Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

[music]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 680 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you write action set pieces that work both on the screen and on the page? We’ll talk with a writer who has made that her calling card. Then it’s a new round of How Would This be a Movie?, where we take stories from the news or history and squeeze the cinematic juice out of them. To help us do all this, let’s welcome back the screenwriter behind Bumblebee, Birds of Prey and The Flash, Christina Hodson.

Christina Hodson: Hello.

John: Christina Hodson, we’re so happy to have you back.

Christina: I’m very happy to be back. I cannot believe you’re on 680.

John: It’s so many episodes.

Christina: That’s so many.

John: Yes, but as we’re doing the Scriptnotes book, now we’re in sort of the last minutes on Scriptnotes book, it feels like 680 episodes. There’s just a lot there. It’s been a lot of sifting through stuff and the culling phase now where it’s like we’ve had these amazing guests on. It’s like, oh, we want to do a little breakout chapter with them. It’s like, oh no, there’s no room. There’s no room for these people.

Drew Marquardt: Ryan Reynolds, gone.

John: Oh, he’s gone. Ryan, if you’re listening to this, sorry. You were terrific. You’re wonderful. Twice.

Christina: They pick you for me, Ryan.

John: Christina, we want to bring you in here right now just to let you know that you’re such a valuable part of the Scriptnotes community and yet you don’t have your own chapter.

Christina: Fuck.

John: You can swear if you want to on the show.

Christina: I forgot to apologize in advance. I will be swearing.

John: All right. We’re going to have some swearing. We’re going to have some good crafty things. We’re going to talk about story. But in our bonus segment for paying members, I want to talk about the cold email, when you have to just email a person you’ve never met before and pitch your case and do that because it’s a thing I find myself having to do a lot and some people are terrified of it. I find it delightful.

Christina: You do it all the time?

John: Yes.

Christina: Who are you sending cold emails to?

John: People I have questions about what they’re doing. Sometimes on a professional level, sometimes for like the apps we’re working on. I’m actually kind of shameless and I have some techniques which I think other people who are scared to send those emails could probably benefit from.

Christina: Is it possible that your technique is being John August?

John: That is a part of it. Just as a little amuse-bouche for the real advice here, is that people are so much better emailing on behalf of somebody else than for themselves, so pretend you’re somebody else. Pretend you’re doing it for somebody else.

Christina: I used to make phone calls and pretend I was an assistant for myself.

John: You’ve got that British accent though. It still helps. It works. It really does.

We have a little bit of follow-up. Highland Pro shipped, we’re so grateful to everyone who’s been playing with it and installing it. You, Christina, were actually really helpful in the launch of Highland 2. Do you remember that?

Christina: I do remember that. Never in the world did I think I could possibly be helpful in anything to do with software.

John: You were, because one of the features in Highland 2 which you helped to work out was gender analysis. We were the first app that had a thing where you could put your script and say, what were the male and female ratios in the script in terms of dialogue and stuff? We put that in there first. All the other apps copied it, which is great. They could all see what that was like. Do you find yourself using those tools now?

Christina: I have not used them in a little while, but I think it definitely made me more mindful of it in general. I think now I don’t start writing a character without thinking a bit more carefully.

John: It really is sometimes in the conception phase where you’re thinking of like, wait, if I do it this way, there’s going to be so few female characters, or they not going to have any chance to actually talk with each other.

Christina: Totally.

John: This just all came out of the realization that there was like a study that you helped out on in terms of– You’re nodding like, maybe I helped out on it?

Christina: Honestly, I can’t remember anything.

John: Oh, it was pre-pandemic. It’s all a blur.

Christina: It was Me Too, and Me Too got wiped out by COVID.

John: Me Too, like hashtag Me Too, not like Me Too, me also.

Christina: No, I feel like my memory of hashtag Me Too got completely wiped out by hashtag COVID.

John: Absolutely. Everything’s been memory hole’d. It’s so scary. One of the things I find so helpful sometimes is just I will Google myself and find like, oh, did I talk about this thing? Because there was a New York Times article we were both in.

Christina: When I Google myself now, I find you.

John: Absolutely. There’s a lovely shot of the two of us at your house.

Christina: Pretending to read notes from my notebook [laughs]. I find that endlessly amusing.

John: All journals are basically 100% accurately portraying what really happened in a moment.

Christina: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

John: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. One of the things I’ve noticed, the difference between launching an app versus launching a series or a movie is that– There’s some things that are similar. Obviously, you get reviews, you get articles written about you, which is great. You get features. I got a feature of the app store for Highland Pro and ratings, star ratings. But with a movie or a feature, you’re just done at a certain point.

It’s just like, oh, it’s out there and it’s finished and it’s this completion versus something like an app. We’re constantly putting out updates and there’s bug fixes and Drew gets emails and we’re all responding to stuff. You have a chance to fix things, which is great, because it’s not frozen in amber, but there’s also a responsibility to keep doing

Christina: Also, it actually hangs over you forever.

John: Yes, it does hang over you for a while. Anyway, thank you to everyone who has left a review, that is super, super helpful and left us a star rating. If you haven’t tried Highland yet, it is available on the app store for Mac, for iPad and for iPhone. It’s a 30-day free trial. Give it a shot.

Next up and follow up, director’s chairs. We were talking to this on a recent episode about sort of the scourge of director’s chairs. We got some really good feedback and follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Sarah writes, “Last summer, I was six months pregnant as the on-set producer. You think your butt hurts? I was dying. Finally, I gave in and bought my own chair, which was an outdoor rocking chair I bought at a sporting goods store. It’s much lower to the ground, so it requires us to stick down the monitors. I had to swallow my pride a little as I was now a pregnant lady in a rocking chair on set, but I was so much less miserable. Highly recommended.”

John: Christina, what’s been your experience with director’s chairs and chairs on sets?

Christina: Very bad. I’m clumsy and I like to sit cross-legged, so I always do something wrong. I also always put bags where I shouldn’t and then hide things in the pocket and make them heavy and then they tip and I’m a disaster. Director’s chairs are terrible.

John: They are terrible.

Christina: There’s got to be a better solution.

John: There are better solutions. Ryan wrote in and what did she say?

Drew: “I was a producer on The Walking Dead and everyone had back problems after using the traditional director chairs at Video Village for the last 10 years of our show. Eventually, our prop master found a bamboo director’s chair and this made a huge difference for the execs. The props team had rolling carts that the chairs would be hung up on and transported to the next set or village move. The train was brutal and these chairs are a bit heavier, but to save a few people who kept us employed safe from back surgery, the team was happy to help out.” She included a link, which we’ll put in the show notes.

John: That’s great. It’s nice to see that there are solutions out there and it’s just a matter of people stepping up and saying, hey, this is important for me and for everybody else around you to just do this better.

The common threads we see, which Sarah’s first email talked about, is that you got to be lower to the ground. Part of the problem is that if you can’t put your feet on the ground while you’re in the chair, you’re going to have more problems. The other problem is the seat, and the little sling seats, you would think it’d be comfortable, but they’re the worst. It just pinches you in a really bad way. We won’t probably fix this problem on this podcast.

Christina: We could burn them all.

John: That’s a thing we could do.

Christina: Just as a suggestion, guys, this is why you invite me back. Great ideas.

John: Great. Let’s continue on with mammograms. This is from 679. We were talking about mammograms.

Drew: Stephanie B. writes, I’m writing in response to 679, where the terrific Liz Hannah’s one cool thing is to get a mammogram. She pointed out that insurance doesn’t always cover mammograms if the patient is under a certain age.

Even after age 40, my health insurance only covers mammograms every other year. I paid out of pocket for my own mammograms on the off years. There’s a little secret hospitals don’t advertise. They will almost always discount an uninsured procedure like mammograms. My hospital in Atlanta gives me an 80% discount for the mammograms if I pay out of pocket.

Always ask and call around to check different hospitals because this is one time when it doesn’t matter if a hospital is out of network since insurance isn’t covering it anyway. My breast cancer was caught early with a mammogram I paid for on my own and it was taken care of quickly. I’m so, so glad I didn’t wait another year to get a mammogram that my insurance would have paid for. Please don’t put it off. To all the men listening, please remind all the women you love to schedule a mammogram. They really do save lives.

John: This is great advice. I was like, I’m not following mammogram advice super closely. I have a daughter who will eventually need mammograms. I will say that the women in my life who’ve had breast cancer, it’s always been a situation like, oh, I should have gotten a mammogram earlier, but because of insurance, because of whatever, I didn’t do it. If you have any suspicions, if you have any reasons to think-

Christina: Even if it’s not an insurance thing, people just put them off.

John: They do.

Christina: Because it feels like you just did it because a year now goes in like a week. You still got to go.

John: You still got to go. Same thing with colonoscopies. When you reach the age of getting colonoscopies, you just do it and it helps.

Finally a bit of follow up, Birdigo, which is the game that I’ve been making with Corey Martin. We had a demo that people loved and a lot of people were running and saying like, hey, I played through the first 50 legs that came for free in the demo and I want to just keep on playing. Basically, I’m jonesing for more Birdigo and I’m locked out. What we’ve done is we’ve unlocked the first level for everybody so you can play it as many times as you want. We added a bunch of new feathers to get your points up higher and we added keyboard support. If you’re playing on your laptop, it’s actually a really great, fast and different game. If you want a little word game that has really cute, fat birds in it, Birdigo is on Steam right now. They’re really cute little birds.

Christina: I’m very excited to pick it up now that I know it’s yours, I didn’t realize, I saw it on the agenda and thought, but now I’m very excited to find out.

John: Birdigo is like Scrabble or Boggle, but with cute little birds.

Christina: Who doesn’t like that?

John: You just play yourself and it’s tremendously fun.

Let’s get to our marquee topic here, Christina Hodson. I want to talk about writing action because you’ve become an action sort of go-to writer. I see that grimace, but it is true. That is probably top of your calling card, is you write big action movies with set pieces in them.

