Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/better-sex-with-rachel-bloom).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode includes a frank discussion of sex, including some words that may not be appropriate for some ears, so head’s up.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah, my name is Sexy Craig.

**John:** And this is Episode 406 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re joined by our longtime friend, Rachel Bloom. In addition to being the co-creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend she has written and spoken and sung extensively about how sex and sexuality are portrayed on screen. I’m so excited to have her on the show so we can identify and fix all of these issues in less than one hour.

Welcome back, Rachel Bloom.

**Rachel Bloom:** Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

**John:** I’m excited to see you. Our first conversation about this was while you were still shooting the show, but you had an article that was in Marie Claire that you tweeted out about. And it was like, yes, I just so fully agree with the things that you’re saying here. And so hopefully we can talk through some of those issues here and we’ve got a lot of people listening to this show who write for film and for television. Maybe we can make some changes.

**Rachel:** Yeah. Yeah! God, I don’t even know where to begin. I guess I’ll tell you how I come in great detail. Just like graphic detail because you had that warning at the top so like people know.

No, I mean, what it started was, and Scriptnotes unofficial Co-co host, Aline Brosh McKenna, and I talk about this frequently, but it started in season three of Crazy Ex where it’s generally a character-based show but occasionally we would use the episodic format to tackle issues. And sometimes those kind of issue-based storylines would be with side characters. And really where it was coming from was where the show idea came from which are what are stories that we’ve seen that may or may not just be female centric that we just haven’t seen especially done on network television, because we had this cool way for it to reach not a large audience but a broader audience because we were technically TV-14 as opposed to a really, really dirty show where we could talk about sex and I heard about mothers and their teenage daughters watching our show together which is one of the biggest compliments, or parents and their kids watching the show together.

And so when we were talking about, OK, what’s something that we haven’t seen tackled on television or network television that maybe we could tackle episodically this season. And we were like, oh, the ways women orgasm. It had been inspired by just the barrage of sex scenes throughout the history of film, and to a lesser extent theater, of the kind of male-gaze-y heteronormative sex idea which is sex is man on top of woman, man thrusts, both come simultaneously.

And we wanted to tackle this and we did it in the form of this side character, this recurring character Tim played by Michael McMillian who realizes that he’s been having sex with his wife and that he hears a buzzing coming from the bathroom and assumes it’s her electric toothbrush. And someone goes, no, she’s masturbating with a vibrator.

**John:** Let’s pause for one second and listen to a short clip of this.

**Rachel:** Oh yeah.

[Clip plays]

**Tim:** Such profound humiliation. Such all-consuming shame. The buzzing from the bathroom has finally been explained. That was no electric toothbrush. No facial scrub device. And now I finally know the meaning of the words, “Tim, that was nice.” We use two different positions, every other Sunday night. All her writhing, moaning, sighing, I thought I was doing it right. But as I drifted off to slumber thinking I had brought her joy, she would slink off to that bathroom with that blasted plastic toy. Oh the buzzing cursed buzzing. That damn incessant hum. I used to think I was a hero. Can’t believe she didn’t come to tell me that she needed so much more than I could give. Now the buzzing from the bathroom tells a lie that we both live.

[Clip ends]

**John:** So, there’s an example of this is a character who is having a realization which is a classic thing people do in musicals that his wife has actually not been brushing her teeth with an electric toothbrush but has been using a vibrator.

**Rachel:** Yes. And this song was co-written with two men who, this is kind of their worst nightmare in a way. So that kind of horror that Tim feels is very much from the perspective of Jack Dolgen and Adam Schlesinger. And then some of the specifics about her masturbating came from me.

And what was really important in this episode is we wanted just at some point to clearly state on network television the way most women come is from direct stimulation of the clitoris. That is scientifically correct. That is not a graphic sexual detail. That is literally how a woman’s body works.

**Craig:** And can I thank you for it? I mean, not to cut you, but it’s so great. Because here’s the thing. You know, there are generations of men that had no clue, right. And essentially were relying on or reliant on a very kind woman explaining to them how it worked. Because everything that we were told through porn or movies or television or sex scenes was that women have orgasms through some kind of expertise penetration. You know, in other words you have to penetrate the woman correctly and you have to do it for a long time and your dick has to be a certain size. And then she will come.

But if you don’t have those things then you’re a piece of shit and she won’t. And none of that is correct. And I’m so happy that you were able to just put this out there and let everyone off the hook, including young people who need to know.

**Rachel:** Thank you. And I think that one of the most interesting things was, well, first of all my own father said he learned – my dad went to all boys school until high school and he said no one ever told him about this or talked about it. And he was born in 1945. And so he was just amazed that we could say this on network television and that we did say this. And the irony is we barely got to say the word clitoris. I mean, we really had to–

**Craig:** Ugh, well.

**Rachel:** Well, because the FCC prohibits graphic descriptions of sex. Right? And saying like a woman needs stimulation of the clitoris that produces a – that is frank. That is not network TV cutesy innuendo. That’s not Friends’ episode where they’re going OK here are the erogenous zones, 1, 3, 6, 7. We’re just saying, no, you have to touch the clitoris and in order to do that we made the scene scientific. Maya is showing him a book and she’s saying this science book, science says, science, science, science, clitoris. Because we tried to say the word clitoris in later episodes and they wouldn’t let us. And they said that was a special exception.

**John:** All right. So before we get to the exceptions, let’s talk about the general situation. Sort of how we find ourselves right now in 2019 dealing with sex in film and television. And sort of what the overall problem is. So before we can solve it let’s define what we’re facing. So, I would say as kids and as adults we learn about sex from film and from television. We just always have. Like I learned about it from film and TV. It’s just the natural way to see it. Or from online porn increasingly.

We internalize, we normalize the things we see. We have a baseline expectation like well that’s how it should be. That’s the normal situation. So what I’m seeing there is what’s normal. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t see. We don’t hear the word clitoris. We don’t talk about a lot of other things. The misinformation, the lack of information has an impact on our relationships and our experiences ourselves. And even our health.

And so a song I want to point out from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is I gave you a UTI. So let me play a little snippet.

[Clip plays]

**Male Voice:** What’s the burning feeling every time you pee? Well that’s how it goes after you have so much awesome sex with me. I gave you a UTI. Yeah, I gave you, a UTI. My sweet love injection caused a urinary tract infection. I’m just that good I didn’t even try, try, try. I gave you a UTI.

**Female Voice:** OK, so it’s not really a comment on the quality of the sex as much as a lot of sex has been happening and there’s just a very natural transfer of bacteria—

**Male Voice:** Don’t ruin this for me. That bladder inflammation is my little gift to you. Yeah sometimes chicks need medication after what I’ve put them through. Come on, sing with me.

**Female Voice:** No, I’m not going to do that.

**Male Voice:** I gave you, I gave you, a UTI, a UTI. Yeah, I gave you, I gave you, a UTI. A UTI. I’m so good at sex—

[Clip ends]

**John:** So I was a man in my 40s, I did not know specifically that a UTI – I knew they came from sex but I didn’t know sort of the actual transfer. I didn’t know what the actual issue was. And so you taught me something Rachel Bloom with your song “I Gave You a UTI,” because I’ve never given a woman a UTI.

**Rachel:** Of course. And a lot of times it’s not given by someone. Miss Brosh McKenna was more of the expertise in this particular area. But, yeah, it can come from – I mean, to get graphic, if you don’t wash your sex toys correctly. Because that’s what it is. It’s transfer of bacteria to your urethra. A big thing is that if you have any contact with your butthole and then it goes in your vagina hole it can transfer bacteria. So, if you’re having sex with someone and they put their penis or something in your butt and then they put that directly back into your vagina that can give you a UTI.

**Craig:** I’m guilty. I’m a UTI giver. I’ve done it, it’s pretty rare, but I’ve done it. [laughs] I’ve done it. I don’t know, what would you call that crime, UTI giving?

**Rachel:** I mean, I don’t know. I think it depends what the crime is. But, I mean, chances are you’ve also probably given people HPV, because I think it’s something like an overwhelming amount of people who are sexually active have had HPV at some point in their lives.

I had HPV in college, so someone gave that to me.

**Craig:** Yes. Definitely. You know, I’ve been with my wife now since college. So the two of us have been kind of off the grid sexually for so long, disconnected from the rest of the sexual world, that we’re kind of weirdly a fairly pristine ecosystem. But, you know, over time it just – sex is messy. It’s inevitable, you know, a UTI is going to show up sooner or later. It’s inevitable.

**Rachel:** Genitals are disgusting. And that’s what sexual urge does is it gets us to get over how disgusting genitals are because really it’s a horror show for all genders and all sexes.

**John:** Well, I want to push back a little bit on like genitals being disgusting–

**Craig:** Yeah, me too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This may be a gender thing.

**John:** Here’s what I’ll say is that I don’t necessarily need to see genitals portrayed onscreen to understand that they’re there, but a thing I liked about your show is I felt like the characters had genitals. And so often they don’t seem to have genitals.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, I could play a clip from “First Penis I Saw,” but our friend John Gatins is the actor who plays the crush in this situation.

**Rachel:** The first penis.

**John:** And it’s talking about he actually has a penis. And that is a thing which characters are just acknowledged to have in most – certainly most broadcast shows. And that was a groundbreaking thing. So, thank you for that.

**Rachel:** Thank you. And when I say disgusting I mean just on a – we talk about things that we normally see in society and we’re talking about things that are under the clothes and sometimes a little bit stinky and like they’re weird and fleshy and moist.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Rachel:** It’s like things, you know, aren’t necessarily considered conventionally aesthetically or odor-ifically beautiful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would say that I’m a huge fan of the female genitalia post-shower. I mean, I’m in. I’m in 100%. I love it. That’s a beautiful thing. And we do, well, the attraction there to, right, to whatever your orientation is, your attraction to that set of part is – it’s not even like attraction or appreciation from the point of view of like look at that beautiful statue. It’s way more primal. You don’t even understand why you like it, but you do.

I mean, sex is a chance for otherwise civilized people to roll around the mud a little bit like animals. And I don’t apologize for that. I don’t care. That’s how I feel.

**Rachel:** That’s great.

**John:** On a character level, you can look at it as a way to talk about a character’s kind of lizard brain. Their basic hard-wiring and sort of why they’re driven to do these things, which may not be their overall goals as intelligent, rational people, too. And so that crossover between the two things is a fascinating thing. And I don’t think we’re seeing it enough in our film and television because we’re not willing to talk about that first part.

**Rachel:** You’re right. It’s a primal drive. And I think that you see love as a primal drive and when sex is wrapped up in that conventionally, and I’m also thinking about even musicals which the show drew a lot from, it’s carnal or not true or shallow and the fact is, no, no, no, this is one in the same. And when you get to the lizard brain it is one of our main drives that also when you’re in love or in lust, often which the two are one in the same, it is a drive. It’s not a want. It takes over everything. And it is often counter to what is going to make you happy in the long run. It does not have to do with career ambition. I mean, sometimes they can coincide.

But when you are consumed by this, yes, it’s primal. And you cannot control that. It’s chemicals taking over your body. It’s neurons firing. I mean, they’ve done brain scans on people who are in the throes of love and it’s–

**Craig:** It’s a drug.

**Rachel:** It’s similar to cocaine or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

**Craig:** Yeah. Without question. And then there’s this other aspect of sexuality that’s very casual and pointless. If we were to be accurate about sexuality in every single movie and in every single episode of every single television show at the very least the men would have to jerk off once. Because time would have gone by where they would have just stopped and been like, hold on, got to jerk off. I’ll be right back. Then they would come back.

It doesn’t matter what’s going on. It doesn’t matter what’s going on. It’s off-story in a weird way. Like I get it. Sometimes sex is just off-story. But where we get into trouble is when it’s on-story and we show it and we just lie. There’s like this crazy conspiracy about how sex works.

I mean, first of all, men just stick it in. They just stick it in. Sometimes they’re with a woman and they’re talking and then suddenly it’s like are we doing this, yes, and they stick it in. And I’m like it’s dry. What are you doing?

**John:** There’s no preparation.

**Rachel:** And that gets into like a little bit of standards. I mean, on network television as far as sex you can show pre-sex. You can show a man on top. You can show a woman on top. But you can’t imply that penetration is currently happening. So there is only so much you can do with the general discussions of how sex works for either. It’s not like on network TV you can show thrusting but you can’t show a woman touching her own clit. You can’t really show any of it.

But what that does is it does limit talking about the nuances of sexuality, which is so many storylines on television. Every romantic storyline, it centers essentially around sex.

**Craig:** Which you can’t show.

**Rachel:** The fundamentals of which you can’t show. Exactly.

**John:** But I don’t want to give us all a pass just because of standards. I mean, obviously HBO and streamers, they don’t have the same standards. So they could do a lot more.

**Rachel:** Exactly.

**John:** And so we do see some things on Game of Thrones which we couldn’t see on broadcast television. But I don’t see a lot of examples of really interesting portrayals of reality that’s going beyond what we could see on normal television. Or even just discussion of it. Like the discussion we’re having right now, I’m not even seeing that happening at a lot of the places that could have those discussions.

**Rachel:** I went on a Twitter rant, partially prompted I think the article you’re talking about was – I’m slowly catching up on the television that I’ve missed over the past four years of doing Crazy Ex. And I’ve been watching a show, and I don’t want to throw it under the bus, so I won’t say what show it is. But I was watching a show that actually is created and written by women, so I don’t – look, there are some women who can come vaginally and it’s easy and that’s great for them. That’s just not – statistics show that’s not the majority of us.

Anyway, it was a show where a woman was having bad sex, bad weird sex, and came. Just from the sex. And it’s a show where you could show graphic sex but at no point was she reaching down to touch herself. At no point was he touching her. And you could have actually shown that. And she just came. And it’s just disappointing because I was so frustrated from having a network show for many years that I couldn’t show that. And we couldn’t show sex in a realistic way. And not just realistic sex, but also all of the awkward moments that come with sex.

I mean, god, the sex scene in Booksmart that just came out is so good. That bad teenage sex scene where it’s her first encounter with a woman. What a great representation of, yeah, this is a side of sex. It starts out and it’s awkward and weird and bad. And it is hot, but you have – communication is really key and really essential. So I was frustrated I couldn’t do that.

And so seeing shows that can do that and don’t really bum me out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you. I think even if you can’t show it, the idea of substituting in something that’s false is not helpful to anybody. It’s as unhelpful as people waking up in the morning and starting to French each other. Which as I always say would lead to vomiting. Would just lead to instant vomiting. You wake up with your morning breath and you immediately start Frenching each other – I want to gag. It’s disgusting.

So, you know, there are things like, OK, when I’m watching sex onscreen, whether it’s limited by the network or it’s even kind of the Full Monty as it were on cable, I’m taught that my job as a man is to make a woman come with my dick only. And then when I’m done whatever I’ve shot up inside her apparently has disintegrated because it doesn’t come back out. No one is saying go get a towel, which every sex scene should end with go get a towel. Every sex scene. I don’t care what combination it is, at some point someone is going to ask for a towel.

**Rachel:** Or she should go pee because that also cleans out your urethra and prevents UTIs.

**Craig:** And you got to pee. Exactly.

**Rachel:** She should go, “Excuse me, this is great.”

**Craig:** “I’ve got to pee.”

**Rachel:** “I’m going to pee.” Or even just like, “Excuse me, I have to go to the powder room.” I’m trying to think of a way you could do it on network television that would be – “I’m going to go relieve myself, sir.” I don’t know.

**Craig:** “So that I can stay fresh.”

**Rachel:** I think any good writer is – it’s almost like an entrepreneur on Shark Tank. Where is there a need? Where is there a gap? What’s something I know to be true that has not been shown yet?

Because at the end of the day that’s what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to show the truth of humanity. We’re trying to show things that are reflective of maybe not real life but what could be, or our wants, or our needs. That’s what good writing should do. And so the fact that there are so many gaps in the truth about how everyone’s sexuality is shown.

And you make a good point. It’s as much a problem for men. And I’ve talked to my husband about this. I told him what I wanted and in some ways I was maybe the first woman to say and do that, because it’s scary and it’s vulnerable. It’s much easier to fake an orgasm from penetrative sex. And it’s much sexier. It’s way – you have to trust someone and you kind of have to stop sex, or stop the idea of what you think sex is to be like, “Hey, no, no, slow down. Or this is how you do it. Or this is how my body works.”

And from what I’ve heard from men who are with women, or anyone who is with a woman, every woman’s body is really different. And so what works with one woman might not even work with the next woman. And so the things that not only women in not being communicative are doing to themselves, but also doing to their partners. Especially a man who is with a woman – men don’t know. They don’t have our plumbing.

Most of them I find are willing and eager to understand and be taught. But it’s not their fault if they can’t – just like in our show we say in the end Tim couldn’t make his wife come and finally Paula says, “If she didn’t tell you that after 15 or so years of marriage you two have major communication issues.” And that’s a really good point. Some of that is on her.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about how we start to fix this. And so obviously some bravery and some creativity of people going and saying like these are things I actually want to tackle. It’s a person writing a thing by themselves, a screenwriter writing a movie, you have the freedom to do all of this. But how do you bring up these issues in a writers’ room and make it comfortable for everybody in that writers’ room to talk about these things because we’re also in a time when writers’ rooms can become perilous places for conversations about sex and sexuality.

**Rachel:** That is true. I mean, I think the Friends ruling was quite interesting because it did allow for creative freedom in the writers’ room. And, you know, I think that this is where we get into social EQ. I think that a lot of the problems we’ve had with harassment are from people who either don’t care to develop proper social EQ or haven’t been properly taught it. Because I think if you’re talking about sexuality in a writers’ room there’s a way to talk about it.

I mean, for instance you can say there’s a statistic I read, or even if you talk about yourself, to tell those personal stories is not harassment to someone else. It’s much different to say, well, you know, I’m one of those women who needs direct stimulation of my clitoris to come, rather than say, hey, Bob, how do you fuck your wife. You know, it’s just different.

**John:** Yes.

**Rachel:** And then Bob will probably talk about how he fucks his wife.

**Craig:** Oh, no, Bob has no problem with it. We know Bob. But I think if I were running a room and this was part of the creative process I would probably say this is the water we’re about to head into. If you’re not comfortable with a frank discussion of sexuality that’s going to be handled as respectively as we can then I’m happy to excuse you. But, you know, hopefully you are. But fair warning. This is where we’re going and here’s why. And if at any point you get kind of weird or uncomfortable say so and we’ll kind of just handle it. Let’s just be nice to each other I guess would be the kind of philosophy.

**Rachel:** Yeah. That’s a great thing to say. And I think as a showrunner also saying if something makes you uncomfortable you can leave or, you know, please talk to me after if you’re not comfortable. Because it’s scary to be in a room and feel uncomfortable and to stand up and say I don’t feel comfortable with this. You really have to be close.

But if it’s a new writers’ room or maybe a room you don’t feel comfortable in, it’s important for the showrunner to say you can come to me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Rachel:** And talk about it. And for the showrunner to be aware of not only social EQ but what is a discussion for creative purposes and what is putting people on the spot in a way that they don’t feel comfortable with. And it’s so contextual. But it’s a fact of life. A sperm fertilizing an egg is how you create the people. I mean, this is also why I’m very upset that maternity and paternity leave aren’t paid in this country. How do you expect us to make the people who are going to watch the TV shows? So, you know, when there’s unpaid maternity or paternity leave on a show, OK, cool, without the new people there won’t be the people to watch the thing that you’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It strikes me that the very same people who are freaking out because the birthrate is lowering and they’re like oh my god what are we going to do are also the same people that refuse to make having a child and raising a child easier, especially in that first couple of months which I know from experience is really hard. The hardest thing I’ve ever done easily. I mean, it’s not even close. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I wasn’t the one who was nursing. I wasn’t the one who had just gone through physical trauma to deliver the baby. And it was still so hard.

**Rachel:** I think that’s the other thing about our room that was interesting is we were majority moms. And so we got into a lot of frank discussions, not only of sexuality but of child birth. And all of the things that come with pushing a baby out of your vagina. And when you get into that it truly is a discussion of it really is a non-sexual discussion of sexuality because you’re talking about your parts used for something other than sex. And so there really is this dovetailing of subject matter that happens.

But I think that, yeah, it’s about being respectful. And I think that people sharing their own experiences, if that’s something you’re comfortable with, how your body works. And I think giving it the talk of, OK, we’re going to wade into this now. If you would like to talk about your experiences, things you’ve read, things you’ve seen. And if you’re respectful I don’t see – it’s tricky – but I don’t think it’s inherently a problem.

**John:** Yeah. Well, let’s put some things on the whiteboard for some of these rooms that are staffing up now. Things we would love to see them try to tackle in their shows.

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** So things I would love to see is that moment where you’re not quite sure whether sex is going to happen or not happen. And you’re not quite sure yourself whether you want sex to happen or not happen. You’re still just kind of feeling it out. And we talk about consent but there’s also that sense of like I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with this next thing. And I don’t see honestly that happening a lot in shows.

Just the embarrassment of sort of the nudity in front of a new person. Even if you can’t show the nudity, that sense of like are clothes coming off and what that’s like.

**Rachel:** Well that’s where you get into also body image. Because network shows, any show you can show people taking off their clothes and getting down to their underwear. What you don’t see is people with less than perfect bodies doing that.

**Craig:** There we go.

**Rachel:** And it was really important for our show as much as possible, and the last season poor Rebecca Munch wasn’t having sex as much as I personally think she should have, but it was part of the necessary part of the plot.

**John:** Her healing, yeah.

**Rachel:** But I think showing people with imperfect bodies rolling around together, there is nothing against standards for that. And I don’t know why, and I have to say when I first say Lena Dunham on Girls getting naked, asking a guy to make her come, not having a perfect body, that was awesome. That was so, so cool. And I hadn’t seen anything approaching that. And so on our show it was important for me to – I have just an average curvy body. It was important for me to show that. But I still think we can go further in all shows of showing people with the bodies people have being sexual with each other in the ways people are sexual with each other.

I mean, that’s really what it is is just what’s authentic. And I think that there’s that classic kind of sitcom post-sex scene where the woman has a bra on and they’re both staring at the top of the ceiling. And I think that even little things of like it’s post-sex and she’s coming out of the bathroom, or they’re kissing and she goes, “I have to go pee.” Or they’re kissing and she goes, “Oh, you know what, I haven’t,” and he goes, “Oh, allow me,” and you see him maybe start to dip down and then we cut away. Things like that that are just true because it makes it good television. It makes it interesting.

**Craig:** It makes it interesting.

**Rachel:** Sorry, those weren’t action items. You want action items.

**Craig:** Those were good action items.

**John:** I never see contraception brought up in any of these things. And so that question of like are you on the pill, are we doing this, are we using a condom. What is actually going on here? Because that seems to always happen offstage. We never see that actually addressed. The awkwardness of lube, which was brought up before. How are we doing this thing and exactly what are we doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. What are the ground rules? Are you coming inside me? No, we’ll have sex but you can’t come inside me. There’s 100 different rules and things to negotiate. But I also think that you’ve touched on the last great taboo which is physical appearance. We’re now fine with people of different races having sex onscreen. We’re fine with people of the same gender having sex onscreen. But what we can’t seem to wrap our minds around is that in a country where I think 30% of people are defined as medically obese and in a country that is increasingly aging, what we can’t handle are fat people and we can’t handle old people having sex. Well, I got news for you. I think probably most of the sex that happens in this country are between overweight old people. Old meaning old for like a college kid.

But all we ever show are 20-somethings and 30-somethings and maybe 40, maybe, and they’re all in-shape and they all have perfect facial symmetry and it’s all bullshit. And all it does is kind of – it gets into your brain and it starts to teach you that hot sex is the – that is the purview of hot people. But that’s bullshit. It’s literally bullshit. It’s not.

And I would love to see us starting to acknowledge that people that aren’t “hot” that don’t conform to those standards not only can they have sex, but they do. And they’re good at it. And they enjoy it. They may even enjoy it more than some of the hot people.

**Rachel:** Yes. And I was thinking about it as we’ve been talking, what is that? What is this emphasis on pretty people? If I see a promo for a show with really gorgeous people I truly don’t care.

**Craig:** Yep.

**Rachel:** I am done with shows about young hot people. I truly, for the most part, couldn’t care less. I really don’t care. But why are we drawn to it? Is it the male gaze? But then I think about porn. And you go on Pornhub and it’s busty MILFs. You don’t see busty MILF even nude scenes on HBO or Showtime or Netflix for the most part. But you see it a lot in porn. You see imperfect bodies, especially in amateur porn. And they’re some of the most popular porn videos. So, I don’t have the answer to this, but I think that we can all agree that there is a gap between what is real and what is sex really like and the way it’s still being portrayed and the way that writers still fall into trite, easy, and tired ways to show sexuality.

**Craig:** It’s so old-fashioned to me. I mean, you know, I was the voice of Louis B. Mayer for the You Must Remember This podcast.

