John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 738 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome the creator of Nemesis and the Power franchise to talk about writing, showrunning, staffing, production, and navigating the shifting tides of television. Welcome to Script Notes, Courtney Kemp.

Courtney Kemp: I’m so excited to be here. So excited.

John: As I said as we were starting up this call, I’d wanted you on the show for a while, but then I heard you this last week on The Business talking about your new show. It’s like, well, I have to have her on. I have to talk more about those things because The Business is a great podcast. I recommend it highly, but it’s short in its general interest. I really want to dig into the writing and the showrunning.

We recently had Haley Boston on the show. She did her great horror show, which was also number one on Netflix. We talked about her rise and her suddenly becoming a showrunner. She went from nothing, and she suddenly has a show, and she’s a first-time showrunner. You’re not. You know what you’re doing, which is so great. You rose up through the ranks. I want to talk to you about how you know what you’re doing, but also what you learned rising up through the ranks, because I’m just so curious about the steps along the way and the things you take from previous experiences that you can apply that you only get because you were on shows that were in production.

Courtney: That is such a great question. The first thing I would say is I’m so grateful for my journey because it’s interesting, we watched that whole period where they were young screenwriters, and they’d be like, “Yes, you can run a show.” No, they can’t.

John: That was me, by the way. They gave me a show. I had no idea what I was doing.

Courtney: My bad. Sorry. It’s true. The job is so different. The kind of what-ifs that we deal with as television writers are very different from the what-ifs of a feature writer. I always say the job is not what story do I want to tell. It’s what story can I tell for this amount of money and shoot it in this amount of time. It’s just a different equation. My story has a lot of ups and downs, but I think the most important part of my story is that when I came out here, my first job was on The Bernie Mac Show. I got out here in June and I was staffed in August on The Bernie Mac Show. That was huge. Then I got fired. I got fired at the end of the season because I’m not funny. I really had to pivot.

The pivot was really interesting because at the time there were a bunch of sitcoms of color, like The George Lopezs and things like that. My agent, who is still one of my agents today, Nancy Etts, said to me, “Do you want to go in that direction, or do you want to write drama?” I was like, “I would much prefer to write drama.” My favorite show was Law & Order. I was never supposed to be a comedy writer. I just was supposed to be a person who puts jokes in violent dramas. That’s what I do best. The reality is being fired was the best thing that could have happened for my career. I always try to tell young writers that. That that’s actually an important step, is figuring out what you should actually spend your time doing.

John: Great. Well, I want to dig into all of that. We’ll answer some listening questions as well. In the bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about shooting in Los Angeles because your show was shot in Los Angeles as Los Angeles. Watching that, I just said, “That’s a neighborhood I’ve never seen before.” I believe that house is in that neighborhood because it probably was in that neighborhood.

Courtney: That’s correct.

John: I want to talk through the logistics. I always hear that it’s too expensive. You’ve found ways to do it. I want to learn from you so we can just shoot more shows in LA.

Courtney: Oh, thanks. Well, it wasn’t easy. Netflix, they were very much like, “You could shoot this in Atlanta, and you should shoot this in Atlanta.” I said no. There you are.

John: We’ll get into that in the bonus segment because I want to know about, in saying no, you had to say yes to other things. We’ll figure all that stuff out. Before we talk television, I want to talk about movies for one second because over the last couple of weeks, we talked about how this was shaping up to be a huge box office year, a huge box office summer because we had so many on-paper blockbusters coming out. We had sequels and parts of franchises. I think we couldn’t have anticipated it. There’s two huge movies that were not on the radar. First, Obsession and now Backrooms, both low-budget horror films that have broken out and becoming big things.

To me, it’s just such a great lesson in, you have to try multiple things. If you have a monoculture where it’s all just sequels and franchises, you’re not going to have the opportunity to put these movies on enough screens to make tens of millions of dollars. Also recognizing that, I think for these horror films, there’s a pattern, there’s a way to do it so they know that they can make their money back. There was a floor, but what’s so encouraging is that there’s not a ceiling. The ceiling is much higher than I think we were anticipating there being. It’s just a great lesson. You have to be open to genre things that break out, that become huge phenomena. Courtney, have you seen either of these movies?

Courtney: I have not because-

John: You’ve been making and launching a show.

Courtney: I’ve been launching a show. I’ve had actually no ability to do anything, but I do have opinions on these movies that I have not seen, which is that Original Fare, Hey Guys, original ideas. Every time an original idea does well, there’s this whole wave through our business of, “Look, this original idea did well. Hello.” It’s okay for people to make movies. I don’t know the usual suspects. I can’t think of a million movies that are original ideas that are great ideas.

This allergy to original ideas that are not IP is just so frustrating. It’s so demoralizing because, as writers, we are the dreamers. We are the what-if people. We are the people who come up with this stuff. Not to say that IP isn’t other writers, but why is it that novelists are suddenly the reason? They don’t actually do what we do. Some of them do, but a lot of them don’t. Why is it that the proof of concept always has to be now that it was already digested? It feels so strange to me that we are in the business of actively discouraging new ideas.

John: Yes, or whitewashing ideas by going through like, oh, this is a short story. We’re going to hire a screenwriter to write a short story, which we will then sell, and then hire that screenwriter to adapt the short story, which is just absurd.

Courtney: Insane. I just honestly don’t understand why. So many IP things fail. It’s not like IP is the magic bullet. They fail all the time. I feel as though the whole thing is about, well, I can’t get fired for greenlighting an IP idea, so I will go ahead and greenlight this IP idea. Is it a good idea? Does anyone care if it’s good? That, to me, is the thing that is so mind-blowing about where we are in this business right now.

John: I think with the case of both Obsession and Backrooms, there were situations where you took a gamble on the original creator of the idea, the person who put that YouTube idea out there in the world, and they saw them as their talent. It’s like maybe they could just do it themselves. Rather than, okay, we’re going to take this and put this in the seasoned hands of somebody who knows the thing, sometimes you take a gamble.

We’re talking about how I got trusted with a TV show well before I should have done it, but as a feature, I probably could have maybe done it. I was very involved on go, and I knew how to make a movie. I didn’t know how to make a TV show, but I knew how to make a movie. That would have been a smarter play for people to trust me to do that than to run a TV show, which is a business. You’re hiring people, you are managing this giant team for a year, and it’s just a different beast. In the case of these two movies, they saw filmmakers with talent and said, “Great, we’re going to help you make your movie.”

Courtney: I think it’s interesting because, again, there are people all over the business now going, “Hey,” to their younger execs, “find me a Backrooms. Find me an Obsession.” That’s what’s happening. You know that’s happening everywhere. It’s like, “Well, we could have done that three weeks ago. Remember, I brought you that young filmmaker, and you said no because you wanted to put that whole budget on IP?” How many young executives are going, “I had this idea, but you said no”?

Are we going to continue to watch A24 and Neon be the only places that actually take a gamble on anything? Is that what we’re just going to continue to do? I know these are separate ideas, but I’m just saying, why? Why are we just out of the business of the new?

John: Agreed. We won’t solve those problems today on this podcast, but hopefully we’ll dig a little deeper on some TV things because you’ve actually provided some solutions for some of these questions in television. Can we start with some of your background? How did you get started? Where did you grow up? How early did you know, oh, I should be making film and television?

Courtney: Oh, well, I’m from Connecticut, the most boring place on earth. I grew up in a town called Westport, which is mostly known for the Westport Country Playhouse, Paul Newman, Shonda Rhimes lives there now. Other than that, it was shiity and whatever. I grew up in a family that was very much all about TV and movies. My taste in film is probably from my dad, who raised me on The Godfather, Q&A. Movies that were really hardcore. I think I probably saw Taxi Driver way earlier than I should have. I know I saw Purple Rain way earlier than I should have.

John: Me too.

Courtney: My dad was an early adopter of HBO, so we had HBO very early, like before my friends. I was the household where people would come over to watch HBO. Then my family, Sunday night, we would all watch 60 Minutes together because my parents wanted us to be well-informed. Then we would watch Murder, She Wrote. We would have to solve the crime. We watched Dallas as a family. For those Power fans who are listening, the Who Shot Ghost, I just ripped off Who Shot J.R. It was such a long reference that most of my audience didn’t know I was doing that. If you knew, you knew.

I came up and then went to college in Rhode Island at Brown. Did not do a film major because I thought, “I’ll never make a film. I’ll never make any TV.” I was wrong.

John: There are a lot of Brown film and TV people, though. Doug Liman is Brown. I just know a lot of executives out in this town who are from Brown. For weirdly, like a Rhode Island school, it did feed a lot of LA people.

Courtney: It’s because there’s no core curriculum. It’s because we’re like a bunch of losers who can’t do math and science. Literally. We just completely failed all of those and then stumbled into this Ivy League school. We were like, “I’m going to read a lot, and they’re going to give me a degree.” That’s literally it. Then I went to Columbia for English literature and wrote my master’s thesis on Clueless. I’m not joking.

John: You know that’s my favorite movie.

Courtney: I did not.

John: This is down to being a Clueless podcast. We’ve done a deep dive on Clueless itself because it’s just such an incredible movie.

Courtney: It’s an incredible movie. I specialized in Jane Austen at Columbia. My master’s thesis was about the book Emma, the movie Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and then the movie Clueless. They were like, “What are you doing?” Columbia is a very conservative school. There’s a film school there. They were like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “This is what’s interesting. Film as text. This is what’s interesting to me.”

Yes, Clueless is a perfect film. Going back and watching it now, it’s still perfect. I fell in love with Paul Rudd then, as did many girls my age, but also just the knowing jokes in it, all those things. It’s so great.

John: To realize that Amy Heckerling originally was trying to do it as a television series, and they said, “No, it probably is a movie,” and she needed to just hang it on a spine, so she hung it on Emma. It’s a master class. It’s like someone who really knows what they’re doing, and just all the cylinders fire. It’s so remarkable how well that film turns out. I can imagine you come out of that with a thesis that is, I’m sure, terrific. I want to read your thesis, by the way.

Courtney: It’s so not good.

John: What do you do with that thesis? What do you do with that degree? What’s next?

Courtney: Nothing. You sound like my dad. My dad was like, “What are you doing with your life?” I remember him saying, “What are you going to do? Make $33,000 a year for the rest of your life at the University of Puget Sound, teaching English literature? Is that what you’re going to do?” I was like, “I don’t know, Dad, maybe.” Then I left and went to magazines. I worked at Mademoiselle and then GQ. That’s, again, where I started to really learn how to write for a male audience a little bit more.

John: I don’t want you to elide over the fact that you have to get hired by one of these places. How do you get hired at Mademoiselle or one of these glossy magazines?

Courtney: In my case, it was a friend of mine, Cameron Smith, who had a connection at HR there. I was overqualified for the job, but they took a chance on me. I just got lucky. I could interview well. I had been trained from a young age to say all the right things and to be all the right things, and dress the correct way. I was very much my mother’s child. My mother is southern. Wear the right dress, be the nice girl, which is a really interesting thing considering what I grew up to write.

Yes, I was very much Condé Nast. I was the good girl in the good outfit, in the right hair, conservative, little pearls, pearl earrings, the whole thing. I did get hired there. Then I didn’t fit in at Mademoiselle. I belonged at GQ. A little rougher.

John: At GQ, what were you writing for them?

Courtney: I was an assistant. I was on a desk. Then I wrote one article for them about interracial dating. I believe it’s called Don’t Buy Her Fried Chicken, something. It was like a primer for white dudes on how to date a black woman. Maybe it was called How to Date a black Woman, actually. It got me an agent. This is the end of that story. It got me a book agent at ICM. Then I ended up moving to the TV side.

John: Were you one of the few black people at GQ at that time?

Courtney: Absolutely. I was one of the few black people in the building. It was me, André Leon Talley, and five other people. It was like nobody. He and I would see each other in the hallway. I’d give him the nod, and he’d give me the nod, and we’d be going our merry way. I was 22-23. I was very young and naive.

John: This article you wrote, How to Date a black Woman, and this gets you an agent, that feels like a familiar story where you write something that is so specifically your voice that it’s a thing that identifies an aspect of culture that is not being discussed enough, and that is attractive to an agent. This was ICM, and they cold-called you. How did that all work?

Courtney: Heather Schroder, who was my book agent, she called. I was still on my boss’s desk. She called. Then, after that, two TV writers called Alberghini and Chessler, who were comedy guys, they called, and they wanted to turn that into a TV show. That TV show did not sell, but I did my first pitch to HBO at 25. It was a wild convergence of things. I think that’s the thing with all of us. Our stories are all so weird. They all have some weird left turn because when I moved out to LA, I was just leaving my job at Origins, where I was doing facials and makeup.

John: Great. You have a lot of random jobs. I had many random jobs as well along the way. God bless them. They paid the bills. They kept a roof over my head. I can understand, though, that based on this book, and you’re going in with this pitch, that people think of you as a comedy writer because it’s an inherently funny premise. You can see the comedic potential out of that book, that title, and so that they got you into The Bernie Mac room. That was your first–

Courtney: Basically, yes. Basically, I went in– remember when they had freelances to give away?

John: Oh, yes. Explain that for our audience, because that doesn’t happen really anymore.

Courtney: No. It used to be that if you had a 22 or 23-episode TV show, that probably two of those episodes would be given away as freelance episodes to writers who were not on staff. That was pretty common until I was about a co-EP, I think. When I first came in, a couple of freelances were given away on most successful shows. I went in to pitch Bernie Mac for freelance, and then they ended up hiring me, which is a crazy story that never happens to anybody.

John: Just so people understand what a freelance was like, though, these are shows that are going to run 22, 23 episodes per season. There was so much to do, and the premise was so well established that a person could come in off the street and say, “In this episode, these are the things that happen,” and you’re like, “Sure, that makes sense.” That was the experience?

Courtney: Yes. That’s exactly right. Then I would say, specifically with Bernie Mac, that show’s basic premise was that you had these three kids who were from an underprivileged background who were all of a sudden in an encino, like in a very white suburb. I grew up, as I said, in a very white suburb, so I had very specific ideas that almost no one else in that room could really speak to. Again, the point that you’re making that’s so wise is you have to write what you know. What is really specific to you? Because if you are writing something that you think will sell, but it doesn’t have anything to do with you, someone else is going to do that better.

John: Yes. You were on The Bernie Mac Show. You realized writing comedy is just not what you’re put on this earth to do. What is that conversation? Because it’s hard to go to your agents and say, “Don’t put me up for comedy,” or “I’m not going to get these comedy jobs because it’s not my thing.” What is that conversation, and how do you get to the next step?

Courtney: Nancy said, “Well, I got a phone call from Warren Hutcherson, who was the showrunner at the time. They’re not asking you back.” I said, “Oh.” She said, “But the George Lopez people would like to meet with you, or we can take a beat and we can think about what we should do instead. Do you want to be in comedy?” Because Warren was like, “She’s not funny enough.” I said, “I want to write a spec CSI.” I wrote a spec CSI. Then from that spec, I got staffed on a show called Injustice, which was run by Robert and Michelle King.

John: Oh, yes. Icons.

Courtney: Yes. That’s my first staff writing drama job. Back then, there was something called a minority staff writer. They’ve called it a million different things. Basically, the show wasn’t charged for your existence. On Bernie, I was the minority staff writer. Then, on Injustice, I was a minority staff writer. That relationship with Michelle and Robert, obviously, I ended up on The Good Wife for three years after that. I’m still close with them. They really taught me so much about how to write.

John: Let’s talk about what you’ve learned in that room because it sounds like Bernie Mac, you learned, “Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this thing.”

Courtney: At all.

John: In Injustice and then on The Good Wife, what are the things you learned that helped you both as a staff writer and moving up those ranks? What were the crucial things?

Courtney: On Injustice, the showrunner of record was Jeff Melvoin. He taught me a lot about how really to run a show. I watched how to run a show from a perspective of producing that was really smart. The Kings, in terms of story, Robert and Michelle are really– that first year of The Good Wife, basically, Julianna was in every scene. They had to figure out a way to not have her be in every scene but keep the story going. I learned how to create a proxy character, characters that kept the story going even if your main character wasn’t in the scene. If you look at the first season of Power, Tommy, even though he’s the best friend, he’s also a proxy character. He’s moving that forward.

John: I want to pause for one second. Julianna Margulies, she’s the star. She’s the lead, but the literally can’t be in every scene because, production-wise, you can’t have her on set 16 hours a day for every day.

Courtney: She had a young son at the time, too. She was really shouldering a huge burden. She’s also an incredible actress which isn’t easy. Right?

John: No.

Courtney: Yes, absolutely, what you’re saying, which is that it’s not possible to put that much weight on someone. That’s a thing I will also say that is a difference between a feature writer and a television writer, is that the television writer has to think about how many days a week is this person going to be working, and am I going to be able to spell them and give them a break? Can I double shoot? If they’re in every scene, I can’t actually shoot two scenes at once. Whereas in a feature, you can have one person in every scene. You can do that movie with Ryan Reynolds in the grave in a feature, but you can’t do that–

John: Buried.

Courtney: Buried, yes. I don’t know why that didn’t come to mind. It’s a pretty obvious title. You’re absolutely right.

John: You’re learning those really practical things about how the decisions of what’s happening on the page is going to impact how you’re going to actually be able to shoot the thing and the whole franchise. You could probably do it for one episode, but you couldn’t do it over the course of eight episodes. Everything would come crashing down. You have to really be smart in thinking about the whole show, not just what this one scene needs.

Courtney: Absolutely. I’ll tell you one other lesson I learned from the Kings. In the first three seasons of The Good Wife, we would always have to build to, at the end of the third act, what is Alicia’s dilemma? She has to make a decision, one way or the other, that’s about her morality and her character. It was a way of having plot feed into character. That’s something that I learned from them, from the Kings, about how to structure an episode and then structure a season. You’re structuring the episode with that dilemma, but you’re also structuring the season with that dilemma as well.

John: What did you learn about running a room from the Kings or from these other showrunners?

Courtney: I would say the biggest things I learned about running a room came from Greg Berlanti, the year I was on Eli Stone. I run the room like this to this day, which is we come in, and we first start talking about scenes we want to see. What are the scenes we want to see this season? What are the scenes that are necessary? For example, with Nemesis, we know we want to see these men meet a couple of times, but we also know we don’t want to see them meet that often. That’s not what the show is. The show is about I’m obsessed with you and I can’t get to you, not I can get to you.

We start with that. Just a big board where there’s no wrong answer. It’s open. No one gets trashed, hurt, or judged because they come up with a bad idea because there’s no such thing as a bad idea. The worst idea that was ever come up within a Power writers’ room was from this guy. It’s totally fine. I say that to say Greg taught us that. Then the other thing that Greg was very good about was a great idea can come from anyone, from anyone. It does not matter who you are or what your title is. The best idea in the room wins no matter what. I really learned a lot about that from him.

John: That’s great. How long is that blue sky, no bad ideas phase in a writers’ room? How long do you do that before you start, “Okay, now we actually have to break episodes”?

Courtney: I do a good three or four days of that, but the writers know, come in with it. We’re not going to just shoot the shit. We’re going to come in with it. We do a lot of breaks and a lot of joking. I like to keep my room really funny because we’re doing heavy things. Once you start to get the scenes I want to see, and then if it’s a secondary season, like it’s a tertiary season, you need to have, what do we owe the audience? That’s another day. What do we owe them? Because we’ve already asked a question and we have to answer it.

John: That’s right.

Courtney: Once you get those down, you can start to actually structure your season. You can actually start to put those places, like where do those scenes go, in what order? Now you start to thematically look at what is each episode.

John: Talk to me about the transfer from you’re on these shows, you’re moving up the ranks, to, “Okay, now let’s have you do your own show. Let’s have Courtney Kemp showrunner.” What was that transition, and what happened?

Courtney: I was at CAA. Nancy left ICM and moved to CAA. I moved to CAA with her. Then I was working with Nancy and Andrew Miller, who’s, they’re both still my agents. Andrew was working with 50 Cent and with Mark Canton, also. I was working on an early iteration of Get Christie Love, which I ended up shooting as a pilot many years later. Did not go. They wanted to do, Mark and 50, who were in business already. Wanted to do a music-driven drama, but neither one of them really did TV. Mark’s a film guy, and 50 obviously is a music guy.

Andrew set me and Mark and 50 up on a creative date because I was really wanting to write in this black exploitation space, and they really didn’t know how to get into TV. Then this idea for Power, which was really a combination– that lead character Ghost is a combination of my dad and 50. My father had just died prior to this. I was trying to figure out a way to write about him. Then that’s where the idea was born.

John: That’s great. Classically, you come up with a take. You have this team. You have you writing it. You were just pitching it. Did you write an episode? Were you selling it as a spec? Were you going around town and pitching it to all the streamers?

Courtney: This is an old-school process because this is before you really would write a spec episode. This was me going into, let’s see, where did we go? We went obviously to Starz. We also went to FX, but we started at Showtime because I had been on a CBS P deal before that. Not an overall, but I was under contract to CBS P because of The Good Wife.

John: It’s so hard to remember who owned what at what point, but CBS and Showtime were the same company.

Courtney: They were the same company, yes. The first thing we did was we pitched it at Showtime. They didn’t take it. Then we pitched it at FX. They were like, “We already have a drug-dealing show.” Then we pitched it at Starz. They were already exploring a hip-hop show. Our show was not a hip-hop show. Our show was a drug-dealing show that just had a hip-hop soundtrack, really. They picked us up, and they let us write it. I was still working on Hawaii Five-0 when I was trying to figure it out. Again, still at CBS. I was still knocking around CBS studios at that time. While I was at Hawaii Five-0 and then Beauty and the Beast, I was working on this outline. It finally came together.

John: That’s an aspect I don’t hear people talking enough about. It’s that a lot of times you are staffed on one show, but you’re creating another show. You’re trying to do this other thing. It’s just so tough to be juggling so many different hats. You want to be fully present for the show you’re supposed to be working on, but you have this other project which could go at any point. That balance is tough. You were probably not the only person in those rooms who had other outside things that could catch fire.

Courtney: Absolutely. I’m not totally unsure that Jeff Rake wasn’t developing Manifest then. He went on Beauty and the Beast with me. I don’t remember. No, it was the Deborah Messing mystery show that he was working on. It’s so great to have employment. It doesn’t matter. You figure it out. It’s like you just figure it out. I was very lucky to be able to have a check.

John: Yes. You were able to make Power. Where did Power shoot? New York City?

Courtney: New York City, yes.

John: That’s great. On Stars. Stars is such a weird case because you have much more experience with Stars than I do. I have other friends who’ve had shows there, and it’s just like, they make really good things that no one sees. It was a cable network for people to think about. I now think of it as a streamer. Yet your show found an audience which not only brought it through this first season, but brought other spin-off varieties of it. You had not just a series, but a franchise out of that. You must have been pulled in so many different directions.

Courtney: First of all, just the first part of what you said, Stars was very much a mom-and-pop shop back then. It was just Carmi Zlotnik and Chris Albrecht, and whatever Chris wanted to put on, he just put on. It’s not the layers of asking and begging and waiting that you have now with the streamers. It was just like, daddy likes what daddy likes. That’s why there were so many different shows. You had my show. You had Outlander. You had Black Sales at that time. It was just whatever he thought was cool. That’s the thing I would say. Taste has gone out of our business, but he had taste. He just really liked what he liked. That was weird, yes.

The other thing is that Power was able– Our first season, we doubled our audience in our first season from the beginning to the end. Then we grew every year. We got bigger every year. By the time we were done with it, 50 very much wanted us to keep going. I was like, “We can’t. There’s no more story to tell.” I feel, really importantly, get off the stage when you’ve nothing left to say. That’s when the spin-offs started to– I said to them, “I can’t make more of this show, but I can make something else in this world.” That’s when those ideas of Ghost, Raising Kanan, and Force came up. That’s how we started. We’re shooting Origins right now, which is, I think, the fifth spin-off, maybe fourth or fifth. Yes, it’s a lot.

John: Courtney, I’ve lost track of how many spin-offs I’ve heard you say.

Courtney: She has, but only because she’s been working on Nemesis. That’s why.

John: Let’s talk about Nemesis. I have a sense of probably how you pitched Nemesis. I’m going to make a lame attempt to pitch Nemesis at you. There’s a story of two men. One of them runs a criminal gang that do heists and burglaries. The other one is a brash LAPD detective investigator. They are on a crash course to confront each other. We will learn in the pilot that the investigator’s best friend died as a result of one of these heists, and that the wives/girlfriends of these two men are also friends. That is the complicated dynamics between the two of them. It is essentially a two-hander with a lot of other hands around it. What else would be in that pitch of it all? Is that the core idea as you went in to talk to people about it?

Courtney: Yes, absolutely. I think the only thing I would say is I co-created it with my now fiancé, Tani Marole. It came from having two conversations. One, which is what is not out there for our audience right now? Which turns out to be that it’s not out there for any audience. There’s no big action show right now, before I wrote.

John: Heat is a natural comparison to it. There’s not a Heat show, which is surprising.

Courtney: Right. Then there’s that. Then there’s the other piece of it, which is are people really writing about marriage, like adult marriage? No one’s writing about that right now in a way that feels considered. We don’t talk about the other thing that’s in the show, that’s really strong, is this idea of male burden. We’re always talking about how terrible men are and all these things. There’s a lot of men who are good guys, who just want to be a good husband and a good father.

John: A good son.

Courtney: A good son. Exactly. That’s hard. I think one thing that people don’t really get is it’s hard to be a good man. It’s not easy. That’s one of the things that we’re writing about, is that these two men and they’re trying to fight their inner demons in order to be their versions of good men. One of them is a little bit more successful than the other, but that one is also a murdering thief. Whereas Isaiah is actually a white hat. It’s just a little dingy from a lot of his behavior.

John: He’s not always the most attentive father. There’s things he doesn’t do.

Courtney: No, but he doesn’t cheat either. That’s the other thing. He’s trying.

John: You have this idea, and you and Tani have created the show together. What is that partnership like? What is the creative partnership there in terms of pitching the show, making the show, feeling that this is the joint vision?

Courtney: I would love to call Lisa Joy and find out how her experience is.

John: I know Lisa has done it well, but it’s tough.

Courtney: I think in our case, I have a lot of experience running shows. This is Tani’s first. I think where we would butt heads a lot had to do with the finances of things. I’d be like, “You can’t afford that.” He has written a lot of features, and so he’s a feature guy. He’s like, “The sky’s the limit.” I’m like, “Actually, the limit is right here. It’s more of a credenza.” Especially, and I know we’ll talk about this later, but shooting LA for LA, you can’t do everything you thought you were going to do on the page. You just can’t. We did have some conflict there.

Working with a partner, one of the things that I did find was so great is that some of the things that necessarily are not the most important pieces of it to me were really important to him. He got to really invest in some moments that– I don’t know that I would have insisted on full loads, but those gunshots in episode six are great. He was right. Sound design became a big part of what we did. I don’t know that I would have focused on that. It actually made the show better.

John: Talking about then, you had this vision for a show, pitching the show, ending up at Netflix, what was the conversation there?

Courtney: I was on a deal at Netflix. I was on an overall deal. Some of the things that I had pitched then did not work. They were outside my genre. A little bit more creative than maybe what works for me. The pitching process was that Tani and I had talked about this show, and then we came in not only with a full pitch, but our leave behind was a script. We did actually– now, I remember going back to power where I didn’t write a script. This was, “Here’s the show,” because we really didn’t want to develop it. We wanted them to understand what it was.

While we went through a development process, that development process was really notes on a script, scriptnotes if you will, as opposed to trying to develop a show from scratch there, which I had not had a lot of success with. It helps concretize their thinking. It’s not really you. You know what the show is anyway. You know what the show is out of two sentences, but they can’t, so you have to really show them what it is.

John: I was reading through other earlier interviews, you were talking about Power, and you said it’s a frustration people want to describe it as a black show as a containment strategy. That’s putting a lid on it and not recognizing the overall potential of a thing. There’s shows that have black leads, that have largely black cast, but they’re not black shows. Scandal, you would never consider it to be a black show. If you have a show that has a largely black cast, how do you make sure that a place sees the potential in it beyond just one audience?

Courtney: You can’t. First of all, I think Scandal is such a really good– That’s a great reference because while Kerry’s the lead and the people that are around Kerry, like her parents, are black, the other leads of that show are not black. Your main romantic interests, they were Scott Foley and the amazing Tony Goldwyn. No, it’s not a black show. It’s just a show. It just happens to be that Kerry is based on the woman who it’s really based on is a black woman. What I would say is this idea that white people will not watch shows with black people in it is so foolish. When I was growing up, everybody watched The Cosby Show. Everybody watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

John: Everyone still watches Black-ish. Everyone still watches Abbott Elementary.

Courtney: It’s so foolish, and yet it’s still there. When you get to the higher levels of conversation at the streamers, they’re still saying these things. It so boggles the mind. You watched a little Nemesis, or you watched all of Nemesis?

John: I watched the first episode of Nemesis.

Courtney: Okay, right. It’s a lot of black people, but did you not see yourself in those characters?

John: 100%.

Courtney: Did you not see yourself as a married man? Did you not see yourself as a hardworking– It’s just people. Human beings have so much more in common than they do in terms of difference. I think we’re all supposed to be writing, as long as we’re not robots, as long as we can still hold on to humans writing, that we’re writing about the human condition. It really boggles the mind, but I can’t stop people from doing that. I can’t stop people from saying, “Your show is just– it’s a black show.”

John: Going back to this earlier conversation about Obsession and Backrooms, it does speak to the fact that there’s an underserved audience. That underserved audience can give you a potential, can get you in the door, but these movies are breakout hits because they’re moving beyond that one narrow audience that you started with. It’s because they’re good and they’re successful and they have a universal appeal to them that is making them the hits that they are. Yes, I share your frustration because the same thing happens with a gay story. It’s like, yes, there’s a floor because a gay audience may go to see a thing because they’re hungry for these stories, but the good ones will break out beyond that.

Courtney: Absolutely. Again, it does not matter. I don’t know. It’s like, at one point, Logo made RuPaul’s Drag Race, and then it became an international phenomenon. It’s like, someone said, “We can’t make that, it’s too gay.” Really? Well, you lost money, bro. It’s all that. I was told the reason that a certain place would not make Power was that it would only appeal in America. That’s not true at all. The experience of Nemesis, obviously, it’s not true.

John: Worldwide.

Courtney: It’s nuts.

John: One of the difference between Power and Nemesis is that Power was week-to-week and its typical cable schedule release, and we can see all of Nemesis today. It all drops at once. How did that change how you were thinking about storytelling episode by episode, or did it change anything for you?

Courtney: That’s a great question, and it changed a lot. When writing Power, not only did I have to contend with the fact that I was on Stars, which had this tiny audience, but I also had to contend with the fact that it was week to week, and that we were, at first, on Saturday. We weren’t even on Sunday. We weren’t even on the HBO TV night. I had to make sure that at the ending of every episode, we were causing conversation that would last a week. That was, by design, big cliffhangers, big end title songs that would cause conversation. Just anything to get people to come back.

With Nemesis, I need people to stay, keep sitting. The whole job when you’re writing for a streamer is that you need people to not get up. On Netflix, I will just tell everyone who’s listening, and if you’re developing for Netflix, first of all, those first two minutes are incredibly important of your show. They have to keep people staying there.

John: Netflix will tell you that. They will remind you that on meetings often. Yes.

Courtney: Often. If you go back and you look at the pilot of Nemesis, the first two minutes are the beginning of that heist. You just get straight into the heist. Don’t even bother with introducing people, having a conversation. Nothing. You don’t even know those characters. You get to know them during the heist, but that’s it. Then the other thing is, I have to get you to stay, which means I have to have, it’s not just a, oh, let’s have a conversation for a week. It’s, I need you to need the answer right now. Right now, which is very different from– You can’t speculate. It’s not about speculation. It’s, I just need to know.

