Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Biddy, biddy, biddy, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 678 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how does a series maintain its look and feel when directors change each week? We’ll talk about one solution, which is the on-set producer responsible for upholding a showrunner’s vision on set. We’ll also talk about TV development and answer listener questions on pitching, shipping an app, and writing by hand, plus the scourge of directors’ chairs. What can be done about these implements of torture?

In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about officiating weddings, because me and Craig and our guests have all been officiants officially at weddings. We’ve married people. We’ll talk about the process of marrying people.

Craig: We marry people and we’ve married people.

John: We have, yes. Both as a transitive and as an intransitive verb.

Craig: No. They’re both transitive.

John: They’re both transitive, but different.

Craig: Just different verb meanings.

John: Yes. We’ll dig deep into the verb meanings behind–

Craig: Welcome to nerd corner. Do you know what I did when I introduced my– do you recognize that sound?

John: No. Tell me.

Craig: Biddy, biddy, biddy.

John: I don’t know what it is.

Craig: Do you have any idea? That is from the Buck Rogers television show way back [crosstalk]

John: Oh my God. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and I remember it. [crosstalk]

Craig: The little robot. Biddy, biddy, biddy.

John: So good.

Craig: Was it? [laughs]

John: Well, I enjoyed it, but I also kind of enjoyed Gil

Gerard. I think that may have been why I was watching the show.

Craig: Erin Moran.

John: Erin Moran.

Craig: There we go.

John: Everyone has a thing to–

Craig: Everyone’s got–

John: What’s the robot?

Craig: By the way, early network executives were like, “I don’t care what happens in space. I want a guy that everyone who likes guys would like. I want a girl that everyone who likes girls would like. Put them in the spacesuits. Go.”

John: Go.

Craig: They were right.

John: They were absolutely correct.

Craig: Nailed it.

John: Our guest this week is a guy that all guys will like and that all girls will like. Helping us figure all this out is Dan Etheridge.

Craig: That’s so much pressure.

Dan Etheridge: Wow.

John: He is a producer whose credits include Veronica Mars, iZombie, High Potential, The Carrie Diaries, and Cupid. He co-created Party Down and on the feature side, he produced seven movies, more than seven?

Dan: Yes, I think that sounds right.

Craig: For a moment there I thought you meant Seven the movie and I was like, “What?”

Dan: It’s pretty incredible.

Craig: What a weird outlier in that resume.

Dan: You’re welcome.

John: There’s a bunch of movies including my film, The Nines.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Dan Etheridge, welcome to the show.

Dan: Thank you. Thank you. Nice to be here.

John: Dan Etheridge, in addition to being an incredible producer, you are also one of my dearest friends on earth. It’s so great to finally have you on the podcast.

Dan: Back at you.

John: All right.

Dan: What’s it been, like 30 years as of this year?

John: That we’ve been friends?

Dan: Yes.

John: I guess our friendiversary is probably coming up pretty soon, because it would have been– What year did we meet? That would have been– I’m going to call it in ’95.

Dan: ’94. ’95.

John: ’95. Yes. Right in there. Great.

Dan: Right in there. That’s the time. Then what year was God?

John: God the short was 1998.

Dan: Okay.

John: Yes. Shortly after.

Dan: A few years later. Right on.

John: God, a short film with Melissa McCarthy.

Craig: Yes. The great Melissa McCarthy.

John: So good. So much fun. We have actual news. In addition to everything else, my company makes the app Highland for the Macintosh. Today we are coming out with the new version, Highland Pro, which is a new app from the ground up. It is made for the Mac, of course, but also iPhone and iPad. Today, as you’re listening to this episode, it is available in all of the app stores. On the podcast, we talk about Nima, the helpful elf. This is a work done by Nima and Dustin, if you’ve heard of the show. It’s mostly what they work on, but also Drew, Chris. Drew is just cutting a video for the launch of it.

Drew: I thought you were giving me credit for making this app, and that was not true.

John: No. Drew uses the app regularly.

Drew: All the time.

Craig: That’s almost the same thing as making it.

John: Yes. Drew and I have been using the app for the last two years. We’ve gotten to see all the beta development things. It’s so nice to actually have the rest of the world be able to use it.

My goal with this new version of Highland Pro is to get rid of all the stuff that can distract you in the world as you’re writing. A couple of examples is we have a new thing called the shelf. Sometimes when you are writing something, you need to cut a scene and then you will just cut it and paste it into an extra document, sort of a scratch file. Craig, I see you nodding. It’s a thing you do.

Craig: I do that.

John: You do that.

Craig: I do that.

John: Then it’s work and you’re breaking your flow from doing it. In Highland Pro, you just grab it, you drag it to the side, to the shelf, and it just stays there.

Craig: Yes, that’s a really smart idea.

John: It’s always there. Nice.

Craig: It stays within the file.

John: Yes. Craig, you probably leave notes for yourself in a script to go back and do some stuff. Do you boldface them?

Craig: Rarely, I do an all caps, boldface, fix this, or make this go better.

John: In Highland, you can just put double brackets around things to make a note or just put an equal sign in front of it as a note. It’ll always stand out. It’ll always show up in the navigator on the side for like, oh, these are the things, the work list you leave for yourself on stuff.

Craig: I wish I used a navigator on the side. It’s there. I never look at it. I just scroll like an idiot.

John: You don’t need to. You can just do this. The coolest new thing that we introduced in this version of Highland is what we call lookup. So often when I’m writing something, I’ll need to switch to Safari to find something. It could be a rhyme for something, it could be, what year was Madison president? It could be some small little thing. I’ll find myself just getting sucked into a hole because I switched over to the browser because I left my typing environment to do it. Now in Highland, you just type slash and then whatever you’re looking for. If it’s a rhyme for green, if it’s a distance from Denver to Houston, it gives you the answer right there in the documents.

Craig: Does it connect up with Google or something?

John: It does. For things like rhymes and for dictionary, for definitions, it’s using an outside service, an API that’s called WordNet something. Those answers are blazingly fast. If it’s something it doesn’t know how to do, it reaches out to one of the services, reaches out first to our server and then to one of those services, and gives you an answer as quickly as it can. It’s basically Googling it. I just want to give you the shortest possible answer.

Craig: You don’t have to leave.

John: You don’t have to leave.

Craig: You’re forcing me to write more. Stop it.

John: I’m hopefully making your writing process smoother and more enjoyable.

Craig: I don’t know about you, but I love the distractions.

John: You love the distractions sometimes.

Craig: Yes. I can’t wait for Final Draft to steal all of your ideas, John.

John: It’s going to happen here soon. What question– Drew has it open here. What question do you want Drew to ask? Let’s pretend you’re writing something. It’s something you need to know.

Craig: Got it. When was the first locomotive in operation in the United States?

John: He’s typing.

Craig: I hear him.

Drew: It says the first locomotive introduced in the United States was the Tom Thumb, which was built in 1829.

Craig: Oh [crosstalk]

John: Wow. Did you know that already? Was that–

Craig: New. Nor do I know if that’s true.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Seems made up.

Drew: Tom Thumb.

Craig: Tom Thumb. Sus.

John: What I tend to use it for is, I don’t need the absolute verifiable fact. What I need is, what is that? What am I thinking of? Sort of the reverse. There’s a word I’m thinking of that starts with an L that means this thing. It’s so good for that.

Craig: Confirmation.

John: Yes. The kind of stuff that could stop you for 2 minutes and just break that pattern. Just getting you out of there really quickly. Also, you don’t have to go open a menu. You don’t have to do anything. You just type slash and then what you want, it’s there, and it goes away.

Craig: Great.

John: Highland is out today. It’s on the Mac App Store, the iPhone App Store, the iPad App Store. You can try it there.

Dan: I think that my blurb, I believe it was from Bronson Watermarker or either Weekend Read, probably Weekend Read.

John: Probably Weekend Read, yes.

Dan: “Staggeringly useful,” and that applies very much here as well. Very nice.

Do you remember that you asked me to write something up? I happily did because I really did love the app and I’m not really a writer, but I wrote up like a three, four sentence paragraph that I really spent some real time on. It had the phrase staggeringly useful in it when the blurb appeared, “staggeringly useful”. I appreciated your editing, ever the great writer/producer.

John: You’ve got to be concise. You’ve got to be short.

Craig: It’s a blurb. [crosstalk] It’s a blurb.

John: Blurb. I overdid it. It was my fault.

Craig: You over-blurbed. Very common mistake.

John: Yes, I know. I do it all the time. Let’s do some follow-up. What do you got for us?

Drew: Yes. In the last episode, Craig, you said that there is no way around Google AI summaries.

Craig: Yes. Not at least other than what I’d read was forcing Google to only return answers prior to a year.

Drew: Right. Tom, listener Tom wrote in that you can get around Google’s AI results by including profanity in your search, and it works.

Craig: Yeah. Weird work around. So if I just want to search something, I just got to throw an F-bomb at the end of it?

Drew: Yes, or get creative. Put it in the middle.

Craig: When was the first fucking locomotive invented in the– oh, warning, language warning.

John: Yes. Sorry.

Craig: Okay. Interesting. Also, weird choice by Google to just be like, “Oh, yes. Oh, we can’t let the AI hear those dirty words.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: I bet that will work for about the next two weeks and then–

Craig: I switched my search engine to a start page.

John: Oh, very nice. I’m using DuckDuckGo. Dan shaking his head.

Dan: Google.

John: He’s Google. I’ve heard of Google.

Craig: Start pages seem nice. Work great.

John: Good.

Craig: No stupid AI results.

John: We have some follow-up from episode 536.

Drew: Tony in LA writes, “In episode 536, you read my story that my best friend and writing partner had unexpectedly died. Thank you both for your sympathy and advice. It was very much appreciated. You asked me to provide an update after a year. I obviously missed that deadline by quite a bit, but in all honesty, I didn’t have much to update after a year. Writing solo continued to be a struggle. It didn’t matter if I was working on a short or a feature, editing something old or creating something new. I found myself constantly second-guessing my ideas. I felt rudderless. I missed my friend. I missed his voice, his opinions, his humor. I no longer felt joy when writing.

I was still able to keep busy creatively, however, editing a micro-budget feature that he and I had shot before he died. That film is now finished and out on the festival circuit. I’m sad that he’ll never get to see it, but I think he’ll be proud of the work that we did. Since his death, I also started playing D&D.

Craig: Nice.

Drew: We have a weekly Saturday night game. I knew none of these people before, but we’ve become an incredible group of friends. I’ve gotten very close with one in particular, and she and I have started writing together. I wasn’t looking for a new partner, but it just organically grew out of other creative work we were doing together, and writing with her is, dare I say, easy, and I feel joy again. The strangest thing, I can now hear my friend’s voice much clearer in my head.”

Craig: Well, Jeez Louise.

John: No, I’m so happy that it pulled out a happy ending there.

Craig: That has everything. That story’s got it all.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s got D&D.

John: It’s got loss. It’s got a love connection, but it’s a creative love connection.

Craig: A creative love connection, which is great. His email here reminded me a lot of the lyrics from I Miss the Music from the musical Curtains, in which someone has a songwriting partner who dies. He talks about, I miss the music. I miss my friend. I miss the wisdom and somebody to tell me I’m not doing it well enough, but then makes it better. It’s nice that he found– Some people should be working in a partnership.

John: Yes.

Craig: There are partner people and he’s a partner person. I’m glad he found a new one.

John: All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic today, which is the role of the on-set producer. All this actually stemmed out of a gripe I had about directors’ chairs that I vented to Dan and Craig both about, but then I realized like, “Oh, I’ve actually never talked about what Dan does on TV series productions,” which I think is incredible.

Can you describe the function you’ve fulfilled on the last couple of TV shows that you’ve been doing and what your job is, which is different from what Craig is doing as a showrunner. It’s different from what a line producer does. Tell us about what you’re doing on these shows.

Dan: I feel like you all already know this intuitively. I’m speaking to folks out there in the million foot view. There are two pillars of it. One, the creative. You’re there to help effect the showrunner’s vision for the show. Particularly, not just in the short-term, but the medium or long-term.

Then there’s the production pillar. In the on-set producer version of this, which is what I tend to do, you be on set every day. Ideally, you’re bringing a wealth of set experience to that job. What you are doing is every day accruing the experience of that set and the nuances and intricacies of that particular set.

Then I perhaps unglamorously, what I describe the job as, is a transaxle between those two pillars, because as we know, those are intricately linked, but it’s not always possible for the showrunner to be the person who links them or the writer/producer, if you have a strong one, or if you have a junior writer/producer on set that you are helping to educate on how to produce a show.

When I do it, and I think when a lot of folks do on-set producer, is that’s what they’re doing. They’re there every day so that the cast and crew and folks who are there every day know that there is one person that they can always come to who, if they don’t know the answer, knows how to get the answer.

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: Similarly, with the showrunner, ideally, you have a relationship with them and they know that you have their creative back. All of this, I should say, is, in television particularly, you are supporting the episodic director.

Obviously, there’s no infringing on the DGA prerogatives of the episodic director, but ideally, you’re supporting them in their mission and keeping an eye on the longer-term goals of the season of the series. Again, you all, I think, already know that, but the great thing is that every show operates as it wants to operate.

Many shows will not need an on-set producer. For instance, if the showrunner values being on-set every day and is able to construct the shows so that they can be, obviously, that would mutate or even negate the need for an on-set producer. Again, if you have a strong writer/producer there for their episode, as you should, but then there’s a lot of shows where the showrunner either doesn’t want to be on-set or can’t, or where there’s a junior writer/producer episode who needs to learn how to produce and needs a colleague and a partner in that. That’s when an on-set producer could be valuable.

Craig: Yes. There are times, I have a producing partner who’s usually on-set, but I’m also there, I’m an everyday showrunner. I call myself an activist showrunner. There are times where something happens where neither one of us know how to fix it. We do need a producee-producer. I call them producee-producers. Okay, so we’re supposed to be here. The problem is the people that are supposed to be not doing construction across the street are. Locations is on it, but when are we going to find out and who, talk to whom, and what are the actual– so you have to dial back to the mothership and a lot of texting goes on. Having somebody there to producee-produce, yes, I can see, especially if there’s not a showrunner there. I don’t know how you would not. I don’t know how a show would function without you.

John: Dan, so many of the shows I’m thinking about that you have been the person on-set because the writing was happening in Los Angeles and you were in Vancouver, you were in New York City, you were someplace different than where that was. You were functioning as the will of the showrunner, making sure that things were actually happening the way that Rob Thomas, in many cases, really wanted things to happen.

Dan: Yes, geography has certainly helped the career of the on-set producer by necessity. There have been a few shows in Los Angeles. For instance, and I don’t think Rob would mind me saying this, Rob finds great value in writing and being in the writer’s room and post. That is where he likes to spend his time. He and I know each other so well and have worked together for so long that he understands that I have a pretty good shot at knowing what he was looking for out of a scene or to answer a question. There’s value in that relationship.

You and I have been on set together throughout the years and I understand, I believe, the John August aesthetic and I believe in it and I’m excited to effect it. I did land this job once by just interviewing and it worked out great. Amy Harris, who’s a terrific showrunner and I love working for her, but you don’t usually do that. I think it’s someone that you’ve come to develop a trust with.

Craig: Yes. Wow. Because I’m not– I guess I’m a much more scared person. I don’t want to say paranoid or less trusting, but on the one hand, when you said, okay, there for the writing and then there in post, I went, “Oh, that sounds like a dream.” Then immediately, my adrenal glands fired.

John: That’s Damon Lindelof on Lost. Damon Lindelof was never in Hawaii.

Craig: Right. I think that’s most people. It’s just like, I immediately go, “Oh my God.”

John: That’s how people are built.

Craig: It’s how people are built, exactly.

John: Let’s walk through the process because as I understand it, you get involved, on a classic show, as the room is figuring stuff out, you get a sense of what the season is going to be like and helping the showrunner figure out what are the sets we’re going to need? Where are the issues? Then it transitions into production and you have a much stronger role there. Talk us through from pre-production into production and what your day might look like while you’re working in production.

Dan: Just to tee that up, to each showrunner his own or her own, in the case of Rob, who I’ve done many shows with, I will tend to be in the writer’s room. That is an exercise in listening, for the most part, and exercises in learning and listening, seeing how they’re developing the aesthetic of the show so that I can best help to affect it when we get there.

Obviously, one hopes that you have a great line producer-producer on the show. If you do, they’re also going to be absorbing that aesthetic. As pre-production starts, obviously they’re beginning to do the mechanical work. I will start to help out. If you have a producer-director, they might be doing this, but we often just go with an on-set producer and I’ll be doing it, so you’ll be starting again.

It’s that transaxle quality. You start to help to oversee sets, make sure they’re being developed in the right way, not just on the brutal level of construction, where you’re going to put the camera ports, but does it live up to what I’ve been hearing in the writer’s room?

John: And not just for the episode, the first episode [unintelligible 00:17:14] but where it’s going down the road.

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: Which is something that you can provide, not just to go back to sets again, but if you have a new set in the middle of the season, the episodic director obviously will have a lot invested in that set because it’s their episode, but you know what it needs to do five episodes down the line. That’s the value you can bring ultimately.

I do think, to answer your question, day by day, once we start shooting, I’m on set every day. I might step away for the tone meeting, which we can talk about what that is, or maybe you all touched on that before.

Craig: I think we’ve probably talked about tone meetings.

John: We’ve talked about it, but let’s recap the tone meeting. The tone meeting is the discussion where the director for that episode gets up to speed with what the showrunner and what the creative team wants to do for this episode, and gets the conversation that happens here. It feels like your function is to really know what that is and be able to remind the director of, this is what the goal is of this scene, of this episode.

Dan: You have done many tone meetings. Showrunners will do tone meetings in different ways. I always think of it as a conversation between the showrunner and the director that I get to eavesdrop on. Sometimes other folks will be invited to eavesdrop as well the first day, depending on how the showrunner wants to have that done. But I think it’s invaluable for me to be there for exactly that reason.

It’s really a support thing. The director is taking all this in, but they’re taking in a lot. When they’re on set, sometimes they turn to you for the support of, is this in keeping with the flow of the show? It’s good to be able to be there for them when they need that.

John: That’s great. You’re on set from basically call to wrap to make sure that everything is working okay. Who are your conversations with? Obviously the director is an important conversation. It’s making sure the director feels supported, but also understands what the goal is-

Dan: Exactly.

John: -of certain scenes. You also have ongoing relationships with the talent because you are the person who sees them every day, whereas directors will drop in and drop out.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Talk to us about that.

Dan: First of all, and again, I’m not just saying this as lip service. I have absolute respect to the prerogatives of the episodic director and speaking to the actors. I would never speak to the actors in terms of directing the actors. That is verboten and wouldn’t do it. It’s not good for the show, even if it wasn’t a policy. They need to hear from one creative voice.

But there are questions that they will have about things that are going on during the series. Look, different actors have different idiosyncrasies, different strengths and weaknesses, different fears and turn off. Over time, as you get to know them, you can help address them, assuage them to mitigate them so that then the director and the actor can do their best work on set.

John: Absolutely. Because you have all the intel on the actor and know what the actor needs and how things tend to work, you can have the private conversation with the director to get them up to speed. These are things to be thinking about with this. Here’s how you might want to organize your work.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Let’s talk about, you know what the season is supposed to be. You have some sense of where things are going, but a lot of the series you’ve been working on, they’re still writing episodes as things are going along. To what degree is there a feedback mechanism from you to this is what’s happening here in production and this is what you’re doing there? How helpful are you in terms of being able to communicate back to the writing room and the writing process and to the showrunner, these are the issues we’re running into and let’s be thinking about that as you’re putting together stuff?

Dan: Not to sound like a broken record, but it is showrunner dependent and the relationship you have with the showrunner. Obviously with someone like Rob, we talk all the time, and just by nature, it comes up, how are things working, how are things doing? I’ve worked with other showrunners who are terrific, but they don’t need that kind of support and also they can get that feedback a little bit from the line producer if it’s a little more mechanical. You are there to offer it and should be there ready to offer it, but it’s not always a part of the job description to be honest.

John: You’re tending to address the problems that are coming up in the day’s work, that is, to make sure that you get the best episode shot as was written.

Dan: Yes.

John: If it’s helpful to communicate back, great, but that’s not your main function.

Dan: Yes, and there are bigger picture just in terms of, like you said, in tone and certain things, you want the consistency that you want to help bring to it. Otherwise, you hope, and often the showrunner has got the vision for the season and you’re just trying to help execute it.

John: Now, the other people who are obviously stakeholders in this are the studio and the network who may have opinions too. Hopefully they’re communicating–

Dan: Oh, they do.

[laughter]

John: They’re obviously communicating opinions to the showrunner, but I can imagine they could also be showing up on your sets.

Dan: Yes, that is true.

John: That is true.

Dan: That is true.

John: Talk to us about how to manage that, because I think even as, hopefully our listeners are writers and they’re on set, but they’re also going to encounter suits who are going to show up and want to do things. What are some things you’ve found to be helpful? What are some things to really avoid when it comes to you have visitors on set who are decision makers?

Dan: I am not saying this to be politic, though I probably would be politic as one, but my more recent experiences, I’ve actually had some pretty capable and lovely executives come down the set. That doesn’t mean that everybody gives a great note every time somebody gives a note, but it does mean that there is a collegial respect for you. You do need to take in what they are saying, and you do need to try to see if that fits within what you’re doing, or in certain cases, to figure out a way to do it, because sometimes they’re just your bosses flat out. I know this is different for different showrunners and-

Craig: Different networks.

Dan: -different power hierarchies, but I would say, generally speaking, if you’re in my job, your job is not to put up any sort of fight or a wall, but to try to form a relationship with them where you can understand the heart of notes that they’re offering and giving, and if you do feel like there needs to be some pushback, you can either hopefully have that dialogue with them, or get the showrunner down there to do it, if it’s going to be something that you know to be invasive, again, where your relationship comes to bear, because you then have to sense, is this something where if we do this, it’s going to really hurt the show in a way they’re not going to like?

Craig: I could see a scenario where an executive who isn’t getting anywhere with the showrunner might try and backdoor something in with you.

Dan: I would like to think that I can balance those, but look, I’ll be honest, when certain folks are on set, the studio is the boss of the show, and if they have certain things they want to see done, I would never do anything without roping in the showrunner if I felt like it was pushing against it, because then you would never do that.

Craig: They are paying for it?

Dan: Yes, but you do need to consider what they are saying-

Craig: Always. Yes.

Dan: -and at the very least, bump it up if it needs to be.

John: A couple years ago, Craig and I did an episode where we sat down with a bunch of development executives and talked to them about, here’s how we are hearing the notes that you’re giving us. It was really a session for development executives to really learn about what it’s like to get notes as a writer.

I wonder if you could do a short version of this for if you are an executive who’s visiting a set, what are some best practices, what are some things to think about as you’re arriving on that set to help the process and not throw giant wrenches in there? Are there some best practices?

Dan: Here I want to– and I will stress this again, not to be politic, this is something that happened 15 years ago. This is not anybody I worked with recently, but with a junior executive on set, I think eager to make their voice known, offered some notes about blocking that were not sensical. They simply did not speak to–

Craig: They were bad.

Dan: Thank you.

Craig: They were dumb.

Dan: I over-blurbed. I over-blurbed.

John: They were bad.

Dan: It really was opaque how to grapple with that because it simply was, they didn’t understand how editing might accomplish what they– and were going to cost us an hour. In that moment, one does have to make a snap decision to not do a note, which is a very difficult decision to make.

I guess I would say long-windedly, is that for the folks who don’t yet understand set, there is not a need to give notes to pretend like you do understand set. Happily, over the last couple of shows I’ve worked on, we’ve had executives who are very experienced on set, so they’re not worried about that and they’re not trying to give notes on things that they know, “Oh, we can deal with that in a different way.”

John: Craig, what advice would you have for, not your HBO execs, but just things you’ve noticed as people come to set?

Craig: I want the HBO folks to come more to set. They’re so, in a wonderful way, hands-off, but then sometimes I’m like, “Don’t you want to come?”

John: Your first season in Calgary, nobody wanted to come to Calgary.

Craig: Calgary is awesome. I’m a big Calgary fan, but no, in the middle of COVID, nobody wanted to get on a plane, sorry, WestJet specifically, and go to Calgary.

My advice would be to at least have a basic understanding of the protocol of the set, and to ask questions rather than make statements. If you do think, “Hey, you know what, this scene might be better if that guy walked over to the ladder instead of not,” it’s probably better to pull someone aside and say, “I have a question. It’s probably dumb, I’m probably wrong. Would it be better if that person did this?”

Because as a question, you might get, “If we weren’t shooting this other angle in about an hour, you’d be absolutely right, but we are, because here’s a plan.” I will walk onto my set in the morning, someone else is directing, I will see the blocking, and I’ll be like, “I feel like we’re missing a thing.” Then I’ll check with the director, and they’re like, “Oh, no, no, totally. It’s just that we’re going to do this after because of–” blah, blah, blah. I’m like, “Great, I didn’t know.” Better to ask as a question.

Just enjoy it, and then leave because it’s boring if you don’t have something to do. When I say something, I mean really, minute to minute, if you are not occupied with a task on set, it turns into a very boring experience.

Dan: It’s such a great point in life generally, but don’t pretend that you know. Ask, and sometimes, in fact, they’ll say, “Yes, we’re planning on doing it,” or sometimes it can lay bare something that you’re missing.

Craig: Absolutely. You know what, that’s a great question. “Hey, Jane, come over here.” It’s a great question. “Why aren’t we doing it that way?” “Oh, yes, well, maybe we should. Absolutely.” There’s a humility to it, which is nice.

John: Yes, the most frustrating kinds of notes I’ve seen on sets from development executives are clearly, oh, this is a casting issue. We are now four days into shooting with this person, and you don’t like the person. It’s like, I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve almost shot out this actor. This is what we have, and so this is not an addressable concern in this moment. I don’t know what to tell you. What can be useful is, really, again, if the executive is asking a question, or stating the concern, like, “I’m worried we’re missing the point of the scene.” There’s probably a more gentle way to say that, but like, “I’m worried that I’m watching this, and I’m not actually getting out of this what I’m supposed to get out of it.”

That’s valid. We might take a moment to actually consider, “Okay, is there something here that we’re missing because we got so caught up in the choreography of the scene that we’re actually missing the point of something?” That’s where a set of fresh eyes could be really helpful.

Craig: Yes, there is something that happens early on in a television series, and we’re talking about the pilot, the first three episodes, where everybody has a panicked feeling that if they don’t get their point of view in the door now, then forever hold your peace, because everything is cemented into place, which then means, as the people who are making something, you start getting panicked by all these people telling you to do stuff that you’re not really sure you’re able to do. You can get a note that says, “Hey, could the lead character, she’s playing an elderly mom. We don’t think she’s funny enough.” You’re like, “Funny.” I’m like–

If you go, “What? It’s too late. We cast her, we’re making it, we wrote it, and we’re shooting.” Then people are going to feel shut out and shut down, particularly in that beginning part. You’ve got to go take deep breaths, take it all in, and then come back and say, “Here’s the thing. We’ve got to go work with what– we’ve got to go dance with the date we brought. We can nudge her, and we’re going to nudge. We’ll get her there. She’s finding her legs under her, but it’s going to be a little awkward, but we’re working on it.” That’s often enough for people to at least feel heard.