**Rachel:** Oh, I heard. It was really good.

**Craig:** Thank you. And one of his quotes, he was yelling at someone, I can’t remember who, about how you can’t show ugly things onscreen. That you have to show beautiful things onscreen. And I think we’ve carried this very old-fashioned thing forward to now, but you’re right. If you do look at online porn, which is a free marketplace of arousal. It’s an Ayn Rand wet-dream of libertarian whatever gets you hard, whatever gets you wet, you’ve got it, here it is. And they have everything. Everything. Meaning people are aroused by every kind of thing. Not every person is aroused by everything, but all things find somebody that they arouse. And so much of it is about imperfection. So much of it is about the different or the other in terms of Hollywood normative standards.

I do agree with you that when I see a show where everybody is all pretty and perfect and eyebrows plucked and when they wake up in the morning they’ve got their makeup on, I’m out. It’s not real and I’ve lost interest.

**John:** I’m going to stand up for beautiful people.

**Rachel:** Please. Please.

**John:** I’m going to defend some beautiful people because I don’t think it’s realistic to get all of them off the screen–

**Craig:** We’re not talking about putting them in camps or anything.

**John:** So, I’m willing to hold onto the beautiful people, but I also think we need to – if we saw the beautiful people having the same issues that all normal people have I think that would go a long way. So that people who are just conventionally look like normal people would see that, oh, even beautiful people have the same issues that I’m having and the same insecurities or the same nervousness about things.

So while it’s not going to be a perfect match I think it will help people have better expectations about sort of what sex should be like and what they should be looking, particularly women. I feel like they often sort of get forced into a set of expectations that’s unfair and unrealistic. Particularly about whether they should enjoy sex. And that we can say that, oh, it’s good, we can try to be positive and say like women should enjoy sex, but in any series or in any story in which we show a character who genuinely enjoys sex and is having sex “like a man” with multiple partners the hammer of judgment still comes down on her. Like she’s not a virtuous character. Or she’s a character who has to learn a lesson and it’s not that what she’s doing is OK.

**Rachel:** Yes. And also oftentimes it’s often a man’s idea of what a woman who likes a lot of sex is. Because I mean I think a big part – so I did the foreword for a book called Moan which is anonymous personal stories about women and their orgasms, put together my friend Emma Koenig, and I think what was interesting is the number of stories in there of women who can’t orgasm and have never had an orgasm. So, it’s a weird contradiction because, yes, women should come but also there are women out there who can’t come and will never come. And that’s not their fault. That is just literally how their body works. But sex is still really enjoyable for them.

**Craig:** Right.

**Rachel:** And so I think that the idea of you have sex, it leads to orgasm, and then you’re done, that’s also really untrue. Because for me, I mean, just to be candid, I cannot come without some direct stimulation to my clitoris, which makes me like I think 70% of women. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t get immense pleasure from penetrative sex. I do. And I’m not talking about just when I’m actively engaging my own clit. I’m talking about I do get pleasure from that. It’s just not the pleasure that leads to an orgasm, which is fine. Pleasure does not have to always be towards this end goal. It’s very American in some ways to be like, “Yeah, you got to get in there. You got to come. And you’ve got to get out. Go to sleep and take a shower.” No, no, it’s a process. Pleasure is a multi-faceted and multi-layered thing.

And so this emphasis on the orgasm, you know, you didn’t make me come, let’s all calm down. Let’s everyone calm down and communicate about their body and what they actually like and want. And it’s OK if you’ve never had an orgasm as long as you’re happy. And, granted, a lot of people aren’t happy they haven’t had an orgasm and that’s a whole other thing. But that emphasis on that kind of binary of you come or you don’t, sex is good if you come and it’s bad if you don’t, which is sometimes women saying well I didn’t come so he’s a bad lay. Well, no, there’s a lot of other stuff to consider.

**Craig:** I wish every boy could hear this. I really do. Because I wish I had known all of this. I had to learn that generally speaking you can’t make women come just with your dick. And I also had to learn that sometimes women just want to have intercourse but then say like, actually no, I’m good. No, I’m good. That’s all I wanted. That was it. That’s what I wanted tonight. And I also wish we could – and this is where porn becomes a real problem – explain to boys as they’re becoming men that the porn their watching which is designed to run for, I don’t know, 20-mintue scenes or 40-minute scenes, is just a battering at some point. Like, yes, there is a line where you go, OK, this is technically premature ejaculation. But if you’ve been having intercourse for, I don’t know, for five or six minutes, or seven minutes, or something like that, and you can’t hold back, you’re not a fucking failure.

You know what I mean? Everybody calm down.

**Rachel:** Yes. Exactly. And I watch a fair amount of porn and I always though, and there are some websites I watch which are porn made by women, and there is a certain difference. There is a certain dog whistle difference. But even in that I fast forward through when positions look uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Right.

**Rachel:** Kind of standard porn position is the man is sitting and the woman is like squatting over him reverse cowgirl style. And I just, I’m so uncomfortable. She’s doing a constant squat. I can feel that.

**John:** You can feel the tension.

**Rachel:** I can feel that in my hammies. I have to fast forward through this. I can’t. I’m not doing that. Like I’m doing that. And I’m in bad shape right now where like sometimes when I’ve been having sex I’m like, oh, this is like doing a crunch. I need to exercise. This is getting to be a problem. A personal health problem for me, which is a different story. But I have to fast forward through uncomfortable positions because I know what they’re feeling and I know – also they’re on a set.

And I talked to someone who did porn one time. And I wish I talked to people more who did porn. And they said it’s actually a big problem when men come too soon. It happens a lot. But they don’t talk about that because it has to be 20-minute porn scenes.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. The other one that Melissa always comments on, if there are two women and one of them has long nails and they generally do–

**Rachel:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** She’s like, nope, nope, nope.

**Rachel:** Oh my god! You’re so right. I’ve actually never – yes, when they have these long French manis and they start fingering each other. Yeah, ugh. Oh my god, I’m literally wincing right now. You’re totally right. And that’s very male gazey.

**Craig:** So male gazey.

**Rachel:** I mean, something we haven’t talked about is both the porn and cinema space and talking about the scene in Booksmart is when you start to get into more of a lens of LGBTQA – it starts to get more realistic because I think we don’t have thousands of years of well this is how sex between two men should be. And obviously there’s fantasy and there’s idealization, but – someone correct me if I’m wrong – but you don’t have that same kind of baggage of a thousand years of I guess the patriarchy.

**John:** Well, here’s where I’ll speak up as the gay person. Where I do feel the patriarchy is there’s an expectation that penetrative sex is going to be the norm. And so therefore like oh it’s not that, it’s not really sex. And there’s a wide range of things between two guys which would be considered sex and should count. And so that is a frustration I do sometimes find as I watch scenes that are overall trying to be positive but they’re rushing to a thing that is just not realistic.

**Rachel:** Well that’s a really good point because penetrative sex being the norm is also very, very if you have two people with vaginas who are having sex, yes, it is sex if they are just going down on each other or fingering each other. That’s still sex. But this emphasis on another penis has to go in something. You’re totally, yeah, that’s so interesting about it being the patriarchy. And I’ve also just learned, I will say in that LGBTQ space, if you’re doing penetrative sex, and this also goes for men and women too, there’s a lot of prep involved. And you never hear a sex scene where it’s like, “Hey, let’s have sex tonight. I’m going to go to the shower and get my shower douche and I’m going to clean myself out.”

**John:** Never see it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Rachel:** No one told me that. And, in fact, I wish I’d known that as a girl engaging in certain butt things. Like oh no, no, it’s a thing that men who are having sex with men do. It’s a whole thing that you prep all day for and my friend Mano Agapion who is a brilliant comedian, he did a podcast where he was – oh, he did my friend’s podcast Duty Calls which is all about these embarrassing shit stories – where he talked about prep and I think Mano maybe said to me personally, he went, “There’s about 15 minutes when a butt doesn’t smell like a butt.” And that’s so true and great and interesting.

And as a straight cis women I’d never heard about that, but that’s so interesting for me to know about my butt.

**John:** Absolutely. On the show The Other Two, which is a great show from this last year which you can catch up on, that is a whole issue and there’s a whole discussion. These two guys are going on a date and it’s not quite clear who is going to be doing what. And so neither of them have really been eating all day–

**Rachel:** Oh, that’s unbelievable.

**John:** Because they’re trying to be ready.

**Craig:** They’re just trying to clean–

**Rachel:** Well, I’ve exposed myself in not being up on The Other Two which features my friends and is co-created by Chris Kelly who taught me improv 201.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** Can I take this as a handle to talk a little bit about improv, just because we just did our live show with Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone.

**Rachel:** Cool.

**John:** And so I asked them about Groundlings, but you’re from the UCB world. How much – a question I didn’t ask them that I want to ask you. How much would you recommend an aspiring comedy writer go through a program like UCB or Groundlings? How important do you think it is for someone who is learning how to write funny?

**Rachel:** Oh, a lot. I’ve heard that compared to other comedy programs, I’ve really only been a UCB gal, but I know a lot of people who have done Groundlings and Second City. And from what I’ve heard from the stuff that Del Close taught, game, which is what the UCB teaches, which is what is the game of your scene. What is the pattern of what’s funny in your scene and then how do you heighten that? That’s one element of what Del Close taught and that’s a major element of the UCB program which is really conducive to writing. I think it’s why a lot of great writers come out of there.

So, I really, really recommend it. And I think this idea – and in all improv schools they say don’t think, go with your instinct, really connect with someone – comedy coming from inside you and inside your impulses, not what you think should be funny but what you’re actually feeling in the moment is really important for writing.

And it’s very relevant for a writers’ room which is in essence in a way one long improv game where you’re suggesting jokes, you’re building a world, you’re suggesting jokes that are in the realm of this world. That sometimes the best jokes come from trusting the room enough where you don’t think. It just kind of comes out and it makes everyone laugh. I think it’s really great and really relevant. Because even if you’re not an actor getting in touch with your own impulses in a scene where you’re doing an impression of reality really helps you write.

**John:** If a writer doesn’t like it, if a writer takes a class and doesn’t like it, can they bail? How far do you have to get into it before you realize whether it’s for you or it’s not for you?

**Rachel:** Well, are you using it as a writing tool or are you using it because you want to get into improv? They’re kind of two different questions. The hard thing about improv is that to get good at it you have to do it a lot in order to free up those impulses. Because improv classes 101 through 301 often are awful. Because you are so locked in, ugh, I’m trying to muscle the scene into being funny. And that’s something that everybody does.

It’s only when you get into the upper levels that you relax into it, that you have the muscle memory, to actually let your impulses bubble up. So it’s weird and it’s difficult. And now that I’m done with my show a big goal of mine is to get back into improv because I miss – I feel some of those impulses now getting, especially when I try to do improv again, it’s a muscle. And you have to keep it going.

I don’t think it’s necessary for good writing. But I think it’s a really good tool.

**John:** Cool.

**Rachel:** Have you ever done improv?

**John:** I’ve never done improv. Craig, have you done improv?

**Craig:** No, I’ve done improv but I have–

**John:** You’re supposed to say yes Craig.

**Craig:** What? Oh, yes, sorry, yes and—

No, but I have done a lot of the kind of, I guess I would call it unwitnessed improv. I remember spending hours with Jason Bateman where the two of us would just sort of improv scenes that then we would kind of cherry pick from as we were working on Identity Thief. So you just start to play a character and you start to have those discussions and react with each other and just see where it goes.

The part that’s terrifying to me about improv is the audience.

**Rachel:** Yep.

**Craig:** Just by the way the same reasons – the part that’s terrifying with writing is the reader. You know, I wish we could get paid for writing a script and then we didn’t have to show it to anybody. But we do. It’s such a bummer.

**Rachel:** Well, you guys, if you guys want to start an improv practice group that’s just in someone’s house with no audience. There would have to be a coach just to help you along. I mean, I found Aline to be very good at improv.

**John:** Oh, I’m not surprised.

**Rachel:** Because she was a writer. I mean, I’m kind of her stage mom now. I encourage her to perform. But I mean when we write together it’s basically as improvising together.

**Craig:** Right.

**Rachel:** I think you guys would be great at improv. I’d pay a lot to see you guys do a two-man improv show.

**John:** Thank you. We’ll try it one of these days. Rachel, a question, I don’t know, did you meet your husband through UCB, through improv?

**Rachel:** Kind of. We met because he was a graduate of my college sketch comedy group which the graduates of that group went to go on and do UCB. So in short story is no, long story is kind of. Our relationship story is, yeah, we’re both UCB people. Our basement is covered in props and costumes from UCB sketch shows. And that’s what happens when two sketch comedians marry each other. It’s a nightmare.

**John:** I just love that you and Melissa and Ben and Greg have such a similar ways of getting together.

**Rachel:** I know, I really – I’ve only met Melissa once, but I really would like to get a double date with them, because they have a similar sweet dynamic.

**John:** They really do. Rachel, you are now done with your show. But you are doing a ton of concerts. Where can people see you this fall?

**Rachel:** Oh boy. Well, I’ll just say, I’m going to have a residency at Largo in LA once a month where I’m just going to try out a bunch of new shit every month.

**John:** Oh my god, I can’t wait to see that.

**Rachel:** Which is you live right by there. It’s only – Largo only seats about 250 people, but it’s going to be me trying stuff out in preparation for I’m also doing a little mini tour of America, the country America, which is on my website.

**John:** Is this called What Am I Going to do with My Life Now?

**Rachel:** It’s called What Am I Going to do with My Life Now. Because that’s what everyone is asking me. They’re like so what’s next. I’m like get off my fucking back. I just got back from London.

**Craig:** Sleeping.

**Rachel:** I’m tired. I want to nap.

**Craig:** I know.

**Rachel:** So that’s what’s next. And then the other thing is I am now the queen of general meetings. Oh boy, I’ve been going on a lot of generals.

**John:** The water bottle tour of Los Angeles.

**Rachel:** Yes, the water bottle tour. For me the English breakfast tea tour of Los Angeles. And I think it’s interesting. People are hungry for content. There’s a lot of hunger for content now which is cool.

**John:** This is the point in the show where we do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Emma Hunsinger in The New Yorker called How to Draw a Horse. It’s just terrific. It is an illustrated story of like teenage longing and it was heartbreaking and funny and just delightful. So I’ll recommend that. There’s a link in the show notes to that. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Cool. My One Cool Thing was a gift/curse from Mr. David Benioff who is kind of the king of time wasters. He was the one who told me about – I think he was the one who told me about Alto’s Odyssey.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Anyway, this one is called Dig It. So it’s an app. It’s for the iPhone and as always I don’t care about Androids so I don’t know if it’s available for that. But it’s a very, very simple concept. You’re trying to get these little green balls into a little green cup. And by moving your finger you are erasing dirt. You’re digging through dirt and creating paths. And it just gets more and more complicated.

I’m so frustrated with it and I have to keep going. And I don’t know, $1.99 or something. Dig it.

**John:** Great. Dig It.

**Rachel:** Beautiful.

**John:** Rachel, what would be your One Cool Thing?

**Rachel:** I’ve recently become obsessed with this podcast called Hello from the Magic Tavern. I don’t listen to podcasts where comedians just sit around and talk about their lives because those are the people that I’m friends with. I really like podcasts that are funny, so I’m going to fit a couple One Cool Things into this Cool Thing. I’m a really big fan of there’s a podcast that The Onion put out called A Very Fatal Murder which is–

**John:** Which I loved so much.

**Rachel:** It’s unbelievable. And it stars my friend David Sidorov and it’s the hardest I’ve laughed at any podcast. It’s so good. And—

**Craig:** Is it like a spoof of Serial?

**Rachel:** It’s a spoof of Serial. What is the one where the guy was the murderer of Tara? It’s all of those podcasts.

**John:** Dirty John. All of those things.

**Rachel:** All of those things that are kind of a little bit getting off on these people’s lives who have been ruined. It’s a brilliant podcast. And I finished A Very Fatal Murder. I’m also a big fan of Off Book Podcast which is an improvised musical podcast where every episode it’s a different musical story. But anyway I finished A Very Fatal Murder and I was in the mood for something with narrative thrust. And I found Hello from the Magic Tavern which is an improvised podcast but it’s an ongoing plot. It’s maybe the one time I’ve heard choices made in the midst of improv turning into sci-fi fantasy canon. Because it’s a podcast that takes – this guy Arnie Niekamp who is a real guy – the premise is he fell into a magical portal behind a Burger King and now he’s doing a podcast from the magical land of Foon. And the cohosts are a wizard named Usidore and a shape-shifting badger named Chunt.

**Craig:** Chunt!

**Rachel:** It’s great. It’s fantastic. But the thing is they’ll say something on the podcast and suddenly it becomes canon. So there was this thing that someone said where, oh, you know, wizards have two buttholes and suddenly it’s a major thing of the whole podcast where how many buttholes can you magically get.

It’s a great example of plot and improv intersecting in a really cool way.

**John:** Yeah. In a future episode I’m going to do a dissection of Craig’s theory on how to write a movie and I think that’s actually part of it in that sense of that wasn’t a thing that was planned but it ends up changing the experience and how we encounter story in moments. And I think that’s a great example of that. So, excited to see that.

Last bit of news I have on my side is this past week we launched Highland2.5 which is a major revision of our screenwriting app. We added revision mode that is super nice and simple and it’s for all documents, not just for screenplays. So if you’re curious about that it is on the Mac App Store.

And that’s our show for this week.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was a good one.

**John:** Rachel Bloom, thank you so much for joining us.

**Craig:** Thanks Rachel.

**Rachel:** Thank you.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intro and outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions.

But for short questions I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Rachel, you’re on Twitter as well.

**Rachel:** @racheldoesstuff.

**John:** @racheldoesstuff. And @racheldoesstuff is also where you can find her website which has all the tour dates for things, but we’ll have a link to those in the show notes as well. You can find those show notes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up the week after the episode airs.

Some people do recaps on Reddit, so join us there and tell us what you thought about our sex episode on Reddit.

**Rachel:** Oh my god, do you read your own Reddit?

**John:** I read my own Reddit thread.

**Rachel:** Oh, you are strong like Aline.

**John:** Ha, yeah. It so far has been pretty good. And I’m impressed that they’re actually doing the recaps. It’s nice.

**Rachel:** That’s nice. God.

**John:** You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com. We have an app where you can listen to all of those back episodes including the very first time we met you which was at the holiday live show where you came and you sang When Will I Be Famous.

**Craig:** And look what happened.

**Rachel:** And then I kind of was.

**Craig:** You kind of are.

**John:** And now you’re doing a national tour.

**Craig:** See? You just had to sing that song. We’re like little leprechauns. You just rub us on our heads and gold fires out of our butts.

**Rachel:** That is true. And that’s another realistic sex thing that I think you should portray.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Rachel:** That if you rub a man on his head gold will shoot out of his butt.

**Craig:** Oh god. I wish that were true.

**Rachel:** So do I.

**John:** Thanks Rachel.

**Craig:** Thanks Rachel.

**Rachel:** Thanks.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Rachel Bloom’s Realistic Sex [Interview](https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a26453707/rachel-bloom-realistic-tv-sex-scenes/)
* [Sex Education TV Series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Education_(TV_series))
* [Moan: Anonymous Essays on Female Orgasm](https://www.amazon.com/Moan-Essays-Female-Emma-Koenig/dp/1455540552) with foreword by Rachel Bloom
* [How to Draw a Horse](https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/how-to-draw-a-horse)
* [Dig it!](https://apps.apple.com/al/app/dig-it/id1453411110) on the App Store
* [Hello from the Magic Tavern](https://hellofromthemagictavern.com/)
* [A Very Fatal Murder](https://www.theonion.com/c/a-very-fatal-murder)
* [Rachel on Tour](https://racheldoesstuff.com/tour/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Rachel Bloom](https://twitter.com/Racheldoesstuff) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jim Bond and James Llonch ([Send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_406_better_sex_with_rachel_bloom2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/live-at-the-ace-hotel).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode of Scriptnotes has a few bad words. So if you’re driving in the car with your kids this is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 405 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We are recording this live at the beautiful Ace Hotel Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. We have a huge crowd that I cannot see at all because there are bright lights shining at us. But I hear them.

**Craig:** And I love this theater. I was here – the last time I was here they were showing The Battle of the Bastards, the big Game of Thrones episode. It was a great place to watch it. Not as much excitement tonight, I don’t think, but we’ll do our best. We’ve got some pretty great guests first of all.

**John:** So I think hopefully a funnier night than the Battle of the Bastards. We have amazing guests. So I just want to give you a teaser of who is on our show tonight. We have Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. Rob McElhenney. Kourtney Kang and Alec Berg. Craig, we have titans of comedy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m out of comedy. I don’t do it anymore. So it’s good that we’re bringing these people on.

**John:** Now, we have our Los Angeles listeners, of course, because this is an industry town so it’s natural that you guys are here. But I’ve really been impressed over the years at our international fan base. And they reach out to us. And so we read questions from people in, you know, different countries in Africa, all throughout Europe. A lot of email recently from Russia coming in to the ask@johnaugust account. And it feels like they’re phishing for some answer Craig.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** I just want to thank you for that.

**Craig:** Sure. I assume many of their names are a name and then six or seven random digits after that?

**John:** Funny how that works.

**Craig:** That’s my fan base.

**John:** So, Craig, I just want to congratulate you on Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Just to keep things interesting can you please next write about North Korea? Because I feel like we could get more North Korean interest in the show. It would really help.

**Craig:** We have evidence that writing about North Korea is perfectly easy to do. Nothing will go wrong.

**John:** Nothing bad will ever happen. Seth Rogan loves to talk about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We are here as a benefit for an amazing charity called Hollywood Heart. I want to bring John Gatins back out for a second to ask him some question about this amazing charity. John Gatins, could you please step back out on stage so we can ask you a few little questions here?

So, we have done – this is the fourth or fifth – we have done a bunch of shows for Hollywood Heart. It’s an amazing charity that supports kids living with HIV and AIDS. They provide summer camp experiences which is amazing. The camp that you guys have been using is–

**John Gatins:** Oh, I left this out. Thank you John.

**John August:** Yes, it’s pretty amazing.

**John Gatins:** Thank you, John.

**John August:** Tell us about what happened this past year.

**John Gatins:** Well, the Hill fire and the Woolsey fire burned the camp that we’ve been using for 24 years. So, we’ve had to rent a camp in San Juan Capistrano. So it added further financial stress on our small charity.

**John August:** Yes. So, part of the reason we’re here tonight is to raise additional funds because an organization that needs support all the time but especially now with the fires that devastated your camp.

**John Gatins:** Absolutely.

**John August:** So this is the 25th anniversary of this camp.

**John Gatins:** Correct.

**John August:** It’s amazing. John Gatins, thank you for doing this.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John Gatins:** Buy t-shirts. Did anybody buy t-shirts? Buy t-shirts.

**John August:** By the way, buy some awesome t-shirts. In the lobby we have amazing t-shirts. They are genuinely limited edition. If we don’t sell out of them tonight we’ll have them at the store at johnaugust.com. They are great. And you will love them.

**Craig:** You know, for once I’m OK with not getting any of the money from those.

**John August:** Fantastic, Craig.

**Craig:** This one time.

**John August:** This one time.

**Craig:** I’m OK with it.

**John August:** It only took a fire and kids who needed help.

**Craig:** And I got to say, it was close. It was sort of marginal for me. But this one time. And thank all of you honestly for coming out tonight. I know that these – we’ve done these events before. We do live podcasts, live shows. And the ticket prices here were a little bit higher because, you know, obviously we’re raising money or this great charity, which is a legal charity. I want to be really clear about this. It’s not like John Gatins just says it and we do it. We’re not dumb. We looked into it. They have a website. But we really appreciate you guys coming out and filling this enormous theater. It means a lot to us and it will definitely mean a lot to those kids.

**John August:** Hooray. We have so many people we should actually get started with our guests.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Our first guests are writers, actors, directors, and producers who have been nominated for nearly every award that exists. As a team they have made four movies and two children. Please welcome our friends Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone.

**Craig:** Yay. Thank you fine people. Have a seat.

**Melissa McCarthy:** Oh, hi. Hello everyone.

**Craig:** As part of getting them to come tonight they did ask that they not speak and we not ask them questions. So we’re going to bring out–

**John:** Yeah. It’s going to be a mime performance which works really well—

**Melissa** I’ll just mouth breathe into the mic.

**Craig:** I’ve done it. I’ve done it.

**John:** Melissa, I was saying backstage that of all the people who we have wanted to have on Scriptnotes you’re actually the person who we’ve mentioned the most on Scriptnotes. We went back and counted today. You’ve been mentioned 61 times in 400 episodes. Because Craig and I have both made movies with you.

**Melissa:** In a negative way? In a negative way, probably.

**Craig:** Usually I just yell the word out. Melissa McCarthy. No reason whatsoever.

**Melissa:** That’s so weird.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re weird.

**John:** But understandable because you are a person who we have both made movies with you, you’re doing a ton, you’re writing a ton.

