Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 434 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you’re back. You’re recovered from your flu.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was a little nasty. I thought it was just the cold. I never think that I have the flu. But you know what, a cold will kind of over the course of a couple days just get worse and worse. This thing started in the morning and by the evening I thought I may be dying. And I went over to the urgent care. Do you know how they do the flu test? Have you had that done before?

**John:** You described it to me on the bonus segment. So we’ll spoil it for people. They stick something far, far up your nose and swab.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nasty. Did in fact have the flu. They put me on Tamiflu and holy cajole that stuff worked great. I guess if you get it really early at the start of your flu. I basically had that day and then the next day I wasn’t feeling too good and then I was fine.

**John:** Great. Glad to have you back.

**Craig:** Happy to be here.

**John:** You missed a terrific episode with Greta Gerwig. So folks if you skipped that episode, go back and listen to it. It really was terrific. We got into a lot of very specific stuff on the page. We talked about parentheticals. Craig will be so envious of this conversation we had about real specificity on the page.

Today is also a specificity on the page, because we’re going to be doing another round of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** That’s where we take a look at the first three pages of screenplays that people send us and we talk through what’s working and what’s not. We will also be talking about the difference between ambition and anxiety and how writers can find a balance between those two opposing forces.

**Craig:** This sounds like a pretty good day. I love talking about pages. I love talking about screen pages. I also love talking about anxiety. I was feeling rather anxious earlier today. I was in my car and I just got the feeling in my stomach, and I just thought, well, this is terrible. And but I did my breathing. You know? And while I was doing my breathing I thought, OK, I’m doing all the right things. This is just anxiety. It still stank.

**John:** Yeah. It does stink. Even when you know you’re doing the right things to take care of it, it can stink.

**Craig:** I know. It stinks.

**John:** And our Premium members will also hear a bonus segment at the end of the show where I will rant about mugs, because I have really strong opinions about mugs and I feel like I need to talk to somebody. So I’m going to talk to Craig and our Premium members.

**Craig:** This is where the Premium members question the wisdom of their subscription.

**John:** But so many people have joined the Premium membership program. So thank you everyone who has subscribed. The Premium membership is at Scriptnotes.net. For $5 a month you get these bonus segments, you get the bonus episodes, and all the back episodes. We’ve crossed a threshold so I feel pretty confident we’re going to be able to hire somebody new to be able to help on the technical backend side of Scriptnotes, which is great.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So thank you very much to everyone who subscribed.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Thank you.

**John:** And reminder to everybody that the old feed, the one that was on the app, that will be going away, so everything is going to be on the new thing. But thank you to everybody who has signed up now at Scriptnotes.net. And news today that we now started accepting Apple Pay. So you don’t even have to pull out your credit card, you can just hit the little Apply Pay button to subscribe to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** I have to admit that whenever I see Apple Pay I get super excited because I can just use my face or fingerprint. I’m that lazy. They figured it out. They knew exactly what needed to happen and it was to make me be able to buy things without moving.

**John:** Yep. Now if you’re buying things this week a thing you could pre-buy would be the third Arlo Finch book. So I finished my trilogy.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** So people who have listened to this show for a while will know that I started writing these books, Arlo Finch. There are now three of them. The third one comes out February 4 here in the US. February 4 is also my Half Birthday, so you can help me celebrate by buying Arlo Finch 3, or the whole trilogy if you haven’t bought it yet. Craig, were you ever a person who would not start a series until he knew that all the books were written?

**Craig:** Absolutely not.

**John:** No. But there are those people out there.

**Craig:** That’s a person? Really? That’s the weirdest thing.

**John:** Because they don’t want to get trapped by an unfinished series.

**Craig:** No. It’s called Anticipation. When J.K. Rowling was still working on the Harry Potter series–

**John:** This is before she was canceled.

**Craig:** [laughs] She is uncancelable as it turns out. I think I started reading those books I want to say when she released the third one. So I caught up quickly. And then for the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh when those books would come out it was kind of a little holiday for me. I would take the day off and I would just read the book that day.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** And it was great. I loved those days. They were great. And the waiting made it all worth it. I love that. We can still wait. We don’t have to binge everything.

**John:** What’s exciting about the third book in Arlo Finch is the first two had advanced copies, and so there were these sort of special paperback ones that would come out a few months before the hard cover. And so folks would read those. And so it was sort of a soft rollout. Kind of no one has read this third book. Like I’ve read it. Megana has read it. My editor has read it. But very few other people have read it. I’ve slipped it to a couple kids who are big readers and they are very enthusiastic.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I can’t wait for folks to be able to take a look at the third Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** Spectacular. And congratulations, by the way. That’s a real achievement.

**John:** Thank you. For people who want the custom bookplates, you can go to johnaugust.com/arlofinch and there’s a place where you fill out the little form and I will send you a custom bookplate with your kid’s name on it, or your name on it if you prefer.

**Craig:** Is that an illustration? Is that what a custom bookplate is?

**John:** Yeah. A bookplate is a sticker that goes in the front of your book so in lieu of me coming to sign your book, it’s a way that you have a signed copy without ever meeting me in person.

**Craig:** We had a woman that worked for us for a while. She was a housekeeper. And her thing was more like, mmm, today instead of cleaning I’m just going to pick a project for myself that has not been assigned and do it that nobody wanted her to do. And, I mean, lovely person though. And there was apparently a pile of these little – I guess you would call them stickers that said this book belongs to….

She decided to go through all of the books in my daughter’s bookshelf and put them in there, except that a lot of those books were Melissa’s books when she was a kid. It’s like some of them were worth some money. Well, not anymore.

**John:** Ugh. Sorry.

**Craig:** You know what? What are you going to do?

**John:** What are you going to do? I would say putting one of these author signed bookplates in a book would probably actually increase its value rather than decrease its value.

**Craig:** That will increase the value. Your custom bookplate sounds like a positive thing.

**John:** But if you’d like me to sign your book in person you can come to the signing at Chevalier’s on Larchmont. It’s a bookstore on Larchmont. That’s February 9 at 2pm. So, it’s a chance to say hello to me and buy your Arlo Finches and I will happily sign them. I will also have some sort of talk which I have yet to figure out. So I’m not doing a big book tour this time. Just small little events, including February 9 at Chevalier’s.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Well, again, congrats. That’s pretty awesome. How many total book papers have you generated?

**John:** Wow. That is a good question. Words I can tell you. I can figure that out more easily. About 220,000 words.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** The three books. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** That’s so many words.

**John:** It’s just a lot of words.

**Craig:** So many words. God.

**John:** That’s the thing about books versus screenplays is just all the words.

**Craig:** I feel like, I mean, in our careers just in terms of screenplays we certainly are over – I never know how many words are – but well over a million words, right? Each?

**John:** Oh, we have to be. Oh yeah.

**Craig:** 10 million?

**John:** I don’t know. We could figure it out. That would be a challenge for us.

**Craig:** Terrifying.

**John:** I’ll have Nima write a little program that will figure it all out.

**Craig:** [laughs] That would be so great.

**John:** That will be in Highland 4.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Calculate your entire – all your work.

**Craig:** I’m almost a million miler on American Airlines.

**John:** Oh, nice. And the pilot will come back and congratulate you–

**Craig:** Is that right? Do they do that?

**John:** Yeah, they do. They come back.

**Craig:** Holy crap.

**John:** When you’ve reached a million medal miles they come back.

**Craig:** Wow. Amazing. OK, cool.

**John:** Things to look forward to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Before you can hit that million mile status you actually have to earn a living. And that is something that is a little bit easier for some CAA assistants this week. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** Well, you and I, we can’t take all the credit for this. We did start I think a very worthy conversation. But it was prompted by somebody who wrote in. And this ball has really been carried forth by a lot of other people. But the good news is it’s working. So, earlier I guess last month Verve, the agency Verve, said, hey, we’re going to bump up our pay for our minimum wage for our assistants from $15 to $18 an hour. And this week CAA, which is the second largest agency in Hollywood, announced that they are doing the same. That’s a big deal. They employ at least a thousand people in that building I would imagine that could work as assistants, mailroom folks, etc. Between their two offices in New York and LA. It’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of money. And it’s a pretty good thing.

So, you know, we are always monitoring the whole hourly wage versus hourly work guarantee thing to make sure that you’re not getting more per hour, but fewer hours.

**John:** Absolutely. As we stressed on the show really your weekly take home pay should be the metric by whether you’re able to survive in Los Angeles. And so we want to make sure that this higher hourly rate really does translate to people being able to afford to do this job in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Right. I think one of the things that was really positive about what CAA announced is also that there’s a different way that they’re contemplating raises. Raises at CAA used to be basically, well, if you’re an hourly employee at the end of the year there’s some kind of – I mean, my guess it was a probably perfunctory raise. And it was just a function of, well, you made it. Congrats.

And what they’re saying now is, no, that actually you can get raises based on upward movement in the company. That it’s not just about the fact that you were a warm body there for a year, but if you take on more responsibility you can get more money. This is – it’s kind of crazy that I’m saying this like it’s something new and exciting. It should have been that way and it should be that way everywhere. And I’m hopeful that now UTA and WME and ICM and Gersh and all the rest of these places will do the same thing. This is how the market should work.

If they don’t, well, they’re going to lose a lot of people to CAA and Verve it would seem to me.

**John:** I would agree. So let’s talk a little bit about our role in this in terms of you and me, because this was sort of a special case. I’m represented at Verve. You know a lot of folks at CAA. As folks wrote in to us at the Ask account the folks who were talking about Verve we took all those emails anonymously and sort of gathered together in a document that we were able to take – that I was able to take to Verve – and say like, hey, just so you know former and current assistants at Verve have these concerns and you should have a discussion.

You were able to do the same for CAA.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Again, all anonymous. But this is really specific things that folks who were working at CAA had concerns as assistants. I do think those helped initiate some conversations within those agencies.

So, if folks who are listening to this who are at the agencies want to write in with their specific information about what they’re seeing at their agencies, we are happy to gather this together and also take them to those agencies to help stoke a little bit more fire underneath them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s great. This is sort of an absolute good. If we can keep doing this and improving people’s lives. Look, it’s not an enormous amount, but it matters. This is an amount that matters. And our hope is that not only will it make life better for the people who are doing these very important jobs that support all of us, it will also make these jobs potentially available and feasible for a lot of people. Everyone. And not just people who maybe have additional financial support from their families.

**John:** Agreed. But that was not the only agency news this week. So we’re recording this late on Friday afternoon. It was announced earlier on Friday afternoon. As we were recording it just went out the actual red lined agreement, so I have not had a chance to read through it carefully. The biggest changes from the previous agreement which was with Rothman Brecher is the extension of when this all sunsets, when packaging gets sunsetted. Some different language in terms of auditing and reporting.

But it’s kind of largely the deal that we’ve been seeing in all these other agreements along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is good news. Gersh is what I would call, and again, apologies to everybody else, but I think it was the first what I would call major agency to sign. I mean, I guess Verve is sort of a major agency. I would count them, I guess. But I guess traditionally Gersh was always up there with sort of like – I would think of them in the tier of Paradigm and Writers and Artists and people like that.

**John:** Gersh also represents actors and directors. They represent a huge swath of kinds of people, so they’re not just a literary agency in the way that Verve is.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. They’re a multi-service agency. I’m not sure how many writers they represent compared to say people like at ICM, but they were my first agency back in the day. So this is good news. So glass half full. They signed it. And the modifications that I’m looking at here don’t seem particularly problematic in any way, shape, or form. Packaging fees sunset period going to July 15, 2021. I mean, we’ve been living with packages for half a century, so I think another year and a half is no big deal.

Glass half empty. They weren’t a huge packaging agency to begin with. It took us about a year to get them to sign this.

**John:** Nine months. So, three-quarters of a year.

**Craig:** There we go. I’ll take that back. It took us about three-quarters of a year to get them to sign it. And I think we’ve run out of this kind of target. I think we’ve gotten the Vs that can matter. And so now what remains are the problems that have always been there and that is WME, ICM, UTA, and CAA.

On the legal front things haven’t been going great for us it seems to me. Can you walk us through that?

**John:** Sure. So let me talk both of those concerns. So, we’ll start with the legal side. The legal news recently, there’s been delays, pushes. I think from the last time we spoke the Justice Department had tried to intercede on the case. The judge says, no, no, that’s OK. You don’t need to intercede. So they were not invited to intercede on the agencies’ behalf, which I think is a great development.

But clearly the timeframe on the lawsuits is long. And if you go back to sort of like the initial conversations about how all of this was going to go, one of the things that was sort of stressed in those WGA meetings was like the question was always like why don’t we just do the whole thing as a lawsuit, well the lawsuit could take a really long time. And that’s sort of what we’re seeing. It’s not a speedy process to go through this. So, the timeframe is into 2021 before it looks like we have resolution on some law stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we did get handed a defeat in there, because we were hoping to get the court to toss the agency lawsuit against us, which accuses us essentially of an antitrust violation, and the judge said no I’m not tossing that. So, that’s not good.

**John:** That’s not good, but it’s not unexpected I would say. So, I mean, I would say that the legal tussling has been the legal tussling that was sort of anticipated. I think the difference being that it’s happening in a federal court rather than a state court which was the initial plan.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the legal stuff is long ongoing.

Back to your previous point though in terms of the big four. The time before that we spoke about this I said that one of my frustrations is that I know a lot of things that I can’t tell you. And I said a possible solution for that which would make me feel better would be to type them up in an encrypted PDF and give you the encrypted PDF so that when this is all resolved I can give you the password and you can see like, oh, that’s why John was feeling the way he was feeling because he knew those things. And so I did give you that PDF.

**Craig:** Yes. I have that. Obviously I don’t know what’s in it, because I don’t know the password.

**John:** Yes. And so all the hacker teams you’ve pulled on the PDF to try to break it open, I know they’re trying their very, very best, but strong encryption is really, really strong.

**Craig:** I have not even inserted it into my computer.

**John:** So, but here’s a thing that is on that list that I’m actually now allowed to say. I have official approval from the WGA to say is that the guild has been negotiating with the agencies this whole time. So, not just the Gersh who signed this deal now, but these negotiations have been happening since the middle of the election, up until this past week. And it’s not just the agencies five through 12. Like it includes three of the four big agencies, ongoing negotiations.

So you say that you don’t think there’s more progress to be made, that’s why I think there’s more progress to be made.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Don’t get me wrong. Well, first of all, I presumed that there were ongoing back channels. I mean, I know that there haven’t been official negotiations, in other words you guys haven’t gotten back into the big formal room with anybody. As far as I know that would have to be announced. But then again I don’t think that that’s the proper venue for negotiating, nor was it ever the proper venue for negotiating this kind of deal.

So, that’s not a big shock to me. All I’m saying is that in terms of I guess what I would call the “easier victories,” the agency that would be more likely to sign this without major reconsiderations, we’re kind of out of those. And it’s a little discouraging that it took this long to get Gersh to sign it. Again, because not a big packaging agency. Obviously I am rooting for all of this to conclude as soon as possible in a way that is favorable to us. And whatever the negotiations have been, they have been long. Longer than negotiations that we typically have for instance with the companies, which while can be bruising and difficult they tend to finish within a matter of say, I don’t know, three months.

This has been much, much longer. And also with what I think we all presumed would be much more effective pressure. They have gone along for nine months now without collapsing which is, you know–

**John:** So, just to point out though Gersh is a major agency that was part of the ATA. And so all the deals that have been made now are with ATA agencies who have said like, OK, no, we’re dealing with the ATA anymore. We’re dealing individually. So I want to distinguish between back channel and individual, because back channel I think implies it’s those sort of unaffiliated folks who are sort of like sticking off in a distance. That’s not what this is. It’s been individual negotiations. And it’s been a lot of what I would say papers being pushed back and forth rather than sort of like the weird Kabuki thing that we do in MBA negotiations where it’s a bunch of people in the room.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I like that.

**John:** That is different.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I do like that. I think if you’re negotiating individually with CAA or ICM or WME or UTA that’s great. I mean, that’s all I think we’ve all wanted. Well, I don’t need to get into communication issues. I mean, the Writers Guild tends to communicate in a way that I don’t understand or think is effective. But, on the other hand nine months is not an eternity. The closer we get to a year the more difficult this becomes.

And I do have some concerns about the fact that these lawsuits are hanging out there. There’s some weird stuff in there that I am, well, I just find concerning. So, as always, I am hopeful that this gets resolved in a way where the great majority of writers who have not signed on to the agencies that have signed on to our code of conduct, but are in fact waiting to get the agents that they wanted back can get them back.