I’ve had so many people say to me, “I just sat and watched it all eight hours. I just watched the whole thing.” Because that’s what it should feel. You need to pump that momentum. I think Tani was really instructive with that because he is a momentum guy. I’m a contemplative guy.

John: I am too. I saw you repost somebody on your stories talking about how, as a woman who’s like, “I could only watch four the first night, but I got up the first thing in the morning to watch four more.” That’s what you’re trying to do there. The great news is that people can enjoy it all at once. The challenges, like Craig and I often talk about, the footprint is smaller because it’s a sugar rush right in that moment, but you don’t get that extended discussion over time.

That’s what I’m loving about Widow’s Bay right now is because I have no idea what’s going to happen, but Drew and I will speculate about what’s happening on the island, and it’s because of that week-to-week, so it’s the trade-off. It’s the sudden rush versus the slow release.

Courtney: I do think, though, that right now the platforms do their release strategy per the platform, whereas I actually think it should be per the show. Widow’s Bay definitely benefits from that on Apple, but Hijack could have been a dump, and people would have watched all of that, especially that first season, because you’re stuck on that plane and it’s so intense. You could have just dumped that, and it would have been a really interesting thing. I just think there are ways to do it. Nemesis works that way. If you are telling a story that’s little and crafted and maybe needs a little time to breathe.

Adolescence is four episodes, so you can deal with it, but you can’t deal with that if it was eight episodes. Maybe I will just say, for your more contemplative kind of writing, which is what I am naturally, maybe you put those contemplative moments in the middle of the episode and not at the beginning or end.

John: Something you mentioned in an earlier interview, this may have been from your time on Berlanti shows, which is where you do a pass on a script saying like, “Did you just see that? Did they really do that shit? Did they actually–” like a pass where you actually just like, “Is there sizzle, is there magic to something?” Is that something you’re still thinking about with Nemesis?

Courtney: Absolutely. The “oh shit” moment is necessary. It’s very, very necessary. We need to have at least two or three in an episode where you’re just like, “What the hell? Did that really happen?” Because first of all, two things. One, necessary, and two, you’re fighting this.

John: You are fighting your phone.

Courtney: All the time. You have to build in, even if it is a moment where the person looks up from their phone and goes, “What did I just miss?” You have to build that in because we are fighting that second screen all the time.

John: I want to talk about an article that came out this last week. Leslie Goldberg wrote up a piece in The Ankler about streamers wanting less of a gap between seasons, which I thought was really interesting, which is that so often, these prestige shows, it’s like two years between seasons and audience falls off, which is understandable because it’s just like, “I forgot whose people were and wasn’t relevant.” The point she’s making is that, in some cases, they’re opening writers’ rooms early so they can get a lead on scripts, so even before they know they’re going to do a second season, they’ll put together a writers’ room.

They’ll do whatever they can to close the gap between seasons because they’re recognizing that a lot of the falloff that’s happening is just because of time. It’s because you’ve lost the momentum of what that show was. When two full years have happened between the thing, House of the Dragons was an amazing show, but good Lord, I don’t remember who any of those characters are yet. Is that a thing that resonates with you? Because you were on a cable schedule that– were you on an annual cycle for Power?

Courtney: Cadence, absolutely. That’s one of the things that’s been very hard to understand about how the streamer culture works, at least at Netflix, where they want to see your show air fully before they necessarily make a decision. I didn’t grow up that way. In Power, we were getting two seasons at a time. They were like, “Just do them.” We had a schedule. We had a cadence because we had to hit that target. The audience was expecting that show every end of June or early July. We were either July 7th or we were June 25th almost every single year. We were on the schedule.

By the way, people used to make 24 episodes on a schedule. This is not because we can’t do it as writers. It’s because the streamers, I believe, are so afraid of making a mistake creatively that they’re just like, “Well, let’s be sure that there will be ROI.” That’s not our business. Our business is not the business of being sure. Our business is the business of obsession, which is somebody took a shot.

John: Yes, agreed. You have so much experience running shows, staffing shows. If you were to arrive in Los Angeles now as a 26-year-old who maybe worked in New York City, but you got here, and you’re getting started, what would you do first if you were a newly arrived Courtney Kemp right now? Where would you focus your time and energy? Would you be trying to staff? Would you be trying to do a feature? What are the things you think are the best things for a new writer to be working on if they just arrived in town?

Courtney: If I were under 30, like I was when I got here, I would make a 5-episode with 8 minutes for each episode series that I would shoot myself or with some friends, cast a couple of my friends who are young actors, everybody my age, and not make it just about our fun lives, but make it about a specific thing, like a specific story that you can tell in those 5 episodes. The bad version is off the top of my head, like Jane’s dad dies and we all have to go to the funeral. There’s a problem, which is that not everybody knows that Jane has just recently come out, or whatever it is.

I would make that. I would edit it. I would make it tight. I would put it on YouTube. I would have all my friends who were in it post about it. I would get it so that people start to see it. Then I would get my specs together: a couple of spec episodes of existing shows, two episodes of two pilots, and one short story. That’s what I would do. I’d have my writing, but I would shoot something that was working for me while I was sleeping, because that’s the thing we couldn’t do. We couldn’t do that. Our scripts did the work, but now you’ve got a phone. You can make a show, so make it.

That’s what I would do first, because that’s the Issa Rae model, but she made Awkward Black Girl, and then we got Insecure. I think that’s so powerful, and kids can do that. Now you could do it even shorter. I’d probably shoot it in vertical, to be honest with you.

John: Because most of the verticals we see are terrible and trapped, so if you make something that’s actually really good, people are going to be surprised, like, “Oh my God, that was good and actually felt like a thing.”

Courtney: Absolutely. 100%. That’s what I would do.

John: The other thing I’m noticing in your answer here is you think people should write spec episodes of existing series, which is not a thing I hear a lot about anymore. Tell me why that is, and do you like to read specs of existing shows as you’re staffing?

Courtney: I only read specs of existing shows as I’m staffing. I do not read your pilot.

John: All right. Tell me why.

Courtney: I know I sound like everybody else. Because I’m not hiring you to come in and write your pilot over again. I’m hiring you to come in and ape the voice of the show. If you can ape somebody else’s voice, most of the people I’ve hired wrote a spec Black-ish; they wrote a spec like Insecure or something, because I know that you can make those voices work, and you can do the math of going, “This is what one character would say that another character wouldn’t say.” I always say to young writers, “You should be able to cover the character name, and by what the line of dialogue is, I should be able to know which character said it.”

John: Wow.

Courtney: If I don’t, then you didn’t make it specific enough. You haven’t drilled down into your characterization enough to let me know what a person is saying. I think that’s the thing that the specs teach you, that your own pilot doesn’t. When you read a weak pilot from a young writer, it’s not their fault. They just don’t have the 10,000 hours. When you read a great spec script from a young person, you know they studied the show. I got hired by Greg off of a spec Grey’s Anatomy. That was the job back then. I really believe in them still to this day.

John: That’s great. You and Mindy Kaling are the two people I’ve heard actually really stand up for specs. Your point about covering over the character’s name is so smart, and I don’t hear people talking about that, but yes, every line of dialogue should only be able to come from that one character. If you could move it around to another character, it’s not the right line.

Courtney: You know what’s a classic example of that? If you go and you look at the Sex and the City pilot, the original pilot, those women come across as their characters in that pilot. That’s why that show, it worked. Worked, worked, worked. That’s it. I fully believe in that.

John: Awesome. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, help us out with Anonymous.

Drew: “How transparent should you be with your reps about your financial struggles? Obviously, my manager and agent know that I haven’t worked for a year. I don’t think for a second that they are gatekeeping opportunities from me. Should I tell them that I’m four months from having to sell my house, or could that kind of honesty give them the ick? For what it’s worth, I’m hustling nonstop. I’m pitching, open writing assignments, doing freelance outside of our industry, all while plastering on a hopeful smile. Unfortunately, time, along with my bank account, is running out.”

John: Courtney, what’s your instinct there?

Courtney: That’s such a great, great question. I would not tell them.

John: I would not tell them either because I don’t think it’s going to help. It’s going to create this weird negative feedback loop. They’re going to feel guilty every time they’re thinking about you or putting something up for you. It’s not going to make them move faster. I don’t think it helps. I’m sorry for Anonymous. I’m sorry for the situation. It’s a very common situation for writers in this town at this moment. I don’t think telling them is going to change anything. Where I would say is, let’s say you’re a feature writer who’s like you’re trying to close a deal on something, talking to your reps like, “Okay, the paperwork is taking a long time.”

I think then you say like, “Listen, I really need this to close so that I can make this a payment or so I don’t lose my health insurance.” When you’re just looking for a job overall, I don’t think that’s going to help you out.

Courtney: To yes, and what John is saying, I think the other thing is that if you have an attorney, when you are doing a deal, the attorney can say to the agent, “Hey, man, don’t go back and forth 800 times. We’re just going to close this deal and get this dude some money.” Rather than you saying it, let the attorney say it to your agent, and let that conversation be without you.

John: Agreed. All right. Answer a question from Mitchell here.

Drew: “How important is having a clear answer to the question of why now when developing or pitching a project? Many of the films and shows I love feel timeless. Their appeal comes from story and characters rather than a sense of immediacy. Relatedly, what advice would you give to a writer who feels that they have a strong script but no compelling answer to why now? Is that something that can be developed later, or does its absence signal a deeper issue with the material?”

John: Courtney, as you were pitching Nemesis. Was there a why now?

Courtney: There wasn’t anything on that was like it. We were very singular in the fact that it was just this eight-episode hardcore note contemplation canon. We knew we were going to be doing something that was heavy action, and so that’s why. What I would say is if we’re talking about a TV show, it takes so long to get these things up that the why now may no longer be relevant. It’s like if you were going to pitch somebody a story about ice right now, I just feel like it would feel dated, even though those things are still happening.

Because of one battle after another, it feels like it’s been done, weirdly enough, even though it is current. I think actually having too much currency is lame. Just be like, why do I want to tell the story now is actually much more interesting than why would it do well now. If you can figure out a why do you need to tell the story now, then that’s probably the best way to pitch it.

John: I fully agree. According to what you’re describing, there is often called a why me. Why am I the person for this? You’re selling like, “Not only is this a good idea, but I’m the person who’s uniquely qualified to tell it. This is why I’m going to devote my entire creative process to this idea because I really feel it for me.” It’s making sure that it’s clear to the people you’re pitching to that why it resonates for you is important.

The why now, you can be pitching something timeless. As long as you can sometimes find ways that this railroad tycoon reminds me of what we’re seeing in terms of our modern-day billionaires. While it’s not about them, it feels like it’s speaking to this moment.

Courtney: That is the most important thing. What you just said is so right. Why me is so important. Going into the why me is really huge. Why am I the person who has to tell this story? Even though it’s about two men who are a cop and a criminal, and I’m a nice girl from Connecticut, why?

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. Courtney, what would you like to share with our audience?

Courtney: My one cool thing is a YouTuber named Ryan Walker who does hotel reviews.

John: Oh.

Courtney: He goes all over the world and does hotel reviews. He is not biased, and he is dreamy to look at. He goes to all these great like Four Seasons and all these places all over the world. The thing is, I’m not traveling. I’m writing. I’m hunched over a laptop with a little bit of tequila next to me. I ain’t going anywhere. I’m a parent, and I’m in a relationship, and I’m not traveling. Ryan gets to go everywhere. He’s pleasant and lovely. He’s great. I recommend that highly as just escapist. The videos are 10, 11 minutes. You can take a break from writing. You can take a break.

John: I love that. My one cool thing is the show Star City, which just started on Apple. This is a spin-off of For All Mankind. For All Mankind tells the story of the space program in an alternate universe where Russia got to the moon first and then started off a big space race that ends up very differently than our space race. This is Russia’s side of the story, so in Star City, which was their development for where they did all their things. Megan McDonnell, our previous Scriptnotes producer, is a co-EP on the show.

I’m sure it’s great for many reasons, but I’m sure it’s partly great because Megan McDonnell was on the show and was in Eastern Europe for months and months and months, actually making the show. It’s delightful. Well, it’s not fun. It’s not a fun show. It’s not a laugh-a-minute. It is like Chernobyl, but with the space program. If that sounds great to you, it’s really great. It’s really well done. It’s gorgeous to look at. Great writing throughout. I encourage you to check out Star City on Apple TV.

Courtney: Can I say a shout-out to Chernobyl? Love Chernobyl.

John: Chernobyl’s a great show. Craig Mazin, somehow, he made a really great show there.

Courtney: Yes, it’s weird. It’s weird that Craig keeps making stuff that’s so great. It’s weird.

John: That’s so great. Courtney, I suspect you have many people who have worked with you and for you on different shows who are killing it. Is that correct?

Courtney: Yes, mostly directors who have moved around. Like Anthony Hemingway, who directed the pilot of Power. I work with Rob Hardy a lot. Obviously, Mario Van Peebles. Crazy that I would be watching New Jack City as a kid and then getting to work with him. A lot of my writers have been with me a long time. They’ve come up the ranks with me. Most of them, I’ve actually stayed in the Power universe. It’s the thing, there’s so many shows, nobody leaves.

John: Why would you? You’re like Pixar. You’re like golden handcuffs. Like, “Let us stay close to Courtney Kemp.”

Courtney: Here’s the thing. Our shows keep going, and we have multiple seasons and people need work. I think it’s been harder for people to get an original idea off, and it’s easier to get a Power Book 19 signed off on.

John: That’s great. I have one last request for our listeners. Many people know my company also makes software. We make apps for writers. We have something new that’s in beta testing. We are looking for Mac users who rely on assistive technology or alternative input methods. Switches, foot pedals, the sip and puff devices, mouth controls, head or eye tracking, adaptive keyboards. Basically, if you have some sort of non-standard input setup, we need to make sure our app works great with all those devices.

If you are someone who uses these technologies on a Mac, write in to Drew at ask@johnaugust.com so we can send you a link to beta test this because we can do what we can do, but we won’t know until actual people who use these things try it out. If you are a person who uses these things or knows someone who uses these things on a Mac, we would love to have them test it out.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our show this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.

That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has links to lots of things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.

You’ll find us on Instagram at scriptnotespodcast. Courtney, where should they follow you on Instagram?

Courtney: @CourtneyAKemp.

John: @CourtneyAKemp. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with all the links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our 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. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on shooting in Los Angeles. Courtney Kemp, what an incredible pleasure it was to talk with you.

Courtney: This has been so great. So awesome.

John: Please come back often. You are a delight. Oh, and congratulations on Nemesis, number one on Netflix.

Courtney: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Let’s hope we hang in there. [laughs]

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Courtney Kemp, not only did you make a delightful show, but you’ve made a show that is shot in Los Angeles that looks like it’s shot in Los Angeles because it is shot in Los Angeles. Tell us about holding your ground on shooting in Los Angeles and the, I don’t want to say compromises, but there are compromises, the decisions you had to make in order to make that make sense.

Courtney: We wrote a show that was LA for LA, and we really wanted to make a show that showed parts of LA that aren’t usually on TV. I will always say this: Issa Rae showed a lot of these places, too, but we wanted to show both the top and the bottom, View Park and Baldwin Hills and the grittier places in Los Angeles. You can’t do that in Atlanta. You just can’t. It doesn’t work. When we started to talk about shooting in LA, every time I said, “Well, we’re going to shoot in LA,” the Netflix people would frown. They would make frowny faces at me.

I was like, “Look, I’m a mom of a trans kid. I’m not going anywhere. My kid needs me. I’m going to be here. I’m not going to mess around with that. If you force us to do it in Atlanta, that’s fine. I won’t be there. I am not going to be on set.” I stood my ground, which was uncomfortable because you want to do everything to get that green light, but I really needed the show to be here. Plus, LA crews need the work. Plus, I know I’m going to hire Black and Brown crew. I know they need me. I know that I’m going to have a heavy LGBT presence on my crew.

I know that my job is to not just represent that in front of the camera, but behind the camera. It was a bigger, I don’t want to say crusade for me, but it was a point of pride for me. Then once they said yes, we looked at our budget and I was like, “Yes.” There was a moment where they were like, “We’re only going to say yes if you can cut the scripts down.” All the scripts we had, I had to cut them all down in two days, which I did.

John: Cutting it down so that there would be fewer days of production, right?

Courtney: Fewer days of production. I had to cut it down to 11 days of production. Our original scripts were 14, so I had to cut it down to 11 days of production, then to 10. Some shows got a little bit of 11. We did some block shooting. We block shot everything.

John: Tell me about cutting them down from 14 to 11, is it mostly cutting scenes or is it cutting locations, combining locations? What are the ways that you get it down from 14 to 11? You have sets you come back to, but I couldn’t tell off the pilot what was built and what was practical.

Courtney: Homes were built. Inside of homes were built. The RHD set is a set. You didn’t see it in the pilot, but in Episode 2, you will see Coltrane Wilder’s office. We had to do some creative stuff. We had a building that we rented, and the top floor was RHD, and the bottom floor was Coltrane Wilder’s office. Creative stuff like that. Cutting scenes, definitely cutting scenes. Cutting a lot of scenes, trimming them down, or combining information. Information that took three scenes to arrive at, we made it to cutting characters.

John: I would say your experience in broadcast was probably incredibly helpful for that because you were probably used to making shows in eight or nine days back in the broadcast days, where you may have had more in Power.

Courtney: That’s absolutely right. I think I will just say very specifically that those years coming up the ranks and watching that happen and learning how to do that and seeing my showrunners really cut that down, that’s that experience that’s invaluable for the moment that a Netflix production exec says, “I don’t think you can do this.” You’re like, “Yes, I can because I watched Greg do it, because I watched Robert do it, because I watched all these people do it. I know how to do this.” It’s very hard. If you were a young showrunner, you’d be screwed. You wouldn’t know how to do it.

John: No.

Courtney: You’d end up in Atlanta, is what would happen.

John: Let’s talk about the not ending up in Atlanta because 2016, 2017, I was living in Paris for the year, and I got really homesick. That was when Issa Rae’s Insecure came on. I remember just watching the show. I’m like, “It’s Los Angeles.” It’s a beautiful Los Angeles. It wasn’t just Beverly Hills and the Hollywood sign. It was like you could tell you were really in Los Angeles, and it does make a difference. The textures are just different. I can tell the houses in your show; the exterior is like, “I know where the house is.”

Courtney: That’s right.

John: That’s important.

Courtney: It was a huge thing for me to write a love letter to my adopted city in the same way that Power is a love letter to New York, to make Los Angeles a character, and to really make the show full of all different kinds of people. Again, that whole Black show thing. A lot of the leads are Black, but there’s also Brown folks. There’s Asian folks. We have a giant, lovely, wonderful Samoan cop. We have all these great people in here because that’s what LA actually is as opposed to the fake LA that you see on TV.

John: I saw a meme yesterday that was talking about you have the stereotypes of Los Angeles, but the median LA voter is a 50-year-old Latina woman who goes to church. That’s what the median person in Los Angeles actually is. It’s so different than how it’s portrayed on screen. Talk to us about shooting in Los Angeles because I hear horror stories of like, “Oh, it’s hard to get permits.” It’s hard to do this. You have to deal with all that rigmarole. Do you have a location manager? How involved did you have to get into negotiating the ups and downs of shooting in Los Angeles? Was it tough?

Courtney: Carolyn, our location manager, is amazing. She was so on top of everything. What I would say is our biggest challenges were there’s a very large shootout where we shut down Century City. That was really crazy because we had to shoot in Century City over a Saturday and a Sunday and do a lot of setups with a lot of guns and make sure it was safe. She got that to happen, but that’s permitting and all those things. I think the biggest challenge for us is that we did end up shooting sometimes in not the safest neighborhoods. You really have to make some good local conversations happen and take care of people.

John: What people don’t think about, it’s you’re in a neighborhood, but also it’s not just the physical location you’re shooting at. It’s where you’re putting your trucks, where you’re putting the trailers, where you’re putting everybody else, how people are moving from wherever the trailers are to the place where they are. Where’s the parking lot? Where’s the village? All those things you have to think about, which are not showing up on screen, but they’re logistically so important.

Courtney: And so expensive. If the job of the showrunner is to get as much money on screen as possible, if you are in a place where you’ve got to put your base camp 30 minutes away from where you’re shooting, that’s going to soak up your day. It’s just so bad. It’s not easy. We were very, very fortunate. My line producer, Phil Barnett, was a genius. He really helped me navigate getting LA. I had never made a show in LA before. That’s where I was new. I didn’t know how to do this, but I was determined to do it. Then the fires happened. Then it was like, “Okay, well, we’re proud to be here in LA.”

All those things happened where it’s like, “We’re proud, LA strong.” It’s like, “Yes, well, I really wanted to be here,” but it was tough.

John: Congratulations on the show. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Courtney: That was fun. I would keep talking to you forever. This is so great. This is super fun. Thank you.

Links:

• Courtney Kemp on Instagram and Wikipedia
• Nemesis on Netflix
• ‘Obsession’ Makes History With Biggest Second-Weekend Spike in Modern Times by Pamela McClintock and Lexi Carson for The Hollywood Reporter
• The ‘Pitt’ Effect: A Scramble to Get Shows Back on Air Faster by Lesley Goldberg for Ankler Media
• Ryan Walker hotel reviews
• Star City
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (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.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 737 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off directing this week, so in his place we have Phil Hay.

Phil Hay: Hello, John.

John: I’m so excited to have you back on the show.

Phil: I’m so happy to be here. It’s really nice.

John: It must be at least five times you’ve been on the show. We’ve–

Phil: I’ve got to be a five-timer at this point.

John: Oh, you would–

Phil: If not, maybe we can do like a quick fifth right after this.

John: 100%.

Phil: I need the jacket, is what I’m saying.

John: Yes, for sure. In my notes here I said designated hitter. Is that a thing? Does that actually apply to what you’re doing here?

Phil: First of all, thank you for speaking my language. I really appreciate that.

John: I’m trying to speak baseball.

Phil: I would say pinch hitter would be more the–

John: Pinch hitter?

Phil: Yes, pinch hitting for Craig. We’ve got a lefty on the mound. It’s time for me to shine.

[laughter]

John: Today on the show with a lefty on the mound, I want to talk about making movies inside the studio system and outside the studio system on the periphery because two of my favorite movies that you’ve done are movies that are made not in the let’s-sell-it-at-festival route, but with outside money in ways that we don’t talk about much on the show.

Phil: Yes, no, I’d be glad to talk about it.

John: We’ll also answer some listener questions about themes and productivity. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to go back to one of your earliest films, the iconic documentary The Dungeon Masters.

Phil: I was very happy to see that on the schedule.

John: We’ll dig into the history of that, which is a more classic indie film, and so the story behind that. It’s also a documentary. We don’t talk about documentaries very much, but we’d love to talk about Dungeons & Dragons.

Phil: This is a documentary that our Dungeons & Dragons game talks about almost every single week.

John: It is. It is a constant point of reference.

Phil: My proudest accomplishment.

John: First, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out with some follow-up.

Drew: We were talking about focus groups a few episodes ago. Steven writes, “I was a film focus group moderator for 12 years, did over a thousand focus groups on first-run movies. In the last episode, Craig did a little recap of the horrible testing process. He specifically mentioned pacing and how no one ever says a movie is too fast. Not true.

Once we break the movie into places or parts that are too slow or fast, oftentimes, too fast will come up. What this means is there’s not enough information given to the audience at that time, and it seems as if the filmmakers have glazed over information needed to enjoy and understand the movie. This happens quite often. Also, I’ve never seen a movie get worse after testing. The scores always go up if the filmmakers are willing and able to follow the research notes. While the process is not a favorite of young directors, the good ones know that tests allow for a director to really satisfy an audience.”

John: All right. You and I have both been through a lot of audience testing, so let’s push back against Steven to the degree that’s pushing back. Have you ever gotten the notes too fast?

Phil: I have never once gotten the note too fast, but maybe that’s part of the kind of movies we make or how we do things. I don’t doubt him, but I think that generally, in all these binaries that we have in talking about movies and art, it’s leaning toward make it faster. The culture is leaning toward make it faster versus, I would say, slower or investing more time. As we both know from making movies, sometimes making the scene longer makes it play faster.

John: Yes, the ironic thing about sort of like if a thing’s not working, it feels too slow, but if it’s working, it’s perfect and delightful. My experience with testing has been largely positive. I really do love seeing a movie with an audience for a first time. We get the sense of like, did that work? You can feel when the audience is confused, when they’re right with you and such.

I haven’t found the actual notes back from the little forms they fill out to be especially useful. Focus groups, kind of marginally useful. I sit in the theater and listen to them, eavesdrop on them, but I have not ever taken anything from them that I felt like, “Oh, that’s an insight I couldn’t have gotten.” Have you?

Phil: Not really. I think that the thing that I gained the most from test screenings is just watching the movie with the audience. To me, my ideal version of that would be you watch the movie with the audience. I always leave that with a ton of things I would like to do to make the movie better.

The reason that it carries a lot of angst with it is that oftentimes, they’re good if the movie’s going well. If the movie is either not going well or if it’s the type of movie that is more than one thing, is difficult, has an ending that is not a positive ending, the fear, and what does come into practice sometimes, is people within that process, start using those comments as weapons against the filmmakers to say, “You’re wrong, I’m right.”

John: Absolutely. They have an opinion and they’re using the numbers off of the test screening to justify their opinions in terms of like, “We have to cut these things. Look at the data here.”

Phil: It’s incontrovertible because this person said that when you could point to someone saying positive version and frequently, that’s not the case.

John: If it were just the filmmakers who were in the test screening or benefiting from the process, I don’t think anyone would be afraid of it. It’s the fact that it is the studio and the financiers who are paying for this, they’re paying for the movie and they want to see that it’s working or it’s not working.

There are cases where I’ve had movies that have been on the bubble. We had a great test screening, and wow, we suddenly just have a lot more freedom to do what we needed to do. The early cut of it was like, we knew there were some real problems, but in showing it to an audience, we got this enthusiastic reaction, which freed up our budget to actually go and do the reshoots we needed to do.

Phil: It can be very helpful in those ways. It’s also the type of movie you’re making, right?

John: Yes.

Phil: Like when we were testing both the ride-along movies, those movies are the type of movie that tests really well if they’re done well. I think they were and they did and you’re gaining momentum from that. A lot of times, the testing, people don’t realize, even filmmakers, what is being evaluated is not how good the movie is, it’s how much the movie satisfied the expectations of the people watching it.

In a way, that’s the way the questions are asked too. Some of my favorite movies of all time have incredibly bleak, downer endings that I know tested in whatever the negative 30s, but they’re great movies. If you’re in a forum, we talk about studio versus independent films, if you’re in the studio, like it’s a commercial film, you do have to reckon with that stuff, and it becomes a very anxiety-ridden process.

John: We talk about the top two boxes, which are the very good and excellent scores that come out. You want those top two boxes to be a high a number as possible. Some people say like, “Oh, it’s the 90s in top two boxes, then you’re doing great.” It’s important to remember that was a snapshot of how people felt right as the lights were coming up. They may feel differently about it an hour, a day, a week later. Are they going to tell people like, “It was a tough one, but I’m still thinking about that movie”? That’s the kind of reaction that gives a movie real legs.

Phil: The ones that are really confounding, and I’ve been to some of them and involved in some of them, are where the movie plays incredibly in the theater. If it’s a comedy, you know when people are laughing. If it’s a horror movie, you know when they’re jumping and when they’re engaged. You can feel that energy. Then the test scores come back and it’s two completely different things.

John: Exactly.

Phil: I’ve yet to discern what that is. Part of me thinks there’s sometimes when you start asking people questions about specific things. They feel like they have to come up with an answer why it worked or it didn’t. Then you start analyzing in a way that’s not necessarily organic to the way you’re just experiencing it.

John: Yes, for sure. In every test screening, we have the system where there’s cameras that are actually filming the audience so you can see what jokes play and what things landed? I’ve been at those. I’ve never seen the footage that comes out of them. I don’t know if it’s real or helpful.

Phil: I’ve had that footage brandished at me before.

[laughter]

John: No one laughed, yes.

Phil: No. It’s funny, what you also realize is you see two different audiences and you see two completely different reactions. What’s fascinating is seeing what jokes play with one audience. You can have a screening where the– It’s a diagnostic tool, it’s not necessarily great because you have one screening where this one gag plays through the roof. The next screening, it’s just nothing.

It can be any number of things. It’s just who’s in that audience or it can be the volume in the theater, the dialogue isn’t loud enough, or all these different things. You do have to take some of that in the aggregate. If you do have a scene and the entire crowd is laughing and it’s visible to everyone, that can be helpful. I’ve had that work for me as well.

John: I don’t think this has happened on any of my movies, but I know of situations where they did sort of an A-B test. They had two theaters side by side that were showing slightly different cuts to see which one played better. I guess, it makes sense. I think you would feel in the room which one people were clicking on, but if the numbers are significantly different, there’s something about that change that is meaningful.

Phil: Again, that’s such an unideal thing for a filmmaker to go through because it’s how clearly they’re not equally excited about both cuts when that’s happening.

John: It is the director’s cut and the producer’s cut.

Phil: Right. Later when we talk about the various bands of studio to independent and in between, sometimes in an independent film you’re fighting for your director to get final cut as a producer. Some of that negotiation sometimes goes back to what all the tie-breakers are. The secret is if it ever comes into play, you’re screwed anyway. Like any of these tie-breakers. If a tie-breaker becomes necessary, we have a big problem, but you have to have something. Sometimes it will screen competing cuts and we create a structure around that. You really hope to never get to that point, but sometimes you do.

John: It does. We have more follow-up on audio questions. This is something that came up last week where some of our listeners were really displeased when we were playing the audio from people who wrote questions.

Drew: Who were asking questions.

John: Yes.

Drew: We had a handful of more folks this time. We only had a couple the last time. Most of them were just saying they also thought something was strange. I had one come in from Jared that I thought was nice. Jared says, “When I originally heard the audio questions, I thought they sounded robotic, but the idea of writing in to ask you to stop featuring them would not have crossed my mind. That’s ridiculously fuzzy. I like the audio, even if it’s from fellow screenwriting nerd robots. Keep them coming.”

John: All right, great. I think Tony actually may have hit on something that may be the issue here.

Drew: Yes. Tony says, “I also think what might be AI sounding is the crystal clear quality of the audio. I listen to many call-in type podcasts, and almost every call has that voicemail sound that your audio questions didn’t. Maybe iPhones just have come a long way, and that’s what voicemail sounds like now.

John: Yes, I think that’s probably partly it. Also, Matthew Chilelli, our editor, has incredibly high standards for audio, and so I do feel like he may be screening to make those things sound like they’re not coming out of an iPhone, and that may be the uncanny value– [crosstalk]

Drew: You got to stuff it up a little bit, and so–

John: If we go back to it, we’ll add some like traffic noise behind it-

Drew: Yes, exactly.

John: -to let you know that-

Phil: Sirens.

John: -someone’s yelling over construction equipment.

Drew: A guy selling newspapers in the ’30s. [laughs]

John: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Somewhat related to this, one of my big frustrations recently has been situations where in a program, there’ll be the sound of someone making a call or leaving a voicemail, but it doesn’t actually work that way, where the audio around it is just not actually how things work. Or whether you hear somebody, this happens in Duolingo specifically, where it’s like someone’s playing a voicemail, but you hear it ringing first. That doesn’t exist.

Phil: Yes, it is weird because it’s so boring. The reality of waiting, and also the thing of no one ever says goodbye off the phone. Everyone in every movie and television show is incredibly rude. They’re just like, yes–

John: Just stops talking.

Phil: Yes, or not even, yes. They just finish saying their line, and then the phone call’s over.

John: I do think it’ll be interesting as generations who are writing movies have never grown up with answering machines or that technology, and they’re trying to write period stuff that’s part of our era, just their assumptions about things. Because they’ll have seen stuff in movies, but that will be wrong too. The fact there was a physical machine.

