window that he taught you to use for parallel parking, which was really smart. And back then you could use that car to do your driving test.

But I also remember picking up pretty quickly. I mean, I’m a good driver. I love driving. And I just kind of got it. And I loved it. I wanted to drive all the time. It’s not that way anymore. So my son hated it. He hated driving. I went driving with him once and it was a little terrifying for both of us. He did attempt to take his driving test. He passed the written test. He took his road test and it was Cher-like. I mean, he didn’t hit a bicyclist or smash into another car, but he did attempt to make a left turn into oncoming traffic I believe. And so the test ended immediately. And he has not tried since.

He’s living in an area where there’s public transportation and we of course live in a ride share world now. So it’s a little different. But, my daughter is desperate to start driving. I think she’s like me. So, I’m going to be going through it with her pretty soon

John: Yeah. So I grew up in Colorado and I learned to drive at sort of the normal age. So I took my summer driving instructing class, so the thing where they show you faces of death movie where you got the terrible car accidents.

Craig: Oh yeah. Blood on the Pavement.

John: Blood on the Pavement is exactly the movie I saw. And then I had my time with the driving instructor which was fine. Our family only had stick shift cars, and so I had to learn on a stick shift car. And so the instructor’s car was automatic, which was easier. So I was trying to apply the lessons I was learning from that to the stick shift car. But it’s just a lot to handle at once in terms of like not stalling out the car while you’re trying to do things and starting from a stop sign to get to places.

I was lucky to have an older brother. So my brother as we’d come back from Scout meetings I was like 12 or 13 and we had this really long straight road. And he’d pull over and we’d swap places and I could drive the Scout, this international Harvester Scout we had a couple of blocks to get a sense of what that felt like.

Craig: Right.

John: I’ve never loved driving. I’m OK at it. I’ve gotten into very few accidents. I’ve gotten very few tickets. But it’s not a thing I love, love, love. And I remember feeling like when I was 16 or 17 and I had my license like they shouldn’t really be letting me do this. I’m just not quite ready for this. In part because I never paid a lot of attention when I was a passenger in a car. So I never knew where anything was in the small town of Boulder because it wasn’t my responsibility to get there.

And so things like figuring out where do I turn, I just got overwhelmed a little too easily.

Craig: Yeah. So in Clueless they’re trying to find the party and they’re using the Thomas Guide which was this big map book that everybody needed when they moved to Los Angeles because we didn’t have GPS. We didn’t have Waze. We didn’t have any of that stuff. Now you do, and so a lot of the where you’re going problem is just not even a problem. It’s not even something that anyone thinks about. They just go tap-tap-tap and off I go.

So in New Jersey you could get your license at 17. And I wanted my license on my birthday. And so we backed it out from there and on my birthday I went and got my driver’s license. And, by the way, I never learned how to drive stick.

John: Oh, you still can’t?

Craig: Yeah. I never learned. And it doesn’t even come up anymore. Now I drive an electric car. There’s no gears anyway. By the way, this is a whole other topic. What car, if you’re going to get your kid a car, what car do you get?

John: I think you get an electric car. I think you get an inexpensive electric car.

Craig: Yeah. So there’s a balance of inexpensive but then safe. Right? This is the thing we’re always worried about is safety.

John: All cars are pretty damn safe these days.

Craig: Yeah. Most cars are. The biggest issue is rollover. Because if there’s going to be an error in judgment it’s going to be taking a turn too fast and that’s a huge problem. But you and I learned how to drive without antilock brakes, without airbags, without crumble zones. We did have seatbelts. So we had that going for us.

John: But the car that I referenced there, The Scout, which is the first car I learned to drive in, like we had to add seatbelts to it. It didn’t come with seatbelts. That’s how old that car was.

Craig: So John referenced these movies. So we took Driver’s Ed in high school. I don’t know if you did that as well.

John: It wasn’t a high school class. It was a separate class you had to sign up for. So it was outside of school.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s a Jersey thing or not, but we had this sort of half-a-year elective sort of thing called Driver’s Ed which would prepare you for the written test. But mostly it was a gym teacher getting an extra period of work in there who would show these movies that I think mostly were made by the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

And they all were made I think in the ‘60s. Some of it was black and white.

John: Yeah. They were old even then.

Craig: They were old even then. So I was seeing this in 1987. And most of the stuff looked like it was made in 1965, so it was color-ish, but very grainy. It looked like 16mm. And what it was was a very stern voiceover narrator who would talk about how important it is to drive properly. But these people decided to have drinks before they went out. And then it’s real footage that the Ohio State Highway Patrol would film of crashes including bodies and blood.

I cannot believe, I cannot believe they showed that stuff to us. I can’t imagine they still are. I mean, it was nightmarish. Nightmarish.

John: Yes. I think a healthy dose of fear going into it is important, sense of responsibility and understanding. But I also suspect it scared some people away from driving who probably should be driving.

One thing I do think about in sort of our modern economy is like I will get into an Uber or a Lyft and just sort of assume they know how to drive.

Craig: [laughs] Right.

John: But sometimes you realize like, oh no, they shouldn’t drive. And so one time I actually asked like, I don’t know how I got to it, but I sort of asked, “So how long have you been driving?” And it’s like, “Oh, this is my second week.” And not second week as a Lyft driver, but second week driving at all.

Craig: Driving ever.

John: And it’s like, no, no.

Craig: No, no, no, no.

John: I don’t want to be in this car.

Craig: Correct. Yeah. Listen, all of it is going to get solved because just as the VR thing is inevitable, I mean, many, many years from now, I think the self-driving cars are inevitable as well. It’s just going to be time. But inevitably.

John: And that will be why Clueless will also become dated. Because like why are they driving themselves? That makes no sense at all.

Craig: Right. Well, that movie and every movie at that point will be dated.

John: Indeed.

Craig: I mean, it’s like there are so many movies with phone booths that I think at some point. Like my daughter – my daughter, it’s so funny by the way. I said to Jessica, “Hey, I’m going to be watching Clueless again for the podcast. Have you seen it?” And she looked at me and it was actually as if Cher Horowitz were with me and she was like, “Uh, I’ve seen it like 40 times.” [laughs] Like, you idiot. And I was like, OK, thank you teenager. A simple “Oh, I’ve seen it already” would have been fine.

John: And when you ask the question there are really only two answers. The answer could have been like, “No, that’s a stupid choice. Why would I ever watch that movie?” Or, “I’ve seen it 40 times.” There’s no middle ground there. It’s complete, you know, one or the other. Extremes.

Craig: The point is you lose, dad. Like, ew, I’m not watching some old gross movie. Or, everyone has seen that movie a million times. Literally a million times. [laughs]

John: Yes.

Craig: Literally.

John: Literally.

Craig: Literally.

John: Craig, thank you.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

 

Links:

 

• Clueless
• Clueless Script
• 8D sound example
• Creme Mains hand creme
• O’Keefe’s Working Hands cream
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• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Ryan Dunn (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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