**John:** You and I share that goal.

**Craig:** Yes. I cannot wait to see this conversation in print verbatim in Deadline again.

**John:** Oh my. [laughs]

**Craig:** Can’t Deadline just say, “Hey, listen to their show.” Wouldn’t that be better?

**John:** Yeah. That would be terrific.

**Craig:** That would be great.

**John:** You know what we should do? We should put all of this conversation only on the Premium feed so that they have to–

**Craig:** They have to pay us $5?

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I think they will. [laughs]

**John:** They probably will.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s move on to another piece of follow up. Akiva Schaffer wrote in to us about his frustration with all the waste being generated by DVD screeners and scripts and everything that we get sent during this awards season. And asked like couldn’t we possibly just have this all under an app. He wrote back in with some follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah. He says, well, so Akiva just to refresh you guys is one of the three members of Lonely Island. And of course therefore he is friends Jorma Taccone and Jorma Taccone is married to Mari Heller. Everyone is a friend of the podcast. Akiva took a look at Mari’s Academy account to see how they laid things out. I want to be clear. He wasn’t looking at the screeners or anything illegal like that. He just saw how they basically do their thing.

And he said it looks amazing. That the Academy basically has figured out how to do the screener thing. “Every movie is HD or 4K with 5.1 sound. They are laid out and organized in a way that is easy to use.” And honestly his hope is that the Academy could reach out to the guilds, WGA, DGA, SAG/AFTRA and help them do that. Because there is really at this point no reason for us to be getting paper scripts in the mail and DVDs in the mail with all the attended packaging and then I guess associated carbon that’s being spewed out of the trucks. It’s all silly. None of it needs to happen that way. It has to stop.

So, I think good advice. Everybody should be calling the Academy and saying help us do it the way you do it.

**John:** Yeah. It really has been quite good. So, during the nomination season as the For Your Consideration season the interface was a little bit wonky on it, but the minute the nominations came out the screen was redesigned. So it just goes by category. And so it’s like Best Picture and here are the movies available for Best Picture. All the way down through things you can see like, oh, in this category these are the movies I’ve not seen. It’s really well done. I’ve had zero problems with it. So, yes, my hope is that the other guilds can go to the Academy and say like, hey, can we piggyback on this thing or whatever vendor it is that is providing it can also provide it for the guilds. Because it is just a mitzvah to everyone.

**Craig:** I love hearing you say mitzvah. I have a voting question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** I have noticed both the DGA and the WGA appear to do some kind of staggered voting, where you get a window to vote for a certain number of categories, but not all of them?

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know why.

**Craig:** Then you get another tranche where you get to vote for – why don’t we just do it all at once?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m not wrong about that, right?

**John:** I think you’re not wrong. I think there are certain categories which get held out for certain reasons. There’s also certain categories for nominations where you have to be on a specific committee, like foreign film.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not talking about nominations. I mean, like just voting to see who wins.

**John:** Oh, category wise I think I vote for everybody all at once. I could be wrong.

**Craig:** But for the guild we don’t seem to be.

**John:** Yeah. Because I don’t remember, I mean, I’m going to vote for Chernobyl, but I don’t remember voting for Chernobyl yet.

**Craig:** I don’t think that that has opened up yet. So, like the last one was feature screenplays and a couple of other things, and drama series, and news series. This is for WGA. All sorts of voting. I don’t know why they don’t – I’m sure there’s a reason.

**John:** There’s always a reason.

**Craig:** There’s always a reason.

**John:** I don’t know why though either.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** It’s probably about some weird thing that’s in the guild bylaws about when things have to happen.

**Craig:** Oh god. The guild bylaws.

**John:** It’s probably the bylaws.

**Craig:** Oh god. The guild bylaws.

**John:** The most important thing about mentioning Akiva Schaffer is that Akiva Schaffer brings us to Jorma which brings us to the news that MacGruber–

**Craig:** MacGruber!

**John:** Is coming back as a TV series on the Peacock which is the only real reason I’ve heard so far for why we need another streamer. It’s so we can have MacGruber.

**Craig:** Well these streamers aren’t dumb, right? They go I think people need something. And somebody over there must have realized that MacGruber is this quiet sleeping giant.

**John:** Oh, 100%.

**Craig:** That is ready to be awakened. As anyone who has been listening to this podcast since, god, the beginning practically knows that I’m obsessed with MacGruber. And I have read various incarnations of a second MacGruber movie. None of them ever happened. I can’t wait for this.

**John:** Yeah. It’ll be great. I’m very, very excited for it.

Craig, will your kids watch MacGruber? Will they find it funny?

**Craig:** My son will not watch MacGruber. He doesn’t really watch any television like that. That’s not what he does. My daughter watches an enormous amount of TV. Will she watch MacGruber? No, I don’t think that’s her gear. No.

**John:** Yeah. And so my daughter wanted to watch a comedy this past week and so we ended up watching Airplane which was phenomenal.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** It’s just great. And I was happy to be able to get her to that place. But I think comedy is an especially tough thing to watch with teenagers because what the teenager wants to watch that’s funny versus what I remember being very funny as a teenager, there’s just not an overlap. It’s such a – so many movies that were funny to us are just not funny to them.

**Craig:** And aren’t really funny anymore.

**John:** Sometimes they’re not funny anymore.

**Craig:** They’re just not funny anymore. I mean, Airplane is kind of permanently funny. But I do remember the feeling of my father saying you will love this movie, it is so funny. And I was just like brace for impact. And it was usually not that funny. But, you know, you watch it with your dad.

**John:** So, comedies can bring us together. Action movies can rev us up. But news came out of London this week that the film Aladdin, my film Aladdin, could actually save your life. We’ll put a link in the show notes to according to the University College of London going to the movie theater to watch a movie can be as good for your heart as going to the gym.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So in this study of 71 people they had folks who were watching Aladdin with all sorts of monitors attached to them and folks who were reading a book with all sorts of monitors attached to them, and the folks who were watching Aladdin had a better, more beneficial heart outcome than the folks who read the book.

**Craig:** The folks who were reading the book died. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, I should also say that this study was put together by a movie theater chain.

**Craig:** So cigarettes don’t cause cancer?

**John:** It’s funny.

**Craig:** Books are bad for you. Movies good.

**John:** Cigarettes improve your vim and vigor. Yeah.

**Craig:** Four out of five doctors agree. Not a ton of stock to be taken in this particular study. But it is nice to see at least watching movies isn’t something that will kill you. I mean, every day there’s a study that explains why something that you like doing will kill you. So, you know, I’ll take that. I’ll go as far as saying it doesn’t appear that they kill you.

**John:** So this was arguing for why seeing a movie in a theater is a beneficial thing for you. And a point it makes here which I think is probably a valid point which they could study some other way is that it is a communal experience but it’s also an experience of focused attention. Because in theory when you’re watching a movie in a theater you are not doing anything else. And in our 2020 world we’re always doing nine things at one time. And so to be doing one thing and being focused on one thing at a time is probably a novel experience for someone in 2020. So in that way it probably is helpful for your mental wellbeing.

**Craig:** It’s like going to the spa.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like the Onsen but for cinema.

**Craig:** What’s the Onsen?

**John:** So some future episode we will talk about public nudity, but Onsens are the Japanese spas–

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** It’s where you hang out naked with everyone else. And it’s uncomfortable for a moment but also kind of a nice thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not going to do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** Nope. Last bits of follow up. Highland2. We came out with a student edition. So people were writing in saying like, hey, I am a film student at this school. We would all like to use Highland. Final Draft will give us a discount. Can you give us a discount?

And so we found out a way to do that. So, if you are a film student at a school, and at a school that uses an edu or something that’s clearly a school email extension where you are, we have a program now where you can sign up to get basically the full version of Highland2 for two years for free.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** So send us in at brand@johnaugust.com and cc your professor or whoever runs that program so we can get your school signed up so that you guys as film students can use Highland2 for free.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, a discount off of Final Draft may reduce its price to nearly what you ought to pay for it, but you’re probably still paying too much.

**John:** Yeah. So send this is in, brand@johnaugust.com and we will get you hooked up.

**Craig:** Great. Good job.

**John:** Lastly, Weekend Read, the other app my company makes, we have I think all of the nominated scripts for the 2020 awards up in Weekend Read right now. So if you want to read what those screenplays are you should take a look in Weekend Read. They’re there. I think one of the best ways to really celebrate the movies that you’re seeing is to see what those words were like on the page.

**Craig:** Excellent. Smart idea.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our feature topic today which is anxiety and ambition. We’ll start with a listener who wrote in. “I’m a 29-year-old aspiring writer who is currently working a ‘job with value’ from Episode 422 for a major TV network here in Los Angeles I am not gainfully employed as a writer, but I’m hoping to be one day. For much of my adult life I’ve been dealing with some form of manageable anxiety. To cope I’ve always brushed these feelings aside. After all it’s easier to blame the news cycle, Twitter, a bad relationship, or some other external influence.

“I tell myself things like this must be part of what makes me me, or aren’t the most shining archetypes of writers always battling and embracing their own demons in one way or another? After years of brushing my anxiety issues under the rug with little work to show for myself I thought it time to reconsider my practices. During the past few months I’ve started seeing a therapist, practicing yoga three or four times a week, journaling daily, and exploring the many realms of meditation. Before these practices it felt like I’d been subconsciously wearing a heavy jacket of tension that forced me to suffer in silence.

“Paying attention to mindfulness seems to be impacting my life in dramatic, positive ways. I feel happier, healthier, and more able to connect with my inner voice. A lot of the credit for me taking the step to see a therapist goes to your discussion in Episode 99 with Dennis Palumbo. So, thank you. Out of curiosity what sort of mindfulness practices do you both engage in? I apologize if you’ve already talked about this in some form and it missed me.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s terrific to hear. I think you’re not alone, friend. A lot of people cope with anxiety by brushing it aside, which of course is not coping, and nor is it aside, nor can it be brushed. It never goes away. Avoidance is everyone’s first move. It’s the path of least resistance. And we’re humans. We’re built to be efficient. So if someone is walking down the street and suddenly they turn left and they’re walking on a bunch of nails they’re going to stop and go a different way. Avoidance. Pretty normal.

Unfortunately with things like anxiety and depression they can’t necessarily be avoided because you are the nails. You’re generating pain. So a lot of people, they engage in mindfulness exercises – meditation, yoga, deep breathing. Some people just sit really still and think. Honestly, whatever works. I mean me, personally, I’m a breather. I just stop and I really just work on breathing for about 45 seconds. I hate it. I’ve got to be honest with you. I hate it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But then like suddenly it works. But while I’m doing it I just feel stupid and angry. And then it works. So, you know, it’s like eating vegetables. You’ve got to do it.

**John:** So the listener mentions meditation. So I started using Head Space. I don’t use it regularly right now but I will say that going through the practice of like that first month of it got me much better at being able to mentally open up my fist and sort of let that anxiety go. There’s a way in which your mind grabs onto things and holds them really tight. And it just lets you unclench and let that thing float away and you find like, oh, I can actually get that thing to not be occupying every thought in my head.

Mindfulness to me is really about sort of recognizing where you are in the present moment and so it’s not ruminating on the past or like over-planning for the future. It’s really sort of being like where you’re at right now and sort of checking where you are in that space. So, breathing is fantastic.

Another thing that can be really helpful and this sounds really simple and dumb but it’s just like to sit where you are and take a survey through the room and just like notice everything in the room. And not try to put judgment or value on it, but just be really seeing everything that’s around you. And it just sort of stops kind of your brain from doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Those are things I find myself doing when I get stressed out.

**Craig:** I do think that for some people, and I’m likely one of them, sometimes there is an anxiety because of some emotional things that you’re holding onto or you’re struggling with, or you’re afraid of. Sometimes I think I’m experiencing anxiety because my brain is designed to work. It’s designed to chop a certain amount of wood. And if it’s not chopping the wood it can start chopping itself.

And it’s one of the reasons why I love puzzles so much because they kind of just – it’s like my dog will just sit there with that rawhide bone and she’ll just chew, and chew, and chew. And I just think well what for? It’s not food. You’re not getting anything. Well, because she needs to chew. And puzzles are like my rawhide bone. And I think it’s important for writers to also remember just because their mind is worrying and they’re kind of feeling that sort of brain churn it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re broken or flawed or sick. It’s just that’s how your mind works. And sometimes all you need to do is give it a bone to chew.

**John:** Yeah. I want to talk about an aspect of anxiety that’s probably more common to writers than sort of the general population which is ambition. And so I was having a conversation with some USC film students this past week and they were talking about this need they feel to like I have to say yes to every project. I have to always sort of be climbing ahead, ahead, ahead. They sort of sounded like Silicon Valley types. That they were constantly sort of chasing. And they were overworking themselves. They were suffering from burnout. And like, wow, you shouldn’t be suffering from burnout when you’re in your second year of film school. That’s too much.

So I wanted to distinguish between some good things about wanting stuff and going after stuff, which I label ambition, versus anxiety. If you’re going to say yes to a project here are some good reasons to say yes to a project. It might be because there’s something you’re just genuinely excited to do. Or there’s a specific thing you want to learn or a specific person or group of people you want to work with.

You’re asking yourself why do I want to do this. And if those good reasons are there then, yeah, that’s a project you should consider. But, if you’re approaching a project and you’re wanting to say yes because of these bad reasons that’s anxiety. So you might be thinking you’re afraid if you don’t say yes there won’t be another opportunity. You’re jealous of other people doing stuff like that. Or you’re just kind of adding to a list. And it’s understandable why people sort of want to do all the things but really if you just take a second and think about why you’re trying to do this thing you may decide, you know what, I don’t really need to or want to do that. Because every time you say yes to a project you’re de facto saying no to something else. You have a limited amount of time and there’s a bunch of stuff that you probably should be writing, that you want to write, that are really uniquely yours to write that if you’re always chasing after other stuff you’re never going to get the time to actually do them.

**Craig:** And you will make mistakes. You will say yes to things that you shouldn’t say yes to.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** You will say no to things you shouldn’t say no to. You will say yes to something that makes total sense and then 12 days later somebody comes along with something that’s so much more interesting and better and now you’re not available. These things will happen, so just price it in. There’s no way, there’s no perfect strategy. You’re not going to be able to solve this. You just kind of hope for the best.

I think your list here is great. The only thing I’d probably add into the bad column is that you don’t want to say yes because someone is giving you approval through the offer of work. When someone comes to you and says we think you’re amazing, we love what you do, only you can fix this, you’re incredible, and it’s a big deal, you might go, well, who am I to say not to that? I mean, this is amazing, right? They’re telling me I’m great therefore their opinion of whether or not I should write this is more valid than mine. And as it turns out it’s not.

**John:** Craig, I got a shiver as you talked through that because that still works on me, honestly.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it works on me, too. It never stops. I’m trying to become more aware of it because I think 90% of the time people are being honest with you. They’re saying we love you. And as somebody who is – you know, we all start in this business unloved. Right? We’re out in the cold. We’re desperate for somebody to take us in. We’re like the Little Matchstick Girl in Hans Christian Andersen, freezing out there, while everyone is inside eating that big turkey.

And then suddenly people are inviting us inside and we’re so delighted. And we never really lose the trauma memory of being shut out and undervalued and underused and underemployed and underappreciated.

So, when people come at us with honest approval it can sometimes screw up our brains.

**John:** Yeah. It overwhelms your pleasure sense. You’re just like, oh yes, this is what I’ve craved all this time.

**Craig:** Exactly. 10% of the people know exactly that they’re doing that. And those are the worst people. And you’d think, well, 10% is not that many. It’s a lot. It’s actually numerically a lot of people. So you just have to allow yourself to enjoy the approval of somebody wanting you to do something without feeling that that obliges you to do it.

**John:** Yeah. Now, I also want to be aware that what we’re talking about may seem like luxury, like we have the choice of things, where you’re not stuck doing a thing because you have to keep the lights on, because you have to sort of pay rent. Totally understand and get that. But the things you’re doing for yourself, the choices you’re making I’m just arguing to avoid sort of meaningless grinding. Like there’s that videogame quality where you’re just killing orcs in order to make enough leather to do at thing.

You know, sometimes you have to grind a bit and just try to make a meaningful grinding and at least be aware of why you’re doing what you’re doing. And if it is just to keep the lights on, that’s fine. That’s good. But don’t pretend that it’s also your artistic satisfaction if it’s not.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I mean, if you’re doing it well you will end up in a place where you will have more things offered to you than you can do. That’s inevitable. So, yeah, we don’t mean to rub it in because some of you are listening to this going what a wonderful first class problem. But, my friend, if you are struggling right now but good you will have this problem.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. The other last thing I would say to avoid burnout is to focus on the process and not the results. So obviously you want to come out of this with a great script. It would be wonderful to get awards. But really look at how do you make the days’ work meaningful? That doesn’t mean it’s actually fun and joyful at all moments, but that you could wake up in the morning saying like, OK, this will be a difficult day but I will get to learn this thing. I will get to see these people who I like. There will be a good reason for me to go through this day. And I will go to bed knowing that I did something that mattered today. If you can do that–

**Craig:** [laughs] I always struggle with that.

**John:** But if you can do that then you’re finding some meaning in the process and it’s not all about sort of chasing this thing down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I say all the time that what we do is a process job, not a results job. And yet there are days when you kind of feel bad because there weren’t results that day. Over time you will be able to recognize that just because you didn’t get results on a particular day doesn’t mean that you’re result-less.