Phil: There was an era. The machine era was like a gag, like a repeated gag that people would do, like–

John: Swingers had a great gag about-

Phil: The greatest. Maybe the greatest voice machine gag ever.

John: Voice machine. It was a pre-voicemail answering machine.

Phil: You remember the thing where somebody would introduce the character, and it’d be like, “Beep. Hey, it’s Toby. You know what to do.” You’re like, “Oh, great. Yes, I’ve been introduced to the character.” Not anymore.

John: Not anymore. All right. Phil Hay, you have made, with your partner, Matt Manfredi, made many studio features. We’ve also made features that are indies, but not kind of the, “Oh, let’s sell this at South by or Sundance.” They’re movies that are made with independent financing, that could have been made inside the studio system.

I want to talk about the split there. We’ve talked about this with you on Episode 244. We talked about The Invitation, which is fantastic. 377, we talked about Destroyer, which is a bigger film. The Invitation feels like you can imagine it playing at a festival, and so– [crosstalk]

Phil: That was the route for that one.

John: For that one? Okay.

Phil: Yes.

John: Whereas Destroyer, it’s a noir film set in Los Angeles with a recognizable star lead, and it could have been made for a studio, yet wasn’t. I’ve also talked with Keith Calder, Episode 343. We talked about indie producing overall. He’s a person who raises the money and does things outside of the system. I want to talk about the decision to do some things in the system, do some things outside of the system. Let’s start with The Invitation. You said it’s more of a classic model for it. Did you know from the very start this is how you were going to approach making the movie?

Phil: Yes, that one we did know from the beginning. In a way, it came about over the course of many, many years in a reaction to feeling like we not only wanted but needed for ourselves to make a movie that was ours, and that was not in the studio system, and that wasn’t beholden to all the stuff that is good and bad about that system. We wrote it very deliberately to be able to be made on a very small budget. In the end, it was $1 million flat, for that movie. We shot it in 24 days. All along the design for that, though it doesn’t fit into something like a classic festival movie. It’s not a straight drama. It’s a drama, thriller, horror, whatever else it is.

John: It anticipated the Blumhouse era, though, of a single location, terrible things happen in a single location, in a not quite real-time but almost real-time.

Phil: Yes, the thing that makes it necessarily independent was the subject matter and the tone, and also, the size of it being. That was our proposal to everyone. “Let us do this movie, and Karyn directing it, and let us be in charge of it.” When you do make a movie for $1 million, it’s the same as now, there’s these thresholds, where the level of you getting to do what you want to do decreases as you go up potentially. It really depends.

At that level, the deal that we said is like, “Karyn has final cut. This movie is what we want it to be. We’re going to cast whoever we want to.” We found the financiers who were willing to do that. Then did take that to South by Southwest where it premiered. It did sell there. In an interesting way, I think we’re going to talk about this a little bit later, the role of streamers now.

Then, we were able to sell to Drafthouse Films, which became Neon. It evolved into, with other things into that, for just theatrical and physical media. We sold it to Netflix for just streaming, which is not something they do anymore. They only did that up to a certain point. I think it was a real boon for a lot of independent films because you could sell it to the right distributor that could put it on as many screens as you can while knowing it wasn’t going to be a wide or even medium release. Then the Netflix deal could backstop everybody and make it work. That was the intention. Everything about it felt like an independent film. Destroyer–

John: Before we get to Destroyer, let’s talk through the pros and cons of doing something indie, because you were saying like, you have just much more freedom and autonomy. You have final cut. You have all these abilities. You can just say no to things you don’t want to do, but you’re also not an employee. Not being an employee means you don’t have the guaranteed money that you have to do. It’s all a risk, a bet on yourself because no one is paying you to write that draft. All of the work that you’re doing, you’re doing for yourself in the hopes that a thing will get made.

Phil: When the movie got made with a low-budget agreement, WJ, we deferred basically almost all of our screenwriting money. That’s it. You’re just investing in it yourself. It is really a labor of love. You’re doing it because you want and need that movie to be made. You’re doing it because you think that’s the best way to get people to see it.

John: Of my movies, The Nines is very much that model, where it’s just money we had ourselves. We went to Sundance, sold out of Sundance, sold foreign, sold domestic, got our token theatrical. That was always the plan for it. Go was an example of supposed to be all foreign-financed money in a very classic indie way that we would sell at a festival. We lost that money before production started, but Columbia Pictures came in and said, “We will be the bank, it’ll be our movie, but It was structured like an independent film. It already had a buyer at the end, so we didn’t go through the whole sales process on that.

Let’s talk through more, though, the pros and cons of you have this idea, a script you’ve written, pursuing it independently versus trying to sell it to somebody to make. What’s the calculus?

Phil: For us, it usually is, are we going to make this movie ourselves with Karyn Kusama, my wife, who’s the director? It really becomes a, is this something we’re going to take together and try to go all the way with? We have one right now that we’re planning to make independently, but it is not impossible for a studio. A studio maybe in another era would have made this movie, but now, the type of movie it is more likely to be made by either one of the mini-majors that we could talk about that have filled that gap a little bit, or made independently with independent money. For us, it’s like, what the thing is.

There are certain things that you can squint your eyes and see how a studio might see it, but if you have to work hard, I’m already worried. You want to make sure everybody makes the same thing. It’s almost dangerous to get someone excited about the potential of the thing versus the thing itself because you might not see it exactly the same way.

John: You can imagine a project which a studio might read the script and it’s like, “Yes, we’ll do that,” and so you get into development and you’re doing a draft, you’re doing another draft, and you realize, “They’re never going to make this movie.” You spend a lot of money and time wasted to getting it there and they now own the thing.

Phil: That’s the thing that’s really, you think you hit upon the thing too, is giving up your control and ownership over it at the last possible minute because if you do sell it to a studio, you get money and that’s great. If they make it, great, but if they don’t make it and they cannot make it for a million reasons, it’s almost impossible.

We had one recently where we miraculously got it out of turnaround from one studio into another studio. Then that entire leadership changed and we got it out of turnaround a second time, but by then, it was too expensive. We couldn’t make the movie. We had someone, an independent financier or a mini-manager ready to make the movie and you just can’t. That’s tragic when you’re–

John: Became expensive because of the money spent on development–? [crosstalk]

Phil: Because the money spent on script? The money spent on development, the interest on that money, the producer’s deal at that studio with their amortizing against it, all those fees, they just lumped that in there. If you can’t negotiate them off of it, then the movie’s dead. That’s something you have to think about, especially if it’s an original, do you want to risk putting all your eggs in that basket, unless you get the green light? You can obviously sell it to them if they’re saying, “We’re going to press Go if you sell it to us.”

With an independent film, there’s endless chances. You go down the line, financer after financer, there’s a million ways to do it. All of them are hard, but if you control it, like this movie I’m talking about now, the new movie we’ve just written, it’s me and Matt, it’s Karyn, and it’s Fred Berger, who’s our producer on Destroyer, and he’s our producer. That’s it. It’s an original, so there’s no rights to worry about. It’s just us.

I think that’s the safest place in a way because you have to be really careful about who you ask in and who you invite in because then they’re with you.

John: With The Invitation, it’s $1 million. You’re able to raise $1 million. No one had rights to this territory, that territory. Everyone was investing in the movie, hoping to make their money out of the movie when it’s sold to a distributor, correct?

Phil: Yes, that was the pure equity model.

John: Yes, that’s clean.

Phil: We did foreign sales later or maybe concurrently. Our producer, XYZ, was really great at foreign sales. I can’t remember exactly what the order was, but I think we had the equity money first, and then it was backstopped by some foreign sales. That was, again, just finding financiers who really wanted to make the movie and the price tag was low enough that they could literally write the check.

John: Let’s talk about the entities involved here. You say XYZ, there’s also Gamechanger, and Lege Artis.

Phil: Yes. Gamechanger was the primary financier, a fund that was specifically created to finance female-driven, female-directed films.

John: Great.

Phil: They had a mission. They were very serious and pure about it. They really liked what they saw with our movie. Then, they could put up three quarters of the money, and so we had to go get another quarter of the money. That was from a group of investors out of Canada called Lege Artis. That came together. Of course, there were lots of ups and downs and money flying from here to there. [chuckles]

John: Who connects you with those people? Is it your agents, Karyn’s agents? Who is the people who’s like, “Oh, you have this script, and so here are some people we can go to,” or are you just meeting people at festivals? How are you finding these folks?

Phil: The way that we did it and the way that a lot of people do it is, so every agency has an indie sales department. In our case, we’re at UTA, Karyn’s at WME at that time was at ICM. You just have to decide which is going to be the sales agent. Often, they team, but another secret about making independent movies is you have to leave one slot open for an actor because if you get a big star in your movie and they’re CAA, CAA is rightfully going to want to help control and package the movie.

We’ve had to have a noble back and forth with our various agents on who is going to handle the movie. We worked with a woman named Jessica Lacy, who was at ICM at the time, who put both Destroyer and The Invitation together. That’s just her job. She goes out and finds money for independent films. She was invested because she worked for Karyn’s agency. It was all part of a push to try to get this movie to happen. The sales agent at an agency is one very prime way. They’ll get involved at some point, no matter what.

There’s also a version where you don’t have them driving and you’ve got someone like XYZ or you’ve got someone like Rocket Science who is the foreign sales for Destroyer or FilmNation, very powerful, great entities who can say, “We’re going to build this on foreign sales. We’ll run it. We’ll go to Cannes market or we’ll go to any of the markets and try to start putting together based on your movie and your cast. We’ll put together the money that way.” They’re almost always working with a sales agent too. It’s foreign sales and a sales agent, and then your producer.

Fred, our producer is a real producer. He’s out there pulling stuff together. He’s on his own mission, monitoring and managing everything and has his own relationships with financiers and his own relationships with every agency in terms of that. That’s the answer is really the sales agent is the sales agent, producer, foreign sales is the [unintelligible 00:24:36]

John: Absolutely. It ends up being a lot of emails, a lot of calls, a lot of just figuring out who is doing what and what the next step in the process is. You’re all sort of chasing this dream of imagining making this movie. To what degree is this person attached? To what degree is it realistic? Is this timeline realistic? Is the money actually going to show up in the account when you need it to show up in time?

Phil: Yes, that is the question because so frequently, the money doesn’t show up in the account [chuckles] and you’re back scrambling again. Or you put together an entire cast and take it to sales and get the money, but by the time you can get the movie going, half the cast has to fall out because they’re doing something else. This is constant gears turning and trying to grab whatever the go thing is and get it far enough that when the inevitable stumble happens, they’re okay with the fact that it’s not that actor anymore. Now it’s this actor. That’s basically how that works.

The one thing I’d say that I took away, I’ve been doing some mentoring and so I’m talking to some younger filmmakers about this, is through all these meetings, the difference between someone who has the money and someone who can “get you the money” is the difference between night and day.

[laughter]

Phil: There’s so many people who will only out themselves in the meeting that they don’t have the money, but I can call this guy and this. You don’t need that person to call that person. You can call that person. The gold is the person who actually has the money.

Then the part 2 of this was to say, and this might be useful for listeners out there who are trying to put their own movies together, is always trust your first instinct about the people you’re sitting down with because that first meeting is the very best they are ever going to be with you. They want something.
They might stay that good and you might learn wonderful dimensions about them later, but on a basic sense, if you’re sitting in that meeting and you’re like, “I don’t think I’m aligned with this person, or I don’t think they get it, but they say they’ll write a check,” you have to acknowledge that because when the pressures of making the movie get together, that’s going to be your favorite meeting with them. It better start out pretty good.

John: There’s a feature I’m executive producing and I’m not heavily involved in the day-to-day of it at all, which is great and by design. Over the course of its development, there have been different actors in different roles. I was talking with another filmmaker and said like, “Oh, one of your actors is in this movie I’m executive producing.”

It’s like, “Oh, that’s so exciting.” It’s like, “What’s the thing?” I was like, “Blah-blah-blah. I don’t know that he’s doing that, but maybe he’s just doing something secret.” It was like, “Oh, no, he’s not in the movie at all.” I was like three or four months behind. It’s like, “Oh, it’s a completely different person.”

As I see the actual like, “Oh.”

Phil: It’s complete alternate universe you were talking about.

John: “That person’s not in the movie whatsoever.”

Phil: Yes. No, no, not at all.

John: You forget how many times along the way, like, this is the dream of things being put together and it wasn’t this way. My movie, The Nines, we had a completely different cast. As we were putting stuff together, but then schedules change. I can imagine that movie. I had a lovely meeting with Aaron Eckhart, but he’s not in the movie.

Phil: Right. The alternate universe version he is, I guess.

John: Yes. With The Invitation, you’re making a million-dollar movie, and there’s a template to that. We know what that looks like. 24 days is a reasonable amount of time. You’ve got one location. Destroyer is much more ambitious. For that, it feels like it could have been made as a theatrical feature. It’s unusual to have a woman starring in that role, Nicole Kidman. It’s her out of her normal lane. What was the process on that? Were you ever considering going into the studio, or you knew from the start that this would be some kind of indie?

Phil: I think when Matt and I first thought of the script, and again, like everything we do, it took eight years from inception to the movie coming out, and Invitation was the same thing. When we first thought of the script, I think we thought of it as something that we could do at a studio, that we wanted to maybe either write to try to sell to a studio or pitch to a studio. In a way, it’s like maybe a movie that Warner Brothers would have made in the 1970s or something, but maybe creeping up toward the present.

John: Yes, Jane Fonda would have starred in it. Yes.

Phil: Right, but we quickly realized, once Karyn knew she wanted to do it, and we started imagining what we were really chasing with it, we felt like it was much more at home. Again, we wanted to try to make it ourselves. The Invitation allowed us to have credibility to say like, “We want to do this again, and we want to do this movie.” The budget wasn’t massive. It was around $9 million, but it’s a lot bigger than The Invitation.

John: It’s a bigger risk and a bigger swing, though.

Phil: It’s a bigger risk, and that’s the thing, once you get to that point, people can start seeing how they might lose money. Fortunately, we made money for everybody with that movie.
The way that was built was, again, through Jessica Lacy, through all the people that were- through Rocket Science, through Fred, who came on to produce it, it was finding the perfect equity financer, again, to write the check on the trust that the type of movie it is with the director and with the script was going to pull people in. They got on board before Nicole Kidman, which is very, very rare when that happens now especially. It’s almost always cast– [crosstalk]

John: For a movie that’s almost entirely on her shoulders. She’s in nearly every frame.

Phil: Who knows, had it taken longer to find her, who knows what other things might have happened. To her eternal credit, Nicole is one of my favorite actors and people and is so wonderful. She just read it and wanted to do it, and she was in. It was not a lot of crap. It wasn’t a lot of waiting seven months to read it or whatever. That really made it go.

John: What were the differences in terms of, it’s one thing to reach out to people like, “Oh, for $50,000,” or whatever, but if you’re trying to get to $9 million, you have to have bigger swings and bigger people writing bigger checks. Was there a foreign presale? How are you getting up to $9 million? Was it just individual people writing bigger checks or was it pre-commitments to–?

Phil: I think we did well in presales, and we did, and then–

John: Let’s talk through presales. In presales, this is the script. This is the theoretical poster. You’re going to a market like Cannes and say like, “We’re making this Nicole Kidman thriller with this director.” Out of different markets, they’ll say, “I’ll buy that for X dollars”?

Phil: Yes. You’re going market by market. Like in Japan, you get a certain amount of money for that. Each market, each star is worth more in every market. Of course, as we know, that’s mostly just total voodoo.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Phil: Nobody has any idea. It means nothing, but they believe it. [chuckles] You’re going down the line. They present you with something, the ask and the take. The ask is what, in best scenario, they would get from, say, Australia, which you did really well because Nicole is an Australian and a massive star there. The take is like, “This’ll be okay. These are our bottom line. If we get the take from everybody, we’ll still be able to make the movie.”

John: What’s crucial to understand about this is that you could come to them with like, “I have this genre of movie and this star,” and they could do it, but they could also do it even without the project itself. They kind of know how much different people are worth in different packages. They could get a sense of what a package is worth.

Phil: In a feel of a type of movie.

John: Yes, they get a feel.

Phil: Sometimes they read the script. Sometimes it’s very intensive. Sometimes we’ve all seen endless deadline announcements of some package at Cannes that sold for all this money, and they just grabbed this star and they grabbed that star, and they have a title, and then they go, and then the movie never gets made, or maybe it gets turned into something else or whatever. In this case, we also had a unique thing where we were able to make the movie. We talked about, “Should we try to go get a distributor now?” Because we felt really strongly about the movie. We felt like it was turning out just the way we wanted it to.

John: An option you could have done is essentially, a negative pickup like we did with Go, where it’s like, “Okay, this movie is happening. Paramount, do you want to come in now and–?”

Phil: “Would you like to come in now, and you’ll be the distributor?” Now we have that backstop. Also, if you have a domestic distributor, your foreign sales go way up. That really helps them to know that because that’s advertising for them, too. We went back and forth about the pros and cons of that, like making the movie for a place, or making the movie ourselves and then trying to sell it. The plan always was make the movie, and then get into one of the festivals and sell it there.

Then at Cannes, at the market, when we were in the middle of cutting the movie, the idea came up, and I don’t know whose it was, to cut a reel. We cut a 15-minute reel, which is a mega trailer, but it was beautifully done. I was so proud of how they put it together. That really tells you the story of the movie if you are a distributor. They were like, “Look, we could either, we could have a distributor screening and screen the film later, or do the thing, we’ll premiere it Toronto, and we’ll try to sell it there, or let’s have this screening.”

We screened it for many, many distributors. I think a couple studios were there, too. Out of that, Annapurna just bought it lock, stock, and barrel. That was the ideal outcome for us because they were able to say, “We’re going to write a check that will make your investors fine. We believe in the movie, and we don’t want to wait until you screen at whatever festival.” We ended up premiering it at Telluride, which was incredible, and then screened it Toronto and London. Then it was better because we had a movie that we were just putting out, as opposed to trying to sell. That worked out great for us that they were willing to step up.

John: The festival is a launch pad, but it doesn’t have to do a sales job, which is great.

Phil: Totally. It’s a very different experience.

John: You mentioned Annapurna, which is no longer exists, if I recall?

Phil: They’re around. They’re making a comeback.

John: Fantastic. I want to talk about these mini-majors, because that’s an example of a place that can make and release its own movies, but it’s not one of the big studios. They could have developed the script themselves and got into it, but they also will buy a project along the way and do it. How do mini-majors complicate the question here? Because you have the Searchlights, the Focuses, the sub-labels of bigger companies, and you have these independent companies like Neons and Annapurna. How does that change the equation?

Phil: I think it seems like, and again, to use the movie that we’re working on now, it’s called Sorceress, that we’re in a hopeful way, it expands the possibilities for those things because A24 and Neon are acting more like traditional studios now, but in a really good–

John: They’re clear brands and–

Phil: Clear brands and clearly what they like and what they want to do and what they want to give their audience. I think it’s working out really well. The question that I have, I think they develop some within. I think that it’s possible to go to them with something and say, “Hey, let’s develop this movie together,” if you’re a filmmaker that they want to work with and you have the right idea. I think mostly it’s still buying a package, either buying script director, stars, plan, budget, and they’re like, “Okay, go, we’ll do it.”

Especially Neon is like a lot of acquisitions at festivals. It’s like the best movie at every festival is Neon grabs it, usually. You’ve seen the budgets that they’re comfortable with go like up to 20 or whatever million dollars, which is now something that Neon could not– Neon was one of the people interested in Destroyer, and we love them and they’re wonderful, but at that time, [crosstalk] they’re nowhere near the budget that they were able to spend on stuff.

John: Now you have A24 doing Marty Supreme for–

Phil: Yes, exactly. That’s going to be really interesting to see how that works because as they push out into the desire to make commercial movies, in my heart, I’ve always felt commercial movies are just good movies. We’ve been taught that commercial means bad or there’s one or the other. I’m like, “How about making a great movie, and then people show up and they see it and they talk about it?”

John: I do feel like the success of the box office this year will get people hopefully remembering like, “Oh, that’s right, we can make movies and make money,” which is great.

Phil: Yes, totally. Create something that people want to go see in a movie theater, which I think is important.

John: Let’s also talk about streamers because made for streaming, I think three years ago, we were like, “Ahh.” We were concerned about how much is made for streaming in terms of features. Now, you don’t hear about it as much, but both of these movies could have been made for streaming directly, and there’s a good case were made for those.

Phil: Yes. No, and I think a lot of movies that are on one end, a lot of super commercial movies, but then a lot of oddball, fascinating, director-driven, script-driven movies are made for streaming. For me, it’s always like the first thing is making the best movie, but there is something very real that we talk a lot about, about what happens to it in the culture? If you make it, if the tree falls and no one’s there.

I think the danger is how do you get people to pay attention and remember? We’re very lucky with movies like The Invitation and Destroyer that did not make a ton of money at the box office or anything, but they’ve been kept alive and thriving online and through getting reviews and through getting the traditional ways that people talk about movies and on Letterboxd and on all this stuff.

A lot of movies that are, I think, excellent movies come and go and it’s without a trace. It’s not even when a movie comes out in a theater and leaves in two weeks. It’s like, I’m in the business and I have never heard of a movie starring someone I think is incredible, directed by someone I think is incredible. That’s crazy.

John: We so often think about like, “Oh, you want to make sure your movie gets into a theater because of its exposure and people can see it on a big screen,” and that’s absolutely good and true. I’ll say my experience with The Nines is we never got the right streaming deal. The fact that it’s never been– It’s always been on iTunes, you would always buy it through Amazon. It’s always been a rental versus it just shows up on streaming. I’ve never gotten the right streaming place for it to be featured on.

Phil: That’s interesting.

John: It sucks. Frustrating.

Phil: Let me go to work for you, John.

John: Yes, absolutely. We’ll get somebody on board. To wrap up a few things in terms of the people involved, we talk about the agents who are representing the film for sales. We talk about the packaging and the fee. Let’s make sure we’re differentiating that kind of packaging from traditional TV packaging, which was the whole agency campaign.

Phil: Yes, totally different thing.

John: It’s a different thing. They are not taking an upfront fee, but they’re getting a percentage of whatever the sale is they’re able to make out of this.

Phil: They have a number, a percentage built into what’s called, which you know is called, The Waterfall, which maybe your listeners, some know and some don’t, which is this document that the money trickles through until a little desiccated little bit might fall into your little bird mouth at the end. It’s how everyone gets paid, and it’s administered and dropped through. They take their fee off of percentage of the sales that they make. It’s not a similar thing to what we were talking about there.

I’ll tell you as an anecdote, with The Invitation, which only cost $1 million to make and succeeded beyond our dreams in terms of what it accomplished and how many people know about it and everything. Just two months ago, we entered our profit stage.

John: Actual profitability.

Phil: Which is shocking and incredible.

John: Incredible. Nicely done.

Phil: It’s happened.

John: That’s awesome. Great. Let’s ask and answer some listener questions. What do you have for us, Drew?

Drew: Helen in Toronto writes, “I’m in post-production as a writer-producer of my first indie feature. This is my first project as a producer and sole writer. The script is political in nature and originally included talking heads and experimental moments. It hinted at a larger systemic failure surrounding our two protagonists. At this stage, some of the B-roll and interview-style material is being cut because it “isn’t working” in the edit, making the film feel smaller and more interior to me.

We lose characters, locations, and a sense of scale. I already had to rewrite the ending 13 days into shooting, and have also been asked to change the title. My question is, how much should I fight with my director and co-producers over cuts? What should I defend and how do I know when I’m blinded by my writer lens and should defer to the editor or director-producer perspective?”

John: What Helen’s describing is specific to her movie in terms of what’s getting cut, but really familiar to everything we’ve been through on our movies, where you have an intention as a writer and then in production and then going into post, it’s not the movie you had in your mind.

Phil: I feel for you because it’s something that a lot of us go through, that sense of it mutating before your eyes into something. It can be a very happy thing. It really does hinge on your relationship with the director and how you think they are accomplishing the goal. For us, it’s been very transformative to work with Karin. We were side-by-side, step of the way, and we mutated and evolved it together.

In this case, it sounds like you’re a little bit at aesthetic odds. I guess what I would say is the director really, for better or for worse, does have to be the last word. That’s the way it was meant to be. I guess the advice that I would give you is to fight for what you think is important for that relationship, because you’re going to have many of these along the way. You’re going to want to be able to work together. You’re going to want to maintain your credibility as not just a writer but a producer on this movie.

Our rule of thumb is always if we suggest something to the director and they say no, most of the time, we just move on. If it’s really, really important, we take the time to stop and explain one more time why we think it’s so important. If it’s a no again, it never is spoken again. It just never comes up because it will never change. If you can give yourself leeway to say, “Hey, can I explain to you why this is really important to me” in the most comprehensive manner you can, do that. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I think you have to move on from it at this point.

John: I would ask Helen, does it feel like the director actually has a vision and a plan, or is the director flailing and floundering? If it’s clear that they know what they want to do and they have a vision for how to do it, what Phil says is exactly right. You can speak your mind, but eventually, you’re going to have to back up and let them pull off its vision. If they’re flailing and don’t know what to do, that may be a situation where you’re going to have to insert yourself a little bit more directly into the editing room as the producer and say, “Let’s try this thing. Let’s go in this way.”

There have been some of the studio features I’ve worked on where I’ve had to just get in the editing room and just like, “Let me show you what this could actually look like and try it this way because there may be a way to do it.” In theory, Helen, you were there for a lot of these productions. You saw the stuff that was shot, and you have a sense of what footage actually exists. There may be a way to get something more like what you want happening, but it’s going to depend on the social skills of being able to read where this director is at and how much.

Phil: That’s a great point, John, that I would say is useful no matter where Helen is with her director is if you can offer an alternative and a solution and an idea and articulate some ideas that are different, versus articulating that you don’t think that works and it should be the way it was. It’s funny. It’s often the right argument. In human beings, it’s not a compelling argument to go back. You have to take that and go forward with that.

John: 100%. There’s also a bit of validation that needs to happen. You have to make sure that you make it clear that you hear and understand what’s not working about the old version, and also that the version you’re describing isn’t trying to recreate that. It’s trying to recreate the best of what was actually shot.

Phil: Sometimes speaking in values is really helpful, like the values of what you’re feeling is not there anymore. If it’s the value of, I want something bracing, I want something that really shakes the viewer, or I feel like we’re missing something that creates a sense this is happening in a wider world or any of that, then that starts to become a conversation that is more likely for you to win because we want you to win because you’re the one who wrote it.

John: Grant has written in asking about task lists.
Speaker 3: “In Episode 728, you mentioned you have a daily task list, John, that’s broken up into four quadrants, and you pointed to it as a key to achieving your daily goals. I’m always struggling with getting things done and breaking down tasks into achievable amounts. I’d love to hear more about your lists. Do you make them the day before? If you miss a task, does it carry over? Do you have repetitive elements accounted for on your list, like vitamin consumption? Basically, I’d just love to know more. If you care to share. Great.

John: I have mine right here. This is a blank one. Phil, you can describe this. Tell me what you’re seeing.

Phil: What level? Do you want me to go philosophical with it? Do you want me to analyze why you might have done this?

John: Maybe describe it physically, and then we can describe.

Phil: It’s just a piece of paper folded in quarters. Today is blank because it’s the place for the date. It’s got a lot of boxes and nice faint dotted lines, like a lined paper that you could write a task on. Then we got some PERMA stuff at the bottom. Rush Lambert’s teeth, journal, Duolingo, afternoon fiber, Anki. That’s what you got.

John: That’s what you got. It’s a sheet of 8.5 by 11 paper folded in quarters. It’s pre-printed, so I print it 10 at a time and just fold it up in quarters. Keep a little stack of them by our phone charger. First page says today is. I write the day of what it is. There’s an overflow inside. The back has 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM schedule. I rarely use that. Mostly, though, if I’m on a phone call and I need to take little notes from myself to remind me things to ask or just what happened in the call, I’ll jot those on the back.

Every day at breakfast, I fill this out. I say, “These are the things I want to get done today.” I will carry over tasks from the day before if they are still important. It’s just been great. There’s a blog post. I’ll put a link where I have a template there. People can look through a bit. I’ve done it since 2019, 2020. It’s really good. It’s my way of doing things. Only I put things on the list. No one else can touch the list. No one can go to it. I wouldn’t dare now. I wouldn’t dream of it now.

It’s my personal accountability. The other thing I’ve talked on the podcast, I have index cards everywhere in the house. If I need to write something down, a note to myself or a lot of dialogue, or a note for a scene, I write on an index card. Those index cards get tucked into the little pocket here. They all stay together until they’re handled or processed.

Phil: I’m experiencing this, John, like a beautiful alien being descended and taught me of a life I could never live, but I’d aspire to. Wouldn’t you rather just take a Sharpie and grab something and write, outline, and then stick it somewhere that you never found it again?

John: Absolutely a valid choice. I’ve sat next to Phil playing D&D. Phil will, in a notebook, hand-draw the cheat sheet guide for his character. He’ll do it every session, every single time. He doesn’t bring it back in every time. He’ll do it each time.

Phil: I love doing it each time because I actually enjoy it. I enjoy feeling the Sharpie. I do draw a little diagram, little stars and arrows, and things. Yes, I redo it every time, and I don’t know why.

John: Obviously, people could do that. You could have a list on your phone that you do it. I find having it on paper and the process of doing it every morning at breakfast to be really good in terms of just prioritizing and figuring out what the things are that need to get done. Another thing I think is crucial is don’t just write down things you have to do. Write down things you want to do, so things like watch the next episode of Widow’s Bay. It’s on the list, so I remember to actually do it because I want to do it. Otherwise, I’ll forget to do it.

Phil: That sounds great, John.

John: If it works for you, there’s a template you can download. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. Do we have a question about themes?

Drew: Joey in North Carolina says, “I’m in the middle of writing my first feature. It’s all outlined, and I have a pretty good idea of where it’s going. However, I keep coming up with interesting new themes to explore. At this point, I probably have six to eight themes woven into the script. Though these ideas all fit the story conceptually, I worry I may be trying to explore too many themes. I come up with a new idea, then stop myself, saying, “I can’t explore that because I already have enough themes. Is there a line I should avoid crossing when it comes to the number of themes in my screenplay, or am I just overthinking this?”

John: In the first sentence, I actually had my explanation. He’s in the middle of writing his first feature. In your first feature, you’re going to try to shove everything in there because you’re like, “Will I ever write another feature? I don’t know.” I’ll put everything I know about everything into this one feature. At least he’s aware that he’s doing it. That’s a good sign.

Phil: First of all, I’m glad he’s thinking about theme because I think weirdly thinking about theme, there’s some people who act like they’re too cool to do that. I know you do. I do all the time. I’m always thinking about it because theme to me is just what does it mean? What’s it about? Why would someone want to watch this? I’ve never thought about it in terms of number of themes. I guess what I would say is, hopefully, what you have are shades of one theme, are many shades of one theme.

John: If the theme is the central question, it’s parts of that question or aspects of it.

Phil: Totally. I think it’s always helpful. Part of the reason I was excited to answer this question is talking about theme, it’s always worth reiterating that so many times people mistake theme for what I’m telling the audience or what my lesson is or what my political stance is or anything. I think the most potent way to talk about theme is it’s a question that has more than one legitimate answer. Your movie is about digging into where you lie on that spectrum of those questions.

To me, if you’re thinking about it in terms of themes, having themes that are coherent and that are intriguing, another way to look at it is it gives your characters, there’s always something for them to talk about. Whether they’re talking about it directly or more likely indirectly, whatever that theme is, touches something that is either a strength or weakness of that person, and they want to express it in action or words.

John: It occurs to me, Phil, you and I, and three others I know, we’re never sitting around talking about theme. It’s not that thing that just comes up. It’s an inherent, intrinsic part of the specific story that we’re telling, but we’re never around lunch tables like, “Yes, I’m really struggling with the themes in this thing.