**Melissa:** My first movie, Go.

**John:** First movie, Go. First time on screen.

**Craig:** How about that? How about that?

**John:** But what I was so curious to have both of you guys out here to talk about is I first knew you from Groundlings. So the first time I experienced you was from working in the sketch comedy group Groundlings and we talk so much about writing but we don’t talk about writing and performance and how they inform each other. It’s how you’re building a character from the ground up.

So, how did you first get started with the Groundlings?

**Melissa:** For I was moving out from New York and I was really just doing theater and plays, mostly dramatic stuff. And my sister sent me a little thing ripped out of a magazine. And I also had said, oh, there’s going to be tons of theater in LA.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Melissa:** Because I didn’t know. I’d never been here. And I went to see a Groundlings show and I couldn’t get my head around how it wasn’t scripted. And it was like Mike McDonald, Kathy Griffin, Patrick Bristow. It was like really incredible people doing it. And everything made sense. The lines were incredible. It wrapped up at the end. And I kept thinking but it’s written, what part is improvised. And, I don’t know, I was so taken with it that I started taking classes there.

**John:** Ben, what was your experience with the Groundlings? How did you get started?

**Ben Falcone:** I looked in LA Weekly. I don’t know if that’s still a thing, but it was a thing then.

**Craig:** It is not.

**Ben:** It is not. Great.

**Craig:** You killed it.

**Ben:** I killed it.

**Craig:** Yep. Just by looking at it.

**Ben:** And so it said it was a place to go and see a show. So I went and saw one and a guy named Jim Wise, I’m musical, I’m throwing that out there. I can be musical from time to time. And a guy named Jim Wise sang a song improv in the style of like a Led Zeppelin song. And it just blew my mind because I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t all rigged and staged.

And I thought I have to learn how to do it and maybe I could do it like Jim Wise, which was never the case. I never could do it.

**Craig:** Never got there.

**Ben:** Never got there.

**Craig:** Never got there.

**Ben:** But that’s how I started there. And then we met there.

**Craig:** It’s interesting that you both were drawn to this notion that there was writing going on but it was through performance. It seemed like a magic trick to you both. And then you start doing it. Talk a little bit – I’m kind of fascinated by the fact that improv is this strange intersection between acting and writing. It’s like you’re doing both at the same time, kind of. How does it impact the way you write when you’re say not improv but you’re just writing-writing?

**Melissa:** I think, at least for me, when I first – we were in a class together. When we first had to like start writing, Ben was the first one that called me out and he’s like – because we’d get ten minutes, go out, write a character, come back, and do the monologue. And I thought, well, I can’t write. I’m not a writer. So I would really lock up and I would just go up with an empty piece of paper. And he was the only one that was like I know your paper is empty.

**Ben:** I wasn’t being creepy about it though. Let me just throw that out there.

**Melissa:** A little creepy. A little creepy. But I could say it all, but I was like well that’s not writing. You have to write it first. So I would say it all and then I would go back and try to remember it and write it down. And it wasn’t until I kept doing that to be like it is still the ideas of how does this character feel, how does she think about things, and how do you make a story out of that. And then finally I was like, oh wait, but it took me a long time to be like oh that is writing and then structure and all the bones of it came later. But it really did start with what would she say and why is it worth anyone’s time to watch this moment in her life.

**Craig:** Which is basically what we’re doing when we’re writing things. Was it a similar thing for you? You’re writing a scene. You just happen to be doing it in front of people staring at you which is terrifying.

**Ben:** I mean, it is. I remember I took more of a – when I was learning to do it I thought well I had better write. And you get these assignments, like what does the color blue mean to you. And I’m like, I don’t know, holy shit. Someone else has got a good color blue thing. And then it wasn’t until I started working with people like Melissa or like Dax Shepard and just these different people who were in the Groundlings at that time and they were just like, no, I just start doing a thing that seems funny to me and it’s based from the character perspective. Which I think so much good writing is. It’s based on what characters are doing and why they’re doing it and what circumstance they’re in. So, it took me a hot second to figure that out. And I’m still probably trying to.

**John:** So it sounds like you’re approaching these things not from thinking like, oh, this is the thing that’s going to be funny, but basically this is the character that’s going to be funny. This is a character that’s going to continue to let this happen for five minutes and actually be an enjoyable thing.

**Melissa:** To this day I still don’t think I could ever write a joke. Like I don’t understand how to do it. And people do it so incredibly well.

**Craig:** When you say joke you mean like three guys walk into a bar? Or a standup routine?

**Melissa:** I couldn’t write a scene based on something funny. But something like she’s ordering a sandwich, well she loves ham. She loves ham too much. Then you’re probably going to talk about I had ham for breakfast and then I have ham for dinner. And I can do it that way because I think well Carol loves ham.

**Craig:** Ham Lady 2022, from Universal Studios.

**Melissa:** I’m going to put that one in my back pocket. I’m not saying no.

**Craig:** Where did you get the idea for Ham Lady? Well…

**Melissa:** Franchise.

**John:** Well you just said I’m not saying no. And the cliché we always hear about improv is that you’re just supposed to say yes. You’re supposed to be alive in the moment and saying yes and playing together. And that’s a very different thing than what writers are usually doing. Because usually we’re by ourselves and we’re just these little islands. And you have to actually hit the ball back over the net doing improv.

**Melissa:** Yeah. Or else the game is over. You’re late for work.

**Ben:** No you’re not.

**Melissa:** Good night! It does, and it makes you – you just have to play along. I mean, it’s kind of the fun of it, even if like it’s not where you want to go. You can’t control every moment of it when you’re improvising. You just have to go with it. And usually it’s kind of a gift because you end up out of your heard and just actually responding to people, as opposed to trying to come up with something funny.

**Craig:** I have a question for you guys. There is a very different kind of comedy for a movie, a comedy feature film, and then there’s the kind of ongoing comedy like Mike & Molly where it’s ongoing. You guys – and I think a lot of comedy has been moving towards the ongoing space, mostly because they make more shows than they do movies.

But you guys are making movies all the time. Is it just that you kind of have that vibe like the stories that you want to tell and the kind of comedy you do fits better in that closed narrative built around one character in kind of a short cycle? Or is it just kind of the way it’s worked out?

**Ben:** I mean, I can just say for me I love TV. I grew up watching Seinfeld, not to date myself, but Cheers and all these shows. And I had VHS tapes and I watched them all. But I just love movies. I just love them. I adore them. I don’t want them to go away. I don’t think they will, but it’s a narrative form that I find so interesting. Because you can make sequels if you ever wanted to. I just love the idea of digging into a story just a little bit longer, which I guess really now some of these shows are doing anyway, you know, the longer form ten-episode thing, 30 minutes a thing.

**Craig:** Right. Just a long movie. Yeah.

**Melissa:** Sometimes I kind of enjoy the heartbreak of a movie ending. It’s like if I love a book so much and when it ends you’re like, no, like I have a whole thing when a book ends if I love it that it’s this weird torture, but I love it. Then I read slower. Then I’m down to like a paragraph a day. I mean, it’s really weird. Something about a movie, because you do have to wrap it up and then you’re left to wonder what’s the next day. I think it kind of lets your imagination roll. I don’t know, there’s just something about that format of like it’s a story. I grew up with a dad that told really great stories around the table. And he’s so funny but he really could tell a story. And I think there’s something about – it’s a story. It’s a segment of someone’s life.

I mean, I love both. But there’s a magic to having to wrap it up.

**Craig:** You know, I never thought of it that way because we talk about this all the time, the difference between ongoing narrative, like an open-ended narrative like the kind our other guests write, and then there’s that closed-end narrative. And I never really thought of it this way, but for me – you know, you’re right. The part of me that loves it is the part that loves an ending. Like you start with an ending almost, right? And then you kind of craft to it.

**Ben:** Yeah. And so many reshoots in movies, you know, all throughout whether it’s a superhero movie or a comedy, so many times people are like did we get the ending right. And I think it’s such a tricky game to play and it’s really satisfying if you can execute it.

**John:** When you guys are making one of your movies how do you know something is funny? And at different stages? As you’re writing it obviously you’re both actors so you can probably play some stuff out and really get a sense like, OK, are you inhabiting this thing. But then as you shoot it and then as you’re going into the editing room how do you know that something is working or not working? And as you’ve done four of these, five of these now, has that evolved?

**Ben:** Melissa is just a really funny person. And so when we’re writing it probably makes me laugh. And then when we’re shooting it it probably makes me laugh. And then in the cutting room it makes me and the editors laugh. So it’s a pretty simple – I mean, the one thing I really like about comedy, and I’m concerned that there’s less comedies out there doing well right now and I certainly hope that they come back in a big way soon, comedy is really truthful.

You know, if you get a roomful of people and you test your movie and nobody laughs then guess what? It’s not funny. Even if you think it’s funny. So, there’s something about the democracy of comedy that I find really interesting and I believe in it. So even if it’s funny to me and I laugh like hell and then I show it to Craig who is really a funny person and he laughs and then we show it to a whole audience and it bombs we don’t go, “Well, that’s funny.”

**Melissa:** I stand behind it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I laughed, right? So we’re good. I don’t really care.

**Ben:** Yeah. We’re done. I don’t care what those 400 people think.

**Craig:** Look, I’ve been there. God, those test screenings are terrifying in that regard, but it is kind of a science experiment at some point. And it is why comedy is so difficult but so rewarding, right? I mean, even the best drama in the world it’s not like people are rolling in the aisles sobbing and puking up their guts. They’re crying silently in their seat. But when you’ve got them going in a movie theater in a comedy they’re rolling. It’s amazing.

But, I’m just kind of curious, both of you have – well, we know from a lot of the roles you play, but even through the writing that you guys do there are these moments. You know, Tammy really sticks out to me as the one where there’s drama that’s coming through that’s drama-drama. And I’m kind of curious do you guys ever see yourselves, I mean, definitely comedy is going to keep coming from you guys, no question. But do you ever see yourselves ever kind of going you know what let’s scoot over and try a drama. It’s going to be way easier. Way easier.

**Ben:** I mean, you know, because in a comedy when we’re shooting, like the thing that Melissa and her acting partners do, let’s say Maya Rudolph who is one of the funniest people in the universe. And they do something and it’s so funny. Well, now I’ve got it. But I have to get another one because it might not work. And I just think that’s insane. And sometimes I’m like Christ if this was a drama I could move the camera around and mess around and we’d all be like what technical things should we do.

**Melissa:** He always comes in and says now do the version that hurts my heart. Don’t do the whole thing that made us laugh. I’m like, what? And he’s like just come in and ask her this and say this. Sometimes we improvise and sometimes we go really like clean with it. But I mean I think there’s just such a weird thing that if you stay truthful in it, sometimes even when the whole audience, not when it’s out in the world, but those test audiences I do sometimes worry about are you in there to critique or are you in there to enjoy? And sometimes, I mean, I get really defensive for me characters. Not for me. I don’t care about me. But I’m like she does like ham! And I end up defending.

And what’s weird is I really do love ham. And I might be a little hungry so I keep bringing it up. But I don’t know, I don’t let it go until we’re still in ADR and I’m like if I turn my head away I’m going to throw in a ham joke. I just keep pushing it.

**Craig:** I like that.

**Ben:** But for sure I would consider doing drama.

**Craig:** I mean, take it from me – seriously – way easier.

**John:** Absolutely. People praise you for it.

**Craig:** They praise me for it. I’ve worked so hard in comedy for so long just being kicked in the fucking balls over and over and over. I mean, done really good work. I mean, work I’m really proud of. Not the one with you. But other ones that I thought were really good. And then you do one drama and everyone is like…

**Melissa:** What I think is weird is I think a comedy always needs drama. I think you have to let your characters fall down hard, because then you get to watch them get back up. And I think it’s necessary.

**Craig:** And the ending is never about the jokes in these comedies. When you get to the ending at some point you’re like the jokes are over. And that’s what I think is amazing about guys like – because you’re both writers and you’re both performers. And you two have this thing, and Maya Rudolph can do this too, where you’re funny, you’re funny, you’re funny, and then – and Kristen Wiig can do this – and then suddenly you’re breaking my heart. Find me the drama-drama people that can flip around and make me crack up. It’s not so common. It’s really not.

I mean, this is why again all the awards should go to comedies. All of them. All Oscars. All of them.

**Melissa:** But I do feel like there’s a strange shift where like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to me is a perfect movie. I laugh so hard. I cry every single time I see it. It breaks my heart. Tootsie even, there’s moments where you’re just like, oh stop, like you’re killing people but it’s so funny. And breaking someone’s heart, not like killing people.

And I feel like in the last maybe ten years, and we got this a lot when we made Tammy is from so many of the people reviewing it they were like well you’ve done it wrong because of the odd dramatic scenes within a comedy.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know. I know.

**Melissa:** And I was like since when is that a new thing? This isn’t like Ben and I came up with a crazy style.

**Craig:** Blows my mind.

**Melissa:** So it is really odd that it seems to – and I’m like did anyone in the ‘80s and ‘90s ever get lectured about that?

**John:** Well, James L. Brooks was able to make a few movies that had dramatic moments but were genuinely funny.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know how he got away with it. I just feel like – here’s the thing, when you make a comedy, right, you show it to an audience, they laugh. It’s what you said. You can’t fake it, right? You know it’s working or it’s not. They tell you. They even write little numbers down and you know. And then you put it out in the world and people go to see it and you know.

So you have this strange thing where you show it to people and they love it, and you show it to audiences and they love it, but then a bunch of other people are like, nah, it’s not the way comedy should be done, Ham Lady.

**Ben:** Yeah, I mean, it’s tricky. That stuff is tricky. But we just make the movies and just hope that the people like them. Because you can’t worry about that other stuff.

**Craig:** So far so good.

**John:** Let’s come to see the movies. Before we move on and talk to our TV folks who have done a lot of comedy/dramas and sort of that intersection, in a normal podcast this would be the place where we would pause and insert an ad. We would insert an ad for some product.

**Craig:** Not one of our normal podcasts.

**John:** No, but a normal podcast in any other podcast.

**Craig:** Like a regular one. Where people make money and then share it with their cohost.

**John:** Yes. Like one of those kind of podcasts.

**Craig:** Understood.

**John:** Craig and I don’t do this for the money but we’re actually kind of doing it for the money tonight because we’re trying to raise money for Hollywood Heart. So I thought maybe we’d break tradition and do a podcast ad right here live on stage. And since it’s a podcast ad it needs to be for Squarespace. So Squarespace doesn’t know that we’re going to do an ad for them.

**Craig:** Don’t worry.

**John:** The goal is we’re going to guilt them into paying some money to the charity. So we’re going to do the best ever Squarespace ad. Here are some facts about Squarespace. So if you actually go online and see what the template is for a Squarespace ad they’ll include things like beautiful templates created by world class designers. Free and secure hosting. Nothing to patch or upgrade ever.

**Craig:** What if you had a space that was triangular? It’s wrong. Where do you go?

**Melissa:** I just like squares. Hi, I’m Melissa McCarthy for Squarespace. And I’d love if you sent in gobs of money and checks or—

**Ben:** I don’t think people use checks very often anymore.

**Melissa:** I’m 110. Send in checks or rubles or whatever you have. Because if you think about it a dream is just an idea that doesn’t have a website yet. Make it reality with Squarespace. SquarePace.

**Ben:** Are you calling it SquareFace?

**Melissa:** SquareFace. That’s my second movie coming out, SquareFace. Just send money.

**John:** Ben, can you think of any reasons why an upcoming writer might want to build a website to showcase their work?

**Ben:** I certainly can. Well, I’d love to just have the ability to customized look and feel settings, products, and more with just a few clicks. And also I know that the future is coming, so I’d like to make it brighter with Squarespace.

**Craig:** But can I ask you a question? I mean, when you do this you’re going to want to patch or upgrade stuff all the time, right?

**Melissa:** Well, yeah.

**Craig:** No. No.

**Melissa:** No.

**Ben:** Of course we won’t. No.

**Craig:** No, that’s bad.

**Ben:** That would be bad. So we don’t want to do that.

**John:** Now, Melissa, when you’re building your ham-based website.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Ham.com.org.

**John:** So do you already have your URL reserved? Do you have any thoughts for what you might want to–?

**Melissa:** Oh, I would definitely reserve my Hamspace.

**Craig:** Hamspace.

**Melissa:** Hamspace. And I do it through Squarespace. It was just a square made of ham because the ability to customize the look and feel, settings, products, and more with just a few clicks? Come on.

**John:** So everyone should go to Squarespace.com for a free trial when you’re ready to launch. Use the offer code – what’s the offer code?

**Ben:** Name.

**John:** Name?

**Craig:** It just says name.

**John:** We need to pick what it is.

**Craig:** Hamspace.

**Melissa:** Hamspace.

**Craig:** Hamspace.

**John:** Hamspace. Use the offer code Hamspace and they will know who many people came here from this ad for your first purchase on a website or domain. Thank you very much for playing along. Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone, thank you. Slide on down.

**Craig:** Slide on down, just like a talk show. Do you think that’s going to work? I mean, do you think Squarespace is going to–?

**John:** Is Squarespace going to pay some money? [Audience claps] Yeah.

**Craig:** Squarespace doesn’t care what they think.

**John:** Squarespace really cares what they think.

**Craig:** Oh, I guess that’s true. They love podcasts.

**John:** They love podcasts.

**Craig:** Love them.

**John:** Our next guests are amazing. Kourtney Kang is best known for her work on Fresh Off the Boat where she was a writer/co-executive producer for the first three seasons, and How I Meet Your Mother, where she was an executive producer and worked as a writer on all nine seasons. She has written and executive produced multiple pilots and worked on many features. Kourtney Kang, please come on out.

**Craig:** Thank you so much for being here. I was going to wear that tonight.

Oh and next up, one of the finest men I know, and certainly the finest Irishman second to John Gatins. Rob McElhenney is an actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. He is known for playing Mac on the comedy series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a show he co-created and executive produces. And he is currently on a show for Apple. And number 16 on the call sheet is me.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** That is a very small part.

**John:** Finally, Alec Berg has written for Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, but is best known for the two incredible HBO series he runs, Silicon Valley and Barry. Welcome back to the show Alec Berg.

**Craig:** Alec Berg, here he is. It’s Alec Berg. Alec Berg.

**John:** We were just talking about putting dramatic things into comedies is a challenge in movies. And yet I think I see it all the time in the comedies that you guys are making. But there’s dramatic moments that are happening throughout. Alec Berg, I want to start with you because Barry especially has so much drama at its core and yet it’s so funny. And as you’re working through the plans for the seasons, plans for this episode, what is your barometer for like this is funny enough, this is going to work?

**Alec Berg:** We don’t ever really write jokes. There’s no jokes in the show. It’s all just what would happen. What’s real? What’s true? And it all comes from that. There’s no plan. We never sat down and said this is the tone, this is how we’re doing it. We literally just started writing a show and we’re like what if it were this. OK. And what would go with that.

We had this idea for – we had worked on another idea, Bill and I, for a couple months. And we were going to go in and pitch at HBO and we thought, all right, well we’re pitching a TV series. You were talking about closed-ended versus open-ended. We’re like we should probably go in with a few episode ideas so they know what the show would be. And we literally couldn’t think of one episode idea past the pilot.

And we were like this might be a problem. This might not be a TV show. So we threw that away and we decided that the problem with the show idea we had is there’s no stakes. It just was a guy. So Bill said, OK, there should be stakes, like life and death. That’s stakes. What if I was a hitman? And then we just started from there and it was like, OK, well what’s funny or interesting about a hitman? There’s more hitmen in TV and movies than there probably are in real life. It’s like dog catcher or one of these jobs that only exists in Dennis the Menace cartoons.

So then we just started from there. And it was, oh, what would be interesting is if he was a hitman who wanted to be something else. What would he want to be? Oh, what if he wanted to be an actor? And we started finding all of these interesting parallels between light and dark and being anonymous versus being known and having to use your feelings versus having to shut them down.

But never at any point did we think, oh, that would be funny or that’s hilarious. It all just came from truth. Who is this guy? What does he want? Who could he be around and what could they want? And how would that be in conflict? And still we don’t ever really write jokes. We just keep saying this could happen and then, oh, that’s funny if that happened. But it never comes from like what would be a funny thing to happen. It would always come from when we’re writing it what would actually happen or what would this person really want.

**Craig:** But that’s a change. I mean, it wasn’t like that’s how you guys did Seinfeld. I mean, Seinfeld was jokes. I know it’s a show about nothing and all the rest, but there were lines, there were jokes.

**Alec:** Yes. Seinfeld was always about story ideas. What’s the funny story idea? Like somebody dates somebody who is something, or somebody runs into somebody and here’s a funny thing. Or George eats out of the trash.

**Craig:** And Silicon Valley also has that kind of Alec Berg looping thing that happens. It feels closer to that tradition. And Barry feels a little bit more like further down the line.

**Alec:** It’s definitely more of a just follow the story where it goes. Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Kourtney, now you’ve been on writing on more traditional broadcast sitcoms or comedies. So, in those cases there is that expectation that this has to be funny. So How I Met Your Mother is in front of a live studio audience. Fresh Off the Boat you don’t have those same pressures but you still have that sense of like this has to be funny. So at what point in the process are you evaluating like is this actually going to be a funny enough idea? Are these scenes going to work? As a room how do you figure that out?

**Kourtney Kang:** Yeah, I think you sort of have to balance it a little bit more and sort of have your eye on both prizes so to speak. But I will say the most important thing is the story. And all of the best stories that we did at How I Met Your Mother started from someone saying, “Oh, one time this happened, or one time me and my friends, we did this thing.” And those always tend to be the best stories. And once the fun of writing a show like that for so long is you know those characters so well that you just go, oh, we’ll put this guy here and this is going to be great. You know what those jokes are.

Yeah, we did nine seasons. I started as like a baby writer and by the end I was an executive producer. And for me it was such a great boot camp because I was very fortunate. It’s a great staff. There were great guys, Carter and Craig that ran it. And so you just sort of churn it out. Some seasons we did 25 episodes a season.

**Craig:** God, that’s amazing.

**Kourtney:** Yeah. And you’re just constantly balancing keeping it real, keeping it grounded. Yeah, it’s a multi-camera sitcom. If it’s not funny like it’s rough.

**Craig:** And Rob you guys do about 40 episodes a season for 90 seasons now. What are you up to? 14,000 episodes of Sunny?

**Rob McElhenney:** We only do ten episodes a season now.

**John:** You’re so lazy. Kourtney was doing like 24.

**Craig:** But you—

**Kourtney:** Minorities always work harder.

**Craig:** Again, he is Irish. At one time that was a real problem in this country. If this were 1850 Rob would really be aggrieved.

**Rob:** This is the part of the conversation I just keep my mouth shut and I’m good.

**Craig:** So, like Kourtney you’re on a show – I mean, really on a show. Not only do you know those characters because it’s going so long, you are one of the characters. But what’s really interesting to me–

**Rob:** I play one of the characters. OK. I play one of those characters.

**Craig:** Eh, I mean, I know you pretty well. So that show has evolved, too. I’m just fascinated by what’s going on in TV in general with comedy. Because it does seem like there’s this strange evolution and your show, you know, was a way and now suddenly we’ve got this incredible – I mean, it was the season finale last season, correct, with the dance?

**Rob:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, [Audience claps] and that was him. They didn’t put his head on someone else. That was actually you.

**Rob:** Dancing?

**Craig:** Is that right?

**Rob:** Yes. That’s correct. That was me. There’s a lot of people who have no idea what you’re talking about because the show has been on for 14 years. Even people who have seen it, they haven’t seen 14 years of it.

**Craig:** Got it. So in this last season Rob’s character Mac comes out of the closet and you’re trying to connect with your father and you attempt to do so, because your father is not approving, and you attempt to do so through an interpretive dance. But, no—

**Rob:** A four-minute long contemporary dance. I expressed myself.

**Craig:** You would think it would be like waka-waka-waka, and it’s actually heartbreakingly gorgeous. This freak who works out 29 hours a day comes out there with 15 abs. You don’t even get 15. He has extra abs. And does this beautiful dance. And then Danny DeVito has this moment at the end which is one of the most incredible things I’ve seen in any half hour sitcom ever where he’s crying and he says, “I get it.” It was an amazing thing.

How active are you in pushing the evolution of that show now that it has gone on all this time?

**Rob:** Very active. I mean, we always try to just do things that we haven’t done before, which gets tricky after 14 years. And one of the things that we very rarely do is delve into the more dramatic. It’s just not the tone of the show. And it’s a very difficult thing to shift tone in comedy. You know, in a show like Barry when you’ve established that in the first episode then obviously it’s easier in the second, third, and fourth and you can get away with a lot more. And we’ve just established 14 years where we’re not doing anything like that.

