Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 436 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s a new installment of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories in the news and figure out how they can become entertainment, because real life is deeply unsettling, and even in circumstances where someone’s guilt is incontrovertibly established traditional rules of not just storytelling but actual democracy are shattered one after the other making you wonder whether anything actually matters. And if there’s even going to be an election in November, which is why we retreat to what-if scenarios and imagine a world in which choices have consequences, and the bad guys sometimes lose.

To do so we have a special guest this week. Liz Hannah—

**Liz Hannah:** No pressure.

**John:** She is a writer whose credits include The Post, Long Shot, and the upcoming All the Bright Places. Welcome back, Liz.

**Liz:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Welcome back, Liz. Third time?

**Liz:** Third time. Need the jacket.

**Craig:** You got the jacket. We have a burgundy jacket for you.

**Liz:** Oh, that’s nice.

**Craig:** At five. It’s gold-stripe.

**Liz:** Oh wow.

**John:** Later on we give scarves. There’s a whole sort of Scriptnotes wardrobe.

**Liz:** I was like do you start with like a jean jacket, then you get to a leather jacket?

**Craig:** All of it from Goodwill.

**Liz:** Great.

**Craig:** Rest assured, someone died in that jacket.

**Liz:** If it’s XXXL, that’s exactly the way I want it.

**Craig:** At minimum.

**Liz:** Yes, obviously. Either that or like petite.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That’s how it works.

**Liz:** Those are the ranges.

**Craig:** From a child.

**Liz:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** And if you’re a Premium member stick around because at the end of the show there will be a bonus segment, and Liz hopefully you’ll stick around for this, too. I would like to talk about books and what it’s OK to do in or with a book. So, are you allowed to dog your pages? Are you allowed to markup books? What is permissible to do with an actual physical book?

**Craig:** That will be our bonus topic?

**John:** Bonus topic.

**Craig:** Great.

**Liz:** Great.

**John:** All right. Craig Mazin, you just won a WGA award.

**Craig:** I sure did. I can only imagine how frustrating that must have been for some of the people from the guild that were there. I realized when I walked in, because I ran into Sally Burmester who is the kind of second in command of the credits department who I’ve had a lot of years working with, and then just some other people that I know from the guild that I’ve always been very friendly with. And I had such a nice hugs and all the rest of it. And then I realized like there’s only really two kinds of people that work at the guild. People that are like, yay, but then most of them who are like you son of a bitch. So, I was like–

**Liz:** Do you feel like it’s just the guild that feels that way about you?

**Craig:** No, no, obviously the rest of the world. I’m aware of my polarizing nature.

**John:** Well congratulations on another award for Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So there’s very few awards left, but it’s been a good run.

**Craig:** It’s been a great run. And honestly because we all love each other – I feel like there are probably shows that do, or movies that do really well where there’s a lot of enmity between people. I think there was like something in the air when was it 12 Years a Slave, when that movie won? There was like the writer and the director didn’t like each other. There was something in the air. We all love each other. All of us. Like everybody. So when all these things, like Johan Renck won the DGA award last weekend. So, we were loving on him. And our production designers won. And our sound people won. And so everybody sends each other these lovey-dovey emails. And I’m, you know, that part is wonderful. We all actually like each other so we’re happy.

**Liz:** Such a rarity.

**Craig:** I think it is.

**Liz:** It is.

**Craig:** I think it legitimately is. Ah, if people could see the misery that goes on. But, yeah, it’s been great. And I’m very grateful. And the Writers Guild, you know, my relationship with the Writers Guild is complicated in that I’m always kind of just a fuse-budgety policy questioner, but obviously a loyal member of the guild for a quarter of a century. And, you know, that award last night actually was emotional. It was nice.

**Liz:** It’s really nice to be in a room with other writers. And it’s nice to be recognized by your peers who you respect and who you are either internally or externally competing with. You know, you’re all trying to make each other better, or be better than somebody else. And so to be recognized like that I think is really wonderful.

**John:** Yeah. Some news and some follow up before we get to our main topics. My third book, Arlo Finch, comes out Tuesday, the day this episode drops.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it.

**John:** So Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows is the third book in the installment.

**Craig:** OK. I just want to describe for people–

**John:** Describe it.

**Craig:** So Arlo Finch and his friends are staring into what appears to be two centurions, but statues with wings, but the wings are it looks like stone. And it’s like but the centurion statue stone goliaths are facing each other and in between them is a crevice of light.

**John:** Fair.

**Craig:** And something good or bad is coming out of it. And you know what I feel? I feel like they’re about to leave something and enter something new.

**John:** That is absolutely true and accurate. They are headed into the world beyond the woods. The realm.

**Craig:** Yes. The Kingdom of Shadows.

**John:** Yes. That is in fact the Kingdom of Shadows. All three books have an “in the” thing. It’s all geographically based.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So “in the Valley of Fire,” “in the Lake of the Moon,” and now “in the Kingdom of Shadows.” It is actually truly a trilogy. This last week I put out a long medium post which you can read about the experience of writing a trilogy, because as screenwriters we always write like one movie. And it was really cool to actually get the chance to write the whole trilogy and do the whole thing. But unlike your Chernobyl experience where you could plan out the whole series in advance, I really kind of couldn’t do that. And so one of the things I wanted to get into in this post is the degree to which you can make a plan but there’s just a lot of discovery along the way. And the villain of this series was not the villain who I thought was going to be the real villain as I started writing the first book.

**Craig:** The real villain I presume is capitalism.

**John:** It is capitalism. [laughs] It’s funny how it all comes back to that.

**Craig:** I’m in a Bernie State of Mind.

**John:** If you want to come see me and get your book signed I’m doing an event at Chevaliers on Larchmont this Sunday at 2pm.

**Liz:** Love that bookstore.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** I do want to read this blurb on the back of the book. It’s pretty amazing. This is Ransom Riggs who is a number one New York Times bestselling author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a book that my children both read, and thus I read and loved. And he writes, god I hope Ransom Riggs is a man, because I just said he writes.

**John:** He does. He is a man and he does write.

**Craig:** It could be – Ransom is a gender-neutral name.

**Liz:** That’s true. It’s sort of a human-neutral name.

**Craig:** It’s human-neutral. It’s actually a word. It’s a noun. Ransom Riggs says, “John August is a master storyteller.” That’s pretty impressive.

**John:** It’s nice. Yeah.

**Craig:** Master.

**John:** Yeah. I got some good reviews on this.

**Craig:** Yeah man. That’s awesome. Congratulations.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Are you going to do another one by the way? Not another one of these, but another thing?

**John:** At some point.

**Liz:** A book series.

**John:** Well, at least a book. I don’t think I would do another series right away. It was a lot to undertake right at the start and it was kind of foolish in a way, just because to do a book a year is just a huge commitment.

**Craig:** Derek Haas does a book a minute.

**John:** He does a book a minute.

**Liz:** That’s right. He does.

**John:** And his books are ultimately a series, but they’re not a trilogy in that way. Like it’s another installment. This was a lot.

**Craig:** I wish I had – so our friend, Derek Haas, who does all the Chicago shows, Chicago Fire, all the rest of it, has more confidence as a writer than anybody I know. And because of that he’s free, like he doesn’t do that thing that I’m always doing which is just going, “You know what? I suck. And actually today would be best spent playing a videogame.” He doesn’t do that.

**Liz:** Oh, that’s every day.

**Craig:** Yeah. Right.

**Liz:** Every day opening the computer, and particularly when it’s a blank page you’re like, no, not good enough for that. Just no.

**Craig:** No, I can’t. Derek is like, “Awesome, blank page. Let’s fill it. Woo!”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God, I wish I had that.

**John:** He gets up at five in the morning and just does it.

**Craig:** He gets up at five in the morning. I go to bed at five in the morning because my mind won’t shut up. Ugh.

**Liz:** I had to open a blank page on Thursday. I was writing an outline for something and it was luckily like the 15th draft of it that I had been doing, or 15th break of it, and so had kind of an idea of where I was going. But man opening that blank page, even knowing like I’ve got the notes, I know where I’m supposed to head, I was just like there’s so much more interesting things happening on Twitter right now. Or Instagram. Or The New York Times. Or quite literally anything else possible.

**Craig:** Anything. Can I tell you also as I get older there’s this new thing that’s been happening – I don’t’ know if you experience this, John, because we’re older than you, Liz. I’ll start a new project. It’s the beginning. I look at it and I go, “My god, am I still doing this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Have I gotten nowhere? [laughs] You just realize that you’ve been driving a car in a circle forever.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you’re like I have to do this again? Here we go.

**Liz:** My favorite thing is to revise my title page.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a classic.

**Liz:** I’m really into that.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** I’m like, um, is this where you put – is it centered? Is this the font that I want to use for the title? What are the other title pages I’ve used for other movies I’ve written? And then you go down that wormhole. Maybe I’ll just read this. We’ll see–

**Craig:** I’ve got a new thing for you if you want. This is my new jam. So I’m adapting this thing that’s based on another existing work. And that existing work has a very specific font it uses. So I’m like, oh, I’ll use that font for the title page. Well, that font was specifically for that thing. But then other people have made similar. So now I’m on a font hunt.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, font hunt. That was so much fun. And then you get to download the font and install the font. But that’s a day. You’re exhausted.

**Liz:** I was doing a look book for something recently and really got into the font world. And I was like, you know, I really think I want this to look like a neon sign. Guess how many neon sign fonts there are?

**John:** 700.

**Craig:** 4,000.

**Liz:** A million. Just a million.

**Craig:** There we go. I knew it.

**Liz:** And so then you’re like what color is it if I’m doing this in neon sign?

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** It was a great day. It was a great day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a good day.

**John:** And really when you’re being paid a daily rate to do this, well, my pages aren’t done yet but I did fit the font for the–

**Craig:** What we’re saying is their nightmare come true.

**Liz:** Actually every producer listening to this right now is like, “Ugh, that was why it was on Tuesday and not Wednesday.”

**Craig:** Exactly. “Because of the font? You piece of shit.” [laughs] What can we do? We’re humans. We can only do what we can do, unless we’re Derek Haas.

**John:** A script from this past year which did use a custom font on its title page–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Was Knives Out. And we talked about Knives Out in Episode 436. I got a bit of follow up here. It says, “John and Craig, you guys were talking about the specificity in scripts and referenced the Knives Out script. I was excited to read it but I noticed there was very little if any description given to the characters. Starting on page one with Fran and then within the first three pages Marta, Mom, and Alice are also introduced, but Marta was the only character with any description whatsoever. And this description was only given as 20s. I’d have to believe that if this was a three-pager sent in by an unknown you would have mentioned that and Craig would have had some umbrage.”

**Craig:** Yes. I would have.

**John:** “So is this because the script is written by an established writer, or it’s a style that some writers can either do or not do as long as it’s consistent?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Tell us what you think, Craig?

**Craig:** Rian Johnson was writing a script for himself to direct.

**Liz:** That’s what I was going to say.

**Craig:** So there’s no question that when it was time to cast, I mean, well first of all that movie is cast almost exclusively with stars. Well-known actors. Meaning there wasn’t going to be an audition process as much as we think this kind of person – I imagine this sort of person, this sort of person. For those actors when the script was sent without question Rian must have included – I mean, I’ll ask him – but he must have included, or just called them and said, “This is who you are. This is what you look like. This is how I see it.” But there was no reason for him to put all that in there because all it would do would be to limit the description for the actors that would be reading it. So he could tailor that to them.

Yes, if he were not directing it, or if there were any chance that anybody else would be working on it, or that there would be a lot of open auditions then, yeah, no, he would have to do something.

**John:** He’d write, “Ruggedly handsome, but doesn’t know it.” Or any of those classic things.

**Craig:** Papa doesn’t know it. Ruggedly handsome but doesn’t know it.

**Liz:** She’s the girl next door, but…”

**Craig:** But.

**Liz:** But.

**Craig:** But. Yeah. Exactly. Because the girl next door sucks.

**Liz:** Yeah, exactly. She looks great without her glasses on.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, the glasses.

**Liz:** That’s my favorite. I’m also wearing glasses right now ironically. So there you go.

**Craig:** Wait, take them off. Let’s see what happens.

**Liz:** Well, it’s like Clark Kent. I can’t.

**Craig:** Of course. Wait, oh my god. Liz Hannah is–

**John:** Superman.

**Craig:** Superman. She’s Superman.

**Liz:** Obviously.

**John:** That’s a good disguise. I was talking with a friend of the show, I had lunch with her a week ago, and she was talking about the process of going out to a major star and so the character is written a certain way in the script but you also write a top page letter that sort of says this is why this is the role for you. And that’s a whole process we should talk about in a future episode, because it’s a very specific thing that happens.

**Craig:** Yes. I did those. I did those. They’re nerve-wracking. I don’t like doing them.

**Liz:** It’s horrifying. You do it for directors, too. You know, like if you’re trying to attach somebody and why is it you and why is it that person and blah-blah-blah. And then when they pass 12 times then you really just get to the letter and you’re like this letter isn’t good. This is why they’re passing.

**Craig:** Also I feel like, oh my god, I’m just – if they say yes I feel like I just sold somebody—

**Liz:** A really bad [crosstalk]–

**Craig:** Like a defective product. Yeah. But that’s me and that’s my sad brain.

**John:** Craig, some shocking and sad news this past week. MoviePass fell to zero. The stock fell to zero. So it had ceased operations in September. We had talked about MoviePass over the past two or three years.

**Craig:** MoviePassed.

**John:** MoviePassed. Craig, any surprises? Any last words for MoviePass?

**Craig:** The surprise was that it took this long. It’s actually amazing how long a venture with no logical prospect for success can actually last. Neither you nor I are business geniuses, but we saw fairly clearly what I think a lot of business geniuses just did not want to see. Which is that that was just not a functioning workable concept. And hopefully people will learn their lesson. But they won’t. Because capitalism is the villain, man.

**John:** Since this is probably the last time we’ll ever talk about MoviePass–

**Liz:** Fingers crossed.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to say that I think there is something underlying the idea in terms of like encouraging people to go see movies at theaters which was a good thing that happened for a short period of time. And so I was talking with Megana, our producer, and she was saying like it was kind of great for a while because it made going to movies with your friends so cheap that they went to more movies.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** And that’s a good thing. So, if the movie theater chains themselves, or other people who actually have a financial interest and an understanding of how movies work could bolster that kind of frequent movie-going I think that’s only to the betterment of everybody.

**Liz:** I agree. I had friends who had it and the thing was that they wouldn’t just go see like Star Wars or whatever the big movie was. They were like well because we can go to the movies we’re going to go see anything that’s in the theater. So they would see small independent movies that like I didn’t even know were in theaters. And so I think that encouragement was really great. Because it’s not really the Star Wars of the world that need the butts in seats.

**John:** Exactly.

**Liz:** We’re all there.

**Craig:** We’re all there.

**Liz:** It’s the other movies that are getting the theatrical release that are really looking for the butts in seats. And so I agree. I think encouraging people to go to theaters is great. I think it just has to be sustainable in any form.

**Craig:** It was great for us. It was great for people that like movies to see as many movies as they wanted for the price of one movie. If restaurants did that more people would definitely eat out. And experience new foods. Unfortunately never could quite – I mean, remember there was that one point where they were like, “No, we’re playing three-dimensional chess. You don’t understand. We’re in the data business.” And for a moment I was like, oh, well, OK. Maybe I’m dumb and that’s a thing?

**John:** I don’t really get how Facebook works either, so maybe.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. But then I was like Facebook has ads. I can understand that. But what is MoviePass going to do with their data of people that go to movies? Really the only data they had was that people that were smart enough to take advantage of this insane thing. RIP MoviePass.

**John:** Yeah. The point you made, Liz, about sustainability I think is really crucial. Whenever you look at a bunch of money spilling into something it can stir stuff up. But like can it really build a sustainable business model out of things? And that’s always the question whenever I see venture capital coming into something I’m like, oh, are they going to ruin something and try to change it?

**Craig:** Yeah. The probably will.

**John:** They probably will. All right. Liz, you have just made a new movie, All the Bright Places. It is coming out on Netflix. What was the process of you getting this movie put together and making this movie? Because this is one of the – you were hands-on in actually making this movie. So talk to us about it.

**Liz:** Yeah. It started a while ago. Actually I think I started the first draft of it right after I sold The Post. So it was before we started shooting The Post. So this would have been 2016/2017. And it’s based on a book by Jennifer Niven called All the Bright Places. I got sent the book by my manager who is a producer on it. And Elle Fanning had been attached for a long time. I’ve known Elle for a long time. We wanted to work together. And I read this book and found it emotionally very moving, but also it dealt with things that we don’t always talk about really openly. I think we don’t always talk about mental health as openly as we can. And we don’t talk about tragedy and sort of trauma and how we recover from that, or don’t recover from that.

And it was also a story about teenagers, but it wasn’t a story just about teenagers. It was sort of when we talked about making the movie we were like let’s make a movie where the two leads happen to be 17, not a movie about them being 17.

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** And so I started a draft in 2016/2017. And then everybody was busy, couldn’t really find time. Couldn’t find the right director. And then I was doing rehearsals for Mindhunter in Pittsburgh in 2018 I guess, what year is it? No, yeah, 2018. And I got a call that this guy Brett Haley wanted to direct it. Brett had directed a movie Hearts Beat Loud, which was really wonderful and sweet. And he had read the script and everybody somehow was available. Like it’s one of those crazy things, like everybody had sort of six weeks to shoot this movie in two months. And so we all went to Cleveland and made this movie. And got really the wonderful weather of both steaming hot and icy cold winter.

**John:** That’s why Cleveland is such an in-demand filming spot is because of the climate and its accessibility to everyplace else you want to be.

**Liz:** Yeah. It was beautiful for us to shoot there. It gave us everything. The movie takes place in Indiana originally and so we were shooting Cleveland for Indiana.

**Craig:** That’s good enough. That’s close enough.

**Liz:** It was pretty close. But it was great. And Justice Smith is the co-lead. And he’s phenomenal. I had not seen him do work outside of Jurassic World and Pikachu and stuff like that. And what he did in this movie and what he and Elle did together was really phenomenal.