I love a set piece. I love a set piece that works really well and so often you read bad set pieces in scripts. Let’s just talk about what doesn’t work on set pieces in scripts and the bad things we’ve read, because I’m sure you’ve gotten sent stuff where it’s like, oh no, no, no.

Christina: It’s so bad. There’s so many different ways to make them bad. I feel like we should be positive though and talk about what makes them good. Bad things are like, when it’s a whole block of text that you turn the page, no one speaks, and it just makes you go, oh God. Because it’s fine if no one speaks during an action set piece. It’s like, oftentimes people can’t speak during an action set piece, but you can still break up the page. The white space on the page is critical.

John: Yes, this podcast has been about white space on the page since episode one. It’s just so crucial to help the reader get their way down the page, because if you give them a wall of text, they’re going to skim.

Christina: I know, it’s really sad, isn’t it? We can read books, but in screenplays, if you turn the page and you just see like wall of text on two sides, you’re like, no, I won’t.

John: No. Some bad action sequences on a page, I just get lost. I have no idea, like what am I actually supposed to be following? What is the point? What is the purpose? What would I be seeing?

Christina: Sometimes people feel like, because they know they want the set piece to be two or three minutes long, they have to cover two or three pages, but they don’t actually have anything to say for two or three pages. They just write stuff and then you read it and you get so bored and so lost.

The big thing I find really frustrating is when the person clearly has zero sense of the geography of the space. That’s how I think you can tell, and this is where I’ll turn it into a positive because I’m so positive today, John.

When you read a writer who has a good handle of the geography of the scene they’re writing in, it can be in any genre. We ran a writer’s program, Lucky Chap and my company, and we were looking for writers who wanted to write in the action space. Often they didn’t already have an action sample and that was the whole point of why they wanted to do the program. You can tell even in a drama when someone has a handle on the geography of a scene, because they use whether or not someone is in the room, out of the room, coming in, walking in, sitting down, standing up. All of the spatial stuff basically that can add tension and storytelling and character stuff is there on the page, whatever the genre. A really good writer and a really good action writer always has a sense of the geography of the space.

John: Absolutely. You sense that you are in that space with them. We talk about, we see and we hear useful things that a screenwriter might choose to use, but it’s crucial that you as the screenwriter are placing the reader in the seat, in the theater. Experiencing this thing around them and so they’re simultaneously within the space of the scene and what it’s going to feel like on that screen.

Doing both things at the same time, it’s really tough. I think people tend to give short shrift to action writing because they feel like, oh, well, it’s storyboarded and there’s a stunt coordinator and the director and all that stuff. All true, but there has to be a plan for it on the page.

Christina: Yes. Also, I was going to say, this is a really important thing where there’s a big difference to me between a production draft, like a shooting draft and your first draft. The draft that’s going to go out that you’re trying to sell a spec with is written completely differently to the one that they’re going to shoot on the final day. The first pass of the Flash, by the way, first 12 drafts of the Flash, the third act is very, very short because it wasn’t intended to go on and on. It was like quite short and simple and contained and whatever.

By the time we got to the end, there’s 30 extra pages because you’ve got, like you say, HODs who want to do this and actors who want to do that and different set pieces and things that need to be all laid out really cleanly on the page. You can’t be sexy and succinct in the production draft because you’ve got hundreds of people whose jobs are dependent on understanding exactly what it is that the director wants to put on screen.

John: I want to both agree with you and also encourage our listeners not to take that too far. The idea that like a shooting draft is completely different than a script you sell, for a lot of things, it’s not. You shouldn’t at least discount the work that you’re doing in your production, in your own script.

Christina: Oh, I think the first one is way more important, because that’s the one that sells it.

John: Exactly.

Christina: That’s the one that gets you the job, gets you the next draft, sells you the project.

John: Absolutely.

Christina: To me, that’s a thousand times more important. I hate my production drafts. I sometimes like my first draft.

John: Sometimes the production draft, it’s because you’ve had to add all these little scenes to do these different things.

Christina: Costumes are asking you to like state exactly what weapons everyone’s holding and what exactly everyone’s wearing and when the jackets come on and off and stuff that you don’t normally care about.

John: Really inelegant stuff.

Christina: Yes, really inelegant stuff.

John: Absolutely. What we’re mostly talking about here, like this is the writing that you’re doing to let everyone see like this is the movie. You’re selling the movie on the page. That means you have to really clearly communicate what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what we’re feeling.

Christina: I was about to say, feeling for me is the main thing. You can change so many things about the way the action plays out and the specifics of the space, but the feeling should stay vaguely the same. You should know what you want it to feel like, the intensities, like the ebbs and the lulls.

John: Absolutely. And the vibe. Is this a cool, crisp, everything is sort of precise or is it just chaos? That’s the thing that you’re going to be able to communicate on the page. I think most crucially is, yes, you as the writer and storyteller are welcoming us to this world, but if we don’t have characters and the character’s experience within those moments, it’s pointless.

I’m thinking back to The Flash and like some of the moments you have, which I love The Flash, by the way, I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast. All the scandal around The Flash and Ezra and everything else, it’s a really good movie and Ezra Miller is good in it too. As challenging as everything was around that, it was so specific to that character’s experience of those moments is what makes it land.

Christina: I also think just generally people, not even just beginning writers, I think a lot of writers sometimes think put character on hold and just focus on the action. To me, like you’re going to have a dead set piece if you’re only thinking about the action. You have to be telling a character’s story through the action. You can reveal so much about a person in the way that they fight or the way that they run or the way– Like, are they resourceful? Are they sloppy? All of those things and the way people work together, to me, each of those action set pieces should have its own beginning, middle and end that gives you a little story arc and a character arc.

John: I pulled out three examples of some really good action writing and some really different action writing to show the range of what this looks like and feels like. The first is from James Cameron’s Aliens, which we’ve referenced endlessly on this podcast.

Christina: Why not? Just keep referencing it.

John: It’s so good. As you guys are watching, it’s scene 114, but it comes pretty late in the movie. They are waiting for this ship to take them back up to the station. I’ll read this aloud, but we’ll put a link in the show notes too.

They watch in dismay as the approaching ship dips and veers wildly. That’s uppercased. Its main engines roar full on as the craft accelerates towards them, even as it loses altitude. It skims the ground, clips a rock formation. The ship slews, side-slipping. It hits a ridge, tumbles, bursting into flame, breaking up. It arcs into the air, end over end, a Catherine wheel juggernaut. Ripley shouts, run. She grabs Newt and sprints for cover as a tumbling section of the ship’s massive engine module slams into the APC and it explodes in twisted wreckage. A drop ship skips again, like a stone engulfed in flames and crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball. It goes on. It gets to the Hudson’s. We are in some real pretty shit here.

Christina: I want to ask you a question.

John: Yes.

Christina: How do you feel about caps in action?

John: Let’s talk about caps. Here’s what’s uppercased in this section. Crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball, that’s uppercase. Roars full on, veers wildly. To me, these are things that are sort of catching my eye and also, they tend to underline sounds that are happening here. How are you feeling about the uppercase?

Christina: Generally sound I do in caps, generally. In action, it gets so tricky because there’s so many loud moments and there’s so many big moments and crashes. If you do every crash and bang and whatever, capital can get too much. I have had one hilarious experience in a studio job with an old school, terrible producer person who is no longer with us, so I can shit all over him. He was a mean, mean man. He once told me that a set piece I’d written, he was just like, “This is dead. This is nothing. This is terrible. You got to rewrite this completely. There should be real punch in it.”

I was not this much of an asshole, I only did this because this was 17 free drafts and it was early on in my career: I just added caps. I didn’t change anything else. Oh, I also underlined the scene headings. I resubmitted it and he was like, “This is incredible. This is what I’m talking about. This has real pizzazz.” I was like, wow. He just needed capital letters.

John: That’s what he needed. He needed something to hang on.

Christina: Underlining and capital letters. I just think there’s too much sometimes, I find it, like when it’s overused. This to me is nice.

John: This is really nice. These paragraphs are longer than I would normally use myself. This is like six or seven lines, some of these paragraphs. Yet I read every word of it. I was never tempted to skim because it was catching my attention, holding my attention. Sentence fragments are there. Clips of rock formation. Did it need a subject there? Great. You have parallel structures because basically you have the implied subject is continuing from sentence to sentence. It’s just really good writing.

Christina: Nice short sentences.

John: Love it. Let’s compare this to Tony Gilroy who wrote Bourne Identity and many other things including the new Andor. I’ll read this, but you actually do need to see this because what Tony is doing at the end of every sentence basically, it’s a dash-dash.

Christina: Not even end of sentence, he’s interrupting himself constantly.

John: Absolutely. Basically, it shows just constant movement. You feel like what the tension is.

Bourne, the light bulb. He’s tossing it across the room, over her head, into that frosted window and she ducks down as it shatters. Everything starts happening at once. Silenced automatic weapons fire, raking into the apartment, and the frosted window peppered with holes, and Marie on the floor as the window shatters above her. Castel, he’s in the air shaft hanging from an out-of-sail rope, but off guard, firing blind, strafing the apartment, and Bourne kicking that chair across the room, and Castle reacting, instinct moving target, and the chair just strafed to shit, and Bourne rolling away, and Castle, he’s coming in.

The last piece is a window frame crashing away as he swings to the apartment, and Marie, right below him, shit raining down as he flies, and Ward throwing the knife and Castle turning back too late, the knife catching him in the neck, and it just keeps going.

Christina: I think people need to read that, because it sounds crazy when you read it.

John: It does sound just absurd.

Christina: It’s fucking cool on the page.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Christina: Because you see exactly what it is. The thing that he does here, which I like very much and which I think is a little bit also a thing that we should talk about, which is breaking the rules. Which is he’s using the names of the characters to create shots which are almost like cut between.