Dan: Having that dialogue, being able to have a nuanced dialogue, that’s when I think we know you’re working with a great executive, is when you can have a really nuanced dialogue like that, and they don’t immediately grab the most melodramatic version of, that’s going to be horrible, or that’s going to be great, but we’re working through this problem, and here’s how, and they can hear that.

John: Back in the day when we shot pilots, if something didn’t work, we could re-shoot them.

Craig: It was almost like we’re the dog that caught the car. Everybody hated, “I’m waiting on pins and needles to see if my pilot got picked up, and they’re going to shoot 20 pilots, and green light 6, and the rest of us are all–” Then they were like, “All right, what if we just green light stuff?” We’re like, “Great. Oh, no.”

[laughter]

Craig: Oh no. What do– It’s a horse of a different color.

Dan: Brave new world.

John: Brave new world. A thing that a visiting executive will get to sit in is a director’s chair on set, and so I want to have a little sidebar about directors’ chairs.

This came up because last week I shot two different EPK things, and shooting an electronic press kit, I was seated in a director’s chair, and for, I don’t know, about an hour for each of them, and my legs fell asleep, because directors’ chairs are terrible.

Let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. A director’s chair is a folding chair that has a canvas seat and a canvas back. It is taller than a camp chair. It’s like about 2 feet higher up, so that if you’re sitting in it, you’re at standing height to people, which I think is by design. Your legs fall asleep, they kill your back. Dan, you specifically had an issue with directors’ chairs.

Dan: First I do want to say, I held this in my pocket till now, but also on lookup: The history of the director’s chair.

John: Oh, what did it say?

Dan: Now, there’s a word I don’t know how to pronounce, but it is C-U-R-U-L-E. It is the Roman, it’s that Ottoman style chair.

Craig: C-U-R-U-L-E?

Dan: Yes. I believe that is the–

Craig: A curule.

John: A curule.

Dan: Let’s go with that.

Craig: Curule.

Dan: You can see why it was scary for me-

Craig: It’s a tough one.

Dan: -so I avoided it. I believe I got the spelling of that correct.

Drew: You got it correct.

Dan: That’s where the magistrate would sit. It was a seat of power.

Drew: Absolutely.

Dan: I think there was actually a company also on look up. It was like 1868, that date’s wrong, but it’s close. A company that started manufacturing the director’s chair and it still exists to this day. I think it parked it as sort of a hierarchical chair position hearkening back to the curule.

Craig: The curule. They also managed to make the noisiest possible chair ever for a position that needs to be absolutely silent. I have talked about this a number– We use the director chairs, and by the way, they’re director’s chair and everybody sits in one.

Dan: Oh, yes.

Craig: All the producers sit in them and the cinematographer and the key grip, everybody is sitting in those chairs.

John: Basically at Video Village, it’s a bunch of those chairs gathered together looking at the monitor.

Craig: There are multiple Video Villages because there’s your producer tent, your director tent, your cinematography tent. We use the aluminum frame ones that aren’t the classic wooden X style, but more of a– They’re quieter and they’re better.

Dan: Do you do the lower ones? There’s medium ones and–

Craig: I’m just used to the up one.

Dan: You want the position of power.

Craig: I think it might be a medium one because I don’t feel like I’m a kid at a table. The wooden ones, the footrest is also foldy. After, I don’t know, 4 minutes of use of a new director’s chair, that footrest just starts–

John: Swingin’.

Craig: It just doesn’t catch the little peg anymore. I’ve talked about this with prop guys because the props department handles the chairs. No one knows why. No one.

Dan: No one.

Craig: No one knows.

Dan: They resent it.

Craig: Yes. They totally, they’re like, “So our job is to make all these creative objects for this show and keep track of continuity and make sure that the guns are safe. Also we lug in your chair.” This is, we’re shooting on the side of a mountain and they’re lugging chairs up. Of course, from their point of view, they’re like, whatever it is, it’s got to go be foldable and it’s got to go be light.

Dan: May I rope in another, this is a tangential issue, and it’s an issue of Video Village, but that’s sort of my workspace and it’s other people’s workspaces as well. Here’s a gripe that I have about set that will never be fixed, is that there’s this Venn diagram overlap of the people responsible for assembling Village, obviously the camera and the DP do this, props does the chairs, then you’ve got sound that’s got–

Craig: Location does the tent.

Dan: Exactly. If you do not have a show–

Craig: They’re all yelling at each other.

Dan: If you’re not a show where, let’s say that, fortunately, I work with DPs who very much value getting Village set up. If you don’t have a DP who values that, then suddenly trying to coordinate those departments when they actually have other things to do, very difficult, very angering.

Craig: One of the things that happens during the day when you’re shooting, usually when you’re shooting on location, is they have to move Video Village.

Dan: All the time.

Craig: Because you’re turning the camera around and pointing towards all that other stuff. Sometimes the AD is like, yes, we’re going to have to move actually all those trucks, that Condor, those two tents. They have to do this fast because on set, time is money. The chairs at that point, it’s good that they’re light, I guess. You can see the prop people are like, “We’re also trying to get the props ready for the scene. Then we have to move chairs. It’s insane.”

Dan: Then if you have visitors, let’s say you’re in the desert, you’ll have a tent, you’ll have the air conditioning unit, and you’ll have everything set up because they need to be– I can rough it. I can rough it.

Craig: You need a luxury tent for your executive.

Dan: Exactly.

Craig: It’s only fair.

Dan: I do have a solution to offer for directors’ chairs.

Craig: Please.

John: This is a podcast about not just whining about things, but actually fixing– Doing things about it.

Craig: Yes, we like to fix things. What’s the solution?

Dan: After I stupidly sat in those chairs in around 2014, had three years of miserable back pain and two surgeons said, you’re going to have to have surgery. Instead, because I did not want to do that, I just had the grips make me a board, a hardboard, the shape of the chair. Then I got a little cushion on Amazon and I put that board down and do the cushion and I have not had to have those surgeries and it has cured it.

Craig: It’s that curve in the seat that just collapses everything.

John: If you think about it, your buttocks, everything is being wedged into the wrong shape.

Craig: There’s no support. It’s like–

John: There’s no support. There’s no lumbar support either.

Dan: I would say it’s antagonistic to the notion of support.

Craig: It’s undermining you, literally.

Dan: Yes. That’s right.

Craig: It is undermining you by giving you–

John: It’s a terrible hammock for your [crosstalk]

Craig: It’s a hammock. It’s a butt hammock.

John: Yes.

Craig: No, it is– You know what? Yes, they’ve got to fix this because I spend a lot of time on that thing. I’m not getting younger. My back, I got problems.

John: Craig, I’m saying season three, you’re going to stop blocking pages. You’re going to stop doing colored revisions.

Craig: That’s out.

John: You’re going to end up like, find a better seat situation.

Dan: Make pals with construction, get that board. It’s done.

Craig: Are you kidding me? My construction team and I-

John: Are like that.

Craig: -me and Dino, we are tight.

Dan: Then you’re in.

John: In my head, it should be pretty simple because the canvas seat just slides in. There’s little dowels that slide into the edges. It feels like you should be able to make a hard thing that slides in that place

Craig: Yes. The props people will not want to be responsible for it.

Dan: Unless you have befriended them and then if you’ve got a good relationship, they’ll take that board.

Craig: Here’s what I worry about. This is a showrunner thing. It’s different. What I worry about is, if I say, “Hey guys, I’ve come up with this. The guy recommended this. It’s great. Now this is part of our routine is putting this wedge in the chair.” They’re going to go, “Got it.” Because I’m the showrunner. Then they’ll walk away like, “You dick.” Now we’ve got to lug this around for little Lord Fauntleroy’s butt. I worry about that all the time.

Dan: In a show I did called iZombie, fantastic crew up in Vancouver. It was a five year show. I was up there for quite a bit.

Craig: We probably have a lot of overlapping crew, I suspect.

Dan: Yes. Great folks up there to a person. Over time, when they knew that I was having back problems, the board for the chair, then there actually came a sturdier chair made out of wood and with the board. Then the gaffer started to rig an electric cord on the side-

Craig: Oh, nice.

Dan: -and then they gave me lamps. By the time it was done, it was like working the con in a Star Trek episode.

Craig: It’s so funny that you mentioned the– if there’s one spot on a set where more departments intersect, I think it’s the tent. You can’t have light without the electricians. You can’t have tent without locations. You can’t have the monitors without the video playback person. You can’t have the chairs without the prop folks. You can’t have the food without the caterers. Every single thing. Oh, and then the lighting, you’re like, okay, the electricians put a light in, it’s glaring.

Dan: Yes, it’s awful.

Craig: Here come the grips to put a little duvetyne or a little crinkle paper around it. Everyone works on the tent.

Dan: Yes, they sure do. It worried me considerably that this overdone chair on iZombie, was I– did I have a– I was assured that [crosstalk]

Craig: Well, that’s the thing, they always assure you, and then they walk away. [crosstalk] They walk away like, “Can you believe this? This guy.”

Dan: Son of a bitch.

John: Is there any bigger solution to this? Because when you just described, okay, the whole tent situation is crazy because of the split of departments.

Craig: Of course there is. The solution is money. Here’s the problem. I don’t know who owns those chairs. I don’t know if the props people actually own the chairs. That may-

John: Be a rental.

Craig: -then be part of it. Often they do. What happens is, and this is very similar to a key grip. Key grips obviously earn that job by experience and time, but also they’re renting stuff to you. They are a grip equipment company that comes with a guy that understands how to do the job of the grip.

If the props folks, part of their money is renting you the chairs, they don’t want to spend their own money to get new chairs and then turn around and go, “Hey, by the way, our chairs cost five times as much as everybody else. I can get my money back on these,” because no one’s going to pay that to them.

Dan: On lower budget shows, I’ve had the props people say, “These are the chairs I got.”

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: There’s been some higher budget shows where the props people said, “Well, I’ll just buy some new chairs and the show will buy some new chairs and there’ll be mine.”

Craig: I feel like we qualify. We do. We have the nice, the aluminum frame ones. They are definitely nicer. I can’t remember the name. The manufacturers right now are screaming, “Say our name.” I just can’t remember it. It still could be because it’s still a butt hammock. It could be better. Some sort of space age polymer, a nice titanium.

John: Carbon fiber.

Craig: It’s expensive.

John: I will say, you and I had kids 20 years ago, baby stuff now is so much lighter because of carbon fiber.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: The car seats weigh nothing.

Craig: The lugging.

John: The lugging.

Craig: The lugging. Also, we were in that horrible middle spot because now they got carbon fiber, which is great. When we were kids, they just had crap. The strollers that you and I were in was like two sticks and a diaper.

John: Yes. It’s a wheelbarrow for a child.

Craig: We were in that middle zone of like, here’s just an apartment full of plastic to ensconce your kid and roll down the street and press 20 levers to fold-

John: Absolutely. Super heavy, everything.

Craig: -to get your finger caught in it, and they were heavy. Woe is us.

John: Woe is us.

Dan: That’s why I didn’t have kids.

John: Well done.

Craig: Well done. Isn’t that horrible? Our kids, if our kids listen to this, so our youngest, well, you’re only my youngest, they’ve been wanting to do the daughter version of our show, together just an episode. If they hear this, you’re like, “That’s why I didn’t have kids” and the two of us instantly, “Well done. You’ve solved the answer to how to live a good life.”

Dan: Hey, look, when I die alone, just remember that.

Craig: I think you can pay for somebody.

John: That’s true.

Craig: What about all those people making you these chairs?

John: That’s right, definitely.

Craig: That’s when you get the props guy in.

John: That’s when we find out if the assurances were real. Yes. All right, let’s do some more questions. We have one here from Adam.

Drew: Adam writes, I work in post-production as a picture editor. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a post-production software tool for a few years and finally got a working demo or prototype developed this year. After the initial excitement of getting a demo in hand had passed, my first thought was, “Shit, I don’t have any idea what I’m doing next.” My second thought was, “John did something like this. That seems so great. Wonder what he did.”

When you were getting Highland off the ground, I’d imagined there’s plenty you did, didn’t do, or wish you had known that informed and shaped how you pitched, developed, and finally launched the product. I would love any insights, pitfalls, considerations, or tips you’d be willing to share.

John: We’ve talked about this on the podcast a bunch. We’ve had people who have come in with production software, or production scheduling software, or other things like that, and trying to knock off entrenched, bad systems that are there. It’s tough because they’re the entrenched systems for a reason.

Even people who recognize the way we’re doing stuff is dumb, but there’s inertia to it. Adam, it’s great that you’ve got this prototype. You need to get it in front of as many people who actually do the job as possible, and get their feedback, see what it is that would stop them from switching to this right now, and incorporate that as quickly as possible. For Highland, it was really easy because I was just using it every day. I was dogfooding it every day, so I could see what was there, what I wanted to be there. I’d get friends to use it, and we could iterate really quickly for that.

The most important thing for you right now is just to make sure that other people are trying it, using it, and getting their feedback, and incorporating it as quickly as possible. It’s probably not enough of a market that you could have a Discord or any sort of message board or forum for it, but just reaching out personally to get people to try it is how you’re going to make it the next best thing. You’re not going to find a big publisher for it. You don’t need a big publisher for it.

Craig: Don’t need one.

John: No.

Craig: This reminds me a little bit of Evercast which didn’t exist, and then now it’s essential. I feel like winning over post-production supervisors is the key because editors if they like it, will be like, “Great.” Then post-production supervisors who have to pay for it are like, “What if it breaks?”

John: Yes, and figuring out what your-

Craig: That’s my impression of them.

John: -figuring out what your business model is for it, because Highland was a consumer app that could be just a thing you buy on an app store. This would not be. This would be something you’d be really selling as a service. There’s a tool called Scripto, which is designed for multicam shows, for late-night writing shows. There, they’re charging the show versus charging the individual user. Maybe that makes sense for it. As much as you’re figuring out the technical aspects of figuring out your app, you really need to figure out what is the model for the app? What is the business model for the app?

Craig: I bet if he just called up the folks at Evercast, because they’ve specifically done this three, four years ago. Evercast is the remote editing platform and it didn’t exist. Then about five years ago, it suddenly did. Now it’s–

John: They got it.

Craig: Yes. Right on time. Right on time. We use it all the time anyway, because we have people all around. They would probably be able to, because it’s such a specific thing, this industry-specific post-production tool. Who do I get it in front of? How do I commit some– Those guys may be willing to sort of tell their tale?

John: Yes. The fact that he was already working in post-production as a pitch writer, he knows what some of the other systems are out there. Get a sense of what is it that you like about them? What they hate about them? What other companies are doing the right stuff?

It’s possible that if your tool is really solving a need, that one of the other companies might be able to recognize it and take in your product. You don’t have to be the entrepreneur behind everything, which is honestly what sucks about doing Highland. I’ve gone through 10 years where I wish I had a marketing person, so I finally hired a marketing person. It’s just all the drudgery of running a business you get when you start making software. Next up.

Drew: Mike writes, after hearing you talk about how you like to break the back of a script, writing scenes out in longhand before working on the computer, I got into writing first drafts of scenes longhand, and I love it. Alas, I don’t have an assistant to transcribe them, so retyping them is a long process. However, there’s tablets like the Remarkable 2 that allow you to transfer handwriting into text. Do you guys know any screenwriters who write longhand on tablets, and do tablets convert the text well into screenplays?

John: I don’t know anybody who’s using it for writing that kind of stuff. The only time I’ve seen a Remarkable tablet in person was I had a meeting over at Amazon, and the executive there, she was writing on a Remarkable tablet, and they are really cool looking. It’s like e-ink, and it just feels really thin and nice, but also you can write on an iPad, and you can try it. I’ve never liked writing on screens.

Craig: I don’t write with my hands at all. I just type. I guess that is with my hands, but I don’t. Yes, if I have to make letters with a pencil or a pen, it’s like, what am I doing?

John: I don’t handwrite scenes that much anymore, but I will say that when I was doing that for my assistant to type up, I would write a little bit more cleanly, a little bit more neatly, and so that when the faxes went through, it could work. I do suspect fax machines, so I go down to the hotel lobby and say, “Hey, could you fax these 16 pages through to Rawson?”

Craig: Can I get into your business center?

John: Yes, absolutely. I know it’s late. I still need to fax something through.

I’ve been to bed and breakfasts and had to use their fax machine to send stuff through, but I’m thinking back to the pretty nice handwriting I did on those things. I have to feel there’s probably really good OCR now for handwriting that could get you pretty close. Mike, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s going to spit it out. It’ll be a little bit jumbly, but at least it gets you partway there.

Craig: Yes, and I think GoodNotes has a thing where you can train it. You write a bunch of stuff, and then you type it, and it compares and starts to figure it out.

John: It just feels like as good as AI stuff has gotten for this is a good use of AI is to read your chicken scratch and enter it into.

Craig: This is good. This is acceptable AI.

John: Yes.

Craig: A-A-I.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s A-A-I.

John: A-A-I. Acceptable AI. Last one here from Tim.

Drew: I have a pitch meeting scheduled with a major production company. Initially, they were drawn in by one of my scripts, praising the writing but finding the film’s tone too dark for their brand. However, they invited me to a pitch meeting to hear my other ideas, particularly for TV shows. I prepared six TV show concepts, each with strong premises that my manager has approved but I’ve never formally pitched before.

Beyond confidence and enthusiasm, any specific tips? Should I present each premise individually and gauge their reactions? Should I talk more generally about them while they peruse log lines to themselves? Or have a full-on show, Bible, and deck for each of them? I want them to be hooked but not bogged down by overdoing it either.

John: I’ve pitched some TV. You’ve obviously pitched some TV. Dan, you’ve developed a bunch of stuff with Rob. What kinds of things can you think about for Tim here in terms of going into pitch stuff? Let’s go back to Party Down, for example.

Dan: Sure.

John: Party Down is a show you co-created. What was the pitch for it? What was written before you went in to talk to stars about the show?

Dan: We’ve tended to have fully thought out and pitches down to the quip and that sort of thing. However, I do think all of that seemed to me, and you would know better than I, under the category of read the room when you’re in the pitch.

Craig: Yes, and I think there are certain things that you can pre-read any room. I can’t imagine any pitch meeting where they would be like, “Well, we didn’t like your first five ideas but we can’t wait to hear the sixth.” If you come in, you’re like, “Listen, I have six ideas but I’m not going to kill you with that. There are two that I really love. See if you respond. If not, I can always shoot an email with the other ones and see if they grab you. These are the two that I really love. I’ll just give you real fast five minutes on each.”

A lot of writers forget, you need to make space for them to talk and they have to then ask their questions and turn it into a conversation rather than, I’m here to sell you on this new nonstick cookware.

Dan: Right. You have to improvise in there. You have to come in with a plan but improvise, which is not profound but that’s nice.

Craig: Plan, improvise.

John: Yes. Generally, if they’re setting up this pitch meeting, it’d be great if you knew going in, from your manager’s job is to do this, to get a sense of what thing they’re actually looking for. You don’t come in there with this rom-com but they’re not doing a romantic comedy series. If you get a sense of what space they’re interested in, then you’re going in there and pitching them, having a conversation about one or two ideas that fit this. In that initial conversation, as you’re feeling them out, you can ask, what things are you looking for? What’s appealing to you?

Get a sense of what their taste is and then decide, this is the first thing I’m going to, this is the second thing and be ready to telescope the pitch. You give them the very short idea of this is a thing set in this world, blah, blah, blah. Is there interest?

Craig: Yes. I’ll go deeper.

John: Great. Let me talk you through what happens in the pilot and where it’s going.

Craig: That’s exactly what happened in my first television pitch, which was Chernobyl where I was like, “I think I got five minutes to figure out how to not have this guy be like, ‘Get out of here with this.’” I’m leaning forward. I’m like, “Let me give you a little bit more on that. Just a touch.” Then it’s like, you’re a crack salesman.

Here’s a little, here’s a little, now you’re a Chernobyl addict. Isn’t that a weird torture analogy?

Dan: You said telescoping, and the converse is also true. If you feel the eyes starting to glaze, then you can get out and get to the next one, get out and get to the next one.

Craig: Pull the ripcord and go.

John: It’s helpful when you’re there in person because you can read the body language and read the room. Unfortunately, so many of these are on Zoom. I will say that the instinct on Zoom is to keep talking as you’re trying to keep the ball up in the air. What can be helpful is once you establish what it is you’re looking for, if you have a deck you can show that shows like the three images of the thing, that can be really useful. Some of the series that I’ve been able to find homes for, I was able to show images that let people feel like, this is what it feels like inside the show, which is just really helpful because it gives them something to look at.

Craig: Yes, without you walking in with like these big posters, which makes you look like a dork.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Another thing is to check in with them to make sure that, any questions?

Dan: Yes.

Craig: Just so I don’t monologue and steamroll you on a Zoom.

John: Absolutely. I think I’ll often say is that as I’m sharing a screen to show images, you are going to get really small in my screen. Speak up if you need anything, because I won’t be able to see you if you’re waving your hand on things. That tends to work. It tends to be helpful. Good luck, Tim.

All right, it’s time for our one cool things. Dan, what’s your one cool things to share with us?

Dan: I almost switched this morning when we got the news of Gene Hackman and wanted to proselytize about Night Moves, which is one of my favorite movies. There’s some B-side 70s Hackman films, like Crime Cut and Scarecrow, great. Yes, there’s that. I don’t know if I just cheated because I mentioned that, but really what I want to take a risk because I’m not a gamer at all, but every 10 years, some puzzle game comes out. I did Zork in the ‘80s.

Craig: Yes, classic Invocom.

Dan: Fool’s Errand, I think.

Craig: Oh yes, I remember about that. Cliff Johnson.

Dan: Yes. It’s been a while, but last year, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this. It’s basically a puzzle game. It’s got a little bit of Zork in it, but it’s an art house puzzle game. It’s got a vibe to it that is a little bit German expressionist cinema, maybe Lynchian fever dream. It’s an exquisite puzzle game and it’s geared for the cinephile. I just, as a non-gamer or one who touches base every decade, that is the real deal. I just heard your Puzzle Box podcast. I need to recommend this to you.

Craig: I love stuff like this.

John: Craig is obsessed with puzzle games.

Craig: This’ll go right on the Steam Deck, it looks like.

John: Fantastic. Craig, what do you got for us?

Craig: I also have a game. I was talking last week about a game that I have not played in, I think, possibly 40 years.

John: Jesus.

Craig: I still think about it and I want to try and see if I can get another round of it going because I loved it so much. That game is Diplomacy.

John: Yes, so I love Diplomacy too, but I value our friendship too much.

Craig: That’s the thing. It’s important to know who you can and cannot play Diplomacy with. For those of you who are not familiar with the game, it’s a little bit like Risk, except there’s no dice. There’s no chance involved at all. There’s nothing random about it. It’s a World War I style map of Europe and you control territories and your job is to try and take over Europe. The only way you can do that is by creating alliances with other players to gang up on other players. Then, of course, the question is, when will you or your ally turn on each other? Are they even your ally at all?

The beautiful part of this game is the movement phase takes about 10 minutes. Then in between, there’s an hour of sidebars, whispers, winks, lying, not lying, mind changing. It is so awesome. It takes eight hours. Yes, it’s totally worth it.

John: I have so much PTSD from my one time playing Diplomacy with friends and some strangers. I was in high school and I hated it. I could never trust anyone ever again.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Mafia, except Mafia is fun and it ends within an hour or so because people are dying. You can see what’s happening after once you die. This is getting hurt or hurting all day long. The movement round, everybody finally writes their moves on the little secret slips and you’re hoping to God that the person who told you they’re going to do what they’re going to do isn’t screwing you over. The slips are collected and then they open up together. That’s when you find out just how boned you are or how–

John: Yes, I feel like with the rise of Survivor and the reality competition shows and Traitors, we get some of that on our screens all the time, but I’ve never wanted to do it.

Dan: It seems like there’s a purity to this.

Craig: It’s so pure because it’s basically like you got an army and you’re trying to go there, but you need somebody to support you from an adjacent territory. Will they or won’t they? What do they want from you? Then the person you’re attacking is like, I know, this makes sense, but think about this two turns from now.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s always like promises, like I promise I won’t attack you for the next three turns or something.

Craig: Exactly, which you can’t, nobody can promise anything in the game, but it is so pure because there’s no chance. It is all strategy.

Drew: Are you doing it all around a table or can you be like, “Oh, I’m going to go get some dessert in the other room.”

Craig: Oh no, you got to split up. You got to go find corners in the house and then you come back and someone’s waiting and they’re like, “My turn, I need to talk to you.” Then you just sit there waiting, like please don’t fold. Please don’t fold. Come on.

Dan: I got to go get this right away.

Craig: It’s awesome. The rules are not complicated.

John: Oh no. They’re really not. They’re not, it’s just all the social aspect of it, the social psychological.

Craig: You need to be on firm ground with the people with whom you’re playing.

John: Or complete strangers who don’t care that you’ll never see again.

Craig: Even they might pull a knife on you. It is brutal.

John: While you’re decompressing from the stressful game of Diplomacy, let me recommend Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace. Daniel Wallace is the guy who wrote Big Fish. He’s a phenomenal author. I really love this new book.

It’s flash fiction, so they’re very short stories, almost sketches, but refined and distilled like poems are distilled. Flipping through it, it’s like, you read the first three or four pages of a great novel and you’re like, “Oh, I want to read more,” and then it’s gone. It’s just like, no, enjoy the moment that you had in the little scene that you were in.

It comes out in May, but you should pre-order it wherever you pre-order your books. If you have the power to get galleys, which I think a lot of people listening to this show who work on the Hollywood connect with galleys of things, get the galleys for this, because it’s really good and you’ll enjoy it, and it’s quick, and you can read it in an hour or two and get the whole thing done. Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace.

That is our show for this week. It is produced, as always, by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our episode this week is by Richard Barrett. I just love that after 672 episodes, we still have folks doing completely new things.

Craig: It’s incredible.

John: Yes, a sound that we’ve never had before on the show.

Craig: Who would have thought?

John: Yes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at JohnAugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at JohnAugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find there’s a cotton bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to everybody who clicked through the link and moved to annual subscription to save themselves money, because people were overpaying us, and they shouldn’t.

Craig: We hate that.

John: We hate that. We hate that. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on, officiating weddings. Reminder to download Highland. It’s free. Get that on the app stores.

Dan Etheridge, thank you for coming on the show. It’s so good to talk to you with a microphone.

Dan: Yes, it was great to be here. Thanks. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so as we set up in the intro, you can marry a person, which means that you’re bound together with them for life, or you can marry a person, which you are getting that person married to another person. They’re just different forms of the verb to marry.

Craig: God bless our weird language and the poor people who have to learn it.

Dan: How many weddings have you officiated?

John: I’ve only officiated one.

John: I think I’ve only done one. I’ve done one.

Dan: Boom.

Craig: Whoa, five.

John: Five. Including my wedding. Dan was our officiator.