**John:** So as I was putting together the outline for this I was looking for the trailer for it. And so I find this trailer that’s Elle Fanning and some other dude and it was like a fan cut trailer from 2015.

**Liz:** Oh boy. Yeah.

**John:** And so it was crazy to me that like apparently right from when the book sold people were like, oh, this should be a movie and Elle Fanning should star in it. And it’s like the universe wanted this movie to exist.

**Liz:** The fans of the book are ravenous. They love this book. Jennifer Niven, again who is the author of the book, my cowriter on the screenplay, she just has this amazing fan base. I think because it’s real. And it’s also not talking down to teenagers. I think that was really, you know, when I grew up the movies I watched were like Say Anything and John Hughes movies that were not saying that your feelings that you’re having because you’re 17 are any dumber because you’re 17 when you’re having them. And I thought that was an important sort of thing to put out in the world.

I have two teenager half-siblings. I have a brother who is 18 and a sister who is 14. Making things for them I think is now something that I think about. And I don’t want them to watch something and be like, “You totally got it wrong because you’re old.” And I was like well that’s fair.

So, anyways, yeah, honestly Netflix came in and helped us make the movie. And they’ve been amazing partners. But it was a really interesting experience to just sort of have – actually what you were talking about with Chernobyl. It’s like we all kind of lived in Cleveland for eight weeks and became super close. And kind of making a movie with your friends about something you all feel so passionate about is really – I’ve never had something that was that kind of communal in a way.

**Craig:** And now how do you go back to the other way? Where you’re making a movie which is already a war and then you have more wars?

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is brutal on you.

**Liz:** And if you don’t like the people you’re doing it with and you don’t – it’s funny, at the time that I was doing Bright Places I was talking to an actress-producer about doing another movie, about doing a movie together. And we were kind of just having big talks about what do we want to do, where are we at in our careers, and things like that. And both of us sort of right before, she made a little movie and I made Bright Places, and right before that we were both just so burned out and we were like, “I don’t know, man. Like I don’t know if we can do this. This just feels really hard. Maybe we should just take breaks.” Both of us were just kind of totally burned out.

And then she went and made this little movie with an ensemble cast where they all basically lived in a house together for six weeks. And I went and made this movie with a bunch of people and we basically all lived in a hotel together for eight weeks. And I called her when I got off and I was like, OK, I think I know how to do a movie again, because it’s like this is actually how you should do it, which is with people you love who are going to push you.

Brett and I, the director, got super close during filming. That does not mean that we didn’t fight and argue and disagree. But I think in good ways. You know, I think the writer/director relationship on set is super unique and super different from every project. It sometimes doesn’t exist. Sometimes the writer isn’t there. And I believe that’s very unfortunate because I think that relationship can really push the material and push the movie to be so much better.

**Craig:** It’s the best thing. When it works it’s the best. I mean, Johan and I would – we would have our disagreements, but even as we were having them we had this absolute confidence and faith that we would agree. At the end of the discussion agreement would happen. There was never this like paranoia that OK I’m just going to get rolled over.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On his part or on my part. We were just like we’ll figure it out. It’s cool. We figure things out. That’s what we do. And we’re going to be fine. And I’ve been in so many situations where that’s not even a question. There’s no availability for any kind of consensus because consensus is considered insulting to the director that they would have to even have consensus with the writer.

**Liz:** Yeah. Well, and I think you’re talking about the respect of it, too. Like the mutual respect. I have been super fortunate about the directors I’ve worked with. There’s been that mutual respect. But I’ve also been around and it hasn’t.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** And obviously we all know those stories, or unfortunately been a part of those stories, but when you have the mutual respect where it’s like I’m not disagreeing with you because I just want to be right, I’m disagreeing with you because I think this might be a right way to go. And then you talk about it. And then you make a decision together about what the right way to go is. And I think there’s no – people I think get really afraid of stepping on other people’s toes or that as the writer you’re trying to encroach on the director and things like that. It’s like, no, I don’t really give a shit. I just want it to be good. And I don’t care who is right. It just has to be good.

**Craig:** They have no problem encroaching on the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I just see a whole like encroaching thing, I just laugh at.

**Liz:** It’s crazy. I mean, I’ve worked with producers who have never worked with onset writers before. And I’m like what do you think – I’m here to help. That’s what my job is on set as a writer. I’m just here to help. And with Bright Places we were really lucky. And Justice and Elle and Brett and I would just kind of like go over the script every morning. And we were rewriting every day to be better.

You know, I’ve been in situations, I’m sure we all have, where you’re rewriting it because you’re like we just have to have words. There’s no words. So we just need them. This was like we had the words, but we were just like let’s take a couple hours and make them better.

**Craig:** Lovely.

**Liz:** And it was a really lovely experience.

**Craig:** That is great. And correct me if I’m wrong, you now make a movie every 14 days. Is that right? You’ve got one in the theater every 14 days.

**Liz:** Yes.

**Craig:** You’re becoming very prolific. I have to say. You are.

**Liz:** Oh, no. That’s silly.

**Craig:** No, you are. This is exciting.

**Liz:** I appreciate it. Yeah, actually this year I’ll have two things out.

**Craig:** How about that? And last year how many did you have?

**Liz:** Two.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Liz:** Yeah. I do a movie and a TV show a year it sounds like.

**Craig:** I like that you were like I wrote this thing all the way back in like 2018. And like it’s taken almost a year for it be like…

There’s a movie that I’m hoping to get made at Universal that I wrote in 2014. And that was after it took Lindsay Doran and I, I think, seven years to get the rights to this book. I mean, so that’s fast.

**Liz:** Oh, no. It’s very fast.

**Craig:** You fast. You fast.

**Liz:** It’s very fast. I’m very lucky. I’ve had really great partners in this, too. I mean, I think that’s the other thing. Because I’ve written scripts that haven’t been made. And I’ve tried to get things made that haven’t gotten made, be in TV or in features. But I think the thing about the ones that get made, or sometimes they just don’t work. Sometimes it’s just not the right time. So it’s not anyone’s fault. But the ones that do work is because I have great partners on it who are willing to just do it. And I think that’s – there’s so much overthinking. There’s so much questioning. There’s so much doubt in all of it. I mean, just talking about the blank page. And when you’re kind of just like let’s go make a movie, or let’s go do this because it’s something we really care about—

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Liz:** You know, that’s what I’ve been really fortunate to do. And I’ve also – talking about this other conversation I was having about what I was going to do, you know, a movie to do next and stuff like that. I’ve also just like, you know, I’ve gotten to a place where I just don’t like making things with people I don’t like.

**John:** Oh yeah. It’s the luxury of some choice about who you’re working with. And we all have those choices, but we don’t sort of recognize we have those choices early on, especially in our careers.

**Craig:** We do not.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I did not.

**Liz:** But I also think it’s how – what are you willing to give up? Like I think one of the things that I was really lucky about of The Post happening not when I was 22 years old is that I had a life. I was married. I knew what was important. I had really close friends, really close family who didn’t care really about – they were excited for me, but that didn’t change their perspective of me. Well, hopefully. I guess I’ll find out.

So I was like I’ll go work in a coffee shop. You know, I’ll go be a librarian. My priorities are not based really on the success of my career. They’re based on the happiness of the people in my life and that I hope my job helps that, doesn’t hinder it. And so I try and make choices that it’s like, you know, would I rather go work in a library in the Pacific Northwest than make this movie? Then maybe I shouldn’t make this movie.

**Craig:** Ooh, I don’t know if I should be applying that test because I think I might pick the library every time at this point.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** But you don’t want to make fear-based choices about the things you’re doing. Like I better take this project or else I won’t get another project. So, I think as you get through your career you can recognize like am I making this choice to do this project because it is something that I actually want to do, or is it something I fear if I don’t do that there will be a consequence?

**Craig:** I mean, tell me I’m wrong, but I always felt like you were actually really good about that. That you weren’t somebody that made choices out of fear. Whereas I only made choices out of fear for so long.

**John:** Well, sometimes I wouldn’t make choices out of fear, but make choices out of envy. Like I knew somebody else was going to make that movie. I know that movie is going to get made. And I want to make that movie.

**Craig:** I’ll be walking by the theater going why did I not?

**John:** There was a major book series that I passed on just on concept and then it became like one of the biggest book series of all time.

**Liz:** 50 Shades of Grey?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** 50 Shades.

**John:** And it’s like, no, I wouldn’t want to do that.

**Craig:** I would love to see your 50 Shades by the way. Now I really want to see your 50 Shades of Grey. It would be amazing.

**John:** It was not 50 Shades of Grey.

**Craig:** That would be so great.

**John:** Liz, when do we get to see your movie?

**Liz:** All the Bright Places comes out on Netflix February 28th. I think there is a trailer dropping the first week of February, so you can actually watch a trailer that has–

**John:** That’s not fan-made but actually made by professionals.

**Liz:** Not fan made. A real trailer. And super excited. And then I guess you watch it forever because it’s on Netflix. So–

**Craig:** Forever.

**Liz:** Would love for people to watch it the opening weekend. Opening I guess is so–

**Craig:** Opening minute. Opening second.

**Liz:** Opening minute. Yeah. And also if you’re in LA I’m going to host a screening at the Alamo Draft House the Sunday after the release.

**John:** Oh great.

**Craig:** Love that. That’s great.

**John:** That will be nice. All right. Before we get into our How Would This Be a Movies, I wanted to take a look at an article by James Pogue in The Baffler which was called They Made a Movie Out of it, which is sort of the other side of this whole story. And so this article takes a look at how nonfiction journalism, especially long-form nonfiction journalism, has become such a pipeline for movies to get made. And that source of IP has become incredibly important. And Pogue really rails against it. And to kind of comedic effect also in a way. I found it kind of hilarious at a certain point.

But he talks about war time romance, unlikely savants, deranged detectives, gentlemen thieves, love-struck killers. Stories that tap into the thrill of being alive as being the mandate behind these companies that are sort of essentially packaging together, not literally packaging in the way that agencies do, but they are creating these stories with the intention that they will become movies down the road.

So, it was the first time I saw someone actually writing up about this phenomenon which I think we’ve all kind of seen. And it’s really there. So, Craig, what was your first take on this article?

**Craig:** I was very glad that he wrote it. I am currently subsumed by people who are like here’s a podcast, here’s a book, here’s an article about some horrible thing that happened, because obviously that’s what you do. And every single time I think to myself why would I need this? It’s facts. So, what I think is going on is that there is this world of producers, and I don’t mean to tar them with an evil brush. They’re doing their jobs. But what they’re doing is they’re trying to present to Hollywood ownership of something, an exclusivity. I got a book out of galleys that is about this event. Now I own the rights to it. And we can now make something of it and no one else can. And I’m just like, oh yes we can. Oh yes we can.

And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, like my lawyer will call and will say, “OK, I got this submission. This producer has this thing.” And I’m like, OK, but what are they for? So they just planted a flag on a thing that is community property, like they went to a fire hydrant and said my fire hydrant. It’s not your fire hydrant.

And the worst part of this, and he really does such a good job of pointing this out, is that it’s distorting the way journalists do their work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they know how this works. They can see what sells. And the money they get from selling the rights is vastly more than the money they get to do their actual jobs, which is a shame.

**Liz:** Yeah. We should definitely pay journalists better.

**Craig:** Yes. So it’s distorting the way we are now receiving information. And that part is the scariest of them all. I always say like, hey, the reason you’re sending me – I never say this to them – but I’m like the reason you’re sending me this book that is a bunch of facts that nobody owns is because you saw a show I did and you think I will do good with this. But there was no producers with books and properties back then. You know, in fact we were in “competition” with a project that Scott Rudin had because he bought a book out of galleys. Which, by the way, was an excellent book. But that book came out when our show came out. So they’re waiting around for a book to be published. Do you know what I mean?

Anyway, so I thought this was a great article. And I would just say to people like to writers if you love some bit of history don’t be afraid to talk to those people, but you don’t get boxed out of anything just because somebody has the rights to nonfiction.

**John:** So let’s talk about the money for a second because what Pogue says is that a long-form piece in something like The New Yorker is about $9,000 is what a top tier writer could expect to make out of this. Versus like options could be $300,000. It could be more than that. And so they’re definitely looking at a paycheck. And so even while on a screenwriter level, like a top tier screenwriter, that’s not a ton of money, for a journalist that is a ton of money.

Mark Harris had a tweet this last week where he was saying, “I talked to a writer today who told me her goal is to establish a Twitter persona—“

**Liz:** Oh right. I saw this.

**John:** “—that she can leverage into a deal for a book of identity-driven essays that she can sell as a streaming series that she will consult on and kick off her TV creator-producer career.” And so it is that sense of like if I’m going to be a journalist I have to be thinking about what stories I’m going to tell that can actually carry on to the next thing. And that’s not what journalism was supposed to be about.

**Liz:** Well, it’s also complicated because we’re living in a world of IP. We live in this world where everything has to be based on IP. Everything. You can’t, you know, do this – I mean, genuinely one of the reasons everybody freaked out about Knives Out, I mean, I think it’s a really great movie, but it’s also because it was original. It felt different. It felt like there wasn’t some underlying anything for it.

And so I think it’s really hard as – by the way, any version of writers, journalists, screenwriters, anybody – is going into a study and selling something and just being like, no, I made it up. Or, no, it’s about this time in history. And by the way it’s real. And I don’t need to back it up with a novel or a book or a nonfiction book. So I think that’s really hard.

Whereas when you say like here’s the book that this is based on everybody’s eyes sort of light up and they’re more excited. And they see the Time cover.

**Craig:** They shouldn’t be.

**Liz:** By the way, there is a tie-in book cover for All the Bright Places that has just been released for the fifth anniversary of the book.

**Craig:** But that’s fiction. Like I get that. But for nonfiction, everybody is just staring at this book, thinking that the book is going to get them through. It’s not. Especially if it’s nonfiction.

**Liz:** Well, by the way, The Post.

**John:** I was going to say The Post is based on real stories but it’s not based on any specific book, correct?

**Liz:** No, it’s not. It was never based on one specific book.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Liz:** It’s based on about a dozen different people’s stories. And actively Katharine Graham never wanted her memoir optioned, which was one of the issues everybody felt of adapting it. But in reality you don’t need that specific book to write a story about her life.

**Craig:** You don’t need it. Right.

**Liz:** And in fact that book is – by the way, personal history. Everybody should read it. But it’s specific to her perspective. And it’s her story.

**Craig:** That’s the other problem with this is that when you get these books you’re getting a point of view that you’re now locked into. If I had to pick one book about Chernobyl that show would not be what the show is because everybody has their focus. In fact, that’s how they end up selling the book. There is no event. Pick anything in – let’s just pick something. Vietnam War. There’s been 4,000 books about the Vietnam War. If you’re going to sell one now that somebody is going to option it has to be from a point of view that no one is like – this is a Vietnam War from the view of Viet Cong. He’s 16 years old. And he’s got to get from here to here. It’s his real story.

I get books like this now all the time. And I’m like that’s great. But, again, I’m only writing about that? That’s what I’m doing? Really?

**Liz:** Well, I mean, I think this is also 1917 which was a movie that I frankly was like dreading watching because I was like it’s another war movie.

**John:** And it was very specific.

**Liz:** I’ve seen this before. But, then I sat down and within five minutes I was like, oh, this is completely different because this is so specific. And it’s so personal.

**Craig:** It’s personal. It’s not a book.

**Liz:** First of all, I think it’s genius. But it’s so personal. And so that – I think there’s this dread of watching historical movies because you’re like it’s just going to be the same thing, or I’ve done all these, blah-blah-blah. If you’re encompassing one big story, you kind of have to do it either way. You’re either encompassing a huge story from multiple perspectives, or you’re doing the one. And I think that’s how you can do it now.

**Craig:** And you get to choose.

**Liz:** And you get to choose.

**Craig:** Whereas the book is choosing for you. And then when you show up as a writer, this is the other problem with these books, and these articles, and these podcasts, which I hate, is that you show up as a writer as an employee from the jump. Right? If you go and you say I have an idea, I want to write a history of the Washington Post and Katharine Graham and Ben Bradley and all these things that happened.

**John:** Or if you just go and do it yourself as a spec.

**Craig:** Or you do it yourself, exactly. I am the property. The writer is the thing that matters. As opposed to would you like to rent a room in my book house for a while, employee? And I just think we lose power from the jump with this stuff.

**Liz:** It’s interesting. Because I just adapted a podcast as a limited and I had never done that before. It’s a true story. And what I found interesting was actually–

**John:** It wasn’t Scriptnotes, was it?

**Liz:** It…

**John:** Oh yeah. Who is playing me is what I want to know.

**Craig:** I am.

**Liz:** Yeah, sorry.

**Craig:** It’s the weirdest thing.

**John:** That’s such a bold choice.

**Craig:** It’s so weird. Well she said that I knew you well enough and that I could do it.

**Liz:** I wrote him a cover letter and I was describing his character. And that’s how he agreed to do it.

But so I adapted this podcast and it was really interesting because it was kind of the best version of what we’re talking about because it actually was multitudes of perspectives. It was a podcast that was done by journalists and so there were dozens of people that they interviewed. And so what it was, they had done all the research for me.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Liz:** And so it was in one way for me the most freeing way to do that because I had all these different perspectives. Not just me, obviously. The team that I was working with. And that I think is really freeing. If that had been one person and that had been one person’s perspective on this story I don’t think there was any way to do it. And that’s very limiting. But because it’s IP everybody is really excited.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that. There was a podcast that I was considering adapting and it was very much like the one you’re saying. It was very broad in its scope and it was so brilliantly researched and done. And so I felt like, OK, this is the most amazing research partner of a general world of stuff. But these things where they’ll come to you, “We have a podcast about one family and their war against another family in this little town. And it’s crazy the things that happen.” I’m like, great, but that’s like, ugh. So it’s all real and it’s very narrow. And can I just listen to the podcast and then do my version?

Why do I actually need? You know? Anyway.