Look, it never ends. It never, ever ends, no matter what you do. No matter how you do it in this business. Your brain is going to mess with you somehow. It messes with you on your worst days. And I’ve got to be honest, it messes with you on your best days. It just gets in there. You know, you’d think like, whoa, hey, cool man. You won some awards. And then you think, oh, never going to do something that good again. Then your brain starts doing what it does. It’s just part of who we are and you’ve got to kind of give yourself a break as your brain undermines itself. It’s just inevitable.

**John:** Yep. It is true.

Let’s move on to our next thing, and we can frame this with a question that we got in from Michael. He lives in East Hackney, London, UK. He writes, “I was curious to hear your thoughts on how much knowledge and spatial awareness writers should have of interior spaces. Seemingly subtle things like the location of a bathroom or the distance between your character’s living room and their study may play an important part in your story, but its location has been scouted or built is there an industry standard for how specific you should be when it comes to describing specific interior spaces?” That’s a good question.

**Craig:** It is a good question. I don’t believe there’s any kind of standard of how specific you should be when it comes to describing those spaces. But I’m a big believer that you should know them. Because what you fail to do if you do not know them is write something that will easily map onto real physical space. If you have thought about the physical space clearly, and then written the scene, nothing that you write will be incompatible with the physical space.

Very frequently new writers will write scenes and then you get there and you’re like so this person just, what, teleports to the other side of this room in one second? How does that work? Because they haven’t thought about the space. So this person is coming out of the thing but they’re facing towards the door so the bathroom is in the street? What’s going on here?

And, Lindsay Doran, famous for asking me, “Where are they standing?” It’s a big thing. Literally where are they standing in the space. So I think about that a lot. A lot. And the fact of the matter is the more you have a sense of what it ought to be when the rubber hits the road and reality shows up and you’re shooting somewhere that isn’t like what you imagined in your mind what you imagined in your mind can still exist in it, because what you imagined is consistent with reality.

**John:** 100%. So I want to offer as proof of concept of this is Rian Johnson’s screenplay for Knives Out. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDF.

**Craig:** Garbage.

**John:** It’s a pretty good script, I guess.

**Craig:** Garbage. And nominated for an Oscar. Congratulations, Rian.

**John:** Yes. A wonderful movie. But we’ll look at the first two pages of this, just as you take a look through them, he describes “The grounds of the New England manor. Pre-dawn. Misty.” We come inside the house. I’m not going to read the whole thing aloud. But he talks about the first floor, what’s there. “The detritus of a party. Stray champagne flutes.” It’s minimal. We follow a housekeeper named Fran carrying a tray of coffee up a flight of stars. The second floor doors are all closed. “The house has not woken up, and Fran steps lightly.” So he’s describing this tracking shot which is going to establish the geography of this house, which is of course incredible important. But it’s so well done. And it doesn’t feel like D&D descriptions. It’s not talking about a 20×30 foot room with ceilings of a certain height. He’s telling you what the character of the house is, but also giving you a sense of the unique geography. The way the hallways get narrower and narrower. The stairways get narrower and creaky. It completely tells you what you need to know about this house.

I’m assuming he wrote this way before he knew what the actual locations were he was shooting in and he was able to find locations that gave him what he wanted. It’s a great example of sort of how important it is to think about these interior locations as you’re writing.

**Craig:** I mean, I haven’t even asked him this question. My guess would be that the house was a set.

**John:** No, the house was not a set. I heard him on another podcast talking about it.

**Craig:** Wow, really?

**John:** So – actually when they screened it for the Academy Rian and everyone else was there talking about it. And that was the question, like what was the set? And basically it wasn’t a set. It’s a real house. There’s certain rooms in it where they shot at other houses. But, no, it’s not sets.

**Craig:** Wow, great. Well, it’s a terrific job that he does here. First of all, he’s directing on the page. And you can say, no, he’s a director, too. Yeah, uh-huh. OK. So it’s our job is to direct on the page. And it doesn’t involve camera, zoom, lens, blah. It’s just I need to know what’s going on.

I love how short and terse and readable it is. There is exactly as much information as I need. And none of what I don’t need.

So, and this will come up as we read through these things here. Here’s a wonderful thing. The very first line of action description. “The grounds of New England manor.” “The grounds of a New England manor” is not a sentence. Doesn’t matter. I get it. Great. “The grounds of a New England manor. Pre-dawn misty.” 999 writers out of a thousand, particularly those who are aspiring to be professionals, will come up with some sort of purple, rosy, fingers of Jesus pre-dawn haze lingers like the breath of an angel. Blah-blah-blah. “Pre-dawn misty.” Got it. Next.

Do you know what I mean? Like no time for baloney. Just here’s the deal. “Inside the manor. Unlit and still.” That’s how we do it. “Unlit and still.” It’s just like when we talk about how to describe characters. Wardrobe. Hair. Makeup. Things I can see. “Unlit,” view, and “still,” sound. Wonderful. Three words. Also not a sentence. Doesn’t care. Lovely. Great job.

**John:** Yep. Lovely. And by doing things so efficiently he’s able to give us a dead body at the bottom of page one.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well done Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Yeah. He deserves an Oscar.

**John:** All right. So he did not submit his three pages for us to critique.

**Craig:** Should have.

**John:** But a bunch of other people did. So thank you to everyone who submitted to the Three Page Challenge. Here is how this works if you’re new to the podcast. We have a page on the website, johnaugust.com/threepage. People send in the first three pages of their screenplay. They sign a little form saying it’s OK for us to talk about them. And they go into a big hopper. Megana reads through them. This time we had help from Bo Shim and Jacq Lesko in your office. Thank you very much for lending them to us.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** To read through all of them with a specific mandate for what we wanted to talk about this week which is how you establish settings. So that was the mandate we gave them to look for scripts that would let us talk about settings. So in some cases they did it brilliantly, or there were some issues. But that’s what we’re really going to focus on as we look through these three pages. So if you want to read along with us you can find links in the show notes and pull up the PDFs. But we’ll also give you a quick summary of the three that we’re going to take a look at today.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ll start with Bruja by Janelle B. Gatchalian.

**Craig:** All right. Shall I read the summary?

**John:** Read the summary for us, Craig.

**Craig:** I shall. Outside of a condo building two security guards fan themselves off with folded cardboard as a swarm of bats flies past them. One considers shooting at them but stalls. He looks up at a window. Inside a child’s bedroom we see a dresser, a doll on the floor, and four clocks set to different time zones on the wall.

On a calendar we see that it is April 13, 2001, Good Friday. There’s a crucifix on the wall and below that two cribs. A mother tucks her twin daughters in. They’re infants. One has a twinkling face. The other has watery eyes like she’s going to cry.

Nearby her son asks from his bed about the aswang. His mother replies, “We don’t believe that stuff anymore.” And he says that he heard bats. She says, “No, you didn’t. The sounds would be too high-pitched.” She says go to sleep. She leaves. Turns off the light revealing glow-in-the-dark stars.

Later we watch the stars fade as a breeze sweeps through. The door hinges open. Bats fly into the room in a cluster. The bats take form into a Filipino woman wearing white. We see her black hair in the mirror reflection as she makes her way to the cribs. She floats above them. Then wraps her tongue around one of the crying baby’s necks before she eats its head and then the rest of it.

The little boy is scared but watches as the aswang makes its way over to the other twin. And holds her, resting the baby at her shoulders where we see three small freckles on the baby’s ear.

And that is the first three pages of Bruja by Janelle Gatchalian.

**John:** Fantastic. So small exception here. There’s actually an extra page here because Janelle has included a glossary. It’s between the title page and the real page of script. There’s a glossary that lists seven terms and sort of gives descriptions of them. For some scripts I would be fine with this. I didn’t need it for these three pages. For a longer script it might be helpful. Craig, how did you feel about the glossary?

**Craig:** I don’t mind it. It’s not ideal. If you can get away with not putting the glossary in you’re better off because the audience will not get a glossary.

**John:** Nope. They will not. Also panopticon I don’t think belongs in a glossary because that’s just a normal English word.

**Craig:** That’s just a word.

**John:** All right. But getting to the actual text on the page, you know I did have a sense of the space and the place. I liked what we were doing in terms of establishing that there are security guards, that it’s hot, that’s it is in an environment that is sort of interesting and exciting to read. I have nitpicks on some of the writing on the page in terms of like some of the word choice. But I will say that I read this this morning and did sort of stick with me. If you were going to have a lady made of bats who then eats the head of a baby it’s going to stick. And at the end of these three pages I was curious to read more.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is meant to be a pilot for a series. My biggest issue really was with the very first scene. So this exterior condo building, night. I don’t know what a condo building is.

**John:** I don’t either.

**Craig:** I mean, I know it’s an apartment building that has condos, but how many, what, three stories? Four stories? 100 stories? And then I don’t know where it is. Is it in a city? Is it in the suburbs? Is it outskirts.

**John:** Yeah, only when we get to the caption near the bottom of the page it says Manila, Philippines. Give that to us at the start. It’s important. Really anchor us into the place where we are.

I love that it’s hot. I love them fanning with the cardboard. But we’re talking about the stagnant air and yet I can’t feel that. We need to see what’s happening to the security guards who also a little too generic for this. I want to see them – distinguish them. Make them sweaty. Tell us more about where we are.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this condo building is a nondescript building. It’s in the middle of nowhere that is defined. The two security guards emerge out of a guard post. What? What guard post? A guard post in front of a condo building?

**John:** I don’t know what that’s like.

**Craig:** Is there like a guard arm? Is this to enter the parking lot? Is it just a kiosk? What are we looking at? Why do they emerge? When it says to beat the hot still air, I need to see that they’re hot before they emerge. Usually if you’re hot on the inside there’s a little fan or something. So, they’re just coming outside. And I don’t know why. It seems like they’re emerging just because the writer wants them to emerge.

And then this is one of the stranger bits, because we’re talking about geography. It says, “Their eyes roam to motionless wheels of a parked car.”

**John:** I had a big question mark there, too. I don’t know what that means. They’re looking at a parked car?

**Craig:** The one thing that will never attract anyone’s attention ever are the motionless wheels of a parked car. Also, is it just one car? Is it alone? What kind of car? Why would they care? And then it says, “A swarm of bats rush in.” To the outside? You can’t rush into the outside. They’re outside.

**John:** They can rush past.

**Craig:** They can rush past. Where do they come from? They don’t just materialize out of thin air. This is exactly the kind of logic geography that we need to consider or else on the day of production meetings people say, “Are the bats just poof? What’s up?”

**John:** Yeah. So let’s describe the fantasy version of this scene which I think is what we were maybe trying to go for. Is that you have these two security guards who it says, “Swelteringly hot night.” They’re near their little booth, whatever it is. Have them already be outside the booth. There’s no reason for them to be inside and then come out. They’re already outside this booth. They’re fanning themselves with the cardboard. I love it.

Suddenly a thousand freaking bats are swarming past them. They freak out. They get inside the booth. One of them pulls a gun like should I shoot the bats. Like, no, of course you don’t shoot the bats. That is an interesting opening and I think that’s kind of what we’re trying to get to here. But the words in this opening section didn’t land for me.

**Craig:** They didn’t. And also it says that one of the guards “aims his gun at the bats. He stalls, shivering with fear.” Nobody actually shivers with fear. Not like that. And then it says, “He looks up at a window.”

**John:** Why?

**Craig:** Why? And which window?

**John:** Why?

**Craig:** How do we know he’s looking at a window? You know what it will look like when he looks up at a window? He’s looking up. That’s what it will look like. We won’t know. There is a version of this, by the way, just occurred to me, where you start with these two guys in their guard kiosk and it’s super-hot but there’s a little fan going [spinning sound]. And then the fan goes [sound of fan dying]. And it stops. And they’re like, oh no, because it’s super-hot, but they don’t want to go outside, which is information. Like well why don’t you want to go outside? What’s the problem?

And then they’re like, screw it, let’s just do it. It can’t be that bad. And then the bats come. Because the implication is that they know, I guess, that there’s some sort of supernatural thingy out there.

**John:** Yeah. Could be. So let’s take a look at this moment of looking up at the window because I think the instinct was to be, oh, that’s going to help the transition into the apartment. It doesn’t help. It’s just confusing. So if we see these guards and all these bats go past, the fact that we’re cutting to the inside of this apartment with this mother and these kids, we are expecting those bats to come. And that is tension that is great. And so that suspense is going to be there because holy cow something is happening.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. But the problem is that the bats appear to be in some sort of JFK air traffic control holding pattern for a very long conversation.

**John:** They do. Yes. So I think we can probably lose a little of this conversation. I also want to lose the mother’s line on the bottom of this first page. “Naku. It’s 2001. We don’t believe those things anymore.” Scratch that line. Just say like, “Mama, what about the aswang?” “Naku.” “I heard the bats.” Cross all the rest of this out. “Just close your eyes. I’ll keep the AC on. You’ll fall right asleep.”

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** That’s all we need.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** We’re set.

**Craig:** We’re done. We’re good. The scene where the woman appears, it can be scarier. The truth is that the – like when it says, “Hard to make out her face. She flips her raven hair back.” You know, like my daughter’s friends flip their raven hair back. Do you know what I mean? There’s a way for the hair to – you want to feel like this – is it stringy? Is it wet? Is it dirty?

**John:** Dirty fingernails claw through her stringy hair.

**Craig:** Or does the hair just float away revealing this terrible face? We’re missing something. And then honestly when she eats the baby it’s gross. There’s a line – sorry folks – “a bloody flesh of flesh, eyeballs exposed, floats and enters her mouth.” Well that almost sounds funny. Because like how does – flesh doesn’t have eyeballs. Anyway, there’s some issues here like this. And in the middle of this page – there’s about a page description or three-quarters of a page of this creature eating a baby.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when it is done eating the baby our writer writes in description, “She just ATE THE BABY!” Yes, we know.

**John:** We were there. We saw it.

**Craig:** Yeah. We saw it.

**John:** But did the young boy see it? And that’s where I got a little frustrated with the sequence.

**Craig:** Yeah, where is he? What’s he doing?

**John:** So I was confused by sort of the boy is in the room with the twin babies. OK. That’s great. But we lose him through all of the baby eating and then suddenly he’s there on page three. “The young boy grips the covers. He can’t control his heavy breathing. The aswang turns its head to the other baby twin, unfazed.”

So, he’s there but we don’t clock him for a very long time in there. And that should be – we should be worried about him. We should be seeing him.

**Craig:** Perspective. Right? You want to talk about what’s scary? Well the kind of objective perspective of this creature is not scary. A little boy’s perspective of this creature as it floats by him and then eats one of this infant siblings–

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** And then we’re like peeking. We’re getting peeks. We’re getting things. And then it looks over and he hides. You know, you’ve seen this stuff before. I mean, so anyway, that’s – yeah. But, you know, it seems like a good setup for a show.

**John:** It does seem like a good setup for a show. So this is a show about setting and sort of places things in a specific place. I like Manila, Philippines as a place to set this story. I have not seen it before. I’m curious about the mythology that Janelle is building for all of this. And while I didn’t love some of what happened on here I did like the idea of like, OK, there’s this woman who is made of bats who just ate a baby. That’s compelling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Bat-cloud lady baby-eater is good. So, we’re really talking about, again, living in that space. Looking around. Seeing it. And asking what do people need to know. Space. Relationship to space. Time matters. If bats are going to fly toward a thing they need to show up at bat speed, right? That’s just how it goes. So it’s stuff like that.

**John:** Yep. All right. Let’s travel still in the southern hemisphere for Night of Game by Alex Beattie. We’re in Kruger National Park at night. We see 50 white rhinos migrate through the plains. We hear the buzz of cicadas. And through the long gross we spot a silver tip of a rifle and then a few yards away more silver tips. We watch a rhino grunt as it charges ahead only to be shot with bullets and the wail of the rhino as it collapses. We see these white Boer poachers rise from the grass, removing their knives.

Then we cut to the Zimbali Lodge at night. Masks and sculpt animal heads lining the lobby. We follow the footsteps up the stairs to the hotel rooms. There’s a beep as a card swipes and a door opens. Miles, 18 years old, sleeps. We pull up on him as his eye flickers open and we see his seven-year-old sister Caitlyn. She’s fully dressed, trying to wake him up.