Craig: Did you catch a gay wedding boom when it was legalized?

Dan: Most of them, I think you’re my only gay wedding.

Craig: You’re just getting–

Dan: Just got my credentials from the universalchurch.org.

Craig: Same. Oh my God, you’re also?

Dan: That’s right, yes.

Craig: We’re all practitioners at the universal precepts of that church, which are to pay $10 to officiate a wedding.

John: I go to services every Sunday, I don’t know about you guys.

Craig: There’s a place to go? Oh no.

Dan: Unlike California, I did a wedding in, I think it was Oregon. It was a different state. They actually did require you to file your credentials and to sign different things that they had to do. I think California is very, very loose.

Craig: I did one in Ohio and I had to file a certificate, yes.

John: We just had to send through our marriage certificate for some form or something that we had to do. I was able to pull the thing and see your little signature there on the day.

Dan: It was a great wedding. I’m not complimenting myself. It was a great wedding.

Craig: Crushed it.

Dan: By the way, I don’t think– You can cut this out if you want to. Sometimes folks, they want you to take everything off their plate and construct the wedding. Sometimes people want to know what’s going to be said. John, I really appreciated this. John handed me a word for word script for what was going to be said.

Craig: That is so John August.

Dan: I think I delivered it like it was mine.

John: Oh, 100%. You owned it.
Craig: That’s right.

John: Dan’s also an actor. We should have stressed that you’re an actor first and foremost.

Dan: Previous life.

Craig: Yes.

Dan: Previous life.

John: Let’s talk about best practices for being the officiant. Like you, I’ve seen situations where the officiant was clearly following a plan given by the couple being married. Other times where like, they were just doing their own thing and the couple had no stake in this. I tried to hit a middle ground with the one wedding I did, which was during the pandemic. I was there in person, but everybody else was on Zoom. I sat down with the couple and really talked about what things do you want in what I’m going to say?

Craig: What do you not want?

John: Exactly. How do we emphasize this?

Craig: What you’re getting at is, your job as the officiant of a wedding is to get the hell out of the way of the people that matter. No one is there to see you. The good news is the expectations are zero, which means you actually can kill. Meaning you can get laughs, people can really be impressed by what you do. They can be moved, they can cry because their expectation is nothing but get out of the way and make sure you don’t because a problem. Make sure that you do touch on the things that they want to be touched on. Keep it short and get the hell out of there.

John: Now, Drew, you are the most recently married. I thought your officiant did a really nice job.

Drew: She was great.

John: Talk to us about the conversation you had with her.

Drew: I remember she was a justice of the peace who knew what she was doing. I remember us giving her our initial outline for it. She was like, “You’re missing five minutes. This isn’t going to be enough for people,” which I was surprised by. I was expecting-

Craig: There’s no such thing as a too short wedding.

Drew: That’s how I felt.

John: I can’t be fast enough.

Drew: I agree.

Craig: 10 seconds, best wedding ever.

Drew: Her argument was that like, if people come there and show up and are dressed up, that they’re expecting a little bit more of a full ceremony as opposed to, and we just wanted to–

Craig: They just want the food. Just get to the food.
Drew: Agreed, yes. It’s the party.

Craig: Nobody wants to sit there.

Dan: We had a nascent stage party down idea that never made it to camera. One of the actors abused the officiant role to test out a monologue.

Craig: That’s awesome. With the note cards like, no. Anyway. Won’t be including that one on the road. For our premium members, I guess you could tell the story of the part of the episode that was inspired in part by our wedding. Do you remember this?

Dan: Oh, yes. The gay wedding episode, the season finale of season one. That’s right.

John: Absolutely, Adonis Catering?

Dan: Yes, Adonis. We did, a rival catering company came in to cater that particular wedding, and it was Adonis Catering filled with just the most beautiful men of all time. I did have a template for that.

Craig: That should be a thing.

John: Yes, it was a thing.

Craig: Oh, it was a thing.

John: We did not intentionally hire them because of their beauty, but we were always like, “Oh, these are all models.”

Craig: It just worked out.

John: They’re all incredibly attractive people who are our waiters.

Craig: That is a thing in LA. When you go to parties and behind the bar and the people passing hors d’oeuvres around, many of them are here in town to be actors or models, and they’re working these jobs at night because they get the auditions in the day, they do these jobs at night. You can feel like an absolute troll. I’m asking, “Can I have a drink?” Oh my God. This is weird. I’m sorry.

Dan: I think there was, I think, I might be misremembering, I think there was a character prototype at your wedding of the person in charge of it all. Kristen Bell came in and played that very officious–

Craig: That’s good casting. That’s always good casting. It’s Kristen Bell. Yes, you’re just the greatest.

John: Pretty much the one when you decide on Kristen Bell.

Craig: The greatest.

John: Some bad officiating I’ve seen at weddings includes anything about Webster’s Defines.

Craig: Oh, god.

John: Or quotes.

Craig: Mawage.

John: Mawage, yes.

Craig: That, oh, you.

John: Yes, one of the worst weddings I’ve ever been to was just a series of quotes about love being read by a person who had no idea who the couple was. It went on for 20 minutes.

Craig: No.

Dan: That’s the corollary to, because I agree with everything you said about brevity. You’re also there because you ideally know them. Make it personal in the brief time that you have.

Craig: It’s actually rife with potential disaster. You want to make sure that both sides of the family are acknowledged, even though they might not like each other. There may be exes in the crowd. You don’t want to talk about, oh, after a lifetime of struggle, they found each other. Then people sit and they’re like, “Wahh? We- Come on…” We thought we were still friends. There’s just so many ways to go wrong. Then jokes. If you’re not funny, don’t. Do not because the problem with being not funny isn’t that people won’t laugh because the joke isn’t great. The problem is you won’t know what will upset people. That’s the problem that unfunny people have. You will upset grandma because she’s going to be there.

Dan: You make a good point about vetting. I do try to give them a look at the script or what have you, because of all, you don’t know there might be some minefields in there.

Craig: No question.

Dan: Or you forgot to mention so-and-so because it’s politics.

Craig: No question.

John: I’m a strong believer in the couple themselves exchanging vows and saying things and not being silent witnesses to it. I think you both said things during your vows.

Drew: We did, but we went basic. Like, do you? I do.

Craig: Do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded–

Drew: I feel like they’ve just been, those have– we’ve iterated them enough that they’re perfect. They’re just simple. We don’t need to say, we don’t need to write our own vows to each other.

Craig: That’s what we did because I don’t want anyone to hear what I have to say to my wife at all. That’s private.

Dan: I think this is the reason I’m not married yet because I don’t want to have to say anything overly private in front of a bunch of people.

Craig: You don’t have to.

Dan: I don’t want to.

Craig: You can just do the Nicene Creed or whatever the term is for that. Ridiculous, it’s not that.

John: The counterpoint I’ll make is Megan McDonnell, our previous script producer, her wedding, it came time for the bride and groom to speak. Megan did a great job. Her groom, her now husband, knocked it out of the park. It was definitely, the thing was, everyone for the rest of the night was like–

Craig: Low expectations. No one expects the guy to be good at that. Everyone expects the girl to be just naturally expressive and emotional and she’s going to tear up at the right moment, and you’re going to tear up because, they have access to their emotions and this guy’s just going to be dirt to dirt. When I met you were good and I thought we were good. Then he, yes. See, as the guy, you come in and dunk.

Drew: My favorite is when people go, “You look so beautiful today,” looking down at their paper.

Craig: You mean last week when you wrote that?

Drew: When you wrote that.

Craig: Or possibly last night when you wrote this in a fever sweat?

Dan: I made a rookie mistake I just thought of in my second one, which is, I do think I can land a joke, but this one I didn’t land and it was right out of the gate. Hot out of the gate. I did a look down to pick up the names of the bride and groom, whom obviously I’ve known for decades and I don’t need to look and get their names. Assuming that that would elicit a little bit of a warm chuckle as people understood that. I soon realized, no, most of the people in the wedding don’t know me. They think that I don’t know the bride.

Craig: They literally don’t get it.

Dan: The crickets there was like, this is going to be rough and I got to hold a climb out of home right away.

Craig: You know what? That’s where you do appreciate the studio executives showing up and being like, “I do have a note.” I know you’re going to say the audience isn’t this dumb, but.

John: Takeaways from this. Officiants should not overshadow the couple getting married. We like short, we think short is great.

Craig: Short’s great.

John: It’s an important part of the night. Obviously, you want it to go really well, but it’s actually a pretty small part of the night. People are there to celebrate you together.

Craig: If someone’s aunt comes up to you in the middle of the party and says, “I thought what you said was so funny and so sweet,” you’ve done a great job. Then that’s that. Two minutes, two minutes.

Dan: Yes.

Craig: Two. You go past two minutes, you’re in so much trouble.

Dan: Be sure to end it with the line by the authority vested in me by the great state of California and the universallifechurch.org.

Craig: Exactly. I pronounce you, .org.

Dan: Get the last joke right in there.

Craig: Then you have to say copyrightuniversalchurch.life.org.

Dan: Yes.

John: All right. Lessons for everybody. Thank you, Dan.

Craig: Thank you.

Dan: That was fun.

Links:

• Highland Pro | Download on the App Store
• Dan Etheridge on IMDb
• Buck Rodgers’ robot sidekick
• [The Tom Thumb locomotive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Thumb_(locomotive)
• Statpage and DuckDuckGo
• I Miss the Music from Curtains
• Curule
• Evercast
• Scripto
• Night Moves, Prime Cut, and Scarecrow
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes on Steam
• Diplomacy
• Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Richard Barrett (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Today’s episode has no bad language, but it does have some mild spoilers for Severance. If you’re trying to go into that show clean, without any spoilers, about midway through the show when Craig starts spouting wild theories, just skip ahead 30 seconds or a minute, and you’ll miss all of Craig’s wild speculations. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Oh. Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 677 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what the hell is going on? We’ll discuss mystery box shows where the premise and audience experience involve solving the puzzle of what’s really happening. Then, we’ll talk about revisiting old projects. I am just back from two weeks in New York, working on the Broadway version of Big Fish, which I’ve been working on for now 20 years. We’ll talk about how writers should approach their earlier work when they need to.

We’ll also follow up on home automation and locked pages, plus answers to some of our listeners’ questions, and Craig and our bonus for premium members. Let’s talk about taking some time off. You just took some time off. You took the weekend off. Your weekend off feels like time off.

Craig: [laughs] I had to negotiate it, too.

John: Yes, let’s talk about being more deliberate about working on certain days, not working on certain days, and refilling our supplies after a lot of work sessions. We’ll talk about ways to do that.

But Craig, first, we have a little housekeeping. We want to thank all of our premium subscribers. You want to keep the lights on here.

Craig: When you say you, you’re talking to me. I am a premium subscriber.

John: You are.

Craig: I pay the $5 a month.

John: See, that’s what we’re here to talk to you about, Craig. Because right now, you’re paying $5 a month. We’re going to be raising that price.

Craig: What?

John: Moving up to $7.99 per month.

Craig: 7–? [sighs]

John: Because people should really be on the annual plan. Here’s what’s happening. Our annual plan is staying put at $49 a year.

Craig: Oh, so that’s even less than $5 a month.

John: It is. We really want people to stay on the annual plan because it’s just less tedious for everybody involved to stay on the annual plan.

Craig: We’re really incentivizing this?

John: Apparently, because we initially rolled out with this price, and it was really parity between the two things, people stayed on the monthly plan. People should move to the annual plan.

Craig: How do you do that?

John: It’s so simple. You click on your account settings. There’s a link in the show notes to this. You got an email if you’re a premium subscriber, just please move over to the annual plan.

Craig: It’s good for you, and apparently, it’s good for us.

John: It would save a listener $48 per year.

Craig: We’re asking you to give us less money.

John: Please give us less money.

Craig: Please give us less money. We should make the monthly $14,000.

John: Yes. [laughs]

Craig: Then watch how quickly they go to that annual subscription. You know what I’m saying?

John: We debated. If we went up like $1, would that be enough of a factor? Would it be enough of a friction that people would actually do it?

Craig: No. Can I just say, is there a point in our humanity, in our civilization, where we will just move on past the 99-cent gimmick?

John: Some stuff, yes, it doesn’t make sense.

Craig: It’s just everybody does it in every way, shape, or form. We’re all on to the trick, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: We all know what’s going on.

Drew Marquardt: They’re supposed to be doing away with the penny soon.

John: The actual physical penny.

Craig: Typical.

John: The idea of 99 cents doesn’t go away.

Craig: I could argue that all prices at this point should be rounded to a dollar.

John: Yes, they should be.

Craig: Rounded up or down, but then taxes back–

John: Let’s say an issue with like, if something costs $99, it’s really $100, too.

Craig: This is my point, so what are we doing?

John: What we are doing is raising the price to $7.99 in the hopes that people will get to the annual plan, which is $49.

Craig: I think that’s a great idea. I think that’s lovely.

John: We should talk about, Craig, how much money do you make from Scriptnotes?

Craig: Oh, I have seen $0.

John: I see $0 as well. Craig and I don’t take any salary for this.

Craig: No.

John: The money pays for our incredible editor, our producer, Drew.

Craig: We’ve gotten cars out of it, obviously. We got the cars and the houses.

John: Absolutely. All that big podcast money. We’re not the Pod Save America people who actually like to buy houses with stuff.

Craig: The Pod Save America guy lives across the street from me.

John: They’re doing well.

Craig: That’s a really nice house. They’re lovely people. I was in Vegas for a couple of days.

John: Gambling the Scriptnotes money?

Craig: Gambling my Scriptnotes money away at the penny slot machine. They project ads for all their acts everywhere. On the side of a casino that was facing my room, they were advertising a true crime podcast. I don’t remember the name of it, but apparently, they’re on tour. They’re on tour in Vegas? A podcast?

John: Many questions are raised by this. First off, when are we going to do a live show in Vegas on the strip? That’s crucial.

Craig: Right. Can we have dancers?

John: Yes, we’re going to have dancers. The question is topless, not topless? Or maybe there’s two shows. The later show is topless. I don’t know.

Craig: I would be fine with a kid’s show, a family show.

John: A family show, yes, for sure.

Craig: Then, at night, an adult show. This would be amazing.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, of course. We could get the ladies, but we could also get the Thunder from Down Under guys.

John: Oh, 100%. I would definitely have to be on a mixed show.

Craig: We need a mixed show but not at the same time. I think they would confuse each other with their choreography.

John: Different acts, different segments.

Craig: You bring on one group, then we do the first half of the show. Second group comes on, gyrates. We come back. What a weird thing to come back after, for you and me. It would just like, we’re the worst people to follow any kind of hot strip show. Then it’s just like, “Back to these two podcasters.”

John: It really does make a hard transition into, let’s talk about transitions, or let’s talk about–

Craig: Back to slug lines.

John: Yes, or I was going to say the Scriptnotes slot machine. The Scriptnotes is like a video poker machine, like those branded things.

Craig: Ooh. That’s fun.

John: That’s good stuff.

Craig: You know what the jackpot is, right?

John: What is the jackpot?

Craig: Sexy Craig.

John: Oh, yes. I always think if you get the jackpot, you get to be on a three-page challenge. It’s like a live show.

Craig: No.

John: I guess now it’s better than that.

Craig: No. If you get five sexy Craigs in a row–

John: Oh, lining up. Oh, gosh. We don’t take a salary. This pays for everything else, but the money that’s left over at the end of the year, we donate it away. We donated this year to Hollywood Heart, which is a beneficiary of our great live show. We also support the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps writers and others in the Hollywood industry.

Craig: Isn’t that also targeting some funds for the fire relief?

John: Exactly. Yes. That’s what we do with the money. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it all possible. On the topic of games, though, we actually have a game shipping this week. Way back in Episode 655– actually, not that way back, 655 is 22 episodes ago.

Drew: That‘s like half a year.

John: Half a year ago, I put out the call that I was looking for an indie game developer to partner up with on a game that I wanted to make. Drew, we got 10 people writing about that.

Drew: That sounds right.

John: I zoomed with a bunch of them. They were all fantastic and great. I ended up picking this Canadian developer named Kory Martin, who has been toiling away. Now, just a few months later, we have a game for you to try out right now. It’s called Birdigo. Birdigo, like the thing that flies. It is a roguelike deck builder where you’re trying to make words. Craig, you just played it. Tell us about the game. Your experience so far.

Craig: Oh, I just played a little tiny bit, but as far as I can tell, what’s going on is you get some letters from a constrained letter bank, a little bit like a Scrabble tile distribution. You have to make some words from your letters. As you make words, you get some new tiles. You have some discards, and you’re trying to hit a point number to move on to the next thing. But when you do, you’re going to get some sort of power-up, some kind of Belatro-style card that makes the next rounds better, because I presume it just gets harder and harder and harder.

John: It gets harder and harder. It’s a roguelike in that it’s really difficult to complete a level, what we call a migration, but eventually, you’re able to do it, and then it unlocks more things down the road. If you would like to play it, you can play it right now. It is on Steam as part of the Next Fest event this week. You can follow the link in the show notes or just go to birdigogame.com, click through and see the game that’s there. The first 50 levels are up for everyone to go and play this week as part of this special event.

Craig: And John?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s called Birdigo. Like vertigo but with a bird?

John: Yes.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: Birdigo.

Craig: How much does it cost?

John: We don’t know yet, so it’s free. The demo is free. We don’t know what the final pricing is going to be.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We’ll ship it sometime this spring, probably.

Craig: Right, but right now, it’s free.

John: It’s free.

Craig: It costs nothing.

John: Yes, so you should try it. If you like it, put it in your wish list. Originally, we were going to call it AlphaBirds. It’s really a spin-off of the physical game we made called AlphaBirds, but Birdigo was a better name for what this game is.

Craig: Yes, I think so. Plus, also, people love the stuff on there. Are you going to bring it to iOS at some point?

John: We’ll do Steam first, and then we’ll see where we’re at for it. Because the nice thing about doing it on Steam first is we can then transition to Xbox or Switch or all the other stuff. Eventually, iOS would be great, too.

Craig: All right.

John: It’s fun.

Craig: Great.

John: All right. More follow-up. Drew, help us out on locked pages and unlocked pages.

Drew: Michael wrote in and says, “I’m a script coordinator on a large TV series where our security is super intense, and everything is distributed digitally. Since we’re forbidden from printing scripts, I thought our show would be a great case study to implement keeping the script pages unlocked throughout production and using the locked scene numbers as our linchpin for revisions.

My stipulation was that I would only do it if it didn’t mess with the workflow of any of our departments. However, in reaching out to the departments, I found that not having locked pages would cause issues with the work of our script supervisor and our post-production team, mainly the editors and assistant editors.

Our script supervisor told me that they use a software to do their job that relies on the pages being locked. One of our scripties uses MovieSlate and the other uses ScriptE, which seems almost final draftian in its arbitrary rigidity. The software organizes their notes by scene number, take, timing of take, notes, cameras, and other things, but each page of their notes corresponds with a facing page, and that refers to the page number of the locked script.

John: Let’s pause for a second here. What I think I’m hearing is that in a physically printed script, you have on the right, if you’re printing on one side of the page, on the right in your notebook, you would have the printed page of page 46, but there’d be a blank page on the left. I think that is the facing page where they’re typically taking notes or doing other things on that page?

Craig: Okay.

Drew: Since the notes are not connected to a specific facing page, if that page were to change with the new content during the shoot, the notes wouldn’t line up anymore. At the end of the shoot, all the notes and their facing pages are exported as a continuous document to send to the editors. The assistant editors use the daily reports from the scripties to assemble binders for their editors with all the notes and their corresponding facing pages. Those binders are organized based on the locked script and messing with the locked pages would mean it was difficult for the AEs to match the scripties notes with the facing pages.

It appears that until the software the script supervisors use can find a way to connect their notes with just the scene number and not the locked script pages, I think locking script has to remain. I will say, even though I can’t figure out how to make it work and not interfere with certain departments, everyone I pitched this concept to was down for a change. For my showrunner to the script supervisors and post-production, people would love to bring things into the digital era and leave some of these old methods behind. Also, no one cares about keeping color names for revisions.

Craig: In talking with my script supervisor, he did bring this issue up, but even he seemed quite flexible about it. I believe there’s a way in the output to just say, okay, just bring me to the notes for scene, whatever. The idea that the assistant editors and the editors are using this massive binder of notes is a pretty old school, I think. I have not seen the binder in a long time.

Also, the idea of editors routinely consulting the notes, while lovely is something I’ve seen every now and again, like a four-leaf clover. It’s actually quite frustrating how editors just don’t look through that stuff. In a way, I like that. The editors get their fresh take on things. They don’t necessarily want to be bound by whatever opinions were written down on the day.

But I do believe that document would still function unless you were literally using it like a printed bound thing, which I don’t think anybody does anymore, or most people don’t. I’m sure the ones who do will write it and insist everyone does. The companies that make the software really need to just make this very simple change. It should just be organized by scene number. I don’t care. I’m doing it on Season 3. I’m doing it. I’m just getting rid of the page breaks. I don’t care. [sings] I love it. I don’t care. That song was originally written about this very topic. Page breaks.

John: I’m happy that Michael, who is a script coordinator, the person who is responsible for this, was writing it and was really trying to make this change happen and was consulting with the people who he knew it could affect early on in the process. It really does sound like people have entrenched ways of doing things that don’t necessarily make sense, but it’s what they’re used to, and it would be an adjustment.

Craig: Movie productions, television productions are rife with this-is-how-I’ve-always-done-it-ness, and sometimes getting people into the new way, you got to drag them kicking and screaming a little bit. Once they’re there, they’re thrilled. It does take a moment or two where they’re like, uhhhh. I’m doing it.

John: It’s good news on colored pages as well because the concept of colored pages is good.

Craig: At this point now on revision levels, it’s just so that you know which– is it draft one, two, three? I might change them to numbers.

John: In the part we cut out here, it says they started using version plus number for our drafts.

Craig: I might do that. Drafts V1, V2, V3, Rev1, Rev2, Rev3.

John: Put a date on it.

Craig: The thing is I put a date on them anyway.

John: Colored revisions have dates.

Craig: Maybe I’ll just do date revision. That’s it. The revision is this date.

John: How do you like doing dates? Actually, I have a question about this and then about Oxford commas, but we’ll talk about both.

Craig: Sure.

John: My preferred way of doing dates is I love periods between dates.

Craig: Very European.

John: I love the year first and then the month and then the day works really well for me.

Craig: If you did year, then day, then month, you’d be fully European, I think.

John: Yes, exactly. Doing date then month, things increase the right way. When you do date before–

Craig: Oh, I completely agree. This is one area where I think we’re right. I go day, month, year, which is more standard, I think. Just because of my old, old, old computer days, my convention is to go underscores in between because periods were reserved for file extensions and dashes right out.

John: Absolutely no colons on the Macintosh.

Craig: Oh, good Lord, no. Something, underscore, something, underscore, something.

John: Related question. I have a similar related question in terms of what your preferences are. For the Scriptnotes book, we’re now starting copy edits. Oxford commas. My personal take is I believe that Oxford commas can be useful for disambiguating situations. Obviously, we can bring up situations where without the extra comma there, you’ve changed the meaning of it. I find oftentimes commas are wedged in there in a superfluous way that makes me annoyed. How do you feel?

Craig: Oxford commas, from an informational point of view, are objectively superior because they give you more information than less. That’s always a good thing. From an aesthetic point of view, they are inferior to the American style. American style is cleaner. In the 94% of cases where there is no ambiguity, the American style just simply reads better.

My thing is I don’t think you need to be consistent. I think if you feel like, “Oh, this requires an Oxford to disambiguate,” put it in.

John: Great. I think we are aligned and agreed. That will be the notes back to the copy editor. That was what I did on Arlo Finch. To me, part of the reason is that even though this is text that is not meant to be read aloud, I’m still reading aloud in my head. I perceive a comma as being a small pause, and it’s an unnecessary pause in a series of things. When it’s not needed, it’s weird.

Craig: It’s a funny thing that in our language, when we do list things, we group the last two things together, and I don’t know why. A, B, C, D, E and F. We just do that. It’s weird. I don’t know. It’s a strange mental thing.

John: We have one more bit of follow-up here.

Drew: In the bonus segment of 671, we talked about home automation. We had a lot of smart people write in. Apparently, Lutron HomeWorks is the top-of-the-line lighting system, including shades and curtains.

John: That’s actually what we use. I forgot the name of it, but that’s what we use. That’s the app I have on my phone that lets me turn on any light in the house.

Craig: I had Lutron in my old house. I hated it. So annoying.

John: I think if it’s not set up properly, it can be just an absolute monster.

Craig: It is set up properly. I’m just like, I got to go to my phone. The switch is right there on the wall.

John: You should be able to do either one. It wasn’t set up properly.

Craig: No. It was set up properly. It’s just a pain in the ass.

John: I can tell our system. I can just verbally say, set the lights to 20%, and it’s a blessing.

Craig: Everywhere. Oh, because it’s linked into your Alexa or whatever?

John: Yes. In the TV room, I can just say, set the lights to 20% as I’m watching a movie, and it’s just great.

Drew: There’s also, apparently, an open-source software called Home Assistant, and that can pretty much connect everything, but it’s very DIY. You have to set it up yourself. It’s not plug-and-play.

John: Mike also uses Home Assistant for other stuff, which also works with Lutron. We can do things that are clever, but it relies on Mike figuring out how to do stuff and then teaching me what the commands are.

Craig: I’m quite good with these things. I did also try to explain to Melissa how the Lutron worked, and that didn’t go well. That’s also my future. I have to explain it to Melissa, and I just know it’s not going to go well because here’s what I’m going to get. I’m going to get a text that says the lights aren’t working, or Lutron is broken. I’m going to say, no, it’s not broken. Is there smoke coming out of it? No, it’s not broken.

John: The Wi-Fi is down, which could mean anything.

Craig: Yes. I actually get the wife’s Wi-Fi is down quite a bit.

John: It happens. All right. Let’s get on to our marquee topic, which is Puzzle Boxes. This comes from a listener question. Drew, read us a question here.

Drew: Christian writes, “I love both Severance and From, but I’m worried that they’ll both be Lost all over again.

Craig: Oh, jeez.

Drew: I’m worried my own novella is in the same trap. I feel really cheated by the end of Lost, but love the middle of the journey. When mysteries don’t deepen the focus, but just get wider and wider, it can temporarily create momentum that feels like a recipe for a disaster ending. How can you keep the pleasures of a puzzle box without falling into the trap of an unsatisfying ending?

Craig: I love when people say, I’m just worried that it’s going to become like that thing that was one of the most beloved television shows of all time and a massive hit. [sighs] Can we just stop with that? Can we just stop with beating up on Lost like it was a failure or something?

John: It was a great success.

Craig: It was.

John: Let’s broaden our scope. There’s a lot of series that do things like this, obviously talk about Lost. Severance is a current series.

Craig: Severance, Watchmen, but Watchmen had a built-in ending, so it was different.

John: Westworld, Twin Peaks, Silo right now. The new show, Paradise. Yellowjackets are just still going on. Heroes, Leftovers, Alias, The Man in the High Castle.

Craig: Good Lord.

