Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 454 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’ll be discussing the difference between story and screenplay, both as official WGA categories but also what we mean in everyday use. We’ll also explore that icky feeling that something is wrong with your script and what to do about it when you feel it. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about age, starting over, and whether you should turn in the Final Draft file when the producers ask for it.

**Craig:** Oh, yes.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for Premium subscribers, Craig and I will read erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Now if that doesn’t cause a stampede toward the subscription button I don’t know what will.

**John:** It could all be a big tease. We’ll see.

**Craig:** By the way, the erotic fiction we’ll be reading from is called Stampede Toward the Subscription Button.

**John:** Ha-ha. Really it’s good. It’s a very meta kind of thing.

**Craig:** Hot.

**John:** Hot. Some news about writing. Last week on the show I mentioned that my local bookstore, Chevalier’s was reopening and a bunch of local authors we’re getting together to celebrate its reopening – of course delivery or takeaway. But still it’s great that indie bookstores are being able to reopen. So we’re hosting a special event this coming Saturday, June 6, at 2pm. We’ll have a dozen authors, including myself, Aline Brosh McKenna, Derek Haas, Stuart Gibbs. Other middle grade YA and adult authors.

**Craig:** Stuart Gibbs! I’ve known Stuart Gibbs forever.

**John:** He is a lovely, lovely man.

**Craig:** Yeah. He really is. I’ve known him since I first arrived in Los Angeles.

**John:** Yeah. He’s a good guy. So we’re going to be talking through our summer reading list. So these are books we recommend people take a look at, both all the way from picture books up through grown up adult novels. So we’ll be talking through the books we love, books you should read over the summer. People should buy those books from Chevalier’s or whatever your indie bookstore is. But come join us on Zoom. It’s 2pm this Saturday, June 6. We’ll be hanging out and discussing summer reading.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Second bit of follow up. Last week on the show we were talking about how to reopen the town for production. And several people wrote in about French hours. And they’re making a point which we didn’t really make in the show is that to summarize French hours are where rather than working these endless long production days you limit yourselves to 12 hours and there’s no lunch break. You don’t stop for lunch. You work through lunch and everyone goes home at a reasonable time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, Craig, what is the downside of that from an economic standpoint for an individual person?

**Craig:** Well…I think maybe it’s that there’s a less likely chance that there will be overtime.

**John:** That’s exactly it. So people were writing in to say that French hours sound great and they probably are healthier for everybody concerned. The reason why you’ll see pushback against it is that after eight hours people on these union sets tend to get overtime. And so you want to work more than eight hours because that’s how you bring home the big bucks.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that’s the thing we’d be balancing out is how to we get to a place where people value their life and their livelihoods and having a quality of life rather than just the sheer number of dollars they’re taking home.

**Craig:** Well, if you recall when we were talking about this Rawson got emotionally pleased at the thought of French hours. Most filmmakers do. And so what I would say – let’s say for instance on the next television show that I’m showrunning and EP’ing, I’d say to the producer, meaning the person in charge of the budget and also the studio, “Hey, what if we offer the crew more money per hour? We sort of say, look, we’re just going to go apples to apples here.” So we would probably end up doing this many hours over the course of a week with this much at time and a half, which is standard overtime. We’re going to give you a little bit more for your standard hours to get to that number and in exchange we’ll do French hours just because it makes us happier.

**John:** That is the right conversation to have.

**Craig:** Yeah. And hopefully that would go well. Because the benefit of French hours is not – look, maybe there are bean counters who say the benefit is that you’re saving money. But for us on the creative side the benefit is just that it’s just better creatively. And also for the purpose of managing COVID and etc. It’s vastly superior.

**John:** Yeah. So my hope is that as we start having these conversations about reopening the town some of the necessities, like French hours, become the norms. And that we really do move to a place where we are thinking about the health and safety and creative function of the people who make film and television and that it becomes a matter of course that we’re limiting our hours to things that make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m all for it. But point well taken. We should not put this on the backs of working people. That’s not who should be absorbing the cost. Nor should there be a cost to absorb. We’re already paying people this much money. We should keep paying them that much money, if not more, and just shift the way we do the work during the day.

**John:** And now there’s not a real state update in terms of when we are going to have guidance about how we’re reopening the town. As we’re recording this, this is on a Thursday, we thought earlier this week there would be an official state of California guide and plan for how it’s going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah. What happened there?

**John:** It didn’t really happen. I’ve heard rumblings that it’s really on the actors’ side. That there’s real concerns about, again, safety and basically what we talked about in the show. They are the most vulnerable people on a set because they cannot wear masks. Social distancing won’t apply to two actors who are in a scene together likely. So, there are real concerns about maintaining their safety.

What I hear, and this is all just people gossiping, is that’s one of the hold ups about having official guidance behind this. Still, when I talk to showrunners there’s ongoing discussions about maybe it’s July, maybe it’s August. That there’s going to be an attempt to get TV production at least back up and running.

**Craig:** Yeah. It will continue to be the actors and it should. Because they are going to be the ones who are the most risk. And they are literally incapable of doing their jobs properly if they are physically restrained from being near each other or revealing their faces. Unless we just go to an all Iron Man kind of thing. [laughs] Where everyone is just Iron Man’d up.

**John:** 100% of the time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or Banes. Just Iron Mans and Banes.

**John:** Iron Man or Banes. Or a tremendous amount of visual effects to paint out people’s masks, sort of like how we painted out Henry Cavill’s mustache.

**Craig:** That didn’t work so well.

**John:** It was phenomenal. It’s what everything should look like. There’s vaguely a little bit long. Like an Animal Crossing face.

**Craig:** [speaking like Bane] I don’t want you to worry, John. I’ve had my COVID test.

I would do Bane all day. If I could do Bane all day I would. If it were allowable. If my wife would allow it.

**John:** Yeah. But she would never allow that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our two main topics. Our first is story versus screenplay. So, on the show many a time we have talked about writing credits and what they mean, but we should probably recap that because for American movies the credits you see onscreen have very specific meanings and Craig can you talk us through what the very specific meanings are for the writing credits we see on a feature film?

**Craig:** Again, and first thing to know just as a little bit of background is that these writing credits that we have onscreen are the production of negotiation. So it’s actually writing into our collective bargaining agreement with the studios. And because that bargaining agreement is a massive contract these terms actually are legally defined in the contract.

So, what is story? Well, let me give you the dry version. Then I’ll give you – then we can discuss what we think it is. The dry version is “the term story is all writing covered by the provisions of the MBA representing a contribution is that is distinct from screenplay and consisting of basic narrative, idea, theme, or outline indicating character development and action.” And this is something that when we did our rewrite of the manual for clarity this was a section that I worked on pretty carefully. And this is a bit of my hobby horse. What it now says in there is “distinct from screenplay means that the contributions considered for story should not be applied to screenplay credit, nor should contributions considered for screenplay credit be applied to story.”

But what does that clunky lawyer-written phrase actually mean creatively? I’m kind of curious what you think it means.

**John:** So, when I think of story I think about if I were to sort of pitch the movie or pitch what’s happening in the story and write that down, so my written version of a pitch would probably be story. And that is it’s what’s happening but it’s not the specifics of details, individual scenes, how it works. It’s really more kind of what happens and the overall shape of things rather than the specificities of how it’s being told onscreen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I think that’s generally the way people approach it. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways you can work it in your mind. I mean, one tactic I have sometimes is to think what part of this could have been expressed in a treatment without any of it seeming like it might belong in a script. You know, people can put dialogue in treatments. Well, that could fit in a script. But if it’s just sort of a treatment-only kind of thing then it’s likely that it’s story, but not necessarily. Basic narrative to me kind of feels like broad plot. Not the specific little ticky-tacky moments but broad plot.

**John:** Now, the very specific language you gave, here’s why that language is important. Is that ultimately at the end of a writing process and as we’re determining credits it’s that very specific language that we are going to be using in our arbitration statements, or if you’re an arbiter determining credit you are going to refer back to that very specific legal language to say this is why I’m defending this decision on this. So, when Craig and I are talking in generalities about story, great, we can talk in generalities. But if we’re talking about the specific credit for this piece of literary material we are always going to reach back to that legally language because that is how WGA credits are determined.

**Craig:** Yeah. So when I’m doing an arbitration I will talk a lot about what I consider to be the basic narrative and who contributed to the basic narrative. Idea. I think everybody kind of gets what that is. Theme. Everybody kind of gets what that is. And then outline indicating character development and action, which to me means again kind of a – well, it’s an outline. And then the question is how fine or specific of an outline. Generally for story I tend to think of it is more on the broader side of things because of the nature of the definition of screenplay which I suppose we should get into.

**John:** Let’s get into that.

**Craig:** So, screenplay. And remember this is story is distinct from this. “Screenplay consists of…” and this by the way I’m about to read one of the worst sentences ever written.

**John:** Oh yeah. Full of semicolons. Yeah.

**Craig:** To this day I cannot parse it properly. It’s brutal. And here’s what it says. “A screenplay consists of individual scenes and full dialogue together with such prior treatment, basic adaptation, continuity scenario, and dialogue as shall be used in represent substantial contributions to the final script.” What? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. But there’s even more.

**Craig:** There is more.

**John:** There’s four bullet points.

**Craig:** So, what the credits department did in their wisdom was sort of say, look, let’s take that and actually turn it into something that’s fairly useful as a general rubric for arbiters who are analyzing screenplay. We tend to look at screenplay as contributing to four major factors. The first is dramatic construction. The second is original and different scenes. The third is characterization or character relationships. And the fourth is dialogue.

So, what do you think those mean?

**John:** [laughs] So, and again, if you’ve ever done an arbitration either as a person seeking credit or as a person determining credit you have used this exact language in defending your decisions and your choices.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Dramatic construction. I think we all get what that means. It’s how the puzzle pieces are put together. This is how you’re telling a story. These are the ups and downs. The twists, the surprises, the reveals. It’s how the story tells itself.

**Craig:** Right. It’s different from just if I said, OK, what is the outline of John Wick. John Wick is a hitman. His wife dies and leaves him a puppy. Bad guys kill the puppy and steal his car. He declares revenge. He goes and kills this guy. And then he kills this guy. And then he kills this guy. The end. And there’s a hotel. Right? I mean, those are the big, big moments.

But the dramatic construction are the way that things unfold. The way that the bad guys explain to John Wick is to his son and how that, you know, factors into the way he deals with John Wick. Those are sort of – it’s the specific stuff, right? The specifics of the dramatic. Which leads us into original and different scenes, which you know, I think we get, right?

**John:** Yeah. We get a sense. A scene is as a moment begins, as a moment ends. It’s how the moment begins. How the moments ends. And crucially what happens in that scene. It’s the very specific beats within that scene. And so while in an outline or a treatment you might give a sense of the shape. We might get a sense that there’s a scene here that does this, it’s the actual scene itself is what is considered part of screenplay credit.

**Craig:** And that’s why the word “different” is in there. Because we are oftentimes parsing out this contribution between multiple writers. If there is a beat. If you and I are both asked to adapt something like Fiddler on the Roof, which by the way was just announced is going to be a movie produced by Dan Jinks, your former Big Fish producer.

**John:** And directed by Tommy Kail. Excited about all this.

**Craig:** And directed by Tommy Kail. Sounds like it’s going to be – I mean, I’ll see nursery school productions of Fiddler on the Roof.

**John:** Craig, let’s stop the podcast now. You clearly are going to be cast in Fiddler on the Roof.

**Craig:** I should be.

**John:** There’s no way this is not going to happen.

**Craig:** I should be.

**John:** Yes. If you’re not a Tevye there is a role in that production for you.

**Craig:** I’m weirdly too old for Tevye. Isn’t that terrible? I’m too old for Tevye. I always think of him as an old guy because Zero Mostel was probably – but he’s like – well, actually, maybe I’m not. Because his youngest daughter–

**John:** No, he has teenage daughters.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? I’m a perfect age for Tevye. And I can sing that – you know what? I’m going to do it. I should do it. I’m the best. I’m the best Tevye available. [laughs] I am. So we’ll discuss that with Dan.

**John:** And Craig can sing. I mean, I really don’t know why you’re not working on your audition right now.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Dank Jinks, I will go on tape. And you will be amazed. You will be amazed.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Also, I’d like to point out I’m Jewish. That matters. Seriously. I totally get the white-washing thing. Like so just side note on Fiddler on the Roof. I’m a huge Fiddler on the Roof fan. To the point where I can explain why Zero Mostel is a vastly better Fiddler than Topol and I know people are going to say, “What?” But I really do think so. Because I think that Fiddler on the Roof is a very Yiddish kind of thing as opposed to a Jewish kind of thing. It’s different feel in a weird way.

And then there’s Alfred Molina. [laughs] I mean, Alfred Molina is a brilliant actor. And he can sing. But you got to be Jewish. You just got to be. I don’t know how you do it without being Jewish. I really don’t. I don’t know.

**John:** So that ties into our next topic which is characterization and character relationships.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So back to the screenplay. And I like that character relationships is pulled out as a separate thing because as we talk about on the show a lot it’s very hard to imagine a character without really imagining how those characters are interacting. That’s how you actually reveal how two characters fit together. How a character is demonstrated in a screenplay is generally through its interaction with other characters in it. So the relationship between two characters or nine characters is crucially important for a screenplay in ways that it may not be in a story document.

**Craig:** No question. And so the reason Fiddler showed up in the first place here was when we say if I say to you I need you – we have a story beat. It’s story. And the story is that Tevye is going to marry his daughter off to the butcher. You and I will write very different scenes of that. Any two writers will write different scenes of that. Same basic story point, but different and original scenes.

Similarly, with character – so character development and action is story. So, who is in it? Like the guy that delivers the milk in this little village of Anatevka and he has five daughters. OK. And he is a big believer in tradition. Characterization is literally how that character is expressed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The things he says and does. His temperament. His choice of words. And the nature of his relationship with his wife and his daughters and the townspeople and the Russians. All of that is script. And, of course, the primary way that that is expressed is through dialogue. It’s not the only way, but the primary way. Dialogue is essentially entirely a contribution to screenplay. Those are kind of the two big things.

**John:** Those are the big things. And so as we’ve said before sometimes in treatments you’ll do the parenthetical dialogue or the italics dialogue to sort of indicate what the things are. But it’s really a screenplay aspect. And that matches up I think with our basic expectations of what a story is versus a screenplay. The story is sort of the gist of it. It’s like this is the overall shape of it. But the screenplay is the on paper representation of what the movie is going to look like and feel like.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** And so from a credits level if the same writer has both story credit and screenplay by credit those compress down to become a written by credit. There’s special cases in weird situations based on underlying source material. So sometimes they don’t compress. But in general if you see a written by that means that the writer who is credited there is entitled to both story by credit and screenplay by credit so they’ve smooshed together.

**Craig:** That is only what it means. That is it. That is the definition of written by. And we’ve been working on this, and hopefully one day we’ll get there, but if you have written a story that is based on something, so it’s an adaptation, but it is quite a bit different. It’s clearly significantly different than the underlying material. Then you’ll get screen story by. And if you get screen story by and screenplay by unfortunately they don’t squish down, which is I think silly. But it’s the way it is. So, alas.

**John:** Yeah. And every once in a thousand credits you’ll see adaptation by which is a very unique credit that is only given as a result of arbitration.

**Craig:** It doesn’t mean what it says. And–

**John:** It’s a way of acknowledging that a person contributed to a thing that is important but isn’t meeting other thresholds. It’s a weird credit. We’re going to sort of ignore that for now.

**Craig:** I don’t think it has been given out. I don’t know when the last time it was. But I honestly don’t think it’s been given out within the last ten years.

**John:** So this is talking through credits when a project is completed, so the end of the process. But what I want to really focus on today is figuring out story and screenplay credits earlier in the process, when you’re thinking about writing something or you’re working with somebody and figuring out what are we going to put on the title page of this script because that is really important. Because that title page for your script is what sets the precedent for who wrote this thing that they’re reading.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so figuring out story and screenplay credit is really a writer’s decision at the very beginning of the process. So let’s start with some listener questions because this might help us frame our conversation. So, a listener wrote in saying, “I have a question regarding credit on a screenplay I wrote with a partner. The project began with him pitching me a general premise and a very basic description of a couple of the main characters. From there we broke the story, even completely overhauling it at one point, and created the characters together. We’ve agreed to take a 50/50 credit on the screenplay but he is suggesting that he also get a story by credit. It seems to me that story by is too much for just a basic premise and some general characterizations, but I do think he deserves some sort of added acknowledgment for having the original idea.

“We were wondering if you could tell us whether ‘idea by’ is a legitimate credit in these types of situations, or if you have any other suggestions.”

**Craig:** [laughs] I like when questions are clear and easy. So, the deal is that there is story credit. That’s a thing. There is no idea credit. Story credit includes idea. So, while he’s correct in suggesting that he should get story credit, it’s also quite obvious that you should get story credit because like you said you broke the story with him, created the characters together, and then wrote the screenplay. Which, by the way, remember screenplays contain story elements. Story credit can be generated even if there’s no treatment or outline or something like that. So, the fact is you both deserve story credit and he doesn’t get special story credit or first story credit. No such thing exists.

The answer is no. He does not get anything special. It is 50/50 for the screenplay. It is 50/50 for the story. And your partner should take a look in the mirror and ask himself what kind of person he wants to be. Because this is not how you get ahead in the world as it turns out. And this is just separate. This is psychological. And I’m not condemning him. I understand it. Everybody is starving for a credit. And then along comes food and people are like “but I found the food I should get an extra chicken wing.” I totally get it. It turns out in the long run being generous with your partners will generate far more success for you than being stingy and parsimonious. Oh, there we go.

**John:** Yeah. So specific advice in this situation. So, you two writers should say title of screenplay, written by, because you’re both going to claim story credit and screenplay credit, written by your two names. Now, a thing you might decide to do is to put his name first because maybe that’s a way of acknowledging that he was the first person who came up with the idea. You guys can decide that. But, no, don’t break it up into separate things because it’s not going to accurately reflect what’s happening. It’s not going to be a good idea down the road.

Do what Craig did. Be generous, both of you, and god-willing you’ll sell this and many other things down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just be cool about it. And in case you are wondering the order of names within a writing team has no significance. It’s not like the Writers Guild determines which person in an ampersand situation should go first. We do not.

Let’s see, should we do a Francesca question?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** OK. Francesca writes in, or Francesco, depends, “About eight years ago I was pitching movie ideas to my friends. Most if not all got shot down except for one. The friend I pitched it to said to rename it 299, because it’s a play on the movie 300. Sure, why not? Titles change. Since then I’ve heard him talk about this movie he came up with by himself called 299. He’s done this in front of me once and in group chats. Like, hey guys, when are we going to work on the movie that I came up with. This was recent. 2020 pre-COVID. I sent a message in group that basically was like, hey man, we created that, not you alone. And he said, oh yeah.

“But even then, knowing he claims he created this movie I didn’t want to argue that in fact it was my creation. But really it was. He had a title and some suggestions. But I pitched him, not vice versa. What do I do and how do I keep stuff like this from happening again?”

Oof, we get this quite a bit.

**John:** We do get this quite a bit. So, there are a bunch of small things to unpack here. Listen, nothing was written down yet, so there’s not like a title page thing to be worried about yet. What we’re really talking about is what is that line between just sort of shooting some ideas around with friends and colleagues and saying like, oh, we’re not writing this thing together. At what point is feedback sort of like actually contributing to the underlying thing?

And there’s no clear answers here, but I can give you some – hopefully together we can give you some guidance and also some commiseration because even among us, among our friends, this still does happen. So, it is a little bit frustrating. Craig, how we would start off with Francesca here.

**Craig:** Well, in terms of this situation I think what you don’t want to do is soft pedal things. It seems like what’s happened is he’s somehow managed to bargain himself into being the cowriter of this when he’s not anyway. Or the co-creator of it. So, I think you want to be clear. “Look, this is what it was. And then say I’m going to not use the title but thank you. And this way we’re nice and clean.” If that’s really all of significance. And if there’s anything else you can say I’m not going to do that either. Sometimes you might be considered that, well, he’s going to go off and he’s going to write a movie called 299.

Look, if he is a better writer than you than he’s a better writer than you and his is going to go and yours isn’t. Odds are he’s not. Just going – odds are that nobody is a good writer, right? That’s just generally the odds as we know. So I wouldn’t worry too much about that.

In the future, going forward prospectively, one thing you can say to people before you ask them for advice or pitch them is say, “Listen, I was wondering, I’m writing something and I was wondering if you’d be willing to just give me some friendly feedback, just sounding board stuff. I’m not looking for anything, you know, I’m not looking for producers or writing partners. I was just really just looking for a sounding board. If you’re interested in just being kind of one of those no attachment sounding boards for me then that would be awesome. But if not, I totally understand.”

And then before you’ve ever said a word you have anchored dialogue in the proper context. Because people sometimes misconstrue things when you come to them and you’re like, “Well what do you think about this?” And they’re like, “Well what if you did this.” Oh yeah, and now we’re riffing. And suddenly we’re writing partners?