**Liz:** Why does every episode have to follow the episode of that? Yeah.

**John:** So Pogue’s article I think very smartly points to Argo as being really a key point in the progression of this. Because Argo is based on this Wire piece by the guy who founded this journalism company, Joshuah Bearman. And that became sort of the platonic ideal of sort of like what the true life story turned into good Hollywood entertainment. It had all of the pieces and beats that you sort of want to see. And I think we’ve referenced Argo a lot as we’ve done these How Would This Be a Movie segments. It’s like you’re taking a real life story and how you’re transforming it. But I really wasn’t thinking about the underlying piece of IP. I was just thinking about the actual events and assuming that a great script was written because it was a great script.

**Craig:** Well we will watch these things and appreciate them when they’re done really, really well. But the business layer in our industry looks at process. And they’re trying to duplicate a process. So a writer sent me an email this morning and he said, “I want you to know that I was meeting at a place,” he wouldn’t tell me where, “and they have asked their executives to just start compiling lists of industrial disasters.”

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** And I just was like you dumb–

**John:** Taking the wrong lesson.

**Craig:** Dumb, dumb dodos. Like you dopes. But this is what they do. So Argo is a remarkable story that, you know, as we do ours and we’ll do some today, some of these resist and some of these as you know just blossom in front of you. Argo is one that just like any one of us I think could have looked at that and said we know what to do. It was one of those. And not to take anything away from the brilliance of what they did do, but you could see how it could be something. And they don’t understand that.

They just see a process. Buy article. Sell article. Make money. Because so many of them make money from just things being made. Not from them being made correctly or interestingly or, yeah.

**Liz:** Well, I think it’s also what you’re talking about is the specificity of a writer’s voice, too. Because I think there’s also the version where the three of us see all of the events of what takes place in Argo and there are three different movies and none of them are actually Argo that Chris Terrio wrote.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Liz:** And so I think that, you know, The Post was a movie that wasn’t a remarkable and a unique idea to be like I want to make a movie about the Pentagon Papers and Katharine Graham. People have been sort of talking about it. When I was writing it I heard there were two other scripts going on at the same time that were, by the way, very different, that were much more focused on – I haven’t obviously read any of them but I was told much more focused on the Pentagon Papers.

So my unique vision on what to do was to follow Kay. And so that’s really specific. A dozen other movies could have been made about Ben Bradley. About The New York Times. About any other version of those stories, of those events. So I think like to people listening who are wondering like well I want to make a movie about the Vietnam War. I want to make a movie about this, but like every movie has been made about this, everything has ever been said. Well what are you saying that’s different? What are you bringing to it that’s going to be unique?

**John:** Yep. So, I asked on Twitter saying what stories should we talk about for a How Would This Be a Movie. And so here’s what I did not pick, but I want to single them out because they were some really, really great stories that I didn’t pick for this one. People asked like, oh, an adaptation of the book She Said, the Harvey Weinstein story. Sure. Great.

The History of the Vibrator. The Secret History of the Vibrator. It’s different than you expect. It was not actually done by a medical professionals for hysterical women. It was actually a very different origin.

A stripper named [Tanka Ray] who had a great backstory.

**Craig:** [Tanka Ray].

**Liz:** Love it.

**John:** What actually is happening in the Chevy/JD Power commercials, the ones where they keep revealing all these real life people.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** And JD Power. Like what the hell is JD Power?

**Craig:** And Associates.

**John:** The demon ZoZo who often shows up with Ouija Boards.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**Liz:** Wow, that was not a twist I saw coming.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** ZoZo.

**John:** Outsourcing of hitmen, so hitmen who keep hiring a subcontractor and a subcontractor.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** Is that like Barry season four?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It will be.

**John:** It is. This woman who falls in love thanks to being catfished. She actually falls in love with the guy whose photos were being used by the cat-fisher. And they actually–

**Liz:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** She fell in love with the stock photo guy.

**John:** Yeah. Stock photo.

**Craig:** I love that. That’s amazing.

**Liz:** That’s great.

**John:** Ronald Reagan’s October surprise. Bic vs. Gillette. Could be the new Ford vs. Ferrari.

**Liz:** That’s the one we’ve been waiting for.

**John:** Yes. Firefighters who are saving the dinosaur trees of Australia. Tuna price-fixing. Ships frozen in ice at the North Pole. Soldiers battling wolves in WWI.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** There’s some good stuff here. But for today I picked political stories. Things that have a good political angle because I feel like we’re in a political moment. Liz, you’re a person who writes movies with politics involved.

**Liz:** Unfortunately. Sorry everybody.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The first one I want to talk about is Jeff Bezos and his phone getting hacked. Because this was a really complicated saga also with some iconic characters. It’s still kind of happening in real-time in front of us. Very short version of this. Everyone knows Jeff Bezos. This is a summary that John Gruber did. And so John Gruber has a site called Daring Fireball. And I really liked his pitch for what this saga was. I’m going to summarize it a bit here.

The richest man in the world, a billionaire a hundred times over, meets and exchanges phone numbers with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the most powerful dictator in the Middle East. The richest man in the world happens to own as a mere side business The Washington Post, a newspaper whose news coverage and opinion columns have been highly critical of the Saudi Arabian royal family’s brutal and aggressive regime. The crown prince uses this superficial personal relationship with the richest man in the world to hack his phone by an infected attachment sent by WhatsApp using military grade technology seemingly crafted by a secretive firm from Israel that supposedly only offers its services to trusted governments.

With the information they extract they end up revealing an affair that he’s been having. His marriage falls apart. He brings in Gavin de Becker, a world-famous sort of researcher and protector to figure out what’s happening. The president of the United States is involved in the saga. The president’s son-in-law is involved in the saga. A team of Saudi agents brutally murder and dismember Jamal Khashoggi, who was a reporter for The Washington Post.

There’s just a lot of pieces here. So, the Jeff Bezos MBS saga, how do we start this movie?

**Liz:** Well, if it’s Craig there is a natural disaster or a manmade disaster probably.

**John:** Well let’s take a look at this on—

**Liz:** This is the article. This is the one you’ve been looking for.

**Craig:** This is it.

**John:** Let’s take a look at this on two fronts. First off, the actual story. And then I think we should also talk realistically about how challenging it will be to make this movie given the people involved.

**Craig:** Well, so weirdly I don’t think it would be hugely challenging depending on the company. There are some companies that are tied up with money from the Middle East, but generally not from Saudi Arabia. Look, I think one of the competitors to Amazon, whether it be Netflix or Hulu would be thrilled to maybe poke Bezos. It’s not like he’s going to kick their stuff off of Amazon here and there. But when I read through this story the challenge I see it as is that other than the Khashoggi story which was just terrible and shocking, I’m not sure I care that much.

In other words, it’s a billionaire who is getting poked back by another billionaire and his marriage falls apart. But he’s OK. And he continues to own that business and The Washington Post. It is concerning that Saudi Arabia is in possession of technology that can do this. But that’s it. It’s sort of like so it happens and then it’s like and how what. And did it change the world? Did it crack the earth open in any significant way? I don’t really think so.

So, weirdly my problem with dramatizing this is I’m not sure that it’s dramatic in any significant way. That’s kind of – yeah.

**John:** All right. Liz, you made another movie about The Washington Post.

**Liz:** I did do that.

**Craig:** Which was dramatic.

**John:** So I’m wondering where do you see – what characters would you focus on if you were doing this movie?

**Liz:** That I think was my initial reaction reading it was like who is the POV character in this? Because I agree. I didn’t have, again, I think aside from Khashoggi which that I think in this story and the way this article is laid out is almost an afterthought to what happened. And that for me is the emotional crux and the tragedy of this whole story. And so I wonder if there’s something there of that you’re telling the story when billionaires fight there are consequences. And it’s not just done over text message. There are actual legitimate fatal consequences to this power play and to whomever is in the White House currently.

And I think – so that for me was like I don’t know that this article is the story, but if this is the backdrop there’s probably a deeper emotional conversation to be had about the side effects of billionaires trying to play each other.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll link to a couple different articles. And this to me of all – we were talking about sort of like whether things need to be based on IP or based on articles – I don’t think there has to be anything based on an article here at all.

**Craig:** No way. Yeah.

**John:** That question of POV, I would have generally said like I don’t care about rich people’s problems, and then I watched Succession. And I guess it turns out I really do care about rich people’s problems.

**Liz:** I love rich people’s problems on Succession.

**Craig:** Although, are they rich people’s problems? Because my obsession with Succession is that the richness exacerbates family problems. And that they’re everyone’s family problems.

**Liz:** Well it’s basically King Lear.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s King Lear.

**John:** But the degree to which Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, that it is a classic affair but taken to such a weirdly Titanic level. And so I think what might be possibly interesting about doing this story is that you have these characters who are almost like Olympian gods at this sort of Titanic level up here. And then you have the contrast of that with sort of ordinary people. And so I don’t know there’s ways you get down to the Amazon fulfillment worker and the researcher, or the hacker who is doing this one little bit of code, but there may be some way of just looking at how disparate these people’s lives are. The scale at which they’re playing. Because it’s true that also I think national/international policies is happening partly because of this affair. And this weird text message being sent back and forth has triggered something huge in the world over what should be something kind of inconsequential. I think that might be the way you get over the scale problem.

**Liz:** Yeah. It’s also a little bit like The Laundromat. It’s kind of the story of the little guys that are affected. You know, it’s the people who are not involved in the power plays and not involved in those conversations and not involved in the affair and they’re getting totally screwed.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about some of the dangers about trying to tackle this story at all. Because you said that you felt like a Netflix or an HBO might be willing to some of this. I come back to thinking of Sony and North Korea. And I do wonder if you’re the company that’s trying to this thing you may be looking at not just legal challenges from Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, but also a government who is trying to destroy things.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they’ve proven that they have some technologies there. So, that is an issue. And it’s going to become more of an issue because we know for instance that it’s not possible to tell certain stories about China. This has been coming up a lot because I’ve been getting a lot of tweets and things about Wuhan and coronavirus and what the Chinese government is doing, which sounds very, very familiar to anybody that’s looked at the way other certain communist governments have handled these kinds of things. And the fact remains that I just don’t see how you could make a movie that is critical of the Chinese government in Hollywood today because of the intertwining of finances. It’s just not possible. I just don’t think it’s possible.

And that’s obviously of great concern. It’s going to become of more concern. This is not the first time Hollywood has had this problem. Curiously they did in the 30s. The Nazi government started basically pressuring Hollywood to not make certain kinds of things or they wouldn’t show the movies in Germany. And Hollywood in its typical way said, “OK.” Because Hollywood is cowardly and loves money.

So, despite all of the wonderful speeches that people in Hollywood seem to make about progress and freedom and liberty and so forth, it’s going to become harder and harder to do this because of globalization and the globalization of the marketplace. And more importantly the globalization of financing turns everything into a tricky mess. And sooner or later you just end up with whatever the safest villain is when we start making these movies.

So, famously the Red Dawn remake, right? It’s like, yeah, North Korea, what are they going to do, right? So I think in 20 years the only villains that we’ll have in movies will be the North Koreans. We’re telling some story about what happened when the United States invaded Grenada, it will still be North Korea. We’ll just change it to North Korea.

**John:** We’ll just have to invent some random country. Some island nation.

**Liz:** Yeah. I mean, I think it’s interesting talking about globalization and things like that because look at what happened with the NBA when Daryl Morey tweeted about Hong Kong.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And the cowardliness was just kneejerk, right?

**Liz:** And I think there’s also the problem of people being undereducated to actually the things that are happening. I think people will just say kind of a blanket statement of like, oh, well this is what’s happening. But not knowing and not understanding. Frankly, I think the fact that the Houston Rockets didn’t fire Daryl Morey is a big statement and I think is good that they did not take it to that level and they didn’t fine him and things like that.

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** But it is really this conversation of fear and it is a conversation of, you know, look, I’ve not done a project because I was genuinely afraid that the people that I was writing about would take over my car and make me crash into the side of the building. There are those things.

**Craig:** Those thoughts have crossed my mind as well.

**Liz:** Yeah. There are those stories that there is a legitimate fear. And do I really want to write that one or am I OK just turning my car on and leaving that one on the side? So, Saudi Arabia is a little scary. That’s a little, you know.

**Craig:** It is.

**Liz:** I would prefer not to have them hack my phone.

**John:** All right. Also looking at globalization and probably the single person who most embodies globalization at this moment would be Carlos Ghosn. So this all happened while I was in Japan. I was there for the holidays. And so I was there as all this stuff happened. So, if you don’t know who Carlos Ghosn is he was born in Brazil to Lebanese parents, raised in Lebanon. He attended some of France’s best schools. He was working for the tire-maker Michelin. He worked on his English and became head of the North American company, for Nissan, Renault, Mitsubishi, that alliance.

He was arrested in Tokyo for basically hiding money, not declaring money that he’d gotten in. On December 29th he escaped and made his way all the way back to Lebanon, which should have been impossible, and he somehow did it. So, this feels like – what I love about this story is I can completely imagine a version of this where he is the hero and this remarkable, daring escape he’s made, or that he is a great villain who has fled from Japan.

**Craig:** Or a MacGuffin.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like he’s like the light in the briefcase. First of all, Carlos Ghosn’s last name for a word puzzle nerd is such a gift.

**Liz:** Phenomenal. It’s great.

**Craig:** Like I’m looking at Carlos Ghosn. I’m like, OK, is there a puzzle where other names I can just remove. I can change one letter in the first name and one letter in the last name, both to T, and make a phrase like car lot ghost. So now I have a whole Carlos Ghosn puzzle I’m going to try and work on.

But, my take on this would be like you get hired by a company that’s like here’s the deal, we got to figure out how to get this dude out of this country over there.

**John:** Logistics.

**Liz:** 100%.

**Craig:** It’s logistics. And it’s a comedy.

**John:** A heist in a way.

**Craig:** It’s a heist where you’re moving a human through. And it’s really hard. And you have to make money. And maybe you kind of get to know him while he’s talking through the box or whatever. But I love the idea of kind of a logistics-based black comedy.

**Liz:** I think we should get the Ocean’s crew back for this one.

**John:** Totally. So, at one point in order to get into a plane he’s basically smuggled inside a box, because it was just too big to go through the normal scanner. So they don’t detect that a human being is inside that.

**Craig:** I don’t know. When you read it, because the thing is when you look at him it’s just kind of funny. Like I’m not scared of this guy.

**John:** No.

**Liz:** No.

**Craig:** He seems kind of like a goof.

**Liz:** He threw a Marie Antoinette-themed birthday party for his wife.

**Craig:** He’s a goof, right?

**Liz:** Like it sounds amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it smells like a comedy to me also because his crime is financial. And while we know that financial crimes have impacts on real people, he’s not a murderer. He wasn’t like polluting the air with some evil chemical. He just, you know. And, look, he also kind of has a point. I mean, his point was I got arrested in Japan for this crime and their conviction rate is 99%. That’s a huge problem. Like that is legitimately a problem.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It doesn’t appear that there’s such a thing as a fair trial in Japan if everyone is guilty. So I kind of got like a little bit of sympathy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know? Look, he’s probably a total criminal. But, I don’t know, I just thought it was fun.

**Liz:** Do you think the Japanese government was like, “We got to lose that one case so it’s not 100%.” Do you think they have that conversation?

**John:** A ringer.

**Liz:** We’ve got to keep it just at 99% guys. Because otherwise we’ve got issues.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think they need to adjust that number. I’ve got to be honest with you. 99 is not–

**Liz:** I have questions.

**Craig:** Like I think the federal government has like a 90% conviction rate here in the US.

**John:** Which you could argue like–

**Craig:** They pick the winners.

**John:** They only try the cases that they know they can win.

**Craig:** But even there like, you know, like one out of ten. That feels like we’re normal. If you win every game as a pitcher you’re probably juicing, you know? So lose one.

**John:** I will put a link in the show notes to an article that talks about the Hollywood connection behind all this because – actually both of these stories have Hollywood connections.

**Craig:** That was the craziest.

**John:** Yeah. So Ghosn was talking with a producer about sort of like that his life felt like a movie in this way. And so this was before he had actually done this great escape. So I think that’s funny.

Going back to the previous story, there’s a Hollywood connection there, too, because the way the party at which Jeff Bezos and MBS met was here in Hollywood. Brian Grazer was throwing this party and Iger was there and other folks were there. So it’s so–

**Craig:** Never go to a Brian Grazer party. Never go.

**John:** That’s what tends to happen.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve never been invited.

**John:** Nope.

**Liz:** Yeah, I was like how many of those invitations have you shot down, Craig?

**Craig:** Zero.

**Liz:** There you go.

**Craig:** Zero. But I’m just saying prospectively I’m not doing it.

**Liz:** You have a 99% of not going to a Brian Grazer party.

**Craig:** Of not going to a Brian Grazer party.

**John:** All right. Our third and final story is also political. This is about Holly Cairns—

**Liz:** Love this one.

**John:** Standing against partner Christopher O’Sullivan. This is in rural Cork. She is a candidate for the Social Democrats. He is a candidate for some other political party whose name I can’t pronounce.

**Craig:** But they’re like a moderate, moderate-left versus left-left.

**John:** Yes. But they’re both running for the same spot. It feels like a classic setup, but I was trying to remember what other movies had the male and female—

**Liz:** Competing.

**John:** Competing.

**Craig:** The Competition.

**John:** What other rom-com has the couple against each other?

**Craig:** The Competition is a great movie, Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving are both competitive pianists. And they’re falling in love while they’re at a competition. They’re not like already together. That’s a new one. Hmm?

**Liz:** I can’t pull any.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think so.

**Liz:** I mean, I really – reading this I was like – can we just do the sequel to Long Shot with this? Because it’s such a great story. I also liked that there’s also three seats available. So the two of them could–

**Craig:** Which kind of takes away the—

**Liz:** Takes a little bit.

**John:** The stakes.

**Craig:** The reality has lowered the stakes.

**Liz:** And also the article left that to be like the last line of the article.

**Craig:** Which I was like oh you people.

**Liz:** Yeah. You just got me.

**Craig:** And also but like the danger is the article, or at least one of the articles starts off with, “It sounds like a bad romantic comedy.” And you’re like that’s the problem. It kind of sounds like a bad romantic comedy. So how do you make the good romantic comedy version out of it? Because the two of them seem actually lovely. And they’re married and they’re staying married, which means there’s actually not a ton of conflict there it seems.