John: They’re a really common thing. What’s uniting about all these kinds of shows is there’s a question of what’s really going on that is central to the story engine. It’s who killed Laura Palmer? Where are we really? What is this place? What the hell is Lumon? In Man in the High Castle, why is there this footage of an alternate reality? What strikes me as different about some of these series, though, is what the characters inside the series’ relationship is to the central mystery, is whether the characters are actively trying to figure out what’s going on.

Like in Lost, where the hell are we? What is this island? What’s happening? You as the audience are on the same level as the protagonists, or situations where the heroes inside the story know exactly what’s happening, and you as the audience are just behind where they are. Yellowjackets is an example of that, where we’re getting these flashbacks and everyone in the present day knows what happens there, but we’re just getting exposed to it bit by bit.

Craig: Yes, there’s probably a good distinction to draw between mystery and puzzle box, because puzzle boxes are constantly putting forth things that are surreal. That’s key to the genre, is surrealism. The granddaddy of all of these is Prisoner. The Prisoner? With Patrick McGowan, so this is in the ‘60s. I just remember my dad showing it to me when it was being rerun on PBS, which when my dad would come say, “Hey, Craig, sit down, we’re going to watch something on PBS,” I knew I was in for boredom. As a small child, I was like, “Prisoner, just– what?”

John: I just remember there’s this giant, white, floating ball-

Craig: The bubble.

John: -the bubble that is after him, but it’s great. You have no sense of what’s really happening there. Æon Flux was an MTV series that also had it. It seems like I have no idea how this all connects.

Craig: The surrealism is crucial. The idea that things are emerging that are very specifically puzzling as opposed to– why somebody did something, to me, is a mystery. I remember in Watchmen, they opened a door, and there’s an elephant in a room with tubes coming out of it. What? Severance, particularly this season. Last season, because it was somewhat limited in its scope, it wasn’t quite a puzzle box. It was closer to a mystery. This season, so far, has been a puzzle box.

John: Yes, absolutely. This season is leaning much more into the mythology, and who are the Eagans, what is this town, and the gradual reveal that the outside world is not normal, either. In the first season, it felt like a little stylized normal world, and it’s clear that the outside world is not a normal world either in this. I think it’s really important that you’re distinguishing between most shows. Many shows have mysteries at the heart of them. It’s like, who did this thing? You were trying to solve this puzzle.

You have either detectives or somebody who is investigating, is trying to solve this thing. It is the building up of mythology and impossible connections that is so tantalizing about a puzzle box show, and also can be really frustrating at times. One of the things that our listener was pointing to, Christian, is that sometimes it feels like they’re just spinning new plates.

Craig: This is the gift and the curse of puzzle boxing. As a writer, you and I know that if you have a scene and you want something exciting to happen, throwing something in that makes everybody go, “Wait, what?” People are in a house, and they think there might be a ghost, but they’re not sure, and one of their friends has gone missing, and then they open a door, and there’s a dragon in it. Wait, what? Black. Credits. They’re coming back next week. Everyone’s talking about the dragon. What the hell’s going on?

This is cheat coding your way to grabbing people’s interest. Each time you do it, it’s a little bit like heroin. Drew, I’m going to talk to you because you obviously know quite a bit. Drew, you remember the first time, right? You’re chasing that dragon the rest of your life. That first hit of puzzle boxing, you’re like, wow. Once you hit the fourth or fifth, you start to go, okay, anything can happen at any point. The value per puzzle starts to go down a little bit, particularly as the puzzles accrue in an unsolved way.

What Christian’s concerned about, and I think rightly so, is all of the puzzles have to have an answer. At best, they are interrelated. At best, there are one or two ahas that make all of them make sense all at once. In the case of Watchmen, I thought that was about as good as it gets. Maybe because it was one season, I went aha for all of it. When you have an ongoing series, the challenge is to figure out how to make these connected ahas that resolve everything without ending your show. That’s the trickiest part of all.

John: That’s the thing, when Damon Lindelof came on the show, we were talking about that, and at a certain point, he had to come to ABC and say like, “How many seasons do we have left? Because I need to pace out what we’re doing here because otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels.” He got the answer of, at that point, two more seasons or three more seasons. Like, “Great. We can plan for this overall we’re getting to.”

That also ties into, how often are you introducing new clues or new mysteries? If it’s every episode, then you’re setting an expectation that this is this kind of show. If it’s once or twice per season where you’re doing that stuff or addressing the underlying mystery, then it’s not so foregrounded. It’s obviously always going to be there as an open, unresolved thread, but it’s not pressing. Those are fundamental decisions you make as a showrunner.

Craig: There is that give and take where, like you say, you get to dole these things out because how powerful they are. The things you have to watch out for, in addition to over-puzzling people to the point where they just go, “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore,” is making sure that the characters themselves maintain a reasonable level of curiosity and a realistic interest in trying to solve the problems themselves. Because there are times where the characters just seem to go along with puzzles sometimes, go along with weirdness and then say, what is this all about? The other one is like, I don’t know. Let’s see where it goes.

After a while, you get the feeling that no one’s trying hard enough to solve the puzzles, which can also be a little frustrating. They’re fun. Look, the worst part of solving a puzzle is the finish, unless it’s wonderful. It’s high-risk, high-reward. To refer back to Lost, I think a lot of people just presume that the ending of Lost was “bad”, that it’s legendarily been discussed to death. Damon himself seems to write an editorial about it every few months, God bless him. It was good, I think, and millions of people thought so. People are always going to disagree about these things, but when you look at a show like Lost, the degree of difficulty to do– how many episodes did they do?

John: 20 to 22 episodes per season.

Craig: It was like 100 episodes or something. To do that is astonishing. What we ask now is maybe to do 20 for a puzzle box. For instance, Severance is in Season 2. I think they’re doing 9 or 10 episodes a season. I don’t know how many seasons they go for, but I can only presume that if we’re on Severance Season 8, something’s gone terribly wrong.

John: I think you’re right.

Craig: Which is a weird thing to say because, theoretically, you want shows to go forever.

John: One of the points you made there is how the characters in the world are related to the central mystery. We’re talking about shows where the characters don’t have all the information. It’s not just that the audience is behind. The characters themselves are curious. It’s really a question of how do you make the mystery integral to the show but not overwhelming so that you can actually just do other stuff that a series needs to do in terms of how are the characters in relationships driving plot and story? It’s not all about the franchise mystery of it all.

Example, the far end would be The Leftovers, which is premised on this idea that 3% of the world’s population suddenly disappears. We see the effects of that, but no one is trying to answer the question, what really happened? At least the characters that we are seeing and following don’t have the capacity, the agency to try to solve that. It’s only in the final season that they actually really address what happened, resolve this great loss and make a change that addresses this fundamental mystery. Instead, it’s dealing with the repercussions of the premise, rather than trying to solve the premise.

Craig: More Lindelof. I guess Damon, he’s the king of the puzzle box. I think you’re right. I think that a good puzzle box story makes sure that part of the puzzle impacts the identity and central crisis of the characters, and the way their relationships function. So Severance is very good at this. In the end, do I want to know what is going on at Lumon? Do I want to know what Cold Harbor is and the data refinement process? Sure. Do I want to know why there are goats in that room? Yes, I do. Do I want to know more where Ms. Casey is/Mark S’s wife? Absolutely.

John: 100%.

Craig: Do I want to see how that is going to function within the matrix of Mark’s interest in Helly R? Now we’re just down to good old soap opera, and I love a good old soap opera. That’s where my heart is. Your brain is teased and entertained by the puzzles, but your brain will only get you so far. For what we do, the heart has to be there. And ideally, the stakes of the brain solving the problem are fed directly into the stakes of whether or not the heart gets what it wants.

John: The other thing I would point out to Christian is that as you’re trying to figure out your story and how it all fits together, when you have scenes with characters that know more about what’s going on, be really careful about those shifts in POV. That’s the thing that you’re seeing Season 2 of Severance grapple with, is that you have characters who work for Lumon who are just having conversations among themselves outside of the Severed Floor. They know so much more than we know. Those conversations are very carefully tailored, so that reveals stuff to us that they would know. That becomes a really difficult balancing act.

Craig: It is very hard to do this kind of show — Again, I tip my hat to Severance because they’re doing it — In a world where we have the internet and entire subreddits dedicated to parsing every single thing. My youngest daughter is currently now into Severance. She binged Season 1 with my wife, and now she’s watching Season 2 along with us. She was all over the theory because TikTok was all over the theory that Helly was actually real Helly and not– spoiler alert, if you’re now watching the show, you know it’s going to happen. She was ahead of that. I have a crazy Severance– it’s not a theory. I just had this idea. I’m sure it’s all over Reddit, too. I’m not original about this, I’m sure. Should I say it?

John: Say it.

Craig: I’ve been wondering lately if it’s all backwards, that the people on the outside are the ones that have been “severed,” that the outside is, in fact, the experiment, and the inside is very much what is real.

John: Sure. As we learn more in the second season, the outside world is not what we think it is. It’s not just that the cars are old. It’s that they’re in a non-existent state. The license plates don’t match. The two-letter state abbreviation is not a US state. It’s always winter. There’s something that’s really strange about the outside world.

Craig: One thing that’s really strange about the outside world, the fact that Ms. Cobel almost got to the edge of something and then turned back. It’s a lot easier to say, create a false reality where someone’s wife is dead than it is to kill someone’s wife in reality and then bring her back to life in a false reality. I don’t know. Anyway, there’s just stuff going on that makes me think it’s flipped around. Because I keep thinking, what are they doing in data refinement? Perhaps what they’re doing is refining somehow the way the outside world functions.

That said, it may not be that at all. Also, I don’t care. Here’s the truth, I don’t care. What I really want is for people in the end to be happy or to be resolved, to fulfill their destinies by sacrificing or doing something for the greater good. We have villains. The villains have become much more sharp this season. Corporation has become much more of a villain now. Mr. Milchick, you can feel his– oh my God, this storyline, can I just side note for a second? I don’t want to turn this into the 400,000th Severance podcast, but I was so delighted with this little mini storyline of Mr. Milchick being presented with those paintings, those incredibly, what do we call them, corporate racist? There’s like a corporate racism is its own thing where it’s like, we recognize your contributions, and look, we made a picture.

John: We want you to be able to see yourself in a story.

Craig: We just made our leader Black for you but in a bad painting. That little tiny, tiny story between him and– I can’t remember her character’s name, the woman who speaks for the board. I guess the two Black characters that are working for the company. Oh, it was just handled in the most delicious way. Really, really well done.

John: It was an interesting moment because not knowing what the real world of the show really is, oh so, race is still a thing. Based on the evidence of the rest of the show we’ve seen so far, does it have the racial history of America? It clearly has some racial history there. The fact that their Black is actually specific and acknowledged within the world of the show.

Craig: Right, which a lot of times in shows like this, they do the old colorblind thing where nobody has any comment on race whatsoever. You’re right. It was like an interesting break in the reality bubble of everything.

Anyway, to, I guess, wrap up the question here for advice, if you are thinking about writing one of these things, obviously, plan everything out, be meticulous, study your great mysteries, read Agatha Christie, read Arthur Conan Doyle, read as many things as you can that function like this clockwork machinery, watch all of the great puzzle box shows, go through the whole Lindelof catalog, basically, the Lindelog, and learn, and then figure out how to both begin middle and end it all, and create the characters that fit into it and are informed by it that we will actually follow and care about because when all is said and done, if you’re the kind of person who is only interested in how the puzzle box resolves, you’ll probably be disappointed all the time, but most of us care about the characters and the relationships.

John: One last observation I just need to make is that the fact that we can have this conversation about Severance is because it is a weekly release schedule. Had they dumped all these at once, there’s no conversation because you don’t know where people are at in their watching.

Craig: How are we still talking about this like it’s not the most obvious thing in the world? I wouldn’t even make my show if it were dumped all at once. I just wouldn’t do it. The thought of it, the thought of working that hard for that long for everybody to watch something over one day or a three-day thing and then occasionally nibble on it, oh my, why? Why does Netflix do this?

John: There’s a project that I would love to be able to make, but if we end up at Netflix and we’re released all at once versus someplace else, we would fundamentally have to change how we’re doing some things because you just can’t count on the–

Craig: I literally don’t understand. I’m sure there are a lot of people at Netflix, or a number of algorithms who would be happy to explain it to me. It seems so patently obvious that the shows that people talk about, the shows that grip people and get them excited are indeed released once a week.

John: So, second topic. I was in New York City for two weeks working on a new version of Big Fish, the Broadway musical that I did 12 years ago. This process resulted in a 29-hour reading where we had actors in for one week. You get to rehearse and perform it once for investors and theater owners and other friends. It was great. It was so, so much fun. We had Patrick Wilson starring and Jerry Zaks directing, a great experience. Then also when I got back from New York, I went in and did an EPK interview for Corpse Bride, which is the 20th anniversary of Corpse Bride that I wrote with Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler.

Craig: Twenty.

John: Twenty years. The experience of those things back to back made me think about when do you go back and revisit old projects? In the case of Big Fish, this is a thing that I was working on, first, the movie and then the Broadway show. Andrew Lippa and I had this giant catalog of like, here’s all the songs we wrote for the show. And as we’re reshaping and moving stuff around, it’s like, oh, I remember this little bit from this little bit. The bag of scraps you have can be really, really useful. Remembering what was the intention behind some of those things.

But for Corpse Bride, it was a chance for me to go back and watch the movie again, which I had not seen in 20 years. I remember like, “Wait, what did I actually do on this?” I watched the movie, then I read the script before I came on board. There were so many lines. I was like, “Oh, I remember writing that line.” Nope, I didn’t write that line. That was Caroline Thompson or Pamela Pettler. It was already in the draft. But then there were things that I did change and did add. It’s like, oh, I had no idea. That moment, which worked really well, like, oh, that was so great. The chance to reconnect with those things.

It also made me really wish that I’d kept a journal, that I’d kept some record of what the experience was like. Because in the conversation with the co-director and the producer, I had some ability to just remember why things were the way that they are, but it’s mostly just like, yes, that thing exists. I’m not quite sure how we got to that moment.

Craig: I’ve talked about this before. I’m not a big reflector. I don’t spend a lot of time in my brain in the past. I spend almost no time in my brain in the past.

John: I’m not much of one either.

Craig: It’s a watercolor mush. I remember the strangest things and not things that would be relevant but also, in general, not too motivated to go back and watch things.

What does sometimes happen is I get a chance to see something that I did through someone else’s eyes. When my youngest daughter was home from college, she and Melissa also watched The Hangover trilogy. That was exciting and fun. I didn’t sit there and watch it with them, but every now and then, I’d wander by and hear something and be like, “Oh, I remember that day.” It is fun to see people who grew up with something come to talk to you about it.

It reminds you why you did it in the first place. If you write things particularly for kids or for the broadest segment of the audience, you’re probably not in line to get Portrait of a Lady on Fire-type reviews. Not to say that some things like that aren’t wonderfully reviewed, but in the end, all that fades away. Then you see like, is there something there that lasted for people? That is interesting to see. But the thought of keeping a journal, oh my God.

John: It’s made me think back all the way to how I got interested in screenwriting in the first place, was Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The first script I ever read was his script because it came in a bound book with his script and his production journal. I got to see how he made it and what the whole process was. It was so incredibly illuminating to me. It made me want to become a screenwriter. I don’t have that for much of my stuff. I do for the Arlo Finch books because I had that separate podcast series I did, called Launch, which people could still listen to.

That really charts the whole process from I have this idea to write this book to the book is now out in French. It charted the whole process. That’s such an exception, and there’s no time machine that I wish I could go back and do that. I really wish I had records of more of what the conversations were.

Because even on Corpse Bride, now we can go back and search emails, and emails are so helpful to find out that stuff, but that was back in the time of faxes and phone calls. Now the stuff would be Zooms or Slack messages that are not as searchable. I feel like there’s a lack of a record of some of what’s really happening in the projects I’m working on right now.

Craig: Other than the insane digital paper trail, to me, the product of the work is the most important. I know that people are fascinated by the process. We do give them this very curated look at– “Stay tuned after the episode to watch behind the scenes.”

John: We are filming those. You’re doing all those in one day, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: You’re having to reflect upon, this is this episode, this is–

Craig: They just go, let’s talk Episode 3, let’s talk Episode 4. Though it’s interesting, what I don’t do is say things like, “It looks like so-and-so is in real trouble.”

John: A lot of people do.

Craig: I don’t do that. If there’s a cliffhanger, I’ll let the show do the cliffhanger. I just try and provide as much thematic context as possible. I’ve never been the person to pick up a book like Stanley Kubrick discusses how he made 2001. Weirdly, I don’t care. I’ve never had interest in that. I’ve always had interest in just the result. It may be because of my deep-seated belief that process is personal. I don’t want to follow someone else’s process. I don’t want to feel like I’m emulating anybody. I just want to try and follow my own natural instinct, which, hopefully, will get me to the best thing.

If I did write a diary called The Making of The Last of Us, it would contain quite a lot of whoa stuff. Not all good, but just like, wow, you guys had to do that? You went there? It took how much to build that thing? Yes. But people at HBO will tell you– I just say I’m so allergic to behind-the-scenes because I don’t want to– I want them to believe. If we keep showing people backstage– and that thing is an interest, I just try and avoid that if I can.

John: A case where I have had to go back through a project and reconstruct a narrative of things is in an arbitration. There’ve been times where I wrote something five years ago, and I have to go back through my drafts and figure out which drafts do I submit? What actually changed? What am I actually saying happened here? I did a little bit of that for a Corpse Bride where I was trying to figure out what changed draft to draft. I wonder if I might be willing to put this in a small box of things I feel like could be a good use for AI in a sense of like, compare this draft, compare it to this draft, and tell me what changed. Because it’s such a tedious task for a human being to do but actually is so well suited for something that is just looking for patterns.

Craig: Although change is difficult to judge if it’s judged quantitatively.

John: I would never do it for something. I would never do it in an arbitration situation, but for me, talking on the EPK, what changed over the course of between when you started, and really, it’s like, what were the big shifts? That’s hard for me to reconstruct if an AI or some other system could point out this is the character who’s different. This is how Barkus was in this draft, and this is where Barkus got to. That would be useful for me.

Craig: I don’t know about you, but I’ve become one of those people. Anytime someone says AI, I go, boo.

John: I totally get it.

Craig: I was watching the Super Bowl, and some ad came on, and we were like, “What is this for?” Then finally, they got to AI and we all went, “Boo.” I guess it’s inevitable.

John: I want to totally validate that experience, that feeling. Also, by saying, “Boo,” make sure you’re not dismissing that it actually is real and that it’s there. Because sometimes people will just say, “Boo,” in a disbelieving way.

Craig: No. I say, “Boo,” like, “I don’t want it.” I just wish it weren’t there. I do. I love technology. Just this one, I wish it weren’t there. I so resent the fact that Google gives me that garbage AI result at the top of the page, and you can’t turn it off.

John: I’m sure there’s some workaround that.

Craig: There isn’t. The workaround is to query Google for results that only occur prior to the date the AI existed. It’s not useful.

John: I switched to DuckDuckGo for searches on mobile, which has been fine. What I want to underline is I wish it weren’t there is a valid expression, but that’s not going to help us get any policy or regulation or any controls over it. That’s my worry.

Craig: I can’t get any policy or controls over anything. I’m not a senator.

John: Let’s answer some listener questions.

Drew: Keanu writes, “I’m a high school student at Heritage Academy Maricopa, and my class had a question about screenwriting. If a person is in a cave, is it interior or exterior?”

Craig: I love this question.

Drew: What about Godzilla vs. Kong? Would the middle of the earth be interior or exterior and where do we draw the line?

Craig: Wherever you want.

John: Wherever you want. It’s just a philosophical question.

Craig: I know. I love it.

John: Am I inside or outside?

Craig: Right. It’s great. Interior and exterior are mostly useful for productions to figure out if they are actually going to be physically outside or inside so that they can decide if maybe they’re going to build a set or if they’re going to have to worry about the weather. When it comes to something like a cave, personally, I would say interior because you are getting out of the rain. It really comes down to rain in my mind. If it were raining outside, would my actors be getting wet?

John: Which is the cover side.

Craig: Exterior. Now, if you’re under a bus shelter or something, if you’re hiding from the rain, sure. The center of the earth, you mean in the molten core of the center?

John: No. In the Godzilla vs. Kong movies, there’s this giant underground, it’s really an outdoor space that happens to have a roof on it.

Craig: In that case, I probably would say exterior because there are probably sub-interiors within that. If there’s a cave inside of that world where there’s the dome sky, then– Truman Show, exterior street, interior house. All of it, spoiler alert, under a dome, interior.

John: 100% agree. It’s the other classic things like interior space, exterior space, exactly. If it feels like you’re outside, it’s great. It’s not going to affect anything. We get it.

Craig: It’s not going to affect anything, but I do like the philosophy. Here’s maybe a useful way of thinking about it: If where you are could be separated from another interior, it’s probably exterior, if you’re going to go inside from where you are.

John: I would just go to inside, outside. If you enter a place, then you’re interior. If you exit a place, you’re likely going into an exterior.

Craig: Feels about right.

Drew: Steve writes, “I’m working on a script that features actors who play in a cover band. I’d like to show them performing live on stage in small venues. I’ve read about some of the challenges David Simon faced while filming bands live in the show Treme, but can you go into specifics as to why? Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene? Also, am I mistaken in assuming that the songs that I choose will be cheaper since I won’t be using the actual recordings?

Craig: Here’s why shooting live songs is hard. It comes down to editing. When a band is playing live, it’s never going to be exactly the same each time. Their movements, the notes, the tempo, everything will always be a little bit different from show to show. Any tiny difference will make a jump happen if you’re going to edit from one camera to the other unless you’re filming eight cameras. Even then, most of the cameras will be seeing the cameras.

Now you’ve got some painting out to do and you don’t get that fluid feeling of going through. So typically, what we do is we ask the musicians to play to a fixed track. The fixed track will be in their ears, and they mime play along with it, essentially. They can live play along with it too, but they have to be locked in for editing purposes. It is a challenge.

John: Either a pre-record or a click track, basically something to keep them on exactly the same metronome for things. For Steve, if it’s looking to do maybe a smaller indie project, in some ways, that might argue towards doing some live recording because maybe it has a feel where it’s just you’re just going to record the entire thing, or it’s in a one-er, or there are reasons why you’re there and you’re experiencing it live. I think back to the movie Once, which is about the folk singer you fall in love, that feels like a thing that was probably recorded live and made sense to record live. It felt like the right vibe for it.

Craig: If you’re going to do, for instance, that wonderful song Falling and it’s two people, one playing guitar, one singing, three, four cameras going at once, that’ll get you what you want. No problem. We face these challenges from time to time, and we figure them out with the sound department. But fun, chaotic, proper live with a club, and everybody dancing and everything. The sound is the biggest issue, is figuring out what we’re going to hear and how we’re going to hear it.

The other thing about playing live is the music is coming out through big speakers. Now, you can record the individual tracks, but you still have to mic the drums. You’re getting bleed through those drum mics from everything else that’s playing. What are you going to play for people when they’re watching? Because recording live is its own thing, plus you have the crowd dancing. It may all look great, but now it sounds like mush, or it doesn’t connect to what we’re seeing. Challenges.

John: It’s challenges. Answering two more little things, Steve asked, “Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene?” Not really. The dinner table scene is its own unique problem just because of eye lines that are getting people to match around a dinner table scene. Here, you have a bunch of people who, yes, they might be looking at each other, and that’s just a thing. It’s going to be the same problem whether you’re recording it live or they’re lip-syncing to a thing. “Will it be cheaper than using the actual recordings?” No, because if you’re going to do your own recording of the thing, you’re making your own recording, period. Recording it live doesn’t change that.

Craig: It could be cheaper only in the sense that if you’re going to use the recorded version, you have to pay for both the licensing and the mechanical, the master.

John: I’m presuming that if we see a band performing on stage, you’re going to record a band, that band, or another band recording on stage.

Craig: That recording you’re making, it won’t cost you anything. You’re just paying the licensing at that point and, of course, the performance fees for the band, or if they’re actors, that’s the acting. Yes, it could be a little bit more, but then you have a lot of other challenges you’re going to have to deal with, and you have to weigh those two things side by side. It’s a tricky one.

The good news is, post-production people, production people, sound people, they’ve all been here. They will all give you advice on the various ways you can go, but it is a bit of an interesting puzzle. When you’re trying to figure out how to, for instance, then shoot a conversation between two people who are off to the side with the band playing in the background continuously from their live performance, how are you going to do that? It’s all very tricky.

John: There are reasons why you want that band to be looking like they’re performing and not actually performing.

Drew: We’ve got one last question. Todd in Maryland writes, “I love when you guys talk about D&D. I’ve played tabletop role-playing games since I was a kid and think they’re great for storytelling and socializing. The strange thing, however, is that very few campaigns stick in my head as being memorable stories. Usually, there are one or two standout moments, a funny interaction, a clever situation to a puzzle, critical success or failure, but the personal goals and growth of the characters and the overarching plots are lost in the wash of time. Have you ever used a role-playing campaign as the basis of a screenplay, or are these two fundamentally different mediums?”

John: I think they’re really different mediums.

Craig: Yes, for sure. Two issues there. One is the campaigns that he’s in aren’t memorable. That may be chalked up to the DM. Partly, that’s the job of the DM is to tell a great story, to make more than one or two memorable moments, to provide a lot of great NPCs that you can remember, and to make it all make sense in the end like it was all meant to be purposeful. That’s an entirely different question than from– also, let’s say you got that, should you base this? No, you should not.

John: We’re about to resolve a campaign that I’ve been DMing for the last year or so. Listen, I went in with some story points, but I really let the players dictate what was going to be happening. They are the storytellers of a lot of this. Those characters making those choices, their bad roles a lot of times are the iconic moments from it.

Craig: Like any good DM, you edit as you go. As long as you don’t make a change that undoes something that we all saw happen or somehow invalidate things, you’re fine. It’s a little bit like the puzzle box thing. You just want to make sure that when you get to the end, people are like, “Oh, this is, so nothing mattered. You just randomly did this, even though all these other things happened.” Yes, the puzzle has to make sense in the end.

John: What is I think consistent with good cinematic storytelling is the players, the protagonists should be the most memorable characters and the one who are driving things. While I set up a villain and sub-villains who I thought were useful and good and interesting, your heroes should be driving the story, and they have.

Craig: You hope that you have a group of players that create relationships with each other or key relationships with an NPC, but the point is relationships and how they interact with each other, that’s the fun. When I’m a player, I’m so much more interested in how I deal with the other party members than I am with how I deal with the rest of the world.

John: Absolutely. One thing that I did in this campaign, which we tried out, mixed success, but I said, in our session zero, as we were getting stuff ready, every character had to have relationships with two other characters around the table. It didn’t have to be like brother and sister, but they had to have some other connection with them so that they came into this small community with a sense of some shared history and purpose and relationship. It’s an idea I would continue through to the future, even as we’re looking at our next campaign, is I would love to come in with my player being connected at least to one other player.

Craig: I think it’s a good icebreaker moment. What happens is the players, as they play-

John: They make choices.