**John:** Yep. Yeah. So I was going to say exactly those same three words which is the preface to your pitch is “I’m writing something.” Just declare this is a thing that I am working on. And if you put it in that context then it’s harder for them to say like, “Oh, I thought we were working on this together?” It’s like, no, no, no, I said from the start I am writing this thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that makes it clear this is the scope of what you want their feedback to be about. And that’s good and that’s helpful. Now, this thing that Francesca is describing happened eight years ago. So I do also question why haven’t you written this thing? Like if it’s really such an idea that is important to you why didn’t you write this? And there is also a time limit on this stuff. And if you really haven’t done any work on this in a year or eight years you’re probably not actually really writing this thing and maybe you’re just looking for a reason to be angry about this.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want to be the proverbial two bald men fighting over a comb. If neither one of you – and that’s me and you basically – if neither one of you have written this thing within the last eight years then it kind of is neither of yours at this point. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** It’s the universe’s, yeah.

**Craig:** It kind of belongs to the universe. The other trick that you might want to try before you talk to somebody about something is say, “I’m halfway through something. I’ve been writing it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s much harder for people to imagine jumping on a bus that’s in motion than one that’s currently being assembled at the plant. So, another little trick there. But, yeah, I agree with John. I feel like the bigger question Francesca is what’s been going on for eight years? And maybe spend less time in group chats and write your stuff.

**John:** Yeah. And I think it’s a great way to wrap up this conversation about story versus screenplay is that story is not that hard to do. Story, it can be – generally it’s a document. It’s something you’ve written but it doesn’t have to be an incredibly elaborate thing. It could be a page and you could get credit on a movie for having written a one-page story synopsis. That’s possible.

Screenplay is a lot more work. Screenplay is an actual screenplay. You’re really writing a full thing here. And so, you know, I would challenge to Francesca and to other folks here is that if you don’t fixate so much on story credit and really think about what is the work you’re doing. And if you’re doing the work of writing a full screenplay then that is the work that becomes screenplay credit. And to really think about those things on that scale of like one page versus 120 pages. And when you think about it that way it’s easier to suss out who deserves story credit and who deserves screenplay credit.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. And one thing to be aware of is that the Writers Guild rules are an evolution of copyright rules. And so story is compensated significantly in the sense that 25% of all residuals are given to the person or persons that get story by credit. Now, you could say that’s only a quarter and 75% goes to the screenplay, but again, you can write a single page and get story credit. The person who gets the screenplay credit may have worked for five years and generated a thousand pages. So, that’s the Writers Guild point of view.

But what the world values, meaning the studios that pay us, is the screenplay. And we know this because there’s a screenplay bonus that is oftentimes multiples of what they’re paying you to actually write the screenplay. Meaning, if we make this thing and you get screenplay credit you’re going to get like a million dollars, two million dollars, just suddenly. Boom. Out of nowhere. Because you did the thing that they value the most. This comes up time and time again.

I’m sure that you have had these experiences where someone says, “Hey, we would love for you to write this.” And you’re like, oh, I don’t have the time. But I can maybe work on the story for a week. And they’re like, “We want you to write the thing.”

**John:** The thing. Yeah.

**Craig:** “Thank you. But what we want is the thing we value.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So write your script is the point.

**John:** The other analogy I’d have is the story is like the trailer for the movie. And the screenplay is the movie. It’s the whole thing. And it’s like they are very different scales of time and work and sort of what you’re getting out of it. So, they’re both incredibly important but they’re going to pay you to make the movie. They’re not going to pay you to make the trailer.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct.

**John:** All right, Craig, let’s get to your topic here which you pitched to me as what to do when you sort of feel like your story – you get that icky feeling that your story is not working, your script is not working.

**Craig:** Something is not working. This happens to me at least once in everything I write. I will – it will suddenly occur to me in a vague sense that something is terribly wrong. And I attempt to specify it. I attempt to figure out where it’s wrong, why it’s wrong. But mostly it kind of manifests as a vague nausea that it’s instinctive. Something is wrong.

And when that happens over time I’ve started to come to an understanding of how to get through it and how to get out of it and what to not do. And I’m sure that you’ve had this feeling, too. I can’t imagine. I mean, as robotic as you are you’re still a human being. You have human feelings.

**John:** Yeah. I’d say most projects that I’ve gone through have some version of this. And including things which no one has ever read because I never really got through these situations. And so that may be an escape hatch we talk about in your overall discussion here is that sometimes these aren’t solvable. But trying to figure out where the problem is is so crucial. So talk us through where you figure out the problem might be.

**Craig:** Well, the first thing that you have to kind of wonder is what is the specific nature of the problem that is presenting itself to you. And we’ll find out if that really is the problem or not. But initially these things crop up very typically as, OK, I’ve got a plot knot. And you can call it a plot hole, a plot discrepancy. Things aren’t adding up. I’m supposed to have somebody be over here, but they’re over there. They managed to cross a continent too quickly. Or this happened the day before and it’s the day later. There’s like time problems you can’t get around. Or, I need them to know this thing, but they never knew it before. They haven’t met that person but they need to have this.

So you start to go, OK, there’s trouble. Just circumstances. And then sometimes you have concerns that are entirely focused on characters. The character needs to do something, but it violates some aspect of who they are or how they feel or what they’ve done before. There’s just a basic inconsistency. Their motivations don’t match their needs. These are the kind of problems where you just know before you ever hand a script in that if you did you might sneak it past somebody but never an actor. Never an actor. They would be like this doesn’t add up. And they’d be right.

There are also, man, this one comes up all the time. What I call immovable objects. And when writers sometimes will – I’ll call a friend or they’ll call me and we have these problems and we’re asking for help. They often are in the phrase in this context of immovable objects. The story requires this happens. But I don’t know how to make it happen. I don’t even know why it’s happening. And I don’t know how it should happen. But it has to happen. These are immovable objects and you just don’t know what to do with them.

It’s like I’m driving down a road and there has to be a wall in front of me, also I need to keep driving. What?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Trouble.

**John:** And so you and I have both encountered this situation where we are working on an adaptation of something, and so there are immovable objects because the basic nature of this property – this is a thing that must happen. Like the audience has expectations. This moment must occur.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And yet given the logic of the story we’ve built and everything we know there is no reason for that moment to occur and we have to figure out – either create a new reason. I mean, it is a problem. So we’ll get into what some of the solutions might be to that problem, but it is a thing that happens especially often in adaptations because you’re stuck with – some rules are being imposed upon you that would not be the rules you would set for yourself.

**Craig:** Very much so. It’s a little bit of like if I pull this string the curtain opens too much, so if I pull this string it closes all the way. So I pull that one again. I need this person to be more like this. But then this [song] needs them to be more like this. And you go crazy.

**John:** So somebody is going to be listening to this podcast about three years from now and they’ll be like, “I know exactly what both of them were talking about,” and it’s going to be delightful. So, check back in three years from now. Set yourself a reminder to check in and you’ll know, ah-ha, this is what they were talking about.

**Craig:** Put it on our calendar. And that leads me to the sort of final specific one, which are competing interests. Lindsay Doran has a great phrase. “Close up with feet.” She’ll say, “I want this moment to give me this feeling. Also, I want it to this thing that is completely incompatible with that feeling.” You want somebody to do something bad, also you want to feel like this person falls in love with them. You want them to run away but you also want to feel that they’re brave here. You want somebody to make somebody happy, but you want that person to hate them.

You feel these competing needs. And they negate each other to the point where you clench up and do not know what to do. And all of these things are all wonderfully specific and yet less common than the most frequent one you encounter which is something is not right and I don’t even know what it is or why. It’s just not good.

**John:** So, Craig, before we move on I’m going to pitch two more things to you which I often feel–

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Which give me this vague ickies. One is the awareness that something is repeating and I don’t want it to repeat. And yet I sort of can’t figure out a way for it not to repeat. I recognize I’m repeating the same moment, the same beat, the same idea, and I don’t want to but I don’t know how to not repeat it. I’m trying to stay – basically I’m trying to stay on theme and I’m trying to stay consistent, but in the consistency I’m being repetitive. And what’s often a related thing to me is something we talked about recently on the podcast which is like this is just not interesting.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I recognize that it’s doing what it functionally needs to go, but I just don’t care.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that to me is probably the most troubling of these vague ickies because it’s like if I don’t care about it no one is going to care about this.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a bad feeling to know that you have managed to build a house that is resting on a single load-bearing wall. And that wall sucks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a bad feeling. And it happens all the time. You said you had two. I’m curious what the other one was.

**John:** Oh, those were the two. I would say it’s the “this is not interesting” and the “I am repeating myself.”

**Craig:** I’m repeating myself.

**John:** Like I recognize that this a repetition. So it’s kind of the opposite of “close up with feet.” It is consistent and yet it’s too consistent. It’s actually just the same moment happening again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And when it is a scene that’s repeating, like you can figure out ways to like, OK, I could put a little shading there. But you recognize this whole sequence is really doing the same thing that the previous one did, crap, I didn’t recognize this until now.

**Craig:** Well, right there you’ve kind of avoided the first big pit fall right here because I think some people encounter this feeling, this icky feeling that there’s a problem, and they go, “Nah, you know what, no there isn’t.” Takes them to Jedi mind-trick themselves.

No, no, there is. There’s absolutely a problem. If you know there’s a problem, there’s a problem. Even if you’re technically wrong. Even if somehow you’ve been deluded into thinking that there’s a problem when there isn’t one, the fact that you think there’s a problem means you’re not writing it well anyway. So you cannot ignore this feeling. It’s incredibly important to accept it.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Agreed. You have to – the first step of solving the problem is acknowledging that there is a problem. So yeah.

**Craig:** There you go. Exactly. The very common instinct in your desire to immediately get past this problem, because nobody wants to sit with this icky feeling, you just want to get it out of you, is to solve it with cleverness. You’re going to solve it by using a lot of scaffolding. You’re going to contort your plot and your characters to make the problem go away. And you will technically make the problem go away. You will solve it. It’s just that now it’s boring and it sucks. Because solutions aren’t what people are going to see a movie for. They’re going to see a movie or watch a television show because it is this beautiful, whole natural narrative that is there because it’s correct.

When you write a scene that solves your problem, that scene is bad. Because it exists to solve your problem. It is for you, it’s not for the audience.

**John:** Now, a corollary to this which I’m thinking back to the second Arlo Finch which I ran into sort of a – I ran into problems. This is just not going to fit right. When you talk about a scene that is just there to sort of fix the problem or muscle you through a problem and get you to the next thing, that’s an unsatisfying boring scene. But where scaffolding can become useful is I’m going to wind back, I’m going to unravel some stuff, and actually build in a scaffolding. And I’m going to support this idea by going back in time and making it so it is a natural extension.

So basically I’m going to build a bridge from where I was to where I’m going, but I actually have to step back a bit and build that bridge.

**Craig:** Right. So that’s an actual bridge. It’s not scaffolding.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. You absolutely should go back and support it. And then it feels natural and it unfolds and it looks correct. Yeah, you’re not just – you’re like, OK, we were building a house and this room was supposed to have a hallway to that room. But they’re offset by 12 feet. So let’s just build a weird hallway that just does this weird juke. Nobody wants that hallway. Nobody. I mean, yeah, technically I could walk from one room to another but this hallway sucks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, how do we fix this? So there’s this phrase that always comes to my mind when I’m in these moments and it’s from Searching for Bobby Fischer which I would like to nominate to be our next deep dive movie.

**John:** Oh sure. We could get Mr. Scott Frank on to talk about it.

**Craig:** No. We’ll get Mr. Steven Zaillian on to talk about it.

**John:** Oh, I forget. Steve Zaillian. I always [crosstalk]. Steven Zaillian.

**Craig:** We want to over-credit Scott Frank with everything, but we’re going to get Steven on.

**John:** We shouldn’t. We shouldn’t.

**Craig:** No, we shouldn’t. We’re going to get Steve Zaillian on to talk about it. And it’s one of my favorite screenplays. And also he directed it beautifully as well.

So there’s a moment that recurs where Ben Kingsley’s chess professor is instructing this young child and they’ve got a chess board in front of them. And he’s saying to this kid you can get to checkmate from here in 12 moves. Don’t move until you see it. And the kid is like I can’t see it. And he says don’t move until you see it. I can’t see it. And then Kingsley says, “Here, I’ll help you.” And he just wipes all the pieces off the board and they all clatter to the floor. And he has the kid just look at this blank board. And sort of makes him go through this mental exercise of trying to do it without being stuck in the weeds of the pieces themselves.

And this comes up in the end, in the final match. He’s got himself to a point where Ben Kingsley who is watching the match from another room goes, “You’ve got him. You’ve got him in 12 moves. Don’t move until you see it.” And then the kid is just looking at the board and in his mind he’s just whispering to himself “I don’t see it.”

And then back to Ben Kingsley. Don’t move until you see it. Can’t see it, I don’t see it.

And I’m thinking this all the time in these moments. I’m like don’t move until you see it. And then I’m like but I can’t see it. And I’m like, fine. Don’t move until you see it. And this is why this has become kind of a mantra to me.

Because when it happens it is not hard to solve. Once you see the problem, the real problem, then the solution is evident. It’s easy. It’s elegant. There are not a lot of moving parts. It’s easy to write. Because you’re correct. So, the question then is maybe this sick feeling I had was about what I thought was a problem. I didn’t understand the nature of the problem at all. So, the feeling was correct but my identification of the problem was wrong.

That’s why I’ve been kind of walking around in circles going “I can’t see it. I can’t see it. I can’t see it.” And then one day I go, oh for god’s sakes. Of course. And it’s outside of the problem that I thought it was.

So, one way we get through this is patience. And patience means not only being patient with yourself and giving yourself time to finally see what the real problem is, but also the patience and wisdom to not move until you see it. Because the more you write, the more you try and write your way through this problem, the more invested you are in the writing you’re doing to solve the problem that probably isn’t the problem. So all that writing is going to be wasted. All that effort is going to be wasted. And you’re going to maybe be loath to let it go. So don’t move until you see it.

And then when you see it you’ll know.

**John:** I want to believe everything you just said, and yet I can also imagine myself or other writers in situations where this becomes an excuse for paralysis and perfectionism. Because all writing is difficult. All writing, there’s going to be some moments of self-doubt.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so how do we help distinguish between, OK, this icky feeling I need to stop and wait it out until I really find the perfect solution versus, no, writing is hard. Writing is hard and you just have to do it. And you will discover things in trying to work on it. Because you and I both on our daily writing situations we reach places where we’re like, argh, I can’t make this thing work. And then you just work through it and you figure it out.

So, how do we help distinguish between the moments where you really should stop and wait versus just sit down and put your butt in the chair and get some words written?

**Craig:** Well, there’s a circumstance where you know what you’re supposed to do, you just don’t feel like you’re doing it well. That’s different. You need to just keep working. You need to work on it.

I know what the scene is supposed to be and I know what it’s supposed to accomplish. All that is correct. I just don’t like what I’m doing. OK. Think of a different way to do it. Write that. Try a different way. Try a different way.

But when there’s something that is fundamentally wrong it’s not that you should go to bed or take a vacation. Start taking walks and thinking about it. In fact, it’s important to think about it and think about it and think about it. It’s important to struggle with that problem because the struggle with the problem is what will eventually get you to the place where you see what the answer is. So you’re working. I mean, you don’t take the day off. And the “don’t move until you see it” part is essentially write the solution that you know is right. That’s really what I’m getting to. Is don’t write the bad ones. Don’t write the ones that just rush you through it. Write the one that feels good.

Because when you get it, I mean, I had this problem man on Chernobyl, oh boy. I mean, there was a dark week. There was one very dark week where I was just walking around thinking. There’s this awful wrongness in the midst of something and I don’t know how to solve it. And I did not move until I saw it. And then a few days later I went, “Oh for god’s sakes.” And almost inevitably it’s like all the pieces were there. I was looking in the wrong spot and I was thinking about it in the wrong way. And that there’s something that with all the pieces I already had that is so simple and obvious and once you see it it’s obvious. It’s just like solving any puzzle.

I mean a real puzzle. Not a jigsaw puzzle. [laughs]

If somebody comes along and goes, oh here’s how this works, you go, “Oh for the love of god,” right? So that’s it. It’s really just going through that and then when you know you have it you have it. So you certainly don’t want to do this as some excuse to not write. In fact, the hardest work you should be doing is this kind of work. Just struggling through the problem. If you don’t feel that you’re exerting yourself then, yeah, you’re probably just avoiding and you don’t want to avoid.

**John:** So, the solutions you’re describing, it almost sounds like you’re really talking about – you’re reframing what the problem is. It’s basically you’re working and waiting for your brain to come to a place where it is reframing the situation. Basically change the context so you can actually see like, oh, these are actually the ways these things could line up. This is what the – basically forgetting my original expectations about what needed to happen here so you can actually approach it with the things you actually have and what is going to work for the pieces that you have.

**Craig:** It’s exactly correct. It’s exactly right. We usually end up in this space because we have falsely determined that a bunch of things are givens. And they’re not. Sometimes most of them are given but some of them can change in pretty dramatic ways. And suddenly, it’s so interesting, like when you’re trying to solve these problems some of the, we’ll call them the grindy non-solution solutions, seem like they’ll be a lot of work. But you’re willing to do it to make the ache go away.

Then you come up with the real solution. The real solution is way more writing and it’s much less work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s correct. And it’s actually a joy. That’s how you know.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s tackle some listener questions. Aaron wrote in to ask, “How old is too old? After working in digital media in New York I recently moved to LA to find an entry level job as a writer’s PA or a writer’s assistant. Although I have some contacts in the industry I did not have any gigs locked in. And now with COVID my chances of landing such a job this year or even next seem slim. I’m 25 years old and I know many people trying to break into the industry start their careers by working in these assistant jobs.

“That said, I’ve also heard that once you’re approaching your mid-to-late 20s it’s harder and harder to find these opportunities as people start wondering why you’re 28 and begging to be a PA for example. Basically my question is is it already too late for me to take this path breaking into the industry? Or should I start thinking about other ways in? And how necessary is assistant experience to foster a successful career in entertainment?”

**Craig:** My god.

**John:** Yeah, I know. I have a bit of “my god” in me too.

**Craig:** I mean, what has happened in our world where somebody who is 25 is like I’m over the hill. No, Aaron. Look, how old is too old? 112. Death.

You’re not too old. Objectively speaking in no way, shape, or form, in any hallway, in any building in Hollywood is 25 years too old, unless you’re talking about who is going to be playing a nine-year-old character on television. So, look, yes, tough times. And anybody that – I’ve also heard, he says, “I’ve heard that once you’re approaching your mid-to-late 20s it gets harder.” Who told you this?

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. Some grizzled 29-year-old.

**Craig:** Right. My god. Nobody knows a goddamn thing. Remember, Aaron, nobody knows anything. Nobody knows anything. Nobody knows anything.

**John:** The underline is on the knows.

**Craig:** Knows. Nobody knows anything. Is it harder and harder to find these opportunities? I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think so. I don’t know how old PAs are. When I see them I don’t know how old they are. But in my usually they’re in their 20s or early 30s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Assistants are usually in their 20s or early 30s. I don’t know. I mean, yes, if you’re in your 40s it’s going to be much tougher. People at that point sort of are like, “Look, you’ve been 15-20 years, we’ve had a pretty good look at you.” It’s just like sports, you know. I don’t think you’re making it to this show in this capacity at this point. Maybe think about a different thing.

That’s not, by the way, different than writing or anything that’s purely creative that way. But in terms of production work and stuff like that, yeah, I think it’s a reasonable question. But, no, 25. Come on. No. No.

Look, if you have trouble there may be a series of reasons why. One of them will not be your age.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Joe in NoHo asks, “A writing partner and I recently optioned a script to a big digital media company that is venturing into making features. We delivered the rewrite and the polish we were contracted to send them. And now they’ve emailed us to ask for the FDX version of the script.” That’s the Final Draft source file. “When we asked why they wanted the FDX they responded they needed it to run breakdowns for budget and casting, etc. We’re kind of split on how we feel about sending an editable version of our script for several reasons. Most of our working writer-director-producer friends say it’s not kosher and it’s disrespectful. But our attorney doesn’t see an issue with it. Thoughts?”

John, where are you on this one?

**John:** I used to have a strong bias – a strong opinion that I’m never going to send them the FDX file because that’s an opportunity for people to rewrite me, to make it easier to rewrite, to make little tweaks and changes to stuff. And so like, no, I’m only going to send in the hard copy or the PDF. And then I made an app called Highland which makes it really, really easy to take a PDF and make it back into an editable file. And so I realized it’s all moot.

They can edit the file if they want to. They can make the FDX. All I’m doing is creating a hassle for them to not give them the FDX. So I will send in the FDX file if they want it. Craig, how are you feeling these days?

**Craig:** The same. Although, yeah. So, Joe, it is a valid thing. There are budgeting and scheduling breakdown software that use the FDX version. They require that. I think you have to ask yourself how much of a protection are you affording yourself if it can be defeated by them spending $100 on a typist? Because that’s really what they could do. They could just say like, “OK, give us the PDF. We’re going to go hand it to a temp who is going to spend four hours just touch typing your thing into Final Draft.” That’s literally what – that’s the big obstacle that you’ve thrown up for them. It’s not an obstacle at all.