**Liz:** No. And you can tell they’re not Americans because they’re so just casual and like, well, we agree about everything except politics. So it’s fine. And I was like I’ve never – I don’t understand that. That’s not a sentence that’s ever been said in the United States.

**Craig:** And also like they’re both super good-looking. It’s actually really annoying. I hate them.

**John:** All right. So let’s talk about the challenges. If you get hired to do this story what are the things you’re going to be looking for in order to create the conflict, the challenge that you need? And so we’ve had other writers come on talking about the romantic comedy engine. What are we looking for in a comedy and in here that’s going to make this possible so it doesn’t just stall out?

**Liz:** I mean, for me I think comedy is always best when it’s organic and relatable. Like I think when you – character flaws are inherently comedic. Particularly if you see a reflection of yourself in them. So, I think this feels like a relationship comedy to me. This feels like two people who like the only reason they’re not together is because they disagree about everything. You know, so, it feels a little like a comedy version of like War of the Roses. And you get two really dynamic people who – and passionate people.

My only thing is I don’t know if the conflict of the movie can be sustained about two people arguing about politics.

**Craig:** No.

**Liz:** That feels like a–

**Craig:** Death.

**John:** But here’s where I think the upcoming election gives you a real benefit in this story that you don’t normally get in a romantic comedy. It’s like there is a deadline. There is going to be a decision reached. And normally when a couple has conflict about when do we have kids, are we staying here or are we moving, there’s never a decision. And actually it can feel like the population is getting to vote on some of these things.

**Craig:** Right. My gut is that there’s no way to do this story if they’re happily married in the beginning.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s not a good marriage. It’s falling apart. And the fact that one of them chooses to run against the other is the ultimate shot across the bow. And then what they find, and this is a very romantic comedy sort of way of looking at it, is as they compete with each other they just start getting hotter and hotter to each other.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Again.

**Liz:** It’s a little Mr. and Mrs. Smith meets like The American President.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. There you go.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so what happens is they are back together again and then one of them discovers that the other one has kind of screwed them over campaign wise. It’s that phrase all’s fair in love and war. No. There is an interesting movie where you say that’s nonsense. All is not fair in love at the very least. Right? And so it was like it started bad, it got good, it went terrible, and then there’s the election and obviously something good happens at the end you would hope.

The problem with these movies, and when I say these movies – movies where the climax is leading up to a competition. Sports movies have this all the time. Election movies have this. Someone has to win and someone has to lose. And there’s only so many permutations. The least interesting one is like the person that we thought would win would win. So you see in like, sports movies got smart. They used to be like “we win” and then they were like “we win the semi-final, who knows what will happen next.”

**Liz:** We got the emotional win. We got the character win.

**Craig:** And then they were like “we lose but we lose with honor.” So they’ve done so many permutations. And when you’re dealing with a man and a woman it’s like, well, if the man wins it just feels like, ugh, men win, cliché. But if the woman wins it also feels quite like, ugh, they had to let the woman win. You know?

All the nonsense gears-turning of people misinterpreting. So then what do you do at the end? Do they both lose? But then you feel like, ugh, they both lost. Screw this movie. What do you do?

**Liz:** Or do you do the version – and this is not the romantic comedy version – but this is like the romantic drama version where somebody wins and they breakup.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s so sad.

**Liz:** I know. Sorry guys. I brought you down.

**Craig:** Oh, and then there’s also the whole like Gift of the Magi version where it’s a tie and they each voted for each other. You know, like there could be something sweet. I’m such a sentimentalist.

**Liz:** Yeah, that doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**Liz:** That’s not happening. That’s not a thing that happens. Sorry. I think them breaking up actually is probably like the more interesting version if you’re going to do this. You basically do kind of like a high concept updated War of the Roses. And that like maybe the fighting has like pushed one of them to realize something they didn’t, but also realize we’re not supposed to be together.

**Craig:** I’m so old-fashioned. I want them to be together.

**Liz:** But maybe one of them is like, “I’m president, you’re vice-president, but we’re not going to be together. We’re the best functional as partners, but not romantically.” I don’t know.

**Craig:** Maybe there’s a way that they have to like – you know, like sometimes you can run for an office while you have an office. So let’s say she’s running for this office and he already has an office that he can keep. She wins. But she has to now work with him like as a coalition thing? Like I want them to be in love at the end.

**John:** Yeah. I do, too. A coalition government. That’s what we want.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Coalition is a good title, by the way.

**John:** Every relationship is a coalition government.

**Liz:** It’s true.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Liz:** That is accurate.

**John:** Every marriage is a coalition government.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yes, I’ve been in the minority coalition my entire marriage.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Trick Mirror. It’s a book by Jia Tolentino. The subtitle is Reflections on Self-Delusion. I thought it was great. Megana, our producer, had recommended it. And I read the first essay, The I in Internet, and thought it was so good I just reread the whole essay again. It was terrific.

She talks about growing up in a Houston megachurch. The sororities of UVA. The Peace Corps. Being on an early reality television show. She’s just a really good writer. You know there’s some writers who you’re like I’ll read whatever essay you write. I don’t care what it’s about. I’ll read that essay. And it was just great. So Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.

**Craig:** Awesome. What about you, Liz?

**Liz:** Me? I’m going to do a health thing, which is really—

**Craig:** Ooh, health.

**Liz:** I know. So I’ve spent the last eight months in a room, which basically means I’ve stopped taking care of myself. And a friend of mine recently was like you need to drink more water because it’s going to make you healthier.

**Craig:** Oh, the water people.

**Liz:** I know, those water people.

**John:** They come. They come at you.

**Liz:** But she upped the stakes for it. Superior electrolytes. They are electrolytes you put into your water. It changed my life, genuinely.

**Craig:** Salt. So she sold you salt.

**Liz:** She sold me watermelon flavored salt.

**Craig:** OK. [laughs]

**Liz:** But here’s the thing. Genuinely I’ve been, again, this goes back to what we sort of always talk about which is taking care of yourself, and none of us do that. And particularly writers. It’s just so much easier not to. To stay sitting rather than get up. It’s a lot nice than having to walk around or exercise. But I’ve decided that I’m supposed to take care of myself now. And so superior electrolytes. They’re fantastic. I’ve actually genuinely in the ten days of doing it I found out I feel better when I’m hydrated.

**Craig:** Hydration is important.

**John:** That I totally believe.

**Craig:** Yeah, it turns out we do actually need – we are mostly water and we need the thing that we are.

**Liz:** Well, and if you work out you end up sweating, which is also horrible because that’s another reason we don’t work out.

**Craig:** It’s gross.

**Liz:** Yeah, it’s gross.

**Craig:** You’re peeing out of your skin. It’s disgusting.

**Liz:** It’s just a horrible thing.

**Craig:** It’s terrible.

**Liz:** But I highly recommend. This is a broader spectrum of things to say which is like take care of yourself. It is an important thing to do.

**Craig:** Always. Always, always, always. We’re big fans of that.

My One Cool Thing is a kind of a puzzle that I knew about for a couple of years because I’m a puzzle dork. I learned these little niche puzzles. Usually because I’ll get a puzzle and I’ll look at it and I’ll go what the hell is this. And then Dave Shukan who is my puzzle mentor will go, “Oh, that’s a this kind of puzzle.” I didn’t hear – what’s a that kind of puzzle?

So, a couple of years ago I was doing this puzzle and I’m like I don’t understand what I’m even looking at. And he goes, “Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. That’s called a star battle. It’s a certain kind of puzzle.” In the New York Times they do these big puzzle inserts at the end of the year and they included star battles. And they explained what they are. And people are very, very excited.

It’s such a fun puzzle to do. Very simple. It’s basically a grid. It’s like 10×10. And your job is to put two stars in every row and every column. But there can only be two stars in every row and every column. To make things a little trickier, but also a little easier, they also have these squiggly lines inside of the grid that are regions. In every region there must be exactly two stars.

So it’s this very elegant, very simple logic puzzle. And you’re like, OK, well I guess that shouldn’t be, and then it just absolutely possesses your mind. You can play them on the Internet for free if you just Google star battle puzzle. Like the very first hit should be one of those little online. And you can generate different sized grids and amounts of stars.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** Puzzles.

**Liz:** Have you ever played Wit’s End?

**John:** I have played Wit’s End.

**Craig:** What’s Wit’s End?

**John:** That’s the one where you have the little wooden walls that you put up?

**Liz:** No, no, no.

**John:** A different one. Tell us.

**Liz:** OK. So I’ll do one more quick thing. I’m a huge Trivial Pursuit nerd. We play Trivial Pursuit a lot in my house. The problem is we’ve run out of questions.

**John:** Oh! We call Wit’s End “smart people game.”

**Liz:** Well, Wit’s End is like an updated version of Trivial Pursuit. You can play with two more people. But the questions are very different. They’re not just trivia questions. There’s like word puzzle questions.

**Craig:** Oh I love this.

**Liz:** And there’s like ranking things. So you have to rank like the five countries that start with L from largest to smallest. And so—

**Craig:** I’m buying this thing right now.

**Liz:** It’s excellent. You can buy it on Amazon. It’s called Wit’s, like I’m witty, although I’m not, Wit’s End. Highly recommend. Really fun. Also goes very fast. Like we played two rounds in an hour. It’s great.

**John:** Great. Very nice. That is our show for this week. A reminder for our Premium members that we are going to do a bonus segment about books. If you are not a Premium member you can sign up at Scriptnotes.net. You can also give a gift membership if you want to give a gift membership to somebody. There’s a little button that says “send a gift.” So you can do that.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. With production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin Vox.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

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

Liz, you are?

**Liz:** @itslizhannah.

**John:** Excellent. You can find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. And reminder, Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up to get the Premium goodness. Liz Hannah, thank you so much for joining us here.

**Liz:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, Liz.

**Liz:** I want the jacket next time.

**Craig:** Done.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It’s time for our bonus segment. I want to talk about books and specifically what you’re allowed to do to a physical printed book.

**Craig:** Burn them!

**Liz:** I was going to say there’s one thing you’re really not allowed to do.

**John:** On Twitter this past someone showed a picture of like I find a way to make Ulysses more portable, basically they ripped it down the spine so you just take half of it with you at any point.

**Craig:** But people lost their shit. I mean, they went bananas.

**Liz:** That’s a tough one.

**John:** That’s a tough one.

**Craig:** I think book people think books are alive. [laughs]

**John:** And I grew up, I remember watching—

**Liz:** They have feelings.

**John:** They have feelings. I don’t know if it was a film or probably a film strip with like a [doop] that advanced to the next thing, we were talking about like when you get a library book or a new book you have to open it carefully and bend all the pages and how you don’t mark anything in it. And I’ve increasingly just started just writing in books or dog-earing pages.

Craig and Liz, what do you think is OK to do with a printed book?

**Liz:** I think anything except burning it. I really feel like that’s the one that you don’t do. I mean, I adapt a lot of books, so even in my professional career I have to highlight things. And have to underline things and stuff like that. So, I don’t know how I would begin to do my job without being able to do that.

I don’t think I’ve ever used a bookmark in my entire life.

**Craig:** Same.

**Liz:** So dog ear. Or if like it’s a hardcover sometimes I’ll try and do like the book cover–

**John:** Oh, the jacket.

**Liz:** The jacket into the page. But that inevitably, then the book jacket is gone.

**Craig:** It falls out.

**Liz:** And so inevitably it doesn’t happen. So, yeah, I think there’s just like one really big thing you don’t do with books, and then everything else feels OK.

**Craig:** And there’s one really big thing you do do with them, which is read them. So as long as you’re reading them, read them the way you want to read them. That’s what they’re there for.

**John:** Here’s a question for you. If I lend you a book, should I have any expectation that you’re going to give me the book back? That printed book?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, the word lend implies yes.

**Liz:** Yes. If I’m giving you a book then, no. But, what’s funny is I did recently give a friend of mine a book because I was like this book is great. And then he brought it back and I was like I really didn’t want it back. Like I don’t have enough space for this.

**John:** It’s not a boomerang.

**Craig:** Did you use the word gift?

**Liz:** No, this was yours. I gave it to you.

**Craig:** I’m giving you this book.

**Liz:** Yes. This is for you.

**Craig:** If someone says lend I immediately feel guilty and I’m in a panic and I want to send it back.

**Liz:** I also take care of it. I don’t mark it. I would say that’s something you don’t do. When somebody lends you a book do not highlight it. Do not dog ear it. That kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Well at that point what I usually say is because of the way I sometimes physically handle my books I’ll just buy it. Or, you know, get the e-book version which then I can do whatever I want.

**Liz:** Right. Who is reading Ulysses and needs to carry – we live with e-books and iPads in our world. By the way, you don’t have to tear anything off. And it’s lighter.

**Craig:** By the way, you don’t have to buy Ulysses. Isn’t it in public domain anyway?

**Liz:** I’m sure. I’m confused.

**John:** I’m confused, too. Well, I will say let’s talk about e-books versus printed books. Because like a previous recommendation was Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, which is an 800-page book. And so I bought the book at Chevaliers where they’re doing the Arlo Finch book reading. Everyone should come to that. And you should go and support local bookstores and buy physical books, which is fantastic. So I bought this book at Chevaliers and I was like, oh my god, this book is so big and so heavy. It’s like uncomfortable to read. It’s just too big of a book. So I also bought the Kindle version. So, Chuck Wendig got paid twice.

**Liz:** There you go.

**John:** Which is good. But it was much easier to read that book. And Jia Tolentino’s book I just recommended, I did read the e-book version, although I had the printed version here at the office.

**Liz:** I do that a lot. I do the double purchase a lot.

**Craig:** I’ll do the double purchase.

**Liz:** Because I love having – I am a tactile person, so like actual reading of a book I enjoy. And like, you know, I keep a book in my bag whenever I’m traveling around waiting for meetings and stuff like that. You just have kind of a book.

But, you know, if I’m going on vacation I bring my iPad.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** I hate reading off the iPad. You’ll read a book on the iPad?

**Craig:** I do. But you read better from a book I think.

**Liz:** Yes, I do, too.

**Craig:** A proper book.

**John:** I read better from a Kindle.

**Liz:** I process it better.

**Craig:** I’ll get both versions for research purposes. Because you can search–

**Liz:** It’s so great.

**Craig:** Which is amazing, right? You can search, which is brilliant. And of course you can highlight if you wish, which is a little clunky, although the new pencil makes it a lot easier. But I still, a physical book I just find easier to deal with and easier – because that’s how I was raised. My daughter I don’t think ever reads a physical book unless it’s required for school or something. Everything is online. I mean, that’s how they’ve learned. It’s over, John.

**John:** It’s over.

**Craig:** It’s over. It’s over.

**Liz:** Well, we all knew that. Yeah, the only thing that I really actively read on my iPad are screenplays. Like I don’t read screenplays printed out anymore. I don’t do notes on printed out screenplays anymore. I do it on the iPad. And I just bought the big iPad.

**Craig:** Oh, the big-big.

**Liz:** The big-big one, which felt like an aggressive move until my husband was like, “No, it’s the size of a piece of paper.” And I was like, oh, well that changes everything.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**Liz:** So one screenplay page is one–

**Craig:** That’s the one my daughter has. Oh, that’s actually kind of – is it heavy or?

**Liz:** Nope. It’s wonderful. Because you can do notes. And it’s not cramming them.

**John:** Is it the size of this one? Or is it bigger than this?

**Liz:** No, it’s bigger than that.

**Craig:** It’s the big-big.

**John:** Oh, I find that too big. But it works for you.

**Liz:** I thought it was going to be too big. And now I’m obsessed with it.

**Craig:** This is the one I have. I have the one that you have which is the standard size.

**John:** Which works well. But Craig, you and I used to – we grew up in D&D with physical books. And you’ve really transitioned to e-books for that.

**Craig:** OK, so like D&D wise, just having gone through the – so I’ve switched over pretty recently to just using the source books, because you can search. But the new revelation was I just built this new character with their character builder. It’s spectacular. It’s so good. And the best part is you never want to print it out. You always want to have it on your iPad because now you tap on something and it tells you exactly what it is. Like you never have to wonder or flip through. It is freaking great.

Obviously hugely relevant to your life, Liz. Hugely relevant to your life.

**Liz:** I just fell asleep for a couple minutes. No. No.

**Craig:** Once again, the light went out in her eyes.

**Liz:** There is just a little clicking off. No, you know, I tried. I tried.

**Craig:** Listen, that’s all anyone could ever ask. You don’t have to like things. You know, sometimes – I know I’m supposed to like kale. Right? It’s bad.

**Liz:** I feel the same way about kale as you do. Or you feel the same way about kale as I do about D&D. How about that?

**Craig:** I hear you.

**Liz:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** I hear you.

**John:** Consensus.

**Craig:** Consensus.

Links:

* [Liz Hannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Hannah) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2176283/), and Scriptnotes episodes [242](https://johnaugust.com/2019/austin-film-festival-2019) and [359](https://johnaugust.com/2018/where-movies-come-from)
* The [2020 WGA Award nominees and winners](https://awards.wga.org/awards/nominees-winners)
* [Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows](https://johnaugust.com/arlo-finch#kos-preorder) will be having a [Launch Event: February 9, 2pm at Chevalier’s on Larchmont](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/john-august-020920)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 434](https://johnaugust.com/2020/ambition-and-anxiety) in which we discuss Knives Out
* [MoviePass parent Helios and Matheson files for Chapter 7 and stock falls to zero](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moviepass-parent-helios-and-matheson-files-for-chapter-7-and-stock-falls-to-zero-2020-01-29), on MarketWatch
* [All the Bright Places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Bright_Places_(film)) comes to Netflix on February 28
* [They Made a Movie Out of It](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/they-made-a-movie-out-of-it-pogue) by James Pogue
* John Gruber on [the Jeff Bezos phone hack](https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/hacked_to_bits)
* The New York Times on [Carlos Ghosn’s escape](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/business/carlos-ghosn-escape.html) and [the Hollywood connection](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/business/carlos-ghosn-movie.html)
* [‘Like a bad romcom’: couple run against each other in Irish election](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/27/couple-run-against-each-other-in-irish-election-holly-cairns-cork) from The Guardian
* [Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L2JGLZ9/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1&linkCode=sl1&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkId=b6ea2f4ef065e37692c379f26e11577a&language=en_US) by Jia Tolentino
* [Superieur Electrolytes](https://superieurelectrolytes.com/)
* [Star Battle puzzles](https://www.wired.com/2010/12/dr-sudoku-prescribes-star-battle/)
* [Wit’s End](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Development-Group-11104-Board/dp/B00004W60G) on Amazon
* [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 Lachlan Marks ([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/436standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hey, so today’s show has a few bad words. There’s a clip, and in that clip an actor is saying some four-letter words. So if you’re in the car with your kids maybe skip over that part. Also, they may not want to hear about a couple going through divorce. But, maybe they will. So, that’s the one language warning for this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Noah Baumbach:** I’m Noah Baumbach.