Phil: It’s right. It’s almost like it’s just the breathing of the script is the theme is almost why it exists to me.

John: Absolutely. It’s the question that you’re itching to explore and why you’re even doing it in the first place. I will say that if you’re doing a television series, yes, you might be exploring multiple themes. Each episode might be hitting one aspect harder than another thing. It makes sense that over the course of a series, you’re going to explore different themes. Even over the course of a season might have a thematic central premise that you’re digging into and diving into. For one feature, it’s a one-time journey of these characters going through with this thing. There’s probably a central theme that you’re exploring and aspects of it.

Phil: Maybe it’s helpful to say your theme should be big enough that it can incorporate a lot of these other– maybe I can’t tell because I don’t have it in front of me, but maybe what you’re talking about is six or eight big ideas, or maybe you’re talking about really six or eight themes. That would be a lot for a movie to handle. It’s really what you’re defining the theme as.

Again, to not think about it in the removed sense of I’m stating a theme, but think about it, how it makes your script breathe, how those questions motivate everything. Again, if it’s a question that is provocative, a lot of people say a theme is something that everyone agrees. It doesn’t do anything for you. You have to add to that. If I go back to our own stuff, like The Invitation, one of the themes of that movie that was provocative to us was, can one recover from grief?

Part of the movie is saying, “No, you can’t.” Part of the movie is saying, “Yes, you can,” and that’s the tension. How you do it is the text of the movie, how one can make that possible or not. You may have, ideally, a theme and then a bunch of interesting angles on that theme.

John: Joey, if you’re trying to figure out what is my main theme? Look at what is closest to your protagonist. What are they wrestling with the most? What is the thing that’s closest to them? That’s probably your theme. It doesn’t mean that your other characters can’t have interesting things they do. Everything doesn’t have to be directly on theme.

Phil: Yes, that’s a great point.

John: There are diversions and stuff, and no one has to show up dressed exactly to match those.

Phil: Every single cop in the station thinks the end justifies the means.

John: Absolutely. [crosstalk] Yes, absolutely. Every sequence probably needs to be on theme, not every scene. All right, and now it is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a documentary that Pamela Ribbon, a frequent co-host of the show, is directing about one-act film, which is this annual Texas competition in high schools where each different high school has to put on a one-act play, but it all has to fit within an hour, including building the set and striking the set, and then going back to a black stage.

It is an ingenious competition that they’ve been doing for, I think, 100 years. It’s very longstanding. Pamela has put together a crew, and they filmed behind the scenes of this competition and followed the teams. It reminds me of Boys State. Have you seen Boys State?

Phil: Oh, yes.

John: In that same sense of rather than future politicians, these are theater kids competing at the highest levels, but with all the fun and drama of theater kids.

Phil: That’s awesome.

John: It is great. The movie is largely done, but she’s raising money for finishing funds. If you go to oneactfilm.com, you can see the trailer for it and chip in some dollars for finishing this because it’s going to be great. It is one of the funniest, most emotional. You see the trailer, and it’s like, “Oh, I get why that’s a movie.”

Phil: That sounds great. I’m in.

John: You’re in. All right. Phil, what do you have to share for us? What’s one cool thing?

Phil: I have the good fortune of having a college-age son who is a DJ on his college radio station, Michio at KOXY, Occidental College. He is always introducing me to incredible new music that I might not have found otherwise. I had an experience recently where I heard an album. He played one of the songs. We talked about it. I bought the vinyl at Barnes & Noble, which was fascinating because this is a very niche artist that I’m about to talk to you about that somehow, we were about to go to a movie, popped into Barnes & Noble. This record was there like a miracle.

John: Incredible.

Phil: Whoever is doing the buying at the Americana, kudos to you because it was among all the basic amazing records you’d imagine, and this. It’s a record by an artist called Petey USA. The album is called The Yips, which is a term from baseball about losing your ability to throw.

John: Petey USA

Phil: Petey. P-E-T-E-Y USA. I went home and put on the record. I had the experience that you every once in a while have, where you say, “This is one of my favorite records.”

John: Oh, it’s amazing.

Phil: I put it right on and played it again. I was like, “It’s still one of my favorite records.”

John: That’s incredible.

Phil: I highly recommend it. It’s not a baseball-themed record by any means. He loves baseball. That also touches my heart that he’s into it. Petey USA. His record is, I’m going to call it an instant classic, The Yips.

John: The Yips, a baseball term. Even I know that.

Phil: Exactly. John, there we go.

John: When we went to college, if we were DJing at the college station, our families would never hear this because it was only being broadcast at the college at two watts or whatever. You had to have a radio right next to the antenna to hear it. Now it streams, and so everyone can listen to it around the world. You get to listen to your son DJ all the time.

Phil: It’s pretty amazing because yes, it’s online, and you go, and lots of our friends listen, and his friends listen.

Drew: What hour block does he have?

Phil: He’s Fridays from 4:00 to 5:00, but it’s over for the year now because school’s done. Next fall, he’ll have a different slot, and I’ll come back on Scriptnotes to promote it.

John: I’d hype him up. My similar experience is with my daughter, who is studying film and TV at BU. One of her paid jobs is to film the athletic events that are there.

Phil: That’s a good job.

John: Back in our day, yes, maybe the football game would be taped or something, but now it’s all broadcast on ESPN+. She could text us five minutes men’s basketball, and we can see her directing games, or a lot of times she’s on the court holding a camera. That’s our daughter. Yes, that’s amazing. One nice thing about the internet is this stuff that was incredibly local and temporal, people can see everywhere.

Phil: Yes, it’s really cool.

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

Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all our 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 famous documentary, The Dungeon Masters. Right on. Phil Hay, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Phil: Thank you, John. Literally anytime.

John: All right.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so in addition to your work as a writer, you have a credit as executive producers?

Phil: Executive producers.

John: Executive producers of a film called The Dungeon Masters. Wikipedia describes it as thus, a 2008 documentary film about the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and its significance in the life of three dungeon masters, Scott Corum, Richard Meeks, and Elizabeth Reesman. Let’s listen to a clip.

Elizabeth Reesman: My name’s Elizabeth Reesman.

Richard Meeks: Richard Meeks.

Scott Corum: My name is Scott Corum, and I play Dungeons and Dragons.

Speakers: Dungeons and Dragons.

Richard Meeks: Within my campaign, if I don’t kill you by midnight, I haven’t done my job.

Elizabeth Reesman: There’s a very big difference in the balance of power between males and females. His kind are not welcome. You’re an elf. Rights? Men don’t have rights. Most dragons can speak common.

Richard Meeks What’s that?

Elizabeth Reesman: It’s the common language which I’m speaking now.

Richard Meeks: I’m rolling 14 dice. Oh, Jesus, this is going to be sick.

Scott Corum: I’m a little sensitive to toxic mold.

Elizabeth Reesman: Relationships for me are interesting. The best way I can put it is that I am a drama attractor.

Speaker 6: Also, next month, there is going to be a lifestyle assessment survey. Expect about an hour and a half.

John: All right, so that’s a little taste from the trailer for the movie. What is this thing? Tell me why it exists and how you got involved.

Phil: This exists really from the Herculean efforts of Kevin McAllister, the director, who is an old good friend of ours and an amazing documentarian. I started talking about Dungeons and Dragons because, as we experienced together, it’s one of my favorite things. Kevin had never played and was not even super aware of it, but was immediately fascinated by everything about it.

Matt and I and our friend Kel, and our other producing partners decided to try to do this, which we’d never made a documentary before. It’s completely different than anything we’d done. It takes really long. The biggest difference, it depends on the type of documentary. This kind of documentary, you don’t know what the story is going to be when you start making it. You just have to figure it out. The important thing was finding the people. Kevin took a trip to Gen Con and interviewed a ton of people, all of whom were fascinating.

John: We should say Gen Con is the big D&D convention in Geneva, Wisconsin.

Phil: It’s the big gathering every year, and found all these amazing people. The one thing we had going into it, and Kevin says sometimes with the documentary, you don’t know what’s going to happen, but you know what is happening. That starts creating ideas. When we really knew it was going to be a movie, we realized we wanted to make a movie about how, talking about themes, I guess, if you’re a creative person in the United States of America and elsewhere, I’m sure, and you make money at it, you’re seen as a success, and you’ve done it.

It doesn’t matter what that thing is that you’ve done, or does matter, but you did it. If you are an incredible storyteller, a brilliant person telling stories to your friends, making joy for your community, and you don’t make money at it, you’re seen as nothing. We were like, “That’s really wrong.” The idea of Dungeons & Dragons and what we hope to show in this movie is that the amount of creativity can be a life.

Everyone in the movie, and sadly, we lost Scott Corum recently, but all of them have their whole lives, and then they’ve got D&D offers very different outlets for each of them, too, and that’s part of the fun of the movie. It was the desire to make a movie about creativity, but not in maybe the traditional way that we see artists’ dock of creativity.

John: What’s fascinating, watching it, because it’s 20 years back in time, is that Dungeons & Dragons has become much more popular, much more mainstream.

Phil: Whole different thing.

John: What we see in this film, it’s not live action role-playing, but they’re dressing up in costumes as they’re playing. It’s not what we normally think about it. It’s a more rough-and-tumble. I don’t know, theatricality, it’s just different.

Phil: I think part of that might be that Kevin, it’s a film, so he’s attracted to the people who did dress up more and do more.

John: For credit visual.

Phil: Also, Richard Meeks’s game is a very traditional, the glimpses we get of it, if extraordinarily brutal version of Dungeons & Dragons.

John: It’s actually that [unintelligible 01:05:07] of horror’s aspect of, and now, tear up your sheets and go home.

Phil: Tear up your sheets and go home. You’re all dead. You get the glimpse, the traditional round-the-table friend’s game. Elizabeth’s game, she dresses up. Scott’s game, I think in his game, sometimes they maybe dress, sometimes they don’t. They’re more traditional, too. We also have some LARPing. They all do a little bit of each of it. Yes, it’s a different time. When I knew we were going to talk about it, I was thinking that the evolutions of Dungeons & Dragons and the popular culture now.

Now, shockingly it’s a cool thing to do. It’s incredible to me because people who grew up in our era would be like, “If you played Dungeons & Dragons, you were part of the secret club, and you couldn’t let the jocks find out.” My friend, Chris, who I played D&D with, had a term that he’d call the shame of the game. He’s like, it’s the shame that you feel knowing you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons and they could find you at any time.

John: What’s fascinating about making a documentary and picking these three people to focus on is that you’re shining a spotlight on them and their lives. Of course, what’s fun and amusing about it is their normal lives versus what this is, and to what degree they are masters of the table when they’re DMing, they control the universe. In real life, they don’t control the universe.

Phil: Totally. That was something that I’m so glad Kevin was able to evoke so well. I know it was his intention, is to show that these are people who live very real American lives and have struggles and have triumphs and have this thing that gives them a community. Even though D&D is great. I think some people misinterpret a little bit. D&D is ridiculous. That’s what’s great about it.

John: It’s essentially improv.

Phil: It’s improv.

John: We say it’s a game, but it’s not a game you win. The terrible shooting at home implies that you’ve lost or you’ve failed, but it’s not really a winning or losing game. If you were to make a movie about ballroom dancing or something where you see their normal lives and their ballroom dancing, there’s a scoring to that. You can understand where people are at, but who’s ahead and who’s behind in Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t make sense.

Phil: The idea of being the dungeon master is one who is controlling the experience. You really are in control, and you have a lot of responsibilities, as we see in Richard’s group, which disintegrates because they disappoint him so greatly as a god. That’s part of it. Again, this is the creative outlet for some tremendously creative people who certainly aren’t offered that.

Scott wrote books and tried to get them out there, and did public television. He was constantly making things, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people in the movie, I’d hope they could recognize that the D&D games that they ran might be the greatest act of creativity that they’ve had, and might have impacted people much more deeply than anything else.

John: It’s also the fact that it’s people trying to establish community who, in many cases, don’t have fantastic social skills otherwise. It’s a paradox of you’re playing a social game where you, in real life, are not necessarily so socially adept. That’s some of the comedy in there and the pathos in there.

Phil: I think it’s a haven for people who desire structure for social time, and it really is wonderful for that. I’ll also say the stereotype isn’t always true. We encounter so many D&D players who are robust, hard-living, crazy fun folk.

John: In our town, we have a bunch of very recognizable actors who are playing the game as well.

Phil: That’s true. Ringers.

John: Yes, it’s some ringers. I think what’s nice about it, and I’m so happy that it exists as a snapshot of a 2008 version of this, is because it’s so entirely true for what that is. If you look at it from a modern lens, it doesn’t match up to what it is now. D&D is weird because it attracts both theater kids and folks who love baseball stats.

Phil: Totally. There’s a number- crunching part of it that I’m really bad at, as you’ve witnessed in real life, John. Some people are into that. They’re really good at it, but other people, it’s like, “I want to play a weird character, and I want to roll these dice and roll these wonderful tetrahedrons that are–

John: There’s a collectible’s aspect. It touches on so many different areas of that.

Phil: Totally.

John: I went to the Ren Faire three weeks ago, and it’s not D&D, but there’s a lot of D&D-adjacent stuff there. They have dice. They have special gem dice, and there’s a lot of D&D stuff there, which makes sense.

Phil: It’s weirdly where you can see a nexus where there’s a door open for straight-up hippies, and a door open for metal kids, and a door open for prog rock dorks like me. The world of fantasy, I think it weirdly was like back in the ‘70s. Every band, like freaking Uriah Heep, was with the amazing dragon on the cover and everything. Then it got squashed a little, and now I think fantasy is coming back a little, and just an iconography. That’s cool that we’re in that zone.

John: The Dungeon Masters, you said that the invitation finally paid off. Do you know if The Dungeon Masters paid off?

Phil: I can’t imagine it paid off for the financier. Jeff Kusama-Hintewas the financier, who is a saint and a great producer. I don’t know, but perhaps I should do an audit.

John: Absolutely. Just dig in there and find out the hidden gold at the port of treasure.

Phil: We are owed $4.9 million personally. This is a miracle.

John: Thank you, Phil.

Phil: Thank you so much. It was fun.

Links:

• Phil Hay
• Scriptnotes Episode 244, Episode 377, and Episode 505
• The Dungeon Masters
• The Answering Machine Meltdown from Swingers
• John’s daily to-do template
• Pamela Ribon’s One Act documentary
• Petey USA’s The Yips
• KOXY College Radio
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Craig Good (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.

We also chart how Courtney built her career from magazine writer to creating the television franchise Power, look at the exciting success of Obsession and Backrooms, and answer listener questions on talking to your reps about financial struggles, and how to find your project’s “why now?”

In our bonus segment for premium members, Courtney shot her new show Nemesis entirely in Los Angeles, and you can too!

Links:

• Courtney Kemp on Instagram and Wikipedia
• Nemesis on Netflix
• ‘Obsession’ Makes History With Biggest Second-Weekend Spike in Modern Times by Pamela McClintock and Lexi Carson for The Hollywood Reporter
• The ‘Pitt’ Effect: A Scramble to Get Shows Back on Air Faster by Lesley Goldberg for Ankler Media
• Ryan Walker hotel reviews
• Star City
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (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.

UPDATE 6-5-26: The transcript for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 736 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome back returning champion-

Craig: Yey.

John: -Aline Brosh McKenna-

Aline Brosh McKenna: Wohoo.

John: -whose latest film, The Devil Wears Prada 2, is not only a critical hit and box office smash, it asks timely questions about art and human labor and the world in which we live in. Aline, welcome back.

Aline: Thanks. We’re on camera.

John: So good to have you.

Craig: Victory lap, Aline.

John: Absolutely.

Aline: Guys, we’ve done about an hour of HMU, right? We did about an hour of work.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I really want to be able to do it. Just there’s nothing there.

Aline: Yes. We just did a lot of hair and makeup. Thanks, guys.

Craig: Your hair does look great.

Aline: Oh, thank you.

Craig: I don’t know who’s doing it.

Aline: I did a little Dyson Air Wrap for you guys.

John: Oh, that’s so nice.

Craig: You Dyson Air Wrap for us?

Aline: Yes.

Craig: I even know what that is because [unintelligible 00:00:55]

John: Absolutely not.

[laughter]

John: I want to talk about your film and its Journey because I remember sitting with you at Great White on Larchmont talking through like this might be a thing we end up doing.

Aline: Did I seem stunned? I’m still stunned.

John: Yes, stunned. It happened. We’ll talk through what happened there. Craig, I want to talk about your movie, The Sheep Detectives, which was also delightful.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Two of my friends have great movies out in the theaters right now. I just feel very lucky.

Craig: Combined, it’s a lot of box office.

Aline: Yes.

John: It’s a lot of box office.

Craig: Combined, together, we are so powerful.

John: Incredible.

Aline: There’s overlap. There’s definitely audience overlap.

Craig: There is overlap. It’s very female audiences. We are, from what I understand, and we’ll find out if this is true or not, but we’re only dropping 33% from our first weekend.

John: Which is great.

Craig: It’s a nice hold for The Sheep. Obviously, I walked through. When I went to the mini premiere, we had a mini premiere for The Sheep movie in New York. I get off the plane and I’m walking through JFK and I’m like, did Devil Wears Prada 2 just buy JFK? It was everywhere. Then as we were driving to our little mini premiere, we passed the setup for The Devil Wears Prada 2 because it was in Lincoln Center.

Aline: It was in Lincoln Center. I’m so used to being a side dish, like the side dishiest of all side dishes. I’m used to being the little movie that could, that people are like, well, I love this project.

Craig: Right. Yes. I’m currently in that position.

Aline: I love this project. To have something that was marketed like a Marvel movie, my brain every day is like-

Craig: Where did they sell it?

Aline: -there’s tweezers. There’s three types of dolls.

Craig: Oh, tweezers.

Aline: Oh, yes. Tweezerman went in heavy. Every kind of merch you could human– What’s been really interesting is that a lot of it has lines from the first movie on it. There’ll be a hairspray can and it’ll say “groundbreaking,” because apparently we now own the word groundbreaking because it’s a line in the first movie.

Craig: Because it got memed.

Aline: It’s all of the merch has– There’s a bag you can get from Old Navy that says “that’s all” on it. I have T-shirts that say “flowers for spring” on the front. Then it’s wild how much-

Craig: It’s great.

Aline: -how much that has become– to see something become a marketing property that’s not a genre piece, strictly speaking, that’s not Marvel.

John: Not animated, it’s not the minions.

Craig: No capes, no lasers, no space.

Aline: The leads are two ladies in their 40s-

Craig: Two women in their 40s.

Aline: -a woman in her 70s, and a man in his 60s.

Craig: Then when you say a woman in her 70s, though, you do have to add Meryl Streep.

Aline: Super, yes.

Craig: She’s in her own category.

Aline: She is.

Craig: There’s men, women, Meryl Streep.

Aline: We have young folks in the movie, but it’s incredible. It feels like sometimes that branding gives you license to make something you wouldn’t normally make, like tell a story you wouldn’t normally tell in the way that a book about sheep detectives allows you to make a movie about sheep detectives. I mean, well-established genre of [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, no, it would be the latest entry in the sheep detective genre. Yes.

Aline: It’s been incredible to see– I was going to call my company, Big Surprise, at some point because every time a movie does well with women, it’s just everyone is like, wow-

Craig: What a big surprise.

Aline: -let’s write a lot of op-eds about what a shock it is.

John: A movie for 51% of the world’s population.

Aline: Right.

Craig: Yes.

Aline: It’s really, really being driven by women over 30.

Craig: Same, by the way, for our movie.

Aline: Yes. Listen, it’s an underserved audience. I was going to ask you guys, there’s so much incubation of superhero stuff. We’re setting up separate studios and everybody’s clustered around these properties and looking at them. Shouldn’t they set up development pods and divisions to cook up female–

John: Like Fox 2000.

Aline: -like Fox 2000 used to be.

Craig: Elizabeth Gabler.

Aline: Shouldn’t we have some of those where we’re just cooking up stuff for women and looking at female properties-

Craig: We should.

Aline: -and doing Anne of Green Gables or whatever it is?

Craig: We should.

Aline: Yes.

John: Let’s talk about that because it is certainly happening, and there’s examples of that. Let’s get back to that.

Aline: Oh, good.

John: But in general, on this podcast, I would love to talk about how the movie came to be and the stuff that now that it’s a couple weeks out, we can actually talk about the spoilers. Many spoilers for the movie.

Aline: Many spoilers.

John: I also want to talk about fake bullshit, which is an article I sent through to you.

Craig: I love fake bullshit.

John: Yes. An article I sent through, but actually very relevant to some of the themes you probably can bring up in your movie. I’m not going to plan much more ahead of it. Aline’s on the show. It’s going to be your way off course.

Craig: We’ve got two Jews that are going to just do what we do.

Aline: I did an interview and the woman stopped me halfway through, and she goes, “Hey, it’s going great. Could you do a thing where you just answer the question?” I was like, “Okay, okay.”

Craig: Could you do a thing?

John: Absolutely. A new approach. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about how to best implement the Scriptnotes, script club. We wanted to do this thing where everyone’s reading the same script, and so everyone shows up having read the same script.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: We’re going to actually talk in depth about that. I want to think about how we pick those scripts that are going to be the right ones to do.

Craig: We’re going to be like Oprah. [crosstalk]

John: We’re going to be like Oprah. Absolutely. Everyone’s going to want to be like, “Oh, my script.”

Craig: Was on Scriptnotes.

John: All right. Before we get started with that, I want to do some follow-up. We have some controversy over our audio questions. Drew help us out.

Drew: People didn’t like them.

Craig: They didn’t like the audio questions?

John: Yes. Last episode, we had some of our questions that were answered were–

Craig: We’ve done that before.

Drew: We’ve done it a lot of times.

John: They’re not getting a good reception this last time. Let’s find out why.

Drew: Victor writes, “Are you guys using AI voices to read out the questions? If so, please don’t. I want your guy to read them. The pauses the AI voices make creep me out so much, maybe other feels the same.”

Craig: Wait. AI people? Those were real people.

John: Those were real people sending in actual audio attached to their emails.

Craig: That was Victor who said that?

Drew: That was Victor.

John: That wasn’t the only person who wrote in about this.

Drew: Annoyed AF writes, “This is a rude take. I’m sorry, but the audio questions were like nails on a chalkboard for me. Sharing this in case there’s a significant pool of other subscribers who feel the same. If no one else cares in the audio questions today, I can just fast forward those segments to side stuff. My odd sound induced rage.”

Craig: Oh my.

John: A couple of theories here. First off, I understand this feeling of like, “Wait, is that real or is that fake?” Because on Instagram, it’s one of the things, I was like, “Is that person who’s building that concrete flower pot, is that a real person or is that AI?” I get what that is. For the record, there’s never been any AI content on this podcast at all.

Craig: Nor will there ever be.

John: There shall not be.

Craig: Until I die, and then you have AI Craig, which would actually be awesome.

Aline: It’d be amazing. We’re uploading you every time.

John: There haven’t been that. I think the audio questions were female voices. I do think there’s a thing about women’s voices that people who are writing it in are maybe complaining about female voices.

Craig: Now we’re putting those people in the sexist box. I personally am startled by this because we have done this before, not once or twice, but many, many times.

John: Many times.

Craig: It’s not frequent. It may be that people just get into a rhythm of, hearing the voices of the people in these microphones, and then suddenly there’s a disruption because it’s a different feeling or it’s a different pace.

Aline: Well, it’s been debunked.

John: It’s been debunked. I don’t know if we’re going to do more audio questions. We’ll see what feels right.

Craig: It was two people that composed?

Drew: It was two people. One of them was a woman, an anonymized woman.

Craig: Well, we’ve got two.

John: We’ve got two.

Craig: I’m not sure that’s enough to– I mean, annoyed AF, I would say, I get it, but maybe– I don’t know. Of all things to be triggered by– Yes, just fast forward. You’ll be fine.

John: Then more follow-up on our Scriptnotes survey.

Drew: Jenny writes, so you went over the results of your survey for the Scripnotes listeners. “I am a college student. I was surprised to see that my age percentage was so low.”

John: It was like 3%.

Craig: Yes, very low.

Drew: “Although it is finals season, so I definitely think there are more of us than what was represented. Alongside this, I was sad to hear that people skipped the three-page challenge. I think for us college-age folk, they are incredibly helpful. I often pause the podcast to form my own opinion. Then compare what I picked up on to what you guys have to say about the script.”

Craig: I like that method of learning. That’s an interesting self-seminar.

Drew: Well, she says, “I found it very helpful in honing a creatively analytical eye. I just wanted to share some love for the three-page challenge.”

Aline: I mean, you have to pay attention. Sometimes I’ll skip them because I’m like, now you know my secret is that easiest way for me to fall asleep on–

Craig: Melissa listens to this podcast to fall asleep.

Aline: Craig and John. Well, because it’s familiar voices, and they’re low, and there’s no ads. They’re long enough to get me into Schluff Town.

Craig: This is going to be the most Jewish episode we’ve ever done. Do you know what Schluff is?

John: I have no idea what Schluff is.

Craig: You’re German.

John: I’m German.

Craig: Schluff is sleep. Geschlafen means go to sleep. My parents would yell at me all the time, “Geschlafen.”

[laughter]

Aline: If you want to think, I have sleep books and listen books, and I have sleep podcasts and listen podcasts. Scriptnotes is both. If I want to listen, I’ll do a three-page challenge because you have to be ready to have your brain stimulated.

Craig: I’m weirdly not offended by this. I kind of love that we’re people’s– if we can help anyone sleep, hooray. I wish it worked for me.

John: All right. Aline Brosh McKenna, congratulations on Devil Wears Prada 2.

Craig: Amazing.

Aline: Thank you.

John: It really is a huge accomplishment. I really genuinely loved the movie. When you first described, I think this is a thing that it’s maybe going to happen, it sounded obvious, but I was at the same moment like, ooh, but what is the why now of it? When did you know the why now of it? Because for folks, everyone, you should have seen the movie. It’s not just these characters coming back together, but in a moment where media and journalism is being crushed and repackaged and private equity and all of the issues of-

Craig: Journalism.

John: -journalism, capitalism, this moment that we’re in is so relevant. Did you know that from the first moment or how did you come upon it?

Aline: Watching name brand cultural figures fall from grace in various ways over the last five years, I would think about Miranda Priestley and what kind of trouble she would be in, which I think would be permanent because you’re choosing bodies, and you’re writing about the culture. Also because how many times have you been with a young person, and they’re like, I’ve never heard of, and then it’s someone super famous to you? No one will understand. No one under the age of 50 will understand how famous John Denver was. I’ll just say that.

Craig: So famous.

Aline: He was so famous.

Craig: Eight-track cassette famous.

Aline: The number one TV show and movie and album.

Craig: People of my daughter’s generation who don’t know who Madonna is.

Aline: That apparently happened at Coachella. I always was thinking how would Miranda navigate this? Then also I’m friends with a lot of journalists. My son’s a journalist. Franklin and I have stayed good friends since the first movie. I remember talking to him about something to do with journalism and he said, it’s like patrolling a graveyard. That really stuck with me as my son pursues it. That really stuck with me as, what would these two women be doing in the culture as it is now? How would they be handling that? The first step of this process is always me pestering David and having him say, no, that’s not going to work.

Craig: David, director of the original?

Aline: David Frankel, yes. We’re really such close partners on this. I started calling him and saying, I think this would be a good idea.

John: Had there been other discussions over the last 20 years of like, we should make a second movie?

Aline: There were a few, maybe five to seven years after the movie came out and Lauren wrote a sequel to it that was her own story of what would happen next. Then everyone really felt like there was no reason to do it that soon.

Craig: Okay, let me interrupt there. Devil Wears Prada was a hit, and it made a big cultural impact. It was sort of like its footprint was bigger than its box office.

Aline: For sure.

Craig: Normally, when I say normally, I mean if that were a movie about guys, there would have been a sequel in development before the movie even came out. There was no instinct to just capitalize on that immediately?

Aline: Well, it became culturally more important as the time went on. It was like a pretty successful movie in the time. It was like, wow, this is cool that this happened. Then it really became enshrined in the culture, I think largely because it was so embraced by the queer community. It ended up being quoted and memed. It took on more importance in that sense. I think there was a sense that we had captured lightning in a bottle, and would that happen again? Was it a moment in time?

It was such a moment in time because really the first movie is about Miranda being ascendant and her being at the top of the pecking order. The first movie is much more like Wall Street or Training Day or one of those.

Craig: Ambition and–

Aline: -and a rough mentor whose primacy is unquestioned. Doing a movie where they are in flux, it just didn’t occur to anybody. Then over time, the actors kept saying they weren’t going to do it. We kept saying we weren’t going to do it. Then in all this upheaval, I started calling Dave and saying, God, it would just be so funny to me to see Miranda in reduced circumstances. So many people, not just in the New York media world, but in a lot of businesses, it’s like, hey, man, you got to fly coach and stay at the Hilton Garden Inn. It just always made me laugh.

Spoiler, there is a scene where she walks into coach, and she walks through first class. One of my favorite moments in the movie is Miranda casts sort of like a look back at first class as she walks through it. Then the way Florian shot it, when she enters first class, you go behind a barrier and then you go into coach. The idea of her being forced to do that– and people online have been saying, “Oh, she would have upgraded herself.” When you work at a company like that, it’s frowned upon to make your own accommodations. If they want you to stay at the Hilton Garden Inn, but you want to stay at the Hyatt–

Craig: Don’t worry about the online logic nitpickers.

Aline: Yes, that’s true. That is true.

Craig: Oh, my God.

Aline: In terms of objection, I do think there is now a face of like we’re fiscally responsible, right? We’re not spending money on-

Craig: For some people.

Aline: -huge flowers and certain businesses.

Craig: For other ones, other people get a trillion dollars for running a fraud.

Aline: I think that their indulgences are different, though. I don’t think it’s flowers and croissant anymore. I think there’s other ways in which they’re– furthering.

Craig: It’s true. It ain’t quite the same.

John: Let’s talk about you have this icon who’s being reduced, and it’s in this period of flux and turmoil. We see this in mainstream journalism as well, where these giant anchors of TV shows or of news programs are being ousted. What I think is so smart about being able to apply this lens to Miranda and to fashion is because, even though the first movie establishes that fashion is important in its own lane, it’s not life or death.

It’s not that same sort of importance, and so you can actually focus on– you can explore these issues in something that is lighter and then actually prove the worth of it. To have a character like Andy, who seems to despise fashion at the start of it and got out of it, having to come back in to save it is just a smart choice.

Aline: Right. She’s forced on her. Someone has shoved her on someone else, and she doesn’t realize that’s what’s happening. The level of bossdom, I mean, we’ve experienced it in our business, the level of like– you just get to a level where it’s like Brad’s reporting to Steve, reporting to Jeff, reporting to Dave, reporting to Mike, reporting to Tim, and you can’t even– There’s usually a lady in there. There’s like an Ashley in there or something.

Craig: Sometimes there’s a lady at the very, very tippity-top.

Aline: Not the tippity-top.

Craig: Well, Universal there is.

Aline: She’s got bosses, though, because they’re owned by Comcast.

Craig: I guess that’s true. She’s like a board of directors.

Aline: Yes. The level of and our fluency in bossdom, I know a lot more about this stuff than I used to. Then the idea that things just get deleted, which happens in our business too, like, wait, there’s no show time?

John: No.

Aline: There’s just no show time. The show time library is where? We didn’t sell that to somebody? We just went–

Craig: It’s Paramount Plus, right?

Aline: It might be a tile, but they don’t make new stuff, I don’t think.

Craig: No, I think you’re right. One thing that you’re saying that I’ve never actually considered before is how many bosses the three of us have seen come and go.

Aline: Oh, maybe they come and go.

Craig: What happens when you get to our age and you’re still working in this business and the three of us are fairly rare in that sense? A lot of people, by the time they hit their mid-50s, they’re not anymore. If you are, you begin to realize that the bosses are not really bosses. They’re all renting their seat a little bit.