But we also recognize that we have a tremendous responsibility. If people are going to continue to watch us then we have to take it seriously and we can’t phone it in. And so we work as hard now as we ever have to make the show different and unique and fun and still funny. And one of the ways we do that is to challenge ourselves and say, well, I’ve always wanted to do something. I’ve always wanted to do X, so I’m going to go do that this season. I can’t dance at all. And I’m like, ah, it might be fun to learn how to dance. Maybe I can put that in an episode and I can use that as a tax write-off, get FX to pay for it.

**Craig:** Weird motivation, but OK.

**Rob:** That coupled with, I don’t know, we just wanted to do something a little bit different. So I worked for five months to learn how to dance.

**Craig:** See this reminds me of something. Sometimes Alec will complain – all the time – I’m working so hard. I’m working so hard.

**Alec:** What?

**Craig:** And our friend, Derek Haas, who has Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago PD, Chicago Library, he’s like, “I have to do 70 episodes a season every season. You guys are doing eight.” And I’m kind of wondering for you, Kourtney, because you’ve got to make a lot of television. Do you ever sit there and go, “God damn, those guys over there in cable, they’re just getting away with murder right.” Is there any kind of envy? Do you feel like you’re being unfairly restricted by the format? Or, are you kind of enjoying the fact that that space is actually becoming special in its own way?

**Kourtney:** Well, I was on How I Met Your Mother for nine years and then I went to Fresh Off the Boat for three years. And then I was like I’ve got to get out of here. So I have since left. And now I’m doing more feature stuff and developing and things like that. It’s a great system and when you’re on a show there’s something nice about – it’s like a home. You know, and I sort of came up doing theater and it’s like your own little traveling band of folks that you’re putting on a show each week. And there’s something really fun and special about it.

But ultimately the sort of formula of it and, you know, you can do 25 episodes because you know this is going to happen. This thing is going to come in. There’s a form that you’re sort of filling in. Which allows you to do that many episodes. And at a certain point there is, at least for me, I hit a point of it just sort of felt constraining and you want to do more. You know, you sort of want to stretch your legs. There’s a limit to the stories you can tell.

I mean, on the shows that you guys are doing there’s so many exciting things. There’s different points of view. And TV has just sort of expanded in such a wonderful way and definitely you know sitting on a network sitcom and, you know, it used to be like when I worked on – even on How I Met Your Mother in a short period of time we had so many viewers.

The first show I worked on was this show called Coupling and it aired after Friends. And we were considered dead on arrival because we got a 27 in the 18-49 demo.

**Craig:** To put that in perspective, if you got that now all of the sphincter tone would relax in a network. People would be just, I don’t know, you’d be celebrated. It’s an impossibly high number now.

**Alec:** You would be the Super Bowl I think if you got that rating.

**Craig:** You would be the Super Bowl.

**Kourtney:** You would be the Super Bowl. And so it was tough. It’s sort of the audience is shrinking and you’re sort of – for me I was feeling sort of like we’re doing the same formula and it was sort of time to break out.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I get it. Look, I do love the traditional sitcom. I do. I love the traditional sitcom format. But it does seem like with every new kind of thing coming in, and so Rob’s show has the ability to kind of morph and change. I’m kind of curious, all of you have television experience in episodic. All of you guys. And now with the movies that you guys – you also have people that you write with. I think Steve Mallory is here.

**John:** Yeah! Steve Mallory.

**Ben:** That’s him.

**Craig:** When you are in that boat with another person and you guys are sailing through the choppy waters of trying to make comedy, who are you looking for to be your partners when you’re writing a movie together? When you’re running a show who do you want kind of working for you? When you’re working on a show who do you want to be working or? Talk a little about what makes a good partner in a room, because a lot of these folks I think would love to be one of the people in those rooms.

**John:** Yeah, so who are you looking to hire and who are you looking to team up with? What is the quality that you’re looking? Is it somebody who matches your comedy or someone who is a contrast to what you can bring?

**Rob:** If someone is funny is almost, it’s not irrelevant but it’s secondary. I want someone who, A, is passionate. Someone who I can spend a lot of time with. Someone who understands story and understands story structure. Understands character/character motivations. I mean, the funny will come. Especially if you have funny actors. You know, so for me that’s of paramount importance.

**Alec:** Yeah, I completely agree. To me it’s just structure and tone. It’s funny, I remember when I was working at Seinfeld the first script I wrote I vividly remember handing it into Larry David. And he put it in his pocket and he walked over to a rehearsal. And I followed him, because I wanted to watch him read it. Because I had slaved over every word and my gems, my jewels.

And he read the script, he took it out of his pocket, and he flipped through it in it must have taken him 90 seconds to read the whole script. And I’m like well he’s not savoring any of that. He’s not savoring my words. How could he – there’s morsels. All the morsels. He’s not…

And I realize now when somebody hands me a script it’s the same thing. I just go, uh-huh, what happens? OK, they do this. Right. I don’t care about jokes. Jokes, those will all happen. But it is so important just structure, structure, structure. So working to me with somebody who understands that and understands like what if this happens, or why this should happen and why that shouldn’t happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** You know? That’s all of it to me.

**Craig:** Is that the way it is with network stuff, too? Because my impression is that it’s a little bit more joke heavy and that you would want people that are kind of one-line-y kind of folks.

**Kourtney:** It’s like a football team, right? I don’t know anything about football.

**Craig:** Run with this. I want to see where this goes.

**John:** That’s usually me on this podcast.

**Kourtney:** I don’t know where I’m going, but you have a roster, right?

**Craig:** You pick up a bat.

**Kourtney:** Yeah. Like you kick your field goal and you have an act break.

**Craig:** Act breaks in football, there is. There’s one right in the middle of the game.

**Kourtney:** You know, the thing that I think is really tricky in sitcoms and writing for TV is it all comes down to motivation. Like why are people doing what they’re doing. And I think all you guys have spoken to this. What’s the truth? What’s the situation?

And then after that to me to do a show what you really need on your staff is your need foot soldiers. Like you need people who are in the trenches, who can listen and go, OK, this is the show we are doing. Because with any given show, any given premise, there’s many, many ways you could do it. And all of them could be great. And all of them could be valid. But we need to all run the same way.

And it’s funny because sometimes there’s very talented writers who they want to go this way. And you’re like, OK great, but we’re going to go this way. And it’s difficult to shift. And so you need someone who is sort of flexible and can hear where you want to go and kind of help you get there and like stay in it.

Like there’s nothing worse than when you get to the bottom of act two and you’re like, OK, so like why are they going to this swimming pool at night? So we can have this big funny set piece. And so you need people who have the sort of stamina to help you figure that out who you want to be in the room with till all hours of the night.

**Ben:** They were going there because they were just really tired and one of them just needed to go swimming. I just really want a gig. I want a gig.

**Craig:** This is apparently what Steve Mallory does.

**Alec:** Where have you been all my life?

**Craig:** Because they wanted to.

**Ben:** Because they wanted to. Can we go home?

**Craig:** Let’s get some ham.

**John:** Now Kourtney, you bring up motivation. And we have three actors on stage. So I want to talk about motivation because we talk a lot about it in writing in terms of why is this character doing it. But as actors you guys have to approach how am I actually going to perform this moment. What is getting me to say this line, getting me through this scene? What is a good way for a writer and actor to talk with each other about motivation, motivation in a moment, motivation in a scene?

Melissa, do you have any thoughts for like what works well for you?

**Melissa:** I would have to say, I mean, being on both sides of it, when we write something if an actor comes in and is like I just don’t know why I would say it that way. Then you shouldn’t. The first rule is unless it’s really key to the entire story it’s like you should say it in the way that feels right to your character. If you’re lucky enough to have someone that you’re like they’re going to do it justice, but it has to come out of their mouth.

I mean, I did something once where three – I think we were all in our early 30s – and all of us were saying, um, we’re trying to be nice and said, and I finally said, “Just no woman would say this. I can get the same point across. Can I say this?” And there may have been a 50+ year old white guy that said, “I think I know what a woman in her 30s would say.” And there were three women in their 30s just standing there like, oh my god.

But, I mean, for us – I think part of my job when I’m on the acting side is to figure out how to do it. And also part of my job on that side is when it really feels wrong to go up and talk to the writer. Like Ben, and god, Steve, you’re getting a lot of shout-outs tonight. We meet every morning in the trailer and we go over the scenes. And there’s always things that come up and we’re like it just feels odd. And I always think it’s a chance to improve something. So I think as long as no one is being defensive. We thought it was softer, or we thought it was this. I always want to try something a different way. And I think the writers always have to be open to that as well.

It doesn’t mean you have to – it doesn’t have to make the cut. But sometimes as the actor you have to at least get that out.

**John:** Alec Berg, a question I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time because you’re a show that is about – Barry is a show that has actors in it. And I watch the show and marvel at it, but I also wonder is it unfair that you have incredibly talented actors sometimes playing really bad actors and who sometimes have moments of breakthrough where they’re really good? And how are you finding that balance of like he’s really good in this moment but is he actually a good actor?

**Alec:** Yeah, it’s really a testament to their skill. I mean, Bill and Sarah Goldberg both are just – it’s really like maybe the hardest thing to do as an actor is to be a bad actor. Like I remember I did a thing years ago where somebody was supposed to sing off key and the person we cast was a really good singer. And she couldn’t do it. We kept saying, no, no, you’ve got to be off key. And she’s like I can’t. I can’t sing off key. It’s really hard.

And so Bill’s ability to play things wooden or left-footed, it’s awesome to watch. Right? And he does it in a way that just feels super real. It’s a really hard thing to do.

**Craig:** You’re like slicing it even more and more narrow now because in the second season it wasn’t like, OK, Bill Hader can’t act. But now he’s talking about something real and he is – but now Sarah is doing things where she’s actually acting pretty well. And then she’s acting really well. She’s now doing what’s even harder than acting bad is mediocre. Like that’s crazy to me that she can do that.

**Ben:** Not for me. Not hard for me at all.

**Craig:** [laughs] That is classic Falcone. Right there. Just straight down that middle.

**Alec:** But, yeah, it’s just a testament. I mean, again, it’s just, you know, and it’s funny you’re talking about seeing it from the actor’s point of view. Like I as a writer I am always, always interested in what the actor has to say about stuff. And I try as hard as I can to never be defensive about any of it because I have to worry about everything. I have to worry about every character. I have to worry about the story. I have to worry about what happens next week. All that actor is charged with is being the curator of that character. And they have so much more insight into that character than I do that to tell them how to do it seems insane to me. You know?

Like if they have a concern or something doesn’t feel right coming out of their mouth, like I always want to hear that. And the worst note, and you have to give it sometimes, is I know – I know you probably wouldn’t, but we need it for the story and just do your best.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** It’s a crappy note to give, but every once and a while you’re stuck and you have to.

**Craig:** Rob, do you find yourself – at any point–

**Rob:** I’m an excellent actor.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know.

**Rob:** They write words and I just do it.

**Craig:** You just do it.

**Rob:** I’ll do whatever.

**Craig:** You write your own stuff. Has anybody ever said to you you’re not doing you right?

**Rob:** Yeah. Today. I mean, Charlie was like, no. I’m like motherfucker I wrote this yesterday. And he’s like, nah, it’s not good. Let’s do it again.

But we have a very simple, like our show is so stupid. At times. So ridiculous, right? And so it would be very easy to look at it and say like, oh well, it’s just ridiculous and you can do whatever you want. I don’t think we would have lasted for 14 years if that was the case. We have a very simple maxim when it comes to any scene. Any one of the characters can say or do anything under the sun. It can be as ridiculous as we want it to be. However, we have to believe that that character believes that what he or she is doing will get them what they want.

**John:** Great.

**Rob:** It’s as simple as that.

**Craig:** That’s the classic acting and writing cue. What do you want?

**Rob:** Yeah. What do you want? And really if you don’t have a scene where somebody wants something very clearly then you don’t really have a scene.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Rob:** And then if you don’t believe that that actor, that character, is saying or doing something that will get them that thing then you don’t have a show.

**John:** Then it’s not real. It’s actually a very natural segue to our big game tonight. So, I’m going to pass these out to our gang here. So, we have been—

**Rob:** I’m sorry. Have we not talked about Chernobyl? Have we been up here this entire time and not talked about Chernobyl?

**John:** For you, Craig. Take this stack and pass it down.

**Rob:** I guess we’re moving along, but all right. I thought that’s why we were here. I thought this was Craig’s coming out party.

**Craig:** All he does all day long is make fun of me. I just want you to know all day long he makes fun about me.

**Rob:** I’m happy not to talk about it.

**Craig:** He sometimes just texts me and says, “Are you looking at Twitter? Are you looking at people praising you on Twitter?”

**Rob:** I’ve never seen somebody so close to their phone. Like someone will tweet something, five seconds later, he will be responding to it. About how great he is.

**Craig:** I have 25 years of starving for praise. Just give me my week. That’s all I ask. Just give me my week. I’ll be back to self-loathing before you know it.

**John:** All right, so as we’re starting this game segment earlier on we picked Brad, or Brad won this thing. Brad, can you stand up and move over to the aisle. And we’re going to have Katherine who is a wonderful person right there, she is going to be bringing over a microphone so you can play along with us here. Brad, tell us about yourself. Where are you from?

**Brad:** Rochester, New York.

**John:** Rochester, New York. And you must have listened to a few episodes of Scriptnotes because you correctly guessed that the person who had written the second largest number of outros was Rajesh Naroth.

**Brad:** Yes.

**John:** So how many episodes do you think you’ve listened to? There’s 405.

**Brad:** I contributed to the Listener Guide for sure.

**John:** Ooh, so this is a person who wrote in for the Listener Guide, so the people who told us what the best episodes are.

**Craig:** He’s definitely heard more than I have.

**John:** Yeah. You’ve heard so many more episodes than Craig.

**Brad:** That’s for sure, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m on like six right now or seven.

**John:** So, Brad, you probably know me and Craig pretty well, right? You know sort of the things we talk about and you could probably identify us just by the words we have spoken, right?

**Brad:** Maybe, yeah.

**John:** Let’s see how well you can do this.

**Craig:** Confidence, Brad. Confidence.

**John:** So Craig, we have transcripts for all 404 episodes of the show, dating way back to the very beginning. And a couple of years ago we talked about maybe doing a book, a book of all the transcripts.

**Craig:** So that you could make more money?

**John:** Yes. Turned out to be impossible because as of now it would 17,000 pages long. There’s a lot of us talking.

**Craig:** A 40-set volume.

**John:** 40-set volume of Scriptnotes. But with this giant corpus of text we were able to do some cool things in the office and feed it into a computer. You generate what’s called a Markov chain where it predicts what the next thing a person would say. It generates random seeds. And it’s how you train computers to do new things. How you train computer cars to go around little imaginary tracks.

So we fed in everything I said and everything you said into this. And Brad’s challenge–

**Craig:** Now, for the stuff that you said, did the computer notice that it was from a person, or did it think it was just another Markov generator talking to it?

**John:** Craig?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Aww. We’ll see. We’ll see what Brad says. Maybe Brad can tell a difference. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go down the row and we’re going to start with things that Craig is saying. And so some of these are true, things that Craig actually said, so you would say Not Bot. Or if it is something that was generated by a robot you’d say Bot. So Bot or Not Bot after each one.

So, we’ll start with you, Kourtney. So first round, these are all Craig. So keep in mind this is Craig saying this.

**Kourtney:** There are scenes where they are going to have an ism, like nerdism, and they shove the little small art boards.

**John:** Brad, is that Bot or Not Bot.

**Brad:** Bot.

**John:** That is a Bot. Well done.

**Craig:** That’s a bot. Clearly.

**Rob:** Two last bits of select umbrage.

**Brad:** Not Bot.

**John:** That was a bot. The bot learned about umbrage.

**Rob:** Two last bits of select umbrage? You thought a human being said that?

**Craig:** You don’t listen to the show. That’s all I say. That’s literally all I say. That was a tough one.

**Rob:** Rochester, New York?

**John:** Alec?

**Alec:** I don’t watch the Oscars.

**Brad:** Not a bot.

**John:** Correct.

**Craig:** Not a bot.

**Melissa:** There will be post-Chernobyl.

**John:** What’s your answer?

**Brad:** Bot.

**John:** That is a bot. The bot knows about Chernobyl.

**Alec:** There will never be post-Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Because it even sounded like Ivan Drago was saying it. There will be post-Chernobyl.

**Ben:** It’s amazing how nature creates them to be so lovable and sweet so you almost don’t even mind it as they dig your soul out and your energy with a spoon and just eat it in front of you and slowly choke your life out.

**Brad:** Not a bot.

**Craig:** Not a bot.

**John:** Not a bot.

**Ben:** That was so easy. That one was too easy.

**Craig:** But do you know what I was talking about there? My own children.

**John:** Yes. Craig, you get to take the next round here.

**Craig:** Great. And we’re sticking with Brad. Brad is doing a pretty good job here.

**John:** Brad is doing a pretty good job. I think he’s going to win.

**Craig:** OK, so this next round is all John. This is going to be hard because almost all of this is zeros and ones. So get ready buddy. Next round is all John. Bot or not bot. Kourtney take it away, number one.

**Kourtney:** And I think we actually intercut.

**Craig:** I know, it’s hard, right? It’s hard.

**Brad:** A bot.

**Craig:** It is a bot. But it could also be not bot. I mean, all right, here we go. Rob, number two.

**Rob:** What’s interesting is that you’re trying to break through, because that’s why they’re doing a seminar on structure, on theme, our circle theme, for this person.

**Craig:** I know.

**Brad:** A bot.

**Craig:** You said it’s a bot? It is a bot. That’s right. But, again, really close. OK, Alec Berg, number three.

**Alec:** So, in a recent episode we talk about an Uber kind of, or a self-driving car company comes to town.

**Craig:** I know!

**Brad:** That’s not a bot.

**Craig:** It’s not a bot. You’re right. That one sounded way more like a bot.

**John:** It really did.

**Craig:** You’re the only person when you run that shit through this thing and it sounds more human. OK, Melissa, number four.

**Melissa:** I was like, well, that gun has to sell three million to shoot something new in 2015 or 2014.

**Brad:** That’s got to be a bot.

**Craig:** It’s a bot. It is. Brad is good at this. Maybe Brad’s a bot.

**John:** Maybe he’s too good at this, like a Westworld situation here.

**Craig:** Yeah. I see a turtle flipped over on its back.

**Ben:** And then the Chinese government decides it’s a semi-creative job and they choose, you know, over five years from now.

**Brad:** Bot.

**Craig:** It is a bot. Five for five.

**Ben:** I really tried to personalize that one, too.

**Craig:** I know. That was really good.

**John:** All right. Now we’re in round three. We’re back to Craig. So tell us, this is Craig or a bot. So, Kourtney, start us off.

**Kourtney:** The presence of the tank will definitely be problematic.

**John:** Bot or not bot.

**Brad:** Not bot.

**John:** Correct.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly, you’re freaking me out, dude.

**Rob:** They don’t need to know what I was like. I mean, Alex understands inherently that the woman he loves who he’s put in for real like Eleven. Then it starts with a prop guy about the force in Hollywood.

**John:** Brad?

**Brad:** A bot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Bot!

**Craig:** That was easy.

**Alec:** I have just been really just brain-bleaching. You wouldn’t say that.

**Brad:** Bot.

**John:** Not bot. Craig said that.

**Craig:** I say that all the time.

**John:** Broke the streak.

**Melissa:** And that ability is in the shower. I’m bummed out.

**Brad:** Not a bot.

**John:** That was a bot.

**Craig:** Tripping up Brad. He gets you. I’m tripping him up. I love it.

**Ben:** We love you Melissa McCarthy.

**Brad:** Not a bot.

**Craig:** Not a bot.

**John:** Not a bot. We love Melissa McCarthy.

**Melissa:** I thought that was a bot for sure.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, he says that.

**Craig:** But we also said some other pretty fucked up shit about you, but we cherry picked there.

**John:** All right. OK. Speed round. So these are all things I would have said. Or maybe said.

**Craig:** OK, these are all things that John would have said, Bot or Not Bot. Here we go.

**John:** We’re going around twice now.

**Craig:** Go around twice. And Kourtney.

**Kourtney:** I like to watch the sporting games.

**Brad:** Not a bot.

**Craig:** Not a bot. Number two.

**Rob:** Daddy does bark. Yeah.

**Brad:** Bot.

**Craig:** Not a bot.

**John:** Not a bot. I said that.

**Craig:** He said that.

**Alec:** I think it adds to the joking.

**Brad:** Bot.

**Craig:** Bot.

**Melissa:** Arnold Schwarzenegger is his own refrigerator.

**Brad:** Bot.

**John:** Not a bot.

**Craig:** Not a bot.

**Ben:** I just see these things together and I’m like I have no idea what this is.

**Brad:** Not a bot.

**Craig:** Not a bot. He did say that.

**John:** All right. Back to you, Kourtney.

**Kourtney:** And it’s because my brain could follow people talking.

**Brad:** Bot.

**Craig:** Not a bot.

**John:** I said that.

**Rob:** This was a useful thing about the psychology of the Black List.

**Brad:** A bot.

**Craig:** Yes, that was a bot.

**Alec:** But, so I would say William Goldman, Shane Black, I guess what I’m saying.

**Brad:** A bot.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a bot.

**John:** I’m not that bad.

**Melissa:** I hop on my little two-wheeled scooter and I just go.

**Brad:** Please be not a bot.

**Craig:** Not a bot.

**John:** Not a bot. I said that.

**Ben:** Weather happens in parks.

**Brad:** A bot?

**Craig:** It is not a bot.

**John:** I said it, too.

**Melissa:** That’s my favorite.

**Craig:** Thank you, Brad.

**John:** Brad, you have won the game. Congratulations. You are phenomenal at this. If you have a script that you would like us to read, Craig and I will read your script.

**Brad:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Bad news, Brad. Bad news.

**John:** Thank you very much for playing our game. So we have again Katherine there with a microphone and we will be able to answer maybe four or five questions.

**Male Audience Member:** Hello, my name is Adam. Thank you all so much for doing this. This was absolutely phenomenal. I have a question I guess pretty much for everyone about long term planning in your scripts and leaving little Easter eggs as writers. Something that was awesome in Barry that you had, not to give too many spoilers away, but there’s a character, a detective, who we find out in the first season that’s he going through a breakup, his wife has left him. And at first it’s this cool little character piece. And then this turns into a very critical plot point in season two.

And so I was just wondering if you could all just talk about the long term planning of scripts and just adding fun little things either there for you later or just kind of how to expand those big ideas into really critical parts of the story.

**Craig:** You didn’t know what you were doing there, did you Alec?

**Alec:** Well I can speak to that one specifically which is, no, we did not really know what we were doing. We sort of did. I mean, you kind of go forward and then as you go along you get to certain places and you go, oh wait, maybe there’s something that happened before that we can kind of grab a tentacle of and pull forward so that it seems like we knew what we were doing before. Right?

And that’s a lot of kind of as you lay track from season to season, like you know who the characters are and you embrace what they’ve been through. But, no, sometimes you know going ahead like, oh, maybe at some point this will happen. But a lot of times you’re just kind of going, wait, we said this. What if that’s the thing that connects here. And those are always the most satisfying things to me when you’re writing where you’re like, oh my god, we just made it look like we had an idea a while ago that we never had. And now we look like – to someone like you – that we had a clue about what was happening when really we didn’t.

**Craig:** Most of the plot of Hangover 3 is literally pulled from one of those. Because John Goodman’s character plays this uber crime lord and his name is Marshall. And in the first Hangover the character of Black Doug says, “Oh, Marshall is going to be pissed at me on that one.” And it was just some random throwaway thing. Like the joke was who the hell is Marshall. That was enough. And I think, I don’t know, fooled a lot of people into thinking that there was a master plan. No, there’s no master. It’s cheating. It’s cheating.

**Alec:** You cheat.

**John:** It’s all cheating. Katherine, can you find us another question? A person with a question.

**Female Audience Member:** OK, so you guys all pretty much mentioned structure when you were talking about writing. And so I was wondering if you could speak more to what that means for you when you’re putting a script together, especially network versus cable, or feature. Like I know in network you can kind of write to act breaks. Do you use that kind of thinking when you’re conceiving of a script? Or is that more organic? What’s your approach?

**John:** Great. So a question about structure. And I want to get to the bigger longer things, but when we were talking about improv at the start and working at Groundlings, the things you’re doing do have a structure. It seemed like magic but there is a real plan for how you’re going to get through those. Can you quickly talk through what the structure is of an improv moment and sort of what you teach people about how to start and how to reach an ending?

Because it’s not a formula but there’s a way you do it.