**John:** And this is Episode 435 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on assignment.

Luckily today we are joined by writer and director Noah Baumbach whose movies include The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Frances Ha, and his most recent film, which is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Welcome Noah.

**Noah:** Thank you.

**John:** It is so good to have you here. There’s a couple things I want to talk to you about today. I want to talk about two handers. So Craig and I often talk about movies that have two central characters and generally those are romantic comedies or they’re buddy pictures. Your movie is neither of those things, and yet you still have to find the balance of those two characters and their shifting POVs. So I really want to get into that. I want to talk about the passage of time, because your movie skips ahead in ways that movies don’t tend to do these days. I want to talk about the passage of time.

**Noah:** OK.

**John:** Your movie is funny. So even though there are big serious topics, it’s really funny. So I want to talk about finding the jokes in those moments and trying to balance the comedy and the drama in your story. You have some great speeches in your movie, but you also have a lot of spontaneous dialogue. So I want to talk about the contrast between writing what characters would say in the moment versus things they kind of rehearse to say.

And we can talk about this because we have the script in front of us. So this is going to be one of those episodes where if people want to print out the script or look at the PDF online we might refer to page numbers. So, this is an episode where page numbers can actually matter. Sound fun?

**Noah:** Sounds great.

**John:** Cool. We have a tiny bit of housekeeping. We’ve been talking about the agency agreement between the WGA. This last week APA signed with the WGA. The week before it was Gersh. So congrats APA. And also Craig will be back with us for a bonus segment at the end of this show. So a reminder that Premium members get a bonus segment at the end of the main show. This week Craig and I will discuss escape rooms. Do you like escape rooms? Have you been to an escape room in LA?

**Noah:** I just heard about what this is. I think I know what it is.

**John:** So escape room, it is a concept where you and a group of friends are kind of locked into a room and there’s all sorts of puzzles and you have to find your way out of it. Craig and I do these a lot. We did one right before the holidays. So we’re going to talk through our techniques and recommendations for escape rooms. So if it’s something you considered doing in the future you’ll want to hear this bonus segment.

**Noah:** So you go to like a mall that has escape rooms?

**John:** Sometimes at malls. In Los Angeles you often find them in sort of industrial districts. And so there might be two or three escape rooms at industrial districts. Generally it’s about an hour to try to get out, if you get out in time. They are tremendously fun. So we have recommendations for anyone who is doing it for the first time, or seasoned pros.

**Noah:** And who creates them?

**John:** Very smart people. Puzzle designers. Listeners of the show, there’s a lot of overlap between screenwriters I think and the narrative designers who are putting together these experiences. But it’s people who want to do that kind of storytelling but in a limited period of time in a limited space. It has overlap with theater, so that also ties in with some things I know you’re interested in. It’s how you give people an experience of being in a place and a time.

**Noah:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll get into that. But, let’s talk about Marriage Story. What is the origin of Marriage Story? What was the first stuff in Marriage Story that you actually wrote down?

**Noah:** It’s hard for me to remember. I don’t know if you have this feeling of often a kind of amnesia. Once you get into the script it’s hard to know how you got there exactly. And often when I look back at old notebooks I’m reminded and surprised by things that I thought I maybe discovered later that I actually had earlier and vice versa. I think it’s often a confluence of things that gets me excited about writing something. And with this one there were various things that ranged from working with Adam Driver again to thinking about new ways of telling a love story, or new to me anyway. And exploring divorce and both the minutia of what that system is and can be.

And then probably hundreds of other little notes and things that have found their way in that sort of gave me a kind of in to, you know, or at least the feeling that, OK, now I can start to write this thing. I don’t know if you have that feeling. It’s like you start writing, or when I start writing it’s like I write and in one sense I feel, OK, this feels like a movie to me and I feel like I can see the movie. But at the same of course you can’t see anything. And so you put one foot in front of the other.

**John:** So you talked about notes and notebooks. How important is that process to you? So you’re sort of gathering up your wool before you knit the sweater.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** Are you methodical about that? Or as an idea hits you you will take some notes? What is that pre-writing process like for you?

**Noah:** Well, I think in general over the course of a day I will just write something down if it occurs to me. What tends to happen – once I start maybe a story or some sort of world starts to form itself then every idea or thought I have I almost will sort of pass it through does this fit in the thing that I’m trying to create. And some do, some don’t. Some come back later.

So, I have sort of notebooks, like little notebooks that I carry with me, and then I have more of like a notebook I have at home that I write longhand in. I tend to like to write longhand in earlier stages. And often I’ll find I’ll even write the same note or idea a few times in the book, almost like I’m trying to work out why it’s interesting to me. And at some point I’ll start transferring notes into a Final Draft document which is sort of when – so at least I have it ready when I feel like it maybe can turn into a script.

**John:** So for Marriage Story by the point where you’re switching from longhand into typing into the computer did you know your characters? Did you know the boundaries of the movie by that point?

**Noah:** I think, I mean, I had the notion that it would be a two-hander. That it would be both her and his story. I had some ideas for scenes. I had some ideas for story. The locations. I think all of that was in there fairly early. You know, all the sort of various relationships or how the story was going to tell itself I didn’t know yet.

**John:** Well how the story tells itself is really surprising to me when I saw it because I think I went into the movie with an expectation that we would see this couple either meet or fall in love and we’d see things go wrong, so the expectation would be there’s going to be a turn and we’re going to see everything fall apart. And what really excited in the opening of your film is you see those moments and you realize later what the context is of those moments. That it wasn’t what you anticipated being.

How early in the process did you write that opening sequence? Those first six or seven pages?

**Noah:** I think fairly early. Because I always knew the movie was going to start at the end of the marriage. And so I was sort of tasked with that challenge of investing you in a relationship that’s already over in a sense. And I wrote those sequences I think to some degree as almost an exercise for myself to kind of figure out the characters. Because both sequences are about both of them. I mean, one is the object, but the one speaking is also revealing themselves as well. They’re revealing what they – it’s what they see in the other person which says as much about them as it does about the person they’re talking about.

And it was a way to kind of get inside their relationship and to – I got ideas for character in that as well, of course, because in coming up with things that he might say about her, you know, that she would be this sort of person and vice versa when she talks about him. It also establishes their sort of milieu, their jobs, their everyday life, their son. But in doing that I also realized it provided me with a good beginning.

And as you say in some ways we kind of pull the rug out from under you. But I also felt like it actually – it also sort of sets you up for what the movie is going to be about which is ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances in some sense.

**John:** So, because this is a podcast we will play this opening scene so people can listen to it, but if people want to read through in the script we’re talking about the first four to five pages is what we’re going to cover in this opening section. So let’s take a listen to the opening of Marriage Story.

[Clip plays]

**Adam Driver:** What I love about Nicole. She makes people feel comfortable about even embarrassing things. She really listens when someone is talking. Sometimes she listens too much for too long. She’s a good citizen. She always knows the right thing to do when it comes to difficult family shit. I get stuck in my ways and she knows when to push me and when to leave me alone. She cuts all our hair. She’s always inexplicably brewing a cup of tea that she doesn’t drink. And it’s not easy for her to put away a sock or close a cabinet or do a dish, but she tries for me. Nicole grew up in LA around actors and directors and movies and TV and is very close to her mother, Sandra, and Cassie, her sister.

Nicole gives great presents. She is a mother who plays, who really plays. She never steps off playing, or says it’s too much. And it must be too much some of the time. She’s competitive. She’s amazing at opening jars because of her strong arms which I’ve always found very sexy. She keeps the fridge over full. No one is ever hungry in our house. She can drive a stick. After that movie, All Over The Girl, she could have stayed in LA and been a movie star, but she gave that up to do theater with me in New York.

She’s brave.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. So you say that this is setting up the life before the movie starts, before the plot starts, and also functions kind of like an overture. If this was a big old fashioned musical they’d play the themes of the show so that you get a sense to hear what you’re going to hear ahead of time and sort of cue you up for it. So here you have literally Randy Newman’s score underneath there and sort of setting you up for what it’s going to feel like. Musical things we’re going to hear. But you’re also setting up rhymes for things that are going to happen later on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** And about cooking, about what they see in each other, and how they’re different. And things that attract them to each other but can also repel them later on. So, it’s a really smart sequence. You know, I love – the first shot we see of her is framed in darkness and it just feels like big drama. Then you establish that we’re in Brooklyn. That is what their apartment is like. This is the apartment that we kind of don’t go back to once it starts. This is the home that they’re going to lose. You establish that they have this kid, Henry. That he’s going to be the focus. He’s the stakes behind all of this. You’re setting up her family even though we’re not going to meet them for quite a long time, but that she has a family. That she comes from California.

There’s a couple moments that here on the page that didn’t make it into the film. There’s a moment in the theater where Nicole is putting on a song, getting people to dance. Did you shoot that?

**Noah:** Yeah, that’s in there. Where they dance is in there.

**John:** It’s described a little differently on the page than what it is here, but it could just be a difference in the script versus what you originally did. But it gives us a good sense of who these characters are and most crucially the tone. This is a movie that is going to be funny at times. And so the pickles moment. That she is weirdly good with pickles.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** Writer Noah Baumbach as you’re doing this, like it’s so easy to put these words on the page. Did director Noah Baumbach get frustrated with writer Noah Baumbach for these one-eighths of a page that must have been so much work to set up?

**Noah:** Yeah. In some cases it can be a more difficult challenge from a directorial standpoint to do something that’s going to be five seconds of film versus an 11-page scene, which there are in this movie as well. So, yeah, those become scheduling challenges. And there are scenes in that apartment as well, so often it was at the end of the day you’d be like and we’re going to do Monopoly and cooking or something like that. You would have to fit all those things in. Shooting still lives of tea cups around the apartment becomes of course on a film set longer than you’d like it to be.

**John:** But those are often things you can maybe grab when you have like 15 minutes before lunch, or like while you’re waiting for someone in hair and makeup.

**Noah:** Yeah, those you could do because you don’t have actors in them. But, yeah, the others you’re doing, everyone has to change. You have to come back. You have the kid hours.

**John:** Well, the Monopoly sequence. Monopoly is a really short moment in here, but that’s four shots or something to get that Monopoly and different setups. And your wardrobe person is like it has to have a separate change just for that thing. Or is this a day that matches another day?

**Noah:** Well, yeah. You’re sort of balancing the thing, too. Because part of what I like with characters in movies is to see them in the same clothes sometimes–

**John:** That’s real.

**Noah:** It’s real. But we have the sort of storytelling of this that things are different days and different times. The clothes can help illustrate that. And we’re also sort of setting up their wardrobes for the movie that we’re about to see.

What helped a bit which is actually something is the style of this, the shooting style, we shot this handheld which none of the rest of the movie is shot that way. We did it because it sort of emphasized the intimacy of these moments and putting you right inside it. It’s the way I shot all of the previous of mine, Squid and the Whale, was all handheld. And in some ways with that movie, because I had 23 days to shoot it or something, part of it was by design.

**John:** Efficiency.

**Noah:** Efficiency. Because rather than stopping to cover scene you would just sort of move around and shoot. And so that did help us pick up these sequences in that we were last exacting about camera movement and camera angles by design than we are for the rest of the movie.

**John:** So we open with this sequence and we have his voiceover. And suddenly we switch perspectives and we hear her voiceover talking through the same things. And it’s a nice match because when we just hear his we assume like, oh, does he have voiceover power through the whole movie. Is this going to be his point of view? And then once we have hers like, oh, so she has voiceover power, too. And we very quickly come to see like, oh, this isn’t actually a voiceover movie at all. This is just essentially prelap for what would be happening in that therapist’s office that we’re going to experience later on.

I should have said at the very start, of course, there are huge spoilers to everything we’re going to be talking about here. So this is the opening of the movie. We will get to bigger spoilers as we go through this.

So, as you’re writing these first sequences, you write his POV, we have her POV. Did you know that her POV was going to become a bookend? That basically he would finally find out what she wrote in that list? That that was going to be your ending?

**Noah:** It came to me fairly soon after I had it. By the time I had really written both these sequences and fleshed them out and figured it out I did know that it was going to return. I didn’t know how I was going to get there. I didn’t know at what point in the movie, how it was going to fall. But it’s partly what even sort of generated the earlier bits was then thinking of it as a kind of big reprise later on.

**John:** That’s great. Now, how much did you outline before you went into this? How much did you have a sense of like these are the beats of the story? Or were you finding your way through and just finding the scenes as you came upon them? What was your process in writing this?

**Noah:** Yeah. I don’t outline in any kind of formal way, but I often sort of going back to what we were talking about in the beginning, I think as I’m inputting notes and things I start to have at least ideas for where they might fall in the movie. And so they’re often just scenes or pieces of scenes or lines of dialogue that I just have at the bottom of the document that I’m kind of waiting to reach at some point as I go. And sometimes I never do. And sometimes they just never find their way in. Or sometimes I sort of try to force them in and they don’t stay. But there isn’t any formal outline.

**John:** Did you put any restrictions on yourself saying like this is not a movie where this will happen, or these are things that don’t happen in the world of this movie?

**Noah:** Well, everything was going to be from one or both of their perspectives. And this opening sets you up for that, whether you realize it or not, that it is a kind of more very straight forward way of – I mean, it’s literally his voice and her voice, even though we don’t return to any kind of voiceover in the movie. But it always – every scene is either her perspective – even scenes – so there are points in the movie where we’re with her where he enters into it and I always thought of it as almost like he’s part of her movie at this point. And then likewise when – and that’s when she first goes back to Los Angeles. And then when he arrives and she serves him, then we sort of move over to his – I always thought of it as sort of like you could make two separate movies of these stories. And now we’re going to be in his story for a little while and she’s almost like a visitor in his story.

And then once they start mediation and the lawyers come in it’s both of their movie. They’re sharing it now.

**John:** A notable example of that is there’s a scene fairly early in the movie where all the lawyers and everyone is up in this high tower meeting and there’s a discussion of what to order for lunch. And Scarlett’s character is helping him figure out what he wants to order for lunch. And that’s a case where it is sort of both of their point of view perspective. You couldn’t say it’s one or the other one’s scene at exactly that moment.

**Noah:** Well that scene is really the first time where I felt like, OK, they’re sharing this – they do in the beginning of the movie, too, when they come home after the theater and they’re in the apartment together. But then we move to her perspective as she cries and goes into the bedroom and then she goes to Los Angeles. And we kind of leave him behind for a time.

The scene you’re referring to is when we’re kind of – I felt like we kind of meet back up and it’s both of their perspectives.

**John:** Now, at what point did you have a screenplay you could show to people or were you talking about the project before you had a full screenplay? What was your process in sort of getting your ideas out to other folks to weigh in?

**Noah:** Well, I did approach – Adam Driver and I had been talking about sort of ideas a few movies back that have found their way into this movie. So he was always going to be part of it as far as I was concerned. So I did let him know at some point I’m writing sort of about this divorce. And we would have conversations, more generalized conversations when I didn’t quite yet know what it was fully about what profession it could be, just various things. And then just even general conversations about relationships and just life stuff.

And then when I brought Scarlett in and Laura as well I would have sort of similar kind of conversations with them. Once I kind of knew what the story was and the script was I talk less about it. Then it becomes a more interior process. And then I wait until I have something that I can show people.

**John:** Singling out just some little small things on the page, stuff that’s scene description and no one is ever going to get to see on the screen, but is delightful. Top of page 10 we meet this mediator. We don’t know very much about him. But he’s wearing a sweater vest with too many rings. Sitting tightly-crossed legged facing them. So, he’s not a crucial character. We’re not going to come back to him a lot, but you did spend the time to give us a very specific description of him so we know what it was we were looking at as we were reading through the script.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** How important is it to you that the screenplay make sense to anyone who reads it as opposed to just you who is going to direct it?

**Noah:** That’s a good question. I think – and I don’t know that I’m always consistent about it – I think there’s probably times where I know much more – I have a lot of visual ideas about it or the way I might want to shoot it that I don’t really feel is relevant for the read of it and so I won’t put that in. Likewise a character. But I find with most characters, even if like you’re saying they’re only in one scene, both for the read but also I think just to give us all ideas later. The costume designer. Even myself again later as a director. If I can put in little things that might spark stuff for us, give the actor something to think about, but also give the reader a kind of visual or an idea that just sort of grounds them a bit more, I will do that.

**John:** So on page 13 it’s an example of a tremendous amount of dialogue on the page. So you do a lot of dual dialogue throughout the whole script. But this was a great example of there are a lot of little small conversations, we’re picking up little snippets. And so your approach to showing us all these little snippets is to do a lot of dual dialogue and have people sort of circle around. Is this exactly sort of what happened in the moment or was this just giving you an overall plan for what you hoped you might be able to capture? Basically I’m asking like did you write this page planning like these are exactly the lines I’m going to get, or I want these things generally said and I’m going to catch them?