Aline: Well, I’m going to tell you something that’s going to sound very– This is going to be a little gross for people, but just buckle up.

Craig: Buckle up, everyone.

Aline: We had this idea. David and I started talking about it. We heard that Meryl would be interested in hearing it. We went and we had a meeting with Meryl and we told her what we wanted to do. Then we went to the studio. It wasn’t assigned by the studio, which a lot of these would be, as you said. It wasn’t assigned by the studio. It was us, me, David, and Meryl.

Craig: Also, let’s talk about the studio because this movie was for Fox, and Fox doesn’t exist. Talk about a thing that’s being disappeared.

Aline: That’s why I was going to talk about bosses. This is the part where we don’t– on a writer’s podcast, to speak positively of executives is a bit of anathema.

John: We do it all the time. There are great ones.

Aline: It was Fox 2000, which doesn’t exist under the Disney umbrella anymore. It belonged to Fox, which is run by our buddy, Steve Asbell, who we’ve known for a long time.

Craig: Our puzzle friend.

Aline: Our puzzle friend. He’s really good. He only does Fridays and Saturdays, by the way. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, maybe Friday, Saturday. You only do those?

Craig: I only do Saturdays.

Aline: Ooh, wow.

Craig: I only have for– [laughs]

Aline: That’s a flex. Wow. Steve now is– Fox is under Disney. There’s another gentleman who runs Disney who is now– he and Steve work together, but he is in charge of this.

John: Who actually ultimately came from Fox Searchlight.

Aline: David Greenbaum came from Fox Searchlight. I did not know him because I haven’t made indies like that. I really didn’t know him. David and I got on the call, and I had a six-page outline that I had pitched to Meryl, and I pitched it to everybody, Greenbaum and Steve. Greenbaum, I just saw the light in his eye of like, this is going to be huge. I thought maybe this could be good, and we could squeak out a little double with this, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this could be huge.

I have to say that Meryl’s belief in it always, from the first movie, Meryl thought it was going to be a hit. That’s always buoyed me. Seeing in Greenbaum’s eyes, who had just gotten there and was in charge of bringing in new stuff, and he was like, this is going to be huge. I would sometimes think, well, his opinion is great. His story notes were great. His ability to get out of our way when needed and to pitch things in as needed.

Steve, I’ve known for a long time, so that was very comfortable, but here was a brand-new person who really had a vision for what the movie could be in the marketplace. You can really only have the vision for what you want it to be creatively as a writer. You can, but that’s not really what we do.

Craig: It’s not our job.

Aline: That’s not really what we do. He had a vision for what it could be in the marketplace, which is–

Craig: He realized the vision. Again, I walked through JFK and just thought-

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: -does The Devil Wear Prada 2 own JFK?

John: I think it’s so crucial is that the executive in that position has to be able to communicate with their marketing and PR people like, is this a thing that we can sell into the world? Clearly it was. Every part of that was mediogenic in just the right ways.

Aline: His boss, which is Alan Bergman at the time, he came to set and he said something to me, which was essentially, we’re going to knock your socks off when you see what we can do, which was true because I never experienced that. Then we had a young executive, this woman, Sarah Shepherd, who was so in the tank for this, I can’t even– I mean, we laugh about this, but as you guys know, I’m quite relentless.

There was a day when I needed to get her to approve something, and I called her 22 times because it was 4:00 in the morning here. I’ve worked with people who really would have taken my head off if I’d done that. She was like, “Oh my God, thank God you called me. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up sooner.”

Craig: At 4:00 AM.

Aline: At 4:00 AM. They were just very dedicated and had an idea of what it could be. I think the rest of us were like, great.

John: Let’s wind back to what it could be because you say you have a six-page outline for what you pitched to Meryl and then what you pitched to Fox/Disney. How close is what you pitched to the movie you ended up writing and thus the movie–?

Aline: I went back and reread it this week. It’s quite close because it was very thematic. It wasn’t super story-driven.

Craig: It wasn’t implied.

John: Is this a document you’re willing to share with us?

Aline: No.

Craig: No.

John: No, not a bit.

Aline: Maybe I’ll ask them if I could a page of it.

John: Describe it. Describe what’s in it.

Aline: It was like, these are the times we’re in. This is what these characters would be experiencing. Because it’s so dire, it’s going to be funny. It’s the direness that made me laugh.

Craig: This is important for our friends listening because a lot of people who listen to the podcast are going to be or have been in positions where they need to pitch things to people. I think what the cottage screenwriting advice industry teaches is that what you pitch is plot. I don’t know how many times I have said to people, and I pitch contests aside where you have two minutes or whatever, what happens scene to scene is not relevant.

What is the point of this effing movie? What is it really about? Why would it matter to anyone? Why would people get in their cars, drive, park, walk into a theater? That’s what you do. You don’t need to obsess over every little dinky detail of how one scene gets together.

Aline: No, and in fact, when people are pitching me, I have the attention span of a gnat. I always have, even before the internet, and I’m very easily confused and dumb. When someone’s pitching me something, and it’s extremely detailed, I’m like, “I don’t– what?” I can’t scan it for meaning. Especially because these are not plot-heavy movies. You’re scanning it for theme, and that’s what I had was like, this is where it boiled down to this idea that Andy is going back into the lion’s den because she’s got reduced circumstances.

She’s going back to a workplace that she doesn’t love. Again, everyone in Hollywood’s been like, well, I guess I’ll go work for this guy. It wasn’t great the first time, but I guess I’ll see how it goes. I remember I was talking to David one day, and we were talking about theme, and he said, and I actually screamed and dropped the phone when he said this, he said, “Well, it’s the devil you know.”

John: Come on. That could have been like the title.

Craig: I mean, there it is.

Aline: That works for everybody in the movie because Miranda’s already dealing with her boss’ high anxiety and inability to promote her. Andy’s going somewhere where she knows the stakes are bad. Nigel sees the writing on the wall that all these businesses are going into toilet, things you scroll past whilst you pee, as he says. Emily is not in the workplace she wants to be. She doesn’t want to work in retail she wants to work.

Everybody’s in diminished circumstances, but given the giant economic squoze everyone is in, everyone’s going, “This is fine for now. This is the devil I know.”

John: There’s a scarcity mindset where, as opposed to the original movie, it’s like all the money you can spend-

Craig: Abundance.

John: -in the fountains of champagne-

Aline: That’s right.

John: -but no, this is everyone’s fighting for their little bit.

Aline: Now also what’s comical is yes, and, then when they go to Milan, they’re wearing fantastic outfits, and they’re going to huge parties. That’s one of the things that’s funny about this world in general. I think we’ve all experienced this, which is like, well, especially writers are told we have no money for you, no money, no money, no money, no money for you. Then you see either things they programmed or events they have-

Craig: I know.

Aline: -or people they’ve hired, or divisions they’ve opened, and you’re like, scritch-scritch. I don’t know how they decide.

Craig: They have plenty. When they want something, they pay for it. They will say they don’t have money for things just all the time. The fashion industry is such a fascinating example of this because I can see how, behind the scenes, everything gets squeezed down to coach. I’ve been talking about the Met Gala. Was I talking about that on this show? I was asking somebody, because I literally didn’t know. I’m like, okay, I understand outside the Met Gala. What happens inside?

John: Nothing. Exactly.

Craig: Apparently, it’s an art exhibit that you walk around.

Aline: Yes, it’s an art exhibit. It’s to promote the– I would love to be inside with a bunch of dressed-up people looking around.

Craig: That’s where the substance is. I guess my point is-

Aline: The amount of money.

Craig: -the money that is spent by people to go there. It’s a charity event, and they pay money to attend.

Aline: Then they spend the same amount on themselves getting ready.

Craig: But they spend more.

Aline: Well, it’s a PR.

Craig: They could just donate all that, but obviously that is part of the deal with fashion.

Aline: In the attention economy, just getting anyone to care about your thing. There’s this thing now where they’re doing fake beefs in certain businesses. Fake beefs everywhere.

Craig: Hip-hop is known about that forever.

Aline: That’s right. To get people’s eyeballs on things. It is funny, the fact that they were having to be squoze, as we’ve all been-

Craig: I love squoze, by the way.

Aline: -as we’ve all been, I have friends who work in finance, law, everything you can imagine, everyone is saying, I have to special order my pencils. I have to ask them if I can take this car from the airport. It’s because I don’t remember this being– Now you brag about the money you save to your bosses. You say, well, this guy wanted a couple more maroon polos. I told him, you have a maroon polo. You’re set. No more for you.

Craig: I want another one.

Aline: There’s a sense of pride.

Craig: Is this maroon?

Aline: I would say burgundy maybe.

Craig: Thank you.

Aline: Wine colored. I think there’s a sense of pride now in depriving people of resources and bragging rights.

John: We were talking about scarcity and spending money. One of the things I admired so much about the movie is it looks really expensive. There’s something nice about going into a movie. It’s like they spent real money here. You actually go to Italy, and you can tell that you actually went to Italy. Every stitch on every outfit you’re seeing it’s gorgeous and spectacular.

Aline: I will say, though, that it’s not as much as you think. The reported numbers are actually true. That is really a tribute to our DP, David, our AD, our line producer, everybody who kept things tight so that-

John: The money can be up on the screen.

Aline: Your money can be up on screen, but also you want to be the least of everyone’s problems. You don’t want to be constantly grabbing for more and more and more because it changes the stakes on a movie.

Craig: It does.

Aline: I think everybody felt like, yes, this is more. You can see definitely more. We went to Paris the first time for a day and a half, and Meryl didn’t go. Maybe two days, and Meryl didn’t go. This time, everybody went. It’s so funny, though, guys, to know this. No matter where you travel for work, the minute you get on a set, I could be in Canada.

Craig: Oh, it’s the same.

Aline: It’s like you get up in the morning in Milan, you have the most fabulous cup of coffee and this incredible–

John: It is a cross-service table, yes.

Craig: Then you work for 12 hours in a room.

Aline: You’re in a dark room, and I’m like, I could be in Peoria. I could be in any set, in any soundstage. It’s so funny. You still are walking over and going, they’re out of my– All right, well, I guess I’ll drink the full– I don’t know. It’s just funny how moviemaking is the same.

Craig: Hey, you know what? We’re just three old bags-

[laughter]

Craig: -who had been like–

Aline: No, the oldest hookers at the saloon. Trust me.

Craig: Yes, different country, same shit.

Aline: I know. When I meet young people who are really bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I’m always waiting for the lunch that I have where they’re like, so I told him– It happens every time.

Craig: Welcome. Welcome aboard. Yes, now you know.

Aline: What do you use? Like ducks– you’re just like us. What is it?

Craig: Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, one of us. One of us. That’s from Freaks.

Aline: Yes.

Craig: From Todd Browning’s Freaks, 1931?

John: All right.

Aline: Just disproving your myth [crosstalk]

Craig: 1933? Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, one of us. One of us. One of us.

Aline: One of us. One of us.

John: I do want to talk about script for a second, because one of the things I’ve enjoyed so much, I haven’t read the script when I’ve seen the movie, you have short scenes that accomplish their thing and it just keeps moving.

Aline: So many scenes.

John: It is a freight train, and it never feels rushed. You are getting through things quickly. Entrances and exits are crucial and essential. This is also a movie about glass doors.

Aline: Yes, it’s a lot of glass.

John: A lot of see-through.

Aline: It’s interesting you should say that because David’s cutting rhythm with Andy who cut this movie, Andy Marcus, that’s a feature of the first movie and this movie, which is I think David felt like there’s a lot of sitting in chairs. There’s a lot of typing. There’s a lot of looking at clothes. He really works on pace and propulsion. We have so many scenes of Andy running down the street, so anything that gave movement propulsion.

I did learn that from of they cut out of scenes in a way that I think sometimes my tendency is to really land on an emotion so that an audience sees it. I think there’s like– David has tremendous confidence, the audience, like, we got it, we’re moving on. It definitely has a lot of just strips, tons of strips.

John: You also said like this movie is not plotty, but there’s actually–

Aline: Oh, yeah, there’s a plot this time.

John: There’s a plot, and there’s a lot of balls in the air.

Craig: There’s a plot this time.

Aline: There’s plot this time.

Craig: There was a plot last time.

John: The first movie is much more about like a young woman coming to learn about a situation, and her moral choice to-

Craig: There’s no global considerations and business stuff.

Aline: If you were a writer and you watched the first act of the first movie, you could probably cough through figuring out what happened after that. Then this one, we have some twists and reversals, and it’s got a business plot. As you guys know, my husband is a businessman. That was really fun to talk through some of the twists with him and some of the lingo that BJ’s character has–

John: BJ Novak has been on the show many times.

Craig: Oh, yes.

Aline: Yes. Some of that lingo came from Will.

Craig: Will understands money.

Aline: He sure does.

Craig: I don’t.

John: I would also say one of the things you can– I always remind like, if you freeze frame, could you look at all the characters and tell you what they want? You can clearly do that in your movie. Each all have a thing they’re going for and an arc within there. Nigel has his arc. Emily Blunt’s character has her arc. You can see sort of like what it is they’re going for and what they’re doing. No one is just there to service the main plot, which is so helpful.

Aline: They pull levers. Even though they were supporting in the first movie, they both pulled levers. Emily and Nigel both have important plot functions in the first movie, which is why they were able to be elevated to like a four-hander. In this movie, the young characters, only one of them pulls a plot lever, and that’s Helen’s character, Jin, who does like a plot thing.

John: It’s a little shallow thing, but it feels appropriate.

Aline: She has her little arc. But Simone’s character and Caleb Hearon’s character, they don’t really move plot as much as they are there for you to understand and inform the world.

John: It’s also meant to echo what we saw before in the first movie. They’re the modern incarnations of roles we saw in the first thing.

Aline: That’s right.

John: We were recognizing what is the same and what has changed in that gap in between.

Aline: Once again, the love interest does not pull plot levers. He is there to reflect values and themes. In the first movie, he’s the guy saying, and nobody likes him for this apparently, but he’s the guy saying, this is Gordon Gecko, be careful. I see you changing into someone I don’t recognize. You’re on training day. You’re shooting innocent people. That’s what he’s supposed to be there for. People really disliked him for it.

Craig: Do you know why? Because he’s playing the part that Skyler played on Breaking Bad, which is-

Aline: Don’t do it.

Craig: -stop the movie.

Aline: Yes.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s the part. It’s like, no more TV show. Stop dealing drugs. Stop the movie. Stay away from her.

Aline: Well, that’s so smart.

Craig: Nobody wants the thing to stop.

Aline: That’s so smart. He’s saying, stop the conflict. Yes, that’s true. It’s funny because, when we did Crazy Ex, people would often say, oh, we want this to all work out. I was like, but then your show’s over.

Craig: Then the show’s over.

Aline: That’s funny. He got vilified for that. In this movie, Patrick Bramwell plays her love interest is really there because he buys an old building, renovates it, and makes it monetizable. That’s sort of in the world she’s in. She has an innate distrust of that. Even though he’s a lovely guy, and I think we wanted to make the point, or I thought– it’s not everybody who does that is–

Craig: Bad.

Aline: Listen, some of these things are– yes, right. If you take a broken-down building and you make it into residences in a neighborhood which doesn’t have enough residences, even if they’re high priced or whatever, is that bad, or is that just where we are? Is that just different? How much do you adjust to what exists? One of my friends said to me once, when you’re talking to young people, imagine something that exists. Dream about something that exists. If you’re aspiring to living in a world where your art is not commodified in any way, you’re really in a very limited area. Everyone has to figure out–

Craig: We’ve always needed patrons, always back to medieval times.

John: Well, let’s talk about the patrons here because the journey of the movie is it looks like Justin Theroux’s character is going to be the evil patron who’s coming in and taking over everything. The redemption is like, oh, no, we can actually find a better patron in Lucy Liu. It’s still a patron and you’re still like– the whole thing is being held up by someone’s benevolence.

Aline: Guys, we’re really right now hostage to billionaire benevolence.

John: Completely.

Aline: We hope that they have the values that we would like for them to have.

Craig: Which they do not.

Aline: Large, they don’t. Sorry, this is a lean tangent, but why aren’t people with massive amounts of money just pivoting to social good in the way that the last age that was like this was the Gilded Age, and so many of our institutions–

John: Of course, your libraries, yes.

Craig: The Guggenheim. Yes.

Aline: Yes. So many of our institutions came from those folks. Why isn’t there more altruism and–

Craig: These guys are not– they’re tech. They were never designed really to be very social people. When you look at them, a lot of them are just not socially oriented. They were probably picked on and bullied. They don’t feel like they are a part of the beautiful world. They feel separate and apart. It is interesting to me that the girl that I had the biggest crush on in college, Mackenzie Tuttle, who then went to marry Jeff Bezos and then divorced and is, I think, the richest woman in the world, is giving the money away because she is– I mean, listen, I haven’t seen or spoken to her in 32 years, but she was so effortlessly socially lovely and connected. I think a lot of these guys just aren’t.

Aline: The wives have done that consistently, right? The women after the divorces have done that consistently.

Craig: Melinda Gates.

Aline: Why do we have to go to the moon? Okay, keep going.

Craig: We do not.

John: My theory is that very rich people at a certain point realize, like, I am going to die, and so, therefore, I need to do something for my immortality.

Craig: That’s a great point.

John: That’s why I think you have Carnegie Library. It’s why you have the Guggenheim. I think this generation, they’re rich and they’re young enough that, like, no, I never want to die.

Craig: They’re obsessed with not dying. If you look at Jeff Bezos, he’s so– They’re all pretty swole. They’re clearly taking a cocktail of stuff to get bigger and stronger and, I don’t know, testosterone or whatever it is. They are obsessed with– I mean, Silicon Valley, like our friend Alec Berg did this amazing thing with The Blood Boy.

Aline: Oh, they’re all doing stuff like that.

Craig: They’re doing stuff like that.

Aline: In the movie, it is his ex-wife who is the patron. He has gotten a makeover, although–

John: I did not recognize it was Justin Theroux.

Aline: I know. A lot of people don’t recognize him.

John: Delightful.

Aline: Justin really committed. In my mind, Justin has the hairline, because I spent most of my time with Justin with that hairline. Then when I saw him without it, I was surprised. The vanity, which seems like not regular, normal human vanity, it seems like something else. Then there’s a nihilism to it. He has a line about saying, it’s all going to come like the lava at Pompeii. There is a sense that you’re constantly being told about the technology like, just relax, and it’s coming anyway. It’s really the language of violation. We’re constantly being told like, just relax into it. There’s a nihilistic deadness there about the inevitability around all these technologies.

Craig: The great robber barons of old were building railways, or they were manufacturing steel. There is actually no inherent value to Facebook at all. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, we’d all be fine. Arguably, we’d be much better. You take away railroads in the 1800s, no one can get anywhere. You take away steel manufacturing, no one can build anything. Those guys made stuff.

Aline: Well, when you then buy publications that are responsible for telling us the truth about the world we live in, but you’re treating it like– because the thing that scares me the most is rich people buying things they don’t care about or need, so that they just wake up and go, I don’t feel like doing this anymore. I’m going to delete this publication or this network or this–

John: When Bezos bought The Washington Post, at the time, people were saying like, oh, this is a good thing because we’ll protect it and insulate it. It’s like, well, that doesn’t end up lasting.

Craig: Not really.

John: My concern is that Lucy Liu buys Runway Magazine and buys the whole media group, and it’s like-

Aline: And then what?

John: -she gets bored with it, and what happens?

Craig: What if she’s the devil?

Aline: That’s why we’re all– the line in the movie about we’re just trying to find our piece of wood floating next to the Titanic. I think everybody who works in a creative field, or really, anybody who works in a field that has a lot of corporate control, is like, well, I’m here now. I have this job now. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I certainly don’t feel like I have a sinecure, but I have this now. That’s really how the movie–

In the first movie, they’re not very nice to each other because everyone’s super ambitious and putting their boot in everyone’s face. But in this movie, there’s a much sweeter, sadder thing, which it’s a little bit World War I trenches, where you got to give someone a drink from your canteen or they’re not going to make it. I think that makes the movie, in a funny way, warmer and sadder.

John: At the end of the movie, it’s not like we’re going back to Runway is going to be a book, a magazine that comes out every month. We’re going to be in the era of you are creating digital scrollable content. That’s what Runway is these days, and it’s recognizing that’s the reality.

Craig: Okay, so the obvious question that you’ve been asked a million times, Devil Wears Prada 3.

Aline: Well, I think David and I were so stunned that this happened. I’m sure when I talked to you, it sounded like, I was like– Then, are we going to get everybody together to do it at the same time? Are we going to actually–

John: When we had that lunch, there was an older project that was going to resurface at the same time, and both the same question is, could we really gather all the things together again? You did.

Aline: Well, here’s what I’ll tell– In this time also, I had been working for the previous year on another project that I really thought was going to go. I did something that I don’t normally do. I have always, always worked on more than one thing at a time since 1991. I have always had more than one thing that I’m working on at a time just because I just have– and that’s how my brain works.

John: You had a streaming series, right, that you were working?

Aline: I had a series I was working on, and I was like, I had done a recce, and I was buying the boots because that’s how my brain works.

Craig: Find boots.

Aline: Right, and a rain coat and everything. I was prepared to do that, and then it just didn’t work out. It didn’t work out right around the end of the year. Then I had three months where– I mean, we have a production company, and we have multiple projects so I can always busy myself with that and reading stuff and tending to those projects. My own final draft had nothing open on it. Sorry, still using final draft.

John: It’s fine.

Craig: What the hell?

Aline: Had nothing on it, and that hasn’t happened to me, I think, ever. I had a really strange three months of feeling like I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what to do today. Again, I have a company. I have an office, I go in, but my identity is typing girl.

Craig: You’re always supposed to be guilty that you haven’t written today.

Aline: That’s right. Term paper feeling. I lost my sense of who I was. It was very annoying around the house. I started to get a little graspy about maybe I’ll do this, no. Maybe I’ll do that. Then I was looking at old projects and feeling like–

John: Trying.

Aline: Yes, trying, which is the worst.

Craig: The worst. The worst.

Aline: That’s worst when anyone trying. Then I got an email from Wendy Finerman saying, Meryl would be open to hearing your ideas if you want to go to New York. I was like, wow, if I had been doing this other thing, I wouldn’t have been– I do try and use that. Somebody told me that when Bosom Buddies got canceled, it was like the worst thing that had ever happened to Tom Hanks. I feel that, in this time that we’re in where so many things that people are working on go tits up, just know that there might be something coming down the path for you.

Craig: There probably is.

John: There probably is. All right. This next bit was going to be my one cool thing, but actually, I wanted both of you to read it because it felt relevant to what you were just talking about in terms of media landscape changing and stuff. It’s an article by Kate Davies, which is really a blog post, about knitting bullshit. She is a knitter.

Craig: Wait, it’s knitting bullshit, not knitting bullshit.

John: That’s a good point. The emphasis has been knitting bullshit.

Aline: It’s kind of both.

John: It is actually. You’re spinning bullshit, but also literally knitting.

Craig: It’s bullshit about knitting.

John: She is a woman who runs a knitting company. She was encountering these podcasts that were made about knitting, which are just completely empty and vacuous. It’s this whole world, it’s ecosystem of AI-generated podcasts with fake voices, fake text. There’s a company called Inception Point AI, good Lord-

Craig: What a name.

John: -which makes 3,000 weekly episodes.

Craig: 3,000. What I loved about this is that she took the time to listen to an episode and realize it’s nothing.

John: It’s nothing. Drew and I listened, skimmed through the first episode, and it’s this woman’s voice talking. The woman’s character’s name is Lily. She is Lily Crafty Walker, but she’s a fake persona who is just narrating this thing about the history of knitting and how wonderful knitting is. It’s like, “I’m going to talk you through from the early days to this,” and I’m like, okay, you can imagine an actual podcast about that, but there’s just nothing there.

Aline: It’s nonsense.

Craig: It’s the kid who didn’t do the reading and is up there doing a fake book report that’s mostly introduction and conclusion.

Aline: What’s the relationship between this and pornography? Because there’s an onanism to all of this. There’s a very narrow purpose, but the purpose of this is what?

Craig: Make money, ads.

John: Well, make money, attention, and just keep it– It has to be interesting enough that you actually subscribe to it and listen to it.

Craig: At 3,000-

John: At 3,000.

Craig: -it’s spam. Only one person needs to listen.

John: This company that makes this, they have eight employees, but they can’t listen to all the episodes. They don’t listen to the episodes they make.

Craig: No, they just put it out there.

John: They just put it out there in the world, and so it’s just flooding the zone with a bunch of bullshit.

Craig: In the zone.

John: It goes back to the bullshit in this term is from Harry Frankfurt, who has this book, On Bullshit. What I like the blog post points out is there’s two kinds of bullshit, because bullshit is distinguished from a lie. Bullshit is when you know there’s nothing really true under it.

Craig: It’s spinning a yarn.

John: There’s the bullshit which is “merely emitted or dumped,” which is throwing it out there in the world, and then there’s carefully wrought bullshit, which is more what this is because it is very specifically as the form of a thing.

Craig: Yes. Like when Trump tells a sir story about how someone came up to me, sir, and then tears in his eyes, it’s this very carefully formed bullshit with a beginning, middle, and end.

Aline: I’m tired because there’s so many things that you see online. Now I got to go see if it’s real. I see a cute video, got to see if it’s real. I listen to a podcast, is it real? Is this person real? Did this thing really happen?

John: How are you checking whether a real is real or not? What are you doing? What’s your process?

Aline: I mean, I still, for me–

Craig: She has ChatGPT.

Aline: Oh my God. ChatGPT. This happened the other day where I said it was insisting that Sunday was April 19th when it wasn’t. It just was so insistent on it.

Craig: I’m obsessed with this guy. Sorry. There’s a guy on TikTok. It’s amazing.

Aline: He asks it and he told it–

Craig: Have you seen this guy?

John: Can you count up to like– yes.

Craig: This one was how many E’s are in the word, seventeen?

Aline: It’s incredible.

Craig: There’s one E. No, I think there’s four. You’re absolutely right. There’s four. Let’s count them through. Oh, no, wait. There’s 100. Nope. There’s six.

Aline: Well, it’s agreeing with you. It’s the thing. I tried to make mine, because I really only use mine for search, so I tried to make it not agreeable because it was sending me to restaurants that were closed, ETC. What is real, for me, it’s still going to be like New York Times, AP.

Craig: Brand names.

Aline: Brand names. The thing is, you still need a home base, and this is part of what’s in Prada. You still need a home base that brands you as a something. You’re not going to start a sub stack without being at the Times or being at Atlantic or being– because it needs to be funneled through things that we understand are real.

Craig: You need credentials.

Aline: Man, I don’t want to check and see if–

John: Things that I tend to do is, when I see a thing, I’m like, is that a real person? Is that a fake–? I click through and look at their whole grid and scroll back to see when the first one was. If it’s January, then it’s like, oh, this is all recent, and so this is only done in the time where C Dance and these good video tools existed. If it only goes back to the start of this year, it’s fake. It’s going to be AI. If everyone looks the same in all the things, then it’s like a fake, and I block. I literally block into those things just so the algorithm is less likely to feed me those same things again.

Aline: It’s giving you work to do.

John: It’s giving me work to do. I don’t want this work.

Craig: It’s absolutely work.

John: Sometimes there’s a little AI label on it, and a lot of times there’s not an AI label on it.

Craig: I sent you a link to someone who’s someone. There’s a book you can buy that is an analysis of The Sheep Detectives.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. No, it’s not. It’s just some AI that they fed a bunch of, I don’t know, reviews into or something, and it just barfed out some fake book that they’re going to sell.

Aline: Generally, people ask their peer group, right? You’re on your group text going, “Oh, honey, that’s fake.” Somebody’s getting very mad about something-

Craig: Someone’s going to be that person.

Aline: -and you’re going, “Oh, honey, that’s fake.” Obviously, people over a certain age really get fooled.

Craig: The boomers are notorious-

Aline: Yes, they’re super confused.

Craig: -for just RE, RE, RE emails with stuff that Snopes has already said, no.

Aline: Right.

Craig: We need a massive Snopes.

Aline: We do. Snopes.

Craig: The only thing I think I would actually want an AI to do is to identify other AI and pronounce it as fake.

Aline: Literally, they hallucinate.

Craig: They do.

Aline: Literally, it will tell you things that are just patently false. If you look up anything about yourself, it’s so funny. The wronginess is incredible. It’s easiest to check because it’s your own–

John: I think another recommendation for you is, if you’re asking for information, say include links so that you can actually click on the link and see, is that a real thing or is that a genuine thing behind it?

Craig: I hate it so much.

John: To its credit, Wikipedia has a very strong, no AI can touch this stuff.

Craig: Wikipedia is the most incredible organization. I read this fascinating article about there’s one woman who was really– she dug into stuff. She got pretty specific about some things that she thought were just wrong and biased. She dug in and had to go to war. There are these wars between very established Wikipedia editors. It’s not easy to be a Wikipedia editor. It’s a very rigorous institution.

Aline: I just don’t want to ask AI if something is AI.

Craig: I agree with you. That’s the value of a brand name. We tend to think of brand names as just horseshit. The truth is certain brands still mean something. That’s why it’s so terrifying. When somebody messes with a brand name, then you say, well, okay, now that’s where the Trojan horse comes in. That’s the danger.

Aline: So many local papers now are being bought by cookie billionaires who have an agenda which could be veganism, and it could be we’re all aliens. You’re reading the paper through the scrim and it’s just still showing up at your–

John: The local TV stations that are being bought by–

Craig: Local TV stations that are just–

Aline: Yes, local TV stations.

Craig: They just get fed through a big pipe of bullshit.

John: When I sent through this link to you guys to look at, Craig, you texted back like this is the only good use of AI, which was specifically a–

Craig: Amazing.

John: Describe what it was.

Craig: Amazing. It was a video that somebody used AI. He inserted himself into scenes from Game of Thrones. All he did was smack the people who did horrible things and save the people who died. He smacks Joffrey and saves Ned Stark, and then smacks the knife out of the guy’s hand who’s going to do the red wedding. He just continues to get rid of bad things and make Game of Thrones a conflictless, happy resol–

Aline: [crosstalk] It’s very well touched.

Craig: I loved it so much because also, it was A, clearly AI. There’s no confusion there. B, it was made with thought and care. A human had an idea and just used the tool to help himself achieve something.

Aline: Let me ask you guys a question. Let’s say you, for some reason, you had to make your show on a very reduced budget, an extremely reduced budget. Let’s say you were a young person who didn’t have access to levers of power. There are certain genres that are so notoriously expensive that you can’t make them like a Western because there’s so much period stuff. If AI was able to be enhanced CG, enhanced animation, programmable tech, basically for generating backgrounds, especially like buildings, mountains, settings, scenes, and it would allow people to make things for a budget that were not, in other words, not generative, so not story.

Craig: Sure. If you had an apocalypse filter that could just make a city look like it’s an apocalypse, it would save me a lot of money.

Aline: It would be like CG, where you would be dialing in this, I don’t like this, I don’t like this, I don’t like that.

Craig: Can I tell you the problem? I would then just run to something else because the problem is the zone is about to get flooded. Then if anyone can just press a button and do a thing, there will be a million of those things for free. There will be nothing special about your version [inaudible 00:52:00].

Aline: I believe your storytelling and your character work, and you’re still using LiveAct. This is what I don’t quite understand about when you’re blanketly saying AI bad. We have all been using AI as long as we’ve had iPhones. I love a Waymo myself. I think we’ll all be driven [crosstalk] by AI.

Craig: [inaudible 00:52:19]

Aline: Yes, but that’s AI.

Craig: Is it?

Aline: Oh, yes.