Miles protests that it’s too early. It’s 4am. Miles gets up and meets his mom, Lori, in her hotel room. He looks at an old framed photo of his parents as Lori makes a comment about the night she met Miles’ father with a melancholy tear in her eye.

We cut to a game reserve with an anti-poaching sign. The family rides in a jeep. Caitlyn is asleep. Miles is in the back. Lori is up front with her guide, Barry, who welcomes them to the park saying it’s the largest white rhino population in the world. Lori says it was her husband’s second home. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of page three.

Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** OK, well, keeping with our topic today of location we begin with exterior, the bush, night. Super: Kruger National Park, South Africa. And then we see a crash of at least 50 white rhino. That is a lot, by the way. We tend to underestimate the size of numbers when we look at these things. 50 white rhinos. A ton. Migrate through the vast rugged plains. A rhino lingers behind and wanders into the thicket.

Well, is it plains or is it thicket? Because plains ain’t thicket.

The huge bull feeds on a nearby thorn bush. And so hidden in the long, dry grass a silver gun tip. I feel like this is an area where you’re setting up a rhino is about to get picked off by predators. And therefore I need to know specifically what’s going on. Is it a little area that’s through a gorge? Is it flanked on both sides by tall grass? Is the rhino aware? I mean, this is the setting of a kind of a murder, right? So what we have is a little too generic. It’s sort of like Africa. Here comes guns. But then it charges and it dies. And they come out in their night vision goggles. OK, so that’s kind of, you know, it’s fine.

But I would do, I don’t know if you thought the same, but I would be far more specific about the arrangement of cover and stuff to create a sense of suspense and danger and also give the people who are making this movie a fighting chance at actually picking a location or designing something or even filling it in to fit the vision of the writer.

**John:** Yeah. So going back to Rian’s script for Knives Out. The grounds of a New England. Pre-dawn misty. So incredibly minimalist but we also identify it as Thrombey Estate Manor House. So it’s pretty easy to summon an image in your head of what kind of place we’re at. This right here I do feel like we’re sort of generic African savannah. I need to be grounded a little bit more clearly. You’re going to have to paint me a picture a little bit better, in part so we can get the suspense that Craig is looking for. Like, you know, if we’re just seeing these rhinos here, well, I mean, is this going to be a predator attacking? What’s going to be happening here?

Once we see a gun, OK, it’s going to be some sort of poaching thing. Is there going to be a twist? How many people are there? What’s happening? And I didn’t get that sort of grounding that I wanted here.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s hard to generate surprise when you haven’t really laid in the arrangement in my mind of where these things are coming from and why it even works at all.

So, our next location is Zimbali Lodge and we start inside Zimbali Lodge which is an interesting choice. Typically we’re going to want to see the exterior of something like this. But hopefully we get the sense of what it is. We’re going to need a break in between the scene before and this scene, which is why I’m thinking you might want some sort of exterior. And we’re in the lobby and we’re creeping low along the stone tiles and faint footsteps climb the steps. I was a little confused by that. Are we the footsteps? I think so.

So, it’s OK in this point and here’s where I would say golly gee, don’t be afraid to say “we.” This is a perfect time to use “we.” We are climbing the steps slowly. At the top of the landing, hotel rooms. Beep. A swipe. We push the door open. A fan whirls. Reveal we are, blah-blah-blah, if we needed to, right?

Why is this little girl in a lobby at night? I have no idea. She’s seven. I understand why a little girl would want to sneak out of her room to wake up her brother because she’s bored. But why would she start in the lobby?

**John:** Yeah. That didn’t track for me either. So, this little girl, so story logic wise, this little girl is excited to go on their safari. They do start at the crack of dawn. I’ve done them. They’re fun. But you do start at night, so that’s not unrealistic. But it’s unrealistic that she’s out of the room. I also get concerned by – so if you’re in a location that has multiple sub locations you can do the thing like what we’re doing here which is just hotel room, but I didn’t get a sense of like, wait, are we inside the room? Are we outside the room? You got to make it more clear where we’re at here.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I didn’t know why we were sort of sneaking up. But then through binoculars we see Miles Abbott, 18, slim build, sprawled out asleep. Wait, were we in binocular vision this whole time? What’s going on? I was just really confused by why we were doing what we were doing. And are we supposed to feel frightened for Miles? That these poachers are after him? I didn’t get what the writer was going for here.

**Craig:** Well, I think it is fake suspense. By the way, it’s not shootable. You can’t shoot the thing through binoculars. It just doesn’t work like that, unless they’re fake binoculars because they’re a toy apparently. She’s holding a tiny pair of pink binoculars. Maybe they’re a toy. But even then you’d have to vignette it like binoculars which would just be confusing to people.

And like you said are they doing that the whole time? So it’s meant to be a misdirect and it just doesn’t make sense.

So here’s the thing about misdirects. Totally cool to do. But when you reveal they have to make retroactive logic, otherwise their just a cheat and the audience loses faith in you and they feel like you’re just cheating, which you are.

**John:** Which I worry you would feel that way in here. So, the actual conversation between the two of them if you just strip away all the other stuff is just like the girl is really excited to go, the boy is 18 years old and sort of being a teenager and wants to sleep in. He then goes into the mother’s room and has – this is the kind of scene that I really – it’s not quite the air vent for me, but it’s close. Where there’s a conveniently placed photo of the person who is dead. And for no apparent reason one character picks it up and starts talking about it and they have a conversation about this dead person, which is meant to set up something else. You got to find a different way to do that, folks, because it can’t be there. It can’t.

**Craig:** Well, when a man dies and leaves behind a wife and two children inevitably about three years later one of the kids will look at a picture and the wife will start talking in an impromptu fashion about the first night they met, as if the kids never heard that story.

It’s just, yeah, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s not emotionally logical.

**John:** And here’s the opportunity that Alex has given himself for getting that backstory out, because they’re going to go on safari and she gets the opportunity to say like my husband was a safari leader. Basically we don’t need that information on page two because it’s going to be very easy to get out on page three if it really is that crucial. So, I think that’s interesting and helpful.

I had a question on page two about accents. I think they have British accents but I’m not sure if they have British accents. You got to tell us, because I don’t know how to read some of these lines until I know what accent these people are.

**Craig:** I mean, generally speaking cheeky would imply British to me. Or Irish. Or Australian.

**John:** Or they could be South African.

**Craig:** Or they could be South African. Actually you’re right.

**John:** There’s a lot.

**Craig:** There is a lot. It could be a lot of different things. This is not a sentence. “Hluhluwe home to the largest population of white rhino in the world.” There is no verb.

Now, people don’t necessarily have to speak with verbs in their sentences. But this is a sentence that would normally have a verb like “Hluhluwe is home to the largest population of white rhino in the world.” Why is he suddenly saying that? I mean, normally we want to come into these scenes in the middle. He’s going on and on. He’s rambling.

**John:** Yeah. OK. But let’s talk about transitions between moments in scenes. Because page three, the end of the Lori/Miles scene, “Where’s Caitlyn?” “She’s already started her little safari adventure!” It’s not a good out. So we talk about the out of a scene is like how do you stop a scene so you can get onto the next thing? Or leave a scene with enough energy that you’re spilling into the next one. I didn’t buy it. Especially with “They both laugh.” No. That’s not–

**Craig:** What’s funny?

**John:** Yeah. Maybe laugh at something that’s funny. This is not a moment that’s funny that’s going to give you the out. And in so many cases stop trying to write for the out and look for what is the last thing that sort of necessarily wants to happen in that scene so you can just cut to the next thing and move on. And you can come into the next thing a little bit later. I just felt like we always have these opportunities to be moving ahead.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve covered this one.

**John:** I think we’re good.

**Craig:** Yeah, we did it.

**John:** But I want to say setting something at a safari park is good. That’s a space that I’m not seeing in a lot of other things, so I think there’s really good opportunities to do fascinating things there. But describe what’s interesting and new and different. And unfortunately in these pages we got kind of generic-y Africa and we got a hotel room.

**Craig:** And generic people and generic emotions.

**John:** Again, we want you to take advantage of the specific things you can do in that place which is to make your movie and your first three pages different than all other three pages.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. Well, let’s move onto our last one. This is Upward Mobility. It’s limited series pilot. Oh, I like limited series. And this is story by Carol Gold Lande, Lande I’m going to guess, L-A-N-D-E, and Linda Minnella Yardley. And it is written by Linda Minnella Yardley.

We watch an opening credit sequence of the Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Fresco Murals. The show opens in the dining room kitchen of the Ford Bomber Plant, late morning. A busboy unloads Ford monogramed china while a black waiter, Lester in his 50s, and a young white trainee walk through the kitchen. Lester explains to the trainer that Mr. Ford and his executives eat breakfast in the dining room every day. And Mr. Ford prefers his milk unpasteurized, believing that it’s healthier.

Trainee doesn’t like this, doesn’t appreciate that he has a person of color as his boss. We head into the dining room. Other waiters are getting the room ready for lunch, but Henry Ford, 79, and Harry Bennett, 55, are in conversation. Harry hands Ford a photo of a University of Michigan football player. And throughout this exchange we learn that Ford is disappointed in his own son and is looking for someone to spy on him. He rejects the football player, thinking that his son would identify him as a spy. Lester serves Harry a steak. The trainee gives Ford his milk and cereal.

Ford looks through and finally picks a photo of a middle-aged man named Joe Salvo. Lester brings the phone from the kitchen. There’s a call for Harry. Harry listens briefly and has to leave. He tells Ford one of their planes has blown up and the entire crew is dead. He also says to Ford that Edsel has landed. Ford drops his napkin and then tucks it back into his neck and tells Harry to get Joe Salvo hired for his son, Edsel, quickly. And that is our summary of Upward Mobility.

John, what did you think?

**John:** So, the pages we’re reading are not the first three pages. Apparently there’s a teaser that happened right before this. I’m guessing in the teaser we actually saw a bit more of factory-factory because in what we’re seeing here we have the opening title sequence and then we’re into this sort of executive dining room.

But, with what I saw I was intrigued by sort of some of the setting, the geography, and curious about what was happening, but a little bit confused.

So, let’s talk about this opening title sequence. I know Diego Rivera Fresco that she’s talking about. I think that’s actually a great idea for using in these opening titles because it feels dynamic, it feels period, it feels really cool. In my head because I recently saw Ford vs. Ferrari I keep picturing that Ford Motor Company. So this is a few years earlier. I need to know a little bit more place and time. And I might have gotten those in the first three pages before this, but I was missing some specificity about exactly what year I’m kind of in. And I would love to have seen that.

That said, I’m excited to see Lester and, you know, the black waiter who is training the trainee, and that little bit of racism. I always love a moment where a phone gets brought to a table. I find that to be a good period detail.

But I also got a little bit lost in the we’re hiring someone to spy on the son. And I felt like there could have been sharper moments than that. Craig, what were you feeling?

**Craig:** Yeah. If I had to guess, I mean, again who knows? But I would think the teaser might be the plane crash.

**John:** Yes, OK.

**Craig:** That would be a fun way to open a show is a plane crash. I mean, everybody likes a good old plane crash. I mean, except for the people on the plane. Or the people under the plane. Yeah, the opening title sequence could be pretty cool. You know, the thing about opening title sequences is if they’re not actively telling story, like for instance the title sequence for Game of Thrones, then they might not even need to be detailed if they really are just graphic title sequences.

The bomber plant, again, I would probably not start inside a kitchen if I don’t know where the kitchen is. I haven’t seen the exterior. I’m guessing I don’t see the exterior in the prior bit. That’s if I don’t. I also don’t know what bomber plant means. And bomber plant is kind of a strange phrase. It means bomber airplane. So maybe just a little clearer there.

But there’s a good job here of using space. I like steaming fog. I like rattling. I like flinching as he plucks hot plates from the rack and stacks them.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I can feel it, right? Like I can see it. I can feel it. I’m not sure why young white trainee who is part of this scene and who is bristling under the training of–

**John:** He gets a name. He should get a name.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. Right? He gets a name. Otherwise I’m less interested in his racism to be honest with you. It just has less impact because he’s not a real person.

**John:** Craig, I want to delete the paragraph, “Even though he’ll never hold paper on a spec of land, Lester addresses the trainee with the posture and confident formality of the man who owns this kitchen.”

**Craig:** I agree with you.

**John:** Don’t need it.

**Craig:** Because his dialogue does that for you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think the actors can see what’s going through here.

**John:** I like Lester’s line, “Fix that good in your mind.” It’s specific and kind of weird and it sticks. I mean, and it doesn’t feel too written. I dug it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wasn’t – so we have to talk a little bit about when people say names. We’ve had a few of these in here. People are just announcing names. Generally speaking a cook, “Lester, food is good to go here.” No, I don’t think so. Cook taps the order-up counter. “Food’s ready.” Or just taps it. And they take the plates. There’s an opportunity if Mr. Ford knows Lester’s name that’s good. Or if Harry says, “Thank you, Lester,” because they know him. That’s good. It’s just finding those moments. Speaking of names, a lot of people aren’t going to know that Henry Ford’s son was named Edsel. In fact, most people will not know that. So when it says, “Even Edsel could spot him as one of your moles,” is Edsel a competitor? Does Edsel work for the government? Who is Edsel? Is Edsel confusion? Hard to say.

So, “Even my son could spot him as one of your moles.” Something. You just have to be a little clever about this, otherwise we’re going to get a little – I think that’s part of the confusion. Because this is also a confusing thing they’re doing. They’re looking through photos to find somebody who can spy on or look after his kid and they’re not even sure what the criteria are.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a Talented Mr. Ripley situation where he wants somebody to kind of befriend or sort of get close to his son so he can keep an eye on him. That’s my guess is that Edsel is sort of a mess-up and he wants somebody to watch over him.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. So it’s a little bit – and I love that. I think that’s a really cool idea. It’s just that I’m not quite sure when he says I don’t like this guy, I don’t like that, I’m like why exactly? Altar is spelled incorrectly by the way. A-L-T-A-R.

And also I don’t quite understand what’s going on when Harry says, “One of our planes blew up. The whole crew is dead.” Ford doesn’t care. Lester is worried. And then Harry says, “And Edsel just landed.” That’s all in italics. And that seems to jar Henry Ford. Why?

**John:** Yeah. So I don’t think we have – it’s not that we don’t have information, but we’re not sufficiently curious to make us really want to go to like got to have the answer to that question. And I think some tightening in these scenes could get you to that place.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so.

**John:** We may have seen Edsel in the first three pages which is why we’re focusing on this. So we don’t know everything about this.

**Craig:** We don’t.

**John:** Something I want to talk about with title pages on all of these projects. In this case it’s story by Carol Gold Lande & Linda Minnella Yardley, written by Linda Minnella Yardley. It wouldn’t be written by, it would be screenplay by. So, written by is both screenplay and story. So, if this is a situation where the two of you came up with the story together and one of you actually wrote these pages, Screenplay by is what you would actually be putting in that place.

That date belongs in the bottom right corner of the page.

Generally you won’t see the Written by or Story by, you won’t see the word written or story capitalized. Those would be lower case by themselves. It’s not a big thing. But most scripts you’re going to read are going to have that be lower case. So you might as well do that.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny. I’m just thinking about this because it’s television, I don’t know – would it be screenplay by–?

**John:** Sorry, teleplay by.

**Craig:** Teleplay by. Yeah.

**John:** Teleplay by. You do television now, Craig, so you’re going to have to learn this.

**Craig:** I mean, I am so far behind on everything.

**John:** All right. I want to thank everyone who submitted. So I guess it’s more than 60 folks that we read through. But especially these three/four people who wrote in with their scripts. Thank you for sharing them with us so we can talk through what we loved and what we thought could be improved upon. If people want to send in their own scripts again it’s johnaugust.com/threepage. And you will be able to submit for the next time we do this.

It’s time for our One Cool Things, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, good, you know I have one this week.

**John:** You go first.

**Craig:** So many, many, many moons ago one of my One Cool Things was a game for iOS and possibly for Android, although I don’t care about Android, called House of Da Vinci. And House of Da Vinci was kind of a Room knockoff. It wasn’t kind of Room knockoff. It was a Room knockoff. But it was pretty good. And as I recall I said this is like a good stop gap for people who love the Room. And they have a sequel out now and it’s really good. And it’s not really a Room knockoff. It still has very similar mechanisms in terms of picking up objects, manipulating them, folding them, turning them, twisting them. And some of the same sounds. But the nature of the gameplay is quite different. And it’s really well done. I have to say. And it runs beautifully. Very smooth for a game that’s clearly complicated and large in terms of its demands on my iPad.