What you need to do is just make sure – make clear – that this is the writing I did. And since you have an attorney the attorney is wise enough to know that this is really not something that comes up a lot. Especially if you’re working with a reputable company. A big digital media company has concerns about liability. They’re not going to want to…

If you’re dealing with some rat, you know what I mean? Like some, I don’t know, fringe sleazebag then I guess. But you’re not. So, not a problem.

**John:** Yeah. There was one studio executive at a studio that is no longer a studio.

**Craig:** I know exactly who you’re talking about.

**John:** [laughs] Who was notorious for just like, you know, typing up scenes and pretending that the current writer wrote it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that’s a situation where not ideally want to give them your FDX file. But you know what?

**Craig:** It couldn’t stop him from doing it anyway.

**John:** It wouldn’t have stopped him one bit.

**Craig:** Is he still around?

**John:** He’s still around.

**Craig:** OK. I’ll have to ask you off-the-air where he landed. OK, well anyway, we had an answer for you, Joe, which is nice. Do you want to take Jordan’s question?

**John:** Yeah. Jordan asks, “I wondered if you and Craig had any thoughts about when to put a project aside or even start anew? I’ve just hit a point in my pilot script where I realize things aren’t working. It’s too convoluted. I need to simplify. And I was 45 pages in. So it’s disheartening that I even got this far into it. I wish I realized earlier that there were issues. Something I missed in development I guess.

“Is there anything that raises a red flag for you or Craig and tells you it’s time to take a step back and either reevaluate the story, the structure of the script?”

So, Craig, this ties in very well with what you just were talking about.

**Craig:** Hopefully this episode does give Jordan some general advice. But Jordan you’re asking kind of a different question than the first question. Right? So the first question is when should I put it aside or when should I start anew. But then you describe a circumstance that requires neither of those things. You don’t need to start anew. If you’re 45 pages in and things aren’t working, if you still love it and there was something about it that does work for you then just you’re rewriting, aren’t you? I mean, yeah, take a moment, hit pause, walk around, think about it. See if you can figure out what exactly isn’t correct.

OK, it’s too convoluted and you need to simplify? Do it. De-convolute. Simplify. Make it elegant. I prefer the word elegant to simple. And, yes, would it have been great if you had realized earlier that there were issues? Yeah. But you didn’t. And guess what? That’s the way it goes.

As time goes on you do start to take some seconds off of your realization time. But you don’t get it down to zero. All of us end up in that situation. You know, just mourn for a day or two and then see if you can tuck back in. If you’ve gotten to a point where you’re like oh my god this is just junk, and actually what I’ve realized by writing 45 pages is that this – I don’t even want to watch this thing in any way, shape, or form, then dump it. Move on.

**John:** Yeah. There’s an episode we did a zillion years ago sort of centered around Marie Kondo and her big thing about how to get rid of things. How to say goodbye to things. And this could be a project where like you just don’t want to write this anymore. It does not interest you. You can basically hold it in your hands, or mentally hold it in your hands and say like thank you for teaching me that I didn’t want to write this kind of story. And then you can set aside and not feel any guilt about having not finished it. Because you did learn something from it. If you are going to abandon it it’s fine. It’s cool. It helped you. It taught you that this is not a thing that you wanted to write and you are a better person for having done that work.

**Craig:** 100%. We’ve got time for one more?

**John:** Yeah. Want to take Matt from London?

**Craig:** Yeah. Matt from London asks, “Hi John and Craig.” Hi Matt. “Longtime fan of the show. Your conversations are such a friendly comfort, particularly in these strange times.”

Glad to be a comfort.

“I have an admin question, specifically about digital organization. I’m hopeless at it. Files and folders are littered in scatter shot locations all over my laptop. It’s a mess. Lockdown seems like a great time to do a bit of spring cleaning. What are some techniques you guys employ to keep your digital houses in order? How can I Marie Kondo my hard drive?” Is he psychic?

**John:** It’s weird that he was referencing that. It’s a thing that happens. I feel like we’ve talked about this on the show other times but I keep one folder per project. I keep everything related to that project in one folder. Those folders all go in Dropbox. It works out really well for me and it’s just not complicated. And so this is a good time to sort of clean up your stuff and get things sort of neatly tucked away. But I’m just a big fan of the folder that is everything related to that project and leave it at that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Folders are your friends, right? So your laptop is essentially telling you here is how you should do it. And what you’ve been doing is not doing that. So why don’t you listen to the laptop, whether it’s Windows or Mac. It’s going to afford you the same opportunity. My basic method is similar to John. I have a folder for each project. Inside that folder all of the files that eventually lead up into the first draft I will then once the first draft is handed in consolidate into a sub-folder called Draft 1. And then all the stuff that is draft two gets into Draft 2.

And then if the show goes into production then I have a production folder and production drafts. And I have casting. Everything gets its own little folder inside of the big folder. And I have one mega folder called Scripts in Progress. That’s where all the stuff I’m working on right now goes. All those folders go in there. And when I’m done with something and it’s no longer in progress it leaves the Scripts in Progress island and it goes off into the Writing Archive folder where all the old stuff lives.

This is not hard to do.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’ll take you a couple hours to sort it all through. You’ll feel great. And then once you have that set up as a system you’ll just know to do it next time.

**John:** Absolutely. And once you have that setup you’ll also back up your stuff. So if you’re using Dropbox or whatever cloud service, great. That’s one level of backups. But you’ll also turn on Time Machine. Turn on whatever other system you want to do so you have redundant backups. Stick it on a USB flash drive so you can put those someplace else. Just make sure you hold onto those old drafts because they are useful. And you will want to refer back to them at some point.

**Craig:** John, do you have – a producer emailed me the other day. It was a project that I’d done with them back in I want to say 2001.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And they were saying, hey, you know, would you be interested in kind of reviving that? And I wasn’t. But I did go and look for it. And it was in an – I think it was in an old Final Draft format that no longer seems to exist.

**John:** FDR. Yeah. I can open up FDR.

**Craig:** I don’t think it was FDR. It was something – I don’t know what it was.

**John:** I don’t think there was anything before FDR. Wow.

**Craig:** You know, I should look at what it is. Maybe it was an FDR. I’ll look and see actually. I’m looking right now.

**John:** Send it over because literally we have these sort of magic cameras and we can smash up nearly anything and convert it.

**Craig:** So the file, I’m looking at the information on it, a kind document. [laughs]

**John:** That’s not–

**Craig:** There’s no extension listed for it.

**John:** Send it over and I’ll get you an update. But I will say it’s 95% likely that Nima can smash it open for us.

**Craig:** I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t need to smash it up. [laughs] I really don’t need to. But it is interesting that there’s a line where things before that line are sort of–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and then there’s the world of PDFs came along at some point and everything theoretically from that point forward is easily readable.

**John:** It’s readable.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two small One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** The first is – so my daughter when she was little she was in gymnastics and when she did gymnastics they would get these medals when they completed like one – they learned how to do the fall, they learned how to do this. And so she ended up with like 60 medals. And she’s now coming on 15 years old.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Doesn’t really care about these medals at all.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Because she was getting six medals a month for this. And so we had all these medals. What do we do with these medals? And so my husband Mike found a place called Sports Medal Recycling. And basically you tell them what you’re sending them and you send them like all your old sports medals and they just recycle them. Because they can’t be done in normal LA recycling.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** This place can melt them down and actually reuse them. So, just a good way to sort of get rid of those old things and not feel so guilty about just throwing them in the trash where they’re not being recycled properly.

**Craig:** Ah, well how about that. All right.

**John:** Second thing is something you may enjoy. It’s a video about Pac Man and specifically it focuses on how the ghosts work in Pac Man.

**Craig:** I’ve seen this. Yes.

**John:** And how they follow you. And it’s an actually very clever sort of pre-AI. But the algorithm for why the ghosts chase you the way they do is so much smarter than I would have guessed. And so I’ll put a link to this video on this. Behind the scenes of Pac Man.

**Craig:** Damn ghosts. Early AI enemies those ghosts. Nasty. Hopefully lots of people have seen the Mythic Quest quarantine episode that came out a week or two ago.

**John:** And I noticed the Scriptnotes t-shirt that Craig Mazin’s character wears.

**Craig:** Multiple. I wore two different ones I think. Three different ones possibly. And it was very gratifying to see how well that episode was received. Excellent work by Rob McElhenney and Megan Ganz and David Hornsby who are the primary writers of that episode

One of the things that I was kind of fascinated by was the way we did it. And we had kind of talked through a little bit in our last episode. But there is an app that we were using to actually do the filming.

So we were using iPhone 11s. I guess that’s the latest iPhone?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it wasn’t just like the regular camera thing. It was an app called FiLMiC Pro. And FiLMiC Pro has like four billion little settings on it and the DP kind of had us make sure that all the things were set correctly. Shutter speeds. And exposure curves. And f-stops. I’m the worst at the DP stuff. I really don’t know anything about it. But it looked really good. It definitely looked better than I think it would have looked otherwise.

And so I thought, oh, well this FiLMiC Pro probably costs – it’s like one of those professional apps that cost like $150. $15. $15 for FiLMiC Pro. And it makes everything look quite a bit better, at least as far as I can tell. So, that’s my One Cool Thing of the week.

**John:** So, Craig, talk us through a little bit more. So, watching the episode all the times – we’re supposed to be looking at your laptop or your computer screens through this thing. So we’re looking that way. So, are you looking at the iPhone that’s doing this? Or is there another laptop? Who else is seeing the feed of that camera at the same time?

**Craig:** So we have – my personal laptop is running Zoom. And then we have this flexible gooseneck thing that props up the iPhone so that the iPhone is pointing – the camera is pointing at me. The screen of the iPhone is pointing back towards the laptop. So the laptop camera is seeing essentially the monitor, right?

**John:** Oh great.

**Craig:** Which was annoying. Because I would have to adjust the laptop screen to give a better view of the monitor, but then also adjust the camera to give them the camera angle they wanted on me. And then readjust the laptop camera to get the better angle.

**John:** So I assumed that it was piping out over the Internet.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And recording – that would be great if it could. But it did not.

**Craig:** No, no. It was not doing that. So all FiLMiC does is just suck in data at very high resolution with all sorts of little – so one of the nice things is you can create settings profiles. So before they sent us the phones the DP and production staff went through and made sure that FiLMiC Pro was dialed in exactly as they wanted. And then they put it under a Mythic Quest setting.

**John:** [Crosstalk] and such, yeah.

**Craig:** All of that stuff was kind of done, all the color temperatures, and yada-yada. But there were still a few things that we had to do to make sure it was correct. And it did seem to work really well. So, yeah, our deal was we were basically, as actors, we’re looking pretty much directly into the lens. So it’s interesting because I’ve got like my earbuds in and I can hear for instance Ashly Burch who plays Rachel, I can hear her. I can’t really see her, because she’s–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Blocked. So I can hear her. So I have to talk to her as if she’s the iPhone lens. And one of the just little techniques that Rob said seemed to work really well and so we would do it is leaning in closer to that lens. If we wanted to make a point. But it was an interesting thing to not see someone like that.

**John:** How were you recording sound? Was that recorded separately?

**Craig:** No. It was recorded at the same time. So with sound we were using a Shure mic. The Shure brand. Classic mic brand. And so this particular Shure mic would connect into the iPhone through the lightning port or whatever that port is on the iPhone. I guess now it’s a USB-C port, isn’t it? No, it’s still lightning, right?

**John:** The iPhones are still lightning, yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s stuck in there and then we would point it at us and then there was a separate Shure mic that had the audio department. So then the sound guys had their settings for that. And so–

**John:** And so it was a lav hidden in your shirt? Or where was the microphone?

**Craig:** No. The microphone was on the phone pointing directly back at me.

**John:** I got you.

**Craig:** Because they didn’t want to have us like lav’ing ourselves up and then wiring something back over. The phone was the issue, right? Because they didn’t want to send over a separate recorder. There’s also no syncing.

So in production, you know, people think the clapboard is just for like, clap, but it’s got a crystal in it that’s syncing the audio with the numbers on the slate which the camera is filming. That’s how they sync everything up. So they didn’t have that opportunity here. But FiLMiC Pro understood that it was going to be pulling audio in from the Shure. And, I don’t know, it was all very well thought out.

**John:** Great. And so did you end up clap syncing before you started recording things or not?

**Craig:** You know what? They had us do it like once and I think they gave up. [laughs] Because I think they were like, OK, everybody clapped at once.

**John:** Yeah, it’s hard to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, everybody is getting their Zoom audio at slightly different times and so I think they just had to kind of eyeball it.

**John:** I was looking at how Seth Meyers is doing his show from his attic. And he’s just on an iPad. And the iPad is working as the teleprompter and it’s using the front-facing camera on his iPad is what’s recording him. And it works.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, the front-facing camera is generally nowhere near as good as the back camera. But if you want to be able to see yourself you need the front-facing one, right? So that was the weird part of this is we did use the back camera because it’s a far better camera, but you couldn’t see yourself. Which I guess kind of you didn’t want to anyway. I mean, I don’t want to see the monitor when I’m acting. I just want to be able to see the person.

Because, you know, John, I’m a very accomplished actor. [laughs]

**John:** Yes. So as you’re putting yourself on tape for Tevye, that is choices he’s going to make.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve been around, man. I’ve acted in a show for a number of episodes that is fewer than 10. [laughs]

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

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can see some of them featured in Mythic Quest. They’re available at Cotton Bureau. There’s a link in the show notes for that.

In the show notes you’ll also find other stuff we talked about. At the site you’ll find the 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 just about to record on erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s awesome.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It’s our bonus topic. So back when I was writing Arlo Finch I met with a bunch of the audio book narrators and you can hear some of that on the Launch podcast I did. And one of the things that was interesting as I was talking with them is that most of them use their real names for when they’re recording normal books, but they use special names, alternate names, for when they’re recording erotic fiction. And I just love that the same folks who are reading children’s books are also reading erotic fiction.

And also that there’s still erotic fiction. There’s still a market for erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Is there anything less erotic than the word “erotic,” by the way? It’s such a boner killer.

**John:** When Madonna sang Erotic for her album Erotica she had a good intonation for that, so I get that. But erotic is not–

**Craig:** Nah. Blech.

**John:** But this is maybe an unfair and misleading setup for I really want to talk about meta fiction and fan fiction and sort of that intersection because while there still is erotic fiction even in the age of Pornhub and stuff like that, what’s probably most fascinating is user-generated fiction which is often porny but not always porny. Sometimes it’s slash fiction. But there’s a whole different category of fiction that didn’t exist when we were kids.

**Craig:** This is one of the great bait and switches of my life. [laughs] I can’t believe. I mean, if people are listening at home and they are upset, I just want you to know I am, too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I was told that we would be reading erotic fiction.

**John:** All right. Well, we can at least talk about erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Craig, did you read erotic fiction at any point in your life?

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, I think we should ask Sexy Craig that question.

**John:** Sexy Craig, have you ever read erotic fiction.

**Craig:** I’ve lived erotic fiction. I’ve lived it, John. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, I never thought this would happen to me. Yeah, of course I did. I mean, when I was a kid. So the porn that was available when you and I were youngsters–

**John:** Was all printed.

**Craig:** It was all printed. The thing that you would go to – if you were a young straight lad like myself you wanted Penthouse. You didn’t want Playboy. Playboy was too fancy. It was too classy. Hustler was hard to get and really did make you feel like you were wrong. So Penthouse was a fantastic middle ground. It was dirty enough but you didn’t feel like you were just falling apart as a human being.

And Penthouse had this section called Forum. And in Penthouse Forum people would write these stories in.

**John:** Like I never thought it could happen to me, but…

**Craig:** Every single story had some guy who was like I never thought this would happen to me but I went to a laundromat and I was doing my laundry and three women came in and…

Yeah, and they were great. They totally worked. [laughs] They did the job.

**John:** And they were all fake. None of those were actual real things that happened.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And those were probably the direct predecessor to online sort of porny fiction which was very much imagining scenarios with like famous people. And sort of a newer phenomenon as I was sort of researching this was have you ever heard of Y/N?

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** So Y/N is Your Name. It’s a placeholder for your name. And so it’s fiction where the reader is inserted into the place where we see Y/N.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So it’s a thing that you see on like Wattpad and other sort of online fiction pieces.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s first person/second person. It’s a weird sort of POV thing. But where you as you’re reading it you’re supposed to put yourself into that position.

**Craig:** Do you actually enter your name so that it is stringed in to a variable?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Oh, you have to do it in your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** You have to be your own variable–

**Craig:** Somebody ought to take care of that because that would be way better.

**John:** Yeah. If you’re going to insert your variables.

**Craig:** Do your variables, come on. Come on, man.

**John:** Get yourself some good, fun times. My experience with erotic fiction was, yes, like friends would have Penthouse or Playboy or that kind of stuff, but there were also these trade paperback books that were – they were definitely mostly oriented towards women but there were some that were sort of general purpose or sort of male-oriented.

And they’re weird. I can’t imagine that there would be any market for those kind of things now. But there was a market for everything because that was all you had.

**Craig:** That’s all you had. But I mean you were like in a porn store?

**John:** Yeah. Like in a porn store. So the same kind of place that would ultimately sell videotapes before then would have like cheapy trade paperback kind of–

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Fiction like that.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** I’m sure there’s people who collect. Maybe I’ll look for those because I’m sure the artwork was all fantastic.

**Craig:** There’s an interesting just topic of the porn gap for gay boys in the 1980s, right?

**John:** Oh, for sure.

**Craig:** How did – I mean, now it doesn’t exist, right?

**John:** There was Playgirl.

**Craig:** Yeah, there was Playgirl, but like where did you even find Playgirl? It seemed like Playgirl was a myth. You would talk about it but I never saw it.

**John:** Yeah. So but it was hard to find nude male representations outside of medical things. It was literally sort of hard to find that source of stuff. It’s also why I feel in writing and in fiction you found people searching for queer characters even when they really weren’t quite there. Or they were being so carefully coded into what was there. And so you ended up like, you know, if you could see a movie like Maurice, like oh my gosh, there’s actual men kissing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well wasn’t the birth of slash fiction was – maybe I’ve got this wrong – but in my head the first versions of it were homosexual romances between Captain Kirk and Spock.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what I consider the initial slash fiction. I’m sure there’s some other history but that’s what I think popular culture considers the first slash fic.

**Craig:** They should do that. I mean, honestly. Like we’ve had 400 Star Treks. Just do it.

**John:** Go straight for that.

**Craig:** Yeah, just do it. I would watch that.

**John:** So slash fic sort of leads into – what I will segue into talking about like why these exist in print forms. We haven’t seen a lot of them in actual video forms or at least we don’t see this in actual real entertainment that people are making out there. So the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt special I thought was terrific. It was the most recent Netflix special where you get to make choices between who is going to – at decision points you decide should Kimmy do this or should Kimmy do that. And it branches out in sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of way.

And I just feel like there’s more – it’s weird that it’s still such a new place. Because we’ve had videogames for a long time but we haven’t had the ability to do a lot of the kind of stuff you see in print form in terms of user control over the experience in film or video.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, we try. I think part of it is that we just like receiving video. You know, we like receiving it and–

**John:** Passive.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s passive. When you and I were kids they came up with the Choose Your Own Adventure books and they were great. And we enjoyed them. But I mean the stories weren’t good.

**John:** They were not good.

**Craig:** Because the point is they were designed for you to go pick your way through them, but they were kind of disposable. And they weren’t literature. I mean, literature you want to receive. But what is interesting is that there is this whole the world of receiving literature that is interactive in the sense that fans are creating it. So you mention in the show notes here Wattpad. I mean, my daughter is on Wattpad all the time. I mean, she is reading Wattpad constantly.

**John:** Yeah. And I think within Wattpad it is fascinating that there are genres that exist within Wattpad where it’s like how is this a genre and yet it’s such a thriving genre. So there’s like gay military werewolf is like a big Wattpad genre.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** Which is kind of great. It’s scratching an itch that you wouldn’t realize that people out there had.

**Craig:** So specific.

**John:** Yeah. And so I do wonder at what point we’re going to be mining some of those if not specific stories then the general universes of those kind of stories to create – where is the True Blood for the people who want to see the military werewolf gay romances?

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, eventually we will be able to have an entire channel. There will be the network, right? We are fragmenting things out beautifully. I mean, Wattpad, my understanding is – the way my daughter explains it to me, and I hope you didn’t just get into trouble, is that it’s not erotic fiction.

**John:** Oh, no, no, no.

**Craig:** It’s fan fiction.

**John:** It’s fan fiction but like–

**Craig:** It’s like romances and stuff.

**John:** And so what I’m saying about military werewolves, it can be romance without being sort of erotic.

**Craig:** They kiss and they’re in love. Yeah. Are they both werewolves or is it like a non-werewolf? Like he’s in the military and sergeant has a secret? And then the moon comes up. Is it like that?