Craig: -they begin to figure out who they are and then they just create new relationships. Some of them are good running jokes. I had a good one with Phil Hay’s character based on the session zero, but then a lot of them just emerge because somebody’s character may irk your character by what they do. Then that’s the thing now by the choice they made. As long as you give people room to find their own bonds and flaws, as D&D says, you’re doing great.

John: Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show/experience I had while I was in New York City called Life And Trust. Now, Craig, when you were in New York ever, did you go to Sleep No More?

Craig: I sure did.

John: Did you like Sleep No More?

Craig: I definitely went to Sleep No More.

John: Craig did not enjoy Sleep No More.

Craig: I attended it.

John: Let me talk about Sleep No More, and I’ll tell you about the differences between this and Life And Trust. Sleep No More, you go to this space and you drop off your coat and put on a mask, and then you’re wandering through this space, and you start to realize were there actors? Basically, anyone who’s not wearing a mask is an actor, is a performer in this world. You start to realize like, “Oh, Macbeth is happening around me.” As you’re wandering through the space, there’s really very little structure to it. You’re seeing scenes and moments, but it’s cool and also has a feeling of a little bit of an escape room in the sense of you could just spend all the time looking at the very cool set direction and such.

While I was in New York this last time, I went to see Life And Trust, which is by the same folks who did that. It is done in a bank in the financial district, an incredible space, and just gorgeous and much more ambitious than Sleep No More was. As you’re entering it, there’s a little bit of dialogue at the start as you’re sent off. Then like Sleep No More, you’re wearing a mask. You’re exploring the space, and you could just look at all the incredible set decorations throughout the whole thing. You realize that what’s actually happening is probably Faust or a version of Faust.

I thought the structural elements on it worked really nicely. We’ve just had a really good time. If you’re going with a group, you end up getting separated by default, and you’re having your own experience. Then really part of the fun of it is when it’s all done, which is about three hours, getting back together and like, “Did you make it to that space? I had no idea that thing was there.” I saw this scene happen, and you’re trying to piece together what all happened. I really dug it.

Craig: I remember that I was uncomfortable wearing a mask and watching people. Whatever a voyeur is, I’m the opposite of that. I felt very uncomfortable. No reflection on what they did, their performance, the quality, it was all clearly working at a very high level, and people do love it. I just thought like, “Oh, if somebody were to be looking at me, I’m the bad guy.” I’m just scrolling around, Eyes Wide Shut style, just basking in the performance.

I kept thinking to myself, a lot of these people are the classic starving artists in New York, working this gig for probably not a lot of money, and then waitering during the day. Then I show up at night, and I just casually watch them. I’m not going to watch them. I’m going to turn away and watch something else. I’d rather walk down that hallway than look at you and appreciate what you’re doing. I just felt so icky. I don’t know if anybody else had that.

John: I think that is a valid experience. I will say that this show was much more dance-driven than the other one was. The other one was like–

Craig: You know me. I love dance.

John: You love some dance. At times you realize like, “Oh, there’s choreography happening. Oh my God, I need to move really quickly because they’re about to slam into me.” You have to be so ready to do things on the fly, which is fun and impressive that they could do. Here’s the moment we had at the end, though, that made me– this is true for all Broadway actors, but I really felt it for this is, so we’re down in the financial district, and I have to take the train to get back uptown. We get on the train, and two of the performers are in there too, along with all these young Chinese girls who were there who had just seen the show and were fawning over them. It’s like, man, you just did this thing and you want to be done. Suddenly, there are people there who saw you do it.

Craig: Some actors really enjoy it.

John: Some actors love it.

Craig: Some fans, are you kidding? Who doesn’t like a few fans?

John: All right. Life And Trust is my one cool thing.

Craig: My one cool thing– let’s see. Yes, we’re getting close. This is a sad one cool thing, but it’s a wonderful one cool thing. So in about a week, my intrepid assistant, Ali Chang, will be graduating out of assistant university, and we’ll talk about what she’s doing next. It’s quite exciting. For another time, that’s really up to her. I just wanted to make her my one cool thing because for two years, she has just been the best.

I’d never really had assistants, but if you’re going to be a showrunner, you need not just an assistant. You need a super assistant. You need somebody who is operating like your auxiliary brain and, most importantly, is filtering everything that goes in and out to make sure that the showrunner doesn’t drown in information, so organization and anticipation but then also all the good nurturing stuff.

Then like, “Hey, I want to try something fun for dinner. What’s the best blank?” She knows everything about everything everywhere. I must have spent probably 1,000 driving hours with her because we just drive places because you got to go scout. You got to go to your sets. You got to here and there. It’s just like an incredible wingman and such a super person. I won’t have to miss her because she’s still going to be around, but she just did a fantastic job. She is my absolute one coolest thing this week. The great Ali Chang.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Don’t know him.

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Never heard of him.

John: Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers who really need to switch over to the annual plan and not the weekly plan. Save money.

Craig: It’s going to $7.99, but soon, it’ll be $799.

John: That’d be crazy.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Oy. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record about taking time off. Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, one of the real challenges of being a writer is that because we’re not on the clock, we’re never off the clock. One of the things I really missed about a 9-to-5 job is when I was not on the job, I was just off, and I had no responsibility to that place of work. That just doesn’t happen as a writer.
Craig: No, and there’s this whole new world of people that don’t go to the office. They Zoom commute, which means, a lot of their time during the day, they’re probably also off.

John: It’s unstructured.

Craig: Yes, but if you Zoom commute as a writer, you’re just being a writer. We’ve always just been somebody that occasionally would go to a meeting. It doesn’t matter. You wake up. Theoretically, you could be writing. You should be writing. That’s what your brain tells you at least until you are fully unconscious. You can always possibly be writing. It is difficult to draw the line, and then if you are in the middle of a production–

John: My daughter is in her second semester of her sophomore year. I was FaceTiming with her, and she’s like, “I’m so overwhelmed. I have this paper to do and this stuff, and it feels like all I do is I wake up. I go to class. I go to work. I do homework, and then I go to bed.” It’s like, “Yes, we validate that. Yes, that’s what the experience is. Are you taking time off?” She’s like, “I’m sleeping okay.” It’s like, “No, I don’t mean sleep. I think you actually need to have some time that is just not that time. You have to replenish and refill.” It’s a hard thing to hear or to try to do because you’re just like, “If I’m doing that, then I’m falling further behind on other stuff.” It’s hard to internalize that idea.

Craig: It is, and it’s probably a sign that you either are trying to do too much, or you need to learn how to do the things you do more efficiently. That’s our greatest hope. The first thing we want if we’re an ambitious person is to say, “I’ve been asked to do 100 things. I feel like I could do 10.” Either I need to tell them I can’t do those other 90, or I need to learn how to do 100 things. Now, it turns out that we can do more than we think.

The dangerous thing is if you keep doing that and succeeding, where does it end? Where it ends probably is a nervous breakdown. College is an excellent time to find out just how much you can do. Sometimes the feeling of being overwhelmed is really just the fear that you are going to have to expand your appetite and your output because it’s hard, but you can, until you hit a point where it definitely feels wrong. I’ve had a few of those.

John: I’ve definitely had a few, too. The nervous breakdown I had at the end of D.C., it was my first TV show, was that just trying to do too much and not recognizing or not being honest with myself that I was overtaxed. It just was impossible to do it. I remember very distinctly feeling like I was just a vessel for making the show. If I was listening to the radio in the car, it’s like, “Is that a song that could be in the show?”
I was basically just a sorting mechanism for things that could be in the show and things that were not going to be in the show. Healthier now, I don’t do that.

One of the things I’m trying to be more deliberate about doing is, today is a day off. I’m just not actually doing any work. I’m not thinking about work. I’m going to do whatever feels good and not out of a sense of obligation, but I’m just going to chill and not stress out about stuff. It’s hard for me to do that because I recognize that there are always 10 more things I could be doing with that time.

Craig: I don’t have a guilt about those times. What I struggle with is finding out ways to actively do nothing. When I say do nothing, actively not work. Today I’m not working. Instead, I’m going to clean out this. I’m going to go do here. I’m going to meet up with these people. I’m going to walk around a museum. Mostly what I want to do, I find when I’m not working is dissociate. That’s what I want to do. I want to dissociate. I want to sit down with a video game or a puzzle and go bye-bye.

I think that’s fine. It’s probably not on the top of the list of psychological recommendations for people, and maybe people might think that’s a sign actually you’re doing too much because you need to dissociate, but I actually find it wonderful. I like going bye-bye because my brain is working all the time. I need to sometime just send it to bye-bye town.

John: That will give you Birdigo, and you’re playing some Birdigo.

Craig: Dissociate.

John: Dissociate. The other thing I’m trying to do more of is just allowing myself to be bored. It’s because I find that I’m trying to fill every moment. I would find myself pulling out my phone as I walked upstairs. That’s 20 seconds. I didn’t need to pull out my phone during those times. Literally just putting the phone down and just being in a place and just letting myself be bored. Just stare at my dog for five minutes. It is good for just bringing everything down a little bit for me.

Craig: I think that in time, our ever-increasing age will force us to do these things more and more. I do think sometimes I better get all this stuff in that I want to do now. What I want to do is we call it work. I don’t think of it as work. This is what I want to do. I’m lucky enough that what I want to do is the thing people pay me to do. Fantastic. I will do it now as much as I can until my– I smell burnt toast, and that’s the end of that.

John: We met up with friends of ours from Los Angeles but now have a place in New York. We went to the Met, and it was great, and they had a great exhibit there, and loved it. He’s kind ofd retired. He’s a writer, and he’s just like, “I’m just done. I’m just done working for other people. I stopped enjoying it. I have the ability to be done and I’m just done.” That’s a hard thing to admit. I can’t imagine myself getting there, but I’m really happy that he’s happy doing that.

Craig: That was the goal, I think, for most people for the longest time. I’m thinking of a friend that we have in common who keeps telling me, “Once this is done, I’m ready to finish.”

John: I know who you’re talking about. It’s been 20 years he’s been saying that.

Craig: Right, and I’m like, “Okay, but you’re not. It’s not going to happen.”
John: He’ll describe the plan, “Oh, we’re going to move to Upstate New York. We’re got this place and all this stuff.” It’s like, “Yes, you’re going upstate, but you’re going back.”

Craig: You’re not going to.

John: Your kids are in college. They’re out of college now.

Craig: Because you like the life, man. You like the life.

John: Growing up, did you have any concept of a Sabbath or a day off? Did your family do any of that?

Craig: No. Weekends were for homework and essays and stuff. I was always nervous when I got to the weekend, mostly because I had to spend all day with my parents instead of just a little bit. That was when, I guess, they imposed this running around on your weekend is bad. I did get to play. Don’t get me wrong. I got to go outside, but I had to do all my work first and had to do it great. Homework is the worst. Have we ever talked about how dumb homework is?

John: Homework is generally terrible.

Craig: It’s just the stupidest concept.

John: Study after study shows that it’s not productive.

Craig: It doesn’t do a goddamn thing. What is the point? If you can add two numbers together, why do you have to add more two numbers together all weekend long? It’s stupid. It’s not learning.

John: It also contributes to the Sunday scareies, that sense of this is all the work I have to do to get done, so I’d be ready for my new week. It’s bad.

Craig: It just gives teachers something to grade. It just gives them something to grade. It’s stupid.

John: I think our advice is let yourself rest. Don’t do your homework.

Craig: Don’t do your homework, kids.

John: Don’t do your homework.

[laughter]

John: Don’t do homework that other people have assigned you. If there’s homework that you feel like you want to do to make yourself ready, great.

Craig: If you work at a job and someone’s giving you homework, listen, you got to figure out your boundaries there and make choices.

John: As we record this on President’s Day. It’s on the calendar, is a day that should not have been a workday for Drew, certainly.

Craig: You know what? Drew made a choice. I think he made what I would call a coerced choice.

Drew: I could have not come in.

Craig: It’s a little bit like when a magician tells you to pick a card, any card, you’re picking the one they want you to pick.

Drew: It’s the one that’s popping up.

Craig: Yes, but thank you for picking this day. It was so nice of you. That’s it.

Links:

• Birdigo on Steam
• Lutron HomeWorks and Home Assistant
• The Prisoner (1967)
• Scriptnotes, Ep 296: Television with Damon Lindelof
• Patrick Wilson, Jordan Donica Leading Industry Reading of Revised, Broadway-Aimed Big Fish on Playbill.com
• Falling Slowly scene in Once
• Life and Trust
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John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 676 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you keep doing creative work when it feels like the world around you is burning to the ground, sometimes literally? To help talk us through that despair, self-doubt, and anxiety, we welcome back a beloved guest from episode 99, Dennis Palumbo, a writer-turned-psychotherapist who deals with these issues every day. And in our bonus segment for premium members, Dennis and I will talk about how therapists are portrayed on screen with suggestions for getting it right.

But first, Drew, we have some follow-up.

Drew Marquardt: We do. We had a few people write in following up on our conversation on AI from back in episode 669.

Imran writes, “Recently, a production company added my original TV pilot onto their slate and paid me to craft its pitch deck. This particular script is a lo-fi sci-fi with a South Asian female lead.”

John: I want to stop on lo-fi sci-fi. I just love that as a term.

Drew: “Now, obviously with pitch decks, the visual job is finding comps, stills, actors, et cetera, to show what we’re making. Finding stills of South Asian female leads in Hollywood roles is a very limited pool. Then trying to find them in any sci-fi context is an almost impossible task.

My past experience is that decision-makers often have what I lovingly call “raciaphantasia.” So I got to show them, but what do I show them? Enter AI. I was able to concoct stills from a show like mine that doesn’t actually exist but feels familiar, allowing me to center a South Asian female lead, like a show from a parallel universe that’s already solved its representation problem. Decks generally just use images ripped from TV and movies and they’re not for public consumption, so I feel like I didn’t go against my general philosophy of not replacing a human with a toaster. Could this be considered an instance of AI-enabling opportunity rather than the opposite? I feel okay with this particular usage, but what do you think?”

John: Yes. So Imran, you’re right at that sweet spot where I’m actually wrestling with the same questions myself because I’ve had to put together pitch decks. Let’s talk through what you’re usually doing with a pitch deck, which is you’re looking for images from existing movies and TV shows that sort of give a sense of the feel and the style of what you’re going for. If I’m putting up things for the female lead, I’m talking about like, “This is Rebecca…” I might put up a series of images of split screens of like a couple of different actresses who could play that part. Here’s Zoe Saldana, here’s Jennifer Lawrence. Here are people in that space.

That’s great, but sometimes you need to show what’s actually happening in the moment in that scene. My go-to source for all this stuff is I pay for a subscription to ShotDeck, which is a really good site that pulls stills from all sorts of images and does a really good job cataloging and tagging them. You can say like, I need a close-up shot of a man looking down. I need this thing. It’s really useful for building that and for building mood boards.

But Imran, exactly the situation you’re running into, sometimes that shot doesn’t exist because it’s just never been done before. Particularly with issues of representation, yes, you’re not going to find enough young Asian female leads in a sci-fi franchise that’s going to probably work for you there. I get what you’re trying to do. I would say, listen, don’t pretend that you’re not doing it. Don’t hide from it. Also, I think you need to put some guardrails around yourself. You’re using this stuff to be able to convince other people to embark on your project, but this is not the final product. The fact that it’s internal is a helpful delimiter for me.

Always just be asking yourself, am I taking away someone’s job by doing this? Because what are the alternatives? You could go out and do a photo shoot with a model who does these things. That’s just not realistic. That’s not how these things are done. You could go to a Photoshop professional who could comp together a bunch of other images to find that thing. That’s maybe possible.

As you go out further with the project, it may make sense to enlist some of those folks in terms of building this deck so you can go out. If you need to show it to networks and other places beyond that, that might make some sense. For what you’re doing right now, I don’t personally have a problem with it. Some people would.

Drew: That makes sense. Next comes from Rita. Rita says, “I work at an animation studio, and while our policies are all strictly against AI use, the message from above is that if it’s going to help us work faster, go right ahead. This isn’t being communicated in anything written or over Zoom since our meetings are all recorded, but rather has been said to me with a wink-wink when I’ve been physically in the office. I suspect this is the case for a lot of studios.”

John: Yes. I would be really curious to hear from our other listeners about what they’re finding in their actual working environments. I was on a studio a lot yesterday in a TV space and I saw a lot of people with a lot of really big monitors. I was wondering how much they were using AI to do some stuff in there, and I don’t know what it is. Listen, like what Imran’s question is, I guess I’m wondering what kinds of things are they saying maybe it’s okay for you to use AI to do some of these things?

You mentioned that the Zooms are all recorded, so great. A lot of times they’re using those Zooms to actually generate notes about what was happening in the meeting. I’m kind of okay with it. Again, are you taking a person’s job who normally would be there to do that? For most of these meetings, probably not. In the case of a writer’s room, yes, a writer’s assistant was supposed to be there doing that stuff. I think when you have policies that are written down but then you’re actually not enforcing them, I think it’s in some ways worse than not ever actually having a policy because it’s basically a question of whether there are any boundaries around anything. Drew, what’s your take?

Drew: I know Rita works in editorial, and so there’s different facets to that too. When we had Mike Schur on the show, he was talking about using his audio engineer, using AI to pull seal noises out of the back of a shot, and that feels like a tool. That feels like a useful thing. These editorial programs have little tools and wizards and things that can clean stuff up. If AI is being used in that capacity, I don’t have any problem with it. That feels fine to me.

John: I think I said this on an earlier podcast. If the person whose job it is to be doing that thing is using the tool themselves, I have less of an issue with it than if someone whose entire job is in that space is using that to replace the person who would normally be doing that work.

Drew: But an interstitial shot? That feels bad.

John: Yes, it does feel bad. I think we’re going to be wrestling with this for a long time. Rita, I would say that it’s good to clock how you feel about these situations. When you feel like something is crossing a line or you wonder if something’s crossing a line, talk with others around you. You may not necessarily be able to go up to your supervisor and say like, this is a problem here. If other people at your level are feeling a similar situation, there may be some logic behind that.

Post is one of those areas that’s going to be affected earlier because it’s people sitting at machines doing things and maybe they’re using the next generation of those existing technologies to do stuff. It may be fine, but it may also be disruptive in a really bad way.

Drew: I’d be really curious where the line is for a lot of these people in post, for our friends at VFX, the ethical boundaries that they’re pushing up against. Because to me, a lot of these just feel like extensions of tools that they might already have, but that’s probably not true.

John: Anyone who’s actually edited a movie or TV show will tell you that most of the dialogue you’re seeing coming out of an actor’s mouth is not necessarily what was recorded in that moment. You’ve slipped lines from other takes and you’ve moved stuff through. It’s all artifice and all manufactured. If you’re sweetening or changing the audio to do that, or you’re doing clever things to people’s mouths so that you can slip frames, we’ve long had issues with how authentic and how real a thing is that we’re seeing on screen is. This is amplifying that. I think people are going to have to make choices about what they feel comfortable with and what they don’t feel comfortable with.

Drew: Yes. Please write in with more on this because —

John: Yes, I’m glad we were able to solve all the AI issues. Now let’s talk about our brains.

Let’s welcome our guest. Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in working with creative patients like writers. His screenwriting credits include the feature film, My Favorite Year, for which he was nominated for a WGA award for best screenplay. He was also a writer for Welcome Back, Kotter, among other series. In addition to his therapy practice, he writes mystery thrillers, which you can find in bookstores everywhere. Welcome back to the program, Dennis Palumbo.

Dennis Palumbo: Oh, thank you, John. It’s good to be here.

John: You were on episode 99, which was a zillion years ago, but it’s one of our most popular episodes. It’s one of the ones that we replay most often because it has such timeless advice for writers facing imposter syndrome, and just really the struggle of sitting down in the chair each day to write. Thank you for that.

Dennis: Oh, my pleasure.

John: What got me thinking about you in this moment was an article you wrote just a couple weeks ago titled, Am I Just Fiddling While Rome Burns? Can you give us a little setup behind why you wrote the article and what you were finding?

Dennis: Yes. The article was actually one of the columns in a column I do for Psychiatric Times called Creative Minds, and it’s a therapist looking at dealing with creative patients. The audience is primarily psychiatrists and psychologists because it’s a clinical journal, but apparently, somehow it got a little more. It’s not viral, but it got big for some reason, and I’ve heard from a lot of people. What got me writing about it, frankly, was the LA fires.

One of the things that writers deal with all the time, the two aspects are relevance and perspective. Is what I’m doing as a writer relevant in the world today? And perspective. Relevance to me means, gee, does anybody care about what I’m writing about? Does it help anybody? Is there a reason for it to exist? And perspective is like, here I am complaining because I can’t get the second act to work and people are dying in Syria. People are dying in Gaza. From the 10,000-foot perspective, what I do doesn’t matter.

That really came home to me during the LA fires because I had so many patients who were just saying, look, people are losing their homes, people are dying in Gaza, what the heck am I doing writing my fourth mystery novel? What am I doing writing my 28th episode of an NCIS series?

When you are an artist in particularly a commercial marketplace, it’s really hard sometimes to justify what you’re doing in the face of difficult times. We’re also in a quite erratic and revolutionary political time that’s confusing and disheartening to a lot of people. This is something I noticed in my patients, so I decided to write a column about some of the people that I’ve worked with and some of the things they’ve said about it.

John: Let’s start local, let’s start with the fires because when you think about Gaza, you think about turmoil in the world is not new, but having such incredible turmoil in our backyards, and in many cases, I’ve had 10 friends who lost their houses in these fires, it brings it home very directly. It makes you question, what is it that I’m doing here? What is keeping me in Los Angeles?

Let’s take it from the perspective of the extreme case of a writer whose house burns down in the fires. If you are the therapist talking with that writer about getting back to work, what are the points of the conversation? What are the things that you’re trying to get that writer to see, what’s the conversation like?

Dennis: First of all, I think it’s important for someone to acknowledge the traumatic impact of something like that. You end up with two kinds of patients. There are those who are bowled over by an experience like that and become immobilized. Then you have another kind of patient who says, “I don’t care that my house burned down yesterday, I’m going to get this in on deadline.” To me, they’re two sides of the same coin. They’re magical thinking.

The first thing I would do with any, I have had actually a patient lose her home in the Palisades and we dealt with it like any trauma, any tragedy. People are going to have PTSD symptoms after a tragedy like that. For those who don’t know post-traumatic stress disorder, the kind of symptoms you have is a hypervigilance about bad things happening again, a belief that maybe you could have avoided this by not living in the Palisades or by having one of those automated sprinkler systems that watered down your house. Then if your house didn’t burn down but your friend or your relatives did, then you have survivor guilt.

These are all functions of PTSD. And these traumas have to be experienced and processed and held by the therapist so that the person can move through them. We’re not saying, no, we don’t think you should ever write again. In fact, I’ll make the argument it’s crucial that you do so. I also think it’s crucial that you allow yourself the initial experience and the feelings that you’re having about it and then to challenge the meanings that usually associate themselves with a trauma, primarily meanings that are self-recriminating, that are self-blaming, or that make you feel as though the universe doesn’t like me, my house burned down and this guy’s house didn’t, so God hates me. You would be surprised where people go in the face of a tragedy.

John: Also, we’re dealing with writers who it is by their nature to narrativize, to create stories around these situations and to see themselves as the protagonist in the situation and that they’re in some act of a multi-act story, which is understandable, but may not actually be helpful for them processing what’s happened and to move on with the next stage. You make some examples in your column about great art that came out of really difficult times with Picasso with Guernica. I was also thinking about like Virginia Woolf or Kurt Vonnegut or Auden who are writing about the profound grief and anxiety that they’re encountering.

Some of us will have a chance to channel what we’re feeling into art, but some of us are going to have to write that next episode of that comedy series and go back and do that. That feels like that’s a real tension. You are probably uniquely faced with these things because some people who lost their houses are going back to investment banking and it’s like, okay, that’s a thing. The folks of us who have to go back and write comedy or write things, that feels like that tension is going to be hard to balance.

Dennis: It’s hard to balance unless you look underneath it. I wrote sitcoms for years.

John: You wrote Welcome Back, Kotter.

Dennis: I got to tell you, if you’re not angry and aggrieved and filled with pain and bitterness, you’re not funny. [chuckles] The only good thing to come out of it, it’s like the old joke, hey, the war was terrible, but a lot of great songs came out of war. The reality is you can write comedy coming out of tragedy, because sometimes it’s the only way you can survive. A whole race of people, the Jews, that’s to me how they’ve gotten through the last number of centuries. But I know it’s very, very difficult.

It’s interesting too, because for a lot of artists, they think, well, the way to be relevant when a tragedy happens is to only write about the tragedy. Like John Hersey writing Hiroshima, or like you said, Picasso painting Guernica. There’s a great story where a former German officer was looking at Guernica on the wall and said to Picasso, “How did you do that?” Picasso said, “Actually, no, you did that.”

The thing that’s really important to remember is you don’t have to write directly about something to write about its emotional impact, because one of the things that writing does that’s so amazing, no matter how small or far off or idiosyncratic an idea is, or even a time zone is, or even a historical era is, if the stakes are real and the people’s feelings are real, anyone can relate to it.

You can write an episode of a sitcom in the wake of a tragedy, because every character in that sitcom wants something, has felt denied something, yearns for something, and has been disappointed about something. You can craft a story about the smallest thing, like not getting invited to the prom, but you can work in it all the ideas about yourself. I’m not worthy, I’m not good enough. If I were pretty enough, if God loved me, I’d go get a prom date. All the things that concern us about ourselves can be filtered through something as silly as a sitcom.

John: Let’s talk about writing as a therapeutic practice, because one of the things that writers have that is unique among some of the creative arts is that we don’t need anyone’s permission to do a thing. Even painters, their studio is burned down. Writers, we just need a piece of paper and we can write stuff. I guess there’s probably a double-edged sword there because because we need so little, there’s an expectation we should be able to get back to work quickly. We don’t need all this stuff around us. We don’t need these permission structures around us. What advice do you have for someone who is sitting down for the first time after a fire tragedy or loss of a loved one or some other profound loss in their life? How do you recommend they start, or do they just start and grapple with it as it comes?

Dennis: There’s no one-size-fits-all model for how you work with a patient. It would be dependent on what I know about the patient’s childhood, their core issues, their values, the kinds of themes they tend to write about. Just off the top of my head, I would suggest that someone write about how they’re feeling right now. Even if what they’re feeling right now is I don’t want to write my episode of this procedural or I don’t want to do this rewrite of this comedy film I’ve signed up to do, write about what you feel and how you don’t want to do it and what’s preventing you from doing it. And then I would probably look at what’s the meaning behind preventing it.

In other words, there are people who would feel, what business do I have of writing about the time my sister broke up with her boyfriend when people have lost their homes? Then I’d say, okay, now we’re talking about how relevant you are, how important what you do is. It’s crucial to remember too that like everyone, writers come from a family of origin that contributes to their mythology of how the world works.

I have a very famous director patient whose parents don’t have much regard for what he does. Now, he has a sibling who’s a union organizer and another sibling who’s a social worker. The parents who are good dyed-in-the-wool liberals think that those two siblings do something that’s important. And one of the things my patient struggles with and, in fact, feels as though his success mocks him is how relevant what he does is, how important what he does is.