John: It is AI, but I think what we’re talking about is we need, as a culture and especially as an industry, we need to figure out what are the standards? What are the definitions, and what are the standards, and what does it mean to do a thing? Because I feel if we’re putting mountains in the background of a shot that would be CG, and said these visual arts artists is using an AI tool to create those mountains, sure. As long as it’s the person whose responsibility is to do that is using that thing to do it. Where our concerns are is when there’s basically there’s no lens, there’s no person in front of the lens. It’s just basically animation.

There’s a thing I’d sent through to you guys to look at, which was a vertical, which was all Game of Thrones-y feeling.

Aline: That was rough.

John: That was rough.

Craig: Horrible.

John: When the dragons are attacking, I’m like, “That feels like a cutscene.” Whenever you have two people talking to each other, oh my God.

Craig: Horrible.

Aline: Again, to me, that was at the intersection of fan art and porn. It’s that feeling of onanism, of it doesn’t exist for any reason except to touch itself and show you what it can do. I think that’s where AI is right now. It is going to facilitate and be involved in our search and our transportation, including airplanes. All these things are going to be crunching code, crunching datasets. We are going to be in a world of AI.

What you said, which is when someone says I work for an AI company or I’m starting an AI company, and everyone gets enraged, we have to distinguish between, I want my AI to write every novel and every movie, versus I want AI to help me cure cancer. We are not making those distinctions now. We got to stop yelling at people who are trying to explore this field as a business.

Craig: What I think a lot of people are yelling at are the companies that are actively, clearly peddling nonsense now.

Aline: Oh, for sure. I’m talking about individuals. I’m talking about individuals who say, because there are numerous instances in Hollywood of people who have started businesses or are using AI. We’re in a real scattershot thing of, we’re mad at a couple of actors who have said, “Oh, I’m interested in that, or I’m exploring that, or it’s something.” We’re real big mad about that. Then we get in a Waymo, and we use our iPhone. Any diagnostic thing medically, it’s going to be AI like this. Any big crunching of any big data, health insurance is all going to be done by that.

What you were saying, which is we’re really good at putting limits on things, nuclear technology, driving, shooting, eating. We’re good at doing that. Why are we not implementing a, it should not create things, write things. It should not be able to generate a likeness of anybody doing anything without their consent.

John: Even in journalism. The New York Times has really good guidelines for freelancers. Let me just read since this came out. All writing and visuals that freelancers submit to the Times must be the product of human creativity and craft, and all submissions must consist solely of their original reporting, writing, and other work. Freelance contributors must not submit any material for publication that contains content generated, modified, or enhanced by generative AI tools or that has been input into these tools.

Aline: Anything that’s quote-unquote content, I’m with you. Zero.

Craig: Yes. That’s basically where I’m at.

John: Art.

Aline: Art.

John: If I have a writer’s room, that would be–

Craig: If you give me something and I look at it, and I’ll know. Because the thing about the art that’s being generated by AI, and I have a suspicion that this is a terminal issue for AI, is that it is approaching asymptotically mediocrity. It will eventually-

Aline: Yes, it’s a Hoover.

Craig: When it is perfected, it will arrive at, “I am a mid-level, fairly mediocre writer, artist, filmmaker.” That’s where I look. If you are mediocre, maybe you are going to be out of a job, but you are probably going to be out of a job anyway because that’s how mediocrity works.

Aline: Writing and acting, actors are– Talking about having just made a movie with these four iconic actors, it’s not just their performance in this film. It’s what we know about Meryl, what we know about Stanley, what we know about Annie. We’ve been watching Annie since she was 16 years old.

John: They are brands, which is also–

Aline: Exactly. They have a whole human web of connections.

Craig: That’s why they’re famous.

Aline: We have to make distinctions between things that are, especially in the medical field, which is accelerating exponentially, and will be able to cure things because it can crunch huge things of data, huge datasets. We have to make a distinction between that and having it write your college essay and your novel, which, by the way, it stinks. It’s funny, somebody sent me an AI thing. They had asked it to write a scene in my voice, hilariously terrible.

Craig: The most mediocre version of it.

Aline: It’s also insulting because what it has scraped about you, it’s wild. It is a Hoover. It’s going to scoop up a lot of lint, and bugs, and garbage.

John: I will say, in terms of lint and bugs, in my other job, I have a software company. Where these tools have gotten much better in the last six months is there are bugs within some of the apps, which it’s able to figure out, and find, and solve that Nima could spend two weeks trying to do. They just fall very low on the list of priorities because he’s got to do other things. These tools can find some of those things.

The difference is, Nima genuinely knows all of the code. He is actually the person who’s responsible for everything. He can figure out if it finds a fix, he can know whether that actually genuinely fixes the fix.

Aline: He’s using it as a tool.

John: The person whose job it is to do it is using the thing.

Aline: I don’t know how to prevent volition. That’s what I don’t know. I don’t know how to prevent my toaster from killing me. That’s way above my pay grade. Someone else is going to figure that out. Definitely, the–

Craig: Or not. Then we have Terminator.

John: Yes, the main Terminator. Let’s try to answer some listener questions. Mickey has a question about story engines.

Craig: God, I hope this isn’t an audio question.

John: It’s not. Hey. I’m working on pitching a couple of shows. I’ve heard people asking, “What is the show’s engine?” So far, I haven’t really been able to get a good answer on what that means. I’d love to hear more about what they are and how I can craft them. Aline, you have done, obviously, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but other shows. Talk to us about the engine of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or other things.

Aline: Well, I’ll go back to Shtick. I’m going to go back to Yiddish. I think that all TV shows, good TV shows, to me, you know, how in a movie you want to feel like any scene is indicative of the whole movie? You can watch a scene, and it contains all the themes of the whole movie. TV shows have bits, not meaning pieces, but meaning Shtick. Like, Everybody Loves Raymond has one joke. It’s an inexhaustible joke. You could do 500. They did 100 and some, but they could have done–

Craig: It’s Raymond Bono’s exhaustion with his family?

Aline: With his mother living across the street. I would say even Sopranos, it has a DNA to it where everything feels of a piece. Even if it’s just Tony and Meadow going to look for colleges, tonally, thematically, it’s of a piece. That’s what’s driving it, so that somebody could come in and write a prototypical episode of a show and have it make sense. Have the same drives, aesthetics, themes, character work. That’s really what I think of as an engine is somebody could break down for you. “This is what typically happens, and this is how it moves forward.”

Craig: I think of it a little differently, but maybe because I don’t write episodic as much as–

John: The first season of your show, I would say, engine is the father-daughter relationship between those two characters, but that changes.

Craig: Yes. The engine is the thing that lets you write more than one episode. For Mickey, when you’re pitching your show, the fear that you are dealing with on the other side of the table is: “What if this is just one episode?” A lot of people pitch something that really should just be a movie or a two-episode show, but it feels like it just, by its own nature, will burn out. It will dissolve itself. There’s not much more to do. If the idea of the show is I’m on the first floor, and I’ve got to get to the roof, that’s not a television show. You’re going to run out of floors to climb. The engine is the part of the story that tells people I can iterate if it’s– The engine is I’ve got to get from Boston to Colorado or whatever it is.

Aline: Right, but that’s not the shtick.

Craig: Right. There’s this thing that you know allows you to write more than one episode.

Aline: In Last of Us, I think of that as human resilience in the face of disaster and tragedy.

Craig: There’s always a goal. There are many goals inside of a season, but there’s always one large goal. Season 1, goal is take girl from here to here. Season 2, goal is go find the lady that killed my dad. That’s it.

Aline: There’s logistical shtick, and then there’s thematic shtick, and then there’s character shtick. Crazy Ex, I think we did not pitch it as a woman moves back to town to get back together with her old boyfriend. The shtick was a girl who is addicted to limerence and makes terrible decisions, moves to a new town, and lays waste to it and everyone in it with her horrible decisions.

Craig: There’s an engine because you know you can write another episode because you meet a new guy because you end up in a new job because you–

Aline: You have a new circumstance in which you will make horrible decisions. It’s not about, and it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, which is people really do get mired in plot. I feel you because in the beginning of my career, you’re just swinging on the little possible things on your–

Craig: The monkey bars.

Aline: Monkey bars, thank you.

Craig: You are welcome.

Aline: You’re just swinging on the little thing. The way you’ll know it’s not right is it’s boring.

Craig: It’s boring.

Aline: When you tell it to people, it’s boring.

Craig: So boring.

Aline: It’s so funny now, guys–

Craig: It’s like telling somebody your dream. You can see them just passing out.

Aline: Then this happened. Oh, and then there was a bird. Then there was another thing. It’s funny because now that people pitch a lot on Zoom, this is what you’re looking for.

Craig: [crosstalk] My eyes go down. [laughs]

John: [unintelligible 01:02:53] up and down on the phone.

Craig: Or the sound of typing.

Aline: Because people cannot do it. I watch writers because as a company, we’re working with a lot of other writers, especially when people read, I can see, even the nicest executive, I can just see their eyes. They’ll go to their device. Then some people are pretty good about crypto. A lot of people, especially, I’m sorry–

Craig: The older ones?

Aline: Older ones and the men, sorry. They just go.

Craig: No problem. We’re very focused.

Aline: You’re pitching to the top of someone’s head.

Craig: That’s actually valuable information.

John: Nah.

Craig: It’s important.

Aline: It’s boring.

Craig: Because we are in show business. If they’re bored, we messed up.

Aline: When you tell someone a story, you go, “Oh my God, I ran into Craig, and it was the funniest. I ran into John, and it was the funniest thing because he was saying this.” You’re not saying, “Then he ordered a sandwich, and he did not get the fries. He got the salad.”

John: If you were my mom, that’s how you describe it.

Craig: Melissa’s told me a few stories like that, where I’m like, “Go to the parts that are relevant.” I start giving her notes.

Aline: I think it’s really interesting that storytelling is so basic to humans, and you have to learn it. It’s not innate.

Craig: You have to learn how to present a story to other people. That’s the thing. We can tell ourselves stories. That’s why we tell people our dreams. I don’t because I know it’s offensive, but we’ve experienced it. It’s vivid to us. It’s just, how do we then make it palatable to others? That’s the hard part.

Aline: Somebody once said to me, “Children and the elderly, that’s it.”

[laughter]

John: Essentially, it’s why stand-up comics have to present the material. They have to be at the mic a bunch to see how the story goes. We have to workshop our–

Aline: I’m going to just drop it. Do you guys know Jared Freid, the stand-up Jared Freid?

John: I recognize the name, but I can’t picture him.

Aline: He’s very funny. He’s on TikTok. His stand-up is incredible. He also watches The Bachelorette and Love is Blind and does commentary on it. He’s so delightfully crabby. I’d only seen him online, and I just watched him do stand-up. In addition to being a great storyteller, he does that thing that a great stand-up does, which was, we were in a weird space with fold-out chairs, and the air conditioning was gusting at random, and there was a bar in the back. When Jared’s on stage, he’s pulling you all together, and he’s telling you a story, and it’s really purposeful. There’s a tone consistency that makes it all shrink-wrap everyone together.

That’s really what you want to work on as a storyteller: is being in a zone where everything feels purposeful and zipped together, and you’re not wandering off. When I wander off a lot because I’m a– [crosstalk] No, seriously, because I am a- and just wandered off. Because I am mostly a thematic storyteller, and a lot of my stuff is anecdotal, which is why I’m always very anecdotal and, as you guys have pointed out, very analogy-based. When I’m pitching, there’s no- it’s–

John: Locked in.

Aline: Oh, yes.

Craig: You have to make it. Otherwise, you get the top of the head. [crosstalk]

Aline: It’s like getting the tap in Seinfeld, when he goes down on women, and he gets the tap on his head.

Craig: He gets a tap on the head.

Aline: It’s not working. Now it’s this.

John: Let’s start local things.

Craig: Okay.

Aline: Yes.

John: My one cool thing is the experience of submarining into a script. We so often complain about writing because writing can suck, but I don’t think we talk enough about the podcast. Sometimes, when it’s just delightful to be writing.

Craig: It does happen.

John: The last two weeks, I’ve been on a rewrite, and it has been just so delightful. I’ve been blocking out 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM every morning, and I look forward to actually sitting down.

Craig: I have a question for you.

John: Please.

Craig: Because I know the circumstance that I require to experience that is confidence that what I’m about to write is correct.

John: I absolutely have that with this, which is great. Even though there are difficult things I need to do in this, let me describe some of the issues. In this rewrite, I know I need to move some things around. In moving stuff around, I realize, “Oh, shit, I’m creating a day-night problem where, oh, because I’m moving the scene earlier, it’s going to go today, tonight, today, tonight. Oh, but you know what? I can handle this. I can figure a way through this that is going to be elegant and smooth and wonderful.”

Craig: Then you look forward to writing it.

John: I look forward to writing. It’s just so nice when you are writing a thing you just are excited to write.

Aline: This is a conclave of know-it-alls. When you’re doing a rewrite, it’s the most galvanized. You’re like, “Not this. Come on, guy. Come on. Guy, delete, delete, delete.” If it activates your– Oh, I’m a know-it-all. I know exactly what to do here, whether it’s your own stuff or you’re rewriting or you’re rewriting yourself, that’s a great space. Do you guys ever find yourself getting in a physically uncomfortable position when you’re writing because you’re so-

John: Have I ever found myself in a not uncomfortable position?

Aline: Where you’re so into it that you surface and you’re like, “How did I get over here?”

Craig: This thing that’s been happening to me, actually, it started with The Sheep Detective. This has never happened to me until I wrote that movie. That was, again, 10 years ago. When I’m really into it, and I’m writing something that’s sad, which I frequently do, I cry. That is such a beautiful feeling, of just, “Now I may need to adjust this. Tomorrow, I may look at this and repave it a little bit, but I know there is emotion there. I know that this is honest. It’s not, I wasn’t trying. It’s not bullshit. You can’t fake crying. Why would I fake crying at my own–”

Aline: Also, your neck is crooked, and you haven’t peed in eight hours.

Craig: Constantly drinking up water. That’s why I had a kidney stone. It’s a real issue. Anyway, I love that one.

John: I feel like so often on the podcast, we are talking about it, and our guests are talking about, “Oh, it’s tough, it’s rough.” It is often, but sometimes it’s also just delightful. I just wanted to celebrate, sometimes it feels just great. One of the great things, the luxuries we have as writers, is that you can just go off and write a new thing. When you’re like, “I don’t know what I’m writing,” it can be weird and scary, but also just delightful. Nothing is pressing that I have to do, which is just so great. Aline, tell us about your one cool thing.

Aline: I was going to do an article, but I actually think I’ll just give you the link because we covered some of it. It’s this article about fake–

John: It’s called The Feed is Fake.

Aline: The Feed is Fake.

Craig: The Feed is Fake.

Aline: It’s really interesting, but it connects to what I was saying. I’m going to throw out a controversial favorite thing, which was about two–

Craig: Genocide.

Aline: Yes. About–

John: [laughs] Genocide is good, that’s why–

Craig: It’s controversial. I know a lot of people disagree.

Aline: A puppy should only be purchased at an expensive pet store.

Craig: Oh my.

Aline: Oh, I’m kidding. [crosstalk]

Craig: Genocide, we were like, “Ha-ha-ha.” Puppies? “Hey, hold on.”

Aline: No rescue. Of course, my dogs are the most off-brand [crosstalk] rescue dogs. Here’s what I’m going to say in the controversy, but it’s been a huge, huge boon to my life, and my husband’s life, and our life, which is we don’t drink alcohol anymore. We don’t drink alcohol anymore. When I go to a party, and I say I don’t drink, and people think, “Oh, you’re recovered,” and then, because I’m so much fun, I will say to people, “Well, it’s a Class 1 carcinogen.”

Craig: Oh, here we go. Let’s delete Aline from our invite rosters.

Aline: “It’s in the same [crosstalk] class of carcinogens as smoking and asbestos, and it 100% causes cancer.”

Craig: It’s poison. Of course it does.

Aline: As John and I were discussing, you can pick your poisons. This is obviously not great for you, a can of Coke Zero. Alcohol being deleted, I’m not going to debate it for others, but I’m going to say that for us, it has been great in terms of general health, sleeping, exercising, feeling good, being present. I drink non-alcoholic beer, which has gotten awesome-

John: It has gotten great.

Aline: -especially when working, like when you’re shooting, and your physical resources are so stretched. I just have found that non-drinking has been awesome, and it’s a cool thing.

Craig: I don’t non-drink, but I rarely drink. I’ve always rarely drunk. It’s not something that I’ve ever– I can’t ever have a cigarette again, but alcohol, maybe I’m a one-drink-a-week guy, but what I have noticed as I’ve gotten older is if it goes to two drinks in that evening, my sleep is screwed up, but I’ve never been able to process alcohol very easily. I guess I’m going to be in the, I can have a drink every now and again, because I actually can.

Aline: It’s not even the addicting aspect of it.

Craig: It’s just the health aspect.

Aline: Yes. It’s just I sleep better. If I drink, I look terrible the next day.

Craig: How much were you drinking, if I may ask?

Aline: Probably two drinks a week, and then on the weekends, if I went out to dinner. Again, I can’t process it very well. Will processes it great. Will can have two drinks. Yes, he’s–

Craig: Our people, not great at it. His people, yes.

Aline: He can go right to sleep, and it doesn’t. For him, I think it’s being super present. Then the other good thing about it, if you are, this is more for me than for him, but it saves you from the thing where you’re going, do you wake up the next morning, and you go, “Did I say the word labia three times? What was I talking about?” Because when you drink, you’ll very much notice that when you don’t drink, that you’re in social spaces with people, and they’re saying stuff, and you’re going, “You’re going to wake up in the morning and wonder why you were talking about that.”

Craig: Well, I support anyone’s decision about these things as long as they are not in a disease. I think the one thing that no one should ever do is judge somebody because they’re not drinking. It’s crazy.

Aline: I thought you were going to say not lecturing them about not drinking.

Craig: I am not lecturing them about not drinking. That’s also true.

John: I would also add a long-held opinion, is that if someone says they’re not drinking, no follow-up question is appropriate.

Aline: That’s right, oh God.

Craig: Just fine, great, okay, no problem. It’s like, “Oh, sorry, I’m allergic to peanuts.” “Well, let’s talk about that. Why, when?”

Aline: People rarely do want to talk to you about that, and it’s funny. I’ve really moved into the no clarification zone. One time, I was giving an interview about Crazy Ex, and I said, “Well, I wasn’t going to do TV, but I met this brilliant young woman, and we ran off to the circus together.” Then somebody went up to a friend of mine and said, “Oh, my God, this is just incredible. Aline’s fallen in love with a young woman, and they’re together now, and I just had no idea.” I don’t need to clear that up. I don’t need to qualify anything.

Craig: No, you do not.

John: Craig, one cool thing for you?

Craig: My one cool thing is two cool things in one. My two cool things in one are the Indigo Girls. It’s the Indigo Girls because, in a slightly selfish way, they invited my daughter to open for them on the west coast leg of their tour. She did two shows in San Francisco. She did a show in Los Angeles. She’s in Tucson, Arizona. At this point in Tuesday, she may be in Denver. The reason I want to give the Indigo Girls so much love is they just saw her, liked her, emailed her, invited her, and you can tell how much they are excited about helping the next generation come through.

They are mentoring her. They’re telling her about the business and what to look out for. They are so encouraging and so warm with her on stage. They bring her out for the encore to do it with them. Look, the Indigo Girls are going through it. We grew up with them.

Aline: Oh, my God. The fact that I’m not singing Closer to Fine right now is a miracle.

Craig: That’s the song they bring her out for. Emily, she’s had health problems. She has essential tremor, and she wrote this beautiful thing about it, and it has affected her voice. I went to the show, and nobody cares. Everybody heard it, processed it, and clearly, the point of going to an Indigo Girls show is not, “I can’t wait to hear that song sang live as it was in 1991.” The point is community.

You can see that clearly, and very specifically, obviously, the queer community of which my daughter is a part. The way they reached out, I cannot thank them enough as her dad. I’m blown away by their– I don’t know, just so magnanimous. It’s not like, “Oh, this hot thing that’s happening, we’re going to chase a trend.” Not at all. Just pure.

John: It just means it’s not the next Sabrina Carpenter.

Craig: No, and it’s never going to. That’s not her lane. Her lane is she wants to be the next Phoebe Bridgers or the next Indigo Girls. They were so great to just reach a handout. I thought that was wonderful.

John: They’re the anti-Miranda Priestley.

Craig: They are a little bit of the anti-Miranda Priestley.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. We would love some more outros. If people want to send in their outros, we always love to have those. Reminder that these need to include the bum, bum, bum, bum in them, and they should not be AI-generated.

Craig: How are people missing that it has to be the basic thing, it has to be-

John: Drew will tell you that.

Craig: -and if they send in anything AI, you smack their shit?

Drew: I politely smack their shit.

Craig: Thank you.

John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com.

Craig: Politely.

John: That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You know that Inneresting is named after you, making fun of how I say the word inneresting.

Aline: Me, make fun?

John: You never.

Craig: He flipped the script on you.

John: The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. Our recent episode with Katie Dippold got gazillions of views on Instagram.

Craig: I forgot. A little bit of follow-up.

John: Please.

Craig: Part of what Katie was talking to us about was how she does not put the warm towels on her face because she’s afraid of getting infections, whereas I, on the plane, immediately take that hot rag and stick it on my eyes. She’s like, “Ew.” Two days later, she sent me a photo of herself. She had somehow gotten an eye infection. She’s like, “I’m the worst person to give eye advice on Scriptnotes,” because she immediately somehow got an eye infection.

Aline: Wait. There’s two iconic, Katie. The Babadook thing is iconic. She once said to Craig, I think, or maybe both of us, she once said that there should be a button before you post anything on the internet that says, “Wait, but why?”

Craig: Wait, but why?

Aline: Wait, but why?

Craig: Yes. She’s a genius.

Aline: I think about that all the time when I’m posting something. I’m going, wait.

Craig: Are you watching your show?

Aline: Yes. I just started.

Craig: It’s so good.

John: Episode 4, incredible.

Aline: I’m obsessed with the cast.

John: It’s so good.

Craig: Just like Katie.

Aline: The best.

Craig: Freehold.

John: You will find T-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkware at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links to things we talked about today and the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You are the absolute best. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on the Scriptnotes book club, script club, whatever we’re calling that. Aline Brosh McKenna, congratulations again. It is so lovely to have you back on the show on video for the first time.

Aline: Yes, that’s right. It’s my first appearance.

Craig: With the fab hair.

John: Nicely done. Aline, Craig, Drew, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: The concept behind this was people had written in suggesting that we should all read a script and announce it ahead of time, and then we can actually just do a deep dive on the script itself. Because we do deep dive episodes on finished movies where we’re talking about the things that happened, but we’re not flipping pages. We’re not doing that kind of stuff, and it’s great to do that. The people who would love the three-page challenge would love a bigger dive into a script as a whole. The question is what script, and do we do it for a movie that’s already existing because then people are really going to be thinking about the movie as it was shot versus what’s on the page. If we do it on a script–

Aline: Unproduced scripts?

John: Some instincts would be one of our old scripts, probably not me or Craig, because we’re defending it like something that you wrote, or do we go off of the list of the greatest unproduced scripts or something that’s on the blacklist but hasn’t been made yet? How do we do this? Thoughts?

Craig: I have a vote.

John: Please.

Craig: First, I would pick a script from a movie that exists or a television show that exists that people know. I would go to that writer and say, “Give us the script you want us to go through,” because we all have one. I have a version of The Sheep Detectives that is slightly different, and I feel would be better for publication. Give us the one that you want us to go through.

My other suggestion would be that, because book clubs are about community and chit-chatting, we’d actually do it as a live thing on Zoom, where anyone can come in and just hang and share, and listen. We would go through stuff, and then people could do question-and-answer time.

John: They might be able to do the chat, and they can bring up stuff in the chat and acknowledge that.

Craig: Yes.

Aline: Do you guys remember Scenario magazine?

Craig: I don’t know what that was.

John: Oh, I remember Scenario.

Aline: Oh, I still have all of them.

Craig: Incredible. Tell us.

Aline: They published three or four scripts per issue, and they were heavy stock, beautiful magazines. It was a long time ago, I think 20 years ago.

John: It was a long time ago.

Aline: I still saved them all. The one frustrating thing about it, which is they’re not formatted. They were not formatted. The format is such an important part of the art, is how you’re placing words on the page is very important part of the art. You can ask individual writers for their version, but there are ones that are perennial that people love that are good touch points, like Little Miss Sunshine. I agree with Craig.

It’s really great when you’re a becoming writer, which is what this podcast is for. It’s really great to read something and see how the movie is different and see how it’s translated so that you understand you’re not in the document production business.

Craig: I think my fantasy version is it’s a screenplay for things that people will not have already seen. It’s not the most well-known thing. I just love being able to go in blind and just see the movie that the writer is creating, and then get to see the finished version.

Aline: There’s no reason you can’t do all of the above.

John: It’s tougher just because it’s hard to predict whether or not a movie is going to be made. If we know ahead of time that it’s going to be made, no one’s giving us the script to talk about.

Craig: Exactly. I was thinking, if it was a movie that has been produced, but most people will not have seen.

John: Sure. I’m totally into that. I don’t think it’s necessary to do The Lion King. If there’s some little niche film that we love that other people can watch ahead of time or after that we have the script for, we did Near Dark. We talked about Near Dark and the specific way she did that; Kathryn Bigelow laid that out. It’s really weird, and it’s very specific. It was fun to look at that. Near Dark is not necessarily a movie that a lot of people have seen, although everyone should.

Aline: You know what would be cool is to do things that are not awardsy because the only scripts they ever put out [crosstalk] are awardsy things.

Craig: Oh, thank you for that. Yes, some genre stuff, please.

Aline: Just some stuff that’s every year, I vote for something for the Oscars that’s just a pure comedy, like The Good Boys, or I just always pick something that’s just a pure comedy because they’re really extremely hard to write, and they’re quite page-dependent because they have to be amusing. Things that nobody would think to read.

Craig: I’m into that for sure. I think awardsy stuff has gotten enough attention.

John: When we did our deep dive on Die Hard, it was really great to talk through that movie, but I suspect if we’d looked at the script for it, because it changed so much during production, it wouldn’t have been a great example of looking at what’s on the page. We want something that is probably, it went in with an intention, [crosstalk] and the script that we read is [unintelligible 01:23:35]

Craig: Fairly close because the other thing that we would hopefully discuss and figure out is, this became a movie, and maybe we can talk about how the movie’s slightly different from the script. What we definitely know is this script worked, somebody paid for it, somebody made it. Let’s talk about why this did its job.

Aline: I think that we have lost the sense of, I just looked it up, it was Housemaid. It was such a banger, and we picked it on Christmas. Sometimes on Christmas, when you see the homemade with your family, you can end up with a movie that is just everybody’s looking at the floor because it was– [crosstalk].

John: Yes.

Craig: Top the head

Aline: Yes, exactly. Then that was just a pair. It was so entertaining. I don’t know if that was sent out for Oscars or whatever. I would love to see things that seemed really hard to do and were really fun on the page, and were really entertaining to show people how to craft something entertaining, because sometimes the stuff that’s a super, super indie is not helpful for people breaking in, because it’s almost like a different aesthetic.

Craig: Maybe I had an idea, and it’s predicated on something that’s unlikely. Chris Miller and Phil Lord, who never miss and who are currently out there with Project Hail Mary, crushing it again. If they have a script that is not produced, those guys would be amazing at, “Let’s see your script,” if they were willing and if it exists, because I have a suspicion they don’t have anything that’s unproduced.

Aline: They did have to say that was written by Drew Goddard.

John: Well, it’s a Project Hail Mary, [crosstalk] but they’re writers themselves.

Craig: Fair. They directed it. Drew Goddard wrote it. You’re absolutely right.

John: Drew might have a thing like that.

Aline: Every writer has.

Craig: I’m thinking about Lego Movie and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and all the things they have written and the Jump Street movies. What do they have that they’ve written that has not been made? Does it exist?

John: I think we will gently reach out to some people we know to see if those kinds of things exist, or we may, obviously, we’ll listen to our listeners’ suggestions. Our premium members who are listening right now are going to write in with suggestions for like–

Aline: The thing you can’t do that would really be good is like how they ruined my script.

John: That’s why I don’t know-

Craig: You could find somebody who’s willing to light it on fire.

John: I don’t know that we need the writer on the podcast itself.

Aline: No.

John: I think it’s actually good if we just talk through it.

Aline: I had a friend who said that we should Hollywood. Did I ever tell you guys this? Hollywood should try for a year to just shoot First Giraffes and see if it’s better or worse.

Craig: It would be better.

John: It’ll be better.

Craig: I actually do think it would be better.

Aline: You’d have some garbage nonsense because some First Giraffes that are messy, but you’d probably [crosstalk] have more things for arresting stuff.

Craig: That’s what editing is for. Directors somehow are allowed in movies to just do stuff, and then everyone goes, “Oh, and then we’ll edit it.” Then writers, because it’s easy to edit, edit, fix, change. Maybe you just shoot it as it was. How about that?

Aline: What’s so interesting, we could do another episode on this, is how a director can shoot a scene you wrote, and it’s sort of-ish the scene you wrote, but it’s completely not. It’s just changing one or two lines or the way it’s shot or the tone because that was, for me, was the most horrifying revelation was how someone could take something that technically is what’s on the page, but it’s not at all.

John: Well, here’s the difference between you guys running TV shows is that you have tone meetings where you talk about this is the purpose of this scene. Let’s have all these discussions before you get anywhere near the set. That doesn’t exist in features.

Aline: No.

Craig: You must also then reiterate what you said in the tone mean, multiple times, and on the day, probably need again to remind or adjust or do things because Aline is correct. This stuff is fragile. Movie directors, often non-writing film directors, can often be bulls in China shops who just smash through all the guard rails and–

Aline: You wouldn’t go, it’s got eggs and flour, and I put it in a thing, and I shoved it in there, and I don’t know why this isn’t a pound cake.

Craig: There’s actually, I saw a thing of terrible comments in a recipe comment sections where people are like, “I substituted [crosstalk] eggs for milk, and I used beef [crosstalk] instead of cheese, and it didn’t work.”

Aline: Instead of apples, and I used potatoes.

John: It’s horrible.

Craig: You need to tell people when substitutions won’t work.

Aline: What?

Craig: What? That people are insane.

John: People are insane.

Craig: They’re insane

John: Craig, I think your suggestion that we do this- [crosstalk]

Aline: Everybody is insane.

John: -live on Zoom feels like we would probably email out to our premium members, this is the thing that’s going to happen. [crosstalk]

Aline: Yes, that’s fine.

John: Here’s the time, pre-read this thing, and then so they can [inaudible 01:28:19] because we will edit so the producer can read those questions as they come up, and that could be great.

Craig: It could be.

John: That’ll be fun. We will endeavor to try to do this.

Aline: Do you know what it could be? A Kiki.

Craig: It’d be a Kiki.

John: It could be complete Kiki.

Craig: Absolutely. That’s what we could call it.

Aline: Kiki.

John: Aline, it is always a Kiki to have you on the show. This was delightful. Thank you.

Craig: You made a Kiki. She does bring the Kiki wherever she goes.

John: She brings the Kiki.

Aline: [singing] [unintelligible 01:28:42] bought it up the street.

Craig: Now we got to pay money.

[laughter]

Aline: We’re going to cut this out.

Craig: Thank you, Aline.

John: Aline, thanks much.

Aline: Thanks. Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• The Devil Wears Prada 2
• Aline Brosh McKenna on Instagram and IMDb
• The Sheep Detectives
• Knitting Bullshit by Kate Davies
• Inception Point AI
• How many E’s are in Seventeen? on YouTube
• Inserting yourself into Game of Thrones on Instagram
• One Move God Mode vertical by NetShort
• New York Times Issues Stern Warning to Its Freelance Writers About AI Use by Maggie Harrison Dupré for Futurism
• Jared Freid on TikTok
• The Feed Is Fake by Lane Brown for New York Magazine
• Indigo Girls
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (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.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 732 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we have a very special guest. Haley Z. Boston is a writer whose credits include Brand New Cherry Flavor, Hunters, and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. She’s also the creator and showrunner of the excellent Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. Welcome, Haley.