**Noah:** I mean, I take time with these lines so I actually do want everyone to say these lines. And to overlap the way they are on the page. Sometimes though when we’re shooting and suddenly now you have a theater group and you have a bunch of people I might find that we either have too much or not enough in terms of covering. Because it’s also like music. It’s like atmosphere in the scene. And particularly with this theater company they are almost like Greek chorus in some senses. And so there were cases where I would add a little bit more later to fill out something, or even reduce stuff. Or switch out and give different actors different lines because the – I would say to your question I think does it need to be actor three saying this and actor five saying that, that was more like well once I know who the people are and I know also what the blocking is and how this is all falling together I might switch out some of these lines and give one actor one of them and one another. Unless it’s a specific line to the character themselves.

But I was conscious too though that like actor three know she’s done with it, know this time it’s really over. He’s more skeptical of things. So I would keep all of that very consistent in terms of when I cast. And also I thought about like Matt Maher who I cast as one of the theater company is a great skeptic the way he plays it, so I was sort of thinking when I cast him he would be perfect for that sort of attitude.

**John:** A thing I noticed about your dual dialogue and I don’t know if you’re even aware that you consistently do it is page 13 has an example. So Beth is speaking. And then when it goes to dual dialogue Beth’s dialogue always moves to the right. So the character who is speaking always drifts off to the right rather than staying on the left. And I think it’s just a way of helping to indicate that, OK, this new person on the left is interrupting or cutting into the flow of an ongoing thing. So Beth is probably one continuous thought, but actor three is the one who is interrupting here. You’re very consistent throughout the script as you do that.

**Noah:** Yeah. I think that’s more intuitive in a way. I’m trying to think in terms of left and right. But, yeah, I mean, I do try to – now that I’m looking at it – I think I do try to keep that kind of consistent, and also for the read so that you kind of know what you’re supposed to follow mainly. Also, by naming her Beth I feel like I feel like you’re also ultimately the other actors have names. But it’s a way for the read – I find it’s always very hard in the script when you have so many names you really do get bogged down and need a glossary. And in this case I put in Actor so people reading would kind of know who to follow.

**John:** Yeah. On page 14 you do a thing where Frank stands and makes a toast to Charlie and Nicole about their move to Broadway and how they’ll miss Nicole and then makes it about him returning to Broadway with the Young Turks. In 1986 he was the Young Turk. So in scene description you’re sort of setting up a speech that is not fully on the page. Talk to me about your decision to do that.

**Noah:** I don’t do that a lot, but I do do that sometimes is put in the direction stuff that I think should probably be turned into dialogue later. Part of this, too, was I knew I wanted Wallace Shawn to play this character who is also a friend and also a wonderful writer. And what we ended up doing in the shoot, too, because I ended up making trims in this scene in the movie, is Wally actually ends up making a toast to Charlie and Nicole as it indicates in there, but also giving you story very straightforwardly he says Nicole is going to California. We’re going to Broadway, she’s going to California. We’re saying goodbye to her.

**John:** Crucial.

**Noah:** And we’re cutting between Charlie and Nicole. We get their looks. And so I was able to actually in his toast and also in the visuals tell the scene faster than I had fully figured out on the page. So, there were other lines in this bit that I cut out of the movie because it felt repetitive in terms of where Charlie and Nicole were going to go from this point forward.

**John:** Absolutely. Well where Nicole is going to go is to Los Angeles. And so cut from a discussion in the apartment, you say we switch over to Nicole’s point of view, and then suddenly she is in Los Angeles. And so we’re establishing on page 20/page 21 new characters who are brand new to us. So actually page 18 is where we make the switch over to Los Angeles. You knew from a pretty early moment that this was going to be a movie that was split between two characters, but also between two worlds, so New York and Los Angeles.

You’re a New York person mostly?

**Noah:** Mostly.

**John:** How much research did you have to do on Los Angeles to sort of figure out the LA part of this all?

**Noah:** Well, I’ve spent a lot of time here and I kind of knew it, or at least had my version of it. And I shot my movie Greenberg here as well and it was a different kind of view of LA, but I had thought of LA in terms of a movie before previously.

**John:** You had a good understanding of what a New Yorker would think of LA coming here. So the frustrations that Charlie might feel trying to adjust to it.

**Noah:** Right. And versus Nicole’s where it’s both where she grew up but a place that she had since been away from for a while.

**John:** So Nicole has moved to Los Angeles. She’s going to be working on this pilot. There is a really good and really funny sequence of her shooting this sequence with this baby and it’s going to be CGI and all that stuff. And as we’re looking at this, as I was first watching this scene and thinking like, oh, this is going to be a major focus of the story and it’s sort of a misdirect that it’s actually not about this scene or this science fiction at all. It’s all really about a setup to like, oh no, you need to get yourself a better divorce attorney. Did you feel any pressure at any point to trim, to get to the lawyer part of that faster? Because it’s just so funny, but I’m wondering whether even on the page or in the edits did you feel any pressure to sort of get through that stuff sooner?

**Noah:** Well, I thought of it in some ways her hair and makeup test or her TV, the stuff done on the TV lot, I was thinking of it a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, how the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion all kind of echo – they’re played by the same actors – the farm hands, so that there’s this sort of familiarity in a new place. And I was also thinking about this, it’s actually a conversation I had with Scarlett at an early stage and we were talking about how when you go through a divorce or a kind of major life transition how the world feels weird to you. And you often find yourself in places – you might be more likely to go to some party you wouldn’t normally go to, or something. That you always find yourself in strange – and everything feels a little bit stranger.

And so I thought of that sort of TV experience both as an echo of the theater company, because we have, again, sort of all these overlapping voices that are disembodied and she’s meeting people rapid fire and they’re all new and they all may be a big part of her life going forward, but we don’t know. We don’t know if this show is going to get picked up. We don’t know what it is. And everything is kind of happening rapid fire.

And so I thought it was actually a good introduction to the lawyer thing because it was funny. It was a way to also bring, like you say, have some humor. But I also in a way felt like it kind of captured a certain kind of mindset for Nicole who has kind of done something somewhat radical. And she literally wakes up in her childhood bed. It’s like everything is familiar but unfamiliar. And I thought this sort of added to that.

**John:** Well it’s also a moment of her being very competent. She’s the center focus, again. She’s not in a periphery of her husband. And she’s actually speaking up for like is that the right thing. I think this is not actually how you hold a baby. And should that character actually be killed off? She’s actually starting to assert some authority which becomes important later on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** So even though the TV show is not a major player in this it’s showing her finding herself in this element. She’s not completely thrown to the wolves. She’s not overwhelmed by it. She’s actually pretty good at it.

**Noah:** Yeah. And I thought it was a way both as you say for her to sort of start to find voice. And she even pitches herself as a director and at the end we’re going to find out that she is directing. But also in some ways you could also read it as she’s taken some Charlie with her. And so in a way there’s still the kind of connection there. And how when things end, which I think the movie is in many ways about, it didn’t mean because it ended it failed. And that there are many wonderful things that she’s bringing with her from this experience even though it’s an experience that she no longer wants to be part of.

**John:** At the end of this sequence we’re going to move into meet Nora for the first time. And she has an amazing introduction. So at the bottom of page 28. This begins an eight-page scene. So, Noah Baumbach I need to tell you that the lords of screenwriting say that the longest a scene should ever be is three pages. And so you’ve now broken the rules of a three-page scene.

**Noah:** Well there’s an 11-page scene coming up.

**John:** Yes, I know. You’re setting yourself up for some long scenes. This I think is a great example though of prepared speech versus spontaneous speech. Because Nicole is going to be talking a lot, but all of what she’s saying she’s kind of saying for the first time, or it’s the first time she’s putting it all together. Versus Nora who believes what’s she’s saying, but she’s said this exact same thing a bunch of times. And the contrast between the two is just so nicely drawn and so well done.

You know, an eight-page scene, what was the process of you working on this scene?

**Noah:** Well, the scene also, and this is something that Jen Lame, my editor, and I talked a lot about when we were cutting the scene is how Nicole, because Nicole has this long monologue–

**John:** Page 35 is just a column of text.

**Noah:** Right. She starts in on 33 and I guess speaks all the way to 36. The monologue relies a lot on the rhythms of the previous part of the scene. So that was a balance in the editing which we were always very conscious of. But I’m glad I didn’t know about that they tell you that you shouldn’t be longer than three pages. But to what you were saying which I think is very interesting, somebody said to me, one of the women I interviewed to sort of research for the movie, she said it’s very hard to leave without momentum. And I thought it would be compelling to create a scene where in some ways you watch the momentum develop in front of you.

And so I thought in a lot of cases like with this monologue that you could see her, as you’re saying, she’s putting things together. It’s the stuff of her life, but she’s in effect kind of creating a narrative out of life that’s giving her reason and momentum to move forward. Because she’s in a place right now where she’s sort of done something. She’s now feeling bad about it. She doesn’t know if she’d done the right thing. And Nora in the context of this scene gives her an opportunity to find voice.

But as you say there’s also this interesting juxtaposition of the fact that Nicole is the actress who by design says scripted lines. We’ve seen her act earlier in the movie. And Nora is the lawyer, I mean, you could say a non-performer, but of course in this context Nora is the performer and Nicole is speaking in an unprepared way.

But then you also have this thing, I thought of this monologue, well, and this is something actually – I always knew how I wanted to shoot this, even though it doesn’t specify it in the script, because in the script as you say it’s long columns of dialogue. But I always felt like it should be – we shouldn’t see it coming. Of course when you’re reading it you see it, so you know what – you’re like, wow, this keeps going, and probably most people reading the script turned the pages before they even went further just saying like, wow, OK.

But in the movie you don’t know how long it’s going to be. And that’s something I felt like, well, it’s a great opportunity to sort of create a situation you don’t realize it until you’re midway through, oh, this is still happening. And a lot of that is in the way we blocked it and framed it, which you wouldn’t get from the script.

**John:** Absolutely. So the script makes it clear that there’s moments where she stands, but it doesn’t make clear like that monologue involves a whole trip to the bathroom where she’s off camera for a while and coming back in. It’s not just one single close up the entire time. It actually has a real plan and a real shift in things. So, Nora’s character, her motivation is clear from the start. We know when the scene opens what she wants to do. She wants her to be a client and she wants to comfort her, but also she wants her as a client.

It’s a little more challenging to figure out what Nicole wants at the start of the scene, and it shifts over the course as the conversation goes what she actually wants changes. And what she wants in that moment but also what she wants in the very near future and the long term future. You can see her starting to form a different kind of plan for her life.

A challenging thing to figure out on the page, but I also imagine a detailed conversation you’re having with an actor as you’re figuring out the beats of the performance. What is that conversation like and does it start – are there rehearsals? How are you going through this to figure out how to make all that work?

**Noah:** Yeah. We rehearsed it. And one thing I always felt strongly about and talked to Scarlett about was in effect I felt she should live it as she says it. In another movie we would flash back to these scenes. And that she should give us that experience–

**John:** She is the flashback.

**Noah:** Yeah, she is. And because the telling of it is as important as what she’s saying. And so – and it’s something she does brilliantly in the movie is that when she’s telling the happier times you feel her inside those times. You feel that exuberance. You feel that being seen by him and what that meant to her. How falling in love, the rush of that. And then you feel, you know, at the point where she says “I got smaller” you feel the shift. You feel the sadness, the disappointment, the self-realization. So, that was something we were all very clear about.

And what she could do brilliantly is she could make adjustments two pages into that monologue, you know, when we did take four. And if I had an idea for later she could make these sort of hair pin turns and still stay in the emotion of the scene which was kind of – was really kind of wonderful.

But I think because the earlier part of the scene as you were saying is in effect a seduction scene. It’s somebody trying to get a job. But what she’s also doing is she is giving Nicole permission to tell her story. And to take control of her story. And I mean I’ve had a lot of interesting responses and people’s interpretations of these things or how they feel about Nora. But many people have held very strongly about the fact that Nicole wouldn’t have ever gotten what she needed if it weren’t for Nora. It doesn’t matter whether you like Nora or not. She was necessary.

And I certainly felt that was true in this scene. And we actually – one thing, too, is that we shot the monologue, it was always one take, because I wanted to have the option of just never leaving her. But it actually we felt like you do want to see Nora listening, because the listening is important. You see the invitation in Laura’s face.

**John:** Let’s focus in on one little moment, that moment you cited where I got smaller. We have a clip of that.

[Clip begins]

**Scarlett Johansson:** In the beginning I was the actress, the star, and that felt like something. You know, people came to see me at first. But the farther away I got from that and the more acclaim the theater company got I had less and less weight. I just became who, well you know, the actress that was in that thing that time. And he was the draw. And that would have been fine, but I got smaller.

[Clip ends]

**John:** So you’re saying that in the actual shooting of it that might be take four. You would have discussion about sort of nuances of sort of where you get to and what moments. Are you directing that with verbs, with a scale of one to ten? Like how do you fine tune where you want to be at different moments in this long monologue?

**Noah:** It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge for her, obviously, but it’s a challenge, yeah, for me as I’m watching it to be able to find those moments and mark them.

So, and of course the success of the monologue as I was saying is its own momentum. And the fact that it feels, it’s all live action in a certain sense. And so it isn’t as simple as saying do this part this way, this part this way, this part this way. I mean, that wouldn’t have worked. Even my perfect version wouldn’t have worked. So, I found myself somewhat specific about where, if I felt things. It really was more about keeping them on storytelling I think. And making sure it was clear where we were in the story as she’s telling it. And also keeping that sense of momentum because it is – it’s a scene that has so many beats just anyway so that when it’s still going – and I knew that in effect part of what was going to work about it was that there is a point of like, wow, this is still happening.

**John:** Where the character herself is aware that she’s been talking for a long time and she’s still talking.

**Noah:** And she’s still talking. And by the time she’s on the couch it’s like a different part of the story. And things that I did in the direction for instance is that we actually move in on her while she’s talking and she’s on the couch. It’s the only time until Charlie sings Being Alive that the camera moves unmotivated by physical motion. Because I felt it was an internal development that’s motivating the camera.

**John:** Her monologue is very much like a song without lyrics.

**Noah:** Yes.

**John:** She’s saying what she sort of can’t dare to say otherwise. And, of course, songs in musicals are those moments where like words fail you and suddenly a melody is supporting you.

**Noah:** Right. And in both cases the character is in a different place at the end then they were at the beginning. Another thing we did in this sequence in the clip you played, it starts earlier when Nora is talking to her on the couch and she says what you’re doing is an act of hope. The central air kicks on in the room. And when she says I got smaller it shuts down. And so that’s that sort of silence when you’re in a place where you’re hearing white noise of some sort, when those things do go off suddenly it feels much quieter than you realized.

**John:** Now, one of the things I wanted to talk about today was the sense of time and sort of what you did so smartly at the start and jumping us ahead in the story. But also as it goes along it feels like we’re getting these bigger and bigger gaps where we’re suddenly catching up with characters, like wait, how much has happened in the meantime.

An example at the top of page 73, this is a moment that really caught me, Charlie and Henry are off going to meet lawyers and Henry says, “I remember those fish,” which was just a great moment where it’s like, oh, well of course kids think of all fish the same. And then you realize like, oh, one of our characters has been doing a tremendous amount that we haven’t seen. So basically Nicole has been visiting with a whole bunch of lawyers that we didn’t know about. And it’s such a rug being pulled from underneath us. We thought we sort of knew everything that was going on with Nicole and we realize we didn’t know everything that was going on with Nicole.

So it’s both time had jumped forward, but our assumptions about how much information we had about what each character are doing are not quite correct.

**Noah:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Did you in your head map out sort of what both characters were doing in the scenes we didn’t see? Or were you just kind of only working on the scenes that we did see as an audience?

**Noah:** Well essentially yeah. That time off camera is built into the structure of the script. So the fade outs that are also scripted, those were – between fade out and fade ins there’s always some gap in time. And so I would always sort of essentially figure out what happened off camera, I don’t know everything, but I would know what was going to at least be revealed in the next sequence like the fact that she’s seeing other lawyers.

I didn’t know that necessarily while I was writing it all the time, and there were scenes that I entertained writing or wrote versions of that I decided were more effective just alluded to and not seen. You know, in the early stages I’m sure I thought about writing, if I didn’t write a draft of Nicole visiting a lawyer and choosing not to hire them.

**John:** What draft of the screenplay did you shoot? I mean, how many drafts did you go through before you were in production?

**Noah:** I often work in sort of perpetual revision in a way. I don’t move too far forward unless I revise what I have. I edit that way, too. I’m always kind of like moving backward to move forward a lot. So that by the time I get to the end of something, like if I have a draft of the script, it’s often – I mean, I’ll change it, you know, of course after that, but it’s at least in the ballpark generally of where I’m going to get. And I don’t really know then how many drafts. I mean, there are many because I’ll always sort of – you know, any changes I make I always sort of make a new draft and work off that. But I don’t know exactly.

**John:** While you were in production how much did Noah Baumbach the writer come back and do work? Were there new scenes, new pages, new anything?

**Noah:** Rarely. Only in like I’d say in those moments like I was saying, like if I feel that some of the incidental dialogue that I’ve written needs to be either developed further or trimmed down. I mean, a little bit more in rehearsal. I mean, when I work with the actors thinks might adjust a little bit. Or an actor may say is it OK if I say this. Do you think maybe I could say this? Or this might be a better way of saying it.

But once I’m shooting it’s pretty much the script.

**John:** How much rehearsal did you have with your principles and with other folks? How many days did you have with them?

**Noah:** I had like two official weeks of rehearsal because Scarlett and Adam and Laura were involved. And I cast even some other parts earlier. We had sort of unofficial conversations or like they’d come over and we’d read together and talk about stuff. So I felt like everybody had a good sort of base even once we went into the two weeks. And the two weeks of rehearsal I mainly focus on the rhythms of the dialogue and just making sure everybody sort of almost speed a lot of the time, of just like – and how these overlaps might work. And then blocking. And I try to get into all the locations as much as we can to block the scenes out so that when we get there on the day of shooting we’ve sort of explored it already.

**John:** Absolutely. So people aren’t walking into a space they’re supposed to be knowing intimately for the first time. So they get a sense of that. You’re not doing really basic stuff, wasting time. You can really focus in on those scenes themselves.