**Melissa:** Yeah. It can’t just fade off. And then the other… I mean, that would be incredibly unsatisfying if everybody just walked off the stage. So, I still, I think it’s the same kind of concept even when you’re improvising that there’s still why, what is the big moment, what is the relationship. And there has to be a beginning, middle, and end. Even if it’s in a movie, if it’s on stage and you know you only have three minutes, you still have to work towards why. And kind of what you were talking to before, if you can ever wrap it to the beginning, especially when you’re truly just pulling it out of nowhere, it is really satisfying if you can somehow be like, oh, the first line he said I’m going to come in and that’s the end, or at least it’s related to.

So I think you’re always kind of scanning to have your scales kind of even out. The story, the character, and the humor, none of them are really winning.

**Ben:** And sort of bringing it back to your question, I think in an improv the first thing you have to know really quickly, and it’s the same thing when you’re writing a script, is you really as efficiently, and you guys all do it so well in different ways, but you want to know who the people are, like get a taste of who they are, what they’re up to, and where they are. Like in a film it’s easier because on a stage you’re like, I mean it’s crazy, you’re like doing something, you’re like, “I’ve got some cake batter.” And you’re like, oh Jesus, I hope somebody helps me out with this.

Whereas there’s a production design and you know where you are. Speaking towards structure, in features anyway, I try and get as quickly to the why as I can. And you can’t really do that until you get a sense of who the characters are.

**John:** Craig has an episode just two weeks ago which is basically his plan for how to write a movie and he really is talking about structure but he’s talking about it from a sense of what do characters want, and what is a character’s journey, and what is a character going after. And that’s how you get from this is the idea at the beginning to this is the idea at the end and the journey that goes through it.

He’s a long about a lot of stuff in his episode, so we will have a follow up episode where we talk about that.

**Craig:** Am I? Am I?

**John:** But there’s fascinating stuff in there.

**Craig:** And for you guys at different times I would imagine your structure was dictated by commercials.

**Kourtney:** Yeah, there’s a little bit of a recipe. It’s part of the formula of network TV of you sort of have your setup and then you want to have that uh-oh moment before people sell you vacuum cleaners and chips and juice boxes. And then you’re sort of back in.

There’s been a weird thing that happened. Way back in the day there used to be two acts. So you could sort of go through your story uh-oh moment and then you sort of wrap up. But then networks sort of got greedier and sort of inserted more act breaks. And I think based on nothing it has helped lead to the demise of network TV.

**Craig:** Strange that they would be self-defeating that way when they’ve always been so prudent.

**Kourtney:** Yes. I mean, it’s a 22-minute episode. And so now you have to come up with three moments where something terrible happens, oh no, what are they going to do. But then in another four minutes you’re going to hit another one of those. And so you start to have this feeling of like well that doesn’t feel real.

And then the audience starts to disconnect. And so it’s tricky. It’s a tricky balance of keeping it interesting and keeping with the formula.

**John:** Great. Let’s take one last question. Katherine, can you find us another question out there somewhere?

Female Audience Member: Hi guys. Thank you so much for doing this. I have a question for somebody who is more of a newer writer. I’ve always been writing, but I’m taking it more seriously now. One thing that I noticed about my writing is I tend to do a lot of like talking heads and when I’m trying to get my plot put together the stakes are high enough and then I end up going so far the other way it just becomes more characters talking at each other.

What advice do you have for somebody who is kind of experiencing that and is noticing a pattern of that?

**John:** A couple thoughts off the top of my head is that you may need to challenge yourself to create scenes where no one can talk. And how you would tell the story visually if no one was allowed to talk in your story. And sort of what would it look like. If you had silent characters how would you tell the story of what this character is going through, what they want, how we reveal what they want. How they reveal what their challenges are, who their opponents are. How you would do that without any characters talking. So then when you do start reintroducing dialogue it’s not the only tool that you’re using.

Other thoughts?

**Kourtney:** I think a nice trick if it’s sort of feeling stagnant is to sort of go through your script and say what’s the purpose of this scene. Like what is the state of things at the start and how is it different at the end and who won, who lost, in this scene?

At least for me I’ll find a lot of times it’s just like oh there’s just people being sassy. And you’re like, all right, well that’s great but nothing has happened. And so that sort of forces you to make each scene earn its keep. Like, yeah, there might be really funny jokes there, but if nothing happens or nothing costs someone something, you know, you need to keep that sort of eye on that prize.

**Craig:** Another possible trick is to think of your characters as liars. So sometimes we get caught in that trap of rolling strips of dialogue because people are saying what they think. But people rarely do. So, just say, OK, this is what they think. Write that scene. Write a long stripy dialogue scene. Four pages of yammering. And then go, great, now neither one of them wants to actually say any of this to the other person, so how are they going to get this across and get what they want without saying any of that? They’re just going to think it. And have them lie to each other.

And then you may find in that that all this stuff is going away and you don’t even need it. And it’s just in the eyes or in the spaces in between.

**Melissa:** And those are much better ideas. I want to send you out on a terrible idea. I also sometimes really love the reality of stuff does not come at a convenient time. I love, you know, this is, again, would be a terrible example. But it’s like Christmas morning. Everything is wonderful. And that’s when it’s like just a shit storm. Or you’re making a sandwich, or your teeth is knocked out, and that’s when you’re like, “Hey, I think he’s looking at me.” Things are so not convenient in life and I always think if it’s always like a very convenient place to have this conversation I do like to think like where would it really happen.

Is it like somebody talking over the stall and you’re like not now, not now? I’m going to the bathroom. I need two minutes. Making it less easy sometimes for the actor and for the scene I think that can help.

**Craig:** That’s going to be in the Ham Lady movie. That’s in the Ham Lady movie right there. That’s the trailer. Not now. I need two minutes.

**Melissa:** Not now. I’m eating ham in my stall.

**Craig:** Obviously.

**John:** It has come time for the end of our show.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** I feel a little sad.

**Craig:** You mean like the whole thing? Like this is it?

**John:** We can wrap up some stuff. Any last things you want to talk about?

**Craig:** No, I mean, like are we doing 406?

**John:** Oh, no, 406 will still happen. We already recorded. We banked an episode. So 406 is there.

**Craig:** Got it. Cool. This would be a weird number to end on.

**John:** It would be a weird number.

**Craig:** Sad way to end.

**Rob:** He didn’t get what you were joking about. How has this show survived 405 episodes?

**Craig:** Bot. Not Bot.

**Rob:** OK, now we’re getting it.

**John:** We have a lot of people to thank.

**Craig:** See!

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you. We need to thank John Gatins, Lindsay Cavanaugh, and everyone at Hollywood Heart for putting tonight together. This is an amazing event you threw together.

**Craig:** Incredible guys.

**John:** Thank you very much. Thank you to the Ace Hotel. Thank you to our amazing guests.

**Craig:** Ben Falcone. Melissa McCarthy. Alec Berg. Rob McElhenney. Kourtney Kang. And the great John August.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** And thank all of you. Thank you guys. Have a great night.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-one-with-charlie-brooker).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 404 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off this week, but he will be back next week. Luckily I have somebody really remarkable to talk with about things. This is Charlie Brooker, the creator-writer-executive producer of the remarkable anthology series Black Mirror, the most recent installments of which dropped on Netflix this past week. Charlie Brooker, welcome to the show.

**Craig Brooker:** Hello. It’s a pleasure to be here.

**John:** I want to talk to you about so many things about the individual series, individual episodes, bigger questions such as what is television, what is reality. So…

**Charlie:** Yeah. I might not have answers to all of those things. I’ll try.

**John:** I’ll give you about 30 seconds. I’m going to plug the live show one last time.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** So be thinking.

**Charlie:** 30 seconds. Right.

**John:** Our next live show is this Thursday, June 13, and the Ace Hotel. It’s a benefit for Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney, the showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, Kourtney Kang of Fresh Off the Boat.

Oh my god, we have too many guests. I don’t know how we’ll fit all that in, but it’s going to be a remarkable show. So come see us this Thursday, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. They released some more tickets so you can still get a seat if you would like to see that live show.

If you’re there at the live show there are going to be some games, there’s going to be giveaways, there’s going to be cool stuff that you can only encounter at the show. So, please come out and support a great charity, Hollywood Heart. Craig and I will be together on stage. Craig’s head will be immense from the success of Chernobyl. But, you know, he has still graciously agreed to participate in this live show.

**Charlie:** He’s lowering himself. You see, he’s lowering himself to take part.

**John:** So someone on Twitter this last week asked, “Have you and Craig ever had successes at the same time?” Because Craig has Chernobyl and I have Aladdin. And I said, no, not that I’m aware of. And so I think we’re going to become insufferable.

**Charlie:** You can’t call each other out on it.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** Because you’d both be right.

**John:** So it’s going to be a really interesting live show. So there could be some fireworks.

**Charlie:** But you’re not going to listen to anyone. You’ll just be monsters. You’ll be like Godzilla.

**John:** Craig’s rider for just this live show has been crazy. It’s been months of negotiation. But I think we finally got through most of it. We’ll try.

Charlie Brooker, welcome to Los Angeles. People by your accident might guess that you do not live in America.

**Charlie:** No, I don’t.

**John:** I did not know anything about you or your show until I was on a live show for Slate Culture Gabfest with Craig. We did a little crossover episode. And Natasha Lyonne as her sort of endorsement, her One Cool Thing essentially, said you have to watch this series Black Mirror and I didn’t know what it was. I wrote it down and I started watching it immediately. It is a remarkable program. And I would have assumed that you had done nothing before that, but then I checked your credits and you’ve done a tremendous amount. You have credits all the way back to ’99.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And most of them seem like comedy things that are related to cultural moments. Rewind your–

**Charlie:** That’s fair enough. I mean, I’ve had an odd kind of accidental career. I started out I was a cartoonist at one point when I was a teenager. Then I became a video games reviewer. Then I started doing a website that had sort of topical – it was extremely vicious satire of television on it. And that led me to get work. Simultaneously I started working for a topical comedy show in the UK. And I got a gig writing TV reviews for The Guardian.

So most of the stuff that I’d done until about 2008, in fact everything I’d done until 2008 was comedy. So all the TV stuff I’d done was comedy. And in the UK I sometimes present shows. So I do a show intermittently now that’s kind of Daily Show esque, I guess you’d call it, which was called Screen Wipe. It was about TV. Then we did News Wipe, which was about the news. Started doing annual 2016 Wipe or whatever you’d call it.

And then I sort of developed a parallel career I guess, 2008 we did a show called Dead Set which was like a zombie series. It’s kind of like a prototype Black Mirror in a way in that it’s an absurd premise that we then play straight. So a zombie apocalypse happens and the only people who survive are the participants in a series of Big Brother that’s going out in the UK. And they’re 10 people who have been chosen to not get on.

So, yeah, and then myself and Annabel Jones who is my sort of co-conspirator on all of this stuff, we were asked would you like to do something us. And we’d always been a fan of shows like The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected. I don’t know if you’ve got that over here.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** It’s like Roald Dahl short stories. Really creepy. And Hammer House of Horror was another show, don’t know if you ever saw. And the show we came up with was Black Mirror and we that was in 2011. At the same time as we were doing Black Mirror we were also doing a show called A Touch of Cloth, it’s like Naked Gun. So polar opposite stuff.

So in the UK I guess up until 2008, 2011, I was mainly known for doing comedy stuff.

**John:** So talk to me about that initial conversation about the idea of Black Mirror. Going in they say how about an anthology series. What is the discussion that leads to the specific idea for Black Mirror and what does it look like in those meetings? What are you describing to them?

**Charlie:** Well, initially it was slightly different in that it was – there wasn’t going to be a focus on technology so much. It’s become sort of shorthand for that in a way. It was very much just going to be an update on Twilight Zone style stories. I’d read a biography of Rod Sterling. I felt that at the time those kind of things were missing from television. And when I was growing up – I didn’t see The Twilight Zone until I was a teenager, but the BBC used to put on really strange one-off controversial, thought-provoking, high-concept plays that would always generate a lot of controversy and often be quite horrifying.

And I felt that that sort of thing at the time was slightly missing on television. And then when they rebooted Dr. Who, which was about 2006 or so, I thought well maybe – because that’s almost an anthology show.

**John:** It is. Yeah.

**Charlie:** I thought well maybe there’d be an appetite for this. So that was what we – originally the pitch was it was going to be eight half hours. I was only supposed to write like two of them or something. And it said, I think originally it definitely mentioned technology might be one of the themes, but the idea was just to look at shows like The Twilight Zone and where they would be doing an episode about McCarthyism or something like that we’d be doing terrorism say.

And then because we were only doing three we ended up – the technological stories seemed to be the most interesting ones. Although actually I’d written a whole completely different episode first which we were about to start shooting that, again, didn’t have any technological element to it at all. It was incredibly earnest. And then a new head of Channel 4, the Channel that put it out in the UK, a new head of Channel 4 came in and she did not like this script. I have to say probably in retrospect she was right. They were going to pull the plug on it and if this wasn’t going ahead basically the whole show wasn’t going ahead.

So, there was some panic going on on our part. So I had a meeting with her where my job was to try and persuade her that this was a good idea, that this very earnest episode we were doing about the Iraq War was well worth her time. And if she wasn’t going to go for it, in my back pocket I had the idea for the national anthem episode which is the one with the prime minister and the pig. And I thought well if she doesn’t go for this I might as well pitch that because what have I got to lose.

**John:** Absolutely. Something versus nothing.

**Charlie:** Exactly. So, I ended up pitching that and luckily for me she laughed. Her first question was does it have to be a pig.

**John:** That’s a classic development note question. Does it have to be a pig?

**Charlie:** [laughs] Well, and we went through all the different things it could be there in the meeting. At one point I think I suggested a wheel of cheese or a frozen chicken. And then we went, no, a pig is probably best.

**John:** It has to be a pig.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And I went off and wrote the first ten pages or so, just to try and persuade her. And it was a parody of 24 that I was basically writing. And luckily for us she went for it. So, I mean, that episode is obviously one of our most divisive ones and I think in the UK it’s received slightly differently than it is say here, because I was known for doing fairly unusual comedy stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. So people could see the joke of it played differently there than it does here.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** But I want to get back to this idea of you talk about Twilight Zone, we had Tales from the Dark Side which sounds like a similar kind of thing, generally they’re self-contained stories that ask a question and there’s always a fantastical element or big sci-fi element that lets you focus on differently. In your case it’s technology and it’s a what-if on technology but a generally a very near technology. Things that are almost possible today. And how early in the process of these first three episodes of this first season – so the first three episodes are The National Anthem, which is the one with the pig, Fifteen Million Merits which is the prison-ish situation, and The Entire History of You. So those last two are much more clearly near future technology things. How soon did you know that that was the unifying theme?

**Charlie:** I guess it was, so Fifteen Million Merits had been written but so had this other earnest episode. As soon as that one was – the one that we were going to do was sort of scrapped, The National Anthem I realized there was a sort of drumbeat of social media going throughout it. And I thought, well hang on a minute, and we’d already been speaking to Jesse Armstrong who wrote The Entire History of You which was the third one. And so we realized well all three of these are about technology. And then we realized that, well, really we can use technology in the same way that The Twilight Zone would use the supernatural to tell a story. We can have fantastical things happening. And a lot of the technology we show is impossible, but because of the era we’re living in you kind of go along with it. As long as it looks grounded enough, and it looks like it functions the way you imagine it should, you kind of go with it. So, I think it was then. And then once we’d done that first – I think it must have been by the time we were finishing Entire History of You I thought well this is the way forward for the rest of the season.

It’s strange though, because then looking at the second season one of the episodes there is White Bear which – it looks like it’s a comment saying aren’t people on phones zombies. It’s a zombie movie with people filming things. So I think that was – sometimes we like to remind ourselves it’s not a sci-fi show basically. On the show itself we can lose sight of that.

**John:** Let’s talk about, as you’re figuring out an episode, because with an anthology show like this where each show is about a thing, are you starting with what the one-hour of entertainment is going to be about? Is it the idea or is it the character? Because ultimately the character has to drive that thing. But in this anthology that is so idea-driven you have to be able to sell that idea. So where was the push and pull between those two?

**Charlie:** Yeah. And that’s something that I think I got better at now. There’s certainly – when we’ve done weaker episodes it’s because the story is dictating what happens. It really depends. So sometimes – sometimes the story idea comes about from as you were saying a what-if, some crazy scenario that you imagined. You think, OK, that’s interesting. The different ways that could play out, I’m immediately interested in that. Other times it really depends – something like San Junipero which was – actually I’m going to rewind a bit. Actually Be Right Back was probably – Be Right Back was an interesting one.

So Be Right Back which is in season two, and I think it’s – I feel it’s one that’s slightly unjustly overlooked as an episode. It’s one of my favorites. And Owen Harris directed it who also did San Junipero. And that had stemmed from an experience I’d had that was in the ‘90s a former flat mate and friend of mine had died. And then it was one of the first times that somebody I knew had passed away. And then a couple of years after that, if you remember at the time when cell phones had limited memory and you could only store like a set number of phone numbers in there.

**John:** Oh, of course, yeah.

**Charlie:** And I was trying to make room for a new phone number in my phone which meant I had to delete old ones. And I scrolled through and I saw the name of this friend of mine and thought I can’t delete that. Even though it’s just a number I literally can’t ring that ever again. And there was something very strange – unexpected and strange about that moment. And so I knew I wanted to do a story that sort of spoke to that strange connection you can feel with – a very impersonal piece of technology can throw up something, an incredibly personal moment.

**John:** So I want to clarify that. So that leads to an idea that can be the premise of an episode, but it’s really an emotional spark. It’s like I have an emotional connection to this thing that I know is not the actual person. It’s just all of my memories is embodied in this slot in the phone.

**Charlie:** Yeah. It’s a little souvenir. It’s like one of the few reminders I had of this person. I didn’t have photos of this person. That was the one thing I had. And I was suddenly struck by it.

And then as is often the case, I think, with our episodes what happens is you’ve got an idea like that or really not an idea just a feeling, you’ve got that, and then I got really interested in the world of sort of psychics and mediums who purport to be putting people in place with their loved ones who’ve passed on. And these two ideas sort of glommed together and I was sitting up late one night. We’d just had our first baby. And I was doing the sort of night shift, which incidentally was weirdly a brilliant motivator because I knew I could only work in short bursts.

**John:** So many writers I’ve talked to say productivity actually soared because they knew they only had little windows of time.

**Charlie:** Yeah. It’s like Pomodoro technique or something that screams at you. And you can’t go outside. You can’t go anywhere. You’ve got nothing else to do. And I was on Twitter or something like that and I just saw updates from people scrolling past and I was just struck by what if I was the last person on earth, all these people were dead, and these messages were being generated by some kind of AI. And then you sort of remember these other ideas you had and you go, OK, I’m starting to see a story here.

Now, at that point I thought, so then you sort of end up creating the characters. I’m not sure the process by which I sort of thought who would find this the most upsetting possibly, if there was something that could generate text based on someone’s personality. Who would find that most upsetting? And the answer was a sort of recently bereaved widow who is expecting a baby, sort of my port of call, and so I think this is a very rambling answer I’m giving here.

**John:** I like it though.

**Charlie:** And that’s an odd one, because that episode I didn’t – at that stage in doing the show I hadn’t learned to plan things either. So I would write scripts as I went along.

**John:** You were just doing it by feel.

**Charlie:** Yeah. Just. Which meant that I ended up making all sorts of errors.

**John:** What’s an example of an error you would make by doing it that way?

**Charlie:** Ooh, in the original National Anthem there was a whole subplot involving the government picking up anyone who had ever been on some sort of terror watch list and trying to beat a confession out of them that tonally went – I was trying to play for comedy. It was like somebody gets beaten to death in an interrogation room and it–

**John:** Did it shoot?

**Charlie:** No. No it didn’t. So there was one scene in National Anthem as well that tonally, there’s a porn star he meets in National Anthem, there’s a guy they rope in to try and perform this act. There’s a moment when the two of them, the prime minister and the porn star meet in the corridor in the original script, and the porn star gives him the only good advice he gets all day long about how to deal with what’s about to happen. And we dropped it because just tonally it was very much at odds – but sometimes, White Bear I completely – White Bear is a good example of something where I totally messed it up. I wrote the whole – that was the next episode.

Now it’s one of my favorites because it’s got a really horrific twist and it’s a bit – I was trying to channel things like the Wicker Man and like there’s a short Spanish film called, I think it’s Spanish, called La Cabina. Have you ever seen that?

**John:** No, I don’t know La Cabina.

**Charlie:** Look it up. I won’t tell you anything about it except it’s about a guy and a phone booth. That’s all I’m going to say. It’s about 15 minutes. I was trying to channel that sort of thing. And I originally wrote that script three times. We were about to shoot it. I had written this thing, I had this notion about if you’ve seen White Bear there’s a story they tell the main character in it about–

**John:** About what’s actually going on.

**Charlie:** About what’s going on. And they say there’s a symbol appeared on all the TVs and everyone is behaving like zombies effectively. In the original script that was–

**John:** The actual premise.

**Charlie:** That was the actual premise. There was just this mysterious symbol appeared that made 30% of the population act like psychopaths and 30% act like bystanders. And 30% were the quarry. And I wrote it – it was very confused. But we had to shoot it because we were running out of time. We were literally scouting locations we were trying to work out, because I’d written in all these complicated locations, and we were based on a sort of former maybe US Air Force base in the UK. And we were looking for places to shoot the locations that were mentioned in the script. And one of them, it said it was a shop, but we couldn’t find a shop, but we could find this gas station.

And the location guy, we were looking around, and he said well you’ll have to film this way because there’s a fence around this whole place. So we can’t ever see in that direction. And I thought well a fence around the whole, that’s actually – oh, hang on a minute. And suddenly had a much more interesting idea. And just went off and rewrote the whole thing. Like just threw it away and rewrote the whole thing in like two days or something.

We had a director on board already, so we had to say to him, Carl Tibbetts, I had to say to him, sorry, I’ve totally rewritten the entire script. And luckily he was – but that happened because, and I’m in two minds about that. That happened because I hadn’t been doing any planning, I’d just been trying to write this story from a slightly confused premise. And then because I was forced into a corner suddenly I was in a position where literally I saw this fence around the thing and suddenly I sort of had a eureka moment and realized I could sort of dig myself out of the hole. You can’t dig yourself out of a hole, can you?

**John:** Well, you can dig a different hole to–

**Charlie:** You could dig some stairs?

**John:** Yes, you could use your shovel to maybe dig your way up to something.

**Charlie:** Yes.

**John:** That’s probably. You dug yourself out of it in a way.

**Charlie:** I dug myself, I stood on the shovel.

**John:** What it sounds like though is you’re trying to both plan for what you’re going to need, but also be flexible for better ideas as they come up.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And so you were ready to be lucky. If you had felt confident about the episode that you’d written you probably would have ignored the fence and stuck with what you had.

**Charlie:** Yes. Definitely.

**John:** Because you allowed yourself to feel some insecurity you could say, oh, OK, there’s a better idea. There’s a way of containing this. Because I mean what you’re describing sounds like a completely different episode. Because I love White Bear. I think it is great. And it relies on that twist at the end about what’s really going on. And it sounds like if you hadn’t planned for the episode to be one way that twist never would have come.

**Charlie:** Absolutely. And that was why, I mean, I just knew it was – it was like sort of realizing at the altar you had married the wrong person or something. This was happening and I knew it wasn’t right. And everyone basically knew the script wasn’t right. And then so suddenly to have had this moment was such a relief, but it was also terrifying. And then on the next episode of that season, which was the Waldo Moment one, that’s where I really ran out of time. And I was kind of not happy with my finished script. I think there were lots of good ideas in it but I didn’t – weirdly it should have been a separate thing. It should have been like a separate miniseries or something like that. I should have had more time to develop.

**John:** Absolutely. It didn’t feel like it wanted to be in one hour of time.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And let’s talk about that though because the format of an anthology series is about an hour long for episodes, although you’ve gone past those boundaries now. You have to set up your premise very quickly, or at least your world-building premise. Like this is what is possible in this universe of this episode. And people have a general expectation about what kinds of things can happen in a given episode, but there’s a pretty wide range.

You need to establish your characters very, very quickly. And you though have to decide at what point do you let the audience know what the episode is about. And that feels like a fundamental choice you’re making pretty early in the process or not?

**Charlie:** Yeah. I mean, White Bear was a good example of something where I guess in a way, I haven’t really thought about it, but because I had a story that I then was going to throw out but was going to use as the fiction they tell her within the episode, it meant that I had to sort of cover story that I could tell the viewer for about 75% of the running time. And then in a strange way, once you know what it is you’re hiding and you’ve worked out how long you’re going to hide it, it curiously makes some things easier because it actually limits your range of options. It sort of forces your hands on all sorts of decisions I guess. Which I hadn’t really thought about.