John: Yes, totally.

Christina: You can’t realistically start. This is easier because you’re just in one room, one space with characters. Sometimes you’re doing an action set piece where you’re moving between characters who are not right next. They’re not really in the room together. They’re in the same, call it like industrial plant, but they’re in different spaces. If you had to do a new slug line for every time-

John: You can’t.

Christina: -it would just be an impossible read. I have had a line producer once who made me insert those later and it was horrific for the read.

John: No, impossible.

Christina: When you’re doing the first draft, forget the rules. Find your style. You can basically break the rules and do it however you like as long as you’re consistent with yourself.

It’s really annoying when people switch up. I’ve seen people who do in capital letters on John August, colon, and then do the next line and do whatever. Here, he’s just doing the name of the character in capitals and it’s one smooth sentence. Whatever you’re going to do, make it your style, but then stick to it throughout. Otherwise, it gets crazy making.

John: If you do have people in different spaces, but you’re constantly in between the two of them, what I’ll tend to do is establish a scene header for one, establish a scene header for the next one, and then say intercut. Then it’s really clear that I’m doing uppercase or whatever for the person when I’m back in their shot or in their space, because otherwise, it’s all scene headers and it’s exhausting for us. Here, what I like so much about what Tony is doing is it’s almost you’re seeing shot by shot. Each line is basically just a shot, and it’s great.

Christina: Oh, I had one that I thought of last night when I was thinking about this. One of my favorite ones. We’re like– Just, you know Tony Gilroy, David Koepp. David Koepp’s Jurassic Park script, the one that he’s got on his website, is so good.

The sequence that is the best where they’re outside the T-Rex Paddock when the power goes down. He does this really well, where he’s moving between the two cars, different spaces, very fluently, and it just ups the attention massively, because every time you move away from one character, you’re wondering what’s happening to the other one and it’s fantastic use of exactly this.

John: Yes. Let’s wrap this up with The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The version I could find for this isn’t properly formatted, so there should be actually a little extra returns and spaces in there. I liked a lot of what they were doing here.

Exterior lab day, Jacobs, a security guard, and the two officers are huddled behind a squad car. Other employees are hiding and watching from the safety of the parking lot. They suddenly realize that everything has gone silent. A moment later, lab doors fly open. Officer 1 says, “Here they come. A massive primate barrel towards them.”

Officer 2, “There’s more of them.” Jacobs, “Those are my chimps.” They duck as the apes run by. Some of them get right up and over the car they’re crouched behind. Bam, bam, bam, bam, as the chimps hit and leapfrog over the squad car and their heads. The apes stampede across the parking lot, where several use Jacob’s black jaguar to vault over the fence. The last is Buck, whose weight crushes the car and then they’re gone, every last one of them. Quiet now, except for car alarms.

Christina: Nice.

John: Nice. It’s really smart writing here. I loved how much I could hear it and feel it. I loved the way crushing the car. There was an anticipation. It felt just right.

Christina: Yes, and you feel the chaos work is quiet, which is lovely. It gives you a nice out on the scene. People sometimes just forget about the end. The end is really important.

John: The end is really important. Absolutely. I always think about action sequences as being like, they’re the songs in a musical. Instead of breaking into song and dance, you’re breaking into this action sequence. Those are going to have beginnings and middles and ends. They’re going to have verses and choruses. It’s going to feel like a thing. Often, it’s just like, action is just happening and then it’s over and you don’t know it. Nothing’s really been achieved.

Christina: You feel nothing.

John: Yes. Empty action is just–

Christina: Such a bummer.

John: It’s a huge bummer.

Christina: It’s a waste.

John: Yes, it is. Talk to us about Flash or Bumblebee or Birds of Prey. Action writing on the page that was surprisingly difficult, that was a real challenge to convey. You might have had a vision in your mind, but it was actually hard to get those words down.

Christina: They’re all difficult. It’s one of the bits I love them most. It’s the bit for our job that feels most like playing.

John: It is.

Christina: I literally will get the toys and play with them. For Transformers, I made them send me Bumblebees, which, by the way, was really hard to get. You’d think that would be really easy working with Hasbro trying to get hold of Bumblebees?

John: No.

Christina: No, it was not easy. Yes, I wanted to the toys, because for me, there were things like the way they transform and using action through the way they’re transforming. That is incredibly hard to write because it’s nebulous.

It’s actually interesting with the Alien, that’s an interesting example, because when you’re writing that stuff that doesn’t exist, you have to pick a lane on how much you’re going to describe stuff. Because you can’t go into crazy detail and just put every new nebulizer and whatever. You just can’t, because it gets so boring on the page. You also need to create a sense that this is otherworldly and it is different. It’s a really tricky balance.

John: Talk us about then on the page, how are you talking about transforming? Are you describing those middle states? Are you describing how a limb as a limb is shifting from one thing or phase to another? What kind of stuff are you doing?

Christina: I have two things that inspired me. One is that I wanted the kids in the audience to feel the way I felt when I was a kid and I was playing with Transformers. Which sometimes it’s really fucking tricky and you’re trying to bend that arm back into a bloody door and you can’t. I wanted do that for Bumblebee. He’s a broken robot. I wanted to sometimes feel that. Mostly, I would go by the way it felt for the characters doing it.

Then I also went with the way it was for Charlie, Hailey Seinfeld’s character, is what does it feel like around her? Often, that was more about scale and sound rather than specifics of names of pieces and things. It was just about what would it be like if your sweet little Volkswagen Beetle just stood up and towered over you. Yes, playing with sounds, feelings, scale, things like that.

John: Scale is a thing that’s often missing in action-side pieces too, or on the page, you’re just not feeling like, you have a semi-truck and you have a bicycle. It’s that difference–

Christina: Missing or just that wildly wrong?

John: Yes.

Christina: The number of times I’ve seen people dive off a thing 300 feet and you’re like, “They would be dead. That’s not a thing. You can’t do that.” People often get scale wrong and distances away from each other.

I really recommend to people that they look online or go out into the world and measure things and feel what it’s like, because otherwise it just feels silly. As soon as people start doing that, as soon as you don’t feel that you can trust the writer, that they know what they’re talking about, you check out a little bit because you’re like, “This is just nonsense.”

John: You mentioned LuckyChap, and I remember having lunch with you. You were talking through this program you were working with LuckyChap to help writers who are not traditionally action writers get some experience there. What were you teaching them? What were the common things you saw that you needed to get people comfortable writing?

Christina: Honestly, it was more about teaching them how to get into the space rather than doing the actual writing. They were a whole mixture of levels. There was one writer who wasn’t even in the guild yet, and then there were many who were experienced in TV but had never been in features. Like I said, when we were reading submissions for those, we were often reading a drama as a sample for someone who wanted to be an action writer. You could get the sense of whether they could.

What we were really “teaching,” I shouldn’t be allowed to teach anyone anything. What we were really focusing on was how we would help them outline the movie. They came in with sometimes a title, sometimes an idea, sometimes just a character dynamic. Then we spent four weeks all day, every day in a room, breaking those movies down, outlining them so that when they were pitching them, they actually had a whole movie rather than just a kernel of an idea. Then we had wonderful people come in, talk to them about–

One of the things actually, which is one of the things we should talk about here, which is Chad Stahelski came in and talked to them about writing action and creating action set pieces. Chad Stahelski did the John Wick movies. If you’re interested in this topic, go look up any of his stuff online. He talks about this stuff incredibly eloquently because he comes at it from a place of real passion and love. He talks about Buster Keaton and humor and storytelling all the way through action. It’s not just like, pull out your guns and go bang, bang, because that’s going to be boring.

John: We had Ryan Reynolds on the podcast talking about Deadpool and really thinking about that as a physical comedy movie. Really making sure the set pieces reflected the specificity of who that character was and what they were trying to do and why those set pieces were not [unintelligible 00:29:33] other things.

Christina: It was so playful and fun and funny all the way through.

John: Absolutely. Getting back to what you were doing with LuckyChap, what’s so important about the way you’re approaching it is that it’s not like an action sequence is something you drop into another movie. You have to build a movie that can support an action sequence. And you have to build the action sequence that actually tells the story, and they have to go hand in hand.

Christina: Yes, absolutely. Otherwise, you just end up with a piece that feels wonky and weird. Which happens a lot.

John: It does happen a lot.

Christina: Wait, you said one thing, though, which I think we should talk about.

John: Please.

Christina: Specificity.

John: Yes.

Christina: Because this is a real Goldilocks one, and I’m sure you, have found this. Either people are way too specific, and they’re using all these terms that you don’t know for martial arts that you wish you knew, but you don’t, or they’re not specific enough and it’s just like, “Uppercut, uppercut.” That’s a bummer, too. You don’t want to– Listen, we all know there are some writers who write, “This will be the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen,” but don’t do that.

John: Never do that.

Christina: Just don’t do that. I know people have gotten away with it, but don’t do it.

John: When you see that in a script, you feel like they’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed by this. They recognize it’s going to be hard to do, and so they just don’t want to actually do it.

Christina: Or, they’re just really cocky.

John: Yes.

Christina: Anyway, but I do think it’s a mix with the specificity. For me, I look at it as zooming in and out as well, particularly in things like battle sequences. I’ve had to write a few, big scale battle sequences where you’ve got hundreds of people and then key characters that you have to follow. For me, often that is about picking the moments that you want to highlight. I’m not saying never use specific martial arts terms. If it’s relevant, because, for example, it’s a character who’s just learned a thing that they didn’t know, if you’re writing Neo, sure, it’s fucking cool to drop in a turn that it doesn’t matter that the reader doesn’t know exactly what that kick looks like. Because the fact that they don’t know what it looks like helps inform the way the character is experiencing it too.