**John:** I don’t know the outer limits. I don’t know what the fans would consider the boundaries of what that would be. But, yes, that feels right and also it feels like the overlap of what a pack would be like and those – that kind of order and the wildness versus the military thing feels right. So, there’s a lot of good space there.

**Craig:** The idea of representing unbridled, unrestrained masculinity in a safe context of a story.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Because werewolves are dangerous and brutal and they bite your face and stuff. But, you know, I feel like either you or I could write the greatest gay werewolf military story on Wattpad. We just come in and just dunk on everyone. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe we already have. Maybe this is all a setup for just this.

Now, I can’t believe I’m this far into the conversation without bringing this up is that of course we look at 50 Shades of Grey. This is an example of exactly what we’re talking about. So this was a woman who wrote fan fiction that hit exactly the right nerve and became an international sensation when it crossed over into popular culture. So, I guess I’m just – I’m reminding us that this has happened before and it seems so right to be happening now.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s interesting. You would think that there would be more. 50 Shades of Grey seemed like it was heralding the beginning of something. But it may occupy a unique space. Because I haven’t seen it happen again in that regard. Unless I’ve missed something major. And it’s been quite some time.

**John:** It has been a long time.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that was fan fiction that was roughly based on–

**John:** On Twilight.

**Craig:** Twilight. Which has werewolves.

**John:** See? It all fits together. I mean, it’s really our calling. It’s what we need to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Werewolves.

**John:** Werewolves.

**Craig:** Gay werewolves in the military.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** It’s what we want.

**Craig:** OK. I’ll do it. I mean, I will. Is there a ranking on Wattpad? I want to be number one.

**John:** Whatever the top things are, that’s what our goal is.

**Craig:** I want to grossly abuse my power as a writer to pointlessly make my way to the top of that chart.

**John:** Ah-ha. Yeah. We’re really nothing if not competitive.

**Craig:** It’s weird. I’m a weirdo. This was great.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Larchmont Author Extravaganza](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/local-authors-060620) with Chevalier’s this Saturday June 6 with guests Stuart Gibbs, Aline Brosh McKenna, Derek Haas and more!
* [Sports Medal Recycling](http://sportsmedalrecycling.com)
* [How Pac Man Works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4RHbnBkyh0)
* [FiLMiC Pro](https://www.filmicpro.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [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 John Venable ([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](https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scriptnotes/454standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/getting-back-to-set).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 453 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Now, usually on this podcast we’re talking about writing, but today we are focused on the goal of our writing which is to make film and television programs. Ever since the pandemic began production has been at a dead stop, but now the industry is starting to make plans for getting back to set.

**Craig:** Yes indeed. We want to have an in-depth discussion on why it’s so challenging to reopen film and television production. And to do so we thought we should welcome back two of our OG guests. Is the G also for guests? I mean, they’re not gangsters. I think we’re going to welcome back two of our O guests.

**John:** O guests. Our first O guest, Aline Brosh McKenna. Welcome back to the program, Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** That’s me!

**John:** You are the screenwriter extraordinaire. You are also the co-creator and showrunner of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Most excitingly we’ve just been able to announce your feature directing debut. Aline what is this movie that you’re directing?

**Aline:** It is a movie for Netflix. It is called Your Place or Mine. It is being produced by your friends Jason Bateman and Michael Costigan at Aggregate.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**Aline:** And Lauren Neustadter and your friend Reese Witherspoon at Hello Sunshine. And it stars Reese Witherspoon. And it is a comedy of the romantic variety.

**John:** I can’t imagine why you would be doing a romantic comedy. Aline, congratulations. I’m so excited to see you directing a big feature-feature film.

**Craig:** Well done, Aline.

**Aline:** Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m excited.

**John:** Our second guest also directs big feature-feature films. His name is Rawson Marshall Thurber, writer and director of Dodgeball, We’re the Millers. Last time we heard from him he was down in Georgia where they had just stopped production of Red Notice, the big movie he was shooting with Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot. But now you’re back in Los Angeles, Rawson?

**Rawson Thurber:** Yep. Got back on Friday.

**John:** So I want to talk to you about, you know, stopping production, thinking about restarting production. Both of you are sort of thinking about features, but Aline you have experience in television as well. So, I want to get into all the decisions and complications of trying to get back into production not knowing what’s going to happen next with the pandemic.

But, first, we have some follow up. Craig, previous episodes we talked about the secret mission that you were on that took you away for an episode of Scriptnotes. We can now reveal what your secret mission was.

**Craig:** So, we were working on the quarantine episode of Mythic Quest which is now available – I think it became available last night like around midnight or something via Apple+ TV, AppleTV+. I should know, because I’m on it.

**John:** You should know, because you’re an actor on this show.

**Craig:** I’m an actor on their network. I think it’s AppleTV+. The point is it’s the Apple thing. I think it’s great. And I’m not the guy that likes to pump up his own stuff, you know. I’m not like “I did a thing and it’s great.” I didn’t do this thing. I didn’t write it. I act in it briefly. But I think they did a gorgeous job and it’s beautiful. Made me cry. It made me laugh. It was all of those wonderful things. And it touches on the quarantine experience I think in the most authentic way.

It was really crazy to make it. It involved putting cameras on mounts in front of a lap top using Zoom and the camera and a special microphone. You have to do all this yourself. You have like a DP going, “Great, tilt down for me.” So then you go over and you tilt down with this not accurate mechanism and then somebody else goes, “Great, can you move your laptop a little so we can see the camera that you just tilted?” And then it involved these Rube Goldberg inventions.

It was all bananas. And it works great. So, I honestly hope everybody sees it. If not for anything other than the excellent writing by Rob McElhenney and Megan Ganz and David Hornsby. And the brilliant performance of Charlotte Nicdao who just breaks your heart. She’s so good.

**John:** Now, you were already in production on the second season when the pandemic struck, so this episode takes place in a gap between the two seasons?

**Craig:** Yeah. So they were in production for about two days. And then they shut down. It’s just the way the timing worked out. So this episode takes place in between season one and season two. Meaning that when season two arrives season two will be post-pandemic.

**John:** So it’s very much like the British model of having Christmas episodes that don’t quite take place in either timeline?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The pandemic is our Christmas is really what we’re coming down to.

**Craig:** It’s Pandemic-Mas. But I just think it’s really great. And people seem to be loving it. So, I’m very pleased with that because, I mean, they worked so, so hard. I mean, I’m in three scenes and those were really hard to do. To do all the scenes and then edit it and do all the mix – everything had to be done remotely. It was just bananas. So hat’s off to the Mythic Quest crew. They did an incredible job. And I hope people do see that episode.

**John:** Absolutely. I have two little bits of news here before we get into our main topic. First is I’ve gotten involved with these groups that work with foster kids, especially blind foster kids for research I was doing for this movie I hope to be directing at some point in the future. To help them out I am raffling off a 60-minute one-on-one writing session on Zoom, where we can talk about your script or your book or anything. The proceeds go to help these amazing foster charities. So there will be a link in the show notes for that, but it’s part of #FosterChallenge. If you just Google that hashtag you’ll find me.

Second off, this past week it was announced that Prince William and Kate Middleton, their best friends had a baby. They named their baby Arlo Finch, which seems impossible.

**Rawson:** What?

**Aline:** Did you get to the bottom of this?

**John:** No. And that’s why I’m bringing this up on this episode because I feel like somebody listening to this show must have some insight into why this couple named their child Arlo Finch. Because it seems like too great of a coincidence that they’re naming it after the hero of my trilogy novel series.

**Rawson:** That’s actually true?

**John:** It’s actually true. His name is Arlo Finch Bear.

**Craig:** Arlo Finch Bear.

**John:** Yeah, the husband’s last name is Bear which is a remarkable name anyway.

**Craig:** Oh no, I think his first name is Bear. It says Bear McClane.

**John:** Oh, Bear McClane. Well, very good. So his name is Arlo Finch Bear McClane.

**Craig:** Yes, so I guess it’s like he has two middle names because he’s fancy and English?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Arlo Finch Bear.

**John:** So, somebody listening to this program must have insight into the British aristocracy and can give me an answer on how this child was named Arlo Finch. Because there have been some other Arlo Finches born and the people have written to me saying like, “Oh, we just really loved the name so we’ve named her Arlo Finch.” But for a fancy British couple to name it, it just feels like too remarkable to go unexamined.

**Craig:** We’re going to solve this.

**Aline:** I mean, does this have to do with your close personal ties to the royal family?

**John:** I don’t think so. I know some people who know some people in the royal family, but they don’t know the right people in the royal family. So someone listening to this program will know.

**Aline:** Amazing.

**John:** So if you do know why you need to tweet at me or email me at ask@johnaugust.com. So that is the second most pressing thing for us to address in the podcast today. The most pressing though is let’s talk about production and getting back to set.

Let’s start with we had to leave set and maybe Rawson you could kick us off, because you were in the middle of production on Red Notice when you had to shut down. What were those last days and hours like as you were making the decision to pull the plug?

**Rawson:** Yeah, it was a very, very strange experience. We were day 38 of a 70-day shoot, so just a little past halfway. And we’d been tracking the pandemic for quite some time, not really sure how it was going to affect us or if it was. And we originally had a big opening action sequence set in Rome. We’d scouted it. Second unit was about a week away from shooting in Italy and then the outbreak happened in Italy. And we had to pull the plug there. And then we started scouting London. And so I was trying to rewrite the opening while we were shooting. And then we were going to shut down and go to London to scout.

At that point we weren’t really thinking that we would have to stop shooting domestically. So it was already a daily conversation, sometimes even an hourly conversation for weeks leading up to day 38 in which we pulled the plug I think after a Thursday shoot. We finished a sequence and our producer, Bo Flynn, and Dwayne Johnson gathered the entire crew together and let them know that we were going to take Friday off and reassess over the weekend. I think Netflix was huddling up at that point to figure out what they were going to do with all their productions.

And so when we left it was a very strange way of pausing, because most of us were pretty sure we weren’t coming back Monday. But I don’t think any of us really thought that it would be months, and months, and months, and months before we got back. So it was a strange way to end summer camp I suppose.

**John:** Now, Aline, through all of this you don’t have a TV show shooting right now, but this easily could have happened while you were doing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend where you would have had to just walk away from everything. And put yourself in that position. Imagine if this is happening. What are the conversations and who are you consulting with as showrunner about the decision to stop?

**Aline:** Well, it’s interesting. You know, as they say the best predictor of the future is the past. And none of us, including the somewhat old people on this podcast, we just have never been through this before. So, one of the really odd things about that experience was like who to ask. Who has the answer? And nobody does. And the answer is evolving. And the information has been evolving.

I’ve tried to not check my mail/computer/whatever constantly because you can sort of drive yourself mad waiting for the breakthrough. But, yeah, I mean, I think because your first responsibility is to protect the people who you are working with. That obviously comes first. And so that call seems like you have to stop. And the ramifications are enormous on a production in every single way.

You know, with a TV show you would be mid-episode on several things. So, it would affect not just what you were shooting but what you had shot, what you could shoot. It’s going to interrupt a lot of episodic storytelling. Because as Craig said on Mythic Quest they’re going to stick something in the middle. But do you address it? What timeline do you go to? Do you go backwards? Do you go forward? There are huge implications story wise. But it must have been really hard Rawson in that moment even to know who to consult. Because with such an evolving stream of information.

**Rawson:** Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think for us we knew it was serious and I think it was about, at least initially, about just hitting pause for a second while we all had the conversations that we needed to have. But it was very, very weird. Ending a show like that, ending a shoot like that, you’re saying goodbye to your AC and your boom guy. And hair and makeup. Everybody. And you don’t know if you’re going to see them on Monday or if you’re going to see them in two weeks.

And then suddenly this entire group of people that you’ve been working 16 hours a day with for sometimes five, six days a week, you’re talking to all the time and they’re just kind of gone. It’s a very strange way of doing things.

**John:** Right when it happened I thought it was like, oh, it’s going to feel like a snow day or a blizzard where everyone has to go away and then everyone is going to come back. And it’s become clear like not everyone is going to come back in the same way.

**Rawson:** No.

**John:** And you’re going to have to basically reassemble a new production.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** But before we get into that production side let’s think about for folks who may not know how movies are made so clearly, or television shows, there’s the writing and preproduction and that is a thing which has probably been the least impacted. Because what we do as writers that hasn’t really changed that much. We’ve talked on the program about virtual writer’s rooms and the impact that that’s had. And it’s been weird but it’s not been catastrophic. That stuff is still happening. Pitches are still selling. All that stuff is being done on Zoom but it is happening.

Post-production like Craig was talking about with Mythic Quest, it’s possible. It’s really difficult, but it’s possible. People can work on those things on their home computers. Even animation can still keep happening. Chris Nee was on the podcast to say like weirdly animation on the stuff that she’s been working on continues.

But production is a special beast because it’s actually a physical act where people need to come together to do a thing. And that’s what is so challenging. They can’t all be sort of weird bottle episodes like what Craig did for this Mythic Quest pandemic. We’re going to have to find a way to get back to the set and back to something approaching a normal production flow.

So, Craig, do you want to talk us through sort of like the things that as we talk about reopening businesses in general, the things you’re looking to do? And then we can talk about why those are so challenging with physical production on sets?

**Craig:** We’ve been talking amongst ourselves anyway. I mean, everybody that works on stuff has been hearing rumors about how things are going to work. And there’s basic guidelines that we can kind of carry through from just regular life, so we know we want to repeat those. The easiest one is the fewer people the better. I mean, so when you’re talking about anything you’re talking about a lot of people. Any production is a lot of people. Way more than you think. I mean, the first time you walk on a set as a writer you go, “Why?” Later you find out. And then the first time you’re directing a movie you go, “Where are more people? I need more people. But don’t ask me anymore questions. Just do your jobs.”

So, they’re going to have to figure out how to break the crews down into skeleton crews, sort of essential crews, which you can do. And we know because we do this all the time when we have to. Classic example weirdly enough is nudity. When sometimes we’re dealing with nudity on sets you just break it down to the absolute fewest amount of people who need to be on the set so that it doesn’t turn into some weird peepshow.

So we know how to do this, but we also know that when you do it things go slower. So, right off the bat there is a cost that is going to have to get folded in. And one question that we as creators certainly are going to be confronted by is are we going to get the same amount of time we need to make the same product given that it’s going to take more time to make the same product?

So Rawson had a 70-day schedule. He’s shot 38 days. Will he only have 32 days given to him when he gets back?

**Rawson:** I can answer.

**Craig:** And do you have an answer to that?

**Rawson:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do.

**Craig:** What is it?

**Rawson:** Well, I think the math right now we think is about one extra day per five.

**Craig:** OK.

**Aline:** So that’s about 20%. Yeah.

**Craig:** That sounds right.

**Rawson:** We’re going to go back to our dear friends at Netflix and say, “We know it was 32, but we think it’s maybe 40.”

**Craig:** Yup. And that is a very significant increase in costs for them.

**Rawson:** Absolutely. Massive.

**Craig:** So that’s something that we’re going to – I think for projects like yours it makes sense to just sort of bite the bullet. For projects that are yet to be shot that’s where it gets a little dicier because then there’s a new normal of, well, this is what it costs to shoot a day. And the amount of money we had to give you hasn’t changed. So, shoot less.

**Rawson:** Yup.

**Craig:** So that’s one thing that we’re going to be dealing with. Obviously from a medical point of view people are going to need to be tested. Currently the tests are not particularly reliable. And also they take time. So, just because you test negative in the morning does not mean that you are not completely infected by four pm. So that’s going to be tricky. And then there’s physical isolation from each other. The most cramped, intimate space on a film or television set is the makeup and hair trailer. And that is going to look different.

And all of this is going to slow things down and gum stuff up until such time as there is a reliable vaccine or really effective treatment that reduces the danger of COVID to nothing more than the common cold.

**Aline:** One thing I think they’re doing, or they must be doing, or they should be doing is all these departments will have I think probably very good ideas about how they can reduce the number of people and still do the job at the level they would like it to be done. You know, all these different departments have expertise in their own areas and so they will be able to say, “Hey, I think we can economize here on smaller number of people. Or here are the best practices.” Because each department just has a really deep sense of expertise in their own area. So how do you deal with props? How are props disinfected? How are they transported?

How many shopping trips can you do away with on costumes? And all the folks in those departments will have ideas and thoughts. Because people want to get back to work. I think everybody will be presenting their best ideas about how to be safe, because everyone wants to go back to work but everybody wants to be safe.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about if this were a general business. Sort of the general practices for opening a business. You would say, OK, the people who can work from home work from home. And we talked about that with preproduction and post. Some of that can really be done from home. A real question about how much of the production office work can be done from home. Those are the people who are sort of organizing the paperwork and all the stuff that has to happen. Some of that can be outsourced but some stuff you do need a physical body there to do.

Social distance. Keep people apart. Yes, to some degree you can. But you can’t social distance hair and makeup. There’s things that really can’t be social distanced. But we can close break rooms. Sort of like close craft service. We can do some of that stuff.

We tell businesses that they should tell employees to stay home if they’re sick. And so they have paid time off. The challenge of our industry and production is that we are kind of gig work. And you don’t call in sick to things. So changing those standards.

Obviously masks are going to be important and a lot of people on a set can wear a mask. Most people on set can wear a mask. But not the actors who are in a scene. So how are you going to protect those folks who can’t wear a mask during those moments?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also an amazing new excuse or strategy for poorly behaved actors who feel like throwing tantrums. Because there were certain kinds of tantrums you could throw and you’d have to really throw a big one that really stops stuff. But now you can just say, “My throat hurts. I’m not coming out of my trailer. My throat hurts.”

**John:** “I’ve got a tickle.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “And it could be because I don’t like this dialogue.”

**Craig:** I can think of one actor in particular who is sort of famous for this kind of behavior. And he, I’m sure, is looking at COVID and licking his chops at the thought of COVID-ing a production during the middle of a tantrum.

**Aline:** Jesus, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** That’s intense, man.

**Rawson:** And you’re not going to say who? Name him or her right now.

**Craig:** I’m not going to do that.

**Rawson:** Oh, come on. Boo.

**John:** Write it on a slip of paper and hold it up for the video.

**Craig:** I could do that.

**John:** All right.

**Rawson:** I want to see that.

**John:** Other guidance you would give for a business is to try to keep stable groups. And so if the same people are always around each other that’s safer than if people are constantly coming in and out of the group. But unfortunately in productions we’re always adding in people.

**Rawson:** Tom Hanks?!

**Craig:** [laughs] By the way, Tom Hanks, the one guy that can’t get away with it because he’s had COVID.

**Rawson:** Fair point.

**John:** He’s already gone through it.

**Rawson:** If that’s true, right? If the antibody thing works.

**John:** It feels like the antibody thing is–

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** It’s likely the case. But people should keep their bubbles kind of small and unfortunately on sets people are constantly coming in and out of production. The people you need for a day may not be the same – you might not have the same cast and crew day to day.

A sitcom with a really contained cast and crew is probably an easier, safer bubble to maintain than a giant production like Rawson’s.

**Rawson:** Yeah, I think just speaking for me and my production, it’s such a strange character, right? This sort of post-pandemic pre-vaccine pocket of trying to make your – or continue making your film. It’s a real strange challenge. And for us, well one thing I’m actually looking forward to is kind of a quieter set with less people. I know that’s like a very, very small silver lining. But it can get really cluttered and really full for no apparent reason. So the idea of shooting as though you are shooting a love scene for the entire show seems kind of strangely refreshing. So I’m looking forward to that in a small way.

**Aline:** Rawson, do you think it will effect scheduling? Like shooting outside is probably going to be the chances of transmitting outside are lower. And then certain types of scenes. So maybe people are also looking at schedules to realize, well, we’re shooting outside here so we can have a few more people here. And then here. So, yeah.

**Rawson:** That’s absolutely the case. We have a couple big scenes still to come. We have this giant 500-extra – or used to be 500-extra – masquerade ball kind of scene where Dwayne and Gal do this sort of really fun sexy dance number together. Kind of old school Hollywood style. And we don’t know how we’re going to do it, or if we can. And so I think it’s a combination of new methods and procedures of shooting, but also just speaking on the writing side of changing the script.

**Aline:** It takes place outside on a giant football field. And the dance is sort of like a square dance. Everyone is six feet away.

**Rawson:** Six feet apart.

**Aline:** So it’s sort of like, yeah, one of those. Or one of those courtly old fashioned dances.

**John:** Like a line dance.

**Rawson:** Yeah, a line dance.

**John:** A line dance would do it.

**Rawson:** A line dance. Nothing sexier than a line dance. I think we all know that.

**Craig:** So hot.

**Rawson:** But, yeah, it’s a sincere challenge to try to figure out how to execute it. And there are a lot of really good early ideas about how to do it.

**Craig:** There’s always going to be people that need to be jammed together to do this stuff properly. And what I do get worried about is there is a general macho attitude when it comes to production which is, oh, did you break your leg? Well, just here put some bungee cords around it and do your job. Nothing stops production. That’s kind of always been the case. The show must go on.

This has stopped production. When it returns I can easier see some people going, yeah, I don’t wear seatbelts. Do you know what I mean? We don’t have it. Let’s go. Let’s make a movie. There can be a kind of philosophical pressure.