I mean, I found the stress of doing White Bear, it nearly falling apart and then me feeling like I hadn’t really done a good enough job with the Waldo Moment meant that when we did the Christmas one and that one I planned like meticulously. And that was interesting because that was another story where there was this big sort of reveal. We knew there was going to be a big reveal. Once you know that it sort of means you can spend, yes, and I’m always slightly worried that the audience is going to get there first. That they will – San Junipero, I thought people were going to get that in the first instance, like when they first – there’s a moment early on where Mackenzie as Yorkie is trying on different outfits. And it looks like a sort of a montage that you’d see in a John Hughes movie or something like that. Owen who directed that as well is a huge John Hughes fan and wanted to sort of channel all these things.

And in the script what it’s saying is that she – at one point it says she sort of magically changes outfits. And look. And Girlfriend in a Coma is playing on the radio at one point. And I thought everyone is going to immediately twig what is going on here. And I was pleasantly surprised when people didn’t. Although that’s again something – the other thing I guess I’ve learned is that I think that the most important draft in a way of the script is the edit. So myself and Annabel spend a lot of time in the edit and it never ceases to amaze me how much you can continue to tweak and change – you can rescue things that haven’t worked and you can bring in new things you didn’t notice yourself. And when you’re playing – when you’re revealing something that’s also crucial because that’s how you – you’re trying to gauge at what point people are going to understand exactly what’s going on.

White Bear actually there’s little flashbacks in that as well which I thought, oh, people are going to guess this.

**John:** And they don’t.

**Charlie:** And they don’t.

**John:** So White Bear is an example of sort of a two-stage reveal. First that the world is not what she thinks it is, and that we think we have good insight into who this character is or sort of that we’re seeing it through her eyes. And she’s a trustworthy narrator to some degree but there’s more going on. Shut Up and Dance is again that sort of same situation where we think we understand the premise quite early on that he’s being compelled to do these things and we don’t realize that there’s more to him than we sort of knew at the start. And looking back it’s like, oh, that is what that first scene was and we don’t know that’s why he was chosen.

**Charlie:** That was another one that changed actually. So Shut Up and Dance originally, so there’s like Kenny who is the young kid and Hector who is the older guy who he meets, and originally there was a reveal that Hector who Kenny – they’re both being blackmailed. For people who haven’t seen the episode they’re both being blackmailed by anonymous hackers. And originally the reveal was that Hector had been waiting for an underage prostitute in the room. And so the story was he’s sort of guiding Kenny along and he’s forcing Kenny into doing the more unpleasant aspects of this sort of horrible game they’ve been sent on.

And I came to the end of the script and we’re like it just doesn’t – you sort of know he’s a bastard from the first time he turns up and that’s not very interesting. Well, what if Kenny has got that secret then? That’s more interesting. And, oh OK, we care about him from the first time we see him. Then you can go back and you can go, well OK, what’s a good way of making us care about Kenny. Well, we’ll show him doing something that seems kind. So in just about the first scene you see him handing – a little girl has left her toy behind and he goes and hands it to her. And of course on the second watch that takes on a very sort of sinister – it’s actually Annabel’s daughter.

**John:** Oh no.

**Charlie:** Well no one wanted to put their own kids forward for that. [Unintelligible] She won’t mind me saying that. Her kids are all – they’re in lots of the episodes actually. And so afterwards you realize so that I realized was the beauty of knowing what the ending was. I’m so amateur. I realized that it’s helpful to know what the ending is when you’re writing the bit at the start. Because you can start kind of doing all of that stuff.

**John:** But everyone listening to this episode would assume though that you start at the ending. Like a mystery story where you sort of start with the ending and work your way forward. It doesn’t sound like that really is the process for you.

**Charlie:** Sometimes it is. Sometimes – I mean, when I get very excited about and episode, when it works at its best is when I sort of see what the end scene is. And sometimes then when you’re writing it that changes. San Junipero, good example where originally I did write a sort of story treatment for that. And, again, originally, I should say these things in order. So originally I’d written a short story treatment and it was a man and a woman. And the reveal was, oh, they’re old people. That was sort of the extent of it. And it ended at the point one of them meets the other one in real life and sees that they’re paraplegic. That was the ending.

And then I was sort of thinking, well, isn’t this more interesting – and they were going to get married in it, but isn’t this more interesting if they’re getting married – if we make it a same sex couple they can get married in 1987 which wasn’t possible in 1987 and that in itself is sort of more interesting. I started writing the script from this sort of rough outline I’ve got. And when I got to the point where they meet in real life in the script I thought, oh, I’ll keep going then. I don’t want it to stop here. I wonder what happens when they do get married then. So I sort of just kept going.

So from that point on it was much more – that was me sort of feeling my way along to the end. And then what that meant was, and I never used to believe it when people would say, “Oh, I started writing a scene and the characters just did this and I didn’t know where it…” I used to think you liar. And but that’s what happened. There’s a scene where Kelly and Yorkie have a kind of confrontation and you find out what is going on and what’s Kelly’s deal basically. And why she doesn’t really want to put roots down in San Junipero. A backstory with a husband and daughter. And that kind of just came out – and I don’t think that really changed at any point. And it was sort of like, you know, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the episode.

So, that was a good combination I guess of the two approaches, sort of planning it, thinking I knew where the ending was going. And then I went for a run in the middle of it, because like any basically dying mammal I now have to do exercise just to stay breathing. And I was going running and Spotify was on. And I was listening to ‘80s music because the thing was set in the ‘80s. And Heaven is a Place on Earth came on.

**John:** Perfect.

**Charlie:** And I was like, oh, that describes, and I liked the rye joke that they’re in a server basically on earth. And then I was immediately worried that we weren’t going to be able to clear it. And so I came back and wrote the ending really quickly. And so the whole script was one of the fastest ones I’ve written. It’s Sod’s Law that it’s turned out to be one of the most popular. It’s typical.

**John:** Now, after that season you went on – so season four had USS Callister, Metalhead, Black Museum. USS Callister sort of stands alone as just a great science fiction – it’s a remarkable episode.

**Charlie:** Oh, thank you.

**John:** Congratulations on it. But talk to us about the genesis of that because it’s obviously a very clear appreciation and reaction to a certain kind of Star Trek type TV show and, again, you established the premise really early on and yet our central character who seems like our point of entry ends up becoming the villain of the story. How does that develop as you’re working through story on that?

**Charlie:** That was, I can remember very clearly the genesis for – the whole story came about, we were shooting an episode for season three called Play Test and we were on the set and they were setting up for a scene involving special effects which we hadn’t used many of. And I said wouldn’t it be good, now that we’ve got this sort of tool, we can use special effects, why don’t we just do a space episode. That’s quite often how we think our way into episodes is how can – because we’re sort of almost – it helps oddly for me to imagine what’s the Black Mirror version of a space opera basically.

**John:** Sure.

**Charlie:** So, we knew we wanted to do an episode set in space and I’d also – somewhere along the lines been thinking what if you had – this is a horrible story – have you heard of Josef Fritzl? Do you know Josef Fritzl?

**John:** I don’t know who it is.

**Charlie:** He was this horrible man who kept a family in a dungeon. There was a guy in America who kept women in a dungeon. And so there was a sort of well what if you had someone who is a tyrant but they’re wielding ultimate power over a bunch of people who are copies of real people. And so those two ideas sort of glommed together and you think, OK, you could do – immediately there was something appealing about the idea of a world in which you have the captain of a spaceship who you think is the hero and then you realize none of this is real and he’s a madman effectively. Within this world he’s a horrific tyrant.

And then you think well why is he a tyrant in this world and then it’s like, oh, OK, he’s kind of – he’s enacting his grudged from his daily life where he feels powerless. And it’s office coworkers. And immediately there there’s a sort of comic gulf between the two worlds. That was an interesting example of, again, the first draft of that actually didn’t have the 1960s element in it. And I was thinking it would be fun if it had something else. I think it came about from an idea like well what should the spaceship look like. And I was like I’d love it if we did a Black Mirror episode that opened and it looked like Star Trek from the ‘60s. That would really confuse people. And then you think actually that’s quite interesting.

**John:** And appropriate.

**Charlie:** It’s a great look and also the power dynamics within there that now look dated, even though Star Trek was an incredibly progressive show, Kirk is going around the universe sort of trying to romance green women half the time. So, yeah, so that added an extra element. When we came to the – the original script that we shot, it was much clearer early on that Daly, there was something wrong with him. And I remember this was one of the times we got a note back from Netflix on the first sort of loose cut they saw where – so very early on Daly is in the office Nanette Cole comes in and they meet and he clearly – he’s delighted that somebody is being nice to him and seems to admire him.

And then Walton played by Jimmi Simpson comes in and sort of whisks her off and he’s very slick. And you see Daly looking sort of jealous. Now originally it was written in that you see his fist clenches. And Netflix said I don’t know that you need that actually. It’s really more interesting if you don’t know how you feel about him. And we cut it out and immediately it was much more interesting because it meant that the reveal that, oh, this guy is a bastard came just a few minutes later. You see him walk it onto the deck of the ship and grab Walton by the throat. And you realize he’s a monster.

So that’s a good example of something where losing something that I thought was a clever bit of a foreshadowing delayed the reveal to such a degree that it just had a lot more power I think for people. Because you really – people sympathize with him at the start because he seems – we also cut some dialogue, there was a bit where Michaela Cole’s character is talking to Cristin, who is Nanette, and she says, “Oh, Daly is a bit of a creep basically.” And we toned that – we cut – again, there was something in there that made it more apparent. She was like he’s creepy. She went into more detail. And again it gave too much away.

That was really good fun writing that episode as well because it meant we got to do all the stuff that we thought we could never do in Black Mirror. So it ends in a sort of chase through an asteroid belt towards a wormhole. All of that was just really good fun.

**John:** So let’s talk about, many of these episodes, I’m thinking of USS Callister, fresh example, is there’s a bit of magic hand-waving. You have to accept this is part of the world. And that’s true also in features. Like most features are based on sort of a premise concept that you have to accept that this is a thing that we’re going to say is legitimate in this. And so in the case of USS Callister it’s not only can he build these virtual worlds but he can just off a piece of DNA recreate the entire person.

**Charlie:** Yes.

**John:** So that doesn’t actually make sense and yet it is so fundamental to the premise that you are willing to accept it.

**Charlie:** Well that’s a very good point actually. Because we did spend, again, I’d forgotten this. This is one of those where you repress a memory. I’d forgotten that we spent a long time in the original draft, it was co-written with Will Bridges. And we spent a lot of time trying to explain why when Nanette wakes up on the ship she has all her memories in place. If she’s a clone she wouldn’t know anything.

And actually so in the original draft there’s a whole bit of business that involves – there’s a piece of technology from Season One/Episode Three, Entire History of You, the Grain, that records all your memories. So what we had, we had a whole explanation of that. Everyone has these memory grains and Daly has hacked her memory grain and he’s uploaded. And it was like well why would he do that? What’s the point? And also why do we have to establish that?

And I knew some people would go, “Well that doesn’t make sense.” There’s a line in it where somebody starts explaining, I think that Dudani starts explaining why they’ve got their memories intact. And Michaela Coel’s character just tells him to shut up.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Charlie:** And you kind of get away with it. I remember when we did Dead Set, the director of that was a guy called Yann Demange, and he used to wave away bits – I sometimes get very caught up on the logic of things. And he’d go, “It’s a movie moment. It’s a movie moment. It doesn’t matter. It’s a movie moment.” And he was right. I spent days arguing that it wouldn’t rain in San Junipero. Days. Because Owen wanted to shoot a scene in the rain and I was like, no, no, it wouldn’t – why would they make it rain. It’s paradise. Why would they make it rain? And he was like, “No one cares about that. It will look lovely.”

**John:** Yes.

**Charlie:** And he was right.

**John:** Rain can be nice. It can rain in paradise. One of the strange things about Black Mirror is that you’re writing about culture that is constantly changing and because you have become – because your shows have entered the cultural conversation people say like, “Oh, this is such a Black Mirror moment.” What does it feel like to be reflecting culture that you’re also changing? And to what degree are you aware that, you know, like these three episodes that are dropping right now, they’re going to enter the cultural conversation and change thoughts on that.

Are you mindful of that now in your success with the series?

**Charlie:** You can’t not be, I guess, to an extent. But you have to try. I mean, I just find that a terrifying thought. There’s something about that that’s absolutely terrifying. Because also it means that you’re – we generally try to give away very little about our episodes in advance because we want them to be a surprise. But we also know that, yeah, and I suppose also with an anthology where you’re – one of the things that, you know, we became known for was doing incredibly brutal endings and wiping all hope from the universe for a moment. Which I love doing every now and then. And sometimes we kind of almost deliberately overdo it, like Crocodile was a deliberate – well that’s a whole story actually.

So, you’re aware that – there’s a large subset of people who are coming to your show who want that. They want that horrible sort of feeling. But if you give it to them every time you’re not doing your job, I think, of the anthology show – of our anthology show we’re trying to be as varied in tone as we can within the… – I wanted to do an Airplane style episode.

**John:** Great.

**Charlie:** And I was talked out of it. I was talked out of it. I’m still not sure. I vacillate on that. I’m not sure whether it was a good idea or a terrible one. I really wanted to do one. I’ll have to do it under some other guise.

So there’s a weight of expectation I guess and I think – I mean, it’s very flattering when people go this is a bit like Black Mirror. Oh, that thing they’re doing in China, that’s quite Black Mirror. Oh, have you seen the news? It’s like an episode of Black Mirror. It’s flattering, it’s free publicity. It’s also terrifying as a mammal. It’s just frightening to think that the worst case scenarios that we’ve often been describing that those are reminding people of things they’re seeing in everyday life.

It’s something we don’t tend to – Annabel and I, we never really know whether the show has that much impact because we’re so busy. Because it takes so much time basically. Because they’re all – they’ve all got individual directors and individual casts. And a lot of the crew is completely different. We literally don’t really often get to go out and speak to people. [laughs] So it’s quite jarring when, I think last time I came to the US I was at immigration. They said what are you doing here. And I said I’m doing a thing, I’m doing a show. And they said what is it, and I said Black Mirror, and they’re like, “Oh!” And they called someone else over and said this is the guy who does Black Mirror. That’s really surprising and frightening because you think I’m going to just inevitably at one point going to let these people down.

I am now resigned to the fact that because we try – I think because we try to make the episodes as idiosyncratic as possible, when people inevitably compile their lists of which ones are their favorites you get some which are always near the top, but generally speaking I’ve read people hating on episodes that other people have loved. So you know that you’re never going to please everybody. And I think that’s sort of – hopefully that means we’re doing our job. Or at least failing in the right way.

**John:** I mean, you’re kind of unique in the realm of showrunners, and we’ve had many showrunners on the show, Aline Brosh McKenna, Benioff and Weiss, Damon Lindelof, who have been running these long time shows that have these huge fan bases who are invested in characters who they’ve seen over the course of years. And you don’t have that baggage. Every episode is its own thing and starting its own moment. So you don’t get the benefit of returning characters who can do stuff where you don’t have to set them up from scratch every time. But you get the freedom from expectation. A very limited set of expectations placed on any given installment of Black Mirror.

And I want to talk about Bandersnatch in relation to that because it’s billed as a Black Mirror experiment, a thing. Was it originally going to be a normal episode? When was the decision to make it its own event moment thing?

**Charlie:** Well originally it was part of season five. So we actually shot, so the season that we’ve just – they don’t like you to say dropped apparently. I was about to say dropped. No, no, no, it’s fine. I mean, I say dropped all the time. They say, “Don’t say dropped.” But I don’t think they gave me another word to say.

**John:** OK.

**Charlie:** So, what? Appeared?

**John:** Launched? No. Season five…debuted?

**Charlie:** Slithered? Slithered out?

**John:** Yeah.

**Charlie:** So Striking Vipers which is the first of the three, we’d already shot that. Smithereens had been written and there was some overlap with the filming of that with Bandersnatch.

Bandersnatch was always going to be interactive and that was an idea that – so Netflix had said to us, I think we were over for some season four stuff, and they said we’d like you to do an interactive story.

**John:** Oh, great.

**Charlie:** And they showed us how this tech worked. And me and Annabel both nodded and were very polite and said that looks great. And then we left the room and went no flipping way are we doing that because it’s going to be a gimmick. We don’t want to do it. And then a few weeks later we were having a – so the way it works – so I generally write all the scripts but I’m always working with Annabel, bouncing ideas off her. We have a healthy disrespect for each other, so she will not be shy about telling me that she thinks an idea stinks.

And so we have a sort of back and forth conversation. And during one of those conversations I had – I wanted to do another episode set in the past. And I wanted to do something about vintage computer games. That was–

**John:** Because that’s your background as well.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And so there’s a lot of real nostalgia for me in Bandersnatch. And then I had this idea which was, oh well, what if you’re controlling – it was about somebody starts receiving messages from their computer. And then I remembered the interactive thing they’d just shown us. And I was like well what if that’s you and then so he becomes aware that you’re there. Oh, that’s interesting.

And also, and I didn’t realize this at the time, but I’ll get onto that in a minute. Sorry. Because there’s a thing about interactive stories that’s just interesting generally. So that was it. Then we went back to Netflix and said, OK, we’ve got an idea. Originally it was much more simple. And then I started – so in trying to work out how to literally just write the story outline for this, I started out literally we were in the office and we had a whiteboard and I started with the flow chart. And then you quickly go on. I need a bigger whiteboard because I’ve run out of room. And then it was like, OK, there’s some software that does a flowchart for me. Maybe. No, actually, I need it to track what’s going on and remember what’s going on. And Netflix were also saying please test as many different things as you can.

So, then somebody said you should use Twine which is this interactive fiction software. And I looked at it and I thought I don’t have the time to learn that. That just looks complicated. It’s like html basically. And I used to do a bit of html stuff years ago.

**John:** But then you have to mark which characters are there and if there are any items that would carry through.

**Charlie:** Yeah. But what was useful, I ended up going back to Twine because it worked like flowchart software. So you’d make a cell and you’d type something in it and then it would automatically do the sort of piles that joined up. And as I did that it got fun. Planning it got fun. And it kept growing out into – so it kept expanding sort of length ways and width ways. And then suddenly you’d sort of think oh I can add a whole branch where this happens. And before you know it, you’ve of course fractionally it all expands out. So I did that. And then what I think what we realized I think was that it’s useful – if you’re doing an interactive story I think it was – what we stumbled across that I think was useful was because the main character of Stefan is separate, he understands that these commands are being given to him. It’s not like something where you’re just telling him what to do and he just does it. Because it’s hard to keep him consistent if you do that.

So I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 which I think is a very, very good open world game. It’s great. There’s a scene in it early on where you go and sort of have a conversation with one of your lost loves. And it was like quite well done. He has a conversation with this ex love of his on the doorstep and it’s quite poignant. And the turns away, gets on his horse. And then I accidentally like ran into a pig and then thought, oh, I’ll get off. I think the pig ran at me. So I shot the pig, sort of by accident. And then like somebody came running after me. And I thought what sort of character is this guy now? Murders a pig on the doorstep of his lost love. He’s a psychopath.

Whereas when there’s some sort of narrative distance it means that no matter how successful people found Bandersnatch or didn’t, it meant that hopefully Stefan was always a troubled young man reacting to a problem. And so he would start to resist what you were telling him to do.

So that was interesting. And then I learned a lot – there was one big thing that we had to cut out, and it’s incredibly hard to cut things out of an interactive story. That was the other thing I discovered. So originally the whole thing was structured a bit more like an escape room. So there was a central puzzle that you had to work out, which we have a bit of it down one branch. There’s a bit to do with the phone number. The psychiatrist’s phone number.

It was originally structured so you would always come to a point where he was trying to remember a phone number and he couldn’t remember it. And the idea was that the first time you encountered this you’re like well how am I supposed to know what the phone number. I can’t possibly. And so you’d get frustrated and it would sort of loop you back. And then by the time you’d failed in two different ways you’d realize that these recaps it was showing you–

**John:** Had new information.

**Charlie:** Were telling you the number. We had to massively simplify it because people just did not – I mean, we shot it. But people just did not understand what was going on.

**John:** Well ultimately you’re making a show about a guy developing a video game and the end product is sort of like the video game. It has to be tested and played like a video game to see whether people can actually get it. It’s not normally audience testing. It’s literally like can you – and people aren’t necessarily expecting a puzzle.

**Charlie:** No. They’re not expecting a puzzle, although weirdly – well, we did get some feedback afterwards. People did understand, one thing which was terrifying was that it was appearing quickly that people couldn’t remember a number. It was a five-digit number they were given and they couldn’t remember it for more than like 15 seconds. That was one of the first big boulders in the road we discovered.

Then we had a problem with translation. Because I hadn’t really thought that through. The numbers were buried in dialogue. So there were numbers like two which were just it’s two, what, but obviously when you translate that around the suddenly you can’t do it. So that was a problem. And you can’t predict what – people did understand that it was a puzzle and it was interesting that they said that people appreciated the fact that there was a puzzle involved and they enjoyed that. That was something they came back and said they enjoyed. But they also found it quite confusing and baffling.

So I don’t think that’s something we quite nailed.

**John:** You couldn’t cross that gap.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And another thing was there were some things – there was one branch of it, this is one thing that frustrates me about it. There’s one branch of it where we completely break the fourth wall and you can tell the main character that you’re watching him on Netflix.

**John:** I really liked that moment. It’s absurd and also–

**Charlie:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** And it makes you feel like, OK, I’m aware that there’s a comedy happening here.

**Charlie:** Exactly. Well, that’s the comedy. Totally upends it and it turns it into a comedy. The thing that I can’t quite – originally that was not accessible on your first go through. And then we were sort of concerned – it was one of these things where we were concerned that people would just get down to a more normal real world ending so to speak, certainly a less fourth wall breaking ending, and would miss that. And that was probably a bit of insecurity on our part to make that accessible from the start. But what that meant was that when it came to that point and it gives you two options, frustratingly slightly more people pick the Netflix branch because they didn’t quite understand what the other one was. It was like a symbol.

And so I think for some people that meant that their first experience of getting to a sort of fairly meaty ending broke the fourth wall and therefore sort of possibly undermined the drama of everything else in a way. So I’m not sure – I’m in sort of two minds about that. It was also a lot of business to do with dreams. Like you have to – where he goes through the mirror and stuff. There was such a logistical nightmare going on. Yeah.

And we ended up having to cut a couple of endings out because we just – it was just getting unwieldy.

**John:** Do you get data back showing which paths people took most?

**Charlie:** Yes. We had a whole sort of postmortem debrief they did where they showed us – or we don’t get numbers, of which I’m delighted about because there’s just such relief. But they did tell us – the one that really stuck in my head was when it comes to why the chopping up the body or burying the body it was exactly the same percentage split as Brexit in the UK. It was 52 to 48. Which surprised me actually because I thought most people would not want to – it was 48% wanted to chop the body up and I thought that would be much lower than that because that seemed such a gruesome option.

But generally speaking most of the sort of percentages were kind of roughly where we thought they would land. There were a couple of exceptions. There was a certain amount of stuff we could tweak because the whole thing was obviously weird because having done – just to rewind a bit – having done the story outline in Twine I then started – I realized that I couldn’t find tools that did this, that let you write screenplays in this interactive way. I just couldn’t find something that did that.

So, we ended up realizing, OK, what we need to do is assign a sort of number to each of these cells, at 1A, 2B, and so then I used Scrivener to create this confetti of individual little scenes. Wrote those up. And then had to export those into something else. Paste them back into Twine. So there was this convoluted route we went to. Because we had to get to a point where we had a script that you could read and it would say if you want to do this turn to page such and such.

And also you could read on an iPad and literally click on it and it would take you there, which sort of made life a lot easier for actors. But because the tools weren’t there it was one of those things where you end up with about five different applications open. Then Netflix built a tool for the edit which then managed to import – they imported my Twine thing directly into the edit which made life a lot easier. But it would crash. There would be things where it would be like, oh no, Colin is alive. He’s meant to be dead.

**John:** Yeah. Your episode crashed Netflix probably. The entire system probably.

**Charlie:** The outline crashed. The outline would crash. There was this whole thing where Colin Whitman can jump off a balcony and if he does he’s dead for the rest of the story. And sometimes he would just pop up again and we were like what’s going on?

**John:** What’s happened?

**Charlie:** Which was quite in character for him actually. That was why I kept adding more Colin Whitman. As soon as we knew we had Will Poulter I kept adding more and more Colin Whitman as well because he’s great.

**John:** We have questions from listeners and I picked a few that I thought might be good for you. Chelsea from London asks…

**Charlie:** I’ve come all this way to hear from somebody from London. And they’re called Chelsea.

**John:** “I watched Searching the other night, a film that’s basically all social media, and towards the end I found it was asking too much of me in terms of suspending disbelief. As writers, how can you tell when you’re asking too much regarding the suspension of disbelief? Obviously genre plays a large role in this, but for a film set in the real world how do you know where to draw the line?”

Suspension of disbelief. So, within your shows you are establishing the fundamental premise of sort of like what happens in this world. But do you struggle with suspension of disbelief in your episodes?