Then also have moments where you zoom out, particularly if it’s a big, long battle sequence or something. Go from a tiny detail of swords clashing between two characters you know, and then zoom back out to what it feels like to be on that battlefield.

The other example that I love of this that I read often when I was writing, I wrote a Swords and Sandals thing at some point. David Benioff, of course, is masterful. David Benioff’s Troy script, that film is fun. It’s not one that anyone ever talks about. The battle sequences in that are incredible. Then there’s a really good one-on-one fight scene where he does another thing of “breaking the rules”, where he does–

It’s the Orlando Bloom plays Paris, when Paris fights Menelaus in that one-on-one in front of everyone. He does a very cool thing where he goes into Paris’s POV and he switches to second person. It’s all, you’re in there sweating, like you can feel your heart beating. It’s really fun and it’s really evocative.

John: All right, we’ll find that script and put a link into the show notes. Actually, I’ve never read it.

Christina: It’s cool. It’s very cool.

John: Awesome. Let us move on to our next topic, which is how would this be a movie? For folks who are new to the podcast or new to this segment, every once in a while, we’ll put out a call to our listeners and say, hey, tell us stories from history or from the news that you’re curious about how we might make these into movies. The examples that we’re talking through today, some were things that I just happened to stumble across and bookmarked. Other stories come from our listeners who sent them in.

All right, our first one is A Man of Parts and Learning. It ran in the London Review of Books. It’s written by Fara Dabhoiwala and it tells the story of Francis Williams and sort of the backstory, but mostly centers around this painting, which was a real question of like, is this painting a portrait in a positive light or a negative light? Is it just super racist? Drew, can you help us out with a summary of what we know about this?

Drew: Sure. In 1928, this unknown, strangely proportioned painting turns up from the 1700s. It’s determined to be this portrait of a black Jamaican intellectual named Francis Williams and that it was formerly owned by a white writer named Edward Long who wrote the book History of Jamaica in 1774.

John: Let me stop you there because at this point in the article, you actually see what the painting is, which is included here. If you look at it, it is a man who’s dressed in a formal attire. He’s got a blue coat, gold trim, white waistcoat, knee length, breeches, and his impossibly skinny legs. He’s got this powdered white wig. His hands are tiny. One is resting on this open book. His face feels out of proportion to everything else. You’re like-

Christina: Is it very good?

John: Is it very good? It reminded me a bit of, there was that Spanish painting, The Restoration of Ecce Homo, with the Jesus face. I don’t know if they have repainted it. It’s not that bad, but it’s not good.

Christina: Yes, although I will say so. I looked at it and was like, “Oh, why are we going to talk about this just not very good painting.” By the end of it, I fucking love the painting.

John: Yes, isn’t it great?

Christina: Yes.

John: You cannot tell at the start, is this a mockery? Is it a satire? Continue with what the description is.

Drew: Francis Williams was born enslaved, but he eventually gained his freedom. He was wealthy. He was Cambridge educated. He was arguably the most famous Black man in the world at the time. Lon’s book is actually a racist hatchet job. It’s incredibly denigrating and dismissive of Williams and many white scientific racists, which is a term they used a lot in this. At the time, they attacked Williams’ achievements in order to argue that slavery was necessary.

At first, this portrait’s value is dismissed. Then later it’s rediscovered. It’s assumed by scholars that it is this caricature meant to mock Francis Williams. After this author commissions a modern high resolution scan, it’s discovered that the painting is actually a rebuke of the racist assaults and character assassinations that Williams endured. The author researches every detail to discover it was likely commissioned by Francis Williams from this avant-garde American painter named William Williams.

Christina: I love this article.

John: Yes.

Christina: I’m not going to lie. When I saw it on the internet, I was like, this is going to be dry. It’s so long. I was like, John, why are you making me read this? I loved it.

John: Yes, I loved it.

Christina: There’s twists and turns and reveals. Everyone should go read it. That doesn’t make it an easy movie.

John: It doesn’t make it an easy movie. Let’s talk about sort of ways into this movie. Because, okay, this is a biography of Francis Williams, which is certainly possible. He was the most well-known Black person in the world at a certain time. Grew up enslaved, got out of slavery, but then ended up having slaves of his own. That’s problematic.

Christina: Problematic, yes.

John: Studied at Cambridge. Clearly very, very smart. He was a member of scientific organizations. In the forensics of doing this painting, Dabhoiwala actually discovers that, oh, that’s Halley’s Comet in the background. He actually literally had proven when Halley’s Comet was coming back. Clearly a brilliant man. You could do the straight biopic without looking at the painting. I don’t think you would. The painting is too interesting.

Christina: No, I was thinking of like comps. If you do the academic version where it’s about him, there’s like the theory of everything, but that’s Hawking who everyone knows. There’s a beautiful mind, but that’s really about something actually very different. I then thought about Belle written by Misan Sagay and Amma Asante, which was also actually based on a painting. There was very little known about her story. It was really just a painting, and then they created this fictional story. None of those feel quite right for this one. Did you find a way in?

John: I’m not sure I found a way in.

Christina: I’ve got two, just to be competitive.

John: All right. I have zero, you have two. My halfway in is I do think you’re probably intercutting between the investigation of the painting and the real person and sort of how stuff reshapes around that. I’m curious what you’re-

Christina: That was one of my two, John. Thank you for saying you had zero. That’s one, and I was trying to find them. Please, for the love of God, can one of your readers find the movie that is on the tip of my brain that I cannot find? There is a movie. It’s not The Hours, but it’s not totally similar to The Hours, where it is playing with someone in the present investigating something in the past. It’s a little bit Possession, but I haven’t seen Possession, so I know it’s not Possession, the A.S Byatt one. It’s doing that intertextual thing where someone is discovering and learning something in an old thing, and then you’re seeing that thing play out at the same time.

I do think you could do that. I think the reason, though, that we both want to do that, is just that it’s so fascinating what this very, very deeply passionate, nerdy person did. Who doesn’t love that? Someone going deep diving on this, the details and the twists and turns and how exciting it is when they reveal, this tiny little detail that you didn’t notice before. I think it’s too nerdy to be a movie.

Then the way in that I actually got excited about was the person that painted it, William Williams. Super fucking interesting. The first known paintings of this person, one was a celebrated Native American, one was an outspoken abolitionist, and then the third, according to this, is this guy. It’s Francis Williams.

John: If you look at the other paintings, they’re all weird in the same way.

Christina: Oh, and that’s why I came to love it. There’s details, like the wrinkled stockings. How cool and weird is that little detail?

John: I had assumed that he was just a bad painter who just didn’t see anything.

Christina: He’s not.

John: He’s actually not.

Christina: He’s not. He’s awesome.

John: It’s the same way that Tim Burton draws really exaggerated people. He draws exaggerated things.

Christina: Totally. There is something I think potentially really interesting about the relationship between– The idea is that Francis Williams, at the end of his life, he’s wealthy. They all said he was by then nothing. He’s wealthy and successful, he is. He does own some slaves, and I’d like to gloss over that. He’s doing Rodale, and he chooses to commission this. He’s the one who chooses what goes in the painting. There is something really powerful about the idea of an older Black man, and this young white artist. This man is trying to tell the story of his life through the white man’s paintbrush, because that’s the only way he can get his story to actually be listened to, because no one will fucking listen.

He’s got this idiot, Ed Long, who’s written this horrific book that just makes him sound like nothing and has basically erased him from history. He’s choosing to put himself in history. There is something potentially really beautiful about that friendship between them that could be– Obviously, it’s not a Portrait of a Lady on Fire, that becomes a romantic relationship.

Lindsay Doran, I went to one of her amazing talks at Austin Film Festival, and at the end of it, she was talking about King’s Speech and how they tested that movie, and it didn’t test that great. Then all they did was add the title card at the end that talks about the lasting friendship between the King and his speech consultant, passing, and that friendship.

Just that title card, just saying they were friends until they died, just completely transformed the scores. It makes sense. This is what I was missing from the story, is I want a friendship or a relationship story at the core of it. That, to me, felt like the most obvious place to put it. Let’s sell it.

John: We’re selling it. We’re selling it tomorrow.

Christina: John, taking it out tomorrow and we’ll sell it.

John: I’m embarrassed. Seemed to me like there’s no relationship in here. You need to establish those relationships because it cannot be between the person investigating him and Williams himself, because that is–

Christina: You could, but it’s such a struggle.

John: It’s Julie and Julia, and they’re separated by time and place. I do feel like some equivalent of the journalist of Fara Dabhoiwala feels important because there are so many cool things he discovers along the way. He discovers that like, oh, that book on the shelf is actually this book and this book could have only gotten there by–

Christina: I know, but aren’t we just excited about that because we’re nerds? In a movie, is that as exciting as we think it would be, or would it be cool to see it from the perspective of Francis having William Easter egg it in the thing? I’m so with you. I loved reading it.

John: Yes, but it is a cinematic idea.

Christina: I don’t know, but it’s cinematically exciting being like, oh look, this book was published in this year so it couldn’t possibly have been 1726. It must’ve been 1762. We’re excited, but we’re losers.

[laughter]

John: We are losers, but I think that’s potentially a good story. Really difficult to break. I think just the outlining of this is really tough on how you’re moving back and forth between the timelines and how you’re telling stuff. I think it’s also really cool.

Christina: Everyone should read it.

John: Everyone should read it. Second story, when a deadly winter storm trapped a luxury passenger train near the Donner Pass for three days. The article we’re reading is by Robert Klara for Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a true life event that happened. Drew, talk us through what the reality was.

Drew: In January, 1952, a severe blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada and traps this luxury passenger train, the City of San Francisco, near the Donner Pass. The train, en route from Chicago to San Francisco, becomes immobilized by massive snow drifts, stranding 226 passengers and crew members for three days. During this period, they endured freezing temperatures, dwindling food supplies, and the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rescue efforts were hampered by the harsh conditions, but eventually, all individuals are safely evacuated.