So, strongly recommend. If you do like puzzle-solving games like the Room, check out the latest House of Da Vinci.

**John:** Fantastic. I will check that out. I have two One Cool Things. The first is How America Uses its Land, which is a Bloomberg thing, which apparently is from 2018, but I just saw it this last week because people were tweeting about it. It’s this really good map of the US that sort of shows acre by acre or however they’re dividing it up sort of how America actually uses its land. And so of course all the cities in America could fit up into the northeast. And most of our land is pasture and other sorts of things. Really it’s a great way of describing the choices we made as a country in terms of what we’re using our land to do. And we could probably use our land better than a lot of golf courses.

The second thing is an article in the LA Times about Sweetgreen. So I eat at Sweetgreen every week or two. They make good salads and they try to compost and do things. This article talks through the struggles they’ve had actually composting and sort of they try to have no waste go into landfills. And it’s very, very hard. So the article does a good job showing the real struggles they’ve had with waste management in terms of it’s one thing to try to source recyclable products and things that are made of compostable materials, but actually getting them from the store to those facilities is really difficult. So, just a good article about sort of the really complicated production chains of modern commerce.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Nice. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with production assistance this week by Bo Shim and Jacq Lesko.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jemma Moran. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

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

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one you’re going to hear right after this music where we’re going to talk about mugs.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Bonus Segment

**John:** OK, here is my issue with mugs.

**Craig:** I cannot wait for this.

**John:** All right. So I think mugs are a good invention. I think they’re delightful for coffee or for tea or for whatever you want to drink. My issue is with novelty mugs that are given to me as gifts or as part of gifts. And I don’t want your mugs. I don’t want the mug you’re giving me for this school where I did an Arlo Finch event. People give them to you because they’re thankful for you doing something for them, but you can thank me by not giving me your mug because I don’t want your novelty mug.

**Craig:** You’re a real mug Grinch.

**John:** I’m really Grinchy about mugs. Craig, so let’s say you went to some award show. You’ve been to a bunch of award shows lately. And in the gift bag there was a mug. What would you do with that mug?

**Craig:** I’d probably shove it in the mug cabinet.

**John:** So, you have a mug cabinet. And tell me about your mug cabinet.

**Craig:** You know, it fills up with mugs. [laughs] The thing is like the mugs – I want you to direct your mug ire at Color Me Mine. This is an entire business where you’re paying them for you to end up with an endless mug.

No, I get it. I mean, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that accumulates. The things that bums me out is there’s all these gift baskets and things. Like people send you a gift basket, great, that’s awesome. But there’s an actual basket. It’s like this woven thing.

**John:** What do you with the basket? Yes.

**Craig:** You got to chuck it. There’s nothing else to do with it. You can’t have a room full of baskets.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And at least, look, it’s basket material. It’s not made of iron. Or chemicals. But still like it’s just more junk.

**John:** There’s a limited number of Baby Moses, so I cannot send him down the river. I mean, there’s nothing for me to do with this basket.

**Craig:** Like back in the day of Moses when he was sent down the river, do you think when people found him they thought it was a gift basket? [laughs]

**John:** They did. Like, whoa, look what we just found.

**Craig:** What a bummer. It’s not even like – there’s no wine. There’s no crackers. It’s a freaking baby.

**John:** Yeah. There’s no fancy cheeses in there. There’s nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** No, not a bit.

**Craig:** Useless.

**John:** This year I got only one gift basket. And so I realize – I think it’s partly because, well, the agency I was at which usually sent me a gift back, they’re not my agency anymore. Bruckheimer did not send me a basket this year. Another director I worked with before didn’t send baskets this year. And you know what? I honestly didn’t miss it that much.

I missed sort of like not having that moment of thinking like, oh yeah, I remember I used to work for them. But I didn’t miss like the stuff that I didn’t want that I was going to throw away.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it’s funny. CAA doesn’t send gift baskets for Christmastime. They usually just send – they do a charity thing and then they’ll send a little booklet to show you, OK, here’s where your money went, I mean, here’s where we donated money instead of buying you a basket. Which honestly I think is great.

The thing is sometimes I think – so there’s a whole world of company junk out there. My late father-in-law was a Burger King franchisee. He owned a couple of Burger Kings. And he and my mother-in-law would go every year to a Burger King convention. And kind of the whole deal was like stuff. Junk. Pads. Pens. Clips. Mugs. There’s like a world of crap that gets generated with logos.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the logo crap industry.

**John:** Logo crap. Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know what? You’ve converted me. I’m out. I’m out of the mug business.

**John:** I’m out of the mug business, too. So, I say, Craig, just take that – Marie Kondo that mug cabinet. You don’t want those mugs. So what we’ve done is we got rid of all our novelty mugs. And so all of our mugs are the exact same identical mug from Pottery Barn. And you know what? I make my coffee in the morning. It’s indistinguishable from any other mug. And it’s better that way.

**Craig:** Look, we have these glass coffee tea mugs that are kind of like that insulated glass so you can have a hot thing and it doesn’t hurt your hand. That’s all I need. But I guarantee you if I throw one of those mugs away I’m going to hear about it from one of the two women in my house. No question. One, either my wife or my daughter, is going to say where is my blankety-blank mug? And I’m going to say, really? You wanted that? And then I’m going to get in trouble.

**John:** I want to be able to opt out of mugs. And so I want to be able to like – I want there to be a polite way for me to be able to say like, hey, I’m excited to come to event. And if you’re thinking about giving me a mug, or a baseball hat, with a logo on it please don’t. Or pen. These are things – you’re actually going to make me feel worse about the event for giving me this thing.

**Craig:** I will always take a pen. I love pens. So, I’ll take your pen.

**John:** Another bonus segment will be about my strong feelings on pens.

**Craig:** Oh, I love them.

**John:** All right. I love pens, I just don’t like any pens except for the pen I actually want.

**Craig:** Ugh, god, you’re a robot.

**John:** I am. Craig, thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Sign up for premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows Launch Event: February 9, 2pm at Chevalier’s on Larchmont
* [Gersh Signs Agency Agreement](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gersh-reaches-agreement-wga-1270717)
* [Aladdin Will Save Your Life](https://geektyrant.com/news/study-finds-that-going-to-the-movies-is-as-good-for-your-heart-as-going-to-the-gym)
* Download Highland 2 [here](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/), professors and students interested in the free student edition, email brand@johnaugust.com
* [Download Weekend Read to read Academy Award nominated scripts](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173)
* [Knives Out](https://lionsgate.brightspotcdn.com/fb/14/23cd58a147afbb5c758ecb3dff0a/knivesout-final.pdf) by Rian Johnson
* [Bruja](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2019%2F12%2FBRUJA_3_pgs_Janelle_Gatchalian_120519.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=23db0ab6b106842be40d09efa18690e1dcbe452deb65689c35adbebb303cdb7b) by Janelle B. Gatchalian
* [Night of Game](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F01%2FNight-of-Game.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=9db58af47aec65a547f110c777baf296a31b29383b246df72c88b0abf04c3a35) by Alex Beattie
* [Upward Mobility](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F01%2FScriptnotesUM.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=ac2859f1a8bf18c18229be6012dc782fc4b4fcc279a8a44a17974472e3847aae) by Linda Minella Yardley (Story by Carol Gold Lande and Linda Minella Yardley)
* [House of Da Vinci](https://www.bluebraingames.com/the-house-of-da-vinci-2)
* [How America Uses its Land](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/?sref=q8seIhDd)
* [Sweetgreen Composting](https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-01-15/sweetgreen-green-image)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jemma Moran ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/434st.mp3).

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

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

**Greta Gerwig:** Hello. I’m Greta Gerwig.

**John:** And this is Episode 433 of Scriptnotes.

**Greta:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. 433 episodes.

Today on this show we will be discussing ambition, authorship, and adaptation, which is why we’re so lucky to have Greta Gerwig filling in for Craig. She is the acclaimed writer and director of Little Women and Lady Bird. We’re going to answer some listener questions about descriptive writing and parenthood as well.

**Greta:** Great.

**John:** Craig is out sick today. But he has promised to join me after the credits for a bonus segment for Premium members where we talk about what was happening with him and Tiffany Haddish at the Golden Globes. So, Craig won a Golden Globe. He won a Golden Globe for Chernobyl.

**Greta:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Which is great. And now you already had a Golden Globe, because you won a Golden Globe for Lady Bird.

**Greta:** Actually you know what? The thing is because I wasn’t listed as a producer on Lady Bird or Little Women I actually don’t have any awards.

**John:** Well, you have many awards. You don’t have a Golden Globe?

**Greta:** No. Because it won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy but because I’m not a producer I don’t have a Golden Globe.

**John:** I’m going to throw this table.

**Greta:** I know.

**John:** I’m so angry.

**Greta:** I know. People are like let me see your Golden Globe and I’m like the thing is I don’t have one. It’s quite all right. I think eventually I will be a producer on my projects. But for the first couple I was like I want other people to be able to take that full space.

**John:** That’s fair. So I assumed that you and Craig had that in common winning Golden Globes. But you and I have something in common I discovered during our research. We are both born on August 4th.

**Greta:** No?

**John:** We are birthday twins.

**Greta:** Birthday twins. Plus Obama.

**John:** Plus Obama. The three of us. A powerful–

**Greta:** Have the same–

**John:** A powerful team.

**Greta:** And I think Queen Elizabeth. Is that right?

**John:** That sounds right. I’ll believe it. Say it with confidence and we’ll believe it.

**Greta:** Queen Elizabeth. No, that’s really great. A Leo.

**John:** Yeah, a Leo. I don’t really believe in astrology but like–

**Greta:** Oh, I do. [laughs]

**John:** But I have many qualities of Leo.

**Greta:** I mean, actually I don’t know that I believe in it in that I don’t know that I think there’s a correlation between the facts of the world and what you can glean from astrology. However, I think people use lots of things which it’s not technically based in hard fact at all. And if it makes you a little happier, why not? I mean, an astrologist told me once that I was in a lucky corridor. It was when I was making Lady Bird actually. And then she was like so if anything goes wrong, just ask yourself how is this an opportunity for me. Because it is.

And I was like well that’s just pretty good advice in general.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. Astrology maybe not true, but good advice always welcome.

**Greta:** Good advice. And I have Leo-ish qualities.

**John:** I’m going to be asking a lot of advice from you for our listeners. But let me lay out the overall agenda of things I’d love to talk about while I have you here for this hour. So I want to talk about your adaptation of Little Women which is unconventional and just terrific.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** We have the script in front of us so we’ll be able to do some deep diving on some scenes. But I want to know how you came to write it. Why you wrote it? It’s a story about ambition. Jo is very ambitious. You are ambitious as a filmmaker. You were instrumental in helping create a whole genre of filmmaking. So we should talk about that.

**Greta:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then I want to talk about the notion of authorship because Jo aspires so hard to be an author. And the work I associate you with is so autobiographical. And so like Little Women is sort of meta autobiographical because of some of the things you did, but Lady Bird is highly autobiographical. So the degree to which you are writing things that only you could write is I think a good thing for us to talk about.

**Greta:** Right.

**John:** That will be our agenda for this hour. But I want to know how you came to write Little Women because it’s a public domain story. You could have written it at any time, but you wrote it in a very specific way. So tell me about how you came to write it.

**Greta:** Well, the truth is actually I didn’t really know about the public domain for a long time, in terms of the text of Little Women. But I grew up reading this book. I read it many, many times. And Jo March was my favorite character. And in many ways she was the character that made me believe I could be a writer, because she wanted to be a writer. She was a writer. And then in some way that I didn’t know completely but I think you intuit when you’re reading it is because you’re holding the book Little Women in some ways you know she became the writer who wrote the book even though it’s a different name.

And I didn’t really know who Louisa May Alcott was because I read books the way all kids read books which is that the things within the pages seem real to you, even though they’re fiction. And I think the last time I read the book when I was something like 14 or 15 and then when I was 30 I reread it and I felt like I’d never read it before. I felt like it was brand new.

**John:** You read it just on a lurk? There was no reason?

**Greta:** I was actually moving out of one apartment into another apartment and that’s often the occasion to uncover some things, which is why it’s sometimes good to either move or clean stuff out, because then you revisit stuff. Anyway, I had the copy of Little Women that I had had when I was a girl. And I reread it. Or I sat down to sort of like page through it. And then I started reading it and I was like, oh my god, this is – in one way I almost know this by heart, and in another way I feel like I’ve never read it. I feel like it’s totally modern and strange and pressing. And I knew I wanted to make it into a film. I started seeing it as a film.

And then coincidentally my agent mentioned that Amy Pascal and the folks over at Sony were interested in making it. And I said you’ve got to get me in that room. And I went and I talked to Amy and Denise Di Novi and Robin Swicord and I told them what I wanted to do with it. And I hadn’t yet directed Lady Bird. So it was a long shot. But they said – initially what they said yes to was me writing the screenplay.

**John:** Let’s talk about you as a writer before that moment. Because you’d written on other movies before. And you directed before, but much smaller things.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** And so what were they reading of their work?

**Greta:** Why did they give me this job?

**John:** I’m truly curious. You’re coming into this room. What was it like?

**Greta:** Well, I had co-written two screenplays with Noah, Frances Ha and Mistress America. I think especially now that I’ve written and directed stuff on my own I think it’s a little easier to see how much of that is my writing. But I think when you’re initially a cowriter and also when you’re an actor I think there’s almost an assumption that maybe you just wrote the lines you said.

**John:** Exactly.

**Greta:** Which is not true. But it’s an understandable assumption. And then–

**John:** And that’s probably true for any writing team in general. You don’t know whether one of them by themselves can really do the work.

**Greta:** Exactly. And you’re not sure – and, because Noah had done things alone, it’s a little harder to tease out. But I’d done that. But then I had been hired properly – properly I mean by a person – I wrote a script for Lionsgate for Eric Feige and that I went in, I knew they had an idea of doing something I pitched and I said here’s what – and they gave me the job. And I wrote them a script. And so that was kind of the first thing that I’d done like that.

And then actually interesting on a sitcom that I tried to do that didn’t work, How I Met Your Father, How I Met Your Dad, I was a writer on that as well.

**John:** So there were things people could look at to say like she can really write by herself.

**Greta:** Yeah. There were a couple things. But it was kind of on faith. I mean, I did give them the script to Lady Bird even though I hadn’t made Lady Bird yet. And said, oh, I wrote this.

**John:** OK. That’s a pretty good script.

**Greta:** It was a good script, but I also think, you know, it’s hard to be the first one in the pool. And I thought it was a good script and I had gotten some feedback. People said, oh yes, it’s a good script. But like nobody really knows yet. You know, you have to believe in the thing before anybody else says it’s good. And that’s like what makes great producers is they can read something without anybody else telling them it’s good and think it’s good.

I had that script but it was still kind of – I mean, they certainly didn’t hire me to direct it. And it was like, well, give it a shot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Greta:** It wasn’t like–

**John:** Take a chance on you.

**Greta:** Yeah. It wasn’t like some big like now we’re all in on you. And I think I always wanted to direct it and thought that I should, but even though they weren’t thinking that way, I think a couple of things helped in that regard which is that I sort of had a sense of like I’m going to do whatever I want with this script because I mean nobody is ever going to make this.

**John:** Well let’s talk about talking into that room, meeting with – because I know Amy well and I know Denise and I know Robin Swicord. They’re all very smart, accomplished women.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** What was your conversation? Were you coming in to them saying like I want to do Little Women and here’s my take of a nonlinear way to get into this and how you’re going to handle all this? How much of it did you know as you were going into those meetings?

**Greta:** I knew quite a bit actually going into the meetings. Well, I think one of the first things I said was that I said to me this book is about authorship and ownership and it’s about money. And it’s about women and money and how that intersects with artistic output. And it felt like it was all over the book to me. And then I had already started looking at Louisa May Alcott’s life and what that was. And how that intersected with the subject of the book. And I didn’t quite know how I was going to interweave the time periods, but I didn’t know that I wanted to start with them as adults. That was the way I wanted to come at it.

And I think in part because I knew that the adaptation that I wanted to do was not just an adaptation of the text as it is in the book. Although I did rely heavily on the text in the book. I also wanted to treat all adaptations as almost an urtext as a collective memory of what Little Women is, so that there are things – you know, this is an example that I don’t know how much it’s useful but I always think about it. Our conceptions of heaven and hell for example. They’re not from the bible.

**John:** No, they’re not at all.

**Greta:** They’re from Dante. That’s where we got all of it from. So if you actually go to the bible and you’re like where are the descriptions of the hell fires? They’re not there. They don’t exist. Because that’s something we got later. And I do think that there’s this sense of an urtext or collective text which means more than even what the original text said. So I felt like I had the original text, but then I had images. And the images are things like Marmee and the girls gathered around the fire reading the letter from father. And the kiss in the rain under the umbrella. And Amy falling in the ice or burning the book. There are these little moments. Or going to the Hummels or the Christmas morning. These moments that I feel like they’re from the book but they’re also from all of the times we’ve seen it.