And then what happens is the loosest arrangement becomes the normal arrangement, because everybody just kind of says, “Oh, they’re not doing it over there.” And then people are like, “OK, I guess we don’t have to do that stupid, annoying thing anymore.” And it can cause real trouble.

Even in prep, just writing in that stupid van is dangerous.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know?

**Aline:** Well, might I also say right now with the nature of the disease is you’re not endangering just yourself. You’re endangering others. And that’s a thing that some people are struggling to metabolize in the general public is the idea that the mask is for others. But I think, you know, sets are cooperative and they’re communal. And I think and hope that people will understand that you’re looking to protect other people. And your actions are not just, you know, so it’s not like I’m just going to go out and break my leg. I can walk it off. This is really – look, in an ideal world this sort of strengthens people’s sense of interdependency and community and all that. But that really is what it is, you know?

**Craig:** We’re going to have to pay people if they’re sick. That’s the most important thing.

**Aline:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** We cannot get away with saying to people, “You need to tell us if you’re sick, because if you are you can’t work. Also, if you don’t work you don’t get your hours.” We can’t do it. Because they’ll lie. And I don’t blame them. They need to support themselves. And they should live in a system where they get paid, even if they catch a deadly pandemic, in order to protect all of us. That’s something that I just feel Hollywood has to do. Because if it doesn’t it’s just asking for trouble.

**John:** Now, let’s talk about as Aline was mentioning the people who in different departments are specialists. They are incredibly good at their one area of expertise. And within that area of expertise they can cover for each other if they needed to. So, if the head of the makeup department were to become sick or couldn’t come in to work that day, that person’s job could be covered. They’d make it work.

But there’s certain people on a set who are irreplaceable. And so the director – Rawson, if you got sick you would shut down. If one of your big actors got sick you would shut down. You would reschedule to the degree you could reschedule. But you would have to shut down. So, that’s a real challenge that production faces is that certain individuals if they’re gone everything just stops. And the challenge for that is not only how do you get the production running but how do you get insurance for that production. How do you get a bond on that production so that you can make it financially worthwhile to sort of keep going?

I’m sure that’s part of the discussions that you’re having on Red Notice is figuring out sort of how do you cover this on an insurance level and who is on the hook for if you do need to shut down again.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Absolutely. Those discussions are happening with our producing team and certainly Netflix. I mean, that’s something that’s going to come top down from the financiers in terms of the insurance side of things. But you’re exactly correct that, you know, everybody is important and safety – everyone’s health is incredibly important. But there is a difference between a PA waking up with a fever and staying home. You can keep shooting. But if number one, two, or three on the call sheet is ill, I mean, that’s a catastrophic issue.

**Aline:** Well, the testing – presumably the testing will get a little faster, getting the results more quickly. Because if someone gets a test and it takes five days to get the results back that’s a huge challenge in terms of presenting–

**John:** The challenge though is if Dwayne Johnson does test positive and you have to stop production that is—

**Rawson:** Who pays for that?

**Craig:** It’s a disaster. So then the other option that some people have been talking about is quarantining everybody together before the shoot begins. And just saying we’re showmancing together, all of us. And nobody leaves the compound.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about some of the different solutions that are being proposed and so what you’re describing is sort of the Tyler Perry scenario. So, Tyler Perry has his own film studio in Atlanta and he essentially can just move everyone to this former military base, shoot for several weeks, and everyone test before they go and they basically are locked down on this sort of basically like an island to shoot there. It’s not realistic for many scenarios, but it’s realistic for the things that he wants to shoot.

So, you can see his being able to do that. You can also imagine some true indie films that are sort of very small cast and crew who could do it that way as well. So, that works for certain kinds of productions. It does not work for Red Notice.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It doesn’t work for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Craig:** No. If you’re international or if you’re stage-bound here in Los Angeles it doesn’t make any sense. If you’re making Lord of the Rings it could work. I mean, if you’re going somewhere that has sort of proven itself to have managed COVID very effectively, like New Zealand, and you’re already going to be isolated because you’re in the woods, the forest, and your own sets. In those situations it’s camp movie anyway, right? Then I think it’s possible.

I mean, Aline, as you’re thinking ahead to directing your film have either you or Netflix started to have discussions about how it might work?

**Aline:** I’m not at that phase yet. And so I think there will be other things that roll out before. And so really people like Rawson are sort of on the frontlines. People who were in the middle of shooting, in active prep. And we will learn a lot about how things need to be from how they’ve been. But in that process I just – it’s very important to protect everyone as much as possible with the information that we have. And, you know, I wonder if some of those decisions that are made around the size of scenes and the scale and scope of things, you know, you can always go back to certain types of scenes and say how can I scale this back. It’s just, you know, Rawson is making a big action movie with lots of people in it. My piece is a little bit more self-contained.

But it’s a community that really exchanges information extremely well, right? Because crews move around and people will be already have been informing each other. So I think by the time I’m getting there we will have a lot more information on what some of the best practices are.

You know, one of the things about quarantining for a long stretch of time that I think about is one of the barriers to entry that we’ve discussed before for either I’m going to say women, but it’s also parents of young children is it’s a challenge to leave a child for a huge chunk of time, especially if you’re heavily involved in the day-to-day. Breastfeeding, or, you know. So that’s a challenge. I think for some directors that will be a real tough proposition is to be like 70 days or whatever. If it’s a big, huge movie, yeah.

**John:** In terms of the kinds of projects we might be picking, over the last two weeks I’ve had conversations with all the streamers about this one project I’ve been going at pitching. And the last five minutes of those conversations have all been about producibility. Basically like, oh, is this a thing that we could actually make? And the thing I’ve been pitching is uniquely well-suited for sort of a we’re on sound stages and we could do it like the Mandalorian where we have virtual sets. It is a very producible kind of thing. And that’s been an interesting thing for these streamers to hear about is that it’s very makeable in this environment. It’s not huge crowd scenes. It’s much easier right now to do a big space movie than it would be to do The Bourne Identity, where you have to have a lot of real locations and a lot of real physical interactions with things.

**Craig:** The Mandalorian is perfect, right? Because Mandalorian you have virtual sets and theoretically you can have an entire season with puppets and people in masks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In fact, season two may just be all Mandalorians and multiple base [unintelligible].

**Rawson:** Standing six feet away from each other.

**Craig:** Correct. They’ve got a full mask. It’s cool.

**Rawson:** It’s fine. They’re good.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re good.

**John:** Yeah. So the thing I’m pitching has tremendous amount of – there would be a tremendous amount of preproduction in it, too, and previsualizations of stuff. So, all that work could be done before we’d actually have to sort of turn cameras on and start shooting.

**Aline:** Can I ask a question that’s off the script a bit?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Not Aline.

**Aline:** How do you guys feel about the depiction of the world in a world where we all know COVID happened? Because that’s the thing I’m—

**John:** Let’s talk about it.

**Aline:** That’s the thing I’m interested in. If you’re watching your sort of delightful piece are you going to be distracted by people wearing masks which we’re going to be wearing for a long time? Are you going to be – look, I mean, we don’t generally script people going to the bathroom and washing their hands, but washing their hands is a whole thing. And someone was telling me that in the weeks leading up to this pandemic the number of men at the sinks had like exponentially risen.

I mean, our behaviors are going to be different. Like, when I watch a scene in a movie or television show where people blow out the candles it’s a horror scene now. And so I just wonder going forward when you watch somebody in something that is set after the pandemic and they shake hands for instance, which is something I was not a fan of before, but now is sort of – will have a different meaning.

What do you guys think in terms of storytelling and like Rawson are you going to adjust anything? Are any of you adjusting anything in anything you’ve written for that?

**Rawson:** I haven’t yet. But most of the things I’m working on after Red Notice aren’t sort of contemporary pieces anyways. So, I haven’t really had to address that mentally.

**Aline:** You’re doing a lot of period films over there? You’re doing your restoration comedy?

**Rawson:** No, I’m doing – I’m more – yeah, more like sci-fi fantasy, future stuff.

**Aline:** Got it. Got it.

**Rawson:** So it’s not quite the contemporary—

**Aline:** Or just everybody will slug it for last year. You know?

**Craig:** There is that. There is that. I mean—

**Rawson:** But I mean is it also – do you think that’s what people want when they’re watching a piece of entertainment, right? Do they want to be reminded of the pandemic? Do they want to see people wash their hands? Or do you turn that on to forget about that stuff? That’s another question.

**Craig:** I think it’s a trap. It feels like a trap to me, honestly.

**Rawson:** It’s a trap!

**Craig:** It feels like a creative trap. First of all, we’re not going to be wearing masks forever. We will go back to shaking hands. We will be hugging again. We’ll be packed into restaurants and bars and all the rest of it. It’s inevitable. It will either happen because there is an excellent vaccine or treatment, or we all get it.

But sooner or later the world will return. And so this will become a very topical moment. It will be a thing that happened for a bit. So, I can definitely see people setting things in this time. And also I think it’s reasonable to start to feather in people in masks in the background and stuff like that.

Look, I mean, the show that I’m writing right now is about America after a pandemic. And the only thing, when we had our sort of kickoff conversation the only thing that I said to HBO that I wanted to just consider is that people are much smarter about pandemics now, which is good news for us. We don’t have to explain as much. They get it. The nature of the pandemic is different. But, yeah.

**Aline:** Well, the other thing I think is interesting, kind of a side note, is when we were kids we grew up in a lot more of a monoculture, right? Everybody watched the same TV show that night. And that really has dispersed. But now this is not just the country, this is the world. And that’s why you’ll see like jokes about banana bread. Jokes about I’m an introvert/I’m an extrovert. There’s a lot of things that sort of everyone is having a common experience in a way that we haven’t had in a very long time. And I wonder about the effects of that also on—

**Craig:** Well it’s like after WWII there were movies about WWII. But, most of the movies were not about WWII. Because you sort of wanted, you know, like—

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** Get back into the swing of stuff. Look, odds are that traditional procedural television is going to give us some sort of NCIS: COVID show, right?

**Rawson:** Yeah. Unfortunately.

**Craig:** That’s inevitable. There’s going to be stuff like that.

**John:** Well, so, two different points here. Thinking about – I haven’t asked Derek Haas about sort of the Chicago shows, but the degree to which the Chicago shows – Chicago Fire, Chicago Med – acknowledge COVID-19. Or even if they don’t have an episode about it, does it take place within their universe? And my guess is it probably does take place within their universe, even if it’s not exactly right there.

A thing I’m writing right now is a relationship comedy. And a reality which we’re still kind of grappling with the central couple of this would have gone through the lockdown and quarantine together. And so that would change their relationship and are we going to acknowledge that or not acknowledge that within the course of discussion that sort of happens in the movie. That would have been a factor. Just like they would have gone through WWII or these things, even if it’s not about WWII. They went through this time and it was important.

So, when this first started I thought like, oh, it’s going to be like 9/11 and how on Friends they would sort of like passively acknowledge that it happened but never actually address it again. I think it’s a longer period of time, and so I think we’re going to have to – the audience is going to be expecting like, OK, if this couple was alive or was together during this time, this family was together during this time, it would not be the first time they were all in a house together. They would have gone through quarantine.

**Rawson:** I think there’s going to be a lot of readers unfortunately in Los Angeles who are going to have to put up with 16 zillion different romantic comedy lockdown where they went on their first date and then the pandemic happened and then they had to co-quarantine.

**Aline:** There absolutely will be baking sourdough in that case.

**Rawson:** I mean, oh my god. Just please – if you’re listening just hear my voice.

**Craig:** That’s the title. Sourdough.

**Rawson:** Please don’t write those scripts. Please.

**John:** All right. So as we’re recording this we’re on a Friday. On Monday there’s supposed to be some state guidance about what the state would like Hollywood productions to do. That will be important, but I think much more important is what studios and financiers decide to do. And really what the guilds decide to do. And the guidance of the guilds have their members about what is safe and what is not safe. Because it doesn’t matter what the state says. If actors don’t feel comfortable being on set—

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** If the crew doesn’t feel comfortable being on set production is just not going to happen. And I’ve been talking to showrunners this past week, July is floated out a lot about sort of studios are thinking about, OK, July might be a time to get started.

**Craig:** August.

**John:** Could slip to August. Yeah. But they’re starting to make plans for that. Some of the things I’ve heard a couple times, and I’m curious if you guys have been hearing this, too, is a shift to French hours?

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Generally how film sets work is that you shoot half your day – if it’s a 12-hour day you shoot up to lunch. You have an hour for lunch. Then you shoot after lunch.

If you shoot French hours you shoot straight through the day. And lunch just becomes a walking situation. Like you grab lunch along the way.

**Craig:** Shorter day.

**John:** A shorter day, which is awesome. But also not having to get people together for lunch—

**Aline:** So that would be a case where you go pick up a box lunch somewhere?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have yet to meet a director that doesn’t yearn for French hours. I have yet to meet any filmmaker that doesn’t.

**Rawson:** We’d been shooting French hours on Red Notice every single day.

**Aline:** Nice.

**Rawson:** It’s the greatest thing of all time.

**Craig:** Absolute joy. So, the question is—

**Rawson:** I can’t go back. I won’t go back.

**Craig:** Well, unfortunately we are all at the mercy of crews when it comes to that. The crew has to agree to do it. And I don’t know necessarily why crews are against it. Because it seems like, well, you’d be able to get home faster and your day is shorter. And honestly lunch sucks. It does. It sucks. Everything just stops and then cranking the thing back up again is a nightmare.

**Aline:** Well, some of those are more physically demanding jobs where you might really treasure that physical break.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** But when I’m directing I still eat at 9, 12, and 6. I’ll just go get food or order food or whatever. Because set hours becomes like you’re eating breakfast at 5:30pm.

**Craig:** Six in the morning. Yeah.

**Aline:** And that throws me off so tremendously. So I always eat at normal hours.

**Craig:** Well, really it just comes down to when you have a lunch break you don’t know what’s happening. So if the idea of keeping people safe is in some way controlling interaction, really hard to do during lunch. And food preparation. And people standing over their food and all that stuff. Who knows?

Yeah, for sure if you are a Steadicam operator and you’ve been shooting all morning someone else is going to have to come in. Because you’re not Steadicam operating 10 hours straight.

**Rawson:** Yup.

**Craig:** But for almost everybody else, I mean, god, I would love it.

**John:** There’s a lot of downtime on sets where as you’re moving between stuff there’s a chance where you could go to get the food that you need to go get.

**Craig:** Let’s put it this way. Smokers smoke. Right? So that means there’s always chances to take little breaks. But I personally – I hope that French hours happen. I mean, they’re a delight.

**John:** Now, some of the other repercussions of all this is once production starts ramping back up it will probably be slow to start. But then there’s a bunch of things that were in production that need to get back and finish, like Rawson’s movie.

**Rawson:** Yes please.

**John:** But there’s also a bunch of pent-up demand. There’s like a bunch of stuff that’s being written right now that will need to shoot. And I do think we’re going to get slammed for crews. I think it’s going to be very hard to put together a crew to shoot the stuff that we need to shoot. Because there’s going to be too much demand on those people. And some of those people will not become available because we don’t know that schools are going to be back in session.

So, a big chunk of the work force might be out because they don’t have anyone to take care of their kids. So I hope we’re all anticipating that it’s going to be tough to get crews when we do sort of get back up to sort of full speed here.

**Craig:** Stage space I think will be even harder.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think stage space is going to be the real – because stage space is already brutal. Because there are places where people want to shoot, because the tax breaks are there. So good luck finding stage space in the UK. Have fun.

**Rawson:** Very, very hard.

**Craig:** And even Georgia which is obviously a huge hub of production. Like all those spaces are being taken up. Crew, there’s a lot of crew in Southern California. I think if you’re shooting here you’re probably in pretty good shape. Because there’s a lot of people that are really skilled who don’t get enough work because of the way that production has fled. But even here stage space is going to be horrendous. It’s going to be Broadway like in the fight over who gets to be on a space.

**Aline:** I was thinking about Broadway queues the other day and people who had their shows in a queue and how that’s all going to be thrown up in the air and start again. Yeah.

**Craig:** Broadway is a whole other disaster. I feel so bad for everybody in that business.

**Aline:** It’s heartbreaking.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really, really bad.

**John:** And Rawson your movie is for Netflix so you already have a distribution platform there. But we really do not know what is going to happen with the future of movie theaters and sort of getting movies back into theaters. I do believe we will get back to that place. Will it fully return? I don’t know if it’s going to fully return. The things that are still slated to come out, you know, theatrically this year, we don’t know. We don’t know if the Oscars are going to happen. We don’t know sort of any of that stuff.

But I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter, but in terms of production I don’t know that it matters so much. I do think we’re still going to make a lot of these productions of this size and this scale whether or not they’re going to be showing on those big screens or not. So, I’m not so nervous about that.

**Aline:** Well, there will be also a release bottleneck as you said once we get up and shooting. There will be a release schedule bottleneck.

**John:** Oh yeah. There will be.

**Aline:** My son is a very, very avid moviegoer. He saw 105 movies in the movie theater last year.

**Rawson:** Oh my god.

**Aline:** And this is his number one recreation activity. So, he’s already like really keeping up with the news about sanitizers, mask, dividers, whatever he has to do. There really isn’t anything that will replace for him that experience of going to a theater. But I do think we’re going to have, you know, obviously we’re going to have a dearth and then a flood.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** It’s going to be wild.

**Rawson:** Absolutely.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. It is time for us to talk through the things we want to recommend to our listeners out there. Mine is weirdly pandemic-y which I don’t think would be a good recommendation, but I’ve actually really enjoyed it. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is this terrific book set within an outbreak and then 20 years after an outbreak. It falls within pandemic fiction but it’s just so really well written. I’m greatly enjoying it. So, I would check out Station Eleven.

If you’re going to buy Station Eleven I really encourage you to buy it from your local bookstore. If you’re in Los Angeles our local bookstore is Chevaliers which has just reopened. So get your books from there.

I’m going to be doing a special event for Chevaliers with other middle grade and YA author, sort of a virtual book signing, so I’ll have details about that. But support your local bookstores. We’re also going to be making sure to put up links to Bookshop.org for any books we’re recommending on the podcast, so you can buy them through your local bookstore rather than a giant retailer/reseller.

But there is one thing about Station Eleven which is also interesting is they had just started shooting. They were two episodes of five into shooting a miniseries based on Station Eleven.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** And what a weird thing to have a pandemic shut down your pandemic episode.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** And they will of course need to make the decision about within the world of this show did COVID-19 happen or is this – it’s so complicated. The meta levels of all this is so tough. But even as I’m reading the book I’m thinking like, oh, well people wouldn’t react that same way now because we’ve been through this situation. So that’s a weird case where the audience is going to be coming in with much more information than the characters in the story would have.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing is so not cool and also the coolest thing ever. It’s cool and uncool at the same time. The Miracle Sudoku Solve. So, there is a guy named Simon Anthony who is he a member of Britain’s championship Sudoku team? Of course he is. And he will solve Sudokus, these really intricate, difficult Sudokus on YouTube. So he just records it and you can watch it.

And if you think that watching solve Sudoku is probably boring, I would think so. I mean, if it’s a regular one, yeah. But this is not. He gets one. He gets the special Sudoku that’s written by a guy named Mitchell Lee. Constructed, I should say. And you guys are familiar with the rules of Sudoku?

**John:** Yeah. So the numbers one through nine arranged in boxes. And basically you cannot have the same number in any row or column.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s a 3×3 grid. There are three boxes wide, three boxes down. And then inside each of those boxes is another 3×3 grid. So, inside of a box you can’t repeat a number. It’s one through nine. And then in the columns and the rows through the boxes you can’t repeat. And then what they do is they give you a bunch of numbers to start with and you have to deduce all the other numbers and where they go.

And, you know, it’s not my favorite. I’ll be honest with you. It’s not really solving the way I like to solve. However, he gets a special one. In this one there are a few other constraints. If any two little boxes that are separated by a knight’s move, you know, the little L shape, or a king’s move, meaning in any north/northeast around it those can’t contain the same digit. And the other rule is that orthogonally adjacent cells can’t contain the same digit, have to be contained consecutive digits, or something like that.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters. He explains all that and he goes, now, let’s take a look at the puzzle. And he hasn’t seen it yet. And it comes on the screen and we can see it, too. And it is a Sudoku grid with exactly two numbers filled in. Just two. A one and a two.

**John:** And a two.

**Craig:** That’s it. And he solves it. And people have been watching this–

**John:** Yeah, but Craig what’s important is he doesn’t think he can solve it and he’s convinced he’s not going to be able to do it.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And then you watch the process of discovery as he does it.

**Craig:** Yes. He says, well, I’m going to try this for a minutes and then I’m going to stop this video and call Mitchell Lee and yell at him. And what happens over the next 25 minutes is as close to Rocky as puzzle-solving gets. And the joy that he experiences as he starts to unravel how this thing works is remarkable. I think at this point something like 700,000 people have watched this video of a man solving a Sudoku and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Because he himself is an utter joy of a human being. And you are watching somebody not only figure something out but experience joy. And it’s so nice to experience authentic joy. To see somebody have that in real time is wonderful. Especially these days.