John: Christina, so we’ve had many train movies. We have Snowpiercer, we have Murder on the Orient Express, which actually features a train that gets stuck in snow as a plot point. This was a real-life historical incident. Some people died in the process of rescuing things, but no one on the train itself appears to have died. Is there a movie here, in your estimation?

Christina: I think it could work as a setting in the way that those movies used it as a setting. I think it could be a really fun setting for anything from a heist, to a murder thing, to a whatever. Is there a version where it’s really– It’s not Society of the Snow. They don’t eat each other. It’s only three days. They’re a little thirsty and a little hungry. I’m not that excited about it. I would want to either add a big genre element, like a thriller, heisty, murdery thing, potentially a romance.

By coincidence, these are both train movies, but Brief Encounter and Before Sunrise came to mind, where you have some intense love story that develops in three days. Then at the end of three days, they have to say goodbye to each other forever. The one detail in the story that made me giggle and made me think of Triangle of Sadness was that there were some dedicated staff who remained on latrine patrol, and they would take buckets of snow and deal with all the piss and shit [laughter], which you could do some funny satirical class thing, maybe.

John: Yes, Train to Busan hits on some of that stuff too. I agree that this is a setting, but it’s not actually a movie. It’s not a story, because we don’t have characters in there yet. We just have a general place.

I think them being trapped is part of it, but I think they’re going from where they’re stuck to whatever tiny town they end up in, it’s also fun. There’s something about that feels interesting too, and it could lend itself to a comedy. It could lend itself to something else, because there’s like, the whole point of a train is that you get to bypass all these places that you would otherwise get stuck in.

Christina: Oh, like that. A bunch of rich people descending on a small mountain can be kind of funny.

John: Absolutely. There’ve been various versions of it, but for 9/11, when all the planes got grounded, there was a plane that was stuck in a tiny town in Canada. There’s an article called When the World Came to Town. It’s essentially just like, it’s a bunch of people stuck in an unfamiliar environment. It’s always a good setup for comedy. I didn’t feel like a pressing need to take this one exact point.

Christina: We won’t be pitching this one tomorrow as well?

John: No.

Christina: We’ll just stick with A Man of Parts and Learning.

John: Yes. Next up, a UK teen’s parents send him to Ghana. He took them to court by Lynsey Chutel for the New York Times. Laurie Donahue, a listener, sent this through.

Drew: British parents send their teenage son to a boarding school in Ghana believing he is at risk for being drawn into gang culture in London. The boy, initially unaware of his parents’ intentions, thinks that he’s visiting a sick relative, but upon discovering true reason for the trip, he contacted the British consulate and initiated legal proceedings against his parents, alleging abandonment and seeking to return to the UK. However, the judge ruled that the parents acted lawfully within their parental rights to safeguard their son from potential criminal activities.

Christina: He’s still there, guys. I read this and then only got to the very end where I was like, “Oh, this kid is still only–” He went when he was 12. He’s still there. He’s only 14 or 15 now, still stuck.

John: Still stuck in Ghana.

Christina: It’s harsh.

John: As we said before, relationships are important. Lots of relationships here and lots of really interesting relationships. You can definitely see the multiple perspectives on what this is. This is a family that wants to protect their kid, and they believe that their kid is safer in Ghana than he would be in London. That’s really interesting. That perspective is really interesting. We can see it from the kid’s point of view. It’s like, “Oh my God, how could you ship me away to Ghana when I have this life here in London?” You would think that the life would be better and easier for him in London. Yet-

Christina: The judge said no.

John: The judge said no, and also knife culture.

Christina: Oh my God, I know. The judge said it was like a sobering and depressing moment. I was like, “Yes, as a British person reading this, this just makes me real sad.” The picture of the knives in the London like [crosstalk]–

John: All the seized knives, yes.

Christina: London, not so good. If you’re willing to trick your 12-year-old and send them away to a country where they basically know no one, because I think he actually doesn’t– They’re from there, but he really doesn’t seem to know anyone from there. Just sending your kid anywhere where they don’t know anyone and in that situation, you’ve got to really be worried about where things are at in London. Yes, I feel bad for London.

The only way I would want to see this as a movie is if it starts with this setup, it’s super depressing, but then it becomes magical and wonderful. He finds incredible friends and the school is amazing, and he ends up really happy. The version where he sues his parents is– The version where they send him and then he discovers great things and connects with family and whatever, that could be great.

John: There’s a version of this where he wins the lawsuit and is able to get back. It’s a question like, do you need any–

Christina: Gets back to the knives on the streets of London.

John: Get back to the knives, or that, basically, his parents’ vision for what his life was like is actually not accurate or he’s able to overcome it. Those tensions are really interesting. I don’t think you need these actual people at all. I think the situation is what you care about and you could pick a different kid, a different family. It doesn’t have to be Ghana. It could be whatever.

That idea of this immigrant family who’s come to a place with one vision and then they see the dangers in this vision and they want to send their kid back to the place they came from, it’s really understandable and relatable. We can see both the family’s point of view and from the kid’s point of view, why it’s [crosstalk]–

Christina: Maybe that’s the way it is, that there’s something nice about if the kid can learn to see in his parents’ home country what they see in their home country, and they can then see in their new home country what their son does. Maybe there’s something redemptive and nice there.

John: Also, I think about the non-immigrant families, you’re always worried for your kids and you’re always, you want to protect them. What that means and what you’re able to do really depends on where you come from. A family of greater economic means can send them to a private school. They can shelter them. For this family, this is what they thought their best option was. From the kid’s point of view, of course, they’re going to say no. That’s not what they want. Is it a movie?

Christina: I’m going to say no.

John: Yes, I think it’s maybe a movie. I feel like it’s like a Sundance-y movie.

Christina: Oh. Yes.

John: I think it’s a smaller movie, but I think it could– I don’t know. I think the good version of this gets some Academy Award attention.

Christina: Do you end it happy or sad?

John: I don’t know. You could end it in a way that like a Palme d’Or winning movie at Cannes is neither happy nor sad, just sort of in that place.

Christina: Crunch [laughs].

John: It’s a crunch. I could imagine this being a movie that actually comes from the country that they’re being sent back to. Essentially, if it was a Ghanaian movie and this is basically the same setup, but you really follow the story as it happens back in Ghana, that’s also really interesting.

Finally, zombie colleges. These universities are living another life online and no one can say why. The article we’re looking at is by Chris Quintana from USA Today. Drew, talk us through what this article is describing.

Drew: The author starts looking into these zombie colleges. There’s one called Stratford. It ends up being these colleges that used to be real, but have since shuttered and they’re online, but they’re connected to nothing.

Christina: To be clear, Drew, there are no zombies attending the colleges.

John: Yes, I was a little disappointed too when I ended up past the headline.

Drew: We don’t know.

John: Here’s the reality. There are these colleges that shut down because they were no longer economically viable. Then somebody, somewhere, it’s like, oh, I can pull them up online and get people to-

Christina: Give me application fees.

John: Give me application fees and basically cash the application fees. In some cases, they will actually like, someone from that college will call you about what major do you want to study. A person naively could think like, “Oh, this is a real place.” I guess because these colleges were real as of a couple of years ago, googling them, you might think that there’s still a viable college. It’s not nearly as much fun as a college for zombies, though.

[laughter]

Christina: Oh, I know. On my little notes that I jotted down last night, for the first one, as you could tell, I got excited and wrote a whole page of scribbles. Then there’s like less for the train, and there’s like three lines for the UK teen. For the zombie one, you will see it’s literally just the bullet point and nothing.

John: An empty bullet point. There’s something cool about that. The term “zombie college” is better than the actual story.

Christina: Than the actual story [laughs].

John: It’s just a scam. A journalist investigating a scam can be interesting, and maybe it can lead someplace. At the end of this article, I didn’t have a bigger perspective on it’s just scammy people doing a scam.

Christina: People who go to college and want to eat each other’s brains, who doesn’t want to watch that?

John: Yes, that’s good. Yes on zombie colleges, no on this specific article. Let’s do a recap of how this would be a movie. I think we’re both excited for A Man of Parts and Learning, a Francis Williams movie. Difficult, but potentially great. Some really good roles in there. The trapped luxury train, it’s a setting, but it’s also a setting we’ve seen, so you’d have to do something interesting and new with it. I don’t think you need to have that specific incident as the basis. The Ghanaian teen, I think it’s a small movie. You’re less convinced.

Christina: I’m less convinced. I think you could, but I think anything could be a small little indie. Is it going to be a good small–? I think you should start out writing a small little indie being like, this could really work and move people. I see why people leave the Eccles Theatre clapping.

John: Yes. Honestly, I bet there’s a filmmaker out there who won’t have the identical life, but will have a similar life. I think you could find somebody who can make this movie and is like, oh yes, that’s my story. Honestly, the opposite is probably very common too. I have a couple of friends who’ve- they grew up in a struggling country and the parents shipped them off to the US or to the UK. They never saw their parents again, but their parents did everything they could to put them out there in the world.

All right. Let’s answer a question or two. We have Albin in Finland.

Drew: I was wondering how you create side characters specifically. Are there any guiding practices to help you figure out what side characters should be present in a story and what role they should play, or does it come up naturally? I found that it’s difficult to write a first draft when I don’t exactly know what roles all the characters should play in the narrative. I think getting a better grasp of this would help immensely.

John: Side characters, these are supporting folks who are not your protagonist, they’re not your antagonist or a key love interest. They’re characters who are in multiple scenes, but maybe it sounds like Albin doesn’t know quite who they are yet or what function they’re playing. Christina, as you are mapping out a story and you were actually just working on a project with a writing partner too, what are the conversations you’re having about those not central characters?

Christina: It’s really tricky because they take up space.

John: They do.