If I don’t know that, having worked with him for a long time, if I don’t know that about his core issues, I’m not going to know how to talk to him about what is preventing him from going back to work, which may include the idea that if he were really moved by what was going on in the world or in the Palisades, for example, he wouldn’t be able to write. He wouldn’t be able to work.

One of the things that’s very important is, what’s our self-concept? What meaning do we give to the fact that we can’t work? What meaning do we give to the fact that contrary to what everyone seems to believe conventionally, we’re quite able to work? Does that mean we’re heartless or have no empathy? For some people, what it means is you’re escaping into the work. Doing the work saves your life.

In my experience, writers save their ass by writing. I don’t care if they’re going through a divorce or the loss of a family member or their house burning down. For most writers, the way they connect with themselves is to utilize and manifest their skill set. It’s like True North. If their needle isn’t pointing to True North, they get wiggy. That’s a clinical term. [chuckles] They get wiggy.

John: I want to segue from this incredibly local situation of the fires and the loss of what we see in front of us to something I’m feeling a little bit more personally, which is I feel like I’m grappling with this sense that I’m not sure that the world, as I understand it, is going to exist in two or three or five years. I just feel that it’s an acceleration of things. You touched on part of this, that sense that the administration is trying to rip apart the government, that we have the rise of very powerful AI without any guardrails around it, and the sense that this cold war we’re in with various nations could become hot.

Those are all anxieties I have that the stuff that I’m working on right now may not be relevant, and relevant is a loaded word, but it may just not make sense to do. I find myself in some cases racing to do certain things, like travel to certain places and the belief that it’s going to be harder to do so after, but also holding off on some projects that might take a little bit longer because I feel like, wait, is that even going to be meaningful when it comes out?

A concrete example would be Craig and I have the Scriptnotes book, which should be out at the end of the year. I feel really good about that. We’re going to get it done. I’m excited people have it in their hands. If I were starting a project right now and it was 2027 that was coming out, I would feel a little bit different about that because I just don’t have a clear vision in my head of what 2027 looks like. I see you nodding, so these are not new ideas to you, but how does one start to process that as a writer, as someone who’s trying to work on things that are going to take a while to do?

Dennis: Again, there’s not one way to look at this. My overall view is that art speaks to something when we are in existential angst. The science and reason and even the ability to prognosticate the future doesn’t. That’s the thing that’s so magical about art, is that it transcends what rational or cognitive thought has to say about the situation we’re in. Yes, the world seems incredibly unstable right now and quite dangerous. This is a terrible period to me. It feels like the industry seems like it’s gone sideways. AI scares the living hell out of me. The only thing good about being old is I missed AI as a writer.

I began writing before there were word processors and computers. I wrote the first draft of My Favorite Year on a Royal Portable typewriter, which I still have, by the way, and I had it oiled up and detailed and everything. I figure when the big, massive electromagnetic pulse happens and we all go back to the Stone Age, I’ll be the only guy that can type. That’s my theory.

Anyway, to deal with your question in somewhat more serious terms, I’m hearing this from a lot of patients. I don’t know what the world’s going to be like in two years or five years. I don’t know what my life is going to be like, what the industry is going to be like, what America is going to be like, how it’s going to feel. It’s very frightening for a lot of my patients who found themselves in the Midwest over the holidays and seeing nothing but Trump signs and MAGA hats and feeling literally like they were in a different world. They literally felt like, boy, do I not belong here?

That feeling is encroaching on a lot of people with sensitivity right now. It’s very, very tempting to become overly pessimistic and go, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, so what I do doesn’t matter. I would flip it on its head. I would say, because you feel everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, it’s never been more important to do what you do. In my article, in my column that you referred to, I talk about two films that speak to that.

One is Sullivan’s Travels, the Preston Sturges film, about a director, filmmaker, a comedy filmmaker who thinks that what he’s doing is irrelevant given the troubles people are going through. He learns throughout the film that his work provides solace and relatability to people. Even at a further end, in Woody Allen’s Stardust, when he’s speaking to some aliens who have come down from outer space and he says, “What can I do to make things better?” and they say, “Write funnier jokes.”

Even though that’s a joke in and of itself, I think the intent’s very serious under there. The role of art is to transcend and help us cope with stuff that reason and science and logic cannot contain, it cannot contend with. I defy anyone to look around the world right now and go, well, through reason, I can contend with what’s happening and feel reasonably certain about what the next five years is going to be like.

John: You can’t even trust the ground underneath your feet. It does feel like everything is just shifting very, very quickly. But your point, which Craig often will get back to as I spin into my, not quite apocalyptic nihilism, but approaching it is, well, our job is to entertain. Our job is to, our function, and this is obviously each individual writer’s going to have their own sense of what our purpose is, but our job is to provide that storytelling, to provide that sense of reflecting the moment that we’re in, but also carrying people outside of that moment that we’re in. That’s really what our function is.

Dennis: I agree with that. See, where I would differ slightly is I don’t think of entertainment as outside of relevance. I think there’s value in any kind of creative entertainment that you do because it’s an expression of what’s in your mind and heart. An expression of what’s in your mind and heart, no matter how silly or outrageous it is, is relevant to others who can have us. You don’t have to have been Rocky Balboa to know what Rocky wanted in that boxing match. He wanted to be taken seriously, to felt like he wasn’t a bum. We all understand that.

You didn’t have to have been raised in poverty to understand what Frank McCourt was writing about in Angela’s Ashes. We all know what it’s like to feel like we’re trying to reach beyond what people think is capable for us. Look at Neil Simon. Everybody says, wow, I really love his plays that were so serious toward the end of his writing career and how relatable they were. I think Come Blow Your Horn and The Odd Couple is relatable because it’s about intimacy. It’s about human connection. If anything is important when times feel crazy, it’s anything that supports the human connection.

John: I wanted to emphasize that, because I think a natural tendency towards when you see things all going crazy is to pull back, is to retreat. I think we also, because we went through the pandemic together, which is also a shared PTSD, which was a function of retreating and pulling back, that there’s a default posture of that, which is just, okay, I’m just going to get in my little bubble and protect myself and protect myself around you.

That’s not generally the right instinct. The instinct is to reach out and to find connection with others and making art, sharing art, being part of a writer’s group, getting a chance to actually show what you’re doing and pull that feeling back in is probably what gets you through it. It also creates meaning in a world that feels increasingly meaningless or where meaning is harder to find.

Dennis: Psychiatrist Rollo May wrote a book called The Courage to Create, and it’s the same as Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The goal for a human being, I think, is to be authentic. Then out of that authenticity, where do they find meaning? There are people who find meaning in animal rescue or in working for Greenpeace, but there are also people who find meaning in writing a 700-page book about their family history. All of it is okay, because art pushes against existential angst.

Imagine going through the pandemic, going through the fires, going through Gaza, going through the Holocaust, going through the Black Plague, going through the Dark Ages. Humanity has managed to get through all of these things by somehow finding a mode of expression for what’s in his or her mind and heart. That’s the courage to create, and just like anyone else, my instinct is to never read a headline anymore. I don’t want to hear– I can’t listen to him actually speak and I can’t look at him. It’s tough to know what’s going on at the White House if those are your rules. I’ll skim a headline just in case there’s an alien invasion or something. But I’m going on a news diet.

Another part of me thinks, well, what are you doing? You copping out? Shouldn’t you be involved? There’s a real dichotomy there. I think for a writer, unlike other people, by writing about a narrative that’s going on in our head, we are involved because that narrative is infused with the context we’re in.

I could argue that reality is only subjectivity in a context. I would say, John, your reality is your subjectivity in the context of what’s going on in the world right now. Whether you write a joke or whether you write a horror movie, if it’s coming out of where your subjectivity is in the context of the world we’re in now, it’s legitimate and authentic. And given how much bullshit there is in the world and how little authenticity we find, whether online or in politics, every authentic expression of your inner world is a candle against the darkness. It really is.

John: We speak of authenticity in a time where the question of whether a work of something that looks like a work of art or a piece of writing was written by a human being or an AI is also relevant. The fact that you did this thing yourself lets you know that you did this thing yourself and you have the skills to put this thing down and you had an original idea and you created an expression of that original idea and you can share it. You can actually have it resonate with other human minds that are out there.

Dennis: Absolutely.

John: It’s a gift.

Dennis: Yes, my feeling is why give the world more impact on you than it needs to have? If you don’t create because you’re battered by what’s going on in the world, you’ve allowed the world to take away your skill set, which is the thing that is so important to your self-concept. It really is.

John: Great. We have two questions from our listeners, I think, were perfectly suited to your skill set. Drew, do you want to start us off with Shiloh’s?

Drew: Shiloh writes, “Pixar movies have some of the cleanest and densest storytelling in the business, but I’ve heard of the Pixar Brain Trust and I find it disheartening. If it takes 15 of some of the most creative people in the business five years to make a brilliant Pixar film, that’s about 75 years of brainpower being directed into one story. How can one screenwriter writing specs ever hope to compete against that? Is it achievable to write something of Pixar quality by yourself? Because I don’t have 75 years.”

Dennis: [laughs] That’s a great question.

John: That’s a great question.

Dennis: I’ve never heard that question asked like that before.

John: I hear little bits in there that I think do speak to things we talked about in episode 99 and also in this conversation, that sense of like– It’s almost an imposter syndrome. “I couldn’t hope to compete with that.” Also, the idea of competition is a thread we can pull on as well.

Listen, Pixar has a bunch of really smart people who look through all their stuff and critique it and make it work, but so do all other filmmakers you’ve ever encountered. They have selected groups of people who they trust to help them figure out how to do a certain thing.

The good news is, Shiloh, you don’t have to make a Pixar movie. You don’t make a Pixar movie. Make your own movie, and it doesn’t have to be done in a Pixar-y way. This is me as an amateur speaking. Dennis, dig in. How do you help Shiloh process that?

Dennis: First of all, I haven’t heard it quite put like that. Funnily enough, of course, I’ve had a number of writers who’ve worked for Pixar and it’s like the Bataan Death March. It’s not a great experience.

John: Yes. Let’s make sure that Shiloh hears this, because I, too, know folks who’ve worked up there and some had good experiences, but some also felt like, oh, my God, I spent four months and we worked on like two paragraphs, and it doesn’t feel like it’s my thing at all.

Dennis: See, I used to work in sitcoms. My first years in show business were sitcoms and we had writers rooms with– it’s not like it is today. We had 10 or 11 funny people in a room so that by the time the script came out and you were about to shoot it on Tuesday, I didn’t know who wrote what joke. One thing I knew for sure is the script wouldn’t have been as funny if it had just been me, because that gang-writing of a comedy really helps make it funnier.

Now, if that’s your only goal, that’s fine. But one of the reasons Neil Simon left your show of shows and began writing plays is because he lost his own voice in the writers’ room, which is the reason I started writing prose, because I began to think I’m not a writer, I’m a funny talker. Yes, you can group-write something and over five years distill it down into something as good as Inside Out. I agree. Or Finding Nemo. I agree. But each of those people involved brought their own sensibilities in it. The Brain Trust up there put it through the sieve and took the best from column A and the best from column B.

That’s not how individual writers work. It’s not your job to compete with anyone. See, even if you– God, I always remember one of my patients who won an Oscar for best screenplay. He brought his Oscar in and I said, “Congratulations.” He said, “Thanks, but I’m no Billy Wilder.” What I didn’t tell him is that in an interview where people were praising Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder said, “Thanks, but I’m no Ernst Lubitsch.” It’s like Hemingway said. “Boys, Shakespeare got there first and better, so relax and start writing.”

These kinds of questions, I think, speak to issues of meaning where you’re competing to prove that it is worth it for you to pursue your goals unless in your mind you see it as equal to the material that has inspired you, you’re not entitled to do it. I see this in my practice all the time, this lack of entitlement. The feeling that, well, the thing that got me to be a filmmaker was Citizen Kane or the thing that got me to be a TV writer was The Sopranos, but I can’t do something like that. Those jobs have been taken.

John: Yes, no one’s trying to do Citizen Kane 2. They were trying to do new things that are relevant to 2025.

Dennis: That’s exactly right. That’s why you should never follow trends, because by the time you think you’re following one, it’s no longer a trend. More importantly, some idiosyncratic approach was the beginning of that trend.

John: Definitely. Second question here from Ethel.

Drew: Ethel writes, “I was recently approached by a major publication that wanted to interview me about my experience working with someone embroiled in a controversy, and my reps have advised me not to touch it with a 10-foot pole. They say nothing good can come of it, and it’s a lose-lose to speak up, even if it’s only about my own personal good experiences with someone I deeply care about. It’s just business, they say, but is that an excuse not to speak up for a friend?”

John: All right. Grappling with the ethical concerns of like, I want to speak up for my friend. Would it be helpful to speak up for my friend? I don’t want to get embroiled in that controversy. I’ve been there. I understand this. Actually, I very much understand the rep’s point of view of like, no good will come from this. Dennis, I see you nodding here. What’s your insight?

Dennis: I’ve been in this position too because in my 17 years of show business, I knew a lot of people. I worked with a lot of very famous people, and I’ve been approached by people who are writing unauthorized biographies or writing profiles and stuff. My position is always that I will not comment. It’s because I never know how it’s going to be taken out of context or whatever, how it will be used by the writer or the editor. We don’t know if it’s a hatchet job or not. The thing is, we just don’t know.

I think you’d do your friend a disservice even if you say, “I think he’s the most wonderful guy I’ve ever worked with.” Then the writer puts underneath, “Well, that’s the only guy I found that felt that way. Everyone else said he was a son of a bitch.” You actually don’t help your friend by saying, “Well, my personal experience was he was great.” You’ll find someone who thought they had a great experience of Harvey Weinstein. You’ll find someone who thought they had a warm encounter with Bill Cosby. In fact, I know someone who did.

See, if you say, “Yes, well, I don’t know. I thought Bill seemed like a great guy,” you look like a moron because you’re not aware of the totality of the context. Because we don’t control the context outside of our own subjectivity — I know I sound like a therapist, but I can’t help it — because we don’t control the context outside of our own subjectivity and our own intent. It’s usually not a good idea, I think, unless you’re willing to go do it off the record or anonymously. I have a number of patients who’ve said a lot of outrageous things and were just called an unidentified source. My experience is it gets back to who they are sooner or later.

John: Going back to Ethel, I don’t know whether Ethel is still in touch with this person who is famous, who’s embroiled in a controversy. If Ethel wants to be there for that person, for that friend, be there directly for that person and for that friend. That’s reaching out to them and say like, “Listen, I’m here for you. What you’re going through feels like it really sucks.” Let me be helpful to that person. You’re not going to help them by publicly speaking out on something because what Dennis said is exactly right. Outside of the context of you just don’t know how it’s going to play.

Dennis: Yes, you’re much better off to personally just say, “Let’s go have a cup of coffee. You can cry on my shoulder. I think these guys are pricks, but you’ll get through this,” and stay with them as a friend.

John: There are situations where you’re dive-bombed, like you are doing press for something else and they start to ask you a question about that. Just be ready for it and be ready to, you don’t say no comment, which is a sort of a Succession joke I think they had in there, don’t say no comment. No comment is not the thing you want to say. It’s just like, that’s where a publicist or somebody else can help guide, like that’s not what I’m here to talk about today, and you can move on from that.

Dennis: Yes, I agree. I do think sometimes with a little bit of due diligence and thought, you can prepare for certain questions in case they come up. One of the things that was so disheartening for me in Kamala Harris’s campaign was when I think she was on The View and somebody said, “Is there any difference between you and Joe Biden?” and she can’t think of anything.

I thought, her whole team never thought to prepare her for that question? I could have prepared her for that question. Anyway. I think if you’re going to comment to any reporter or journalist or TV reporter about a certain subject that’s embroiled in controversy, at least do some due diligence as to kind of questions they’re going to ask and how you’re prepared to answer them. I wouldn’t do it. I just wouldn’t do it.

John: All right. It’s come time for our one cool things. Dennis Palumbo, do you have a one cool thing that you can share with our listeners?

Dennis: Yes, I want to share a book that I read and I absolutely love. It’s by Sarah Bakewell and it’s called At the Existentialist Café. Now, I don’t know if your listeners are interested in existentialism, but the subtitle is Freedom Being & Apricot Cocktails. It’s the private lives of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Camus. It’s delightful and funny and talks about where existentialism came from and the lives of the people who pushed it without living it. [laughs] It’s a wonderful, warm, funny, but very intelligent overview of that post-war time in Paris where all these existentialists came from.

When you read it, one of the things you’re really struck by is the impact and influence, particularly if you’re a writer, that this train of thought has on modern writing. The perspective, the cynicism, the valueless aspect, the sense that things are absurd has seeped into especially all of our premium stuff, all of our top tier stuff.

When you read it, one of the things you’re struck by is, oh my God, some of the material and themes and viewpoints of these authors from the late ‘40s and ‘50s has filtered into not only our literature, but our film and television, our comedy, particularly, our satire, particularly. I could make an argument that most of our best stand-up comics nowadays, male and female, are existentialists. I could make that argument, but I wouldn’t take your listeners’ time to do it, but I could make that argument. So I recommend At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell.

John: I shall purchase it today. My one cool thing is River Runner Global, which is a website that I found this week. The idea behind it is it’s showing you a map of the world, a detailed map of the world. You can zoom in to incredibly close things. I was able to find my house that I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Once you zoom to whatever level you want to get to, you can place a single raindrop. Then we’ll take wherever that raindrop falls and we’ll figure out, based on geological data, where that raindrop is going to go. It’s going to show you from what’s going from this into this creek, into this river, into this, and how it’s making its way to whatever ocean it ends up at.

It is a fun way to waste some time and also just sort of zen out and figure out like, okay, where does this all go? It not only shows you the path, but it literally shows you the point of view of this raindrop entering all the different rivers as it’s going its way to the coast. It’s just a good reminder of like, there’s a giant physical world out there that’s going to exist no matter what. I always find that in times of uncertainty, the recognition that the natural world will continue on without us is somehow reassuring, that it’s beyond all the craziness of the day. This is a version of that that’s just on your screen and gives you a sense of like, oh, that’s right, the world is huge.

Dennis: Yes, it reminds me of the thing the Buddhists say, a tree has more to teach us than a zen master.

John: You have taught us a tremendous amount today, Dennis Palumbo. Thank you so much for coming back on. I can’t believe it’s been all these years. We get to repeat your episodes, so we get to you more often, which is nice. This was a really great conversation. Thank you so much.

Dennis: Oh, John, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me back.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. To get an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber or attached to this episode.

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes like episode 99 with Dennis Palumbo, one of our most requested episodes, and our bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on how psychotherapists are portrayed on screen. Dennis, thank you again very much for being on the show, and we’ll talk to you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we are back. We’ve had other specialists come on the show to talk through about how we are portraying different professions on screen. Ken White was on to talk through about lawyers and the legal system and how it’s portrayed on screen and what’s the actual reality behind that. Therapists are often characters that we’re seeing on screen. As a therapist yourself, give us a report card. How often are you seeing therapy portrayed accurately and the role of a therapist being portrayed accurately? What are some things that stand out as like, oh, that’s a good example, or, oh no, this would never ever happen?

Dennis: That’s a very broad question and I do have a lot of opinions about it. I’m glad you asked me. [laughs] As some of your listeners may know, I was a consulting producer on the recent Hulu show, The Patient, which was about a serial killer who kidnaps a therapist in the hopes the therapist will use therapy to talk him out of his homicidal rages. The two creators of the show, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, who created The Americans, one of my absolute favorite TV shows, reached out to me and said, we want to know what a therapist sounds like. Are we anywhere in the ballpark of what he would talk like?

It got me thinking about how therapists are portrayed on screen. Probably my favorite depiction of a therapist on screen is Gabriel Byrne in HBO’s series, In Treatment. That was the most accurate representation of how gloomy, pessimistic, humanistic, and struggling against his own doubts the therapist is. I thought he did a great job. Where I have a concern is in most procedurals, whenever they have a psychiatrist or psychologist character, and this is when they’re not a predator or a serial killer, which they are– hell, every other dick will kill.

John: The Basic Instinct problem, yes.

Dennis: Yes, the villain is a shrink. When they’re supposedly a “good guy,” they have a tendency to rattle off diagnoses about the personality and the mental status of a person they’ve never met, and it’s very clear-eyed. It’s like a list of diagnostic categories and symptoms right out of the diagnostic manual. On a typical procedural, they’ll go, well, this guy’s leaving baby dolls with knives stabbed into his eyes. They go, “Well, obviously he hates his mother. What we have to do is go back to his hometown…” It’s obviously nothing. Humans are too unique.

One of my favorite real-life examples of this is the DC sniper, where every FBI profiler said it was an unemployed White man in his early 30s. It turned out to be an older Black man and his nephew. No profiler in the FBI was even in the ballpark of that. Which is not to say profiling isn’t a valid thing. It’s a very valid thing. You want to be careful when a therapist on screen. Do they know more than they should? How certain?
One of the guys who walked that line pretty well was J.K. Simmons on Law & Order as Emil Skoda, the psychiatrist they used. He was fairly forthright. He would say like, “The guy’s a sociopath,” or whatever, but then he’d go, “Well, what do I know?” Often he would say something like, “Well, that could be true, but on the other hand, it couldn’t.” Sam Waterston or someone would go, “Ain’t science wonderful?”

We want our therapists to know. It’s part of the transference we do. There’s a powerful parental transference that viewers have on lead characters in TV shows, particularly therapists. We want them to be right and we want them to know. Now, way on the other side of that continuum is Hannibal Lecter, Donald Trump’s favorite guy. Everybody was so upset that here he was, Hannibal Lecter, a guy who ate people. I don’t think it’s the fact that he ate people that made him so horrible. I think it was the fact he was a psychiatrist and he was a good one.

What’s interesting is that he is the classic manifestation or avatar of a psychiatrist gone bad. The metaphor that he represents is he eats you. It’s that fantasy people have about therapists that they take your soul, they take your feelings, they open you up and look inside. Hannibal Lecter literally opens you up and eats what’s inside, eats your heart. I think he is the classic manifestation of what we fear in clinical workers.

Now, if you want to go back to a wonderful one, in my mind, you have to go back all the way to the Bette Davis movie, Now Voyager, where Claude Rains plays a really warm, thoughtful psychiatrist as opposed to I want to say Claude Akins, but that’s wrong. The actor who plays the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho, who neatly wraps up everything having to do with why Tony Perkins was the way he was. No real legitimate clinician speaks with that kind of certainty.

John: I think one of the reasons why therapists and psychiatrists on screen are so compelling and so fascinating for writers is because it’s just a conversation. A lot of the work inside that room is a conversation. A question I have for you is that as writers, we are thinking through our dialogue and we’re thinking through we want both characters to be listening. Yet as a therapist, you’re listening, but you’re also trying to direct the conversation. You’re trying to help a person achieve an insight. This is a weird question to ask, but how far ahead are you of the patient generally? How much are you leading versus listening? What is the balance there? Do you see that portrayed accurately on screen? Because I feel like a lot of the psychiatrists I see or therapists I see on screen have this brilliant insight and are like 19 steps ahead of their patients.

Dennis: Yes. That’s not how most of it– That’s not how it should work and how it isn’t really good clinical work. I think of good clinical work as shuttling over between your own subjectivity and what you’re picking up from the other person, what they’re saying, which then triggers the next thought of yours. It’s a bidirectional encounter. You and your patient are co-creating the session. That’s why when I say, oh, there’s not– when someone says, what do you do about a guy who can’t sleep? There’s no one-size-fits-all model. Give me the clinician. Give me the guy that can’t sleep and let them interact with each other and learn from each other what the therapy is.

To me, it’s a little bit like writing because I think writing is bidirectional. The moment you write a sentence, you’re simultaneously the reader of that sentence, which makes you go, “No, that sentence isn’t right. I want to do something else.” You and your writing are co-creating the text, kind of. I think that’s the way good therapy works. There’s a shuttling back and forth. It’s very similar to what Martin Buber, the philosopher, calls I and thou. A really good therapist is engaged in I and thou. The only thing therapist has is the tools to see where they might be going. Not to direct it, but the tools to recognize where they might be going.

John: Yes. I do feel like sometimes my function on the podcast is that, where I’m trying to be simultaneously in the conversation, but also be thinking down the road where it is that we’re trying to go. Over the course of 12 years doing this podcast, I hopefully have gotten better at being able to do that and understand. The other metaphors that may be relevant here is like it is a bit of improv where you’re trusting that you are the partner there and you’re picking up each other’s cues to create something that neither person could do alone. You as the therapist could not read someone’s whole writing. They couldn’t write a whole thing and give it to you and tell me, help me out here. You need to have a conversation. There needs to be a back and forth.

Dennis: Absolutely. Also, I think one of the things a therapist does is he or she models congruent behavior. If somebody tells a sad story, I’ll find myself tearing up because it’s impacted me. Then if the patient reacts, I’ll go, what’s it like for you to see how much that impacted me? We follow what happens, and you get a range of answers. Some people go, “It weirds me out.” Other people might say something like, “Well, you’d be made a stone if that didn’t make you sad.” You learn each other, and mostly you learn what the therapy needs. Just like you learn what a script needs by writing it.

John: Generally on film, we want to see characters in a room together doing stuff because it’s more interesting. Starting with the pandemic and I think beyond the pandemic, a lot more therapies move to Zoom or online. What is the difference there and what has been your experience working with patients online versus in person? How does that translate on screen?

Dennis: I have mixed feelings because I do a lot of therapy on screen. I have patients all over the world. I have patients in London and Prague and Budapest and South Africa, all over the place. I do it all on Zoom or Skype. I prefer in person only because I like that shared space, that intimacy of the shared space. I also find that you’re able to lapse into silence a little more easily if you’re in the room with a person. You can just let a feeling lie. I think the part of us that are social beings, sometimes I find my patients feel a need to keep presenting something because they’re on a screen.

John: Yes, I get that.

Dennis: It’s not a performance, but it’s a sense of obligation to keep feeding this. I have many sessions where we just both go silent for a minute and it’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s moving and it’s human. I miss that part when I work on Zoom. It’s the future and it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going to be replaced by AI. Not too many years after I retire, there’ll be an AI version of me.

John: We’ll hope to get you back on before that happens. Dennis Palumbo, an absolute pleasure talking with you about– I’m gesturing with my hand to indicate all the world around me. Thank you very much for coming back on the show. This will be another episode I think we’re going to be re-airing frequently.

Dennis: Okay, well, thank you so much again for having me, John.

John: Thanks.

Links:

• “Am I Just Fiddling While Rome Burns?” by Dennis Palumbo for Psychiatric Times
• Scriptnotes 99 – Psychotherapy for Screenwriters
• ShotDeck
• River Runner Global
• At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, I will be solo hosting, but joined by the creator and showrunner of FX’s Say Nothing, Joshua Zetumer.

We’ll talk about that show, which is one of my favorites of 2024, if not my favorite of 2024, as well as answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, and this is probably going to be a surprise to Joshua, he and I will put on our urban planner and civil engineer hats to answer what I think is a fairly easy question. How would we make Los Angeles function better? Joshua, welcome to the show.