**John:** The collective unconscious. It’s what we associate as this being–

**Greta:** Exactly. So what I wanted to do was kind of find a way for that to be almost like the found materials. And then to explode it and deconstruct it and put it back together again.

**John:** So you mentioned the starting with them as older and then going back to them as children. My guess when I watched the movie was that part of your instinct for doing that was so that the actors that you cast would be established as the older versions so that when you come back to them as a younger version it didn’t feel like a weird mismatch. Like if you started with those older actresses as the younger versions you’re like, wait, she’s not 13. But you’re more forgiving. That’s something as a filmmaker you’re doing, but it was also your narrative sense of that you really wanted to make sure that the older life of them was as important as the younger version. What was your instinct?

**Greta:** Yeah, well, one thing that I realized – I mean, there are so many angles I could come at this from which leads to very longwinded answers. But there’s an inherent meta quality to the text which I was alluding to before which is that you’re holding a book, so someone wrote it. And then so you have Louisa May Alcott writing Jo. And Louisa May Alcott is writing something that looks vaguely like her life and Jo is kind of an avatar. And then Jo was also writing something that vaguely looks like her life. And then it’s me writing Louisa writing Jo. And I felt like the only way to represent all of this is to get quite Cubist about it.

It’s like there’s all these different points of authorship. And I think that there’s a real ache in the text. There’s a couple of lines I could point to that have it. But one thing is that the text is not told – it’s not first person. It’s not Jo narrating it. It’s Louisa or the narrator or whoever that person is. And there’s a lot of sadness in that person behind the people. And this perspective of Louisa’s real sister is already gone. Her sister Elizabeth died. And Louisa herself had gone to the Civil War as a Civil War nurse and had suffered through typhoid fever and almost died. And her sister, not Meg, but the character that Meg is based on, she’d gotten married and it was devastating for her.

And so there’s all these things of like she is writing about a thing that already past. And there was something when I was reading the text – and this is why every answer is so longwinded – I realized that once they’re all in their separate lives, like once Amy is in Europe, once Meg is married, once Beth is living at home but sick, and Jo is in New York trying to sell stories, they are never all together again. The thing that we think of as Little Women has already past. And I think that ache and that absence of the togetherness and that absence of the sisterhood as being the way that we contextualize these cozy scenes brought out something in me that felt was inherent in the text.

And then I think I wanted to start it just squarely with the publisher with this idea of this negotiation of will you buy my work and what do I have to change for you to buy it. And I think, you know, there’s another level on which like this scene is something that I know from this scene. I know what it’s like to sit across from someone who basically tells you morals don’t sell nowadays. So it was – I mean, there were lots of reasons for it. But emotionally I felt like there was, yeah, that ache. That it’s already gone. And then beyond that this relationship of Louisa to the text and me to the text of I think that what artists do is you write it down because you can’t save anyone’s life. Like I think that’s part of what the impulse is.

I can’t save your life, but I can write it down. And I can’t get that moment back, but I can write it down. And I think that’s part of it for me. And that kind of – and it allowed me to kind of weave that sense of is that how you remembered it or is that what happened. Is that what happened or is that how you wrote it?

**John:** But you also by moving back and forth between the two timelines you’re creating a tension for the viewer saying like, wait, how did we get there because I assumed that Laurie would be with her, but Laurie is with this other guy, so it becomes a mystery.

**Greta:** Exactly. And then also I will say this is a less poetic response. But I think there’s always been just when you tell the stories narratively straight, this is now just a nuts and bolts thing. I think there’s two things that are tricky about the traditional straight ahead narrative of Little Women. The first one is Beth gets sick and then she gets better. And then Beth gets sick and then she dies. And I always find that’s like a little hard narratively to kind of get like oh no, oh it’s OK, oh no it’s not. So one idea I had was just that stacking. And then there are poetic reasons within the stacking–

**John:** Of course. There are scenes where she comes down and sees her there, sees her not there.

**Greta:** Exactly. And that feeling of like when someone dies I think you have this inherent feeling of like but they were just there. And it was just the other way. And I felt like it was a way to cinematically give us that. And then the other thing was I felt as a viewer and as a reader and why I wanted – I hope there’s no spoilers – but why I wanted Mr. Dashwood as the publisher to say like “Frankly, I don’t see why she didn’t marry the neighbor” is because that’s what everyone for 150 years has thought. Like if you’re going to marry someone, you might as well have just married that guy across the street. Like he seemed really nice and he likes you. And what’s wrong with him?

I feel like it’s more true in movies than any other medium that the person you see them with first is the person you believe they should be with. I don’t know why it works like that. I just think it tends to work like that. And so one thing when you tell the story straight through is that you see Laurie and Jo together. And when it’s like Laurie and Amy you’re like what the hell is this? I’ve been with these other people.

The second thing is then when you meet Professor Bhaer you’re like dammit who is this guy? I don’t know this guy. I don’t care about this guy. I’ve never met this guy.

**John:** I don’t want him in my movie.

**Greta:** I know. He’s an old German professor. Like who cares? So in a way, I mean, that’s just nuts and bolts-y. I was like if I see Amy run into Laurie first and obviously he’s the object of her affection, and if I see Professor Bhaer at the beginning then I’m less introducing a new person later. And then on top of it someone said later they were like, oh, Professor Bhaer when he shows up it’s like deus ex machina, but to me I was like but that is what it is. It’s in the book. It is deus ex machina. He just shows up. And it’s like if we could set that early at the beginning and be like – and I mean, also because I’m dealing what is storytelling and what do you need and what do you expect from your characters, like with just the briefest outline of this is a romantic interest that you’re like, oh yes, I see it is a romantic interest. Part of it is playing with narrative expectations. So in any case that’s like the less beautiful answer.

**John:** But even in trying to establish that, Bhaer as a potential love interest, you’re doing a very deliberate rhyme where like she burned her dress both times with both of these guys. And so we associate like, oh, her burning her dress or being caught on fire is a thing that happens when there’s a love interest introduced.

**Greta:** Yes, that’s right. It’s right. And also the first scene of the movie when she’s trying to sell the scandal story and he says, “You know, if the main character is a girl make sure she ends up married, or dead, either way.” And then the very first scene you see her in it’s like well there you go. There’s the guy. I mean, we just set up guys because it’s like he just told her married or dead. So now we have to see is it marry or dead. It’s like putting a gun on the wall in the first act.

**John:** Chekhov’s marriage.

**Greta:** Exactly.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a listen to a scene. So this is a scene from Page 68 in the script. This is Amy and Laurie in France. I think it’s chapter 39 in the book. It’s pretty late in the book. This is a scene between Amy and Laurie. Let’s take a listen and then discuss the scene.

**Amy:** I’ve always known I would marry rich. Why should I be ashamed of that?

**Laurie:** It’s nothing to be ashamed of. As long as you love it.

**Amy:** Well, I believe we have some power over who we love it. It isn’t something that just happens to a person.

**Laurie:** I think the poets might disagree.

**Amy:** Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And we had children they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

**John:** Ah, such a great speech.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** So Julie Turner who hosts the Slate Culture Gabfest, they were talking about your amazing movie on this week’s episode. And I asked her like Greta is coming in so do you have any more questions for her. And she said, “Did you always find Amy sympathetic or is that something that came to you on later readings? How did your view of her evolve?” Because this is the evolved Amy we’re hearing in this scene.

**Greta:** Yes. Well, no, Amy was one of the characters that I was just utterly knocked backwards by when I read it again. And she was the one that I kept underlining lines. And there were so many great lines I couldn’t even get them all in. I mean, everything about the script I will say can be essentially footnoted. I could tell you why every line is there. And it’s either directly from the book or it’s from a piece of research. But she has a line where she says, “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant.” And I was like holy crap! Who is this? That’s such an amazing sentiment. And I felt like, oh, she’s been sitting here this whole time.

And I felt to me actually the section when she’s in Paris and in Italy, but she’s with Laurie and she’s kind of contending with her art, I found that to be very profound. And it was, you know, the line “I want to be great or nothing” it’s straight from the book. And I was like well that’s not a person who takes their art lightly. That’s somebody who is really swinging for the fences. And I think that depth of seriousness about her work was fascinating to me and also the pain of giving it up because she doesn’t think it’s going to go great. That’s a very adult thing. And it’s something that I very much understand.

And so, yeah, Amy was the one who was fascinating to me. And also hilarious in a way that I felt like I hadn’t even totally tapped into. Or I hadn’t realized when I was younger. But there’s a whole section – I mean, there’s so many great things in the book that I couldn’t include. But there’s a whole section where she says, she’s asking about Beth because Beth is very good at piano. And I think it’s after Mr. Laurence gives her the piano, and Amy is trying to logically work out what the difference between her and Beth is. And she’s like, “Oh I see. It’s nice to have talents. But it’s not nice to tell everyone you have them.” And they’re like, right. And then but she’s not humble. But she’s figuring out that to be liked she better look like she’s humble, which I think is really funny and really great. And anyway she just was so much richer and funnier than I had ever really totally given her credit for.

In any case, and like the “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant” I later turned that into the line where she says – “Since when did you become so wise?” And she says, “I have always have been, you were just too busy noticing my faults.” I kind of thought that for me it’s like for 150 years we’ve looked at this character as being kind of petty and a little shallow. And I was like we never noticed. She was always kind of amazing.

**John:** Let’s take a look at this scene again. So this is a moment where Laurie is really noticing how incredible she is. So she says, “I’ve always known I would marry rich. Why should I be ashamed of that?” Laurie, “There’s nothing to be ashamed of as long as you love him.” He’s the person challenging the romantic ideal that you should marry for love. And she has the insight to say, no, this is an economic transaction. This was obviously a thing you pitched from the very start.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** This idea that this is really a story of money.

**Greta:** Right.

**John:** And here it is. So of her speech here, what comes from the text? Because we looked through chapter 39 and couldn’t find any of those words, but the spirit is there.

**Greta:** The spirit is there.

**John:** It’s a much longer scene and a much longer conversation. But none of these actual words. So how do you get to this?

**Greta:** Well, OK, so the line “I’ve always known I would marry rich” that’s from the text. She does say that. And later she feels sort of embarrassed about actually having said that. But this speech actually for the most part it comes from a conversation I had with Meryl Streep about this movie. We had an early coffee and we talked about it and she was going to be in it. The book had meant a great deal to her. And she essentially said to me the thing that you have to make the audience understand is this. And she said some version of this. But she was sort of like it’s not just that women couldn’t vote. It’s not just that they couldn’t own property. They couldn’t. It’s that they didn’t own anything. And that they legally couldn’t unless they were completely unmarried and had their own fortune. But even then it was complicated. They couldn’t get educated.

And so she was sort of laying out these limitations. And I knew I wanted Amy to have a speech like this, but actually this particular speech I wrote ten minutes before we shot.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Greta:** Yeah. Because I knew I wanted it to get there and I knew I wanted them to have this conversation. And I assume the people who are listening are screenwriters. In the run up to making the movie what often happens is you end up having to cut a lot of stuff to make page count seem lower, because you’re trying to be like this isn’t unwieldy. This is completely reasonable to make. So you end up like cutting so much stuff. And what I was doing, and it doesn’t matter now because it’s all made, but what I did was I cut the script down, but then I would just save the pages I wanted to make and then write before we’d go. I’d just give them to the actors and I’d say, all right, we’re going to do this. Or I’d give them the night before or something. Sometimes I’d just give it to them handwritten so there was no paper trail. Because I didn’t want them to give it to anyone.

And I’d say like can you just say these things. Because I figured once the lines are in the dailies what are they going to do? Tell me I can’t have them?

**John:** They’re not going to compare them back to the printed pages. No.

**Greta:** No. Nobody is going to do that. So I knew I wanted something like this, but I knew nobody is going to let me do this.

**John:** So this scene existed in the shooting script, but it was shorter and it didn’t have quite this text in it.

**Greta:** I think this scene ended before the speech. It did. It ended before the speech because nobody was interested in the speech. And anyway, I handwrote it. I gave it to her. But I always knew I wanted something like that in it. But I just felt like hearing Amy say I want to marry rich sounds quite crass if you don’t really understand the stakes of what that means. And it’s, you know, for women at that time it was the decision. And if you married the wrong person, if you married someone who had–

**John:** Disastrous.

**Greta:** –drinking problem, or couldn’t make a living, or treated your children badly, that’s it. That the worst decision you could make. So, in any case I wanted to give her context.

**John:** Now, while we’re looking at physical printed pages here, two things you do in this script which I find so great and so fascinating. So first off, all the scenes that are in the past you have printed in red. And was that from the very start. Did you always plan to do that?

**Greta:** Yes. I always did it that way.

**John:** Because very few scripts have such a back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It’s got to be so helpful for everybody involved to know like, OK, from production design to costumes to everyone like what world are we in.

**Greta:** It was a beast in prep I will say just tracking everything. And we had things set out that, you know, on boards where it was like here it is chronologically. And then here it is the way it appears in the script. Because I just always wanted the present and the past to be talking to each other.

**John:** Of course.

**Greta:** And there’s always a link. And in some ways like I felt like I wanted everything to work emotionally. Where moving from one place to another that even if you’re not intimately familiar with the story, because the truth is everything moves forward, which is there’s two origin points of the story. 1868 and 1861. And everything moves forward from there. You don’t actually go back in this story. You just go between those two timelines that are everything is going forward.

So I wanted it to work emotionally, but I also wanted it to if you broke it down to completely work logically. I actually did look at them like a graph, like Nolan had made during Dunkirk. I mean, he had the three timelines that took different amounts of time. And I mean I really loved that intersection of time and the play with it. But you might not know on first viewing how everything lines up. You just are watching it emotionally.

**John:** But you also have confidence that it will work.

**Greta:** Right. So if you do break it down later it all works. And so I wanted it to be, you know, have that thing that it both works. I mean, there’s lots of movies that do that. Obviously Irishman does it.

**John:** Big Fish does it the same way.

**Greta:** That’s right.

**John:** So Big Fish both timelines move forward, but we’re in a fantasy timeline or a real world timeline. And ultimately they overlap.

**Greta:** Exactly. I mean, I think it is one of the things – it’s tricky to do and it’s scary to do. But I think it’s something that movies do well. Can play with time in a way that other mediums can’t as much. Like it’s certainly harder in theater. And also because this is a movie about what it is to make something and to make something of your life–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Greta:** So it felt like the exact right way to play with it. But, yeah, I definitely put it in red from the beginning and I remember Tom Rothman at Columbia Pictures who is great, I always say he’s my favorite person to fight with. He was like, “But I know that it’s the other time because it’s red. How will anyone else know?” And I was like, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.

**John:** There will be a flashing red light in the corner that says PAST, PAST.

**Greta:** I know. But it was actually in the writing of it it was always like this. But it was a bit of a trick in the beginning to figure out how to present everything. But I really have faith in viewers. I love lots of complicated movies. But also people watch really complicated television shows with multiple plot lines, multiple timelines. And I was like viewers are super sophisticated.

**John:** They are.

**Greta:** Like I think that they’re very good at – I mean, I watch Game of Thrones. It’s amazing how intricate it is. I think that sometimes people underestimate how sophisticated viewers are. And they really are able to follow things that aren’t – you don’t need to sign post everything as strongly as you think you need to sometimes. And actually it’s so funny because I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience. Like while you’re making something you encounter different things and then you’re like, oh, well they did it this way, and they did it this way. But also at Columbia Pictures was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood which I loved very much, but like I remember talking to Tom about it and sometimes there’s a chyron that says it’s this place or this time, and then sometimes there’s not.

**John:** It’s arbitrary.

**Greta:** I was like how does he do that? And Tom I think was like because sometimes the audience needs it and sometimes they don’t. And I was like, oh, that’s right. You can do whatever you want.

**John:** Whatever is helpful is helpful.

**Greta:** Sometimes when you’re conceiving of these things everything feels like it has to be so very logical. And the truth is when you’re watching a movie sometimes you need it, sometimes you don’t.

**John:** I will say in watching your film, at the start I wasn’t quite clear what timeline we were in for a while. And I gave up worrying about it and I just trusted that it was going to work, and it worked. But I was reading our local free paper that gets distributed, The [Unintelligible] Park whatever. The reviewer gave your movie a 9 out of 10. And said phenomenal except that it has this crazy nonlinear thing which is completely unnecessary.