Christina: You don’t want them to be so generic that they’re just interchangeable. “I’m the funny best friend.” They’re always such a bummer to read. You also do want to utilize sometimes the shorthands. If you choose to have an assistant who is unusually older– Do you know what I mean? If you do something unusual with one of those characters, it can be really distracting in the reader and people go, well, something more is going to happen to that character, right? There’s got to be a reason why you made your assistant 65 years old.

It’s just a tricky one because it’s a bit Goldilocks. In theory, you want every side character to be like all the side characters in True Romance, where they’re the most amazingly specific, wonderful, life-enhancing humans. But also, you don’t want to be tediously shiny things all around the story.

John: I found that in planning out a story, those side characters who might appear in like three scenes over the course of the movie, I won’t really know who they are as I start writing. Then as I get into scenes and I recognize what I need in scenes, then they’ll become more specific and I’ll realize, okay, that’s this person who keeps coming back through, or I realize like this kind of character shows up in three different scenes, it should be the same character.

Christina: I sometimes think of it in terms of what our main character, what it says about them in the relationship with the main character. Often, I’ll use it as a parallel to another relationship. It’ll be a subtle thing that hopefully no one will ever even pay attention to, but you might just feel it there as an echo.

John: You can feel sometimes in scripts and in movies where a character is just there to set the ball so that the hero can spike it. That can be really annoying, and yet it’s also functional. Is that the character there who can evoke dialogue or actions from our hero that moves the story forward, that’s a good use for the character. You don’t want to think of them as strictly functional, but ultimately to you, they are, just the same way that your scenes are functional, even though they are hopefully engaging themselves.

Christina: I would say if you’re doing a pretty detailed outline, look back at the end of it and just make sure you clock which of the three scenes, and then maybe it’ll occur to you as you’re looking at it from a distance. Oh, I could do this, and then they would have their own mini little arc because people like to be closed out.

John: They do, yes.

Christina: No dingly danglies.

Drew: Let’s try one more here from Daryl. How can I establish a writing routine whilst trying to seemingly balance so much? I’m a student and I’m somewhat struggling to balance writing with school and exercise, healthy eating, living, and whatever else. Am I trying to do too much or do I just lack discipline?

John: Oh, Daryl, it’s all your fault.

Christina: Oh, Daryl, please get a good answer from John August and then give it to me because I don’t know yet. I still haven’t figured it out.

John: First, I want to ask about whilst. Do you use whilst?

Christina: Whilst, if I’m trying to sound very British and posh.

John: Yes, but you probably grew up using it. Are you using it in daily life in America?

Christina: Out loud with my mouth?

John: Yes [chuckles].

Christina: No. No whilst. Whilst. No, I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud.

John: [laughs] Listen, Daryl, you have to give yourself some grace. Yes, you’re trying to do a lot and if you are having a hard time fitting writing into your life and you want to do more writing, you need to recognize, okay, well, what are the times that I’m doing other stuff that I’m willing to not do that other stuff and write? That could just be giving something else up. It could mean making different choices about other hobbies and other stuff, but you’re going to have to make a choice to do some writing.

Christina: I’ve actually got recycled John August advice here.

John: I’m excited to hear it.

Christina: Because you changed my life a little bit with this, but it only lasted briefly because I’m an idiot and I can’t stick to anything. You, I can’t even remember if it was on the podcast or just in life, you told me about sprints.

John: Oh yes, let’s talk about sprints.

Christina: Just doing little short periods, setting yourself a goal. It can be really short, but giving yourself– Even if it’s 40 minutes, set a timer, just do it and don’t– Sometimes trying to clear out an afternoon for writing or a morning or a day is just impossible.

John: We won’t get more done in an afternoon.

Christina: No, you won’t. If you have a job and you have the whatever, and you come in the door and it’s the 40 minutes between walking in the door and making your dinner, and you just have 40 minutes, you will not get distracted. You will not look at your emails because you’re like, I only have 40 minutes. You have the timer running right next to you. Then you just go. You just give yourself a junk.

John: Yes. Just yesterday, I was doing that for edits on the ScreenPants book. I set the timer for an hour and I just did an hour’s worth of work. When the timer beeps, I went a little bit over that. If I had not set the timer, I don’t think it would have actually, I wouldn’t have opened the file.

Christina: I want you to know, I’m such an evangelist for your advice. I give it to everyone and I never do it myself. I don’t know why, because the period that I did it, I was the most productive I’ve ever been. I’m terrible.

John: Yes. Daryl, timers could help. Adjusting where you’re prioritizing that writing time can help too, because it can feel selfish to just take the time and to shut everybody else out to do stuff. That’s what writing is, yes.

Christina: We’re all selfish.

John: We’re all selfish. Be a little selfish. It’s time for our One Cool things. I have two comedy-related one cool things. I went and saw Mike Birbiglia’s new show, The Good Life, this last week. It’s so funny. He’s just so smart and so funny. He’s been on the show multiple times. It’s just observations on life and the way he’s able to weave in personal stuff and family stuff in ways that’s generous to the folks he’s including, but also helps talk about larger themes.

It’s so great to see somebody who can just do that so effortlessly. See his show. I think there are more dates on. We’ll put a link to his website in the show notes. You should also listen to his podcast called Working It Out, which is like Scriptnotes, but for standup comics and just talking through their process and how they come to what’s funny and they workshop some jokes in the course of it.

Second comedy thing is the print version of The Onion is just so good and people need to subscribe to it because it’s just so great. This last week’s just- everything, every story on the front page made me giggle. Trump administration offers free at home loyalty tests, Baby Saves Affair, US military bands man with girls names from combat. It’s all just so smart and to get it delivered.

Christina: It looks so lovely in your hand.

John: It feels so good. I strongly encourage you. We’ll put a link in the show notes to The Onion site, but it comes once a month and it’s just delightful. Christina, what do you have for us?

Christina: My one cool thing is a person and his company. It’s Padric Murphy who runs a company called the Research Department. It’s researchdebt.com. Drew will hopefully find a link and include it. He is amazing. I’ve known him for a number of years. He was a co-producer on Babylon, worked on a number of movies for a long time, worked with Baz Luhrmann for a long time, has always done research for movies just as part of his job.

Then a few years ago, just went out on his own, made it his job, set up this company. It’s just him right now. Although I think people should beg to be working with him because he’s just incredible.

I hired him last fall to research a story. I knew what I wanted. I knew the character stories. I knew the character dynamics. I knew everything that I wanted on a personal level, but I didn’t know when or where the story was set. I knew it was period, I knew I needed to deal with some colonial stuff, and I didn’t know what country or what time period because I didn’t know how I would then lay it into the history. It’s not about the history, but it’s very important that I have the setting.

Working with him was the most incredible experience because he’s not just a research nerd, he’s incredibly creative. His instincts on story and just listening to it and hearing it were amazing. The thing that he would do that was coolest was actually taking it all the way back to side characters.
I would have things like, “I’ve got this side character. It’s a maid.” We landed on Malaysia in 1914, which is not a place or a time that I knew much about. Then I had this side character who was a maid. I needed her to be of a certain ethnicity, a certain age. I was like, “This is what I think I want to do in the story. Does it sound plausible?”

He would go off and then find journal entries of people who were basically that same age, race, in the same time period. I would get actual flavor of what those people’s lives were like. That kind of thing is so extraordinary. I don’t even know how he physically does it, but then he scans all the pages in the books so that you have all of the resources, and then he puts it into a credibly digestible format. He’s amazing. He’s worked on a few TV shows and features as well. For any executives or creatives or whatever listening, he is amazing.

John: That’s fantastic. Researchdepartment.com. Dept. Love it.

Christina: D-E-P-T.

John: dept.com. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chialelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Kotrla, who’s a first-timer. If you have an outro, please send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Art of the Cold Email. Christina Hodson, so great to catch up with you.

Christina: [chuckles] Great to see you and speak with you for the first time today.

John: Come back anytime and sooner, please.

Christina: Anytime. I’d love to. It’s a delight.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. As billed in the opening, the cold email. I’m old enough and you’re probably old enough too [crosstalk]–

Christina: What are you saying, John. I’m a child. I’m so young and fresh.

John: Did you ever make a cold call where you just had to call somebody?

Christina: That’s how I got started in this industry.

John: First, let’s talk about the cold call because the cold call is genuinely terrifying because you’re interrupting someone’s life with a phone call, which is just scary, but we had to do it.

Christina: How else did we do it back in the day?

John: We didn’t have email.

Christina: It was when I wanted to work in film. I had gone to my university career service and they said, “You can’t work in film. That’s not really a thing. Do you want to be a journalist at the BBC?” I was like, “No, I want to work in movies.” They were no help. I went online, but it was early crappy internet when you couldn’t really find anything good. So I got a yellow pages and looked up film production and then just made a list of all of the offices and cold-called all of the numbers.

I need to tell you that I am a person that, to this day, I’ll like go and do big studio pitches with big grownups. I still can’t make restaurant reservations on the phone. I’m so bad at speaking on the phone. I hate it. It like cripples me with anxiety, but I did it.

John: I’m so impressed that you did it. You made a list and you just did it. How did you set yourself down on a phone and pick up the phone and just do it?

Christina: I forced myself to do it. I reminded myself that the person picking up the phone was just the receptionist. They are probably not having the best day in the world. As long as I’m nice, as long as I’m not annoying and an asshole– No, sorry, I probably was annoying, but I wasn’t an asshole, I don’t think. I wasn’t demanding too much. I was pretty specific in what I was asking for, which was, do you offer any internships? Is there anyone that I could talk to about possibly doing any work as a runner? I’ll photocopy or I’ll pick up sandwiches.