**Noah:** Yeah. And where I can I like to bring in – not in the very beginning of rehearsal – but once they’re up on their feet and moving around a location I like to have the DP and the editor and script supervisor and production designer even there for part of it to give them ideas. They can see what we’re doing, but also give them ideas. And often it can also give the actors ideas, too. A prop can give the actors ideas. Or the placement of something on a wall or whatever it might be.

**John:** I want to jump ahead to page 90. This is a scene, Charlie is calling Nicole. She is at a Hollywood party. He is at his apartment. It’s one of the few long phone calls in the movie. And they’re arguing. We have a clip to listen to here.

[Clip begins]

**Adam:** Are you moving out here?

**Scarlett:** Did you find a lawyer?

**Adam:** Yes. Henry says you’re moving here?

**Scarlett:** Have your lawyer call Nora.

**Adam:** I want to talk about it as us.

**Scarlett:** Who the fuck is us?

**Adam:** Let’s just get in a room, you and me. That’s what we always said we’d do. It’s not up them. It’s up to us.

**Scarlett:** My lawyer would never let me sign anything.

**Adam:** It’s our divorce.

**Scarlett:** They say I could later sue them for malpractice.

**Adam:** What am I walking into?

**Scarlett:** What are you walking into?

**Adam:** Yes, what the fuck is going on?

**Scarlett:** I read your fucking emails, Charlie. I read them all.

**Adam:** When?

**Scarlett:** I don’t know. Recently. You’re a fucking liar. You fucked Mary Ann.

**Adam:** It was after I was sleeping on the couch.

**Scarlett:** It was bullshit about working on us. You know what? I have been working. I’ve been doing the work alone.

**Adam:** How did you read my emails?

**Scarlett:** I hacked into your account you dumb fuck.

**Adam:** I think that’s illegal.

**Scarlett:** Don’t give me this shit about being surprised about LA. Surprise, I have my own opinion.

**Adam:** How do you even know how to do something like that?

**Scarlett:** Surprise. I want things that aren’t what you want. Because, surprise, you were fucking another lady.

**Adam:** One time. I think you’re conflating two different things. Mary Ann has nothing to do with LA.

**Scarlett:** I am conflating mother fucker. You watch me conflate.

**Male Voice:** Did you just stamp your foot? I don’t think I’ve ever done that before.

**Scarlett:** I’m just so angry.

**Male Voice:** You look like you needed me.

**Scarlett:** Yes, I do. Thanks.

**Male Voice:** You know the Japanese are making really interesting tequila right now.

**Scarlett:** That’s exciting, I guess.

**Male Voice:** What are you so angry about?

**Scarlett:** My fucking ex-husband. I spent all of this time feeling guilty and he’s so self-absorbed it’s pointless. It’s a game I’m playing with myself.

**Male Voice:** Oh, hey, Pablo. We met at the—

**Scarlett:** You held the bounce board.

**Male Voice:** The flirty grip.

**Scarlett:** Here’s what I want you to only do. OK?

**Male Voice:** What?

**Scarlett:** I want you to finger me.

**Male Voice:** What?

**Scarlett:** Just finger me.

**Male Voice:** OK.

**Scarlett:** That’s all we’re going to do. Just fingering. OK? I’m changing my whole fucking life.

[Clip ends]

**John:** All right. And that is why we have a language warning on this episode. Some strong words being said here. Why I wanted to use this clip is I thought it was such a great example of two characters are having a serious argument and saying some real things to each other for the very first time and things we knew separately they’re saying to the other person for the first time and it’s getting really heated. And then we stay on her point of view and she’s having a comedy moment right through and out of it. And I just really loved it. It was a character you had set up earlier. He’s perfectly cast. And one of the biggest laughs you got from me was her reaction to his tequila line. It was just a really great moment.

Talk to me about the bounce though of comedy and drama. And at what point are you mindful that you’re not stepping on the drama by trying to go for the joke, or worried that you’re going to be too serious if you don’t lighten up. How do you find that balance?

**Noah:** I don’t think about it so much, I guess as much as it feels intuitive to me. I guess I think of it more like these things live side by side anyway. So, it’s sometimes they reveal themselves or not. I mean, I think, you know, in the case of this I thought of her, too. In the storytelling of the movie a thing I was always aware of is like you have on one hand this sort of high drama of this divorce and then just ordinary life is always – you know, once you hang up the phone you’re back in your life. And she’s furious, but she’s also at this Halloween party. And she’s with her new group of people and she’s still sort of feeling her way out there.

And I also thought it said a lot about where they are at this point in the movie. I mean, she’s sort of active and having new experiences and he’s in this hotel room alone, totally out of his element. So I think I thought of it more that way. And then bringing Pablo back just seemed like a good opportunity. Less about the tone balance and more just about the sort of reality of the situation.

**John:** Well, it sounds like the drama is both of them trying to figure out their future and also dealing with all of their past versus the comedy is very present tense. It’s like what’s right there in front of them. It’s the very day daily life, the stuff that comes up. And, you know, the minor annoyances that are in front of you and the possibilities in this case in terms of like Pablo and people say dumb things. And so you can respond to them.

**Noah:** Right. And it’s not that different thematically from ordering lunch in the meditation. These things still have to get done. And maybe in another movie you’d not show them and we’d just assume at some point they all ate lunch, or you assume at some point the lawyer would tell you what they charge, or that you wrote a check to the lawyer at some point. But I thought for this movie all that stuff was part of the story. So I wanted to include all of these sort of ordinary quotidian things.

**John:** Well, an example is there’s the inspector who comes to the apartment and so Charlie’s character has this sort of parental inspector person sent by the state or sent by somebody to watch them do really basic stuff. And so it’s all the tension, the high wire tension of being watched while you’re doing all this stuff, where just normal daily stuff is happening, and suddenly there’s a magnifying glass on what normal stuff would be. And how you cannot act normally when someone is watching you.

**Noah:** Right. Well Charlie’s apartment, a lot of what happens in Charlie’s apartment speaks to that. I mean, because it is – he actually set decorates it to make it feel like a home and then he’s supposed to act like ordinary life with somebody watching. And it does sort of go with this notion of performance which is set up at the beginning of the movie in that they’re actually part of a theater company. And then here he is performing as dad, as human being on the planet in front of somebody. And in an artificially set designed place.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a little terrarium for a father.

**Noah:** Yes. And so it’s, you know, while also a potential step and stage in divorce proceedings, and it’s very real, it’s also – the movie has kind of set you up for something.

**John:** Well it’s a really thematically dangerous moment, and yet in the character of this woman who is coming to inspect him she is a comedic character who just underplays everything so dramatically that like you want to laugh and you do laugh while not neglecting the stakes that are there for him. And that she cannot be pleased. And so you’ve given him a central sort of very classic comedy where he’s trying to please a person who clearly cannot be pleased.

**Noah:** Right. Right. And with Martha who played the part so beautifully, she’s absolutely unreadable. And that is in a sense what all the divorce proceedings are in every stage is that there is no clear answer. This sort of notion of court as a court but no court – I mean, he and Alan Alda’s character Bert, I always thought of those as like an Abbott and Costello routine. It’s like this sort of perpetual – I mean, it’s why Kafka was such a genius, or one of the many reasons why Kafka was such a genius, but it’s these journeys where you keep feeling like you’re coming to some sort of conclusion or answer and there isn’t any. But then there’s some strange logic in that.

And so yeah this scene sort of furthers that notion and if you think about marriage or the fact that their theater company, there’s performance, but of course there’s also what comes up in the divorce proceedings is, oh, you said you were this person and you never were that person, which is also other notions of persona and misrepresentation and who we say we are versus who we are, or who we want to be versus who we are. And so here you have some sort of strange playlet, the playing out of a guy simulating being a father.

**John:** Simulating perfect divorce dad.

**Noah:** Yes.

**John:** So talk to me as you get through the end of this story as a reader, as the writer, as the director, what thematic goal posts were you aiming for? What were some of the thematic things, questions you wanted to raise and hopefully answer and what new ones came up as you were working through the process? Going into it what did you think it was about and coming out of it what did you think it was about?

**Noah:** Well, when I was writing, and I think generally when I write I think less thematically and more I really try to tell the story as entertainingly and as effectively as I can. What I find is if I’ve done that successfully the thematic stuff all starts to reveal itself. I don’t know if you have this experience. And often it really is just structuring it right.

I mean, I feel that way working with actors as well. It’s like if the blocking is right, if the lines are right and the blocking is right it really gives them a lot of freedom and access to playing the scene in the most effective ways possible. And I think that’s also true I find for me with themes is that they tend to reveal themselves only when I’m actually telling the story correctly, or at least – correctly is probably the wrong way to say it – but I mean when I’m telling the story effectively. That the themes start to – I start to see these themes. I didn’t choose a theater company because I thought, oh, this is really about performance and the lawyers will become performers later. I chose it because it seemed – I liked it visually. I liked that milieu. I liked the idea of having a theater troupe. And I liked the director/actress relationship.

I also liked that they collaborators. I thought well that raises the stakes for them in the breakup.

So, but of course as I’m filling it out I start to see, oh, these things kind of relate to each other in some way.

**John:** And things also rhyme. So he starts as a director. She ends up getting an Emmy as a director.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** As you go through this story you sort of see what each of them wants and becoming what they want to be to some degree. You see Charlie trying to just get back to a thing that he had before and finally accepting that he’s never going to get back to that thing that he had before and he has to move on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** He could’ve done that right at the very start of the story, but he wasn’t ready for it at that point.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** We as an audience are sometimes frustrated that her character is not willing to sort of read that list aloud at the start. That she’s not able to acknowledge at the start sort of what she has. And she eventually finds her way to that point. But you didn’t know that all when you were doing your pre-writing, as you were starting. You just had a shape of ideas that could become a thing. That you felt had stuff that connected them together, even if you didn’t know quite what those connections were.

**Noah:** Right. And I knew in a sense – I was referring to The Wizard of Oz – I mean, I was also thinking of things like The Odyssey that I knew that they were going to go, you know, two people going on both an adventure together and separate. And that they were going to meet all these interesting characters along the way. I mean, it sort of goes to the rings. Like I want, you know, to make everybody compelling who they meet because I thought it’s like you’re going to learn something from each person. I mean, sort of like you do in those, like 18th Century novels, like Clarissa or Pamela where they go on these sort of adventures and they seem kind of wild and sometimes kind of horrible, but they end up sort of OK at the end. They get through it.

And so I was in a sense really trying to follow that story. And then also be true to at least a – tell the story of these divorce proceedings. Sort of going back to your earlier question about drafts, I would say the biggest thing I learned in the first draft, the first full script I had, was that scenes that didn’t stay within that narrative of getting them through this divorce process to the end were all the ones that felt extraneous. So things of running into – I had things at Henry’s school. I had things of Charlie running into friends, like another couple that had been their friends that was taking Nicole’s side. I had some stuff with Nicole and Henry that again was sort of off the topic of this.

Because what I realized in telling it was that – and this goes to the ordering lunch and to the Pablo sequence – is that ordinary life is just there anyway while they’re getting divorced. So I can do both simultaneously.

**John:** Yes. Fold those moments into things that actually have to be there for plot, otherwise they could be cut away, you’re going to probably end up cutting them away.

**Noah:** Exactly.

**John:** Yeah. Your script, at least the one we have printed out here, is 152 pages, which seems long. So 120 is sort of what we leave it at. But your movie is not long at all. So tell us about why that one page per minute rule does not apply.

**Noah:** Yeah. I mean, I’ve discovered that over the years that often having some quite short movies when I – I mean, this movie is long for me.

**John:** What is the running time on your movie?

**Noah:** It’s two hours and 15 or 16 minutes or something.

**John:** Yeah, it doesn’t feel long.

**Noah:** But that’s still shorter than the script count would be if it were a page a minute. Yeah, I mean, The Squid and the Whale was 81 minutes. And I remember hitting like the hour mark and realizing I was almost at the end when I was cutting it and I thought like, oh man, I hope I have a feature film. You know, Frances Ha is like 84 minutes. But those scripts were all over 120 pages. So, I just discovered, you know, I do tend to write at least in sections of the movie quite a lot of dialogue. And you know I play it very fast, generally play it fast.

Although this script did have things like Charlie singing Being Alive is just a line. It’s in there, but it’s a line of–

**John:** You’re not sticking all the lyrics there.

**Noah:** Yeah. I didn’t put the lyrics in. So, of course, that was longer than the page count would indicate. But at this point going into this one I sort of have much more of a sense of how my scripts play, so I wasn’t overly concerned by the script length. Although I knew it was going to be a longer movie than I’d done before.

It also has longer pauses. The pacing is a little bit I’d say different than many of my previous movies.

**John:** Well with your nominations I think you officially have dispensation so you can have 11-page scenes and have a longer script. You are allowed, Noah Baumbach.

**Noah:** I’m grandfathered into it.

**John:** We were talking about Charlie’s apartment being sort of like an LA terrarium. And so we got a question which I think you may actually be able to speak to really well. Adam asks, “All the recent assistant talk and advice for the gentleman moving from New York to LA has got me thinking about a weird social science phenomenon. LA housing favors coupledom. In my day job I’m an entertainment industry drone who doesn’t make very much more than an assistant, but I’m not rent-burdened. I share a one-bedroom apartment with my wife. An LA one-bedroom is comfortable for two people sharing a bed, but not for roommates. When we lived in New York the apartments were so much smaller we needed a two-bedroom not to kill each other. Being coupled is no cheaper than having a roommate there.

“Being an Angelino while poor-ish incentives coupledom. Is this why New Yorkers seem to have more adventurous sex lives? How many dissatisfied Angelinos stay together for housing? Should all the 20-something single assistants shack up with the first warm body?”

So, I look at Charlie’s apartment and compare Charlie’s LA apartment to his New York apartment. And his New York apartment seems much lovelier and cozier, but his LA apartment is bigger. And it’s a recurring thing that people say in the movie is like there’s so much more space. What do you think of Adam’s suggestion that LA is cheaper for couples? Does that make sense to you?

**Noah:** Well, I think about it in terms of the movie, your observation is interesting because it is like the LA apartment by all accounts seems bleak, but it is actually bigger than how he would be living in New York. But, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** You never lived in sort of Charlie’s apartment here. Charlie’s apartment here is a real apartment. Is that correct?

**Noah:** It’s a real apartment. I actually wanted to build it but we couldn’t afford to build it. So it took a long time to find it.

**John:** And so you have to rent that apartment. You have to deal with all the neighbors around it. There’s always noise. I mean, in my movie Go we shot that, again it’s an apartment, in a real apartment. And it was a nightmare for everyone involved. And I feel so bad forever. I should still to this day be baking them cookies for all the nights we were shooting there.

**Noah:** Well fortunately I think that that complex didn’t have a lot of long term people in it. And had enough space that we actually ended up renting like – like we had holding rooms upstairs. There was nobody next door because Adam had to hit that wall so many times that I guess apparently it went through to the – like the wall in the apartment next door broke off, too. So, but it’s was interesting that it was that hard for me to find an apartment to the specifications of both conveying what it should be but also having the visual interest and being, you know, both realistic and also because of the amount of scenes we have in that apartment, something that was big enough to shoot in.

**John:** Yeah. Doug Liman often will say if you want to shoot – it’s tough to shoot a boring a party, because you have people standing around and not having fun, well that’s actually not going to be interesting to see. So in this case you needed a drab, boring apartment, but it needed to convey that message but without actually being so uninteresting to the eye that we didn’t want to spend time in there when we were in there. So, finding that balance can be tough.

**Noah:** And that was a challenge of the movie. Because of the story there are so many scenes in offices, both personal offices, then conference rooms, then the windowless room off the conference room. Even Charlie’s theater company is in a rehearsal space. There’s all these sort of transitional spaces which of course worked for the movie because the movie is about one giant transition in some sense. And his apartment was that as well.

But I like that challenge of making something that by design is supposed to have no personality sort of finding beauty in that. And we had all these sort of different versions of white that we would bring from some of these rooms to other rooms, and Charlie’s apartment being one that we tested a lot of different versions of white for that.

It’s also why shooting on film I thought, I mean, I love shooting on film just anyway. But I felt particularly in this movie because there are all these blank walls of sorts to have the grain.

**John:** Give some motion, yeah.

**Noah:** Gives them, yeah, gives it a kind of body that it’s hard to find digitally.

**John:** Yeah. At the end of every one of our episodes we do a One Cool Thing. Were you warned about the One Cool Thing?

**Noah:** Yeah, I was told. Has anybody recommended David Byrne’s show in New York?

**John:** No. So tell us all about that.

**Noah:** it’s called American Utopia. I think it’s a version of what he toured with, but he’s been doing it on Broadway. And Greta and I saw it and Rohmer my son saw it over Christmas break. I mean, it’s just a fantastic show. It’s a concert essentially, but it has not unlike Stop Making Sense if you’ve seen that, he’s kind of created a kind of concept for it which is really beautiful. But he told a story in it which I thought is very interesting about – I think about it a lot with sort of script and directing and script. There’s a song in the show called Everybody is Coming to My House. And he tells the story about how a children’s choir I think in Detroit or somewhere recorded a version of the song. And he said, you know, it’s the same lyrics, it’s the same arrangement, and it’s a totally different meaning when they sing it to when he sings it.

And he said you know when I sing it it’s clear I’m not so sure about everybody coming to my house. I’m worried they might stay. Or won’t leave. And when they sing it it feels like an invitation. It’s about inclusiveness.

It’s also in his telling of it I felt – he seemed so touch by that notion that something that he had really been thinking about, his version of it could be interpreted that way. And of course we’ve experienced that with covers of songs and all the Halleluiahs that are out there. But I think about that a lot. And I’ve talked about it a little bit in terms of people asking me about sticking to the script. Because I do find that there’s actually so much room for interpretation. If you create a framework actually I feel like it gives the actors all the freedom.

**John:** Yeah. Greta was saying that same thing when she was in your seat saying that even having come out of an improv background she feels as an actor she just has so much more permission to go further because she has the words to back her up. There’s something holding her up as she goes and explores things.