**Charlie:** You’ve cited a couple of examples. There’s a good example in USS Callister where we sort of hope you’ll just go with it. Striking Vipers, the new one, there’s a whole thing that they can do in this game that they shouldn’t really be able to do. But we just think you’ll go with it. So sometimes you just sort of gauge it that way.

I haven’t seen Searching so I don’t know specifically what it is. I often find that with the depiction of computers still a lot of the time in movies or TV they are shown doing things they can’t possibly do in the present day. And that’s often quite frustrating.

I think we do spend a lot of time kind of on product design as well to try and make it look like all the technology is just very functional, like quite sleek. A lot of the time we’re sort of trying to remove technology from the backgrounds as well. So there will only be a couple of little devices. And hopefully that makes it feel more grounded.

And there’s also generally that rule that you can withstand one fantastical thing happening.

**John:** Exactly.

**Charlie:** As long as that’s – I think as long as people enjoy that enough. That’s the other thing. As long as people enjoy that enough they’ll go with it. And if two impossible things happen. That’s the famous Speed example. The bus jumping in Speed where you don’t really believe it could do that.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** So you get that fundamental suspension of disbelief that is part of the premise. And so I think your episodes tend to do that. It sounds like what Chelsea is reacting to is choices that characters have made or twists that are revealed that she’s not believing the characters are really doing that thing.

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** It didn’t feel real to the rest of the world that she’d set up.

**Charlie:** I mean, well that is a trickier one. Because that is – and that’s just done to how authentically you think the character is reacting. I mean, in Black Mirror really quite often, and this is something that sort of depresses me when I look back at it, we’ve got in our episode somebody – it starts out somebody slowly realizes they’re in a trap. They start struggling. It gets worse. The end.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] There’s a premise!

**Charlie:** So in a way we often don’t let them escape which is one of the reasons why hopefully people go with it. I don’t really know. I think a lot of it is just as long as you feel that the characters are reacting authentically to the moment then you will go with it. And in terms of the concepts, again, as long as you’re only trying to do one crazy thing at a time, again, people will hopefully go along with that.

It’s a difficult one though because, yeah, that is a tricky one. I mean, we’re lucky as well in a way that we don’t often I guess, because our stories are shorter, we can kind of burn all the characters up and the scenario up really quickly before the logic would strain it too much.

**John:** Well also the universes that you’re creating and because they’re only a single episode we can assume that this technology exists and we are seeing it in the context of this one story. And we don’t have to worry about like, wait, if you could do that your entire universe would be very different. I look at Westworld and Westworld is a show that has to grapple with that because there is technology that exists in Westworld and you’re like would it really be used in this way?

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** And so if it is used in this way, what does the world outside of Westworld look like? And that’s what they’re dealing with in the third season of Westworld.

**Charlie:** See, now I deliberately haven’t watched Westworld because I’ll get crippling professional jealousy. I tend to avoid things that I think might be – and the number of times we’ve gone, “Oh, it would be great to do a Black Mirror western. Oh, hang on, Westworld exists.”

So another good example I guess, so Be Right Back. Actually so Be Right Back is a good example I guess of something where when writing it I was aware that – so it starts off she starts communicating via email, a messaging app, with her deceased husband. Then it sort of escalates and she’s talking to a synthesized version of him on the phone. Then he says would you like to meet me. And at this point I thought people are not going to go along with this. That there’s a sort of android version that shows up.

And there were two things that helped. One was the story was deliberately set in the middle of nowhere. So they were in an isolated farmhouse. She was on her own. So you’re not thinking does somebody down the road have one of these? And there’s a scene we cut out. There’s a woman who originally recommends this to her. And originally there was a scene where you see Martha phoning this woman up and going why did you do this. And you see that this woman is in bed with a robot of her own. I think we actually shot that and we cut it out.

So, we isolated them so you’re not thinking too much about the outside world. And so hopefully those logical questions don’t come into it.

**John:** That’s Westworld as well. Westworld is on a ranch.

**Charlie:** Yeah. The other thing we weirdly lent into the absurdity there, so when she gets this thing it literally comes sort of packaged up like a rubber man. And she puts it in a bathtub and drops nutrients into the water. And meanwhile she’s got Donald Gleason in her ear telling her how weird this is and weirdly acknowledging that it’s weird and it’s crazy.

**John:** You’re hanging a lantern on it to make it clear that this show is acknowledging that this is an odd moment.

**Charlie:** So you’re not sitting there going, well, come on, this wouldn’t happen. Because somebody onscreen is saying that. Saying isn’t this strange? So, I think hopefully, yeah, those are two tricks we got away with there. We quite often tend to isolate our characters generally because it means you’re not considering the whole of society.

Jesse’s original script for Entire History of You had loads of really great extra details about the world in which everyone is recording everything all the time. But it was just too much. Stuff for a whole movie or a series in its own right.

**John:** Brett asks, “As a musician transitioning to a writing career I’ve been wondering given the power of streaming in both music and film is this the best time or the worst time to get a foot in the door?”

So we are clearly in a really strange, interesting time. This is also a moment where I can ask, “What is television?”

**Charlie:** Yeah. I don’t know. I really don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what constitutes. I mean, if I look at, obviously Bandersnatch, what is that? I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of a game. It’s sort of a film. It’s not on a gaming platform.

**John:** But it could be. I mean–

**Charlie:** It could be.

**John:** If it weren’t filmed, if it were done all just with CG characters then it literally would feel like a game.

**Charlie:** The number of times I was like it would be so much easier to do, when we were filming it, would have been so much easier. Yeah, I don’t know. And then things like, so Roma I watched at home, because I’ve got two young kids, really busy doing the show all the time. Never get to go out to go to the cinema. So I watched Roma at home and I had such limited windows in which to watch it. I watched it over three nights in sittings, divided up, like it was a series I was binge-watching, which I was perfectly happy to do. Which makes me a huge philistine.

So like we don’t even know quite what, like Black Mirror is an anthology show, but then sometimes we do standalone one-offs. I think we’ll probably do more of that sort of thing as well in the future. So, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know. I know we got some stick for when we did San Junipero it was like 61 minutes long and it got entered into the Best TV Movie category. And I know that annoyed some people. But tough luck.

I mean, I was delighted that we won, but I sort of thought, well, hopefully that means if we can be entered in that category and then people liked it enough to vote for it, well, you should get extra points shouldn’t you for taking up less of people’s time in this day and age? Like the shorter the better.

Something like Russian Doll, I really loved Russian Doll.

**John:** Oh my god, l loved those episodes were so short.

**Charlie:** 30 minutes long.

**John:** Going back to Natasha Lyonne again.

**Charlie:** And, well I met her the other night because I went to a Russian Doll event and I told her my favorite thing to say to people who I admire their work, and it’s true, I said I liked Russian Doll so much it made me angry.

**John:** Oh, me too.

**Charlie:** I was furious that I hadn’t thought of this show and I hadn’t written this show. And obviously there were certain things that it had in common with Bandersnatch. It was brilliant. And it was short. Don’t you wish sometimes you could sort things by length? Make life easier.

Sorry. So the question–

**John:** The question is–

**Charlie:** Is it the best time or the worst time? I would say it’s surly one of the best times.

**John:** I think it’s one of the best times, too.

**Charlie:** Because there’s so much. I mean, there’s a sort of probably unsustainable mountain of stuff being made that that means by just logic would dictate that there’s a need for more stuff. The machine needs more coal being shoved into it. So, it’s a pretty good time to do that. And also I guess technology is at the point – the thing that sort of changed my whole career, so he talks about transitioning from one career into another. So I was a video games reviewer. And I did sort of comic strips. And I felt I was in a sort of ghetto. And I wanted to be doing TV comedy and things like that. And the way – and this was like 1998 – and the way I managed to make that jump was by doing this small little website that was sort of I guess uniquely mine. It was a small thing I was doing on a deadline that meant people were noticing it. And now the technology exists for you to make – you only get two chances to make your own stuff in your career. One is at the very beginning and then sort of near the end.

**John:** Yes. You’re either a nobody or JJ Abrams.

**Charlie:** Exactly. So you might as well, so you have the means to produce stuff. Write a script. Make a short film. Just do anything that is uniquely yours. And then hopefully people can see it. The problem is of course you’re up against everyone else who is doing the same thing. That’s the downside.

**John:** Absolutely. The firehose problem is that there’s so much content it’s hard to pull those things out. So there’s at least three series that I have sort of backed up, like I really want to watch those things because I know they’re fantastic. I just have only the same 24 hours.

**Charlie:** It’s like being air traffic control, isn’t it? These things are taxiing round and round and round. Well, I mean, even something like Game of Thrones which is like the most – was it the most popular show in the world? Still, you know, I watched it all. Most of the people I know haven’t seen it. It’s the most popular show in the world. This is the only period in history when – I was watching a reality show not that long ago in the UK and one of the contestants his job was described as TV Presenter and Barman. And I thought this is the only period in history where those two – that’s two valid careers that one person can have. Because there’s so much content around.

**John:** I think the other reason why this is the best time is that with the globalization of things your show and any show is available everywhere to the culture at once. And so when I was in Scandinavia doing Arlo Finch press I was talking to one of my publishers and she said, “Oh, what are you watching?” And I said there’s a few things I really want to watch. Haunting Hill House. And she’s like, “I love that.” And it had just dropped. Sorry, we can’t say dropped anymore.

**Charlie:** Oh, you can say dropped. No. Say dropped.

**John:** It had debuted worldwide. So she was watching it in her own language. I was watching it in English. And we could have this conversation in ways that never happened before. So that globalization of things is a unique moment now.

**Charlie:** And you can watch – so I binged watch – I mean they’ve given a terrible title in English, Money Heist. Have you seen Money Heist? It’s called La Casa de Papel which I guess translates as the House of Paper, or something. So that’s probably too close to House of Cards. I guess that’s why they changed it to Money Heist. It’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. But it’s incredibly addictive. It’s basically 24, it’s Spanish though. It’s 24 about one bank heist.

**John:** Great.

**Charlie:** I mean, it knows it’s ridiculous. It gets so ridiculous. And it’s something that I probably wouldn’t have stumbled across if it hadn’t been for streaming platforms. Yeah. And that’s one of the most popular shows in the world I think outside of the US and Britain. It’s amazing.

We never thought Black Mirror would travel, because it seemed so idiosyncratic to us. But it’s very odd when they drop it. I’m going to say drop it. When they drop it. Drop it. What are they going to do? Delete it? They’re not going to delete it now. It’s too late.

When they drop it on the service it is a really weird sensation that you start getting feedback from around the world in a sort of wave as it goes through time zones.

**John:** So one thing I do want to point out that’s different though is Netflix, let’s hope it goes on for 100 years, but likely it won’t. And so at some point the episodes that you’ve made will exist somewhere? So traditionally there’s been a way to find old episodes of things and you can find those things, or a movie exists. We talked before about movies used to be on DVDs so you could at least like always find a movie. Sometimes you can’t find a movie. Something like the Bandersnatch episode without a server to run it on it doesn’t exist as a thing people can enjoy.

**Charlie:** But then someone will build a 2019 Netflix emulator. Emulation. I’ve got massively into emulation which is probably apparent from Bandersnatch. So hopefully the emulator – the emulation community will save the day.

**John:** Well, we’re already in a simulation.

**Charlie:** We are.

**John:** There will be emulation within the simulation.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** It stacks nicely.

**Charlie:** Which is something–

**John:** Turtles all the way down.

**Charlie:** We wanted to do that in the episode, have a bit in it where he’s playing a simple game and you actually – like a Frogger type game. But we didn’t have time.

**John:** I get that. It’s time for our One Cool Things though.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** My One Cool Thing, so I was back in Colorado this last week which is why Craig was hosting by himself. And we’re listening to Colorado Public Radio and there’s a voice and I’m like wait that’s me. And it was the only time in my life I’ve encountered my voice twin. I’m used to hearing my voice on the podcast. And this person sounded exactly like me. And so I listened enough so I could find out what his name was. His name is Matthew Zalkind. He is a cellist living is Colorado. And it was just a really odd moment for me because I almost only get recognized for my voice. I’ll be out at a Trader Joe’s paying for something and I’ll say something and they’re like, “Oh wait, you’re John August.”

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** It’s almost entirely by my voice. So it was so odd for me to be hearing someone else’s voice. I could give this person a script and he could read it and be like, oh, well that’s John. If I do get hit by a bus Craig could just bring this person on to do my job.

**Charlie:** Well, and presumably the technology to do that anyway is five seconds away if it’s not already.

**John:** Oh clearly.

**Charlie:** I think it’s partly in existence. So it’s nice that you’ve discovered that voice just before the tidal wave.

**John:** And going back to some of your previous episodes, I think I brought this up on the show before is that I’ve taken all of the text from Scriptnotes, because we have transcripts for all of the episodes and broken them down into Craig and John, everything we’ve said separately. Run through a Markov chain generator. So I do have a little bot that can generate Craig sentences and John sentences and have them talking to each other. So at some point there will just be–

**Charlie:** Auto-generated–

**John:** Of Scriptnotes. We’ll have one episode that is just generated dialogue for me and Craig talking about things.

**Charlie:** It will be like, there’s a short Roald Dahl story about that. About an automatic writing machine. Because he was writing it in the ‘70s or something, it’s got literally foot pedals. He steps on a pedal to make it a bit more erotic and accidentally steps too far and stuff. So it’ll be like that. You’ll be able to just generate it constantly like 24-hour, an unending loop. What if it’s better?

**John:** What if it’s better? I mean, what is reality? Going back to your first episode of this new season which is the question of like who is the real person and what is reality if you know somebody only in a virtual way.

**Charlie:** And does it matter? If it’s as compelling as they’re finding it in that episode, yeah. Sometimes when we do stories like that it’s like I am no clearer on really – I don’t know that you always need to know the answer to the question you’re raising in a story, because I think it can be hopefully interesting if you literally do not know the answer to what’s going on entirely in that episode. I think that in terms of what that means is as confusing for me as it is for the characters I think. Maybe that’s just a weakness on my part and I should have just worked it out properly. Oh, you never know.

**John:** We’ll see. Craig could tell you because Craig wrote Chernobyl and he knows the answers to all–

**Charlie:** He does. But I have got to watch that. Literally everyone is telling me to watch that. And then I spoke to my wife last night and she was like, “I want to watch Chernobyl.” I’m like, all right. Yeah.

**John:** You’ll get home. You’ll watch it.

**Charlie:** Well, the government will make me watch it at this rate. It will be issued to me by the government. I have to wait. There’s an odd sensation. I have to wait. So I can’t start watching it now until I get home and watch it with my wife. We have to watch a nuclear meltdown together or my life won’t be worth living. And I’ll have to wait. I’m going to save that up. I’m going to save the Chernobyl disaster up to make my life better.

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

**Charlie:** My One Cool Thing is a game called Baba is You.

**John:** Baba is You.

**Charlie:** Baba is You. You can get it on the Nintendo Switch and I think from Steam and probably on other things. It’s a puzzle game and a logic game the likes of which is almost impossible to describe, but it basically involved – you’re a little white like a gerbil or a rabbit, I don’t know quite what you are in it. But you’re Baba. And you scurry around and you can push – how can I explain this? There are blocks of rules, so Baba is You could be one rule. Door is Shut would be one.

Now, you can shove the word shut out of the way and you can put You in its space and then you are the door.

**John:** Oh, fantastic.

**Charlie:** If you see what I mean. And so from that sort of – it’s quite a mind-bending premise in itself. And then it spins out these incredibly clever and mind-mangling puzzles. And my 7-year-old is obsessed with video games and I played it with him and had one of those incredibly humiliating moments where I was – because you can sit there sort of your brain sweating for hours as you try and solve one of these things. And we had one of those things where I was insistent that I knew the answer and I was trying to do something. And he eventually wrestled the joy pad from me and solved it in 10 seconds because that’s the future.

Just that. I’m obsolete. All of us becoming obsolete. But it’s brilliant.

**John:** Great. Baba is You.

**Charlie:** Baba is You.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Mackey Landy. 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. I believe you are on Twitter. Do you want people to reach you on Twitter?

**Charlie:** Well, they can. I don’t often – I generally use it now for shameless promotion and then I don’t look often.

**John:** But that’s how I reached you.

**Charlie:** That’s how we met. See, I sometimes use it. It’s for DM’ing. But I tend to skulk I think is the word. Skulking. Yeah. Because I figured it was bad for productivity and general mental well-being.

**John:** I think that’s often likely the case. 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 so we can Markov chains so that Craig and I can be talking in perpetuity for all time.

Some folks do recaps of the show and discussion on the screenwriting Sub-Reddit. So check us out there. Tell us what you think of the Charlie Brooker episode. I keep trying to drop your R.

**Charlie:** I constantly get that in America. Constantly I’m Booker. Everywhere I go. Is there a famous Booker here?

**John:** Well there’s Cory Booker. He’s running for–

**Charlie:** I’ve never heard of him. Who is he?

**John:** He’s running for President.

**Charlie:** How would I have heard of him? I’m from Britain. I’ve heard of Trump.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Charlie:** Of course I’ve heard of Trump. I had a proper argument with an Uber driver the other day because I got in the car, here, and he said, “Well they’re really rolling out the red carpet for Trump back in your country aren’t they?” And I said, no, people hate him. People hate him in London. And there was immediately an argument. Anyway. How did I get into that?

**John:** Because you have an R.

**Charlie:** Yes. There’s an R. And also I would like to make the case for like quite often I see people writing quite accurate parodies of Black Mirror where it’s my accent going, “What if, what if your mum run on batteries? What if you could 3D print an egg? Some British dude saying what-if.” And I think that is accurate, but I find it disturbing that Americans call the show Black Mir-Or. It’s not Black Meer. That sounds like a place. Black Meer sounds like a place. Blackmere. It’s Black Mirror.

But how do you say Mirror in–?

**John:** Mirror.

**Charlie:** You said it properly. Why do people keep saying Black Meer?

**John:** Because we live in slightly different countries and languages are constantly evolving.

**Charlie:** I feel churlish now. I feel like I’ve really – yeah, sorry. [laughs]

**John:** Well you’re coming from a land that often does glottal stops instead of syllables.

**Charlie:** We just can’t talk properly in my country.

**John:** That’s fine.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

You may want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide to hear which episodes our listeners liked most.

Come to the live show. The live show is this Thursday at the Ace Hotel. Amazing people will be there. Also, I think by the time this new episode comes out Highland 2.5 will have shipped which has revision mode in it which is remarkable, so it’s what I’ve used to write all my stuff recently. You can have stars in the margins. You can use it for writing your next Twine episode.

**Charlie:** Yeah. I like the sound of that.

**John:** I’m going to send you a beta right now.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** Charlie Brooker, thank you very much for being on the show.

**Charlie:** Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes LIVE](https://theatre.acehotel.com/events/scriptnotes-live-podcast-taping-benefit-hollywood-heart/) this Thursday, June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, and Kourtney Kang, buy your tickets [here](https://www.axs.com/events/374457/scriptnotes-live-tickets?skin=acehotel)!
* [Black Mirror](https://www.netflix.com/title/70264888)
* [La Cabina](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065513/)
* [Russian Doll](https://www.netflix.com/title/80211627)
* [Money Heist](https://www.netflix.com/title/80192098)
* [Matthew Zalkind](http://matthewzalkind.com/) John’s Voice Twin
* [Baba is You](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/baba-is-you-switch/)
* Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks [(Light)](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-400-light#/1506766/tee-men-standard-tee-heather-white-tri-blend-s) and [(Dark)](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-400-dark#/1506818/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Charlie Brooker](https://twitter.com/charltonbrooker) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Mackey Landy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_404_the_one_with_charlie_brooker.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Episode 403 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

On today’s show, something we have never done before. It’s just me. No guest. No John. He’s off visiting family I believe in Colorado. So it’s just me today. And we’re going to do something that I’ve been looking forward to doing for a long time. I’m going to be talking to you today about structure and character. I’m kind of giving you my whole theory on how to write a movie.

I know it sounds like a lot. And it is a little bit of a lot. It’s a talk that I’ve done at the Austin Screenwriting Film Festival a number of times. I haven’t done it in a while. And I feel like their exclusive right to it has ended, so now I’m giving it to you. This is sort of my how-to write a movie.

But before we get into that we do have a little bit of business to go through. And it’s about our live show. Our next live show, we’ve talked about this before. It’s going to be on the evening of Thursday, June 13 here in Los Angeles at the Ace Hotel which is a beautiful venue. And it is benefiting Hollywood Heart. We do this every year. It’s a great charity.

We have probably the best guest lineup we’ve ever had. We have Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry. We have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We have Kourtney Kang, writer of Fresh Off the Boat. And we have Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. And by the way that’s – Melissa McCarthy and Ben – I’m not talking about other Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcones that you don’t know. I mean the ones you know. Those.

It is just about the most comedy firepower I think we can ever assemble on one stage for this show. You’re not going to want to miss it. Tickets I believe are still available but we’re getting close to running out, so take a look at the link in the show notes and get your tickets.

All right. Let’s get into it. So when we talk about writing a script a lot of times we’re talking about structure. There are, I don’t know, four million books about structure. I went online and I looked for just images based on screenplay structure and what I saw was kind of mind-blowing. There are these long narrow lines with little ticks on them and then there’s a pie chart. And then there’s a swirly thing that kind of looks like a snail shell. There’s a triangle. There’s a diamond. I think there’s a parallelogram. And if there’s not a trapezoid maybe one of you can get on that.

All of this is designed to help you learn how to structure a screenplay. Here’s the problem. All of it is done from the wrong end. All of it. It’s all done from the point of view of analysis. They look at things, they take them apart, and then they say, look, all these pieces fit into this swirly shape, or this diamond. The issue is that’s not going to help you actually write anything because when you write you’re starting from scratch. You’re not breaking something apart. You’re building something out of nothing. And when you’re building something out of nothing you need a different set of instructions.

I can think of a doctor who takes bodies apart. That’s a medical examiner or a coroner. That’s not the doctor you want to go to to make a baby for instance. It’s just a very different thing, right? So we’re going to come at it from the point of view of making babies and your baby is your script. Don’t worry, we’re going to keep this safe for work.

So, structure. Structure, structure, structure. Screenplay is structure. You need to know how to do your structure. Structure I’m here to tell you is a total trap. Yes, screenplay is structure, but structure isn’t what you think it is. Structure doesn’t say this happens on this page, this happens on that page. Here’s a pinch point. Here’s a stretchy point. Here’s a midpoint. Structure doesn’t tell you what to do. If you follow strict structural guidelines in all likelihood you will write a very well structured bad script.

Structure isn’t the dog. It’s the tail. Structure is a symptom. It’s a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Take a moment. Think about that for a second. I’ll repeat it. Structure is a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Structure isn’t something you write well. It’s something that happens because you wrote well. Structure is not a tool, it is a symptom.

When we think of rigid structural forms I have to tell you there’s nothing honest about them. There’s nothing true about them. They’re synthetic. There’s never been one single great writer who created one single great screenplay following a structural template. Not one.

What real writers follow are their characters. And what great writers follow are their characters as they evolve around a central dramatic argument that is actually meaningful to other human beings. Let me stop for a second and tell you that we are going to get into real practicals but for a bit now we’re just going to talk a little bit of philosophy. First, let’s consider what we call basic structure. There’s a Syd Field point of view. You have your three acts, your inciting incident, act break escalation, magical midpoint character shift, third act low point, and kick off to climactic action.

We also have the Chris Vogler Hero’s Journey, ordinary world, call to action, refusal of call, acceptance of call, and blah, blah, blah. Save the Cat is a lot of stuff.

There’s a lot of what to do but where’s the why? Who came up with this stuff in the first place? Why is it there? Why are there three acts at all? Why is there a low point? Why do we like it when there’s an inciting incident? Why do we like it when there’s a low point? If we don’t know why those things are there how are we supposed to know how to write them? Because we process the world through our consciousness and our consciousness is sort of a natural storyteller, all of us are actually walking around doing this right all the time. We just don’t know it. We’re narrativizing our own lives better than most who try and do it on purpose on Fade In or WriterDuet, or Highland2. I don’t know any other software.

Right now you’re sitting there, you’re riding along in your car, you’re being passive. You are accepting this structure talk, wondering when I’m going to get to the practicals. And I will. But later if someone asks you about this experience you’re having you will naturally, without thinking, create a story. You won’t have to consult a graph or a chart or a swirly thing. You’ll just tell the story.

Here’s a story. I listened to a podcast. It was on the following topics. Reasonable people could agree or disagree. Anyway, I’m the same. That’s not a very good story, is it?

Here’s another story. I was listening to a podcast and it was OK, it was sort of a little boring, but then the person said this one thing and it reminded me of something else I’d heard once and that tied back to this moment in my life where something really interesting happened. And now I’m wondering maybe if I was wrong about that thing and I should be doing it this way instead. Huh. There you go. And that story has character, meaning you. That story is about you and maybe it’s about me. It’s about a relationship that we’re having right now through this podcast, for better or worse.