**Greta:** Oh, that’s really funny.

**John:** You don’t understand the movie you watched, but you enjoyed it.

**Greta:** Well you know what’s funny? You might not think it was necessary, but maybe you wouldn’t have had the experience you had–

**John:** Oh, he wouldn’t have at all.

**Greta:** If you had told it linearly. I mean, that’s the thing. I don’t know. Movies are mysterious like that.

**John:** Someone will do a cut of Little Women that puts everything back in order.

**Greta:** Well, it can’t be done. I mean, it really can’t be done. Because it’s not made that way. It’s not constructed that way. There is no entry point. And I will say there was in the edits a moment where we looked at – because we were asked to look at could you do it the other way. And you can’t. I mean, there’s no movie. And actually one thing that’s not funny but just that I’ve noticed – again, I hope it’s not spoiler-y, but I assume if you’re listening to this you’ve seen it. One thing when shows have asked for clips one thing that’s interesting to me is I often find that the clips aren’t very good at communicating what it is because if you see just childhood in isolation–

**John:** It looks weird.

**Greta:** It looks weird because that’s actually not what it is. And if you see – it’s like seeing the kiss at the end of the movie as if it was just the kiss. But that’s not what it is. So, when you just see them gathered around reading the letter from father it looks like a very pitch straight down the middle. But it’s not a pitch down the middle. What’s the pitch that drops? Do you know baseball?

**John:** No. I don’t talk about sports well on this show and Craig always makes fun of me for not knowing. Like a slider? A drop?

**Greta:** Yeah, a slider.

**John:** Sure. We’ll pretend.

**Greta:** Like it looks like it’s coming over the plate and then it’s just not. So I find that like actually there’s no way to really – the tone is the contrast if that makes sense.

**John:** Totally. On page 68 we also have an example of something else you do which I’d not seen before. You have a lot of overlapping dialogue.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** But you also do this thing where you warn us in the title page. There’s a slash in the first person’s dialogue to show where the person is interrupting. And I’ve never seen that done before. Tell me about your choice to do that.

**Greta:** The slash is sort of a “don’t make,” and then there’s a slash “fun” and then Laurie is “I’m not!” So the word that overlaps is fun and I’m. So don’t make/I’m not. That’s sort of the way it’s supposed to sound. I took that from playwrights. Caryl Churchill does it all the time in her plays. And Tony Kushner does it in his plays. And it’s something that I find really useful because if you want to specifically hear certain words but you like a controlled cacophony it’s very helpful because it makes the actors know it’s not talking over each other. It’s like a madrigal or a round or something.

**John:** It’s also an anticipation of what they’re going to say and–

**Greta:** Exactly. So it gave for the girls in particular like the four of them it’s overlapping over the time. And it gave a very technical thing to work on during rehearsal which was wonderful which was getting everyone up to speed. And it means that, I mean, I like this in general. I like everything said exactly how I wrote it. Because I have strange rhythm things that if you change a word it sounds wrong to me. And it makes it so that you need to have the lines memorized in a muscle memory. You can’t be reaching for the lines ever. And I like that kind of memorization. And I like that kind of ability because it allows me to – especially with the group scenes – treat all the actors like an orchestra.

**John:** And you’re also able to stay wide which is helpful.

**Greta:** Yes. Exactly. And I think some of that does come from my background. My first love was theater. I wanted to write plays.

**John:** And plays are very much that. But here I want to talk about the other films you’ve made. The whole genre of filmmaking you’ve made. Because I associate mumblecore as being under-scripted.

**Greta:** Well it was. The funny this is, well, I wanted to be a playwright. But then I became involved with this very loose improvisational – and improvisational in all ways. We’d have characters, we’d have scenes, ideas, but we would have no actual lines written out, or just the most rudimentary lines written out. Because we would find it in improvisation on camera. And it was incredibly useful in a lot of ways because it, I mean, it became a film school. It became the way I figured out how things were edited and what the camera is interested in and not interested.

But I always missed writing. I really always missed the written word. And I missed what actors could do with text because I found that in a certain way I think we’re all understandably self-protective. And as actors improvising I think it’s actually very hard to go to scary places. Something will stop you from doing it. You know, your brain is protecting your ego or however that works. And one thing about text is it forces you to be vulnerable in a way that you might not be if you weren’t given it.

So when I think of part of the job of an actor is to rise to the text, you can have very complicated, very vulnerable things that you might not access another way. So I always missed the text. And so when I started writing with Noah Baumbach and I wrote those two movies with him part of it was because – the first time I worked with him was as an actor. And when I read his screenplay for Greenberg I thought oh this is, yes, it’s so precise. It is so precise. I know exactly – I could hear it when I was reading it. And that was something that we really shared. So when we started writing together that’s how I wrote.

And then as I continued writing that’s just how I continued writing. I mean, maybe one day I’ll loosen up. But I really like things just said as they were written. [laughs]

**John:** You talk about vulnerability, so I want to get to a second clip. So this is Jo and Marmee. They’re talking in the attic. So it’s page 100 of the screenplay. Probably comes from chapter 42 of the book.

**Greta:** Yep.

**John:** Let’s take a listen.

**Jo:** I just feel – I just feel like women – they have minds. And they have souls as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition. And they’ve got talent as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it. But I’m so lonely.

**John:** So that is a terrific. A terrific moment. So iconic. Let’s talk about what it looks like on the page. So they’ve been having a conversation. It gets down to Jo. The parenthetical reads (crying, trying to explain herself to herself). And then it gets into those words. What a great parenthetical.

**Greta:** Oh yes. I do like a parenthetical. You know, it’s funny. I do think of screenplays as pieces of writing that should be able to stand on their own. And I try to make them as deep as possible. And I think I never want it to be just a blueprint. And I think one of my sadnesses actually about screenwriting is unlike playwriting is that the screenplay is just never a thing.

**John:** It’s not seen, read.

**Greta:** No. And I have some pride in what the actual text of the screenplay is, including screen directions, including parentheticals. So, in any case thank you for pointing out the parenthetical that no one will know. But I also think sometimes I try to cue in the actor to something that is going on. But in any case.

So this scene, you know, it’s come off of this sequence of death to marriage. I wanted to do this thing of like the older timeline where Beth lives then all of a sudden it’s Christmas. And then when you go back she’s gone, then it’s to funeral, and then of course to me it made perfect sense to go from a funeral to a wedding. These are the ceremonies of how we mark life. This is how we do it. This is what… – Anyway, so we do that. But there’s all these losses that have accumulated in both timelines. And this comes from the chapter where Jo does say–

**John:** I am so lonely.

**Greta:** She actually doesn’t technically say I’m so lonely.

**John:** Oh, Marmee says, “I see you’re lonely.”

**Greta:** Yes. And Marmee says it. And then but she does say, “If he asked me now I’d say yes,” which I felt like, wait, we always think of Jo as being like so certain in her path. She never doubts it. I think that’s kind of to the urtext of Jo. And I was like she doubted it. She wondered should I have done the other thing, which just kills me. And in any case this text, this speech, “women have minds and souls, as well as hearts,” actually is from another book that Louisa May Alcott wrote. This is from Moods, I believe. I have to go back and double check that. But I think it’s from Moods. And I found this piece of text. I thought it was so beautiful, but to me that “but I’m so lonely” just was kind of the penetrating thing in this chapter.

I will say about this chapter, too, which goes to the idea of the narrator, is that it begins with the narrator, which we can assume is Louisa May Alcott, speaking about being a spinster and speaking about never marrying. What she says is, “Girls of five and 20 joke about being spinsters, but they do it because they don’t really think it’s going to happen. But when girls become 30 they stop talking about it at all because they know it is happening.” And then she says, she goes on this kind of tangent of be kind to the spinsters because you don’t know what passions are hidden under their somber gowns, or something like that.

It’s this amazing tangent. And I was like, oh my god, it’s her talking. Like you don’t know what my life was, or my loves were based on the fact that I didn’t get married. You cannot tell my heart from my outsides. And I just thought that that was such an incredible thing and in any case I wanted that to be part of this scene. And so when I found this passage I was like I love this passage and I want to add this penetrating loneliness. And I also think there is something about not just Jo as a character, but I think there is a certain loneliness to the writer. And I think she has the loneliness of both.

**John:** At the end of the script we get to sections where they’re labeled “fiction?”

**Greta:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the lovely controversies of your movie is sort of like what actually happens. And I’m not going to ask you to specifically state because clearly looking at the script you want there to be some ambiguity in terms of to what degree did she do this thing, did she not do this thing. To what degree is she the author of this text? You start the movie with a book by Louisa May Alcott and you end with a book by Jo March. So it’s clearly getting into that sense of what is authentic, what is authorship.

But this choice of labeling fiction at the end, was this controversial at all during the development?

**Greta:** Yes. Well, it was controversial also because someone said, “Oh, you sent the wrong thing. There’s question marks all over the end. This can’t possibly be the final draft.” And I was like, no, it is. I mean, this is the end of the book. The end of the book is she’s opened the school, she’s married Professor Bhaer, and it’s Marmee’s birthday. That’s the end of the book. So that is the end of the book. And in life Louisa May Alcott, she didn’t get married, she didn’t have kids, but she did keep her copyright. And the book which was printed, which is actually the book that you see being made is a reproduction of the first printing of 1868 which sold out in two weeks, which is kind of incredible.

**John:** Crazy.

**Greta:** I knew I wanted it to interweave. And this goes more towards directing, but to me directing and writing, it’s all so linked. Because to me everything needs to be on the page in a way that I understand. And I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to shoot this, or how I wanted to shoot the scenes of the past or the “fiction?” But I did know I wanted the style to be different. And it’s a more heightened style.

**John:** It is.

**Greta:** And I wanted it to feel that way.

**John:** You got some big long Steadicam shots.

**Greta:** Yes, well actually we’re on a crane. We’re on a big like–

**John:** The Techno Crane kind of thing?

**Greta:** Yeah. And someone is on a wheel. And we did these big long shots. We did two, no, three sequences. It took all day to go through the house and then to go on the other side of the house and then go down to Marmee. In any case, it was a big – I don’t actually have a lot of – I have two moments of Steadicam in the movie. But everything else is on dollies or cranes.

But in any case like I knew I wanted it to feel heightened. It’s funny, I was actually just talking with – I hope I’m not giving away trade secrets, but I think he’s talked about this – Edgar Wright about the end of Baby Driver, which is a fantasy.

**John:** Sure.

**Greta:** But he was like well some people don’t know that. That’s OK. Like that’s OK.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Greta:** Like whatever you want to know about it. In any case, I hope I didn’t give anything too much away about that. But I wanted it to be both. But what I did know is that I wanted the moment at the end when you see Jo hold her book. And I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be this way. I wanted to figure out how to do a trick where the image you didn’t know you wanted to see was this girl holding her book.

**John:** Exactly. You’ve established the goal of the character from the very start to have her book printed.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** And so if the movie ended with like Marmee’s birthday that’s not rewarding.

**Greta:** No. It’s not. Marmee’s birthday–

**John:** It’s lovely, but it’s not the reason we’re here.

**Greta:** But I felt like because I’m doing this thing where I’m honoring the book itself, I also really wanted to do the literal ending of the book, which is this birthday. Someone was like, “Oh, it’s so weird that it’s her birthday. Why do you need that?” And I was because for the people who know how the book ends this is how the book ends.

**John:** Julie Turner had one extra question which is related to this moment. She asks why did you make the professor a smoke-show. Why is he hot?

**Greta:** Oh. Well, I mean, for a couple of reasons. Number one, movies. It’s movies. [laughs] But really, I mean, I don’t want to get too much into this because I hesitate to talk about male gaze, female gaze, because I think it can sometimes ascribe something gendered to something that doesn’t have to be. Like I don’t want to say like this is how women see the world and this is how men see the world. Because I just think that that’s too reductive.

But, I’m a female filmmaker. I want Professor Bhaer to be Louis Garrel.

**John:** Great.

**Greta:** I mean, I feel like men have been putting glasses on hot women forever and telling us they’re awkward. I can do whatever I want. I always saw, you know, with Laurie and Professor Bhaer and with James Norton who is also very beautiful, you know, all the men. You know, Chris Cooper. Tracy Letts. They’re beautiful men. And I thought, you know, the very first time we see Timothée Chalamet I shot that 48 frames per second. I shot that to be slow because I wanted to shoot him like Bo Derek. He’s the object. He is the object. And I felt like no one really understood why I’d done that. And actually I felt like no one knew totally at the studio why I had done that and thought it was kind of goofy and weird and maybe take it out.

And then the first time I ever had a screening of the movie in Paramus, New Jersey I heard every girl in the audience go – [gasps] – they did exactly what Amy did and I was like because that’s the way we feel about Timothée. And that’s OK.

And I felt like I wanted to make Professor Bhaer the same way. I’m a female filmmaker and this is in some ways if you’re allowed to author that the way that looks maybe you get to author it this way. You know, I wanted to do that. Also, I just Louis. But, in any case it was in a way my own commentary on what we’ve been told women are in movies.

**John:** Two questions that people wrote in with. They’re not specifically about your movie, but I think you might have some answers for it. This one you kind of already answered but I’ll ask the question, too. Jordan asks, “I recently read the script for Parasite by Bong Joon-ho and was completely blown away by how the scenes lifted off the page and roped me in. To be clear, I haven’t seen this movie yet, but the text was enough to draw me in and make me incredibly invested in the family. I also read the script for Annie Hall, another movie I hadn’t seen, but it felt like a chore to drudge through despite many people saying it’s one of the best movies of all time. I felt like if I was a reader at a studio and came across this on my desk I would have passed on it.

“My question is how important is it for a movie to be engaging on the page? Writer-directors don’t necessarily need to paint the world as richly because they’re the ones shooting it, but it seems strange to leave that detail on the page because you know you have it in your head.”

Now, you were saying that you think the screenplay needs to be a real document to read and enjoy that you can really see and feel the movie.

**Greta:** Yeah. Sorry, I’m just going to go to the first – I want the sentences to be active and to draw you in. I want to feel part of something that’s in motion from the beginning. And I’m very deliberate about this.

**John:** Do you want to read some of your first page?

**Greta:** Sure. So, you know, it has the sort of New York publishing office, 1868. Jo March, our heroine, hesitates. To me, I’m interested. What? She hesitates. Like I feel – it feels open. It feels like I’ve opened something. And not everyone has my taste, but for me to give something that feels perhaps unnecessary, you could just write she’s standing in a hallway. Like there’s no reason. But the hesitates, you’re like why? What’s going on?

**John:** Yeah.

**Greta:** So Jo March, our heroine, hesitates. In the half-light of a dim hallway she exhales and prepares, her head bowed like a boxer about to go into the ring. She puts her hand on the doorknob. A pause. And then she opens it onto a disorderly room. Like I want the words to draw – I want it to draw the picture. And then even at the end, and I didn’t know what I meant when I wrote this, but at the very last page she’s given the book and I say, “Jo turns it over in her hands, touching it like the holy object it is, her inchoate desire made manifest. Jo looks up…and sees the future. Cut to black.”

I don’t know what I meant by “sees the future,” but I also did.

**John:** Yeah. You knew what you meant.

**Greta:** And I knew that Saoirse would be able to do that because she’s a genius. But I feel like for me I always want every piece of making a movie to be as excellent as it can be. Because the truth is I don’t know if this is going to become a movie because it’s so unlikely because they’re so unwieldy and expensive and it takes so long. So for the moment all I have is this script. So I want it to be as good and as emotional and as detailed and as specific and honestly as dense as it can be. Because this is all I have of the movie at this moment. I don’t have the movie yet.

So, I want every piece of it to feel that way because that’s how I know it’s – I can will it into existence if I can feel it on the page.

**John:** Yes. You’re going to be asking all of your department heads to do their very, very best work. And so you as the writer doing your very, very best work, it’s got to be inspirational if they can see what you’ve done on the page.

**Greta:** And I also think like little details, little details that are – like I mean on page two a parenthetical that I always liked, I mean now I’m just complimenting myself.

**John:** I enjoy.

**Greta:** But I do think nobody ever knows the parentheticals, but on page two it says, “What do you – that is, what compensation?” He’s saying, they’re talking about the story she’s selling him. He says, “We pay twenty-five to thirty for things of this sort. We’ll pay twenty for that.” She says, “You can have it. Make the edits. But the parenthetical just says “(money over art).” And like to me I was like, oh, no one will ever see it. But I think – I sort of wish – now this is probably I shouldn’t say this, but I sort of wish that the screenplay that would get distributed would be the actual complete shooting script. Because I find it, you know, you do take things out and change them. And this is very close to the shooting script.

But, at the same time, I mean, I find as a screenwriter one thing that helped me tremendously was being an actor because there were lots of things that I auditioned for that I didn’t get. But what I did get was to read the script. And then I got to watch the movie. And then I was like, oh, I see. It went from this thing to that thing. And I feel like reading essentially a transcription of a movie after the fact isn’t as useful as reading the screenplay. Because then you can really see what happens.