Haley Z. Boston: Thank you. Happy to be here.

John: I’m so excited to talk to you because I want to talk about your show. I want to talk about horror, about relationships. I want to dig in on the state of streaming shows, mentorship, and showrunning. I want to talk to you because you are the ideal person for all of these conversations. I’m so grateful to have you here.

Haley: Thank you so much.

John: I want to ask you some listener questions, too. In our bonus segment for premium members. I’d love to talk about red herrings and misdirections because your show does it really well. I want to discuss more generally the role of red herrings and misdirections in storytelling, which is right up your alley.

Haley: I think making a horror show is very challenging because when you reveal the monster, it’s no longer scary. That’s the real challenge in horror. Then, trying to get the protagonist to stay and not have the audience yelling at the TV, like, “Just leave.” I have read some comments online that do yell at her, which I would like to defend myself by saying she does try to leave.

John: She does. In the bonus segment, I want to get into a little bit more spoiler territory here because one of the things I love so much about your show is that I watched it completely cold. I watched it because my friend Mike said, “Oh, this is legit. You should absolutely watch it.” It’s like, “Okay.” I started, I hit play, not knowing whether it was a movie or a series-

Haley: Oh, wow.

John: -and just went for it. I love it for that. We have to talk about some parts of it, but I’d love most people to experience it kind of cold. Then in the bonus segment, we’ll spoil some more things.

Haley: Okay.

John: Can we talk about who you are and how you got to this place where you’re making a show?

Haley: Yes. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, with two doctor parents. I had no idea that you could be a writer.

John: I didn’t either growing up. I didn’t know it was a thing.

Haley: I don’t know how that was possible, that I didn’t know. Like, you don’t think someone’s job is to write a script and then– You just have no idea.

John: Well, you know there are authors. You know there are people who write books, but I didn’t know that it was a job to write all the things I love to watch.

Haley: I became aware of writers after I saw Juno in 2007.

John: Diablo Cody.

Haley: Diablo Cody was a hero. In 2007, I must have been 11, 12. I still didn’t know anything. I was writing a lot as a kid. I wrote about a dysfunctional family that I made up that had lots of big problems, like drug addiction and alcohol abuse.

John: Absolutely. Was it different than your family because it sounded like you had a two-doctor stable family?

Haley: Yes, I had a lovely family. I don’t know what that is, escapism into something dark. I think at that age, you can be drawn to darkness. It’s the opposite of, I think, a lot of comedy writers who escape darkness into humor.

John: Yes, for sure.

Haley: I was escaping safety. I became really interested in the feeling of being afraid. I saw The Strangers at a sleepover.

John: Yes, that’s going to knock you off your rocker because, again, it starts as a very normal thing and just goes haywire.

Haley: Yes. That movie got me really into the feeling of being afraid. I started watching horror movies with friends. Then I started watching them alone. I started to understand more about what being a writer was. I read your blog, actually, in high school.

John: Oh, that’s so funny. That’s great.

Haley: I was aware of Diablo Cody, John August, and Aaron Sorkin. Those were the three writers I knew.

John: Very nice. In my era, it was Premiere Magazine rather than the blog. It was Nora Ephron. I might have heard of who Billy Wilder was, but I hadn’t read it. I didn’t experience them.

Haley: Then I didn’t know– I was writing a script in a Word document, just playing around.

John: Of course, you do what you can.

Haley: I assumed I was going to become a doctor.

John: Yes, because two doctor parents. Of course, that’s what you should be.

Haley: Yes. You can’t make a stable living as a writer. You can. That’s what I thought when I was 16. I was like, “Well, this is all side stuff. I’ll just become a doctor.” Then I developed a phobia of needles out of nowhere, so that wasn’t really a viable option.

John: In a weird way, a helpful phobia because it steered you off a path that you were not destined to go down.

Haley: So true. I was afraid to go to a film school because I still wasn’t sure what it all meant. I went to Northwestern, which is where my parents met. I was still following some kind of path in my head. I applied to the film school. I thought to myself, “Well, if that doesn’t work out, I’ll just go be a chemistry major and continue down the doctor path.” I took a screenwriting class first quarter of college. The professor said, “You’re good at this.” I was like, “Great. Okay.” Then I had to figure out how the industry works from there.

John: After Northwestern, how did you actually make your move to actually really doing this? Did you come to Los Angeles? What was the process?

Haley: I interned in LA every summer of college. Hated it. I hated interning. I hated answering the phone.

John: Let’s talk about it. How did you get those internship jobs, and what were you doing, and why did they suck so much?

Haley: I got the first one through Northwestern. There’s a lot of Northwestern alums out here. Some alum, there was some network. I actually came to LA to do the interview. I think they were impressed by that. I did that. Then I just kept meeting people. I interned at studios and agencies. I was told to work at an agency, so I did, I worked at WME. That was my first job in the mailroom. A classic–

John: It’s a very classic entry of the space. Back in the day, when I was going through the Stark Program, at the mailroom, you were literally sorting mail as part of the job. I’m sure there is some of that now. What were you actually doing when you were in the mailroom?

Haley: It was sorting mail and delivering it. There’s a lot of fear that’s instilled upon you in that job, where it’s just a lot of people being like, “You have to know every single agent’s name and who they are.” There’s a lot of studying. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was told to lie about it to get the interview. In my interview, I lied and said, “Oh, I want to be an agent,” blah, blah, blah. Then I made it my mission. I was like, “Once I get the job, I’ll be honest and say I want to be a writer,” so I did that.

I was in the mailroom for a week. I was lucky. I got on a desk really early. I worked for two different agents for one year. I was in and out. I hated it.

John: I want to hear about what you hated, but also, you probably took something out of it. I hope you were reading a lot.

Haley: Yes.

John: Did you read everything that was across your desk?

Haley: I worked for a book-to-TV agent first. That was lovely. I read a lot of books. I learned a lot about that side of the business. Then I worked for a motion picture lit agent. I did less reading because I had a lot of work. I met some writers who were lovely and some of my boss’s clients who agreed to read my writing. I learned a lot about what agents do and how the industry works. That helped me once I had an agent. Then I worked for a showrunner. I left that job and worked for a showrunner for two years, Network TV.

John: Was it a showrunner who had a show on the air at that point? It was still in development?

Haley: Yes. A showrunner with a deal. Carol Mendelsohn. She did CSI. At the time I worked for her, that show was done, and she was trying to get her next thing off the ground. I learned about pitching and how to deal with network notes. I’m not working in broadcast, but it was really interesting to see, and staffing, I was the assistant reading staffing samples.

John: Yes. I want to get into all of that because you had to do this yourself and figure out what made sense for you. During this time, you’re doing WME, you’re working for a showrunner, are you also writing? Did you find space to actually do your own work?

Haley: Yes. I made that a priority.

John: Good.

Haley: I had heard stories of people who come here wanting to be writers and never write. I had a slasher movie that I wrote in college that I was rewriting, and that’s what got me repped. I was still an assistant for a year, trying to get work.

John: You say you got repped. Did you get a manager? Did you get an agent?

Haley: I got both.

John: Great.

Haley: I met my manager at a networking event.

John: Those things I always dread going to, but it actually worked for you.

Haley: Sometimes they work.

John: Tell me about that networking event. What was it about your meeting this rep that clicked in a way that they agreed to read you?

Haley: It was a, I think, junior Hollywood holiday party.

John: You could go there because you were working at WME? How did you get into that?

Haley: I think it was open to any assistant. I met this young manager who had just been promoted. We were same level.

John: That’s crucial. You’re rising at the same– They’re hungry, you’re hungry. Rise together.

Haley: Totally. She asked to read my script. I sent it to her and then didn’t hear anything for months. We had a drink, and she was basically like, “I’m too new to sign you without someone else on the team, but can I send your script to some agents that I know?” I was like, “Of course.” She sent my script to a couple of agents, and then I met with my agents at Verve. They really impressed me. I didn’t do the thing where I met everywhere. I felt like they were very passionate about me, and I valued that and ended up signing with them.

John: That’s great.

Haley: I was repped and trying to get work, and I had this one feature script and no TV sample. I was like, “I want a staff.” My TV agent was like, “Well, write a pilot.” It took me a year to finally agree to do that.

John: Any sense of why you were resisting that?

Haley: I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to work in film, and I’m now writing a movie that I want to direct. The idea of working in TV and having a group of people and being a part of a team was also exciting to me. I just don’t know what I was thinking when I was 23, and like, “I don’t need a pilot.”

John: Absolutely. You have to give yourself some grace for being 23 years old. It’s a thing.

Haley: I came up with an idea for a pilot, and I was in Albuquerque assisting my boss on a pilot shoot that she was doing. I was like, “I’m going to write this pilot while I’m here because I don’t have any friends here.” I had this idea. Every day, I would sit and struggle. I wrote one page. I had another idea that I was like, “It’s about teenagers and ghosts,” and I didn’t want to do– so I pushed it away. I was like, “I’m going to be a serious writer and write a serious pilot.”

Then, I’d given myself a deadline and told my agents, “It will be ready on April 3rd,” or whatever it was. A week before the deadline, I’d written one page of my serious pilot. I was like, “I have to get this done.” I had four days where I’d finished my job on this pilot, and then I was supposed to be back at work. I was like, “Screw it, I’m writing the teenage ghosts.” I wrote it in four days, which has never happened to me since. That script got me out of assistant land. I sold it to Amazon. I got my first staffing job. Crazy.

John: Yes, because it’s the thing you were supposed to write.

Haley: Yes.

John: It just took you a while to realize that it was the thing you were meant to do.

Haley: Yes.

John: A slasher in this ghost story. Again, the horror general space. Talking about horror, because I was reading an interview you did for the LA Times, and you said this, quote, “This genre has been so much about women, as in studying feminist theory and horror, especially back in the ’70s. The genre forced men to relate to women. You’re watching women survive, which is ultimately something so powerful.” I’ve never seen it phrased that way, but it’s so true that women are almost always at the center of horror. Did you say that in class, or is it a realization you came to yourself? Tell me about your relationship to horror and how you think it, as your show, also encompasses that.

Haley: I don’t think it was something specifically that I studied in school. I’ve always been drawn to the genre, and I think because it explores often taboo subjects in a very visceral way, so it gets to these feelings that I think you don’t otherwise feel so intensely– I read Men, Women, and Chainsaws, which talks about this feminist theory behind horror, and so it’s something I stole from that.

I got really into reading about horror because I was trying to understand why I resonated with it so much. I really do just think it’s about exploring these visceral experiences and putting characters into your biggest fears and allowing yourself to face your own fears. I’m actually a very fearful person, and that’s what I love about horror. After I saw Weapons, I was scared to go to bed.

John: [laughs] Understandably, yes.

Haley: The show, so much of it was me exploring my fear of commitment, which I feel I healed through making the show.

John: Good. We talk about women being at the center of horror, and I’m thinking back to your first episode and the body horror that is shown in there, so not Rachel picking at herself, but also the conversation in the diner about her fear of childbirth and fear of having a giant baby and being ripped apart by a giant baby from the inside. There’s a viscerality to it that is just actually true to a woman’s experience of going through life, is that a woman’s life is gorier than a man’s life,-

Haley: That’s true.

John: -and it feels appropriate. I want to talk a little bit about the pilot, and then we’ll get into how you got there. I printed out the first two pages here, and I was wondering if you could read through some of the first page here, because it gives a sense of what your voice is like because this first page has no dialogue. Classically, we’re like, “Oh, God, no one’s talking on the first page, and no one’s going to read it.” You made some very smart choices of these are short paragraphs that are drawing you down the page. It is in career prime. It looks delightful.

Haley: [chuckles]

John: Good use of some underlining, some bolding. Do you mind reading this first page?

Haley: Sure. Wow. I haven’t looked at this in so long.

“A wedding band plays the song Shout by The Isley Brothers. We enter mid-song late to the party. Open on, into your summer house. Ballroom night. We’ve been dropped into a wedding in full swing in a decadent ballroom in the dead of winter. We’re in the middle of the dance floor surrounded by wedding guests, and they’re doing the thing you do to the song. You know the thing where you crouch down during this part. A little bit softer now. A little bit softer now. A little bit softer now. A little bit softer now.

Once the people crouch down to the music, we can see a stunning table with an enormous, elegant, perfect wedding cake on top, positioned in front of breathtakingly floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out on a snowy paradise. We’re not going to leave this shot. We won’t see the scope of the space. That’s for the finale. This is only a tease, and our view of the wedding cake is obscured again when all the guests rise to this part of the song. A little bit louder now. A little bit louder now. A little bit louder now. A little bit louder now.

The guests are rowdy and drunk and sweaty and alive. This is the most fun wedding you’ve ever seen. You wish your wedding was this fun. Look at everyone. They dance and dance, packed in, young and old, and everything in between. We watch them for longer than feels necessary. Then, a harsh jump cut on the same shot, only now it’s silent. Later, no music. Only the sound of someone shouting, per the song, wailing, screaming, choking for breath between sobs. The table has been knocked over. The cake is on the floor. The wind howls outside, snow falling in buckets. A Russian wolfhound licks frosting off the fallen bride and groom cake toppers, off someone’s long, drawn-out wail of grief.

We cut to: interior car moving, highway, day. A woman’s left hand on the steering wheel, engagement ring sparkling in the light. A big, stunning diamond. Chiron one week earlier than six days until I do.”

John: It’s great. Then we’re going to meet Rachel and Nicky, our central couple here. The reason why I asked you to do that, it’s specific, but it’s also a voice. It feels like it’s a person doing this thing. If people are looking at the pages themselves. You use italics in smart ways, bolds in smart ways. You’re really drawing us through this. There’s a nuance to things that just really works. A person reading this would say, “Oh, should I keep reading? Of course I’m going to keep reading,” because it just feels confident and just every moment piques my curiosity.

Haley: Thank you.

John: When you were first describing the show to people, did you know it started like that? Did you know that it had that feel?

Haley: The show is quite different than my initial vision for it. I came up with “the thing,” the very bad thing, first, and then figured out how to end up there.

John: A classic mystery, like who done it. You’re working backwards because, watching the show, you make the wrong assumptions about what’s going to happen, which is intentional, but you didn’t know that. You knew what the ultimate thing is, which we’re not going to say what the thing is. Did you know that it was going to be a family wedding at an isolated house?

Haley: Yes. That part, yes. Initially, it was Portia, the sister’s wedding.

John: Oh, interesting.

Haley: Rachel was just going to meet this family for the first time. Then, in the development process, it became more streamlined for it to be Rachel’s wedding. I think the visual, the snowy wedding, was something that was there from the beginning. I definitely figure things out in the writing. I’m one of these writers where I’m being taken on the journey. I don’t like outlining. It’s really hard in the professional world to be someone who’s like, “I don’t do that.” How do I pitch something when I don’t know the character yet?

John: You and I are a lot more like that. It can be tough. I really now want to fast forward to talking with how you work with a room when you are a person who’s intuitively going your own way. Talk to me about, you have this idea, this snowy wedding, we have this family, what is the first shape of it? Who are you telling it to? How does it become a thing you’re starting to write a script for?

Haley: I came up with the idea in 2020. It was my 27th birthday.

John: Nice.

Haley: That’s when I came up with the idea. I was in a writers’ room that was pretty time-consuming, so I didn’t have a lot of time to write and focus on this, so I would just write emails to myself. I do a lot of thinking while I’m driving, taking a shower, or walking. I would just write these emails to myself. They were themes, scenes, or dialogue. It was anything, really.

John: Would you gather them together intentionally?

Haley: It was just one email thread. I would just shoot off these little things.

John: Love it.

Haley: Character names, anything. Then, once I had time to really sit down and figure it out, it was like a year later. I had all these emails, and I just sat and wrote. I knew at that point it was going to be a road trip, and I just went along for the ride. I think at one point I’d been like, “They find a baby in a car. Okay, how do we get there?” In the initial version of the pilot, you don’t meet the family. Then that was another thing. The system came in and said, “You can’t have a pilot where you aren’t meeting all the characters.”

I started talking about the show as like, “It’s a horror show about marrying the wrong person.” This always happens to me. I pitch ideas to producers and execs, and there’s always a, “That’s not going to work.” I write the script and present it with that to back myself up. It’s execution-dependent. This is happening to me right now as I’m pitching my movie and going, “I should just not pitch it and just write–”

John: Yes, just write the movie. Yes, it is tough. I will say that over the course of my career, there’s definitely been times where it’s like, “Why am I on my ninth pitch for this thing? I could have just written it by now and shown them what the thing is.” It’s that tough balance.

Haley: It’s a risk, right?

John: Yes.

Haley: Because you could write it and no one could want it.

John: I’ve done that, too. Yes.

Haley: Which I don’t think is a waste.

John: Because at least you have the thing. You have the perfect version of the thing that you have done. You’ve written the script now. How does it end up at Netflix? What were the other conversations?

Haley: I pitched the show to, I don’t know, maybe 12 producers. We ended up having enough interest to split territories, which I think is rare in TV. I pitched to the Duffers. They had not read the script. Their response was, “This seems like a movie. All your comps are movies. I don’t know.”

John: You can get why they say that, because as I said, I didn’t know that it was a series as I started watching. It’s like, “Oh, I get where this movie is going.” Then, I was like, “Oh, no, this is a series, and I’m on the wrong–” I understand that instinct, but ultimately they came around.

Haley: Then they read the script. The next day, they were like, “We want to do this.”

John: Great.

Haley: They had a deal at Netflix, and so it was clear that I would go–

John: They had a little success at Netflix, too.

Haley: Of course.

John: Netflix does like them.

Haley: Yes. They had one other show that they were producing, but neither had been made. It was a good time.

John: It feels like a good fit. It’s a very different show than Stranger Things, but it’s not completely different, not out of the wheelhouse.

Haley: Totally. I was honored that they were interested. I was a big fan of Stranger Things from when it first dropped. I was nervous to meet them, but they’re lovely. I had two other producers that were interested that we took to all the streamers, except for HBO, who didn’t want to hear the pitch, which is fine. We went around and pitched. We had a couple of offers, and it came down to Netflix and Apple. Netflix had a better deal.

John: That’s great. That’s awesome. You’ve written a pilot. My instinct is that Netflix is reading this and they’ll say, “We love this, and there’s things we know about how stuff needs to work.” It’s like, “We got to meet the family. We got to do these things.” I’ll say watching the show, I’m like, “Wow, this thing seems really expensive and there’s no standing sets.” Then at the very end of the first episode, we get to like, “Oh, this is a standing set, and it’s gorgeous,” but we’re going to be on that set for a long time, which is TV, which is great, which is terrific.

You had staffed on a show, but you’d never run a show. You never done all these things. What were the things that, looking back now, if you could magically email yourself to let you know, these are the things you need to keep in mind, what would they be?

Haley: Oh, man. Running a show is so hard. I was told that. I was like, “I’m ready. I’m ready to run a show. Put me in.” I was warned. It’s interesting because the Duffers protected me from having someone come in with more experience because that can be a tricky situation, which was fantastic, but also, I was thrown into the fire a bit and had to figure these things out on my own. I think having a really strong North Star for what you’re making is so important because the whole process is just other people coming in and sharing their ideas, which is incredible, but you can lose sight of what the show is.

That’s another reason why I like to write something first, because I need to give it a spine. I have a thing I say where it’s like, “If I’m telling you my ideas too early, it’s like a baby.” It’s like a floppy baby, and someone’s going to come in and put their sticks in my baby, so I got to make sure the baby can walk before anyone else comes in and tries to push it over.

John: Absolutely. I’ve seen your show, and I know that stick figure people are dangerous signs of trouble, for sure. This resonates so strongly with what I was doing because my first show, I’d done Go, and then I’d sold a show, D.C., for The WB Network. My equivalent of the Duffer Brothers was Dick Wolf, who was not a caring, generous person and collaborator. We were trying to shoot the show on stages in Toronto, locations in DC, and post and writing in Los Angeles. You can guess how well that worked. Not at all.

Like you, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Maybe you were more confident and could ask the questions and sort of get the answers you needed. I had impostor syndrome and was afraid to tell people what I actually needed. It was tough.

Haley: It’s really hard. I had a great producer, Andrea Sperling, who comes from the indie film world, who was with me on the ground in Toronto.

John: Good.

Haley: Every single meeting I was doing was the first time for me. Go into a production meeting, things would happen. Afterwards, I’d be like, “Is this normal? Is that normal? Should I be worrying about this?” Because I felt confident in the story, that’s really all I needed. I knew I was well supported. That’s advice the Duffers gave me. It was like, “You’re going to get all these notes, and you have to feel confident about every creative decision that you make because you’re the one who has to stand behind it.” That was what I did. Yes, it’s challenging to enter a space for the first time and be like, “I’m the leader.” I was worried people wouldn’t respect me. That was my biggest fear.

John: I feel the same.

Haley: For the most part, they did.

John: That’s good. Before you started shooting in Toronto, you were writing the whole season. You’re a person who likes to write things yourself, and I’m sure you did a ton of writing, but you also had some other people working. Was it a challenge to get used to working with other writers on a thing to discuss? I have to imagine it was. Again, sending yourself that email back in time, what are things that you learned along the way?

Haley: I think having a strong group of writers with different skill sets was very helpful. I had a married couple in the writers’ room that were both non-traditional TV writers in that they were chaotic and liked to blow things up and go, “I know we just broke these two episodes, but we should flip them.” I loved that because I think I put my writers through a bit of hell. There were a lot of things I would do differently next time. I was chaotic in running the room, in that it was so much harder than I expected because I am someone who figures things out on the page, where I would see the outline and just go, “Ugh, I don’t think so.” Then I would make it everyone else’s problem and come back in and go, “Okay, we need to change this.”

It was great to have a team of people who were down for that. I don’t know how to do it differently and end up where we ended up because you have to go through this process of going down every path just to make sure that–

John: There’s nothing interesting right there that you’re missing.

Haley: Yes. I felt armed with that when I got to prep and on set and talking to actors, because they would have ideas that were a path I went down. I get to say, “Well, I tried that, and here’s why it didn’t work.” I find it helpful to have a lot of other people bringing different ideas in, but again, it comes back to that North Star and knowing that’s a cool idea, but it’s not this show.

John: You had your producer on set with you in Toronto. Did you have anybody from the writing room with you in Toronto?

Haley: No.

John: Would that have been helpful?

Haley: Yes.

John: I can imagine. Were you block shooting? Were you doing an episode at a time? How did it work?

Haley: Oh, God, it was insane. We shot 72 days.

John: Oh, that’s not very much for-

Haley: No, eight episodes.

John: -eight episodes, no.

Haley: 72 days, we were almost always shooting two units at once.

John: Yes, that’s where it gets rough.

Haley: It was like we were prepping Episode 5 while shooting 2 and 3 at the same time with three different directors. I was just running back and forth between everything. It was chaotic, but we got everything somehow. I don’t know how. Good planning, I guess. I was just writing the whole time.

That was another thing. I was told that that’s what would happen, and I didn’t believe it.

John: Didn’t believe it, yes.

Haley: I was like, “No, the scripts are in good shape.” We had 20 weeks to write the show. Casting started during the writers’ room. I’ve left the room with six first drafts. The pilot had already been written and rewritten many times. Six first drafts and no finale. I was alone in Toronto rewriting every episode just to do the network notes, let alone production needs, actors’ opinions, and directors’. That was insane. I’m writing the finale while we’re shooting.

John: I would say that, based on my conversations with showrunners, that’s really common and yet not a great way to make the best thing you want to make. It ends with a lot of exhaustion that comes with that. Let’s answer some listener questions, but I think some of those questions may tie us back into things we were just talking about. Do you want to start with Carrie?

Drew Marquardt: Yes. “I’m currently in my first-ever development process with a spec I wrote. I attached producers and did, essentially, a page 1 rewrite of the script per their notes. Now they have pages and pages of more notes on the rewrite. Sometimes I feel like, since I’m a younger writer, I’m getting more notes than someone older or more established might. Have you found this to be true in your early days, and how do you not lose confidence in your work during this process?”

John: It’s not that I remember it. It still happens. It’s being able to recognize that, “Okay, this is a note that is really important to them that actually needs to be addressed, and this is just a thing they’re saying,” or they’re diagnosing something that is not working for them, but they’re trying to provide a solution that’s not the right solution.

Haley: Right.

John: How are you feeling?

Haley: Yes, I definitely understand that. I got notes on the show that, mostly in the edit, where I would get notes that were like, “You can’t do this,” or a note about an editing thing that I was like, “Oh, I’m subverting that. That’s intentional, but because you see me as someone who doesn’t have experience, you think you’re explaining something to me.” I get that. It’s frustrating.

I think I have had to learn how to handle the politics of seeing the bigger notes, trying to address the ones that feel true to me, and you don’t have to take their ideas. You have to diagnose the note behind the note and then defend why you made the choice you made. I think that people become more confident in you if you have a strong opinion about, “I hear you, this is how I’m understanding your note, this is how I addressed it,” and they’ll relax and understand that you know what you’re doing.

John: Yes, what you just said, the “I hear you,” sometimes they just want to know that actually, the message got through, and that you actually understand what they’re communicating. Also, “This is what I’m doing, and this is why I’m doing what I’m doing.” Finding the right ways to do that to make sense is tough. There’s a gender component, there’s an age component, all that stuff is true. You and I could say the same thing and it’s going to read differently based on who we are.

Haley: Totally. I think having a relationship with your producers or studio exec where you’re calling them– When we were getting notes on cuts, Netflix would just send emails, and I was like, “Let’s talk on the phone.” You can get through a bit of the understanding of where the note’s coming from easier if you have a real conversation about it.

John: I was just on a kickoff call on a project today, and they asked, “Do you like to see written notes or have a phone call?” I said, “Written first, but then a phone call.” It’s really whatever works for you. It was good that they asked. That’s smart. I have a question about casting, because this is your first time casting. I love casting. Did you love casting?

Haley: Yes. It’s so fun.

John: It’s so much fun because it’s all possibilities, and nothing’s permanent. You get to play, which is great. You have these talented actors come in. It’s especially gratifying when no one gets it right, and then suddenly you get a person who gets it right. It’s like, “Oh, I was crazy, that line actually does make sense. It’s just that the right person has to embody it.” I thought Camila Morrone is fantastic, and everyone must note that Rachel seems very much your energy, and it was just a really good fit. I hope it was a great experience doing that.

Haley: Yes. It’s so funny. I have told her that I’m going to blame her for this, but I met her, and she was like, “Oh, I’m going to copy your look for the character.” I was like, “Okay, it’s not based on me, but go ahead.” I was a fan of hers since Never Going Back. I thought she was so great. She’s a very naturalistic actor. She brought so much to the character, and she’s very smart and hardworking. I’m lucky that she did such a great job, and I was in the edit just, “Oh, thank God I don’t have to–”

John: Yes. You’re not cutting around a person.

Haley: Yes.

John: I’ve been there, cutting around a performance, and it’s tough. How did you like being on set, and what was your experience being on set? Where was it great that you were there, and when– Because you said, “I know when I can walk away.” Tell me about that.

Haley: I think being on set for the setups, rehearsal, and the early parts of figuring out a scene was really great. I enjoyed being there and helping to answer questions. I am also a director, and it was hard for me to not be able to do that on the show.

John: Absolutely.

Haley: Then there’s a certain point where it’s like, “I don’t think I’m helping by sitting here and whispering things to the director. I’m going to let her do her thing and take it from there.”

John: You’ve got really good directors on that show, too, but you’re always going to do things differently. It sounds like you’re there for blocking, making sure that it’s the right scene, that it’s the right thing. You probably had tone meetings before everything, too, so you know what the thing is. You don’t need to be there for all the coverage if you know what the scene is.

Haley: Totally. I think the finale, I spent more time on set and scenes where I felt like, “There’s a lot of layers here, and I want to make sure that it’s all being communicated.” I was also just doing so much writing during production.

John: You did actually just do that stuff.

Haley: Yes.

John: I have a question here from Danielle about splitting scenes that feels right.

Drew: “I’m writing a script where the first half of the film, we see what we think is happening, and in the second half of the film, we see what’s really happening. For some scenes, I have the beginnings in the first half, and we don’t get the true ending until the second half of the film. How can I make it clear in the script that this is a continuation of a previous scene? Can I just write that in the script, or is there a specific terminology for that?”

John: Yes, you split some stuff up. You made it clear in what we just read that things are going to be divided. I think she should just say what she’s doing. People try to be too clever, or there’s some sort of magic lingo. Say what you’re doing and just trust that people are actually reading your script.

Haley: I agree. I think always go for clarity. I’m big in audience understanding. I got made fun of in a writers’ room for always being like, “Well, the audience thinks this,” or, “The audience this–” It’s like, “Oh, Haley speaks for the audience.”

John: You can’t speak for the audience.

Haley: Of course. When I’m writing, I am thinking about the reader, and I’m thinking about what the feeling is of the scene, and what you should feel watching the scene. I write a lot of things that are never going to translate to screen, but I think help the reader, the actor, and the director, if it’s not me, figure out the tone and what you should take away from the scene. There’s a line in the script where I think Nicky says to Rachel, “Everything’s going to be okay,” or “Nothing bad’s going to happen,” and there’s a line that’s like, “Well, that’s the title of the show.” I like to have fun with that. I think just be completely clear what you’re doing, and people won’t be confused.

John: In your script, in the PDF we got, the word “blood” is in red every time we see it. A very specific choice. Watching the show isn’t going to show up, but that was a choice you made. Tell me about that.

Haley: I just wanted to make it clear that blood is very significant in this show. I wanted the reader to be aware of that. When I was talking about the look of the show, I wanted no red except for blood. Actually, I, in part, hired my costume designer, Courtney Mitchell, who did a fantastic job because in her interview she pitched a bunch of red. I was like, “That’s really bold to go against what I said.” Rachel does wear a bit of red. I wanted to highlight that. I didn’t end up keeping that in the rest of the show while we were getting into production drafts and everything, because my revisions were in red.

John: Yes, exactly. It’s going to get confusing.

Haley: I did do it in the finale. I don’t know. You’ve got to have fun with the writing.

John: You have to have fun, yes. Make it an enjoyable read, and people will actually read it.

Haley: Yes.

John: That’s the secret that we just told. All right. Let’s jump ahead to our One Cool Things. My one cool thing is that I’ll link to a blog post by Daniel Frank. He calls it the five vodkas thing. Basically, it’s where you have a tasting. Like a party where you just do a tasting, where the idea is you’re bringing five different examples of a thing, and everyone’s going to taste them and try them and discuss things. We’ve done similar things with Austrian white wines or things. It’s just a good excuse to get people together. Sometimes you just need a point of focus.

I went to a birthday party where they got all the hot sauces from Hot Ones, and a bunch of chicken wings. Everyone just did the Hot Ones Challenge, which was fun. Just as an idea for an excuse to get people together, it’s like you’re going to try five different things within and everyone have a point of discussion. It doesn’t have to be a wine tasting. It can be anything. I’ll link to this post, but just any good excuse for getting people together, I think is a fun one.

Haley: Yes, I love that. I want to do that.

John: Yes, we’ll do that. What kind of things would you want to sample or have people compare and contrast?

Haley: Running the show gave me celiac.

John: Oh, no.

Haley: I was told by a showrunner, “You’re going to get an autoimmune disease.”

John: Yes, and they were right.

Haley: I think maybe gluten-free pastries around LA. I’m new to it, so I don’t really know what the good ones are.

John: There’s amazing ones in Los Angeles. In your gluten-free quest, La Provence bakery on Olympic has a gluten-free chocolate chip cookie, which is the best chocolate chip cookie you’ve had in your entire life. We actually did a tasting here on Scriptnotes once.