So we’ll throw a link in the show notes if you have not already seen Simon Anthony solving Mitchell Lee’s Miracle Sudoku.

**John:** Now, Craig, that’s also a very good setup for our bonus topic for our Premium members which is going to be about puzzling and puzzle-solving. Because you and I discussed previously – people have to be a Premium member to figure out our previous discussion and our disagreement. And Aline has strong opinions on puzzling as well.

**Craig:** Ah, yes, of course.

**Aline:** OK.

**John:** Aline, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Aline:** So, for those of you who live on my side of town remember when you would drive up to the Target on La Brea and when you were driving back on the side street there was a food for homeless people. There was a big – remember that?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Aline:** So that’s the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition. They moved east and it’s now just called the Hollywood Food Coalition. And they serve that community. They do an amazing job. It’s a place that we have volunteered with the kids a few times. And it’s one of the places that I like to donate. And I have donated to the Los Angeles Food Bank since this has started. I think, you know, obviously this is disproportionately affecting people who have economic challenges and food is super important.

And it’s now just called the Hollywood Food Coalition. And I sent you the link to that. And in thinking about this I set up a monthly donation to them. They’re just a great organization. And when we do come back – they are still open – when we do come back if you’re looking for a place to take your kids especially to volunteer and hand out food, it’s a great one.

**John:** Cool. Hollywood Food Coalition. Rawson, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Rawson:** I have Two Cool Things if you don’t mind.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Please.

**Rawson:** I know. Glad everyone is sitting. The first one is semi-pandemic-y, just depends. It’s called the Wakanicci Robe. It’s the perfect robe. David Walton, this fabulous actor, and some friends created the perfect robe for me. And I have one and I love it. And if you’re padding around the house—

**Aline:** What is happening? Rawson, I need a picture. Wait a minute, I am also Googling this, but also we need a picture of Rawson in this.

**Rawson:** I’ll send you one.

**Aline:** OK.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**Aline:** Wakanicci.

**Rawson:** Wakanicci.

**John:** OK. Wakanicci.

**Rawson:** That sounds right. It’s an excellent robe. Highly recommend. It’s a bit pricey, but well worth it.

**Aline:** Amazing. Am I the only person ever to have recommended clothing on One Cool Thing up until this point?

**Rawson:** I was wearing it and my wife Sarah said, “That’s great. Do they make it for women?” And I said–

**Aline:** No.

**Rawson:** I said no. And she said, “Well then it’s not the perfect robe.” And she walked off. And I was like, damn. But apparently–

**John:** Rawson, I feel like we’ve discussed this before. I think robes are terrible. Robes are one of those things that feel like they should be comfortable–

**Craig:** I wear a robe every morning. Every morning.

**John:** That should be comfortable but are never comfortable.

**Craig:** No, they’re amazing.

**Rawson:** This might change your mind.

**Craig:** I love a robe.

**Aline:** Oh my god. I have to force myself to take the robe off sometimes at noon. Like, wait, I had a Zoom and I was like can I pull off this brown chenille robe as like some sort of cool wrap dress. And the answer was no.

**Craig:** I love a robe. I’m buying this robe right now. By the way, I also love that there are two sizes to this robe. The Nicci or the Waka. Nicci is men’s t-shirt large and smaller. The Waka is men’s t-shirt extra-large and larger. I mean, how great is that?

**Rawson:** You’re going to love it.

**Aline:** I’m only going to refer to Rawson in the future as Wakanicci.

**Rawson:** I can dream.

And then the other one, I saw this great documentary. I’m sure you’ve all seen it already. It’s a little bit, a few years old. But I saw it on Netflix and it’s called Winter on Fire. And it’s about the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014. And it’s 90 minutes long.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**Rawson:** And it is fantastic. I’m so glad you saw it, Craig. It’s heartbreaking and inspirational and riveting. And just one of the most intense experiences I’ve had watching television on the couch in a long, long time.

**Craig:** Poor Ukraine. It’s just they can’t catch a break.

**Rawson:** They can’t. Right?

**Craig:** They can’t.

**Rawson:** And I didn’t really understand, like with all the Ukraine stuff that happened 18 months ago or a year ago now, I didn’t quite understand what was really going on. And this documentary Winter on Fire, which was recommended to me by my friend [Nathan Middleton], it was stunning. And if you watch it at the very, very end there’s this moment where it looks like all hope is lost for protestors, our brave protestors. I think it was 93 or 94 days they were out there in the cold. And there’s this one man – one guy – who stands up and grabs the microphone and says this one thing. And it changes everything. And it’s unbelievable. Winter on Fire.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty great.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. As always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Caruso. 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. But for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Aline, you are?

**Aline:** @abmckenna on Twitter.

**John:** Rawson Thurber?

**Rawson:** @rawsonthurber both on Twitter and Instagram, although I’m not really on either very much. Say h.

**John:** Hi. We have t-shirts. They are great and you can find them on Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. And 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 are about to record.

But for everyone else, Aline, Rawson, thank you so much for coming back.

**Rawson:** Thank you.

**John:** You are original guests and it’s nice to hear from you again.

**Aline:** We are O. It’s actually @alinebmckenna. I’m an idiot. It’s @alinebmckenna.

**John:** Excellent.

**Craig:** And for whatever it’s worth the Wakanicci has been purchased.

**Rawson:** Yes! Craig, when you get it you have to send me a picture, or post it. I’ve got to see it.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Rawson:** And I’ll send you mine.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we are now in the Bonus Segment. So, I was talking with Craig earlier this week and I don’t know if it’s because of Miracle Sudoku that we were talking about this, or we were talking about jigsaw puzzles and Craig doesn’t consider jigsaw puzzles worth anything worthwhile at all.

**Craig:** Garbage.

**John:** Doesn’t consider them actually puzzles.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think you describe them as broken pictures?

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re just fixing a broken picture. That’s all you’re doing.

**John:** And arguably Sudoku is kind of just fixing a broken set of numbers. There’s not a narrative thread to it.

**Craig:** No, that’s not right. There’s a logical deduction to fill in things that are not there. Which is similar to a crossword puzzle. The problem with jigsaw puzzles is it’s all there. You’re just like, well, I need a piece that looks like this that fits here. Sort. Sort. Sort. Oh, here it is. It’s like just putting a vase back together. I don’t really understand. There’s no logic to it.

**John:** So, Aline and I are the founding members of the Hancock Park Puzzle Exchange. And so she and I each had jigsaw puzzles which we had solved with our families, and so we swamped them. And so the only time I’ve seen Aline during this whole lockdown has been at a distance when I went to her house to exchange some puzzles on her doorstep.

**Rawson:** My wife is all about puzzles. She’d like to join if that’s possible.

**Aline:** I’ve got some good ones.

**Craig:** They’re not puzzles.

**Rawson:** They are, Craig. They are.

**Craig:** Just saw jigsaw. Just say jigsaw pictures. Just say cut up pictures. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s talk about Aline. Ignore Craig for a moment.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** What makes a good jigsaw puzzle? Because you’ve done a ton over this outbreak.

**Aline:** You know what? What I like is that everybody in my family enjoys doing them, so it’s something you can do together. And it’s one of those activities that you can do and you can chat. My younger son who is a big puzzler, just overall a big puzzler, and has puzzled with Craig many a time, he loves them. His brain is spatial so that is interesting to him. And I think it works for people if you have different kind of visual brains. Colors. Shapes. So it’s a nice relaxing activity.

And the kind of puzzles that Craig and I do, or you know, the more cerebral puzzles are not as good for chit-chatting. And what’s nice about jigsaw puzzles is it’s something that you can put on music. You can talk. It bridges a number of age groups.

**John:** You can zone out on them.

**Aline:** You can zone out.

**Craig:** There’s no puzzle-solving that you could interrupt.

**Rawson:** Oh, Jesus.

**John:** So, I enjoy a jigsaw puzzle for the reasons that Aline is stating. It’s only using a very specific part of your brain and therefore the rest of your brain is available to do other things. And so you can have conversations. You can sort of be in a space together. We sort of got back into jigsaw puzzles because when we would visit my mom in Colorado we’d bring a puzzle so we could all be focused on a table together and be together without feeling like you have to talk at every moment. It just gives you a point of focus.

**Aline:** It’s particularly good if you have sons. Because, you know, there’s all these studies about how boys are easier to talk to if they’re doing something. And so it puts less pressure on the talking. So, we’ve had some nice chats. I also do it sometimes when I’m talking on the phone. So, it’s funny. I try and move things from Zoom to phone so that I can mainly do laundry, which I do a lot. I try and move those meetings so I can multitask. But puzzles are also good for – I actually find it easier to concentrate on what I’m talking about on the phone when I’m doing something that engages my brain a little bit.

**John:** Rawson, talk us through it.

**Rawson:** I’m sure this is poor form on the puzzle side, but I’m not a big puzzler or whatever Craig would call it.

**Craig:** Picture-er.

**Rawson:** Picture-putter back together.

**Craig:** Oh that. Yeah, picture repair.

**Rawson:** Yeah, picture repair. I’m not a big jigsaw guy.

**Craig:** Repairer.

**Rawson:** And like I said I’m sure this is poor form, but what I like to do is wait for my wife, Sarah. She’ll work on a puzzle for a couple days and there’s maybe 12 pieces left. And then I like to come in and just—

**Aline:** Oh no!

**Rawson:** And just kind of put the final pieces in.

**Aline:** Oh no! Rawson!

**Rawson:** It gives me a great sense of accomplishment.

**Aline:** Oh my god. That’s like the equivalent of eating the last piece of cake, man.

**Rawson:** [laughs] Oh, you know, I’m a simple man. I’m a simple machine.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, hearing Craig talk on endless episodes and endless One Cool Things about different puzzles that he likes and why he likes different puzzles and hyping different things, I’ll say that during this interregnum where I’ve been doing a lot of puzzles I’ve come to appreciate levels of mastery of puzzles. Really good puzzles versus terrible crap puzzles.

And so the one we’re doing right now is absolute crap. And we should probably just abandon it. The pieces are too small. They don’t fit together precisely. It’s not interesting. There are big patterns where like this is all purple somehow. You’ve got to fill this in together. And that’s not rewarding. The great puzzles, and I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a Kickstarter that’s happening right now for Max Temkin who does Cards Against Humanity, he has these three puzzles that he’s been doing which are like the artwork is fantastic and designed to be a puzzle. It wasn’t like an existing piece of art that they cut up into puzzle pieces. This was made to be a puzzle.

And then the actual cut lines are designed to precisely fit this so that things don’t fall on one side of the line or the other. So everything fits exactly the way it should fit.

**Aline:** There’s a great article about how puzzles are made. It’s actually very intricate and very difficult. It was in the New York Times and I’ll send it to you. But one of my challenges is you know when you do a chunk and then you want to move it?

**John:** Transfer it.

**Aline:** Some puzzles won’t – well the pieces are too slidey.

**Rawson:** Would the hardest version of the jigsaw puzzle be just like black that’s cute or white that’s all one color?

**John:** All black or white. Where you don’t have any visual information and you can only work on sort of what the shape of the pieces are.

**Craig:** In a way that is the best jigsaw puzzle. Because it goes–

**John:** That’s the equivalent of Sudoku with nothing there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the purest. It’s the only interesting thing about a jigsaw puzzle is that—

**Aline:** Craig, how do you feel about ventriloquists solving puzzles?

**Craig:** If they get their dummy to solve it. Like, wow, what a weird conflagration of non-talents.

**Aline:** What are other fun things that people think are fun that you don’t like?

**Craig:** Other than jigsaw puzzles, ventriloquism and mayonnaise, I think that’s probably – those are the three. I’m generally like, you know, I’m cool.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Just repair—

**Aline:** Is it really annoying when people are like, “What about aioli? What about–?”

**Craig:** Oh, it’s brutal. And I’m like, oh no, we don’t have that. What we have is Russian dressing. That is mayonnaise. That is.

**Aline:** Mixed with ketchup.

**Craig:** Correct. Aioli is mayonnaise. Russian dressing is mayonnaise. Spread is mayonnaise.

**Aline:** You’re not having it. Are you ranch? Do you like ranch?

**Craig:** No.

**Aline:** Interesting. I don’t either.

**Craig:** No, I don’t like ranch. I don’t like sour cream.

**Rawson:** I’m so glad I’m here for this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I love sour cream. But you know what? Craig and I grew up in New Jersey around the same time. He’s a little younger than me. We didn’t have ranch.

**Craig:** No. Ranch didn’t exist.

**Aline:** No. Your creamy dressing was a blue cheese dressing with like big chunks of blue cheese in it.

**Craig:** Which I wouldn’t eat either.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** So Rawson is just young enough that he doesn’t remember a time before ranch dressing.

**Rawson:** I do not.

**John:** But I remember when ranch dressing was actually a fairly new thing you’d get. There would be a packet of like dry mix that you would have to mix up yourself to make ranch dressing.

**Craig:** Because it was patented by the Hidden Valley people.
**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** Is that right?

**John:** They are the only ranch dressing.

**Rawson:** Jesus.

**Aline:** What?

**Craig:** Yeah. There is an actual Hidden Valley Ranch. That’s where they made ranch dressing.

**John:** This discussion of ranch dressing is the whitest thing that’s ever been recorded on a podcast.

**Craig:** It’s pretty white.

**Rawson:** And that’s saying something.

**John:** It’s remarkable.

**Craig:** It’s pretty freaking white.

**John:** It’s remarkable.

**Craig:** Well, the jigsaw puzzles were already sending us down–

**John:** Yeah. We were in that zone.

**Craig:** We were in the white tunnel pretty deep. Yeah.

**John:** Oh, Rawson and Aline it is so good to see both of you. I miss you dearly.

**Rawson:** Likewise.

**Craig:** We miss you guys. But I love seeing you.

**Aline:** Yay.

**Rawson:** All right. Stay safe everybody.

**Aline:** Stay safe is the new goodbye.

**John:** Everyone stay safe.

**Craig:** Stay safe.

Links:

* Catch Craig on [Mythic Quest’s](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3?) special bonus [Quarantine Episode](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/mythic-quest-quarantine-special-explained-cast-talks-emotional-moments-1295570)!
* #FosterChallenge: John is raffling off a 60-minute one-on-one writing session on Zoom. Proceeds go to help amazing foster charities. [Donate here.](https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/johnaugustscreenwriternovelist)
* Please send info on [Arlo Finch Bear](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1262424834555801600) to ask@johnaugust.com!
* [Red Notice](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7991608/)
* [Your Place or Mine](https://deadline.com/2020/05/reese-witherspoon-two-netflix-romantic-comedies-hello-sunshine-the-cactus-aggregate-films-aline-brosh-mckenna-the-cactus-1202932978/)
* [Hollywood Food Coalition](https://hofoco.org/)
* [Wakanicci Bath Robe](https://www.wakanicci.com/products/the-perfect-bathrobe)
* [Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom](https://www.netflix.com/title/80031666)
* [Station Eleven](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20170404-station-eleven) by Emily St. John Mandel from your local bookstore or [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/books/station-eleven-9781594138829/9780804172448)!
* [The Miracle Sudoku Solve](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4&feature=emb_logo)
* [Aline Brosh Mckenna](https://twitter.com/alinebmckenna) on Twitter
* [Rawson Thurber](https://twitter.com/rawsonthurber) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Caruso ([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](https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scriptnotes/453standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here.](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-empire-strikes-back-with-lawrence-kasdan)

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode contains a few bad words and also spoilers for The Empire Strikes Back, which really if you haven’t seen The Empire Strikes Back? That’s crazy. You should see that movie. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** And my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 452 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program it’s a deep dive into The Empire Strikes Back, looking back at how this 1980 sequel to Star Wars works on a script level and a story level. To help us do that we are joined again by screenwriter Larry Kasdan who not only wrote Empire and other Star Wars films, but also Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, The Bodyguard, Big Chill, and so many more movies it’s just exhausting. Welcome back Lawrence Kasdan.

**Lawrence Kasdan:** Thank you. Glad to be back. I love this podcast.

**Craig:** We’ve arranged things so that you can see into everybody’s room. You requested that you could see into people’s rooms.

**Lawrence:** Some of them have stymied me there with their glossies.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, a few of these people have head shots up perhaps hoping to be the next Indiana Jones or something.

**John:** We are doing this live on Zoom. We love to do live shows for the Writers Guild Foundation. This is a live show for the Writers Guild Foundation, but instead of being in a big theater with a bunch of people around us we are staring into living rooms and bedrooms and other rooms of people here on Zoom. Thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation for putting this together. Thank you everyone who came. We have 200 and some people in this Zoom room watching us live.

**Craig:** On the way to 500 I believe.

**John:** That’s pretty exciting. Now, Larry we’ve had you on the show before. You were a guest on Episode 247. That was way back in 2016. A different lifetime. We were talking about Raiders. We were talking about the Star Wars movies you were working on. Today on this program we want to do a deep dive where we really focus in on one project and really the story and script behind that project. We’ve done this for The Little Mermaid, we did this for Raiders. And being the 40th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back we really want to talk about the process of getting from, OK, we’re doing a sequel to Star Wars to the movie that we saw.

And to do that we have you, but we also have your handwritten pages from that script beforehand. So at some points during this video I’m going to be showing you some of those pages and we’re going to talk through scenes that look like the final scenes in the movie and scenes that are very, very different. So I’m excited to get into this.

Lawrence Kasdan, talk us through how you became involved with The Empire Strikes Back. So, Star Wars was of course a phenomenon, but when was your first involvement with Empire?

**Lawrence:** I had just written Raiders of the Lost Ark and it had taken me about six months. And I took the script up to George, handed it over to him in a very ceremonial way. And he said, “Let’s go out to lunch.” And he said, “I’m in real trouble on the next Star Wars. Would you write it?” And I said don’t you want to read Raiders first? He said, “I’m going to read it tonight. If I don’t like it I’ll take back this offer.” But he did like it and almost immediately – I had to have a break – but a few weeks later we started this and wrote Empire very quickly.

**Craig:** And part of the reason that he was talking to you was because the first writer on Empire, Leigh Brackett, was pretty sick and did end up passing away. So you guys, even though you’re co-credited, you don’t really overlap in the creation of Empire.

**Lawrence:** No. And I wish I had met her because she’s a legendary writer, both science fiction and screenwriting, and written great westerns which I love. She’s got a credit on The Big Sleep, one of my favorite movies. So she was a giant. But I never met her because she was hired to do it and she became very sick. She handed in a draft which I maybe saw once. But when George made this proposition to me at lunch she had already passed away. He said there’s a thousand people working in England and we have no script.

**Craig:** When we hear someone say, or imagine ourselves on the receiving end of, “Hey, do you want to write Raiders of the Lost Ark,” it’s already nerve-racking. But Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t a thing when you wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Star Wars was the thing of all things.

**Lawrence:** Yes.

**Craig:** Did you feel anxious? Were you terrified? Or were you like, meh.

**Lawrence:** I was a little bit tired from finishing Raiders. I was worried about their reaction. So I was in kind of a haze. And when he said, you know, will you come on and help me with Empire you can’t really be shocked. At that point I had been trying to get into the business so long and had seen enough things. You know that once you get hired then things start to work. It’s murder to get hired. And no one wants to hire someone they’ve never heard of.

The second they have a decent credit everybody wants to hire you, even though they don’t know if you’re good or bad.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Lawrence:** So I sort of wasn’t surprised. He’s in trouble. He knows I just delivered a script. Maybe—

**John:** Maybe you’re the guy. So, we got to read through the transcript of Raiders, and so the conversations you were having with Lucas and Spielberg about the intentions going into Raiders, was there an equivalent session with you and George Lucas and other folks involved about what the goals were going to be going into Empire? The sequel to the surprise hit movie Star Wars. What were those initial conversations about in terms of intention, and hopes, and things you wanted to see this movie do?

**Lawrence:** My first real conversation was in private with George. And when I had had my little break and I came back up to the ranch and we were talking alone. And he said, “You know, Darth Vader is Luke’s father.” And I said, no shit. I thought that was just fantastic. And it was clear to me that that meant the second movie was going to be very different from the first. And you must know that I love the first one. I love The New Hope. I think it’s one of the great movies. And it changed the world.

But part of its fun and why it was irresistible to people is it was so light and fast. And you never stopped for a second to talk about character or to have very much intimate scenes. There are a couple things if you get three lines between two characters it’s a big deal. But everything around it is perfect and I learned over the years with George that that’s his greatest desire to move fast and entertain people. And anything else is gravy as far as he’s concerned.

Well that was not my point of view on writing. That’s not the things I had been writing. And I could tell when he told me about Darth and Luke that that opened up a whole different kind of movie than the first one. So without taking anything away from the first one, which to me is the greatest Star Wars movie, this was going to be a different animal. And he seemed to be receptive to that. And, you know, for the next year or whatever it was as they went into production and I was around sometimes it was clear that there was always this slight frisson, a tension between my desire to have the characters to be a little more – have a little more depth, to let the love scenes play a little bit, to let Yoda’s philosophy be heard. And always George’s instinct to go fast, or faster, faster.