Joshua Zetumer: Thank you for having me. I’ve listened to the show. I love the show. I’m a big fan of yours as well. So I’m really excited to be here.

Craig: Oh, go on.

Joshua: No. I can go on. I can go on.

Craig: Please don’t.

Joshua: No, I’ll just say one thing, which was Chernobyl was very much a model in my mind in how to do a limited series right and was a huge influence on Say Nothing. I’ll be excited to talk to you about that.

Craig: Well, we will get into that. Whatever influenced you, tip of the hat, because as I said, it was one of my favorite shows of 2024. I think it’s a fantastic show, and I really want to dig into, from the writing point of view, how you put it together and ask you some interesting questions about both the nature of your process and the show itself, the story.

Before we do that, some interesting little bits of biographic detail on you. First, your parents are both psychiatrists, so I think I’m really, really sorry, but I’m not sure. I think that’s better than therapists, probably.

Joshua: I feel like it’s worse than therapists. I feel like neo-Freudians at the dinner table is like maybe worse than like a touchy-feely LA therapist because they’ll really just put it all on themselves since that the Freudians blame the parents for everything.

Craig: Right. I’m sure they were blaming their parents at the same time. Poor grandma and grandpa.

Joshua: That’s right.

Craig: That’s right.

Joshua: It echoes down the line.

Craig: Oh, yes. More interesting than that to me, I guess when you were in high school, you were a jazz drummer.

Joshua: This is true. Yes. I was a drummer, and I was going to try to be a professional drummer for a long time. My childhood was very much like shrinks and punk in San Diego, which is where I’m from, and which is infinitely uncool to be from San Diego. I was like the indoor kid, having an existential crisis while everyone else was enjoying the beach.

Craig: Well, that’s what I would have done also, just so you know. Also, love playing the drums, probably not as good as you, and people that say jazz drummer are always very, very good, I feel like–

Joshua: Or just very pretentious, or just deeply lame. [chuckles]

Craig: Fair. Fair. You can play poorly and call it polyrhythm. I’ve seen this happen.

Joshua: What kind of stuff do you play, may I ask?

Craig: I was mostly just good old– still occasionally I’ll play, but just good old standard rock and roll stuff. Nothing– I actually never got into like the full punk, tu nda, tu nda, tu nda. Jazz drumming to me is– well, first of all, I just couldn’t do the traditional grip anyway, to start with. Then I was like I’m decent with rudiments, but not like jazz drummer good. I always felt like jazz drummers are like the wizards of drummers, and guys like me are just like the warlocks of drummers.

Joshua: [laughs] I definitely– it may be a stretch to call me a jazz drummer, I certainly studied a lot of jazz in college, and I felt like I tried to apply it to other styles. I think for me, those were always my heroes. The jazz guys were always my heroes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, because they were so unapproachable in their skill level, and it was something I really aspired to. Ultimately, I remember there was a really dark joke that I think someone told me when I was 20 years old, when I was really studying, which was like, maybe you’ve heard it, “What’s the difference between a jazz musician and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.”

Craig: Oh, wow.

Joshua: That’s-

Craig: A fact. It’s a tough life. You picked, I think, a similarly tough path. “Oh, I think I’ll try and do the thing that’s even less likely to work out,” which is becoming a professional screenwriter, and yet you have. You, like me, mostly working, were working in features, you worked on Quantum of Solace, I’m jealous that you got to work on a James Bond movie because I’m a huge Bond nut, you did the RoboCop reboot, which I thought was terrific, and you also did Patriots Day in 2016, which is also an excellent film. Then you went, “I think I’m going to–“

Let’s talk about Say Nothing and some facts for our listeners. Say Nothing, the limited series, is based on the book, Say Nothing, A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, who’s also a lovely man.

It is a nine-episode series that follows the story of two sisters, Dolours and Marion Price, who joined the IRA as young women in the early ‘70s, and through that story of idealism, liberation, oppression, terrorism, imprisonment, and murder, we get what I think, this is me editorializing, the best and most complete portrayal of the complicated reality of who the IRA was, and what they achieved, and what they failed to achieve. This miniseries was not your first attempt to write about the IRA, as I understand.

Joshua: No, that’s right. My first job writing in Hollywood was writing a script about the IRA, actually for Leonardo DiCaprio, when I was 26 years old, and that film never got made, but it got me steeped in the troubles long before taking on Say Nothing. The movie that I wrote for Leonardo DiCaprio was going to be– I didn’t want to call him Leo, just there, I had a moment of being like, “I can’t call him Leo,” but it was going to be produced by David Benioff, who created Game of Thrones, of course, and then Brad Simpson, who’s one of the producers on Say Nothing.

So when the book came out, Brad had a very early option on the book, and I think I was one of the first people he thought of because I was good friends with him and I’m one of his friends who happened to be a writer who knew the history of Northern Ireland pretty well. He slipped me the book and it just instantly became my favorite book. I thought it was just an extraordinary piece of writing, and also, I just thought, upon reading it, there’s just no way in hell it’s ever going to get made, just because Hollywood is so fear-based and the idea of doing an ambitious period show set in Northern Ireland, the odds of getting it greenlit seem like they were maybe 5%, no matter how good the book was.

The show was also like un-pitchable. It’s a very awkward pitch. If you pitch it, it’s about two Catholic sisters in Belfast who joined the IRA, and then you follow them on a 30-year journey from idealism to disillusionment. That pitch does not make studio executives see dollar signs. Now, when I look at it on the platform, it’s on Hulu, I can’t believe that it got made. It feels like I got away with robbing a bank, honestly. It’s on Disney Plus outside the US, and so I see this show about Irish paramilitaries like up there next to Buzz Lightyear, and I just cackle at the very idea that somebody was ballsy enough to make it. I spent five years doing the show that I actually got it done.

It is a testament to everybody involved that it got made. Not only my producers who are Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson at Color Force, they’re super pugnacious. They really fight for the projects. Then also John Landgraf and Gina at FX. I don’t want to shill for FX, but truly like they believed in the book, they really believed in the scripts, and they believed in the cast, and that they were willing to make a show that was period, that had no stars, that was limited, that was doing everything that you’re really told not to do. I’m just really grateful that they said yes.

Craig: I know a little something about that process because I went through it with HBO, and you’re right, you have to find some people who are willing to do a thing that probably won’t work. By won’t work I mean gathering viewership and capturing people’s imaginations. Because when we tell these stories based on real-life events and we spread them out over the time they require, there is a worry, I think, in everyone’s mind that it’s going to turn into the thing that substitute teachers show when they come in because they need to do something for the social studies class. And our job, I think, is to try and convince people that, in fact, this story isn’t going to be homework, it’s going to be gripping.

I think what you achieved, we’ll go through how, but I want to ask a simple question. When you set yourself down to lay this thing out, how much were you thinking about the audience and how much were you thinking about how to keep people riveted? Because you kept me riveted through every episode, and because it’s over 30 years of time, you are telling stories about barely young adults. You’re telling stories about women who are, in their 50s and they’re the same people living completely different kinds of lives because of the way things stretch out.

All the events that occur, all the people– you had the same problem I had with Chernobyl. Everybody sounded the same and looked the same. It’s like a collection of white people with Russian names. You have a collection of white people with Irish names. How concerned were you about grasping the audience and holding them?

Joshua: I love a show that doesn’t tell you too much. I love a show that does not spoon-feed. I think there’s a certain amount of table setting you have to do with Irish history that is mostly just jammed into the pilot that I just had to do. The show had to do two things to me. This is actually what made the adaptation such an extremely high degree of difficulty was I wanted a show that was like The Wire. I’m not going to compare it to The Wire because it’s not The Wire, nothing is The Wire. I want a show that was extremely authentic down to all the granular details. And I wanted to capture the spirit of Belfast, which is like very contradictory at times.

At the same time, I wanted to make Say Nothing for a global audience– needed to make it for a global audience who had never heard of the troubles, frankly. I think that was the tightrope of doing the show. When it came to exposition and telling the audience things, you have your narrators, which Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes are looking back on their youth and the world can be very forbidding at times. You need a guide if you’re unfamiliar with the troubles and that device, though a little shop worn, I think is very organic to the story and so it was very useful.

Then beyond that initial table setting, I really want the audience to play catch up. I love getting invested in a world. I love when I don’t know everything and I’m not spoon-fed. I think that was actually honestly a big creative, not argument, but discussion, because as a writer, I’m like really, really allergic to exposition. I love the paranoid thrillers of the early ‘70s where you just dropped into a situation with like Harry in the conversation and you’re just wondering who this guy is and what he does and you’re not spoon-fed any information.

Craig: It sounds like there was a little bit of give and take on that because I have the same thing on my end of things. There’s always a request for clarity, I guess, is that. You’ll say spoon-fed and the people on the other side of the argument will say clarity. For writers who are moving through the system maybe for the first time, that can be quite a shock. How do you navigate those conversations and get what you want?

Joshua: You underline things in the script.

[laughter]

Joshua: You just go back in your second draft and you underline multiple times.

Craig: That works?

Joshua: No, it does work. No, I have done that. I’ve definitely, not on Say Nothing, but on another project, I definitely did get some notes. I felt they had already been addressed, and so in the next draft, I went back and underlined and the executive probably got what I was doing and was like, “I’m going to leave him alone.”

I think there are the compromises you can make that will destroy your work and there are the compromises you can make that will actually be really useful. You have to know the difference, I think, because you can’t be a horrible dick the whole time. You can be really close to a horrible dick the whole time, but you can’t cross that line. You just have to know where that line is, I think.

There’s that book, Difficult Men, about all the showrunners. Running a show, you realize how they became so difficult because there’s such a degree of control that you have to maintain. Really, it’s just about how do you maintain the level of control to get what you want without turning into a monster. That’s–

Craig: Let’s dig into that because like you, I came from features where we don’t have the authority. In fact, we are often in this unenviable position of being the person who knows the most and yet has the least amount of decision-making to do because they put the director in charge. Now, over here in television, you are put in charge. This may have been your first major dose of authority, but not only just over the creative aspects of the show, but also other people working on the show. Did you have other writers on the show or were you a–

Joshua: I had a brilliant writer’s room, honestly.

Craig: Fantastic.

Joshua: If I have time, I would love to just tell you everyone who wrote on the show because–

Craig: Run through it and talk to me a little bit about how you went from a guy alone in his room writing stuff and being told by directors or producers, “Mia, mia, mia” to a guy who is in charge of a show and also now in charge of writers.

Joshua: I think you’re only as good as your writers, I think, especially in a show like this. I was an outsider telling this story, which meant that I’m an American telling a story whose characters have a life that is as far from my life as you could possibly imagine. That meant that I had to treat it with a fundamental respect. I think it meant an insane, like a crazy research process for me, which was years long. Honestly, I think I probably spent nine months just writing the pilot because of the language, frankly, and trying to teach myself to write in a Belfast accent without speaking in a Belfast accent myself, which was just a whole exhaustive process. This is not your question though.

I wanted to make sure when I had my first writer’s room that we had a ton of different perspectives. We had a multitude of different perspectives. The writers who also worked on the show with me, we had Joe Murtagh, who created Woman in the Wall and is a show runner in his own right. Joe is a writer who is of Irish descent, was raised in London, and writes amazing action and his dialogue is hysterically funny. We had Claire Barron, who is a formidable New York playwright who’s been nominated for a Pulitzer and had brilliant insight, particularly into the sisters.

Claire wrote Episode 6, which is the hunger strike episode, which is one of my just absolute favorites.

Craig: Yes, remarkable.

Joshua: When the cast read that episode, they were crying. It’s just a very powerful episode. Then we had Kirsten Sheridan, who’s the daughter of director Jim Sheridan, who’s–

Craig: Oh, wow.

Joshua: Yes. She’s been nominated for an Oscar for co-writing In America.

Craig: Sure. Sure.

Joshua: Her writing is super earthy and humane, and she’s also great with subtext. I was running it, and we had these four different writers, myself included, whose writing was all just wildly different, as different as could be. For whatever reason, the alchemy in the room was just great. It was the writer’s room that you dream of having, where there were no toxic personalities. Everybody was friends, and it just ended up being a wonderful experience. I don’t want to speak for the other writers because who knows what they secretly think.

Craig: Well, they probably will say that you were almost a complete dick, but not–

Joshua: I actually think they would say that. I actually think they would because I definitely–

Craig: “He’s almost a complete dick.”

Joshua: I work really hard, and I try to get the people around me to work really hard and do their best work. It also should be said, we also had Patrick as an executive producer, who was dropping in and out, talking about the history. We have this murderer’s row of talented people all trying to wrangle this massive book. The whole thing, by the way, took place over Zoom during the pandemic, during peak COVID.

Craig: Oh, boy.

Joshua: Me and Kirsten were in LA, Clare was in New York, and Joe was in Madrid. It was crazy. It wasn’t a unique writer’s room because a lot of people were doing that, but it was certainly the thing that got us through COVID, I think, for a couple of us.

Craig: That is a fairly impressive room. You’re gathering up all this great work from all these people. Of course, you’re generating your own work as you go. The thing that impressed me so much, one of the many things that impressed me so much about Say Nothing is the tone. Because the tone, there’s probably a million ways to go wrong and one way to go right. I think I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong with stories like this. The tone here was so gorgeously grounded. It felt so authentic. It wasn’t trying too hard. I also loved how the show found beauty in the plain, the mundane, the faces, wonderful faces. No one was too gorgeous.

Joshua: I think Anthony Boyle would totally take offense of that, but we’ll move on.

Craig: [laughs] He’s very handsome.

Joshua: He’s a handsome man.

Craig: He’s very handsome. You didn’t have a model suddenly in the middle of it. Everything felt deeply detailed and deeply real. How do you keep that tone consistent when you are pulling in so much work from other people whose minds work slightly– Everybody’s mind works differently.

Joshua: Yes. I love that you asked that question because the tone was the thing that I felt most protective of throughout the process. Really, throughout the shoot, into post specifically, I felt like my job was really to just protect the tone and to make sure that really delicate balance between comedy and tragedy was maintained. I think that that’s a facet of a lot of Irish storytelling, obviously, that you can laugh in the darkest of times, and that idea had to be shot through the whole thing.

Otherwise, it wasn’t going to work because the subject matter is so grim. You have prison, you have a hunger strike, you have orphaned children, you have people who have done terrible things in the name of their country, and then realized it was all for nothing. It’s literally could be as bleak as a show gets. The idea that it had to have humor and heart, that was always at the center of it. I think, to your point about intimacy, I think when you have a historical show, my least favorite thing in a historical show, the characters are talking about history with the knowledge that they’re living in history and you’re like making a show about punk and the characters are like, “This is what punk is” or whatever, when nobody was saying that.

So for me, I was just trying to create intimate scenes between people and then let the scope of the canvas deal with the historical details. It was really about just being very aware of what was happening historically, but then throwing everything out. Fortunately, the conceit of the show, at least for the first half, is that these are kids. These are kids who are suddenly given power over life and death, who are suddenly thrust into the center of history and have to figure out what to do, but they’re still making decisions with brains that are, you could argue, not even fully formed. You stop developing as a person when you’re 25, and these were kids who were 22 and even teenagers.

For me, it was trying to capture the experience of okay, what would it feel like to be 19 when the world around you has suddenly turned upside down and the civilization that you’re living in has suddenly adopted violence and what would it be like if you really wanted social change and thought violence was the only way to get it, but you were a teenager? That’s at the heart of the show.

Craig: That also poses an interesting challenge because, as I’ve said many times on the show, my least favorite note is the character isn’t likable enough because I think that’s a compliment.

Joshua: Yes, I agree.

Craig: However, people need to relate to characters. For instance, you have an incredible character, a British military man named Frank Kitson played by Rory Kinnear, who is in a number of ways, a villain. He certainly represents the oppression of the British Empire, yet he’s also fascinating and you admire him. He’s possibly autistic, it’s hard to get a read on him, but he’s so gorgeously smart that you find yourself leaning towards him. Similarly, at the heart of the story, the two main characters, Dolours and Marian, are doing terrible things. At some point, how do you manage those slippery slopes of both humanizing people regardless of what they did, without drifting into, say, apologia?

Joshua: Yes, I think in the case of Frank Kitson, I would quibble a tiny bit in that I don’t think I’m humanizing him. I don’t think he was– He’s somebody who, when you do the research, he’s virtually impossible to humanize. At the same time, he’s ruthlessly, brutally effective at sowing distrust amid the IRA. He’s really good at what he does despite being, undeniably, a dark, dark individual.

Craig: But brilliant.

Joshua: But brilliant, yes. I think there’s another element of it too, which is you can obviously do the tricks that screenwriters do, which is you make everyone around him dumb, which is an old screenwriting trick. I think you can either make it so they’re keystone cops or you can make them smart and him smarter, which is usually the better thing to do. In the case with this show, I wanted a slightly more comedic tone because I did not want the sort of newsreel version of Frank Kitson that I feel like we’ve seen before from stuff about the troubles. I wanted him to be funny.

On the page, Frank Kitson was very funny. I think it’s one of the reasons they greenlit the show was because the stuff with the British, it was really engaging. It did not feel like a dour political drama. I think they greenlit the show because of the tone, to be honest. Then Rory showed up on set and he was so fucking funny and so deft at understanding what the tone of the show was. Because that’s the thing you have to do. Your actors have to know about the dance you’re doing between comedy and tragedy as well. Otherwise, you’re dead. You get an actor who doesn’t understand the tone, especially in the part like that, and the show completely falls apart.

Everybody needs to know the show that they’re making, and Rory really understood the tone. There was one moment when he showed up– I’m embarrassed to say this, I probably shouldn’t say this. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow night and tell you to cut it.

Craig: Let’s find out.

Joshua: Yes, let’s find out. He shows up on set and first of all, he’s like already Frank Kitson when he gets there. We have one conversation in the makeup chair and then he’s in character and the Director Mike Lennox and I are both intimidated by him and going like, “Is he Kitson right now? We can’t tell, or is this just his vibe?” Then he does a scene– his first scene was when he is with the two lieutenants who are around him, and the guys playing the lieutenants are also incredibly funny. They’re doing it and they’re saying the lines are in the script, but it’s just so funny that I actually went to Mike Lennox, I tapped him on the shoulder and I was like, “Is it too funny?”

I just had a moment of going– because you’re making the show that is incredibly politically sensitive, and you’re finding out the tone while you’re shooting when your actor’s reading out the line.

You have the tone on the page, you don’t know what it’s going to look like. I’m like, “Should we get one that’s a little more serious, just to have it in our back pocket, in case this is too far?” Mike goes over, and Mike directed all of Derry Girls, so he knows his way around a comedy. He goes over to the actors, and talks to them for five minutes, and then comes back, sort of like hangdog, and he looks at me and he just goes like, “I don’t know how to make them any less funny.” He’s so good. I guess this is the tone.

Craig: It starts when he lands. He gets out of a helicopter and his lieutenants say, “How’s the trip over?” He looks at them with dead eyes and goes, “45 minutes,” which is awesome. Maybe it was 48, I don’t know.

Joshua: That was right.

Craig: He’ll do everything in an instant. I love how compact and efficient that was. Let’s talk a little bit about the big argument at the heart of this. You touched on it, but if you could, I have my answer. I know what I think this show is about, and I’m right, of course. I’ll give you a chance to see if you’re correct about your own show. This is, I think, of value to anybody that’s trying to write something that is a sprawling historical epic that covers many, many years. You and I have both done this. I think what we both know is the events themselves aren’t enough. There is some glue that makes a cohesive point, even if that point is debatable, and hopefully, it is. What was there for you in the very center of this?

Joshua: The challenge, of course, is that with something like this, there’s not one thing. There’s actually like three or four. I’m really curious which one is the right one according to–

Craig: I’ll tell you.

Joshua: Don’t worry, you’ll let me know.

Craig: I’ll tell you. Yes, I’ll let you know.

Joshua: No, I think for me, there’s so much there and I would actually make two thematic points about it. I think the big one is that it’s about both the romance of radical politics and also the cost of those politics, that you can have acts of violence that have a terrible cost to them for both the victims and for the perpetrators as well. That you can get swept up in something when you’re young and then have to live with those decisions for the rest of your life. This idea that there would be an emotional cost, not only for the individual but also for the entire society, I think that was something I was really interested in. That was point one. Then there’s another thing, I don’t know if that’s right. You tell me if that feels right.

Craig: You’re almost right. Let’s hear what number two is.

Joshua: I think number two was just about this idea of silence and this idea that the price of peace is silence. That if you are going to have a country go from violence to peace, I think for a lot of people in Northern Ireland, people who’ve committed acts of violence and had acts of violence done to them, that the cost of that is that you don’t talk about it, that you don’t talk about the past and you bury it. I think the reason that I wanted to do the show in the beginning– this is actually deeply embarrassing, but I was raised by therapists, as we said, and for me, it was like all emotions are on the table. I was in a house where you were expected to talk about your feelings. That can be good and it can also be bad.

The alternative is having all this trauma– we all have trauma. Having all this trauma and not talking about it. For me, it was about the idea of the destructive power of silence and what it can do to a person to have this thing inside you and not be able to get it out. This idea of unprocessed trauma, both for the victims and the perpetrators, I think that was something that was at the heart of it for me.

Craig: Those are pretty good answers. I’m going to combine them a little bit in my answer, which is the correct answer. I will say to people, if you have not yet seen Say Nothing, you will experience a series of shocking events and startling events that you can imagine having to hold inside as a secret would be very difficult. I assure you, as you’re going through that process, you still have yet to see the thing that is the most upsetting and the one that really feels like, how can you hold this inside? I’ll tell you for me, and I’m joking, I don’t really know, but as a viewer, what struck me about the show was that it articulated something that I think we all struggle with when we have hopes and desires to make the world a better place.

That is that it may be impossible to experience an ideological war and still remain idealistic when it’s over. That it might actually be impossible because the people who inspire everybody through ideas are necessarily throwing a lot of those people onto a fire, whether they are murdered or killed or injured themselves, or spiritually, they die because of things they do to other people. They become pawns in a larger movement that ultimately becomes political. I found that tragedy to be beautiful and moving. The story of people who cared so much because they were inspired to care so much and were possibly necessarily abandoned and betrayed, which, by the way, and I don’t know. Does that sound like something–

Joshua: No, I love it. I love it. I think you should just– You send me the recording and I can just play it back. I can transcribe it. I can start using it in interviews. I think it’s really good.

Craig: You just, you just Venmo me and you can have whatever you want. That leads us to, I guess my final question that revolves around the narrative of the show, and that is Gerry Fucking Adams. Gerry Adams– here’s what I knew, going into things. I was not a student of the IRA. What I knew was there was an ongoing battle between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants/the British government in Northern Ireland, which was possessed by the UK. That battle was between the IRA and the British primarily than the, I guess the Northern Irish police. It involved bombings and it also involved terrorism perpetrated by the IRA and oppressive acts perpetrated by the government.

I know Sunday Bloody Sunday, we all do because we love U2. I knew that Gerry Adams, was– this is what I thought, as an American I thought, “Oh, and then there’s this guy, Gerry Adams, who helped make peace. He’s good. He’s the head of Sinn Fein, which is the political party in Northern Ireland that is part of the British Parliament that figured out how to get to the Good Friday Accords,” I believe it’s called. Good Friday Agreement?

Joshua: Good Friday Agreement. Yes.

Craig: Good Friday Agreement, which essentially ended the troubles. Here’s what your show taught me. Gerry Fucking Adams, as they refer to him over and over, “Gerry Fucking Adams,” was the head of the IRA. He was in charge of the IRA. He was the person who was ordering the terroristic attacks. Perhaps more distressingly, or at least equally distressingly, he was also the person who was ordering the internal purges of people, Irish Catholics, who were believed to be touts, informants to the British, whether they were or not. The show, in fact, is framed around the story of a mother of seven children, or nine?

Joshua: 10, actually.

Craig: 10?

Joshua: I think in the apartment you only see, I believe, eight.

Craig: I was trying to count. There’s a lot of kids. A single mother of 10 children who was murdered by the IRA because she was suspected to be an informant. Yet, “Gerry Fucking Adams,” who, by becoming this political leader and essentially denying that he ever was part of the IRA, he becomes the interesting villain of the story. It’s his betrayal of everybody around him that’s so shocking. What you do, and this is fascinating to me, you are telling this story, and he’s still here. Gerry Adams is still alive. Gerry Adams was a member of the UK Parliament as leader of the Sinn Féin party for 35 years.

He only stepped down six years ago, in part because of some of the revelations about what happened back then. He still denies that he was even a member of the IRA, much less the leader. You found what I think is the most brilliant way to tell the story exactly the way you wanted without getting sued and it made it better. Talk to me about the amazing disclaimers that you ran at the end of every episode.

Joshua: The disclaimers are a way for us– really, this is not an answer that’s going to be satisfying for you. The disclaimers are actually a way to give Gerry his due in a way. I think it would have been morally wrong to not include them. I think on the one hand, we needed people to know that Gerry has always denied being a member of the IRA. I think when to do it and how to do it was obviously a conversation between me, the producers and the legal department. The answer that we came up with was we’re going to do it after every episode.

That kind of repetition, I think for people, creates its own feeling, which is purely unintentional on my part. I would give a disclaimer to the disclaimer and I would say that any feelings you may have about Gerry Adams are not the intention of the artist creating the show and are purely up to the viewer and their own emotional state.

Craig: Well this viewer over here, every time that disclaimer came up, I went, “Wow.” It’s an incredible story, so beautifully told, gorgeously cast. I looked up, I was like, “Who cast this? Oh, Nina Gold. Of course.”

Joshua: There you go.

Craig: Nina Gold who cast Chernobyl.

Joshua: I read an interview with her about the casting process on Chernobyl. That was one of the reasons why it had to be her.

Craig: You chose wisely.

Joshua: I would love to talk about Nina. Can I just go back and say one thing about Gerry Adams just before we move on, just beyond the disclaimer? I think one thing I would say, his role within the IRA, whether he’s running the IRA or not running the IRA, is fundamentally very murky. The IRA had an army council who– you see the old guard, in Episode 3, of other men who are the leadership. His relationship with them has always been very murky. Either way, the show depicts him as being very high up the chain of command in the IRA. I think there is something about–

Craig: The Big Guy.

Joshua: He’s called The Big Guy.

Craig: The Big Lad. The Big Lad.

Joshua: The Big Lad, yes. One of the things I just want people to take away was this fundamental contradiction about Gerry Adams, which is that on the one hand, he has a major hand in the peace process and on the other, his role in the IRA undoubtedly led to the deaths of many, many people. I think that fundamental discomfort that you should feel towards the character, I think that was something I was trying to achieve was that I wanted him, as a character, to make us uncomfortable. We shouldn’t know how we feel about him in the end of the show. I think that’s something that I really wanted, honestly, for all the characters, with the exception of the victims, of course, who are-

Craig: Blameless.