So, I understand why later it’s like, well, you don’t need to have the scene in that wasn’t in, but I mean, but for my movies actually I will say they cut really, really close to the actual screenplays. And also my line producer said to me, he’s like, “You really did use all of it.” And I was like I told you I would. That’s why I needed it.

**John:** So the next movie they’ll know.

**Greta:** Exactly.

**John:** So, on this podcast a lot we’ve been talking about assistant pay. And how low assistant pay is a pervasive problem in Hollywood. There’s a New York Times story that came out today as we’re recording this. You can see a photo of me and producer Megana Rao in this exact room where we are recording this. But Kimberly wrote in with a question. She said, “I’d love your thoughts on assistants with or wanting to start families. I’m really hoping to start a family within the next year and I have 100% confidence in my ability to get both my assistant work and my own work done while also having a baby. But I’m afraid to ask for any maternity leave or an increase in pay to do so. Do I have any right as an assistant to get pregnant and start a family? If this becomes an issue with my higher ups do I have the right to call foul for women’s right? Will this cost me my job, which I like and want to keep entirely? I recognize this is an issue that is country-wide and spreads across multiple industries, but I’m hoping you can talk more about specifically assistants who aren’t in their young 20s who may have families or rather responsibilities, especially women, and how they can navigate moving up in this crazy industry?”

**Greta:** Yeah, well, I mean, this is a big one. This is the big – I think this is a huge part of talking about women both in our industry and all industries. And what we’re doing about it as a country and collectively. And I think it’s something that, I mean, I don’t want to speak to things that I don’t have actual correct knowledge to speak to, but I do think that there is something about things that are “women’s issues” or “family issues” where somehow they become something that you just have to deal with behind closed doors and we have no idea how you got from A to B.

And I think that’s a failure of our sense of what civic life is. And I think civic life is family life. How do you think we get engaged citizens? By people raising them. Mothers and fathers. And I think you can point to a lot of Scandinavian countries who have very excellent ways of dealing with this. And when I was in Sweden they told me they have not just maternal leave, but they have paternal leave which is mandatory.

**John:** Absolutely. Norway has it as well.

**Greta:** Because otherwise they want to make sure that men don’t not take the time.

**John:** Or that women are penalized for having taken the time and men are moving up.

**Greta:** And men are moving up. So, I mean, I think that this is at the center of a civic discussion is what are we doing for families. And it’s everything. It’s healthcare. It’s benefits. It’s leave. And I will say, because I was pregnant while I was making Little Women and I gave birth 72 hours after I showed the studio my cut. And it’s something I’m still educating myself about and learning about because I did not know a lot of the laws that were already on the books. And I’m not someone who doesn’t have access to information, but I actually didn’t know that you have – in California – that employers are required to have a certain amount of paid leave. And I didn’t know any of that. I actually didn’t know stuff like that. And I also think what are the laws that are on the books? What are the laws that we need to get on the books? What do we need to move forward?

Also, I mean, childcare. I mean, national childcare. I have help and I also have my mother. And my mother and my dad watching my baby while I’m able to do different things.

**John:** Record this podcast.

**Greta:** Record this podcast. And I also have an amazing nanny. And that is something I am able to have because I have access and I have means. And not everyone has that. I mean, this is a big old thing. So, I guess everything I’m saying is just to say I don’t know if that’s the right question. And I think I am everyone else, I do want to figure it out.

I think also as filmmakers it’s difficult because if you’re employed by a corporation there’s laws that you can – again, I don’t know that this is completely right. But there can be laws that constrain and also prescribe corporations to do X, Y, or Z. So if you are an assistant working a company, or employed through a company there is something that sort of can be done in a top-down way. But if you’re a writer or if you’re a director it’s a gig economy in a different way. Then it’s like you’re writing something on spec, there is no one to give you leave. You’re on leave because you’re not working. Do you know what I mean? So, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.

Same with acting. Like it’s not–

**John:** Totally.

**Greta:** And I think, and I don’t know if that’s something that we need to go guild by guild, or it’s a national thing we need to be dealing with, or industry, but it is – here’s another thing I’ll say in addition to being in Sweden. I shot a film in Paris. There’s French hours.

**John:** Oh, French hours are required.

**Greta:** French hours are also – the women who are working on the set, and the men who are working on the set, because of the day is more manageable they were able to either take their kids to school in the morning, or give them dinner and put them to bed. But if you’re working 12 hours and then with transpo and everything it’s 14 hours away from your family, if you’re a man or a woman when are you going to take care of your family?

**John:** Craig and I are both pushing for French hours.

**Greta:** I think it’s so much more human. And so that’s a whole lot of gobbledygook I just spat out, but I–

**John:** I share your frustration. And in Kimberly’s question when she said “do I have any right as an assistant to get pregnant and start a family” I wanted to throw a chair.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** Because, yes, you do.

**Greta:** Yes, you do. Yes.

**John:** And part of like having reproductive rights is the right to become pregnant.

**Greta:** Yes, that’s right. That’s right. And of course – and also there should be laws to protect that and resources to help you. I mean, actually there’s a book I read. The title of it is, it sounds much more hard than it is. But it’s called Motherhood and Cruelty. But it’s by a really interesting thinker, Jacqueline Rose I think is her name. Anyway, she says it’s funny that parenthood is seen as an antisocial act because what could be more social. That it’s something, meaning as we were speaking about civic responsibilities, but sort of like a thing you do on your own. But yet what is more social than parenthood?

**John:** Parenthood and continuing our culture and our species and our civilization.

**Greta:** That is a social act. But it’s seen as you do on your own time. And the social thing is seen as just capitalism or commerce. And somehow that’s not part of it. But, anyway, yes, of course you have the right.

**John:** At the end of every episode we talk about One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is actually a puzzle which is sitting in front of you. It’s called New York in Color. It is this really good 500-piece puzzle we did over Christmas holidays. It’s these photos by Nicole Robertson. I just loved it. I love a jigsaw puzzle.

**Greta:** Oh, that’s so cool.

**John:** I find it a great way to make my brain stop braining and just sort of focus on puzzle pieces. Especially good for the last thing at night before you go to bed. Just check out.

**Greta:** Puzzling. You know who is a big puzzler is this genius actress I’ve gotten to work with is Laurie Metcalf.

**John:** Oh, I can imagine.

**Greta:** Loves a puzzle. She also puzzles before she goes on stage every night on Broadway. She’ll like get there an hour early. She’ll puzzle for a while. And then she’ll go out and give the best performance you’ve ever seen in anything. And she kind of, I don’t know, she’s extraordinary. I love her.

That’s good. Well, I guess I’ll give a book suggestion.

**John:** We love books.

**Greta:** It’s a big book, but it’s a rewarding book. It is Behave by Robert Sapolsky. I don’t want to give the title wrong, but he’s a professor at Stanford. He’s an evolutionary biologist, I think. But he’s written a lot about – he studies primate behavior. Anyway, he’s written a lot of really fun – I love science books for lay people.

**John:** As do I.

**Greta:** Because like I don’t really have the math to do it.

**John:** Give me some Dawkins. Give me all that.

**Greta:** Yeah. Like I can’t do any of the real stuff, but like I’m so happy to have it explained to me in sort of laymen terms. And I loved it. And it’s chockfull of lots of interesting things. But it’s sort of about a given behavior that we say like why this. And he sort of walks it through kind of from the nearest proximity to the farthest away.

So like milliseconds before a behavior happens, what are the synapses in your brain doing? How does it get from there to here? But then if you walk it back two weeks, where are your hormonal levels? And then if you walk it back 100 million years, how did we get to this point of this behavior? It’s a very interesting book and also I think one thing is because obviously I tend to – I read a lot of fiction. But it’s not a book that I inherently thought, oh yes, I need to know all about this. But I think as a writer it’s important to read widely.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. And this sounds like a book an actor, a director, a writer.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** Like talk about behaviors.

**Greta:** It’s interesting.

**John:** What is the motivation that got that moment to happen?

**Greta:** And it’s looking at it from a very specific perspective, but it’s really, yeah. And I also think – somebody told me when I was young, it was actually a neighbor who said, “If you read widely consistently, that’s as good as going to college.” And I said, really? And she said, “Yeah, just keep reading everything and don’t only look at the one thing you’re interested in.”

And I mean I ended up going to college. But I don’t know.

**John:** Maybe you didn’t have to.

**Greta:** I never forgot that she said that.

**John:** I think that’s probably true. That is our show for this week.

**Greta:** Oh.

**John:** So for listeners who are Premium members, stick around afterwards because Craig will talk about what happened at the Golden Globes.

**Greta:** OK.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megan Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Jemma Moran. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. You are not on Twitter I’ve noticed.

**Greta:** No, I’m not on any of those things.

**John:** You’re so smart. So smart. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll have links to the books she mentioned and we’ll also have a link to the screenplay so you can download it and read it. That will also be up in Weekend Read if you want to read it there. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

And, of course, you can become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Greta Gerwig, thank you so much for being on the show. Please come back any time.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Greta:** Bye.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig Mazin, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you John. A little under the weather. Sorry I couldn’t be there. I was so bummed. But you did not want me there. That’s for sure.

**John:** So when I was talking with Greta you thought you had a cold but that was not in fact the case.

**Craig:** No, so I thought I’m feeling worse than I would normally feel with a cold. And I had a night of – you know those dreams, those looping dreams?

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yep.

**Craig:** Where you just dream about like the same four seconds of dream over and over and over.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a fever thing.

**Craig:** That’s a fever thing. So I went to work. I sat there. I did absolutely nothing except feel awful. And on the way home I swung by the urgent care clinic here in my little town. And they did a test for the flu. Have you ever had the flu test?

**John:** No, but is it a nasal swab? How do they do it?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a nasal swab. They put a little Q-Tip up both nostrils. But man they go in deep. It is incredibly unpleasant. Anyway, they go and they do this fast test and the doctor came back in and she said, “Well, you know, let’s just cut to the chase. You’ve got the flu.” Which is bad. And I’m stupid. I didn’t get the flu shot. Because I was – it’s not because – I love the flu shot. I worship the flu shot. I just, you know, oh I was too busy. Blah. Well.

**John:** That’s what happens.

**Craig:** And people are nice. They’re trying to comfort me by saying I got the flu shot and I also got the flu, which can happen. But they put me on Tamiflu immediately and it’s been very effective I will say.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you have a choice between getting a cold or getting the flu and having Tamiflu started immediately, weirdly you’re better off with the flu and Tamiflu.

**John:** All right. So you’re on the mend. Now the reason why I desperately wanted you on for this bonus segment is you and I have not spoken since you won your Golden Globe and most crucially since that moment where you were up on stage and Jared Harris is speaking, he’s giving a speech, but you’re holding the Golden Globe. And Tiffany Haddish leans her weight against you. And there’s an eye contact moment. What was happening between you and Tiffany Haddish on stage at the Golden Globes?

**Craig:** You know, some people thought that maybe she was going to faint or something, but I think all she was doing was taking her shoes off. I think she was uncomfortable in her shoes. And when I look at the shoes that people wear I get it. I understand why. So we were just kind of – so I was like, oh, this is cool. Me and Tiffany Haddish. I’m not going to tell you what we talked about. We had a good conversation. It’s private. It’s private stuff between me and the Tiff.

**John:** 100%. I get it.

**Craig:** But, well, I’ll tell you off the air. I was so happy to not – so I had arranged to not do the speech. Some people were wondering why I did not do the speech. And the answer is, you know, we all worked on this. And when it comes to an award where the show was winning I think it’s fair for some of the other people that worked so hard on it to talk. We initially – I had convinced Jane Featherstone to do it, but we all expected Jared to win. And he didn’t. In fact, the opposite of what I thought would happen happened. I thought Jared would win and I thought the show and Stellan and Emily would lose. And Jared did not win. And the show and Stellan won. And I said to Jane, what do you think about the speech and she said, yeah, let’s give Jared the speech. I mean, he was our quarterback. And so he did a great job.

I mean, he was a little nervous that he had to have a rejiggered speech up there.

**John:** He also had to follow Michelle Williams which felt like just I mean a bullet dodged on your behalf because she gave really the moment of the evening. And the next speech after that was not going to be as big a moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think when you’re watching television that’s probably how it feels. In the room itself there were a lot of good speeches I thought. I mean hers was terrific. Maybe my favorite was Ramy.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I thought he was adorable. I was like this guy is so humble and not fake humble. Humble-humble. And genuine. And funny. I thought that was fantastic. And I could have listened to – Tom Hanks who I think gave me the flu from the stage. I didn’t meet him. I didn’t get to meet him. I was so bummed out. But I think just by listening to him intently I got his flu. But I could have listened to him for another hour. I was fascinated by him.

But you know the truth is honestly speeches–

**John:** Speeches.

**Craig:** Speeches.

**John:** Now the reputation of the Golden Globes and everything I’ve heard is it’s a very boozy evening. Was that your experience there in that room?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. So it is. There’s two large ice buckets on your table, each with a magnum of Champagne in it. I think that’s what that’s called. That big bottle. And they have wine coming around all night long. And people are getting drunk. There’s no question about that. It’s a very strange kind of dinner. We got there on the early side. And because it’s – I mean the red carpet had no interest in me. And the feeling is mutual. I’m not wearing like some flowing gown, or am I an actor.

So Melissa and I just headed on into the ballroom I guess you’d call it and there were – you know, maybe it was like 20% full. And every single seat at every single table there was a bowl of soup. And after about eight or nine minutes of being in there and maybe five or six other people had come in an army of waiters just swept through and removed the soup. And I just thought no one is ever going to have the soup.

**John:** Nope. The soup is gone.

**Craig:** The soup is gone. And then, yeah. It’s a very–

**John:** Maybe it’s a lesson for life. Like the soup will always disappear. If you don’t take advantage of the soup when you can have the soup, there’s no soup to be had.

**Craig:** I just thought like – but I get it, because actually what they don’t want is people eating during the show. If you don’t want people eating during the show and you do want people on the red carpet then you should just not have food. But then I think some people will get grumpy and drunker. Look, I mean, I was just fascinated by the whole thing. I mean, the tables are so close. Everyone is very chummy. I mean, it is tight.

**John:** And Cousin Greg was joining you at your table for at least part of the evening.

**Craig:** Oh my god. We were so happy. So Nicholas Braun who plays Cousin Greg on Succession, aside from being one of the tallest people in the world is also one of the most pleasant. He’s just a sweetheart. And there were just a lot of Succession people. And he kind of got overflowed onto our table. And I kept telling him I’m like first of all I spent most of the night just yelling the word Succession out because I love that show so much. And Jesse Armstrong is so brilliant. And the cast is so great.

And they seemed like a happy family. They legitimately do seem like they like each other which is always nice. Especially when it’s a show about people that hate each other, or are rivals. And I said to Nicholas if we win you should come up there with us. Just come up. Let’s not explain it. Let’s not make it seem weird. You just happened to join us as if you were on the show.

**John:** Yes. The way Greg Roy is always showing up at the Roy’s places. Like why is Cousin Greg there?

**Craig:** Right. And he said, “Should I?” And there was an HBO executive at the table who said, “No. You should not.” She said, “You know, Chernobyl is over. Your show is continuing. No.” [laughs] But so we almost had him. We almost got him.

**John:** Congratulations on the Golden Globe. You are skipping out on the – is it TCAs tonight? What was the awards tonight?

**Craig:** Tonight is as we’re recording this it’s the Critics’ Choice. And I’m very sorry I can’t be there. But Carolyn Strauss and Jared Harris are there. And hopefully we do well. But, you know, listen, I never thought I would be in any Critics’ Choice short list. So, it’s very nice. And I’m sorry I won’t be there. But I think everybody would prefer that I not bring my contagious self.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, congratulations on that. I hope you do get a chance to hang out with Greta Gerwig in the future because you would love her. We talked about parentheticals and a lot of stuff on the page. She will be one of your favorite writers I suspect. But Craig continue to heal up and we’ll have a normal show next week hopefully.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Appreciate it. Bye.

Links:

* [Follow along with the Little Women script in Weekend Read](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173)
* [Little Women Script](https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/little-women-by-greta-gerwig.pdf)
* NYT Article with John and Megana [Hollywood Assistants Are Fed Up](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/business/metoo-hollywood-assistants.html) by Rachel Abrams
* [Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [New York in Color Jigsaw Puzzle](https://amzn.to/2FDEBI0)
* [Behave by Robert Sapolsky](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311787/behave-by-robert-m-sapolsky/)
* [Greta Gerwig](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1950086/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jemma Moran ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/433standard.mp3).