Because I was offering something and because I made myself fairly succinct, which is hard for me, as you can imagine, it helped. I finally got someone who asked me a question and we had one thing in common. From that one thing, I like spun it out into like a 5-minute conversation and then 10-minute conversation. Then he was like, well, we don’t have anything now, but come in and have a cup of tea with me and maybe you could do some reading. That’s how I got my first job. Reader, then runner, then intern, then free intern assistant for a year, then an assistant. Yes, it’s tough.

John: Yes, but you did it. You were able to make that cold [crosstalk]–

Christina: It was cold calls.

John: Cold calling is much worse than the cold email. Let’s talk about the cold email, which is at least you’re not ruining someone’s day by calling.

Christina: No. Sometimes they ruin my day. They make me so mad. Because it’s a cold email, you should try harder. You’ve got all the time in the world.

John: Let’s talk about a bad cold email you get and a good cold email you get. What does Christina Hodson get as a cold email?

Christina: I’m so mad just talking about this. The bad ones, the ones where they’ve copied and pasted it, and they’ve like changed the font on your name because it’s copied and pasted and so the formatting is all wrong.

John: Oh, the worst. The worst.

Christina: They’ve copied and pasted the credits in to be, “I love your film, bah bah bah,” but they’ve like copied and pasted that and you can tell. They also sometimes haven’t removed some of the other ones that you didn’t write. It’s so maddening. There’s just no point in doing it. It actively makes me want to block you forever.

John: Yes, I hear that. The mismatching fonts is just a dead giveaway. To me, a good cold email is one that is from the subject line, I can tell what it is they’re trying to do, what they need. It doesn’t say like from a fan or something like that. That doesn’t help me out. It’s specific about a movie.

A good cold email is like, hey, I’m putting together a documentary about women in Tim Burton movies. If the subject line was like Women in Tim Burton movies Documentary, oh, okay, I can see what that is. Quick introduction of like, this is who I am. These are some of the things I’ve done. I’m working on this thing. Could I convince you to come in for an interview for 90 minutes one day?

I’ll probably say no, but at least I’ll understand what the request was. It’s when something is so vague or takes forever to actually get to the ask that I’m like [sighs] “Ugh.” It kills me.

Christina: What about when they’re coming from, not someone trying to make you jump, when it’s someone that is starting out in the industry, that’s reaching out to you for advice? Now you have a whole podcast, they have a whole system they can go through. Do you have any tips for those ones where it’s like– I very often get a, “Could I take you out for a coffee?”

John: The answer is no, from my side. Also, I have a podcast and I can push people towards–

Christina: You’re like, I’ve got 680 episodes you can listen to.

John: Yes. The answer to that has generally been no. Let’s flip it around when you or I need to ask an expert in something about a thing. You were just talking about the research department, who’s a guy who is probably doing a lot of those cold emails to- trying to get those things. When I need to reach out to a specialist in something, I’ll just be very clear like, hey, I’m a screenwriter, I’m working on a thing about this. I see you’re an expert in this field. Could I get on the phone to ask you 10 minutes worth of questions about this subject?

If I read an author’s book and I really liked it, I’ll just reach out and say like, “Hey, I really enjoyed your book. Quickly, I’m John August and this is my thing. I just really wanted you to know how much I appreciate that.” No one’s going to get upset to read that.

Christina: No one’s mad about that.

John: No one’s mad about that.

Christina: No one’s mad about those.

John: If you’re a cold email, make someone’s day a little bit better.

Christina: Yes. I also think with that, in your example of reaching out to a specialist, because I’ve actually recently done that, some people don’t want to talk on the phone. Some people are like me and don’t want to make restaurant reservations because it involves being awkward on the phone. So I give them the choice. I say, “I’m happy to talk on the phone for 20 minutes or whatever, but if you’d rather email, I can lay it out here,” so that they have the option.

John: Yes. Give them choices. Don’t let them feel boxed into a thing.

Christina: Be specific about the ask. The general, like, “Can I take you out for coffee one day and pick your brain?” I’m like, no.

John: No. I never want my brain picked.

Christina: No. If someone emails and say, “Can I pick your brain? It’s this.” Then they give me one question in an email and the rest of the email is actually thoughtful and I think they have bothered choosing to ask me specifically rather than just generic screenwriter, then I might be like, oh yes, actually, this is an interesting question and you seem nice.

John: Do you seem nice and not like a crazy person?

Christina: Do you seem like you bothered proofreading your own email? Typos in those emails drive me crazy. Especially if it’s someone trying to be a writer, which it most often is.

John: One step better than cold email though is the introduction email. When some neutral person has done this or you’ve asked for a CC into a thing, then best practices are, they’ve CC’d you in, you put them on BCC so they can disappear off the thread and you can actually just do this. Drew, you’ve had to do some cold emails.

Drew: Oh God, yes.

John: Talk to us about what you find successful and what you dread.

Drew: It’s being specific with the ask and making the ask easy, to your point. If it’s one specific question, it’s a very short, that can be a fun after– If you need a break for something, you can answer that question. The general is always death. Especially like, because I’m essentially John’s firewall for emails.

Christina: [laughs] You must get so much.

Drew: We get a lot. To your point on the, it’s usually an assistant who’s having their own day. The things that are easy to elevate, that’s great. That’s fun. Think about that intermediary, whether that person exists or not. I think if it’s an easy ask, great. If it’s not, if it’s more complicated, you’re probably not going to get anywhere.

John: We did a 100th birthday party for our house. Our house turned 100 years old.

Christina: Congratulations house.

John: Stuart Friedel, who’s a former Scriveness producer, undertook this giant research project to figure out the whole history of the house and basically everyone who ever lived in the house.

Christina: That’s so cool.

John: One of the things I’ve always admired about Stuart Friedel is he is incredibly good at the cold email. He actually has none of that shame in there that stops someone from reaching out. He will just do it.

Christina: He does it in a way that’s charming and that people respond to.

John: Absolutely. He was able to get all this information because he was just unafraid to reach out to people and make that happen. In the setup to this, he said, “Oh, it’s easier for you because you’re John August?” It’s like, sure, but it’s also easier if you’re working on behalf of somebody else. For that, sure it’s his job. He’s sort of doing it for us. I was able to do it brilliantly because he had no sense that it wasn’t proper. Of course, it was proper. His asks were Also really clear. It’s like, we’re talking about one house.

Drew: There’s also that sort of motivation too. If it’s a thing that’s important to me, I will always be terrified to send the email or call or whatever. If it’s easy, if it sort of doesn’t matter–

Christina: This is just for John, who cares? [laughs]

Drew: Yes, totally. My wife’s favorite animal is a red panda. I was like, I wonder if a zoo would let us hang out with the red panda. I got shockingly far up the chain at I think the LA Zoo, maybe San Diego Zoo, where I just called. I was like, hey, can we hang out with a red panda? They were like, let me ask. I don’t know. I got like three or four people up the chain. The only reason we couldn’t is they were like, well, the red panda’s pregnant. We’re going to have some weird–

Christina: What? They’re going to get inundated now.

Drew: I know, right? That was one of those things that was like, that doesn’t affect the rest of my life. It’s just fun.

Christina: I’m going to think you like an email to hang out with animals.

John: Christina Hodson, Instagram. Will you message people on Instagram or not?

Christina: I’ve done it once, drunk, but I don’t know how to use Instagram. I have it under some– I had a cat who’s not even alive anymore. It was under her name. I drunkenly, in an Uber, once messaged someone and then didn’t know how to check my messages. The reply, I found two months later.

John: No.

Christina: No, I’m not.

John: Not a good strategy for you.

Christina: I don’t think I would do anything professional on Instagram.

John: Yes, I’ve done a couple of professional things on Instagram.

Christina: You probably have a very professional Instagram.

John: It’s also the difference of I think being a man versus being a woman on Instagram. Just the amount of crap that a woman gets on Instagram is much higher. Back when Twitter used to exist, that was the really useful way for me to reach out to somebody because I could– If I already followed them or if I deliberately followed them on that, they would get a notification because I was a verified person and then I could DM and that was–

Christina: Back in the early early days, it was just like, are you a funny person? If I scroll back in your tweets, are they witty?

John: Absolutely.

Christina: Then you can get anything you want. It’s a very different world now.

John: Yes. That is the nice thing, though, about even Instagram is that there’s a little bit better sense of like, oh, this is the actual person, versus an email could come from anybody. It’s really hard.

Christina: Yes. Sometimes it’s a catfish.

John: It could be a catfish. You never know. Christina Hodson, you’re not a catfish. You’re an actual real-

Christina: I’m a real human.

John: -a real star.

Christina: [chuckles]

John: Thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me.

Links:

• Christina Hodson
• That New York Times article with John and Christina
• Bamboo Director’s Chair
• Birdigo on Steam
• Action samples: Aliens, The Bourne Identity and Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• David Koepp’s Jurassic Park screenplay
• David Benioff’s Troy screenplay
• A Man of Parts and Learning by Fara Dabhoiwala
• When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days by Robert Klara
• A U.K. Teen’s Parents Sent Him to Ghana. He Took Them to Court. by Lynsey Chutel
• Zombie colleges? These universities are living another life online, and no one can say why by Chris Quintana
• Mike Birbiglia
• The Onion in print
• Padraic Murphy’s Research Department
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Vance Kotrla (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: No. They’re both transitive.

John: They’re both transitive, but different.

Craig: Just different verb meanings.

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

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

John: No. Tell me.

Craig: Biddy, biddy, biddy.

John: I don’t know what it is.

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

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

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

John: So good.

Craig: Was it? [laughs]

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

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

Craig: Erin Moran.

John: Erin Moran.

Craig: There we go.

John: Everyone has a thing to–

Craig: Everyone’s got–

John: What’s the robot?

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

John: Go.

Craig: They were right.

John: They were absolutely correct.

Craig: Nailed it.

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

Craig: That’s so much pressure.

Dan Etheridge: Wow.

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

Dan: Yes, I think that sounds right.

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

Dan: It’s pretty incredible.