And looking at the movie now I think it really combines those things pretty well. And I’m amazed by how much action there is in it. And how well it works. And I’m amazed that there is a chance to know these characters. And the actors embraced that idea, of course, that now they had something more to play.

**Craig:** There’s a moment early on in the film that I think hearing you talk embodies that for me. It’s a fascinating combination of let’s call it George and Larry. There’s a classic Campbellian story trope of the call to action. And we all know that George was kind of student of Joseph Campbell. And so early on in Empire Strikes Back there’s a call to action. Obi-Wan appears like a vision to Luke and says, “You’re going to go to Dagobah and meet up with Yoda and become a Jedi knight.” Classic. And it’s such a fascinating kind of your mentor reappearing and giving you this interesting challenge. At the same time he’s freezing to death and he’s just escaped from this monster that beat him up. And he’s going to die. And I remember even as a kid feeling like this is what movies do better than anything is they give you two stories at once and it makes sense on top of each other.

I remember just almost laughing at the thought that ghost Obi-Wan didn’t give a damn, which meant he was going to be OK.

**Lawrence:** Meant he’s going to be OK. You know, it’s a trap that people can fall into that maybe this character isn’t going to live, you know. But as soon as Ben tells him what his next chapter is going to be you know that he’ll be OK. Now you pretty much knew that anyway. This is Luke Skywalker. And you know that Han Solo is already looking for him. So you think [Obi pretty good]. But it’s an actual release of pressure like in a steam pipe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, talk us through this early part of the process. You’re having these conversations with George. Was there an outline document? At what point were things being written down in terms of your marching orders and this is what you’re going to try to write?

**Lawrence:** Yeah, I don’t remember in detail, but I know that George – and he was under such pressure. And Leigh had passed away. And he got something down. You know, that’s a great habit to have. Get something down so you can talk about it. And George was a great one for doing that.

So I’m sure that we worked somewhat from his notes. And then very quickly Irvin Kershner became involved, the director. And he was an enormous influence on everything because he was such an unusual, eccentric character. He had actually taught George at USC briefly. He had made New York gritty human adult dramas before that. And when his name was announced to do the second Star Wars people were amazed. You couldn’t understand it.

But Irvin was the kind of guy, he would come in and just embrace. There’s a lot of his qualities in – all of us I think in Yoda. If you’re going to do something just do it. And it didn’t matter that he made The Eyes of Laura Mars or Loving or whatever. He was going to do this now.

**Craig:** Right.

**Lawrence:** And it was a big change for him, a big break for him in a way because it was a big expensive movie that he’d never made.

**Craig:** Well there’s something that’s happened culturally that I’m kind of fascinated by. In your mindset as a writer when you come on something like that you know you’re writing the sequel to the biggest movie of all time. It’s this cultural touchstone for every generation. But it’s still a time where a studio might say we’re making another Star Wars and everybody goes, “Great,” and they’re not particularly freaked out by the fact that somebody has been chosen as a director and this guy who has never written anything we know has been chosen as the writer.

So there’s a certain freedom.

**Lawrence:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it strikes me that now if there’s a property, a franchise that kind of exemplifies a kind of total scrutiny it’s Star Wars. And you’ve been involved in Star Wars since. I mean, you worked on what is it, I lose track of the numbers, on eight? Seven and nine? Is that what you worked on? Seven and nine.

**Lawrence:** I worked on seven.

**Craig:** Seven. And you see the hoopla.

**Lawrence:** And then we did the separate Solo movie.

**Craig:** And then you did the Solo movie.

**Lawrence:** So that was four of these that I was involved with.

**Craig:** Did you have any sense at the time that you were kind of working under an interesting shroud of anonymity even though the property was so famous and global?

**Lawrence:** Absolutely. And you know Skywalker Ranch was a heavily secured area. When people got into Skywalker Ranch they felt grateful. The same way I feel every time I drive onto a movie lot. I’m sort of surprised that they let me in and I’m OK and they’re going to tell me where to park. That’s a big deal. Because for years I looked at the gates to studios and just wanted to get in there.

But Skywalker was much more intense than that. And people did not wander around Skywalker. And we were working up there in Marin and it was private. And I didn’t write up there. I wrote at home in LA. But when we had any of these meetings we would go up to the ranch. And this group of people, Kershner for sure, and then some other people would join, producers, Gary Kurtz occasionally. But Gary was really focused in England. He is the producer and he had produced Star Wars. But things were really rolling in England and so he wasn’t much involved in the story.

**John:** Now how early in the process did you know that you were really going to follow two very different threads? So you’re going to have Luke going off with Yoda and his whole quest line and you’re going to have Han and Leia and Lando Calrissian. How early in the process did you know that those two storylines would be separate for most of the movie?

**Lawrence:** I knew it immediately because that happens in the first movie. You know, the secret and the fun of Star Wars is it’s never one story happening alone. There’s always somewhere to cut to. When you get bored with the scene you just cut to the other storyline and it gives you an enormous burst of energy. Now suddenly you’re back to the other thing. Maybe the other thing, the one you were on, is playing itself out, you’re out of ideas, and now you have a whole chance to make a different movie right butted up against it.

And there’s a lot of that in Raiders, although it’s mostly from Indy’s point of view. But Star Wars, the first Star Wars was like that, back and forth. And even when they were together they get split up in the Death Star. And you’re just cutting back and forth. And so I knew going in this is going to have the same contouring.

**John:** All right. So we’re going to start looking at your handwritten pages and your edits along the way. But I’m really curious about the actual physical process of writing a screenplay back in, this would be 1978, ’79, ’80. And so this is probably before Final Draft at that point. What were you actually writing on? Were things being typed up–?

**Craig:** Or computers.

**John:** Was this done on a computer? Was this done on something else? What was the actually writing at that time?

**Lawrence:** I had always been a terrible typist. And that’s what some people here won’t even know what a manual typewriter is, or an electric typewriter, but I never mastered it. And so I was always making corrections with White Out. It was a nightmare for me, because I was never a good typist.

And so I hand wrote everything I did up until Grand Canyon. My wife and I did Grand Canyon. That’s when word processing really came in around 1990. And I was thrilled. Because now when you made mistakes it was very easy to correct them. And it changed everything.

But for every movie I did before that I was dependent on a typist who was the middle person between my handwriting, which you’re about to see, which is not good handwriting. But I have everything – all those movies – in handwritten pencil on long legal sheets. And it’s sometimes amazing to me how few changes I made.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Lawrence:** And I do think it gets to the heart of something that’s very important to me which is there’s a completely different feeling about writing longhand than there is working on a computer. And you’re very careful. You don’t want to go back and rewrite that whole paragraph. You can mark out some stuff, but basically you’re thinking about every sentence and every word very carefully. More like a novelist would do. And then you move on.

And, you know, at the end of the day – I’m left-handed which is a terrible thing to be when you’re a hand-writer – and my hand would be cramped and I could not even move it. But Raiders of the Lost Ark, Empire Strikes Back, Big Chill, they all exist handwritten in pencil on long legal pads.

**Craig:** Well it’s the difference in an analogous way to the way we used to edit on old Moviolas where you cut the film and you spliced the film together. And that’s obviously with the advent of nonlinear editing that goes away. And there is no such thing as a semi-permanent cut. Nor is there any more tolerance for the little glitch bits that used to be fairly common in the way that things used to be edited together.

**Lawrence:** And the impact on the art itself, whatever you’re doing, is enormous. You know, I often think, oh, I would like to work that way again, you know. Because not being able to change everything immediately, not being able to lift out paragraphs and sentences and move them around is completely different. So you’re committing emotionally and in your story to that thing it took you so long to hand-write.

And as you go through the process and people said, well, we want this to be different, and different, then there are typists who come in and it’s not quite as imposing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, thank god you had Gayle. I was looking through these pages and I was like is Gayle, was she like one of the producers that I didn’t know? Because you’re like, “Gayle,” and it seemed like you were talking to her like, Gayle, forget this stuff. This is no good. I’m so sorry I wrote that. This is what matters.

It turns out Gayle is the typist.

**John:** Yeah. And so I’ve been a hand-writer of scenes for a very long time. And so generally first drafts I would write by hand going back to Go and early things. And so Rawson Thurber and Dana Fox, they were typing up all of my pages. And I didn’t not because – I could type really well, but I did really like the fact that I was committing to a thing. And I wasn’t going back and editing stuff. I was writing the next scene and writing the next scene.

One thing I often notice if I start writing on the computer is that I will just keep rewriting those early pages again and again and again and won’t move on. And handwriting is a way to break yourself of that habit.

**Lawrence:** It really breaks – you don’t want to go back. You don’t want to go through that physical thing again. And when people cavalierly say, “Well just change all that,” it’s a much bigger thing. And you’re thinking about it. You’re going back to the pencil. And the same thing as Craig said, in editing the way movies are edited is completely changed by the way we now edit.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Let’s take a look at this draft. And so if you’re watching this live you’re going to see this on your screen. We’re going to take it over. If you are listening to this episode after the fact we’ll have the slides as a link so you can see what it is that we are talking about with this. But this is an early draft and you can tell us when we would have started seeing this. So everyone on their screen should see, we’re going to start with Scene 8. This is your left-handed in pencil writing version of The Empire Strikes Back.

**Lawrence:** Yes.

**John:** So, what are we seeing here? This is–?

**Lawrence:** And this was very early on in the process. It’s at the beginning of the movie. You’re in the Hoth which is like the first act of the movie. And I get everything – when I was handwriting all my originals and everything I always did it in sequence. It’s not necessary to do it that way, but I always did. I wanted to know what was behind me. I never wanted to jump ahead.

So I wrote Empire in sequence as I had done everything else. And so this was very early in the process. And because I was writing so fast, this is, you know, a few days in, and we’re in the Hoth, you know, in the corridors, which is an incredible set that I was lucky enough to visit. I had barely been on a movie set before. And then to have my first real experience be in the ice corridors of Hoth that was pretty amazing.

**John:** So, Craig, should we take a read through this for our listeners at home? I’d love to hear sort of both the scene description and this dialogue which is so iconic. So this is a long scene between Leia and Han. Really establishing the beginning of what their arc is going to be over the course of this movie. So, Scene 8, INT. ICE CORRIDOR. Han strides down a corridor covered from the ice. Leia follows quickly, agitated. Behind them, unnoticed, the arm of a Wampa Ice Monster suddenly detaches from a seemingly solid section of the wall.

Leia says – so do you want to be Leia or Han? Craig, you choose?

**Craig:** Oh, I want to be Leia, obviously.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Captain Solo.

**John:** Han steps in the quiet corridor and I can’t even read the next word. Going towards Leia.

**Lawrence:** And turns to face Leia.

**John:** Turns to face Leia. Thank you.

**Craig:** Captain Sol—Han. Why are you leaving us now?

**John:** That bounty hunter we ran into on Ord Mantell reminded me of what I’ve got to do.

**Craig:** Does Luke know?

**John:** He’ll know when he gets back. Don’t give me that look, sweetheart. Every day more bounty hunters are – help me with the word?

**Craig:** Searching.

**Lawrence:** Searching.

**John:** Searching for me.

**Craig:** [laughs] Is this how it went on that day? We need Gayle.

**John:** If I don’t pay off Jabba soon – ah, Jabba – there’ll be too many to stop. Remotes – help me out there?

**Lawrence:** Gang killers and who knows what else.

**Craig:** Oh, Gank killers. Now just to pause for a second. Do we ever hear about the Gank killers? I don’t think we heard about the Gank killers in the movie.

**Lawrence:** You know, I’m the worst person to ask. And this has come up many times over the years because when you do gatherings or you’re promoting the movie or you’re at Comic Con people ask you questions. They’re very detailed. They devoted their life to knowing these details and I’ve forgotten. I’ve gone on to other things. So I’m a terrible reference. Pablo Hidalgo who is the head of the history of Lucas Film, he knows everything.

**Craig:** I feel like Gank killers didn’t make it.

**John:** Yeah. And who knows what else.

I’ve got to get that price off my head while I still have a head.

OK, so he’s setting up the danger for Han. Important in this movie, but especially important for future movies. Leia says–

**Craig:** Han, I need you here. The Rebellion needs you.

**John:** Oh, so it’s the Rebellion.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Not you?

**Craig:** Me? [laughs]

**John:** My little princess. I’m afraid you don’t know yourself very well.

**Craig:** What do you mean?

**John:** When I met you I thought you were not only beautiful but brave. Now I see you’re only beautiful.

**Craig:** I fear nothing in this galaxy.

**John:** You’re afraid of your own feelings.

**Craig:** And what are they? Please, tell.

**John:** And the parenthetical here is “flip,” so just like–

**Craig:** I thought I nailed that.

**John:** I thought you did, too. But I want to make sure for the folks who can’t read this.

You want me to stay because you care for me.

**Craig:** I respect you, of course. You’re a bold fighter. Maybe not the brightest.

**John:** No, you’re highness, those aren’t the feelings I’m talking about.

Leia looks at him. She knows exactly what he means. But pretends to understand only now. She laughs.

**Craig:** You’re imagining things.

**John:** Han steps closer and Leia instinctively steps back. She’s almost against the wall.

**Craig:** Whoever – if anyone had ever been inspired to write slash fiction about you and me, this is it, man. It’s happening now.

**John:** This is the John/Craig slash fiction people have been craving for 450 episodes.

**Craig:** This is hot. Keep going.

**John:** And I cannot even begin to describe what a terrible job I’m doing of this dialogue.

**Lawrence:** You’re fine. You seem fine.

**John:** All right.

**Lawrence:** When we did our last one on Scriptnotes and what you guys have probably done more than anyone in the world, you’ve created a library of reference about screenwriting that never existed before and it’s more voluminous than any book you can get or anything. And it’s a wonderful resource for people. And what I’m interested in talking about whenever you want to and whenever you can is the writing itself. And this scene that we’re in the middle of, in the corridor, is a perfect example, it’s in the movie. As you say, it sets up a lot of things. In fact, nothing really changes, which is her denying her feelings toward him. His being very cocky but uncertain. And that plays throughout the movie.

But what interests is me is there’s always two, three, four things happening at once. So that when he starts toying with her about your feelings, she denies it. But it’s clear from Carrie Fisher and from Harrison that she’s very much in love with him. She’s very drawn to him. And all her denials are baloney. She’s playing a role as a princess.

That kind of stuff is so rich, you know. If the audience – it doesn’t have to be explained to them at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**Lawrence:** You just know. They look at human faces and they say he’s not telling her the whole truth. She’s not telling him the whole truth.

**Craig:** Correct. And it sets up a pattern. Because a great scene, and you know, I’m obsessed with relationships really. We talk about character and I’m always thinking really what we mean is relationships. Because that’s the only way character makes any sense. And that scene as delightful as it is, that kind of meeting, these two people recontextualizing their relationship, sets up a pattern that then influences and enhances every scene to follow between them. Because they will repeat this pattern over and over until he kind of gets it right.

**Lawrence:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is wonderful.

**Lawrence:** And she is softening every time, too.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Lawrence:** It works on her.

**Craig:** And just like with Luke in the snow, dying, and Obi-Wan showing up and saying while you’re dying I have the exposition for you, they’re going to have this in the belly of a creature that they thought was really an asteroid while they’re hiding from the TIE fighters. So these layers of things make everything better.

**Lawrence:** And, you know, one thing I was reminded looking at the movie is there are two scenes about he’s going to split off and leave the Rebellion and she can’t rely on him and what kind of man is he. And what happens is they get into the Millennium Falcon and they’re together for the rest of the movie.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**Lawrence:** So all this splitting up turns out to be irrelevant.

**Craig:** That’s another kind of writing question I had for you. There’s a moment that you know about as the writer that nobody else knows about. And sometimes those are kind of the juiciest moments. You know that in Hoth, shortly before they get wind that the Empire is about to attack, that Luke and Leia are going to have the last discussion they’re going to have until the end of the movie. They’re not going to see each other again. And you know that. And sometimes I think writers don’t take enough advantage of the secrets they know that the audience doesn’t know. Because there are things going on in there that just make it all so much more interesting because you’re aware of that.

**Lawrence:** Yes. And that to me is a good part of the fun of screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Lawrence:** Because that’s always happening. If it isn’t happening then the scene is probably flat. The scene is probably too simple. It’s always – and the audience, which is so fast, it doesn’t need anything explained really. They get it from one look from an actor. And a lot of stuff is totally redundant when you say it. So they know, oh, these are people and they have mixed feelings about each other. And maybe he knows something she doesn’t know. That’s what gives it all the juice.

**John:** Going back to the scene with Han and Leia that we were just reading through, you talk about in the first movie Lucas was so obsessed with speed and just getting through stuff, this scene actually has more banter than probably any scene in the first movie does and more sort of romantic comedy kind of banter. And yet while we could see some of that stuff with a look, you also need those characters to be in a space and actually enjoying it and you need to see them playing the sport. Because we need to see them hitting back and forth.

**Lawrence:** You know, in A New Hope it starts, but because it was moving so fast and because it was a certain kind of idea of what a movie should be it never pauses to let that play. So they get two strokes and they’re out. And they’re wonderful strokes and people quote those lines for 45 years now. And they’re wonderful. But you really want a little more. What happens after she has that quick comeback?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s talk about the relationship between Han and Leia and also between Luke and Leia. Because coming off of the first movie we could anticipate that this was going to be a love triangle. And it seems that that was maybe the initial conception of it. But in your movie it’s not that. So at what point was there a conversation about sort of what Luke and Leia’s relationship is going to be? And what point did you know what that was going to be like?

**Lawrence:** You know, there’s a gray area, a mystery area whenever you talk to George because to hear him tell it, and I think it’s true, he always thought this would be a trilogy. That there was more to the story. On the other hand, if Star Wars had failed there would have been no trilogy. So he wanted it as a standalone. No one really believed there was going to be a sequel to it. When it was coming out no one had any idea what it was going to be.

But once this enormous success happened, it changed everything in George’s life. Not only his acquisition of land and ILM and so on, but it also changed his attitude about what the first one was. And he can find the seeds of everything in the first one. And they’re there because that was his instinct. That was the story he wanted. But they’re not the details. And I honestly believe that he didn’t know about Leia and Luke when he was starting this.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t seem like it, but that’s OK. I mean, one of the benefits that it seems to me you had from a writing point of view, and I’d love to hear your feelings about this, is that because A New Hope was so compressed in its characterizations and sentiment and relationships that unlike a lot of sequels where you are trying to squeeze a little bit more blood out of something that was plenty bloody to begin with and isn’t so much anymore, you got to kind of create the real relationships. Like I’ve often said one of the reasons that my wife ultimately married me is because–

**Lawrence:** I’ve wondered so much about this.

**Craig:** Yeah. So here it is. But she is a huge Empire Strikes Back fan. And in particular when Han Solo says to Leia, “I think you like me because I’m a scoundrel.” You know, I was her scoundrel. And there was something about where in New Hope, and again an amazing movie, there’s no space for that stuff at all. It’s just sarcasm and fly boy and let’s get out of here.

So you had kind of a unique opportunity with the sequel that I don’t think many people ever get.

**Lawrence:** Absolutely. And that applies to everything in Empire because walking into that room with George and hearing about Vader you say, oh, this is going to give us room to do anything we want. And these characters who were so amusing and charming and fast in the first one, now let’s see who are they? And that was a great invitation. And the same thing applied to the story, because his resources were so much greater now. Every effect didn’t take forever. There were millions of people working on it which there hadn’t been before. So everything got more complicated.

**Craig:** You had this writing challenge of writing for a puppet. And–

**John:** We need to get into Yoda, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have to talk about Yoda because of all the stuff that – and I don’t know if we’re able to show–

**John:** We think we’ve got it fixed. I think we’ve got it fixed without people being able to hijack us. We’re going to try it.

**Craig:** OK. Try. If they do I’ll freak out again. But of all the stuff that’s handwritten and in this, it seems to me that the Yoda stuff is probably the closest to 1:1. So much of it is there. And it’s kind of goose-bumpy to see and maybe because Yoda was voiced by Frank Oz but not an actor/human being, the dialogue just carried through more linearly from your left hand to the screen. But it’s a remarkable challenge to write for this – it’s not just a new character. It’s not a person that you can even imagine.

**Lawrence:** I know. When George told me there would be a character who played that role in the story and he didn’t know what it would look like yet and he wasn’t sure about what it knew and what it could do, I was excited. Very excited. And he said this is someone who we’ve never seen. We didn’t see in the first one. And I need for him to talk in a new way. Need to have it be very distinctive how he talks. But more importantly and this – both George and I love Akira Kurosawa. The Kurosawa movies, which are the greatest movies in the world, and he is my favorite director, they are full of characters like this.

In fact, the first Star Wars, A New Hope, is practically a mirror of Hidden Fortress in that there’s two little droids, except they’re human beings, and so on. But all through the Kurosawa universe there is a mentor character and there is the son character. There is the innocent and the experienced and the wise and the naïve. And when we were talking about Yoda it was clear that this is a guy that’s in Seven Samurai, my favorite character in Seven Samurai, which is Shimada, the leader of the samurai. And he always has a different reaction to what happens in the scene than everybody else in the scene.