Joshua: -in many ways– No, and in many ways, the heroes of the story. Laura Donnelly playing Helen McConville, is unambiguously the hero of the story and one who is left at the end of the film. I was very adamant that the last shot would be her. She’s left holding the bag. Everybody else, you’re supposed to be kept off balance about them, where they have Dolours, of course, has her sensitivity, her humanity, and also her willingness to kill and die for her beliefs, all of which should throw you off. That was really the goal, I think, with everyone. Anyway, I just wanted to–

Craig: You got there. It was perfectly done in that by the time it concluded, I was uncomfortable with all of them. I wouldn’t know because I ask a simple question when I’m watching these things, “What would happen if I were to walk in a room and meet that person? If I were to meet them, if they were alive– Dolours is not, but if they were, how would that go and how would I feel?” The answer is I don’t know.

What’s so beautiful about your show is that it depicts this very complicated thing, which is violence in service of idea that is almost always depicted stupidly. You depict it with such intelligence and grace. Congratulations on the show. Would you be interested, because you’re so smart, in helping me answer some listener questions?

Joshua: Oh, God. I love the little bit of flattery that’s really supposed to make me say yes.

Craig: Oh, you are the child of psychiatrists.

Joshua: Oh, my God.

Craig: None of my tricks are working. How about this? I’m going to order you to answer some of the questions.

Joshua: I’m good. Unless you want to talk about Nina Gold, I’m good to answer the questions.

Craig: Oh, well, I think Nina would be blushing right now, and I can hear her saying, “Oh, God, no.”

Joshua: She’s a wizard.

Craig: She’s a wizard, and she’s a wonderful person who consistently casts things brilliantly. She casts Game of Thrones. She casts Chernobyl. She casts Say Nothing. She’s just an amazing person. A wonderful person. So well done again, Nina Gold. You’ve done it again.

Drew, would you be so kind as to give us a listener question that we could theoretically answer?

Drew Marquardt: Yes. This question comes from Riley. Riley writes, “I finally got an agent at one of the big three agencies to read one of my scripts, and just before the holidays, he told me we would talk after the holidays, which would be January 6th. I messaged him the morning of the 7th, and he replied that he was currently evacuating his home in the Palisades. On January 10th, I sent him a message saying, basically, I’m so sorry for what he’s going through. I hope he and his family are safe, and of course, no need to respond.
I didn’t mention the meeting or the script.

I haven’t heard from him since, which I totally understand. I honestly can’t imagine what all he’s having to deal with right now. First and foremost, I want to be respectful and compassionate about his situation. I also know the industry is taking an overall hit right now, and I imagine that alongside his personal issues, his current clients are probably reaching out to find out what’s going on with their careers and projects.

Do you think there’s even any time, energy, or bandwidth for him taking on a new writer right this time? And how long should I wait to follow up? I don’t want to reach out too soon and have him say, ‘Never mind. The timing isn’t right. Best of luck,’ but I also don’t want to fall through the cracks or jeopardize this potential opportunity. I also don’t feel comfortable sending the script elsewhere before talking to him first.”

Joshua: We’re going to have to workshop this one because there is not an easy answer for this one.

Craig: No. What do you think?

Joshua: Everything’s upside down right now. I think it’s been upside down for the last couple weeks. I do think that probably Riley is correct in that the agent is probably concerned about their current clients and not thinking immediately about signing new talent. I also know that it can make you incredibly itchy when you’ve turned something in and you’re waiting for a response. I don’t think that Riley should wait for the agent and I think they should try to use any leverage they have to make other inroads.

As far as the timing, the timing is the big question for me. You can wait for months to get an answer from a single person. It’s why Hollywood takes so long to do anything. So I think if they have other relationships, they should use them. Everything is still underwater here. I would at least give it another week for things to get back to relative normal would be my guess.

Craig: Yes, I think you’re right there. Riley, the issue is you aren’t a client there. My guess is this agent is probably not doing a great job of calling back his actual clients because his house may have burned down. If not, evacuation is a brutal thing to go through. I’m going to say I agree with Joshua. You don’t want to stand on ceremony here. He got the script. He has it. He didn’t write back. If you have three other agents that are excited to read this thing, yes, send it. You don’t belong to anybody just yet. I know I like to remind people that agents work for us. We don’t work for them.

I think probably you don’t need to text them again. You just wait now. Joshua says, if you have other opportunities, go for them. There is no hard rule here. He certainly would not be able to say later, “How could you do this to me?” He’s had the script.

Let’s go with Mauro, or perhaps Mauro, in Canada. Drew, what does Mauro wonder about?

Drew: What do you guys recommend to study or watch or practice in order to keep the audience’s emotions in mind when writing? What I mean is taking the reader and hopefully viewer on an emotional journey in an effective way on every page.

Craig: Questions like this always blow my mind.

Joshua: No, but actually, God.

Craig: If you have an answer, that would be great.

Joshua: No. I have sort of an answer, but it’s an annoying answer, which is read the basics, learn the basics, go read the screenplay to Rocky or whatever movie, older movie gets you excited. Find an artist you like and read all their work and then really try hard not to imitate them. I think the bigger thing for me is actually that writers need to go out and live and you have to have life experience truly in order to write something great so that you’re– which is like a corny thing to say, but I really believe it.

When you’re writing, we have a culture that recycles everything right now. A lot of it. For a long time, we’ve been in a backwards-facing culture where we want to make movies that are like the movies we grew up on because that’s the easier thing to do. It’s very easy to go out and say, “I want to make a movie like Fargo, so I’m going to go write a movie that is like Fargo.” Then what you have is a movie that’s like Fargo, but not as good as Fargo. I think the thing that I would really try to do, really recommend is using your personal relationships and saying, “What would it be like if I was writing about my mom?” but doing it on a bigger canvas?

What would it be if– I wrote television and wanted to write television because of The Sopranos. That was David Chase writing about his mom on a bigger canvas. Ultimately, he’s very open about his relationship with his mother being like the seed of The Sopranos. That I think is what artists should be doing. I think you should quietly observe your parents and your friends and just think about writing from the inside out, as they say, after learning the fundamentals. That would be really my recommendation.

Craig: That is probably a more useful answer than the one I’ll give, Mauro, which is to say, I don’t recommend that you study or watch or practice this at all, because if you’re studying it or practicing it, it’s not going to be right. What you’re really getting at, Mauro, is something that is innate to writing and it has to be developed over time. And I think is probably the function of experience. It is the fragmentation of your own brain so that not only are you yourself taking care of all the things that the script needs to be, but you’re also all the individual characters and you’re also the character that’s listening and not talking.

You are also the audience watching all of it. I return to my audience section of my mind all the time. As an audience member, I’m like, do I care? I’m like, how does that make me feel? Just as you need to quadruplicate yourself into four characters in a scene, you also need to be the audience. That is a developed skill. You have to start with some kind of innate understanding of humans and humanity. I completely agree with Joshua that part of this is just going out there and living, but a big part of it is writing stuff down, shooting it, even if you have to shoot it on your camera, watching people watch it, you’ll probably want to throw up and you’ll learn.

Oh, my God, I remember the very first time I sat in the theater and watched something that I had written on screen. It was like I was seeing it for the first time because I was fully the audience and my level of judgment and scrutiny skyrocketed because now I’m a customer. I don’t give a shit what’s happening in the kitchen. I don’t care if the fish delivery was late or the gas stove wasn’t working. I want an awesome plate of food. I don’t care about anything else.

That was a painful wake-up call. I would urge you more to go through as many painful wake-up calls as possible because it’ll speed the process along.

Joshua: That’s a really interesting answer. You asked this question to me earlier about the viewer and your relationship to the audience. I just agree with you so much that the experience of watching your own stuff, it’s just so important. The idea of going out and shooting something just like, yes, please, everyone should be doing that. Everybody should know, even if you don’t shoot it, even if you just give it to some friends to act, even if they’re terrible. Just doing that feels so important.

Then there’s this thing that happens for me where you ultimately stop paying attention to the audience when you write. You tell me if you disagree, but I feel like the artist or the writer or whatever has to be fundamentally very selfish. You have to just care about yourself and the kind of things that you would want to see. Otherwise, you’re fucked.

Craig: That’s you as the audience, right?

Joshua: Yes, it is.

Craig: That’s my point.

Joshua: It’s the same.

Craig: You’re saying, “I want to see this.”

Joshua: I’m saying don’t think about people who are different from you and what they might like-

Craig: Right, don’t do that.

Joshua: -because that’s when you’re dead, right?

Craig: That’s calculating and chasing and that’s horrible.

Joshua: I really think like I just have a feeling like Chris Nolan likes Chris Nolan movies and Michael Bay likes Michael Bay movies, and ultimately, these are biggest directors are trying to on some level make themselves happy.

Craig: That’s a great point. To amend, Mauro, when you are being the audience in your mind, you’re being you as an audience member. Not imagining a demographic or a room full of people. Just you, like what is this working on you? I’ll tell you, the first time you write something and then start tearing up as you’re writing it, that’s when you know that you’ve gotten there, unless you’re writing a comedy. That never happens.

I think we have time for one more question. Victor writes in with a question about citing sources, which is something that I think Joshua and I know a little bit about. Drew, what does Victor ask?

Drew: “I’m working on a historical drama screenplay based on real events and attempting to stay as accurate as possible. This includes taking notes and at times quoting directly from a few books that have accounts of events within the period, as well as biographies and published collections of letters from people involved to use their own words where possible. If this were to be produced, would I need to cite of these somehow, or only the book that is most directly concerned with the time frame and events that I’m writing about?”

Craig: Did you have to go through this rigorous process that I had to go through on Chernobyl?

Joshua: Oh, yes. There was a cite-your-source process with the legal department for virtually everything. You go first. What was it like for you on Chernobyl, which, by the way, I just have not gotten the chance to wax, poetic?

Craig: Oh, geez.

Joshua: No, I won’t. It’s just, it’s such an amazing piece of work. That like the balance between genre and drama, whatever you would call it, the balance of genre filmmaking and genre writing and non-genre writing was just like really at the heart of-

Craig: Thank you.

Joshua: -at the top of mind. You not only made this incredible piece of entertainment, but then also, it felt like it was capturing a fundamental truth that I think, and I think that’s what we’re all trying to search for. You state it so overtly at the cost of the lie right at the beginning. Then you’re like, “This is the thesis, and now I’m going to decimate you with how I illustrate that thesis.” I just thought, beautifully done.

Craig: Thank you. I’m very happy that decimation occurred. As I was going on the journey towards decimation, I had lots of books I was drawing from, some documentaries. I wish I had known ahead of time that I was going to have to go back and provide the sources specifically for all that stuff for HBO. They have a very rigorous guy who is going to stress test everything. It was really just an inefficient process on my end because I had to go back and go, “Okay, at least I have a pretty good memory. This was from this book, this was from this book.” I can hand all those books over, hand over all those sources, hand over the documentaries and say, “Okay, all of this worked out.” There were some interesting questions and challenges, but overall, I think maybe I had to slightly change one thing for legal purposes. I think it was somebody’s name. How did it go for you?

Joshua: Similarly, just extremely rigorous with the legal team. I think there was, you’re citing your sources for everything you want to do. They know that you’re not making a documentary, which is, I think, they know that a certain amount of artistic license has to be taken in any show, but beyond that, they’re pretty strict. All that stuff is very carefully vetted and it’s a challenging but worthwhile process to stress test the thing that you’re making. I would also say though, I would want to add one thing which is probably not the question and tell me if you experienced this, that the research can become a crutch at times.

Craig: Oh, of course, yes.

Joshua: You can have this desire, which probably you and I both had along with the listener, to make it absolutely as accurate as possible. Ultimately, I think in my case, and certainly Craig in your case as well, you can’t know what was said in every room. Because in the case of Say Nothing, it’s about the IRA, it’s a culture of secrecy.

Craig: You say nothing.

Joshua: Yes, exactly. Yours deals with state secrets and things like that. Ultimately, you have to do the research and do as much of it as you can. It’s like a musician practicing scales. You practice your scales, and you practice your scales, and you do your rudiments, or whatever, over and over. Then, at some point, you have to trust that you’ve built enough of a solid foundation that you can go and you can actually just play. Ultimately, do your homework. Do a ton of homework. Do more than you think you need.

Then, at some point, you got to let it go and go and write. Then if it’s lucky enough to be made, which is, of course, a very high bar, only then will you really have to deal with the scrutiny of a legal department. I think you should probably write the best story that you can first, and then hope it survives that process second.

Craig: Fantastic answer. I think we covered all those bases really well for our listeners. Congratulations to you and me for doing so great. Drew, I think we deserve a gold star. It’s time for our one cool thing. It can be anything at all, small or large. I’ll start with mine because it’s so wonderfully stupid today. My one cool thing is eating ice cream as an adult.

Joshua: I love it. I love this one cool thing, by the way, despite being lactose intolerant.

Craig: Same. Ice cream in my mind for so long has been associated with like sin, a weakness, bad health. It’s also like food for children. Every kid has probably gone a little crazy on ice cream, but a little bit of ice cream every now and then, I have to say as an adult, is a lovely thing. It’s just a reminder of something that is elegantly delicious that has been there our whole lives. It is the ultimate comfort food. My method is to put some ice cream in a tiny bowl. This way you won’t go crazy. Because as we get older, it’s a little harder.

Do not eat out of a carton. Folks, stop eating out of a carton. Only bad things will happen from that. Also, you have permission, I grant you permission, from one adult to another, to just eat regular ice cream if you want. You’re not obligated to chase the adult flavors. If you want, whatever, rosemary, chive and black pepper ice cream, that’s fine, do it. If you like vanilla, that’s awesome. One cool thing, if you’re an adult, give it a try, just a little bit of ice cream.

Joshua: I love that. My postscript ritual, whenever any draft goes in, is McDonald’s ice cream and bourbon, which is embarrassing to admit as an adult man-

Craig: Wow. Nice.

Joshua: -but it should be like cigarettes, and I don’t know, something more grown up, but it’s not.

Craig: That’s awesome. What is your one cool thing this week?

Joshua: Mine is less fun and whimsical. Mine is a book that you have maybe read, which is a book about the origins of punk rock called Please Kill Me. Are you familiar with this book?

Craig: I have not, no.

Joshua: Oh my God, it’s so good. It’s an oral history of the early days of punk in New York and then in London from the late ’60s to I think the ’80s. It’s an incredible oral history that really captures a scene and a particular moment in time and makes you envious to not be living in the center of culture, during the peak of culture. Even more than that, I think I’ve said this a few times, but there are moments in the book that you really can’t get out of your mind, that go beyond just rock and roll excess.

I think, I may be getting this wrong, but Iggy Pop is up there doing his very particular thing, birthing a new genre of music, inventing punk. In the process, people are pissed off, and they throw bottles, and he proceeds to roll around in the broken glass as a power move to be like the ultimate “fuck you” to the audience and shock and appall people and continue the show while he’s all cut up and things like that. I think the thing about it that is so incredible to me is that it was this time when art was really dangerous.

It was this time when you could go to a performance and anything could happen. I feel like that is the thing that we’re missing in the age of corporate consolidation. That we’re missing this element of danger and we’re missing this element of like– This is extremely lofty, so forgive me if this is like really pretentious, but I feel like on some level, the question that artists need to ask themselves is, what am I risking by saying the thing I’m going to say? In the case of Iggy, it’s like great bodily harm and death, right?

Craig: Right.

Joshua: I feel like that idea that the artist is supposed to be a risk taker, which is so hard right now with got-you culture and cancel culture and all these things, I feel like that is an important thing to remember that somehow there should be this element of danger. That book captures that spirit in incredibly vivid ways. That would be my–

Craig: All right. That’s Please Kill Me, which is what I say every morning when I wake up, just to myself. Just to myself, please kill me.

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

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. I love drinkware, this is my new favorite word. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber and thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. Finally, you can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you can get all of the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record now on how to make Los Angeles function better.

Joshua, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Joshua: Thank you so much for having me, I really enjoyed it.

[Bonus Segment]

Craig: Okay, Joshua, so this is magic wand time. We just went through this convulsion here in Los Angeles because of the fires and that prompted me to think about the ways our city, and I believe you live here in Los Angeles now.

Joshua: Yes.

Craig: The ways our city could be improved in a functioning way to help. We’re not going to address social problems like mental health right now or unhoused populations or crime. This is just like civil engineering stuff. Let’s start with this question: Should we, after the fires, start to think about leaving some of these places alone? Meaning, should we rebuild in areas where we know fires and mudslides are going to occur?

Joshua: This is a truly tragic question, right? Because as I go through Los Angeles, the dream of LA is that you can be in nature and also be steps away from the city, that nature is at your door. Now this idea that the neighborhoods that are the most ensconced in nature are the most vulnerable is truly tragic. I live in the foothills and I’m unsure if I have to move. I, of course, like everyone, have multiple people in my life who just lost everything. The idea of whether or not we should be rebuilding, it’s a really tricky one. I feel like, as the idealist in me says we shouldn’t give up on that dream.

I think the part of me that wants to be cheeky, if I’m allowed to be cheeky even in a moment like this, is that yes, we should rebuild and everybody should be legally obligated to get a pool. Every home should have a pool and it should include one of the machines that is a real thing that sucks the water out of your pool and uses it to spray down your house. I know a guy who had a pool, had this device installed, and saved his home because the water from the pool was sucked out and covered his house.

Craig: I think that’s–

Joshua: Not a real answer, but like–

Craig: No, but let’s put that under general zoning ideas. It does seem to me that in areas where we know the homes are going to be extremely vulnerable to fire, that we have to improve the infrastructure and we probably have to improve it through zoning. Some of it has already occurred. There are building codes that make homes far more, I wouldn’t say fireproof, but I would say fire resistant. The problem is that those codes were introduced, I think in 2012 or something or 2008, and nothing is grandfathered in because nobody’s going to rebuild their house to match the code.

So, so many of the homes that were built before then, and that’s the majority of homes in LA, are vulnerable. I think zoning laws perhaps coming up with, okay, if you’re in a vulnerable area, you need to install this kind of thing. That makes total sense to me. The other question I have, or it’s just an idea is, I think it’s important to look at some neighborhoods where we know there’s really only one way in.

There are certain areas where there’s one main road. If that main road is blocked off, you can’t get in there either with emergency equipment or evacuation is incredibly difficult.
Because, if you’re in Benedict Canyon, that’s Benedict Canyon. Should we be targeting some of those places and creating additional arteries for movement?

Joshua: When it comes to the canyons, in a perfect world, yes, of course, you would want more than one way out of Laurel Canyon, right? I suppose there are two, there’s this side of the hill and that side of the hill.

Craig: Mulholland and that’s it.

Joshua: But the actual cost of creating multiple exits feels, I’m sure, incredibly daunting to a city that’s already facing enormous unhoused populations, et cetera. I don’t know. You would want to hope that putting in a reservoir that strategically placed reservoirs might help, but the problem is we also have droughts. That’s another piece of the puzzle. I believe that there was a reservoir that they were supposed to be drawing from for the Palisades fire that was dry. Then I heard that they were taking the water from the Hollywood Reservoir to put out the Hollywood fire, which worked, right?

Craig: Right. I think, from what I’ve read, that the Palisades Reservoir probably would not have made enough of a difference, that that fire was just so brutal. Also, nobody could fly. That debate will be going on forever, probably, whether or not it would have mattered. Again, I’m using my magic wand here, but let’s talk a little bit about cost, because anything we do to improve this is always going to come with this enormous cost. That drives me over into traffic, which is another problem that we have in Los Angeles. I’m just trying to make it function better.

We’ve spent an enormous amount of money on creating public transportation, a metro line. Will we finish all of that in time for it to still matter? Are we heading towards a place where either working from home removes an enormous amount of traffic from the freeways, or automatic driving essentially eliminates traffic, because if every car on the road is automatic, self-driving, there is no traffic because there’s no rubbernecking, there’s no accidents.

Joshua: It’s Minority Report, basically.

Craig: It’s Minority Report, exactly. Do you think our future, that LA will function better with more mass transportation or more self-driving buses and cars?

Joshua: Cynically, I think that it will get so bad that half the people will leave and then we’ll be fine. [laughter] No, I think I–

Craig: That’s also a thing.

Joshua: I actually don’t think that self-driving cars will get there to the point where everybody has them in order to get to Minority Report. Everybody needs to have them, every single person. Because you picture Minority Report with the one old Chevy Nova in the middle of the beautifully flowing ribbon of traffic, just causing entanglements. I just feel like, no, maybe in 150 years, but by then, everything’s going to be on fire every other week unless we can fix our global problem of fixing the environment, which is the real issue, right?

I feel, no, just cynically, I don’t think we can look to self-driving cars to save us. Certainly, if the people who are trying to create self-driving cars are the same people who are trying to create them for the next 20 years, make of that what you will, I think we’ll be in trouble. Get over there. No, I think we’ve got to go work it out. I do think that mass exodus is on the table.

Craig: Mass exodus would certainly solve a lot of traffic problems. Here’s something that I think would make Los Angeles function better, at least be more enjoyable. Los Angeles is enormously spread out, we know this, it’s famously spread out, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have, in fact, I think it’s an argument that it makes it even easier to have a very large central park. We have Griffith Park, which is enormous, but it’s like in the hills and its mountains and valleys and hiking.

What we don’t have is that great park in the middle of a city that people can enjoy, that’s beautiful, that is an oasis. It would require, again, enormous amount of public domain and the knocking down of a lot of things, but it seems to me like we could use it.

Joshua: I love that idea. I was just in London for-

Craig: There you go.

Joshua: -a long period of time making the show, and they call the parks, the lungs of London. That was the thing that I liked most about the city. I’d never spent a lot of time there in the past. That was the thing that I think I enjoyed most. I think we could just wipe out everybody who lives in Hancock Park and then just put it all there. No, exactly–

Craig: Wow. That’s where I’m at. That’s literally where I am.

Joshua: That’s where you’re proposing?

Craig: Not in my backyard.

Joshua: No, but where would you put it though? Because I do agree, it’s much better. What we have drawing the people now are like the Rick Caruso mega malls, which are not the lungs of Los Angeles, right?

Craig: No, they are not.

Joshua: We have the Grove and the Americana and that is not doing it.

Craig: There is Pan Pacific Park, which I think could be expanded. The Motion Picture Academy, of which I am surprisingly a member, is certainly screaming right now at the thought that their beautiful new museum and headquarters would be knocked down for park. That seems like a nice place and I also think as you head further south, maybe south of the like the 10, there’s also some nice areas where, again, there’s a lot of commercial stuff which would have to be like, yes, there’s a cost. You have to eliminate things.

You wouldn’t want to eliminate residences, but if we could find some places that are– or downtown, some old train yards and whatever, I would love the idea. I used to live in La Cañada and we would go over to Huntington Park in Pasadena, which is beautiful and we could use one of those.

Joshua: I agree. I would also say that it dovetails into the first question, which is it does feel like the safe way to get nature in your city, right? It is not actually like living in the foothills. It’s going to Central Park. It’s going to Richmond Park or Hyde Park or whatever.

Craig: Hyde Park, exactly. One of the things that I think would make Los Angeles function better is the elimination of jurisdictional fragmentation. I think the rest of the country and the world was very surprised by something we’re all quite used to here, which is 12 different police departments plus the county, plus the state. We’ve got LAPD, but we also have the Pasadena Police Department. We also have Santa Monica Police. We also have West Hollywood Sheriff’s Officers as part of the county. We have California Highway Patrol.

Sometimes they don’t talk to each other. Sometimes you pull up and you’re like, “Oh yes, we’re LA Fire Department.” That’s LA County across the street. The county has to come there and put that fire out. We’re going to put this fire out on this. Everybody else is looking at us like, “Just to make the one thing.” If we could combine it all into one thing, I think that probably would be better. It would be enormous, but I think it would be better.

Joshua: I’m completely with you. I think you see the same thing in medicine, right? Where like, my family’s all doctors. My brother’s a hospitalist. None of the hospitals can communicate with each other because they all speak a different coded language to do their databases. Similarly with law enforcement, I know that lack of communication, certainly when there are crises, and if the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire are any indication, there’s going to be a lot more of those. Responding very quickly is like, right at the heart of stopping some of those events.

I’m in complete agreement. I think, no doubt, they have their bureaucratic reasons, but certainly.

Craig: Oh, yes. Oh, they’re not going to change.

Joshua: I just know mostly the LAPD and the sheriffs, right? There are strange relationships where there will be corruption cases within one department and the other department remains untouched and all that.

Craig: My magic wand is going to try one more thing, and this is perhaps the most magical thinking of them all. The one thing that I think would make Los Angeles function vastly better would be a completely new airport. Air travel, which was once the domain of the wealthy, is now completely democratized. People from every socioeconomic stratus fly, and all of us in Los Angeles, unless we’re lucky enough to go somewhere super local and we can make it to Burbank, we’re all going to Los Angeles International Airport, LAX, which is ancient and stupid.

It is a stupidly designed airport where you have to roll around in a horrible oval loop, everybody’s smashed together. The terminals are subject to refurbishing at great expense, and by the time they’re done refurbishing it, it’s already old and stupid-looking. Security-wise, I think it’s a complete disaster. They’re building a monorail to help move people back and forth, which everybody hates and also probably won’t be done by the Olympics. LAX is just a nightmare. The problem, of course, with building an entire new airport is money, sure, and space.

Airports need an enormous amount of space. If you can build a brand new airport, where would you put it?

Joshua: Oh wow. Obviously, I agree with you. The LAX is the worst airport one could envision. If one were to design an airport built around all the things you don’t want to do, I think you would have LAX. Just to do one Devil’s Advocate, it’s not even a Devil’s Advocate, it’s just, have you ever seen a film called Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round?

Craig: No.

Joshua: There is a film where, I think it’s a heist movie, it’s an old heist movie, the third act of the film takes place at LAX. You get to see LAX in all of its period glory, with the cars that are the right cars, the cars that were intended to be driving there, with all of that beautiful mid-century detailing that it once had before it just became a shit show, and it’s actually really fucking cool in that movie. You realize that it was just built at a time when there was just so much less traffic, and now it’s just congested, it’s worse than the Trader Joe’s parking lot of your nightmares.

If I was going to build it some, can I still wipe out all the people in Hancock Park? Is that still a thing?

Craig: You could. I would take a wipeout here, although that’s really going to be a snarled traffic situation.

Joshua: It’ll be bad.

Craig: And really loud.

Joshua: All I can say is, if we’re waving the magic wand, the Burbank Airport is a delight, I absolutely love flying out of Burbank, it’s quaint. Perhaps if we could just amplify its size and make it our major airport, we would get a chance to redesign the parking, but that would be– if I have advice for anybody moving to LA, it is always fly out of Burbank if you can.

Craig: Yes, fly out of Burbank and take Fountain.

Joshua: That’s right.

Craig: I think we’ve done the best we can to come up with some things that will absolutely never happen to make Los Angeles function better. Almost certainly what will happen is we don’t change at all, and we go through some convulsions from time to time. It is the cost of living here in the city we love. Joshua Zetumer, thank you so much for spending your time with us today, such a fan of your work. Congratulations on Say Nothing, and hopefully we’ll get you back on the show one of these days.

Joshua: That would be great. Thank you for having me.

Links:

• Say Nothing
• Joshua Zetumer
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Difficult Men by Brett Martin
• Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.