Craig: What a weird outlier in that resume.

Dan: You’re welcome.

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

Dan: That’s right.

John: Dan Etheridge, welcome to the show.

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

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

Dan: Back at you.

John: All right.

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

John: That we’ve been friends?

Dan: Yes.

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

Dan: ’94. ’95.

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

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

John: God the short was 1998.

Dan: Okay.

John: Yes. Shortly after.

Dan: A few years later. Right on.

John: God, a short film with Melissa McCarthy.

Craig: Yes. The great Melissa McCarthy.

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

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

John: No. Drew uses the app regularly.

Drew: All the time.

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

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

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

Craig: I do that.

John: You do that.

Craig: I do that.

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

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

John: It’s always there. Nice.

Craig: It stays within the file.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Does it connect up with Google or something?

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

Craig: You don’t have to leave.

John: You don’t have to leave.

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

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

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

John: You love the distractions sometimes.

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

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

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

John: He’s typing.

Craig: I hear him.

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

Craig: Oh [crosstalk]

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

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

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Seems made up.

Drew: Tom Thumb.

Craig: Tom Thumb. Sus.

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

Craig: Confirmation.

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

Craig: Great.

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

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

John: Probably Weekend Read, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: You over-blurbed. Very common mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes. Sorry.

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

John: Absolutely.

Craig: That’s interesting.

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

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

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

Dan: Google.

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

Craig: Start pages seem nice. Work great.

John: Good.

Craig: No stupid AI results.

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

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

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

Craig: Nice.

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

Craig: Well, Jeez Louise.

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

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

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s got D&D.

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

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

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: That’s how people are built.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: Exactly.

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

Dan: That’s right.

John: Talk to us about that.

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

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

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

Dan: That’s right.

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

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

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

Dan: Yes.

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

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

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

Dan: Oh, they do.

[laughter]

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

Dan: Yes, that is true.

John: That is true.

Dan: That is true.

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

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

Craig: Different networks.

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

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

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

Craig: They are paying for it?

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

Craig: Always. Yes.

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

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

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

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

Craig: They were bad.

Dan: Thank you.

Craig: They were dumb.

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

John: They were bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

Dan: Brave new world.

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, what did it say?

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

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

Dan: Yes. I believe that is the–

Craig: A curule.

John: A curule.

Dan: Let’s go with that.

Craig: Curule.

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

Craig: It’s a tough one.

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

Drew: You got it correct.

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

Drew: Absolutely.

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

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

Dan: Oh, yes.

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

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

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

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

Craig: I’m just used to the up one.

Dan: You want the position of power.

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

John: Swingin’.

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

Dan: No one.

Craig: No one knows.

Dan: They resent it.

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

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

Craig: Location does the tent.

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

Craig: They’re all yelling at each other.

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

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

Dan: All the time.

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

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

Craig: You need a luxury tent for your executive.

Dan: Exactly.

Craig: It’s only fair.

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

Craig: Please.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: There’s no support. It’s like–

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

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

Craig: It’s undermining you, literally.

Dan: Yes. That’s right.

Craig: It is undermining you by giving you–

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

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

John: Yes.

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

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

Craig: That’s out.

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

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

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

John: Are like that.

Craig: -me and Dino, we are tight.

Dan: Then you’re in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, nice.

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

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

Dan: Yes, it’s awful.

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

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

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

Dan: Son of a bitch.

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

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

John: Be a rental.

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

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

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

Craig: Exactly.

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

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

John: Carbon fiber.

Craig: It’s expensive.

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

Craig: Oh my God.

John: The car seats weigh nothing.

Craig: The lugging.

John: The lugging.

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

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

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

John: Absolutely. Super heavy, everything.

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

John: Woe is us.

Dan: That’s why I didn’t have kids.

John: Well done.

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

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

Craig: I think you can pay for somebody.

John: That’s true.

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

John: That’s right, definitely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Don’t need one.

John: No.

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

John: Yes, and figuring out what your-

Craig: That’s my impression of them.

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

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

John: They got it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Can I get into your business center?

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

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

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

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

Craig: This is good. This is acceptable AI.

John: Yes.

Craig: A-A-I.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s A-A-I.

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

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

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

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

Dan: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Plan, improvise.

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

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

Craig: Yes. I’ll go deeper.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Pull the ripcord and go.

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

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

John: Absolutely.

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

Dan: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Yes, classic Invocom.

Dan: Fool’s Errand, I think.

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

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

Craig: I love stuff like this.

John: Craig is obsessed with puzzle games.

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

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

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

John: Jesus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: I got to go get this right away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: It’s incredible.

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

Craig: Who would have thought?

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

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

Craig: We hate that.

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

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

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

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

Dan: How many weddings have you officiated?

John: I’ve only officiated one.

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

Dan: Boom.

Craig: Whoa, five.

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

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

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

Craig: You’re just getting–

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

Craig: Same. Oh my God, you’re also?

Dan: That’s right, yes.

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

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

Craig: There’s a place to go? Oh no.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Crushed it.

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

Craig: That is so John August.

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

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

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

Dan: Previous life.

Craig: Yes.

Dan: Previous life.

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

Craig: What do you not want?

John: Exactly. How do we emphasize this?

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

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

Drew: She was great.

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

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

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

Drew: That’s how I felt.

John: I can’t be fast enough.

Drew: I agree.

Craig: 10 seconds, best wedding ever.

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

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

Craig: Nobody wants to sit there.

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

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

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

John: Absolutely, Adonis Catering?

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

Craig: That should be a thing.

John: Yes, it was a thing.

Craig: Oh, it was a thing.

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

Craig: It just worked out.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: The greatest.

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

Craig: Oh, god.

John: Or quotes.

Craig: Mawage.

John: Mawage, yes.

Craig: That, oh, you.

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

Craig: No.

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

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

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

Craig: No question.

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

Craig: No question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: You don’t have to.

Dan: I don’t want to.

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

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

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

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

Craig: You mean last week when you wrote that?

Drew: When you wrote that.

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

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

Craig: They literally don’t get it.

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

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

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

Craig: Short’s great.

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

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

Dan: Yes.

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

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

Craig: Exactly. I pronounce you, .org.

Dan: Get the last joke right in there.

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

Dan: Yes.

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

Craig: Thank you.

Dan: That was fun.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: You are.

Craig: I pay the $5 a month.

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

Craig: What?

John: Moving up to $7.99 per month.

Craig: 7–? [sighs]

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

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

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

Craig: We’re really incentivizing this?

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

Craig: How do you do that?

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

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

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

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

John: Please give us less money.

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

John: Yes. [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes.

Craig: We all know what’s going on.

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

John: The actual physical penny.

Craig: Typical.

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

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

John: Yes, they should be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, I have seen $0.

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

Craig: No.

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

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

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

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

John: They’re doing well.

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

John: Gambling the Scriptnotes money?

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

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

Craig: Right. Can we have dancers?

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

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

John: A family show, yes, for sure.

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

John: Yes.

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

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

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

John: Different acts, different segments.

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

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

Craig: Back to slug lines.

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

Craig: Ooh. That’s fun.

John: That’s good stuff.

Craig: You know what the jackpot is, right?

John: What is the jackpot?

Craig: Sexy Craig.

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

Craig: No.

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

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

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

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

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

Drew: That‘s like half a year.

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

Drew: That sounds right.

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

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

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

Craig: And John?

John: Yes.

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

John: Yes.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: Birdigo.

Craig: How much does it cost?

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

Craig: Amazing.

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

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

John: It’s free.

Craig: It costs nothing.

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

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

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

Craig: All right.

John: It’s fun.

Craig: Great.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Put a date on it.

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

John: Colored revisions have dates.

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

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

Craig: Sure.

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

Craig: Very European.

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

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

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

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

John: Absolutely no colons on the Macintosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, jeez.

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

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

John: It was a great success.

Craig: It was.

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

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

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

Craig: Good Lord.

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

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

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

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

Craig: The bubble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: 20 to 22 episodes per season.

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

John: I think you’re right.

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

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

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

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

John: 100%.

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

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

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

John: Say it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Twenty.

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

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

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

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

John: I’m not much of one either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Yes.

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

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

John: A lot of people do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: I totally get it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Let’s answer some listener questions.

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

Craig: I love this question.

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

Craig: Wherever you want.

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

Craig: I know. I love it.

John: Am I inside or outside?

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

John: Which is the cover side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Feels about right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: I think they’re really different mediums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They make choices.

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

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

Craig: I sure did.

John: Did you like Sleep No More?

Craig: I definitely went to Sleep No More.

John: Craig did not enjoy Sleep No More.

Craig: I attended it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: You know me. I love dance.

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

Craig: Some actors really enjoy it.

John: Some actors love it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Don’t know him.

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Never heard of him.

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

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

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

John: That’d be crazy.

Craig: Ugh.

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

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

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

John: It’s unstructured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Dissociate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: You’re not going to.

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

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

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

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

John: Homework is generally terrible.

Craig: It’s just the stupidest concept.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Don’t do your homework, kids.

John: Don’t do your homework.

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

Drew: I could have not come in.

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

Drew: It’s the one that’s popping up.

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

Links:

• Birdigo on Steam
• Lutron HomeWorks and Home Assistant
• The Prisoner (1967)
• Scriptnotes, Ep 296: Television with Damon Lindelof
• Patrick Wilson, Jordan Donica Leading Industry Reading of Revised, Broadway-Aimed Big Fish on Playbill.com
• Falling Slowly scene in Once
• Life and Trust
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 676 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew: But an interstitial shot? That feels bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis: Oh, my pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: You wrote Welcome Back, Kotter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis: Absolutely.

John: It’s a gift.

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

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

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

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

John: That’s a great question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Definitely. Second question here from Ethel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

John: The Basic Instinct problem, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, I get that.

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

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

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

John: Thanks.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.