He always sees the big picture and his slower to react because he’s figured it out. And the brilliant thing, and this is good for any writer, is our introduction to him is a beautiful ballet [unintelligible] of violence. You know, it’s approached so calmly and he calmly cuts his samurai [nada] and it takes a long time.

**Craig:** Right.

**Lawrence:** And then it bursts into action and it’s over in seconds. And so you know before he starts being the wise patient one he is also this incredible samurai and physically awesome.

Kershner was such a different person than George. And that created this wonderful friction between them. And if you look at Kershner’s movies you’ll see a lot more run up to the joke. Run up to the gag. Run up to the action. He takes his time. And George likes to just go, go, go. And he ceded it correctly. But it makes all the difference in the world when you look at a movie how quickly you get to the [unintelligible].

**Craig:** Yeah. Well that’s, I mean, Yoda is a great example of Star Wars kind of taking its time. And so we have here the – and so this is a combination of typed and handwritten which is wonderful. So, this is INT. Creature House. So you called him creature. This is a question that we get all the time. When a character becomes revealed, their identity is revealed, what do you call them at first? Well, Yoda’s name was creature. INT. Creature House. The inside of the house is very plain but cozy. Everything is in the same scale as the creature. The only thing out of place in the miniature room is Luke who is cramped by the four-foot ceiling. He sits cross-legged on the floor of the living room.

The creature is in an adjoining area, which serves as the kitchen, cooking up some incredible meal. The stove is a steaming hodgepodge of pots and pans. The wizened little creature scurries about chopping this, shredding that, and showering everything with exotic herbs and spices. He rushes back and forth putting platters on the table in front of Luke.

**John:** Good this will taste. Wait and see, wait and see.

**Craig:** Luke looks around rather amused by his surroundings.

Well, it smells good anyway.

**John:** Why wish you to become a Jedi Knight?

**Craig:** Because of my father, I guess.

The creature gives Luke a questioning look.

My father was a Jedi.

**John:** Yes, yes. But why wish you?

**Craig:** I know it was meant to be.

The creature seems irritated, defensive.

I feel it, that’s all.

**John:** Think you Yoda will be satisfied with that?

**Craig:** Yes…I think so. Yoda will understand. Where is he anyway?

**John:** Very near.

**Craig:** When will I see him?

**John:** When you allow yourself to see.

**Craig:** The creature places a plate of steaming food in front of Luke. The young warrior studies the creature a long time through the steam thinking. Suddenly he understands.

You…you are Yoda?

**John:** That is my name. Why so surprised are you?

**Craig:** So let’s pause for a second. This is not how it works in the movie. And we were talking about this before. And so Larry I want to – this is one of these areas where the movie did a much sort of compressed, faster reveal of Yoda as Yoda. We hear Ben’s voice. Luke hears Ben talking. Then he realizes, oh wait a second, you’re Yoda.

But this was a different conception. And talk us through why this is a preferred way of doing it for you.

**Lawrence:** For me?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Lawrence:** Because the mood and the pace that all the Yoda stuff has up to this point, when he first encounters him out in the swamp, when he’s making the dinner, it’s all about this, which dovetails perfectly with Yoda’s character, which is you do one thing at a time and you take your time and you don’t rush anything. And it’s quiet. It’s very quiet. This is after you’ve seen a third of the movie already practically. And it’s been bang, bang, bang, and fast, fast, fast, and monsters and rocket ships. And here is this quiet place.

In fact, even up to the point where Luke splits off from Han and Leia at Hoth it’s different from that moment on for Luke, for Luke’s story. Theirs continues very much in the same tone.

**Craig:** Inside of this you are like the scene in the movie contrasting the essential problem Luke has, which is impatience, which is immaturity, which is therefore connected to fear, which leads to hate, which leads to dark. It’s all there in him being a young man who just—

**Lawrence:** And in fact even with this beginning that you’re talking about that never made it to the movie that is where it goes very quickly. It goes to a discussion about his patience. It is Yoda interrogating Ben in the after why does he believe in this guy. He seems so impatient. He seems so young. He seems so callow. And Ben is defending him. So that’s always, for writing again, this is a good rule which is when two other characters are talking about someone it reveals all three of them.

**Craig:** Right. Right. That’s a great way of putting it.

**John:** Larry, tell me about the choice of how Yoda speaks? Because it’s so distinctive. We’re so familiar with that now, but you had to come up with that. And so what was the process of getting his verbs inverted and what his voice was going to be like?

**Lawrence:** I think it was what I could think of.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Lawrence:** And it immediately got a positive response from George. And we never turned back. And I don’t know why. A part of it has to do, you know, it’s sort of Shakespearian in that you don’t start with the subject. There’s that. It slows things down. You have to worry through the sentence to understand. And then that way you’re paying more attention.

You know, it’s funny, in this pandemic we’re in a lot of people are trying to meditate and it give them some relief in a stressful day. But when you look at the introductory scenes of Yoda, he might as well be a meditation teacher. What he says to Luke from the time he lands in the swamp is you’re not looking at the thing itself.

**Craig:** Well let’s read that, because this is one of my favorite – I mean, so I’m reading this from your handwriting and this is what Yoda says.

“To become a Jedi takes the hardest work, the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. But you, Skywalker, I have watched for a long time. All your life have you looked away, to the horizon, to the sky. Never your mind on where you were, what you were doing. Adventure, heh,” I’ll add that in. “Excitement, heh. A Jedi craves not these things.”

That’s like, OK, so I just want to say from a sort of writing is magic point of view that’s magic. Because, again, your left hand put that there. And then it sort of went into the puppet and now it’s not just something that everybody knows and shares from a cultural point of view, it is in a weird way a fundamental part of our understanding of Zen, in the west. This is – you kind of gave us Zen through Yoda.

Talk about how – I mean, it’s one thing to say like, look, Yoda is 800 years old or whatever he was and he knew these things. It’s another thing to say that you were not 800 years old and how did you know these things?

**Lawrence:** Well, you know, I was very interested in, and my brother who is very deeply involved in it and from the second I learned some of these precepts. And they resonated for me. Because I was – to this day I have a problem with not doing one thing at a time. I’m always splitting my decision. And so you turn away. You knock things over. You forget why you came in the room. And it’s not just age, which Craig will say. You’re too distracted. The pandemic is an added distraction to a world that was already incredibly distracting. And so when you can focus and do the thing you really want to do, and feel it, and live it, it can be three seconds, but if you really live it and you pay attention to it it changes everything. And I like that speech.

But what’s unusual about that speech is it really goes to the heart of A New Hope and him looking into the distance, wanting to get away from the ranch, the farm. And you know. So the audience knows, because they knew A New Hope perfectly. Yeah, that’s what he was like on Tatooine.

**Craig:** That’s him. That’s him. Yeah. One other thing I’ll mention about this scene that’s sort of legendary, and a sign of how good of a writer you are, and a crystallization of what good writing is is that you have this wise character who is imparting these deep lessons of wisdom and there’s this young man who now understands that this is a wise old guy who is going to help him. And the ghost of his other mentor has appeared. These are all calming, stabilizing things.

And you understand inherently that in a movie, any movie, but particularly this movie that comforting, stabilizing, explanatory scene has to end in the most destabilizing, threatening way possible, which is Luke saying, “I’m not afraid,” and from your left hand Yoda says, “You will be. You will be,” which is terrifying. The freaking eyes go yeah. It’s always terrifying and I say that to my wife all the time as well, because it’s fun. But that to me is the essence of what it means to craft a great scene. You understood that it was going to begin here with a young man who doesn’t even know what this little thing is and it was going to end with that little thing terrifying that young man.

**Lawrence:** I always struggled to look and usually did not find. But you’re looking for the thing at the end of this scene that throws you into the next one, even if it’s different characters.

**Craig:** Right.

**Lawrence:** You just want to be sling-shotted ahead. And when he says, “You will be,” it opens up the promise of, oh, this movie is going to be cool.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Had you left that scene earlier on a place where Luke was comfortable or at least like was excited about this next step you wouldn’t have had the same energy jumping into the next scene. You would have lost energy on that cut. And instead you gained a lot of energy by ending the scene on that moment.

So let’s jump ahead to Luke being scared and being afraid, which is this final fight with Vader. And he’s cocky in it and then he’s losing to Vader. And then one of the most iconic moments in cinematic history is the revelation that Darth Vader is actually his father.

Craig, let’s you and I look through the pages that lead up to that. But I’m really curious, you know, you say that Lucas told you, oh, Vader is Skywalker’s father – were you always anticipating that the revelation would happen during this fight, during this moment? Did you experiment with other places?

**Lawrence:** You know, when he said that in the sanctity of his office at Skywalker Ranch it was understood that no one was to know this for the next two years.

**Craig:** Right.

**Lawrence:** And that’s not so easy on a movie. You know, you’ve seen it, how hard it is to keep secure anything. And this was a giant thing that the whole world suddenly would be interested in. So, it was from that moment on never mention it. Never talk about it in public. Never say, you know, in the story conferences. You did not reveal that. And when it came to shooting there were fake pages. And then the very last second it was revealed to the actors.

**Craig:** Right. And a little slightly different here. The way that you reveal it is frankly more subtle I guess is what I would say, from your left hand.

**John:** Yeah, so talking through this, the pages that we’re looking at, it starts in Scene 140 and there’s a Zero-Cold Chamber. Some familiar dialogue here. Some stuff has changed a little bit along the way. And it looks like an addendum page, it’s called Insert A, add to the bottom of Scene 146 or whatever it is. Luke’s sword whistles past Vader and the young warrior is thrown off-balance, his guard down. Vader’s light saber flashes out with deadly skill and cuts Luke’s arm off at the elbow! Luke’s forearm flies away in the wind as the boy himself almost goes over the edge. He can barely stand.

He wipes the tears and blood from his eyes, but still can barely focus on his massive opponent.

And then the next page Vader says, “Search your feelings, my son. But you will know it to be true. Come join your father.” Luke is horror-stricken. Bewildered.

So, Larry, is this an example of that line and that information is being held back from the actors until the very last moment?

**Lawrence:** Yes. That’s right. They did not know. And I had written another ending. I don’t remember what we were dealing with all the time during production, but that was not in there.

One thing, you know, when you’re talking about it John, one of the things that interests me most in life and I try to get into screenplays is this feeling of you do sense things that are not told to you. And we all do it. And you walk into a room with someone and you get a feeling off that person. It could be good, it could be bad. Maybe like I’m getting nothing from that person. And when you think about your own life and you think why did I do that? That’s one of a million mistakes I’ve made. And you feel in your body what is that thing in you.

So, I think that George rightly from A New Hope was playing on something we all know to be true, which is you don’t have to say it, no one has to tell you. You have feelings about the situation. And so when Darth is working on him he’s saying you know this to be true. He wants him to admit it because he knows it is.

**Craig:** And that sequence I have a sense memory as a 10-year-old watching that sequence and knowing early on, like you say, you have a sense of things, even the audience as we’re watching, something is wrong. This is not the usual thing. Where like, good, it’s the good guy versus the bad guy. The good guy is going to shoot the bad guy and it’s over. Or they’re going to have that classic fist fight at the end of the movie and then one of them is going to get kicked off the, you know, the side of the thing and that’s the end of that.

Something is up. You can tell. And the reason you know something is up is because Darth Vader isn’t acting like Darth Vader. This is a guy who randomly just chokes out people. One of the very – by the way, the other thing about you I should say is you’re funny. You are a funny writer. You are a really good, strong comedy writer. And so things like for instance Vader’s, like the running gag of Vader choking out these successive admirals and captain is just funny. But then we get to the end here and he’s not doing it.

So what happens from a writing point of view is instead of us sitting there waiting to see how the inevitable battle concludes. We are now waiting to see why this relationship is not working the way we expect it. And then to satisfy people with what they were not expecting and to make sense of it all retroactively is just tremendous sleight of hand. It’s incredible craft.

And I think sometimes people forget because they think that all it is is like write-write-write, swing-swing, hit-hit, I’m your daddy. What? It’s not like that. Doesn’t work like that at all. There are a billion bad versions of that scene and it’s a credit to the writing that it works.

**Lawrence:** Well thanks. But in A New Hope, you know, the ultimate is in the scene “Feel the Force, Luke.” He’s trying to get the shot down the tiny little hole in the Death Star. And the entire movie is about being in touch with the Force. And he meets Ben who is very much in touch. And in his limited time Ben tries to get this kid to be open to it. And Luke and his father, Anakin, Darth, he knows it. He can track his son across the universe because of feelings that he’s getting.

And that to me is metaphorical for all of our lives. You know? And you just have – you go into a meeting and you have that funny feeling. Wait, this is not right. Why are we having it now? They’re going to tell me something I don’t like here. Or you have a conversation with your family and you say, “Let’s start again. I’m not getting this clear to you. And you’re reacting and we’re not hearing each other.” It’s all there.

The whole saga is about are you in touch with the feelings that are swirling around you.

**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro. Thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation, in particular Enid and Dustin for getting us here.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** We love your outros, so Matthew is doing the one for this week, but you should send us your outro for these shows. Send them 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.

Larry Kasdan, are you on Twitter? You’re not on Twitter. You should not be on Twitter.

**Craig:** No. But John Kasdan is on Twitter.

**John:** Yeah. Follow John Kasdan. He’s always there.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll try to put up some slides, the pages we showed. You’ll also find the transcripts. We get those up the week after the episode airs. And Premium members can sign up at Scriptnotes.net for the bonus episodes and bonus segments. Larry Kasdan and everyone, if you guys want to put yourself on video again and wave to Larry Kasdan.

**Craig:** Yeah, we can see you now. Let’s look back into your rooms.

**John:** Aw. We want to see all your rooms.

**Craig:** See, look at you in gallery view. Thanks guys. Thanks for—

**John:** Look at everybody.

**Craig:** Look at how many of you there are.

**Lawrence:** Goodbye everybody. Thanks for coming.

**Craig:** There’s so many.

**John:** Thank you very much for joining.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** And thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** Thanks everyone.

**John:** Thanks.

**Lawrence:** Thanks everybody.

**Craig:** Bye-bye everybody.

**John:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**Craig:** Well maybe we should get in touch with some of the feelings of the folks that are watching and listening. That’s my segue. I’m being Segue Man now. I’m very proud of myself. Yeah.

**John:** Matthew asks, “The ending of Empire Strikes Back is incredible to me because it feels so satisfying yet so many threads are left open. Can you speak to how that was constructed and what some of the challenges were in achieving that?

**Lawrence:** Yeah. That gets to the heart of the movie for me, because I was trained in classical dramatic construction. And if you think of the three-act-play which is what we worked with generally, the first act you get the situation, you get the characters. And then in the second act everything goes to shit. And you want, you know, ideally at the end of the second act it looks like doom. And how will those people ever get back together again? How will they ever forgive each other? Anything like that. It’s always open-ended at the end of the second act. And then the third act hopefully resolves in a way that’s very satisfying.

Well, Empire Strikes Back is the second act. And that makes it – when I realized that immediately I thought this is really fun. Because we don’t have to wrap everything up. We don’t have to tie it all together. We want it to be chaos at the end of this movie.

**Craig:** Right. Ties into this next question from Hillary who asks, “Do you approach writing ensemble dramas like The Big Chill and Grand Canyon differently than writing genre films like Raiders or The Empire Strikes Back? What is different, if anything, about the approach to writing for a franchise with a fantastic intergalactic story world as opposed to something that is very much feet on the ground like Big Chill or Grand Canyon?”

**Lawrence:** I don’t make a big distinction between them. I really think the job is always the same. Within the reality that you’re creating, it doesn’t have to be our reality. But within that there has to be some sense of logic to the world that you’re creating. And that’s true in The Big Chill and Grand Canyon and Star Wars. You know, it’s just – that’s what you want. You want the audience not to be comfortable, not to be put to sleep, but to say I recognize something true here.

**Craig:** Right.

**Lawrence:** So I’m not just thrown out because the guy does something crazy. You know? Or if he does something crazy then it teaches me that he’s crazy.

**Craig:** Right. It’s intentional. It’s always intentional.

**Lawrence:** Yes.

**John:** So Federico asks, “Any dos and don’ts regarding the weaving of world-building and story, especially when setting up a film’s universe in act one?”

So, I’m thinking about this in terms of Yoda, which we just talked about. You don’t do a lot of world-building about who Yoda is or what Yoda is. That universe – he existed in himself and you’re setting up his planet, but only the degree to which you need it. Did you have other documents that are other things thought through in terms of what all this is? Or is your world-building just what we see in the movie?

**Lawrence:** I’m not drawn to that. And the reason I don’t generally, you know, I don’t like development and I don’t like story conferences too much, it’s a very intimate thing to me. It’s got to be the principal is doing it. I don’t want to talk about it intellectually. I don’t want to write it. And I want to know in a material way what is going to happen, what are the props here. Where are we trying to get to within this scene from here to here? What will we use to get there? What will be revealed while we’re doing that about the people in the scene? Even if they just walked into the scene.

Those are the movies I love. It’s not my movie, it’s every movie that trusts the audience and says, “You’ll get it. Just relax.” And you do get it. I remember watching Gravity and thinking she’s doing things in the capsule, I don’t know what they are but know they’re really intense and that she’s running out of time. They don’t ever say that. You know, it’s all lights and stuff on the thing. And she’s working as fast as she can. And I so admired that. The presumption that the audience will figure it out.

**Craig:** Great. Let’s see if – want to do one more question?

**John:** I was going to do Jeff’s question.

**Craig:** Great. Do it.

**John:** Jeff asks, “It’s always fun to hear about discarded early ideas. What were some wild ideas you or George had early on that were never shot and were discarded?” Do you remember some things that came up early in this process that like what if we did this and you [crosstalk]?

**Lawrence:** No. I don’t have that kind of memory. And this scene that we talked about that did not get shot the way I had written it, it had been reprinted in [Unintelligible] Magazine, my handwritten pages. And when I saw it after many years, I thought, oh, that’s pretty good. You know, when you’ve come upon something you’ve written years and years ago you say that’s pretty good. And I thought it was in the movie. And then watching the movie the other night it wasn’t there. I was freaked out. I said well this other scene is there and I like mine better. You know? And they both end up at the same place, but they start completely differently.

So, memory is really tricky. And, you know, you think you remember something but in fact you’ve created a new history that you’ve convinced yourself is real.

**Craig:** Well, I’m sorry that we played any part in disrupting that history for you. [laughs] I feel terrible now. The movie had been perfect.

**John:** One of the reasons I was really excited to talk with you about this movie though is that I think we do rewrite a history and make it seem like everything was inevitable. That it was inevitable that off of Star Wars you would have Empire Strikes Back, but it was the furthest thing from inevitable. It went through Leigh had done a script and Lucas was struggling to get a script. You were able to sort of deliver a thing that could be shot. But it wasn’t at all obvious how you make a sequel to that movie, or even if it was a good idea to make a sequel to that movie. Because sequels were not a popular thing.

I mean, Empire was the reason why we have sequels to a large degree to these big franchise movies and we even come into some of these giant movies with the idea of like “and then we will make it into a trilogy.” That whole thing starts with Star Wars. So it’s so helpful to have you talk through these initial stages.

**Lawrence:** Speaking to that, I will say that I find, you know, I’m a big basketball fan, sports fan. When someone wins the Super Bowl, my guy wins the Super Bowl for the sixth time, you say well there’s something – he’s the greatest there ever was because who could do that? But what you know if you’re a really big fan, every one of those seasons if you watched every game there was a moment when they almost lost. You know, if it wasn’t a rout.

And somebody made a catch you couldn’t believe, or someone dropped a pass that you can’t believe. And all those things, it happens in basketball all the time. The last minute shot. The fumble. The turnover. And what looks inevitable when they’re standing there, him holding the championship trophy, was not inevitable at all.

And I feel that moviemakers are like that, too. When you put it out there there’s a sense of like well that’s going to be it for now. I’m not going to change this. And there is kind of solidity to it. But up to that moment in the cutting room everything is up for grabs. And there is no inevitability about it.

Very often the things you thought would make it inevitable are superfluous and the audience doesn’t need them.

**Craig:** So, see, that’s what good writers sound like when they talk. He knew that we had come to an end and proceeded to deliver a perfect summary. A wonderful anecdote with an analogy that wrapped everything up and made it perfect.

**Lawrence:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Outrageous. [laughs] It’s outrageous. You just know how to do it. God, it’s just–

**Lawrence:** You’re very nice. I love being with you guys.

**Craig:** We love you, too. We love you, too. Greatest living screenwriter, Larry Kasdan. I’ve said it a million times. And I’ll say it after you’re gone. [laughs]

Links:

* Find Lawrence Kasdan’s Handwritten Script [here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/empire-handwritten-pages.pdf).
* [Scriptnotes 247, The One with Lawrence Kasdan](https://johnaugust.com/2016/the-one-with-lawrence-kasdan)
* Thank you to the [Writer’s Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2020/5/5/online-conversation-revisiting-the-empire-strikes-back-with-lawrence-kasdan) for hosting us!
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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/452standard.mp3).