**Noah:** Yeah. And I love improv and I have an improv background a bit from college. And I actually think I employed a lot in writing. I think I’m improvising with myself in some way. But I feel the same way she does is that when we’re going to do it, but it’s also why the script has got to be ready and you have to spend that time getting it there, yeah, that there is more freedom.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is also about getting a script ready. So ten months ago back in Episode 390 we said goodbye to Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell who had just gotten staffed on a TV show. This past week it was announced she’ll be writing Captain Marvel 2, a big giant Marvel movie that she is now in charge of. So congrats Megan.

**Noah:** Fantastic.

**John:** That will be a big thing. And I don’t think that will be a big improv movie. I think that will be a very scripted movie and a very different process than even I think you went through on Marriage Story. I think it’s going to be a very different kind of screenplay and very different requirements. But I’m excited for her and really proud of her.

Noah Baumbach, thank you so much for joining us on this show. It is a pleasure to have you here with us.

**Noah:** Thank you. It was really fun.

**John:** Reminder to our Premium members that we will be back after the credits with Craig to talk about escape rooms. But this episode is produced Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Alex Winder. 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. Noah, you’re not on Twitter are you?

**Noah:** No.

**John:** No. Good plan. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We get them up the week 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. Noah, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on Marriage Story.

**Noah:** Thanks John.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus segment begins]

**John:** Craig Mazin, I just finished talking with Noah Baumbach who has never been to an escape room.

**Craig:** Well, my opinion of Noah Baumbach just plummeted.

**John:** Well, he was at least curious about it. So I was trying to describe what it was and he had a sense that there are things that are in malls and you go in there. But I promised him in this bonus segment we would talk through our experience with escape rooms, our guidance for first time escape room attendees so that he can have the best experience. He and Greta can both go to an escape room and really maximize their enjoyment.

**Craig:** I mean, that would be nice. Right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Everybody should go there.

**John:** But between all the award show stuff, I mean, they can do an escape room. The little PR limo can stop there and they can have an hour to do an escape room and then go on and do more press.

**Craig:** Award shows are actually the worst escape rooms ever. You’re just like, well, I’m trapped in this room. There’s only two ways out. Winning or losing. But either way I’m trapped.

**John:** The good thing about escape rooms though is it has a timer on it. It’s only going to be an hour and then you’re out. They can’t go long.

**Craig:** Oh man. What I would give. What I would give to have these things be an hour. Oh my god. I’m so ants in the pants, ugh. Man. Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s define our terms. So what we mean by an escape room is this is a business that you go in there. Oftentimes they have multiple rooms but you’re going in to do one specific room. You signed up for it. You and a group of four to eight, sometimes a little bit more, people/friends of yours hopefully are going into this room. They give you instructions and then they close the door and then you have usually an hour to find your way out of this room by solving puzzle after puzzle after puzzle, each one sometimes more difficult than the last. Is that a general definition of escape rooms that matches your expectations?

**Craig:** That’s pretty much accurate to me. Yeah. Some rooms have a slightly different measure of how many people. Some rooms are a maximum of only six. There are a few rooms where they say you can’t do it with fewer than two people because there are people that sometimes just go we’re crazy, let’s do this, just me and you.

Some rooms sometimes have puzzles that require multiple people working at the same time. Fairly common. But, yeah, what you just described. It’s always organized around a theme. Typically there is some kind of narrative. So before you go in the room the person who runs the game will give you a little backstory. And then off you go.

**John:** Yeah. And so you and I got our chance to do our first escape room together, because I’ve done a bunch, you’ve done a bunch. The first one we did together was right before the holidays. So it was all the Quote-Unquote, the podcast folks, and your folks all together in an escape room. We solved a Jumanji room. And I had a really good time. It was not the best room I’ve ever done, but it was really fun doing it with you. You I thought had a good combination of leadership but also inclusivity which is I think two crucial qualities for a good escape room experience.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. And, you know, the thing about escape rooms is only one can be the best escape room. So they’re always, like every escape room to me is a little bit like the way I approach crossword puzzles where I think, OK, you know what, overall I generally liked it, or I generally didn’t like it. But here were some highlights. Here were some things I loved. Here are some things that drive me crazy when I see them in escape rooms, which I’m happy to talk about.

But the escape room personality that is best to have, I think, and I thought you had it as well – and in fact I thought everybody had it that we did this with.

**John:** It was a good room.

**Craig:** Is essentially a generosity of communication.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** You’re just telling everybody everything. You have to presume that some people are just going to solve a puzzle before you can or ever would. So you just keep sharing and then your own brain will naturally match up with certain puzzles that you’re just, you get. And other people will go, oh, the thing that’s frustrating you or completely mystifying you I know what to do. It’s such a relief when one of your partners knows what to do.

**John:** Absolutely. So when we say communication it is to call out the things that you’re seeing, especially when they are inputs or outputs. So you see something on the wall that says like, OK, I need a three digit number. And someone else is saying like, OK, I see it and this is a map and there’s dots on the map. And you’re calling out the things that you’re seeing so other people in the room who hopefully aren’t all clustered around you can see, OK, these are the things we’re looking for. And that kind of constant narration of the things that you’re working on is really important.

Also in that communication is we want to say like this is already solved and done. Because so often when I see people who are struggling in escape rooms they are trying to solve a puzzle that has already been solved. So calling out when you’ve done something is really important.

**Craig:** Exactly. The other thing that you want to do is point out patterns that may not be inputs or outputs but feel like they’re relevant. If something on the wall is some words but they’re in colors and they’re arranged in a certain way, just say we’ve got some words with colors over here. Because you may uncover something later and go, oh, those are the colors that that thing is in. And in this way you can kind of keep everything together. It’s good to announce like you said that something is solved so everybody knows that’s burnt. We don’t need to deal with that anymore. It’s over.

**John:** Almost never in an escape room will one thing be used for multiple purposes. You’re not going to go back and use that same thing twice. So if a lock is opened, you’re done with it. And if there was a key that had to go into that lock, just leave the key in that lock because you’re not going to use that key for anything else. So, cleaning up after yourself and moving on is a really crucial skill here.

Many of the escape rooms will actually have multiple rooms. So you’ll enter in one place and you’ll go into another place. In most cases you’ll never go back to that first place once you’ve crossed a threshold into a new room. Not 100% true, but keep in mind that you’re probably not going to be backtracking a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally speaking there’s forward motion. There are two kinds of rooms and sometimes I’ll ask what kind we’re dealing with, but sometimes I just don’t want to know. There’s linear and there’s parallel. In linear rooms you solve a puzzle, it gets you to a next puzzle. You solve that it gets you to your next one. And you proceed as such. In a parallel room there are multiple puzzles that are available to be solved at any given time. You choose which ones. Eventually you have to solve all of them. But they will begin to open up other things. And you may have to backtrack. And you may have to use something twice. And something could get reinterpreted. Those rooms are harder. It’s fun to play either kind. And it is also fascinating to see how we can trap ourselves.

So, sometimes it’s really good to call out and say I have a theory. I just saw a this, and I know that there’s a that over there. My theory is if anybody discovers a blankety-blank it will tell us how to interpret this to put into that. And sometimes you’re right. And sometimes you’re not. And when you get stuck it’s important to kind of go through and say what are we presuming and let’s challenge those presumptions because what if we’re totally wrong. What if we’ve been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out how to stick a square peg in this square slot when that’s actually not at all what this is for?

And it can get frustration. It’s kind of part of the job.

**John:** It can.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The other thing is to avoid your perfectionist tendencies. So if a combination has four pieces to it, and you have three of them, don’t worry about the fourth one. Just go through all the options on the fourth one until you find it. Unless it’s really clear from the start that there’s some sort of time limit or number of attempts possible on this combination lock before it locks you out for a time. And in that case you will need all the inputs in order to try that thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You will at times – and they usually let you know. They’ll say, OK, for this electronic lock it’s very common that you’ll face a safe that has a standard keypad on it. For this electronic lock if you enter the wrong code, if you enter three wrong codes it will lock you out for five minutes. That’s important to know. Because that’s not something you want to try in brute force. But you’re right. If you have a combo lock and you know three of them, that’s fine. Back solve it. I’m a big fan of that.

**John:** Absolutely. And then I would say rotate out and around. So, if you’re working on something and you don’t get it, let somebody else swap in for you and tell them what you’ve tried and let them figure it out. So in the escape room we did before the holidays, like Bo your assistant was able to figure out something that I just could not figure out. And I told her what I had done and she was able to step back and figure out what I was missing. So, it is good to have – when you have multiple people they have fresh eyes and they sometimes can have a perspective that you yourself were missing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Listen for confidence voice which is different than false confidence voice. Confidence voice is I know exactly what to do. Here’s what we’re going to do and this is why it will work. I’ve got this. Let’s do this. Usually when somebody gets confidence voice it’s good for everybody else to stop arguing with them and let them be right. Because what you don’t want to do is debate what the right path is. If someone has a path that they’re sure of that won’t take an hour to try, yeah, line up behind them and let’s see if they’re right.

**John:** Let’s talk through some of our frustrations with escape rooms and the things that would keep them from getting ten out of ten. For me it is when it is unclear whether a problem is solved or not solved. Where there is no visible sign. It’s not clear that you’ve actually done the thing. No change has happened when you’ve solved a particular puzzle. That is a frustration of mine.

**Craig:** Yeah. You will occasionally hear of someone come on the speaker. You’ve done something. Something should have happened. It didn’t. You think well I guess we didn’t do it right. And someone will say you did solve that correctly. Something has opened. And you go, oh, here’s a cabinet that had a magnet release latch and it opened, but it opened so silently and in such a small way how would we ever know. It’s such a problem with rooms I think when they don’t give you that feedback.

**John:** Absolutely. Or the thing opened but there was no sound cue. There was no light. Nothing told you that this was a thing that was possible to have happened.

Oftentimes in a room you will sense like, OK, there is a door. A door is going to open here. And so therefore I’m looking for that. But it’s something that doesn’t look like it could open that does open, as a designer you probably feel like that would be a wonderful surprise. But it’s not a wonderful surprise if none of us saw that as possible, or no one could have been possibly looking there.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this general technology issue. So you can sometimes walk into these very old school rooms in the way that rooms used to be done let’s say five years ago or so when they really started cranking up where it’s a lot of very analog stuff and it’s locks. Just a ton of locks of different kinds. Well, generally speaking locks don’t break. Although I have been in a room where the lock did not function well which was really frustrating and just sort of a time-waster where you’re like if the point is for me to figure stuff out, I figured it out, and now you’re just punishing me because your lock is crappy. How about this? How about just spend another ten dollars and fix the lock? Seriously. Just put a new lock in. So that drives me crazy.

There are rooms that are more technologically advanced which I love. I love rooms that have tricks. But then they have to work.

**John:** They do have to work.

**Craig:** They can’t not work. It’s maddening when they don’t.

**John:** So you and I both loved Lab Rat which is a room that we’ve mentioned on the podcast before. And one of the things – no spoilers – one of the things I loved about that room is that there were things you would encounter for a second time and like, oh, that’s how those things relate. And the context behind what that item was there and sort of how we might use it were clever on second viewing. So that’s an example of not just good narrative design but good sort of puzzle design. What we assumed was the reason for something being there actually had a very different purpose.

**Craig:** Right. So recontextualizations are great. There’s a lot of – I think I like it when rooms pull tricks that don’t use clichéd methods. So if you want to build a clichéd room at some point someone is going to discover a little flashlight that is a black light flashlight. And it will reveal black light stuff. As opposed to in some rooms where the entire light in the room changes. That’s cool. I mean, that’s fun. But, oh look, it’s the black light flashlight again. We found it. Again.

So there are things like that where I’m like, meh, OK. I also have a huge issue with rooms that require you to break something or push something with a lot of force, of any kind. Because one of the basic rules of escape rooms that you were told a billion times is please don’t break our escape room. So use two fingers of force, no more than that. If it feels like it’s not moving easily, don’t push it. Because people go in there and break the rooms.

And so that’s bad. Which means if you’re a responsible escape room escaper you don’t want to break things. There is one room in LA that I’m thinking of that is a very prominent escape room. And it’s a good one. But it does require you to break something at some point and I hate that. And I honestly think all escape room companies should get together and form some sort of consortium where they agree to not do that, because all they’re doing is training people to break shit in other people’s escape rooms.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say a frustration of mine is sometimes – like in an escape room you should look underneath things. You should turn stuff over because often that’s where you’ll discover important things. But where a chair will have like a number on the bottom of it, if it’s not actually a relevant number, it’s actually just some tag that indicates what room it goes into that’s frustrating for me. If you’re in a room where numbers seem important and there’s a random number 14 on the bottom of a chair, I’m going to assume that it’s important for some reason.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ve actually touched on two things that drive me crazy about escape rooms. And when I see them I get angry. Thing number one. You put something in there that looks like a puzzle and it’s not. That’s not a red herring. That’s a time waster. So there is a room that I did recently and there was in the corner of the room there was an object that had a lock on it. There was a lock holding it flat down on a tube.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** And we were just killing ourselves trying to figure out how to open that lock. And finally someone came on and said that’s not part of the room. Then label it. But if you’re going to put a lock in an escape room, hey guys, we’re going to try and unlock it. That’s why we’re there. So don’t do that. And the other thing that I just honestly loathe – loathe- are escape rooms where part of the thing is stuff is hidden. Like, oh, OK, the big puzzle here was that I had to look underneath the drawer in the corner and find this little key on the ground in the dust bunnies? Great? I feel so smart? What’s the point of that? It’s just – why?

**John:** Yeah. You’ll find stuff tucked into a jacket pocket. And I guess I’m OK with that, but I would prefer that if it was related to the narrative. That there was something about that person’s coat and therefore we have the idea that, oh, it will be important to search inside the coat. But like looking through every tag and every piece of clothing just doesn’t feel like a puzzle.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. Yeah. Like if we unlock – let’s say there’s like a high school locker. And we find the lock combination and we open it up and inside is a jacket, like a varsity jacket. And that’s all there is. Something is in the jacket. Or something is on the jacket. Totally fair game. But if there is a key for a box and that key just happens to be in the corner of the room under a rug. I did an escape room in Vegas and you couldn’t – it was a linear escape room. So if you hit a bump and you don’t know what comes next, you’re done. And what came next was that there was an area rug in the room and you had to lift it up because there was a key underneath it. No. No, escape room, that’s bad.

I don’t like it.

**John:** With that rug, if there were some piece of something sticking out from underneath the rug that gave you the sense of like, oh, this rug is not simply just there for floor covering. It is actually part of the puzzle, then that would be fair.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But it was not fair what they were doing.

**Craig:** Correct. So in my beloved Room games on iOS one of the things they’ll do is if there is something that you otherwise would not think would be movable they might if you examine it closely put little scratches in the metal around it as if to say somebody has been moving this. It is movable. Let me try and move it.

But if it’s just some random thing you just end up wasting time. Like OK there’s a bed. I guess we have to lift the mattress up, too. Do we pull the pillow out? And then they come on like you don’t need to do anything with the bed. Well then don’t hide stuff. How about we use our minds to solve problems instead of just go on some sort of dumb room cleaning assignment?

It’s funny. I love escape rooms so much that I actually do get angry when they fail you. But I wish that – so ideally escape rooms take these elements that we’re familiar with and they just reinterpret them in fun ways. The way that you and I in our jobs have to take stories that people are familiar with and reinterpret them in interesting ways. I’m not giving anything away. No spoiler here. There’s a terrific room in LA called the Stash House. And those of us who have done a lot of rooms have encountered a lot of locks. Well at one point you encounter some locks in that room. I don’t know if you’ve done Stash Room yet.

**John:** I’ve not done it yet.

**Craig:** You’re like, OK, not bad guys. Tip of the hat. Tip of the hat. And you go that’s pretty cool. And it’s because it’s like, oh, you guys have also played escape rooms. You also get angry at crappy escape rooms so you didn’t fall into any of the pitfalls which I always appreciate.

**John:** Yeah. I do look at escape rooms as kind of a new narrative art form. And so sort of like the early days of cinema or early days of television there are conventions that are starting and growing up and we are able to push against those conventions as well. So, I’ve loved the escape rooms I’ve done so far, but I’m actually really curious to see where we’re at five years, ten years from now with the possibilities of the format. So, that will be cool.

So the same folks who do Lab Rat, they have a new thing called The Ladder which sounds really cool. Where you can play it multiple times because there’s multiple endings. That sounds smart.

**Craig:** Yep. No, I’m totally on board for that. I have very, very high expectations for that. And I also like the fact that when I travel somewhere, whether it’s in the US or abroad, there are escape rooms. I’ve done I think most of the escape rooms in Vilnius, Lithuania, and there’s some good ones. There really are. I do escape rooms, if I’m just in some random city I’m always looking for an escape room. Always. And it’s fun.

And, you know, sometimes each city has its own flavor. I’ll tell you. Salt Lake City escape rooms brutally hard. I don’t know what’s going on there. My goodness.

**John:** It’s the altitude that makes it so much more difficult.

**Craig:** It is just – they are like – because they’re nice. They’re so nice. And they’re like, all right, good luck. Close. And oh my god, when you don’t get out, and usually I escape. I don’t think I’ve escaped a single escape room in Salt Lake City. And then when they come in they’re like, oh, you were so close. Here’s 4,000 other things you would have never known. I’m like, wow, amazing.

**John:** Yeah. Amazing. All right, to the future of escape rooms. Craig it was very good talking with you and I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Excellent. See you then, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Read the script for [Marriage Story here](https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/marriage-story-ampas-script.pdf) or watch [Marriage Story](https://www.netflix.com/title/80223779?)
* [APA Signed with WGA](https://variety.com/2020/film/news/apa-deal-writers-guild-of-america-1203475114/), congrats APA!
* [Megan McDonnell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6876585/), former Scriptnotes Producer, to write [Captain Marvel Sequel](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/captain-marvel-2-movie-works-wandavision-writer-1272259). Congrats!
* David Byrne’s [American Utopia](https://americanutopiabroadway.com/)
* [Noah Baumbach](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000876/)
* [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 Alex Winder ([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/435st.mp3).

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.

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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).