And if you were to relay this story, this experience, you might share some parts of this that you thought were interesting or some parts that you thought were stupid, but you will naturally contextualize it as such. This moment in time did or did not help you in your desire to change. We live our lives this way, but when we sit down to write we somehow forget. You know who never forgets? Actors. They have to get it because they are the characters and we are experiencing them as the characters.

So there’s that old cliché line: what’s my motivation? Well it’s not a joke. Believe it or not that is the key to structure. What is the purpose of all this storytelling that we engage in, all this narration? Well, narration helps us move through a changing world. And story is about a change of state. There are three basic ways your story changes. And this applies I think to every possible story.

The first way is internal. This is what is going on inside the character’s mind. This is the things they’re thinking, they’re feeling, their emotions. And this axis goes all over the place. It zigzags up and down. Then there’s interpersonal. That’s the main relationship of your story. It has a start, it has an end. It usually begins in a kind of neutral way. Then depending on how your story unfolds it can dip and then rise and then plummet and then spike. And finally you have the external axis. That’s the narrative, the plot, the things that are going on around you. And that generally is just a straight line. Start to end.

All of this is made up of scenes. And within scenes we’re doing something that follows the Hegelian dialectic. Calm down. You don’t need to look it up. I’ll help you out. The Hegelian Dialectic basically is a way of thinking about how we formulate ideas and thoughts and arguments. You take a thesis. That’s a statement. Something is true. And then you apply to that an antithesis. No, that’s not true and here’s why. Those things collide and in theory what results from that is a new thesis called the synthesis. And that starts the whole process over again. That synthesis becomes a thesis. There’s an antithesis. A new synthesis. That becomes a thesis. Constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.

And who is the person firing these antitheses at these theses? You.

So, as we go through this talk never forget this one simple fact. At any given moment as you begin a scene you have a situation that is involving those three axes and you are going to fire something at at least one of them to make something new. That is all story is. But what is the glue that holds all those changes together? What’s the glue that you the creator can use to come up with your antitheses and get your new syntheses and do it over and over again?

And that brings us to theme. Theme is otherwise known as unity. Unity is a term that was first used by Aristotle in Poetics and this is one you actually should read. I know you’re like, Aristotle? Hegel? Hegelian guy. Calm down. It’s fine. In fact, Aristotle was really a contemporary writer in his own way. Poetics is an easy read. It will take you about 30 minutes. It’s a pretty good bathroom book. And in it you’ll find a lot of things that we hear today, like for instance the worst kind of plot is an episodic plot. Well, that’s pretty much true.

What did he think of unity or theme? Well basically theme is your central dramatic argument. Some of those arguments are interesting. Some of them are a little cliché. And the quality of the argument itself isn’t necessarily related to the quality of the script. For instance, you can have a really good screenplay built around you can’t judge a book by its cover. That’s OK. The theme itself doesn’t have to be mind-altering or, I don’t know, revolutionary. It’s your execution around it that’s going to be interesting.

But the important thing is that the argument has to be an argument. I think sometimes people misunderstand the use of theme in this context and they think a theme for a screenplay could be brotherhood. Well, no. Because there’s nothing to argue about there. There’s no way to answer that question one way or the other. It’s just a vague concept.

But, man and women can’t just be friends, well, that’s an argument. Better to be dead than a slave. Life is beautiful, even in the midst of horrors. If you believe you are great, you will be great. If you love someone set them free. Those are arguments.

Screenplays without arguments feel empty and pointless. You will probably get some version of the following note. What is this about? I mean, I know what it’s about, but what is it about? Why should this movie exist? What is the point of all this?

Now, it’s really important to note you probably don’t want to start with an argument. That’s a weird way to begin a script. Usually we think of an idea. And that’s fine. But when you think of the idea the very next question you should ask is what central dramatic argument would fit really well with this? And ideally you’re going to think ironically. For instance, let’s talk about this idea. A fish has to find another fish who is somewhere in the ocean. Got it. The animators will love it. Water. Fish. Cool.

OK, let’s think of a central dramatic argument. How about if you try hard enough you can do anything, even find a fish? That’s a bit boring, isn’t it? How about sometimes the things we’re searching for are the things that we need to be free from? Well, OK. That’s an interesting argument. I’m not sure how it necessarily is served or is being served by this idea of a fish in the ocean. How about you can’t find happiness out there, you have to find it within yourself? That could work. That’s sort of Wizard of Oz-ish.

But let’s go really ironically. How about this one? No matter how much you want to hold onto the person you love, sometimes you have to set them free. Well, that is pretty cliché but it is a great central dramatic argument to pair with a fish needs to find another fish. Because when you’re looking for somebody out there in the deep, deep ocean you the writer know that what you’re promising is they’re going to find them and then have to let them go anyway. And that is starting to get good.

All right. Let’s get into some practicals, shall we? Because this is thematic structure. This is going to help you write your script. In thematic structure the purpose of the story – and listen carefully now – the purpose of the story is to take a character from ignorance of the truth of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. I shall repeat. The purpose of the story is to take your main character, your protagonist, from a place of ignorance of the truth or the true side of the argument you’re making and take them all the way to the point where they become the very embodiment of that argument and they do it through action.

So, let’s talk about how we introduce. We begin in the beginning with the introduction of a protagonist in an ordinary world. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times. But why? Sometimes movies don’t start ordinarily. You probably saw Mad Max: Fury Road. If you didn’t, do so. Well, there’s no ordinary beginning there. I mean, it’s crazy from the jump. Ordinary doesn’t mean mundane. Although sometimes it can.

What ordinary means here is that the protagonist’s life essentially exemplifies their ignorance of the theme, of the argument that you want them to believe eventually. In fact, they believe the opposite of that argument. That’s how they begin. Typically in the beginning of a story your main character believes in the opposite of the theme and they have also achieved some kind of stasis. There’s a balance in their life. In fact, their ignorance of that theme has probably gotten them to this nice place of stasis and balance. It doesn’t mean they’re happy. What it means is that without the divine nudge of the writer-god their life could go on like this forever. It’s not a perfect life. It’s not the best life they could live but it’s the life they’ve settled for. Their stasis is acceptable imperfection.

If we’re going to circle back around to my favorite fish movie, Marlin can live with a resentful son as long as he knows his son is safe. That’s acceptable imperfection. I get it. Nemo resents me. He’s angry at me. He feels stifled by me. That’s OK. He’s alive. I can keep going this way.

And then along comes you, the writer. Your job is to disrupt that stasis. So you invent some sort of incident. Ah-ha. Now we know the point of the inciting incident. The point of the inciting incident is not to go, “Oh god, a meteor!” The point of the inciting incident is to specifically disrupt a character’s stasis. It makes the continuation of balance and stasis and acceptable imperfection impossible. It destroys it. And it forces a choice on the character.

OK, but why? I’m just going to keep asking that question. But why? But why? But why? Why do you have to do this to this poor character? Because you are the parent and you have a lesson to teach this person, or animal, or fish. Your motivation is part of your relationship to your character. You don’t write an inciting incident. You don’t write push character out of safety. That gives you no real guidance to let something blossom. What you write is an ironic disruption of stasis. Ironic as in a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts that is, and hear me out, genetically engineered to break your character’s soul.

You’re going to destroy them. You are god. And you are designing a moment that will begin a transformation for this specific character so you have to make it intentional. It can be an explosion, or it can be the tiniest little change. But it’s not something that would disrupt everyone’s life the way it’s disrupting this person’s life. You have tailored it perfectly and terribly for them.

So, what’s the first thing your character wants to do when this happens to them? Well, it they’re like you or me they’re going to immediately try and just get back to what they had. They have to leave their stasis behind because you’ve destroyed it, but everything they’re going to do following that is done in service of just trying to get it back. Shrek doesn’t have his swamp, so he has to go on a journey so he can get his swamp back. The point here is that the hero has absolutely no idea that there is a central dramatic argument. They’ve made up their mind about something and their mind has not changed.

Your heroes should be on some level cowards. I don’t mean coward like shaking in your boots. I mean coward like I don’t want to change. I’m happy with the way things are. Please just let me be. And underlining that is fear. And fear, especially in your character, is the heart of empathy. I feel for characters when I fear with them. It is vulnerability. It’s what makes me connect. Every protagonist fears something.

Imagine a man who fears no other man. He doesn’t fear death. He doesn’t fear pain. But, ah-ha, fill in that blank. But the point is it has to be filled in. You can feel it, right? Like he’s going to have to fear something. Because fear is our connection to a character. And a fearful hero should have lived their lives to avoid the thing they’re afraid of.

You, are taking their safety blanket away. So I want you to write your fearful hero honestly. What do they want? They want to return to what they had. They want to go backwards. And believe it or not that is the gift that is going to drive you through the second act. The second act.

Oh, the thing that’s so scary. No. No, you should be excited about it. Let me take a break for a second and say that everything I’m talking about here is mostly to serve the writing of what I would call a traditional Hollywood movie. That doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean cliché. It doesn’t even mean formulaic. It just means it’s a traditional narrative. So, I don’t know, if you’re looking to be a little more Lars von Trier about things, well, I don’t know how interesting or helpful this is going to be. But I’m presuming that most of you just want to write a general kind of movie that conforms to a general kind of movie shape.

So this is how we’re going to help you do it. And the second act is the part that I think freaks people out the most. They get scared. But I think you should be excited about pages 30 to 90 roughly. Please do not quote me on those numbers. But first, are you getting it? Have you stopped thinking about plot? Have you stopped thinking about plot as something to jam characters into? Because when you do that that’s why you run out of road in your second act. You ran out of plot because it wasn’t being generated by anything except you.

Ah-ha. But when you start thinking of your plot as not something that happens to your characters but what you are doing to your characters that’s when you can lead them from anti-theme to theme. How do we do it?

First, we reinforce the anti-theme. That might sound a little counterintuitive but hear me out. You’ve knocked your hero out of their acceptable stasis. They are now on the way to do whatever they need to do to get back to it. The hero is going to experience new things. And I want you to think about making those new things reinforce her belief in an anti-theme. Because this is going to make them want to get back to the beginning even more. Oh, it’s delicious. We’re creating a torture chamber basically. Keep thinking that way.

Imagine your hero is moving backwards against you and you push them forward and they push back. Ah-ha. Good. Design moments to do this. You’re going to keep forcing them forward, but you’re also going to put things in their path that make them want to go backwards. That’s tension. That’s exciting. And more importantly when they do get past those things it will be meaningful. You want to write your world to oppose your character’s desires.

So, you’re going to reinforce their need to get back. Ah-ha. So, let’s see, Marlin wanders out into the ocean. His theory is the ocean is really, really dangerous. What should the first thing be? Maybe let’s have him meet some sharks. And actually, oh, you know what, they’re not scary at all. Oh god, yes they are. The ocean is in fact way worse than he even imagined. That’s what you need to do. He needs to get his son back really, really soon so he can return to stasis. And then when you’ve done that you’re going to introduce an element of doubt.

Something or someone lives in a different way. Someone or something in your story is an example of the life of theme rather than the life of anti-theme. So remember, your hero believes in one side of the central dramatic argument. It’s the wrong side. You want them to believe the other one. OK, but they believe the wrong one. They need to run into someone or something that believes in the right side of it. This element of doubt creates a natural conflict for the protagonist because of course I believe this, you believe that. But it’s also attractive to them on some level because – and again, really important. Your hero is rational. This is a critical component of a good hero. You are dealing with somebody that probably lives irrationally, fine, but they have to have the capacity to see that maybe there is a better way.

You’re living things maybe the wrong way but you need the capacity to see things going the right way. It is fear that separates the irrational hero from their rational potential. And because they’re rational when they get a glimpse of this other way of being they’re going to realize there’s value to it through circumstance or accident or necessity or another character’s actions. These are all things you’re inventing, but here’s why – the hero is going to experience a moment of acting in harmony with the right side of the central dramatic argument.

This could involve their own action or it could be something that they watch someone else do or something they experience passively. But this is why the magical midpoint change occurs. See, now you know why. You’re not just doing it because a book said. These things generally happen in the middle of the movie because our hero’s belief system has been challenged. There is an element of doubt. There is not a willingness to go all the way and believe the other side of the argument yet. They may not even understand the other side of the argument.

There’s only a question that maybe for the first time they have to wonder if their side of the argument that they started with, the anti-theme, maybe it doesn’t explain or solve everything. Have I been living a lie? That’s what’s happening in the middle of a movie.

So, remember in Finding Nemo there’s a moment where because Marlin has to rescue Dory from this field of jellyfish he invents a game. She forces him to do something that he normally wouldn’t do. Play. He’s doing it for the old Marlin reasons of neurosis, but it’s working. She’s following him. And as he’s doing it he gets a glimpse of what it’s like to live without fear. He gets a glimpse of what it’s like to be carefree. To not worry so much. To be, well, a little less conservative with your own life. And he loves it.

And then what happens? She gets stung. Oh, glorious. And that gets us to this reversal of theme. The very moment your hero takes the bait that you put there to think about maybe switching sides – maybe switching sides of the argument – you need to hammer them back the other direction. The story has to make them shrink back to the old way. Dory almost dies in the jellyfish. And why? It happened because Marlin decided in a moment out of necessity to have fun and then forgot himself, forgot his fear. And what’s the price of forgetting fear and not being vigilant? Pain and tragedy. The tragedy of the beginning is reinforced and the hero retreats once again.

Ah. It’s good stuff. And it means you have to be kind of mean. Sadistic really. But it turns out that these are the kinds of things we want out of our narrative. It’s the essence of what we call dramatic reversal.

I’m going to put aside the examples from Pixar for a second and I’m going to talk about somebody real. There’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. This is a true story. Jose Fernandez is born in Cuba and at the age of 15 he escapes Cuba with his mother and his sister and many others, all packed in a very small boat. And during the difficult village he is awakened to the sound of someone yelling. That someone has fallen overboard.

And Jose, 15 years old, doesn’t hesitate. He dives into the choppy water to save whoever it is. And it’s only when he drags this person back onto the boat does he realize he has saved his own mother. Wow.

Jose Fernandez grows up, he’s a hell of an athlete. He goes on to pitch. Major League baseball pitcher. And he’s really good. In fact, he is the National League Rookie of the Year. And he’s an All Star. His future isn’t just bright, it is glorious. Jose Fernandez is living the American dream and I don’t know how much you know about baseball but ace pitchers they get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

But at the age of 24 Jose Fernandez dies. He doesn’t die from illness. He doesn’t die from violence. He dies in an accident. But not a car accident. He dies in a boating accident. A boating accident. Now, do you feel that? Do you feel more than you would if I had said he died of a blood clot? Well, why? I mean, death is death. Why does this detail of the boating accident make you feel more?

Because it’s terribly ironic. Because this is a guy who saved his own mother from water and then he dies in water. It implies that there’s a strange kind of order to the universe even when that order hurts. And this is where we start to pull irony out of drama. This is essential to your choices when you decide how you’re going to push back against your hero. How you’re going to hammer them back. How you’re going to punish them.

Think about that Pixar Short, Lava. And I talk about Pixar all the time because it’s just pure storytelling and they’re really, really good at it. So he thinks he’s alone. He’s a volcano in the ocean. He thinks he’s alone. And then he discovers he’s not alone. But when he discovers that he also discovers that she’s facing the wrong way and she can’t see him. And he doesn’t know how to sing anymore. So she doesn’t even know he’s there. Oh, that’s terrible. It’s unexpected. It’s contradictory. And it’s ironic. And that’s exactly what you want to do.

So, consider the irony that’s involved with Marlin. Marlin is worried that he has lost his son. Every parent who loses a child, even for an instant in a mall, is scared. But that’s not enough. Let’s talk about what the people at Pixar understood they needed to do to this character from the very start to punish him so that his journey would be that much more impressive. It’s not enough to say, look, you love your kid, your kid is lost, you’ve got to go find your kid. Everybody loves their kid, right?

OK. But they go a step further. They say, you know what, there’s no mom in the picture. Mom died. It’s just you. You’re a single dad. You’re the only parent. You’ve got to find your kid. No, that’s not enough. How about this? How about your wife and all of your other children were eaten in front of you because you couldn’t protect them? And the only kid you had left out of all of that, the only memory you have of your wife and your happy life before is one tiny egg. One kid.

And that is still not enough. And this is why Pixar is so amazing. Because they knew that the further they went the more we would feel at the end. It’s not enough that he only has one kid. When he looks at that little egg he can see that the one kid that’s left is disabled. He has a bad fin. Now it’s enough. Now you have created the perfect circumstance for that individual, you cruel, cruel god of story.

Now I know why he’s so panicked that that kid is somewhere out there in the ocean. When you’re designing your obstacles and your lessons and the glimpses of the other way and the rewards and the punishments and the beating back and the pushing forward, keep thinking ironically. Keep thinking about surprises that twist the knife. Don’t just stab your characters. Twist the knife in them. If someone has to face a fear make it overwhelming to them. Don’t disappoint them. Punish them.

Make your characters lower their defenses by convincing them that everything is going to be OK and then punch them right in the face, metaphorically.

So, sorry to tell you that as a writer you are not the New Testament god who turns water into wine. You are the Old Testament god who tortures Job because, I don’t know, it seems like fun. And when you’re wondering where to go in your story and what to do with your character ask this question: where is my hero on her quest between theme and anti-theme? Or I guess I should say between an anti-theme and theme. And what would be the meanest thing I could do to her right now? What would be the worst way to do the meanest thing right now? Then do it. And do it. And do it again until the hero is left without a belief at all.

So as the demands of the narrative begin to overwhelm the hero, the hero begins to realize that her limitations aren’t physical but thematic. Think about Marlin. I promised that I would never let anything happen to him. But then I suppose nothing ever would happen to him. That’s what Dory says. And Marlin knows she’s right. He knows that if all he does is basically lock his kid up to prevent anything bad from happening to his kid nothing good will happen to his kid. The kid won’t have a real life.

So, now what? Well, the answer is obvious, right? If you love someone let them go. And I’m sure that at that point in the movie if you ask Marlin that he would say, “I suppose that’s the thing that I’m supposed to believe.” But they can’t do it. Not yet. In fact, you’re going to want to have a situation where they have a chance to do it. And they fail at it in some important way because they don’t really accept the central dramatic argument you want for them. They just lost the belief in their original point of view. They’re trapped between rejection of the old and acceptance of the new. They are lost. Their old ways don’t work anymore. The new way seems impossible or insane.

Shrek doesn’t want his swamp back anymore. He wants love, but he is also not willing to do what is required to try and get it. He’s trapped. And this is why they call it the low point. It’s not random. It’s not the low point because the books say page 90 is the low point. It’s the low point because your character is lost and in a whole lot of trouble.

Their goal in the beginning, which was to go backwards to the beginning to achieve stasis, to re-achieve stasis, that goal is in shambles. Their anti-thematic belief, whatever it was that they clung to in the beginning of this story, it’s been exposed as a sham. And the enormity of the real goal that now faces them is impossibly daunting. They can’t yet accept the theme because it’s too scary. When your core values are gone and when you aren’t ready to replace them with new values, well, you might as well be dead. And this is why people go to movies.

So, granted, we love the lasers, we love the explosions, we love the ka-boom, and we love the sex, and we love the tears, but what we need from drama – and when I say drama I mean the drama of comedy and the drama of drama – what we need are these moments where we connect to another person’s sense of being lost. Because we have all been lost.

And that’s why the ending is going to work. Because without this there can be no catharsis. Catharsis comes from the Greek word for vomiting I’m pretty sure. So just think of a lot of your plot as shoving really bad food down the throat of your hero because that’s how you’re going to get to this catharsis.

Now, I want to say that these approaches don’t help you map out a second act. What these approaches do is help you develop your character as they move through a narrative. And that narrative is going to impact their relationship to theme. And when you finish that movement of this character interacting with story so that their relationship to the theme is changing from I don’t believe that to, OK, I don’t believe what I used to believe but I can’t believe that yet, suddenly you’ll be somewhere around the end of the second act.

And here is the big secret. John and I have said this many, many times. There are no acts. So you can’t really be scared of the second act. It doesn’t exist. It’s not some sort of weird wasteland you have to get through. It’s just part of one big piece. There’s one act. It’s called your story. And now we get to the third act, sorry, end of your one act. And this is the defining moment. Your character needs to face a defining moment. And this defining moment is their worst fear. It is their greatest challenge. This is the moment that will not only resolve the story that you’re telling but it will resolve the life of your character. This moment will bring them to a new stasis and balance. Remember synthesis, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here we are again.

But what are you going to do? You have to come up with this thing. This is the difference between what I’m saying to you now and what a lot of books say. Books will say, “Defining moment goes here.” And I’m saying, yeah, but how? What makes it so defining? You’re going to design a moment that is going to test your protagonist’s faith in the theme. They need to go through something where they have to prove that they believe this new theme. They have to prove it. It’s not enough to say, OK, I get it. What I used to think is wrong. There’s a new way that’s right. That’s not enough.

They have to prove it. And they have to prove it in a way where they literally embody the point of that idea with everything they have. But before you do that don’t you want to torture them one more time? Of course you do.

The relapse. A nice ironic relapse. You want to tempt them right before this big decision moment. Right before the defining moment. You want to hold that safety blanket up and say, “Go ahead. Go back to the beginning. You get it. The thing you wanted on page 15, I’m giving it to you. Don’t go forward. Don’t change. Go back.”

And what do they have to do? They have to reject that temptation. You design a machinery where they have to reject that temptation and then do something extraordinary – extraordinary – to embody the truth of the theme. And now you get acceptance through action. The hero acts in accordance with the theme. Specifically by doing so they prevail. They have to act.

So let’s go back to Marlin. It’s not enough for Marlin to say, “I get it now. I’ve heard the wise turtles. I’ve seen the way Dory is. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve got to let you live.” That’s not enough. What Pixar does is create a perfect mechanism to tempt and then force action. Dory is captured. And Nemo says to Marlin, “I’m the only one who can go in there and save her.” And this is a great temptation. This is where Marlin has to reject the old way. We’re saying go ahead, you’ve got your kid, we’re giving him back to you. It’s all you wanted. On page 15 you just wanted your kid. Here he is. Get out.

But he has to act in accordance with the theme. So he rejects that and he says, “No. Go ahead, son. And try and save her.” And that simple decision is how he acts in accordance with theme. And it is terrifying. And now you get one last chance to punish him. Briefly. Go ahead. Let’s see Nemo coming out of that net and let’s think that he’s dead. And let Marlin hold him. And let Marlin remember what he was like when he was in that little egg. And let Marlin kind of be OK with it. Because that’s what it means to live in accordance with theme.

If you say, look, sometimes if you love someone you have to let them go, that’s one thing. Actually having to let them go is another thing. Letting them go and seeing them get hurt is yet another. That is the ultimate acceptance of that idea, isn’t it? And that’s what he sees.

But then, of course, faith in the theme rewards. And Nemo is alive.

So then you get this denouement. What is the denouement? Why is it there? It’s not there because we need to be slowly let down and back out in the movie theater lobby. It’s there because we need to see the new synthesis. You have successfully fired a billion antitheses against a billion theses and come up with one big, grand, lovely new synthesis. Please show it to me. So we now see that the after story life is in harmony with theme.

And here’s the deal with the first scene and the last scene of a movie. If you remove everything from the story except the introduction of your hero and the last scene of your hero there should really be only one fundamental difference. And here it is. The hero in the beginning acts in accordance with the anti-theme and the hero at the end acts in accordance with the theme.

Now, this should all help you create your character. When you’re creating character I want you to think of theme. I want you to imagine a character who embodies the anti-theme. You can be subtle about this. You probably should be. It generally works better if you are. And I want you to think of your story as a journey that guides this character from belief in the anti-theme to belief in theme. Remember you’re god – angry, angry god. You have created this test. That’s what your story is. In order to guide your character to a better way of living, but they have to make the choices.

Oh, if you’ve heard, “The worst character is a passive character,” that’s why. They have to make the choices or you’re making it for them. And then, well, it just doesn’t count, does it?

If you can write the story of your character as they grow from thinking this to the opposite of this, and guess what, you will never ask well what should happen next ever again. You’ll only ask how can I make the thing that I want to happen next better. That’s a whole other talk. Maybe I’ll do that one in like five years or something.

I hope that you found this interesting. It was kind of fun to do. I mean, I’m not going to do it frequently because it’s scary. I mean, John really does run this show. But I’m all here all alone. But I kind of liked a chance to at least talk to you directly about all this stuff and I hope that you got something out of it. If you did, great. And you can let us know.

And here comes the boilerplate. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by, well, I don’t know. But it’s a surprise and we’ll let you know who it was the week following.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust.

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And with that, I bid you all good luck. Go torture your heroes.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE on June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, and Kourtney Kang, buy your tickets here!
• Aristotle’s Poetics
• José Fernández
• Lava, Pixar Short
• Finding Nemo
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• John August on Twitter
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• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

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