Drew: Yes, we did cookies.

John: We did a cookie tasting, a cookie challenge, and it was fun.

Haley: Sounds great.

John: Yes. Again, things that aren’t alcohol-based is also a great idea, too.

Haley: I got some whiskey from a bunch of different companies who are trying to woo me right now. I did a blind taste test with some friends, comparing which company gave me the best whiskey.

John: Restaurants, too, we’ll get the beer flight or the tequila flight, so you can actually taste different things. I was like, “I don’t want a full drink of that thing. I want just a sip to see what the difference is.” Great. I love it. Cool. Any One Cool Thing to share with our group?

Haley: I’ve been listening to the radio, the real radio.

John: The real radio. Tell me about the real radio.

Haley: I only listen to one thing. I listen to KCRW. I’m trying to become more worldly, so I put on the radio. I discovered there’s a show on KCRW called FREAKS ONLY. Which is every night, I think, or maybe it’s only Wednesdays. I don’t know exactly. I put it on. It’s just weird music for freaks only. I tried to put a song from it in the show, and everyone hated it. Me and my editor were both like, “Yes.”

John: What’s the song? Because I’m sure I’m going to love it.

Haley: It’s called Atomic Wave Dance. It’s just like a weird electronic jazz song. I don’t remember who it’s by, but it’s great. I put it in the show, and then the producers were like, “That song, how attached are you?” Netflix was like, “I don’t know about that song,” which made me like it more.

John: Of course.

Haley: I lost the battle. I love discovering music via, specifically, that show. Things like that. I listen to a lot of obscure music. My brother had a radio show called Abstractions that doesn’t exist anymore. My brother and I have nothing in common except for our music taste. I will send him a song from that show and be like, “This is a very you song.”

John: While watching the show, I did Shazam at one point. It was a Paul Anka song, and I loved it. Was that always scripted in there?

Haley: No.

John: How did you find that?

Haley: My music supervisor, Tiffany. It plays a role in the show. I don’t remember what it was initially, but she found that song. I didn’t know who Paul Anka was. There’s a song in Episode 4, You Are the Blood by the Castanets, that was written into the end of the pilot originally. I listen to music while I write. I make playlists for every project. I love the part of the edit where you’re placing music. It’s so fun.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is, very appropriately, by Gloom Canyon. If you have an outro, you can send 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 transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. I’m realizing, Haley, that the posts you read on johnaugust.com are still there.

Haley: Oh, wow.

John: Everything you’ve ever read on johnaugust.com is still there and searchable and accessible.

Haley: Amazing.

John: That’s just wild, though. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube, including probably clips from this. We’re recording some video for this, but we’ll see. You’ll find those on YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram: @scriptnotespodcast.

We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about in 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 red herrings and misdirects.

Haley Z. Boston, an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Congratulations again on your show. It’s just a delight. Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and something very delightful is going to happen if you watch your show.

Haley: [chuckles]

John: Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Bonus segment time. Red herrings and misdirects. When I put this in as a topic, I’m like, “What even is a red herring? Where does red herring come from?” Do you know where the term “red herring” comes from?

Haley: I have no idea.

John: Apparently, it was the idea of you take a red herring, which is just a kipper, like a smelly fish, and use it to distract hunting dogs so they won’t go after the things you don’t want them to go after. You rub it on things so they’ll be misdirected another way. Sure, I’m fine. I like it in terms of how we talk about it in fiction because so often you are doing a misdirect or a red herring. There’s times where it works, and there’s times where it feels incredibly annoying and frustrating, where it feels like, “Okay, but it broke the logic of your show to do this thing,” and you have really more of a misdirect than a red herring, I’d say. We can decide what the taxonomy is.

As we start watching the show, we think like, “This family is a murderous, insane family, and she’s going to join a cult, and she’s going to be sacrificed.” In the feature version of it, we’ve seen features like that. As we watch Episode 2, we’re like, “Oh, no, I’m right. This is what’s going to happen.” At the end of Episode 2, there’s a revelation like, “Oh, no, that wasn’t the thing that was actually happening.” There’s a different explanation for stuff. When did you know that? How did you plan for the misdirect, the red herring? Talk to us about that.

Haley: We have a reveal at the midpoint of the season that changes everything. It’s one of those shows.

John: What the real thing is, what the real danger is, yes.

Haley: A lot of it, we talked about the first half of the season, Rachel believes the threat is coming from outside. By the midpoint, she realizes it’s coming from within. It was sort of the house is haunted versus I’m haunted. In figuring out that was the structure, then it became, “Okay, now how do we misdirect while still building to what the real thing is, so you don’t feel like it’s coming out of nowhere?” I think the evil family thing, which was, by the way, very hard in the marketing to try to avoid that feeling like all it is because you’re right, there are a lot of those narratives out there right now.

John: That’s absolutely right. You’re going to get married into, but it’s a family of vampires.

Haley: Yes. It was something that I think used to have a longer life in the show and then in the writers’ room, and in that process, we wanted to pull it up. I think that when you’re watching something that long, you want to be surprised. The trick is to make sure that there is some logic and grounding to it so it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, you’re just fooling me as an audience.” I wanted to try to answer a lot of questions while asking more, so that you always felt like, “Okay, you answer–” At the end of Episode 2, we answer a lot and then leave a hanging question. Then Episode 4 answers everything in the pilot, basically. I don’t know that I went in being like, “That’s the structure.” It just formed that way.

John: As you were pitching to the Duffers and other producers, what were they asking about? Because they were reading the pilot, too, so they would naturally assume, “Oh, this is a crazy, murderous family.” What would you tell them?

Haley: The thing is that when I pitched the show, I didn’t know.

John: You didn’t know. Okay, yes.

Haley: Actually, the version of the show that I pitched, it wasn’t Rachel’s wedding. This is the version I pitched to Netflix. It wasn’t Rachel’s wedding, it was Portia’s wedding. She’s sensing that there’s strangeness from this family and something’s going on. What she realizes is that it’s like an elaborate proposal. Then there was still the story of Victoria, the matriarch, with an illness. The idea was that if you aren’t a fan of marriage and you’re getting married, it feels like a ritual sacrifice. That was a much longer thread, originally. Then she did ultimately end up getting married at the end of the week because of the illness. It was really fast-tracked.

John: Right. That actually makes a lot of sense. I can completely envision how it started that way. Then, like, “Okay, but it’s actually more interesting if it’s Rachel’s wedding.”

Haley: Then there’s a bunch of Easter eggs in the show and little red herrings along the way.

John: Things that seem like they’re going to be incredibly meaningful, dangerous things.

Haley: Yes.

John: For example, to what degree do we believe that Rachel is a reliable narrator? Do we believe that she’s actually just hallucinating, that she’s actually not mentally fully there, which, after the first two episodes, you’d think, l”This could all be in her head.” We see her smoking a joint while she’s driving.

Haley: Yes, there’s a bit of that. Then the Sorry Man came in.

John: The Sorry Man, of course.

Haley: That came from the writers’ room. I love that story. It’s funny, when I was watching the pilot a million times, at a certain point, I was like, “I wish we saw the Sorry Man,” because he’s so scary-seeming. I didn’t want to do any hallucinations or dream sequences; that was important to me.

John: Yes. Also, though, there’s moments at the bar and things like that where it’s pushed to a very far degree, but it’s not strictly. It’s more of a Twin Peaks kind of feel, where it’s just like, “Sure, this could happen. It’s just a very unexpected way it’s working.”

Haley: Yes. I wanted you to feel this is a heightened version of meeting your in-laws, and using horror to externalize internal feelings.

John: Yes. The thing I admire most about what you’re doing, and this also ties into misdirection, it’s a misdirection in terms of what genre we’re in. It’s using the tropes of modern horror to really get out a relationship drama story.

Haley: Totally.

John: That was really fun. The very long tracking shots were where we were just very slowly pulling around things, and that sense of dread. It works so well because we’re not expecting them to see it in this kind of story, which is just so much fun.

Another crucial thing, and in general, when people are thinking about red herrings or misdirections, you have to make sure that during the time the misdirection is happening, there’s still valuable character information being revealed. In your case, we’re learning more about Nicky and Rachel’s relationship while this is all happening. We’re learning how this house is structured. We’re learning about the dogs. We’re learning about this stuff. Things we might be misinterpreting or being led to misinterpret about what’s happening in that shed over there will make sense after the fact. It’s having it tracked both ways.

Haley: Yes. I will say, I shouldn’t be reading what people are saying online, but I can’t help it. There’s definitely people who are not happy with some things not paying off. It’s interesting because, to me, it does pay off thematically. There’s the podcast that they listen to in the pilot about the Coldy serial killer. You see him again in Episode 4, but what she’s saying in the podcast about feeling euphoric when you’re losing all your blood, and how it felt like her wedding day, there’s just a bunch of thematic ties.

I agree. I think it’s Rachel’s eavesdropping in the diner. You think maybe that story about someone killing dogs is going to come back, and it doesn’t, but it, I think, sets the eerie atmosphere. You understand who Rachel is as someone who’s living in other people’s moments and someone who’s curious, and the type of person who would say something to that woman in the diner.

John: You’re also teaching us how to watch your show. That’s a seven-page scene at a diner where they’re basically sitting there. Your normal instinct is, “Oh, that’s way too long of a scene.” Then you realize what’s actually happening in it and just how much it’s getting us into the vibe of who these people are and what the world feels like. It seems appropriate. This is not a show that’s going to rush through things.

Haley: Right. I’ll say that’s not without tons of people pushing back against the amount of notes I got about, “We need to pace up the opening,” and “It’s not going to work.” There’s so many things I learned. Episode 7 is high energy, high energy. Then there’s a 10-minute scene of two people talking, basically. I got away with that. That’s to say, try to get away with it and see what you can get away with.

John: When I had the Game of Thrones folks on, talking about the first season of that show, they were so used to a “feature” pace where everything has to be fast, fast, fast, fast, and their episodes were coming in short. They realized, “Oh, no, we can just have two people have a long conversation at times,” and people love it. You can.

Haley: Yes.

John: Haley, congratulations again on the show, and thanks for the talk on red herrings.

Haley: Thank you.

John: Cool.

We also follow up on testing movies with focus groups and answer listener questions on how to navigate the editing room, daily routines, and what to do when your story has too many themes.

In our bonus segment for premium members, we look back on what Phil learned about D&D from his documentary The Dungeon Masters.

Links:

• Phil Hay
• Scriptnotes Episode 244, Episode 377, and Episode 505
• The Dungeon Masters
• The Answering Machine Meltdown from Swingers
• John’s daily to-do template
• Pamela Ribon’s One Act documentary
• Petey USA’s The Yips
• KOXY College Radio
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Craig Good (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.

UPDATE 6-5-26: The transcript for this episode can be found here.

We also look at what AI knitting podcasts can tell us about the future of industrially-produced slop, and answer a listener question on how to approach the engine of a TV show.

In our bonus segment for premium members, what would a hypothetical Scriptnotes Screenplay Club look like? Aline weighs in to make sure the design is impeccable.

That’s all.

Links:

• The Devil Wears Prada 2
• Aline Brosh McKenna on Instagram and IMDb
• The Sheep Detectives
• Knitting Bullshit by Kate Davies
• Inception Point AI
• How many E’s are in Seventeen? on YouTube
• Inserting yourself into Game of Thrones on Instagram
• One Move God Mode vertical by NetShort
• New York Times Issues Stern Warning to Its Freelance Writers About AI Use by Maggie Harrison Dupré for Futurism
• Jared Freid on TikTok
• The Feed Is Fake by Lane Brown for New York Magazine
• Indigo Girls
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (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.

UPDATE 5-28-26: The transcript for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: The reason I don’t like this producer is because they’re doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist. It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it’s an assumption of authority they do not have, and they are inviting people to just throw a wadded-up poster of Home Alone in their face. I shall do so virtually.

John August: 30 minutes earlier. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 735 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What you just experienced was a flash-forward, or what we call in this podcast, a Stuart Special. They are surprisingly common in spec scripts, to a degree, they can feel cliché. Today on the show, we’ll look at what makes an effective flash-forward, when to consider them, and when to run away.

We’ll also be answering a bunch of listener questions, including some from our random advice mailbag, and in our bonus segment for premium members, how to go to Hollywood parties. Craig, if there’s one thing you and I know about, it’s how to go to parties.

Craig: I can’t wait to learn.

John: Absolutely. There are some minimums. We’re going to teach you the minimum.

Craig: We’ve been to enough.

John: We’ve been to enough.

Craig: We can fill people in who have not been to Hollywood parties on what they’re really like.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: If you ever do find yourself in one, how to behave?

John: 100%. Absolutely. One of the last Hollywood parties I think I went to was premiere for second season of The Last of Us, and I did the things I think you should do at a Hollywood party. We’ll talk through those.

Craig: Great.

John: Some follow-up. Last week and the week before, we invited our listeners to participate in a ScriptNotes survey. We asked them to click a link, go through a form, and answer some questions about ScriptNotes. 333 people, Craig, answered that survey. That’s a good number.

Craig: That’s a great number.

John: About half of them were premium members. Half of them were- our regular listeners.

Craig: I’d like to say about half of them enjoyed the podcast.

John: More than half enjoyed the podcast. What would be terrible if you put the survey like, “We hate this show. Please stop doing it.”

Craig: We’re running about a 55% right now.

John: Yes, that’s what it is. Just above the minimum-

Craig: Just above.

John: We’re higher than Congress.

Craig: Yes, we’re higher than Congress.

John: That’s our goal on this podcast.

Craig: We got all those people, and what did we learn?

John: Some top-line numbers to tell you. 82% of our listeners listen to almost every episode.

Craig: Wow.

John: That’s great. Half of them have been listening for five years or longer. 40% of listeners found out about ScriptNotes through word of mouth.

Craig: That makes sense.

John: That does make sense.

Craig: We don’t really advertise.

John: We don’t advertise. The other ways people find out about it would be like Google, or it was recommended through the algorithms on Spotify, or they saw us at Austin Film Festival, that thing. Word of mouth is probably the way. I guess tell all your friends you listen to ScriptNotes. That’s probably the only way that people are going to start listening.

Craig: You at home are our Salesforce.

John: 100%.

Craig: We do offer some commission.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: 100% of 0%.

John: Yes, exactly. How old do you think our listeners are, Craig? What percentage of our listeners are college-aged? They’re between 18, 22, 23.

Craig: I would say a curiously large number. I’m going to go with 12%.

John: 3%.

Craig: Wow, okay.

John: Small?

Craig: See, I thought 12 was curiously large, so I’m not surprised that it’s not.

John: Again, this is people who filled out the survey, so there could be some of that.

Craig: A little bit of self-selection.

John: What percentage are between 35 and 54?

Craig: That’s going to be the meat there. I’m going to go with 60.

John: 65, yes, that’s 100%.

Craig: We’re an adult podcast.

John: We’re an adult podcast.

Craig: We’re a mature podcast.

John: Absolutely. What percentage of our listeners who filled out the survey have an undergraduate degree or higher? For international listeners, that’s college.

Craig: Sure. We’ll have to deduct 3% from the kids who haven’t graduated yet. I’m going to say 78%.

John: 98%.

Craig: 98?

John: 90.

Craig: Oh, 90.

John: Nine zero.

Craig: That’s rather educated.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m not surprised.

John: If we were to have advertising, which we will never have advertising, that would be a very attractive market for them. What percentage of our listeners live in the Los Angeles area?

Craig: I’m going to go with 22%.

John: 25%.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes, see? Craig knows this stuff. What percentage work in the entertainment industry? As writers or as anywhere else in the entertainment industry?

Craig: 34%.

John: 50%.

Craig: Oh, that’s more than I thought.

John: Yes, that’s good.

Craig: Okay, that’s quite good.

John: 67% of premium subscribers gave the premium service a 10.

Craig: Oh, that’s great.

John: 90% gave it an eight or higher, which feels great. People just seem really happy in that.

Craig: I like the people who just keep paying for it, but they’re like, it’s a three.

John: It’s a three.

Craig: It’s so mid, here’s another five bucks.

John: Absolutely. I’ll never stop subscribing. We asked about some other things that I’d be interested in. Of the recurring segments, people liked most of them. There wasn’t a-

Craig: A big favorite or a-

John: Some people don’t listen to the Three-Page Challenges. “Mike, my husband, never listens to Three-Page Challenges,” which is great.

Craig: Sure. I don’t think Melissa does either.

John: No, which is fine.

Craig: Then again, Melissa mostly listens to the podcast to fall asleep. I think I’ve said this before. It’s not an insult, because I’m not around. She likes hearing my voice. Your voice apparently does not put her to sleep. My voice gives her some comfort.

John: You are her sleepcast.

Craig: I don’t think she ever makes it to the end. Then again, she rarely makes it to the end of any media before falling asleep.

John: One finding that was interesting in terms of a new thing we could try to do more of is, we could describe it as a screenplay book club, which is basically where we just talk through a screenplay. It’s a deep dive, but if we could tell people in advance that we were doing it, that we’re all reading the same script and going through it.

Craig: That’s a great idea. I think we should do that.

John: I think we should do that too.

Craig: That would be fun.

John: What we need to figure out is are we doing something that’s already been produced or an unproduced screenplay. What is the best way to do this?

Craig: I find that people tend to like things they’re familiar with. It’s a little bit abstract, I think. Probably fewer people will be interested in reading a script of an unproduced thing. What we could do is pick a script for something that’s been made that isn’t necessarily the one people talk about.

John: 100%. That makes a lot of sense. I was also thinking if there is some screenwriter who’s really good, and just for whatever reason, this thing was never made.

Craig: Well, there is that.

John: They’re willing to share it with us.

Craig: Scott Frank wants to give us that great unmade screenplay. I’d be happy.

John: Some other suggestions from the open answer sections. Someone said they would love John and Craig to get into writing phone call scenes because I always struggle with how to best represent this type of scene on the page. We should do that.

Craig: Great topic.

John: An entire episode devoted to what we could learn from the work of Stephen Sondheim, Tony Kushner, Jeremy O. Harris.

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: Yes. We haven’t done a lot on playwriting overall, and it does feel like-

Craig: Sondheim alone deserves a 750-episode podcast, and I’m sure there are some out there, but what a wizard. What a wizard.

John: I would need to do some reading, and I need to get up to speed with his workflow and the fullness of the work because I know a lot of the musicals, but I don’t know the process behind them.

Craig: Very rigorous. Not surprisingly because if you look at the lyrics, they are so crafted. I do remember reading one interesting thing about a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The show initially, when it was running, it began with this song about war. It anchored the audience in a position where they were like, this isn’t a funny show because it wasn’t a funny song. Everything that happened after that was a comedy, no one laughed at. Sondheim, in a panic, wrote Comedy Tonight. What became the opener, and nothing else changed, and everybody laughed at everything. It was just anchoring people.

John: As we get into our discussion of flash-forwards, that is actually one of the main things is whatever you introduce the audience to first, it’s anchoring them. It’s setting a frame for what everything’s happening around there. A flash-forward could do that or could mislead the audience in terms of what they’re expecting. Other last things, people suggest your episode on how to write a movie is a thing people can keep coming back to. I’ve always promised I will do my own version of that. At some point, when you’re gone, I will try to do a version of that because we have similar aims but different techniques.

Craig: Different methods. I have promised people how to write a television episode. One day, I’m going to have to do that one.

John: Maybe when you’re done writing television episodes. If it will ever happen.

Craig: My God.

John: It will end. Within a year, you’ll be done writing new episodes of this series for a while.

Craig: Yes, it will end, but until it ends, “Oh, man.” It’s a lot of words.

John: It’s a lot of words.

Craig: When I look back, and I put all the episodes together, it makes large volumes like big thick books on your bookshelf of pages. Oh, man. John, can you imagine if you did that with everything you wrote? Oh, it looked like the World Book. Hey, kids, remember the World Book?

John: No reference at all.

Craig: None.

John: Our listeners are 35 to 54, so they’ll know what the World Book encyclopedia was.

Craig: The 48 to 54’s will remember the World Book.

John: That 3% who are in college right now, they have no idea what we’re talking about.

Craig: The F is a World Book. That is not fire. Cringe.

John: Cringe.

Craig: Cringe.

John: Let’s talk about flash-forwards, or as we call them on this podcast, the Stuart Special. Craig, can you remind us who Stuart Friedel is, what his role was on the podcast, and how the Stuart Special became its thing?

Craig: Stuart, I believe, is the first producer of Scriptnotes. One of Stuart’s jobs, of course, as producer, is to select Three-Page Challenges. We came to note, I think probably because it was just very au courant among people writing screenplays, that so many of them began with a flash-forward where there would be some half a page or page, and then a title would say three weeks earlier, or one month earlier, or one year earlier. We came to call that a Stuart Special because we just figured, “Oh, Stuart loves these,” which he probably doesn’t.

John: No.

Craig: No, he’s indifferent.

John: The volume of what’s coming through, these are- the ones he’s picking, and he’s not the only person who encounters them. We have a listener question from Anonymous.

Drew: “I read for The Black List website, and as with your Three-Page Challenges, I get a lot of Stuart Specials. In my opinion, the flash-forwards generally aren’t interesting enough to get the audience excited about what’s to come, or they give away too much and take some of the suspense out of the story. What makes a strong flash-forward? I’m very interested to hear your thoughts.”

Craig: Let’s say you had a story where the hero, in the end, kills himself. You probably wouldn’t want to start anything like that.

John: Well, except they did.

Craig: Except they did, and I Stuart Specialed the hell out of it.

John: Go opens with a Stuart Special.

Craig: There you go. Here’s the deal with Stuart Specials. Like everything else, if it’s interesting, it works. If it has purpose, and if it needs to be a Stuart Special, if it really does add something, then it’s of value. If it’s just, I don’t know how to begin this thing, so I’m just going to do a record scratch, and then someone’s going to say, “You’re probably wondering how I got here,” then it doesn’t work because you don’t need to do it.

For me, at least, in Chornobyl, I did not want people to eventually get to the end and go, “I wonder what happens– Oh, no, he kills himself.” I’m just like, “Let’s just get that out of the way. Let’s ask ourselves, why did this guy end up doing that?” I think the way ones that work, work.

John: We’ve talked about opening scenes many times on the show, most notably in episode 493. What we were stressing is that an opening scene needs to ask a provocative question and set a promise and an expectation for what the story is about to see. I talked about with Comedy Tonight, it is setting a frame for what the experience is going to be like. You’re starting that contract with the audience in terms of, give me your attention, and I will make it worth your while, and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

What’s interesting about a Stuart Special is that you are essentially borrowing drama from later in the story for whatever reason. It may be because the actual chronological beginning is too quiet or too ordinary, or it doesn’t feel like where the movie’s going. That can be legitimate, but you have to really think. You are borrowing, so you’re creating a debt, and you have to make sure that you’re paying off that debt in a way that is meaningful and rewarding for the audience. Otherwise, it’s just going to feel like a cheat.

Craig: Correct. You do need to be able to tell a story moving forward that allows people to arrive at that moment again and go, “Oh, actually, now that I know what I know, I feel differently about this. I’ve learned why this was important.”
The most powerful Stuart Special I have ever witnessed is Gandhi. Gandhi begins with Gandhi being assassinated. As a kid, I was so shocked and traumatized from the jump.

Immediately, I was in a place where I felt unsafe in the best possible way, which is to say in a movie theater where you are safe, but understanding that whatever this man did, it earned him death by gunfire. What was it? In a beautiful way, you begin to forget if the story does it well, so that when you arrive there, again, you go, “Oh, no. Oh, that’s right. Oh, no. Oh, no, he’s going to die.” That’s when the Stuart Special is working well.

John: That moment where you have returned to that place that you set up in the Stuart Special, if it’s just like, “Oh, now we’re here,” that’s not so rewarding. If you’ve recontextualized that moment based on what we experienced before, now we know the characters, we know the situation, and it’s actually surprising that we got to this moment, those tend to be the ones where it really was structurally a great choice to open with that flash-forward and get us there.

We talk about the framing, Comedy Tonight, this is actually comedy, you’re supposed to be laughing. Often, a movie will get big, but if we don’t know that it’s going to be able to get big later on, those first five, 10 minutes might feel so small that it doesn’t work. I would just always urge the writer to think about, does it need to be so small to start? There may be a way to actually start with the size and scale of what the thing is going to get to in those opening moments.

Craig: Or it may be that the moment that you’re thinking of as a Stuart Special would play better if it just unfolded. Here’s an example. I love John Wick. I love that movie. It starts with a Stuart Special. I got to be honest, I’m not sure it’s necessary.

I remember seeing that Stuart Special and thinking, “Okay, well. Sure, fine.” It didn’t actually make that moment better later, and given what happens early on in the story, I don’t think I needed it. That’s really the test for me, is would this be better to just happen once or is it better if it happens twice.

John: Let’s also talk about anticipation. Because one of the things that a Stuart Special does is it creates an anticipation in the audience that we’re going to get to this moment. That can be great. It can create a sense of dread because the audience is ahead of the characters because we know that this thing is going to happen. We know the gun is going to get shot, and they don’t know they’re going to get shot.

It can also make the reader impatient because it becomes that, “When are we getting to the fireworks factory? We know that’s going to happen at some point. Come on, let’s get there now.” It can make us pay less attention to the scenes leading up to it.

Craig: Which is a good challenge for yourself as a writer, don’t let that happen. Titanic sinks. James Cameron did not let us sit there going, “Oh my God, this boat sinks. Can we just get to the sinking part?” No, he brilliantly distracted us with a lovely romance. I think that’s the challenge, right?

That’s why Stuart Specials are seductive as a writer. You’re basically saying, “I’m a magician, Penn & Teller, do this. We’re going to show you how we do this trick. Got it? Now watch us do this trick.” It’s still awesome because there’s so much sleight of hand and ingenuity that goes into it. That’s the fun challenge of a Stuart Special.

John: The last thing I’ll say about a Stuart Special is you think like, “Oh, we’re setting up the size and scale and scope of the movie,” but sometimes you’re actually just delaying the start of the movie. We’re delaying getting to know who our hero is, what their situation is because it’s all this extra [unintelligible 00:16:20] before you get there. There was a movie I watched a bit of on a plane, this was last time, with talented actors who I loved, but the opening sequence was just meant to set up the size and scale. It’s like, “I don’t care about any of these people.”

Craig: Who are these people? Why is this happening?

John: It’s not the movie I signed up for, so why are we watching this thing?

Craig: Yes. I think sometimes what happens is people make a movie, they test it, which is a horrible process. The guy who does the focus group after inevitably says, “Let’s talk about pacing. Overall, did you think the movie dragged a little bit, was pretty well paced, or moved too quickly?” No one ever says move too quickly, ever, even though many movies do. Almost always, about half the people say it was about right, and half the people say it dragged in spots because every movie will drag in a different spot for everybody. Inevitably, they will say, “It took a while for it to get going.” Correct, that’s how stories work.

Watch Star Wars, a half an hour of robots walking around in the desert. That’s how it starts, a half an hour of that and it’s slow. What do producers do? They panic, and they go, “We got to get them right away, right off the top of the bat. Take this thing, put it in the beginning, and then go three weeks earlier, and now it starts better.” No, not always. No. Sometimes, just let people, I don’t know, get there. They’ll get there.

John: They’ll get there.

Craig: They’ll get there.

John: Takeaway here, Stuart specials are not categorically bad, but if you’re going to use one, it has to really have a purpose. It has to be a purpose, not just because the start of your movie is boring. It has to be there’s a reason why you’re starting with this moment to set up the size and scale and frame of your story that is meaningful. If you’re just doing it for those things, ask yourself, could you do it with the actual present-tense start of your story? That should be your first instinct because you’re always borrowing something from later in the story, and there’s a cost to that. Sometimes the cost is 100% worth it, but so often it’s not.

Craig: It should definitely not be an excuse for you to not try to think of an awesome opening scene that would be present tense.

John: 100%. All right, let’s answer some listener questions, which is most of what we’re doing today. Do you want to start with this one about time jumps?

Craig: Yes, it feels relevant.

Drew: Michael writes, I’m writing a feature set in the late 70s that intercuts between present day 1977 and about seven months earlier. For the first roughly 40 pages, the script moves back and forth in five to 10-minute chunks, often in the same locations with the same characters. These play like different timelines more than flashbacks. My concern is clarity for the reader, especially someone skimming. The two timelines have very different tones. The present’s darker, more grounded. The earlier timeline is warmer, slightly heightened, almost nostalgic. The story really depends on tracking those shifts. What’s the cleanest, most professional way to signal these time jumps on the page?

John: That’s a common thing we run into.

Craig: That’s an extreme situation, though, because there’s so many shifts back and forth, and it’s not large jumps in time. If you go from the 1970s to the 2000s, it’ll just feel different from the way people are talking and probably what they’re doing. Seven months in time is not a lot. If it’s something really subtle like that, the choices, as far as I can tell, are– The most mundane thing is just, in your scene header, you just say what year it is. You can constantly remind people which part. I guess you’d have to go with the month if you’re just doing a seven-month shift.

John: Yes. My instinct would be, because I’ve had to do this in a couple of things, is for the things that are set further back, you put past there and don’t put present. Because the present is our present, that’d be confusing.

Craig: The present is assumed.

John: If you just put the years, I worry that you would actually– There’s two timelines, just mark one of them differently.

Craig: Seven months earlier is a weird thing to write. It’s a weird thing to write 40 times. The other big swing you could do is to just let people know right off the top of the bat, this is what’s going to happen in this script. When we’re in this timeline, it looks like a regular script. When we’re in this timeline, the font is like this.

John: Greta Gerwig does this in Little Women, and all of the past, I think, is in red.

Craig: Yes, exactly. If you can visually set it apart, then you never have to mention anything because they’ll know.

John: Because when you actually make your movie, you’re going to do things to visually distinguish those two timelines. It’s a problem of the script on the page.

Craig: This is the thing where people are, “But the rules.” I guess Greta Gerwig didn’t hear about the rules.

John: No.

Craig: You know what? There’s an interesting thing people ask, what is a common trait among successful screenwriters and as far as I could tell, the only common trait is none of us give a damn about the stupid rules. Literally none of us.

John: Related to that with Greta Gerwig, I would say that she, and this is true to every good screenwriter I know, is she actually does care about the read and she’s trying to make sure that she’s fully communicating what the movie feels like on the page.

Craig: That’s her job. That’s her job. Don’t direct on the page. Yes, do it and make sure people are feeling what you want them to feel. What you said is what she cares about is the read, not the rules.

John: Correct. Now, let’s intersperse this with some random advice. Where do you want to start with it?

Drew: Let’s start with Anais. She writes, “My oldest is going to kindergarten in the fall.”

Craig: Oh, congrats.

Drew: “Any advice for the elementary school years?”

John: By kindergarten, your kid has probably already gotten all the daycare sicknesses. Basically, they pick up all the things, which is just fine.

Craig: No one gets chickenpox anymore because of the vaccine.

John: Which is great. Listen, kindergarten is largely about learning to sit in a circle and just learning how to be around other kids and just do the things. They’ll be very basic. They’ll learn to read. They’ll learn to count and stuff. They’ll mostly just learn how to be a student and how to follow some rules and follow some structure. That should really be all your goal there.

Craig: The elementary years are the best years. This is the good news, Anais. Your child is, I assume, five or six. It’s typical kindergarten age. By the time they’re done with elementary school, they’ll be 10. Yes, some kids, especially girls around 10, will start tilting over into a different phase of life. At least five, six, seven, eight, nine, those are the best years because they’re children. They are not wrapped up in anything adolescent. They are fun and ridiculous, and they still love birthday parties. They love birthday parties. My advice to you, Anais, is, oh my God, enjoy this because, yes, man, then it gets a little crazy.

John: One luxury you have when they’re this age is that they probably get along pretty well with a lot of kids. See if you can figure out which parents you can actually stand being around because you’re going to play dates, and birthday parties, and stuff like that, where you’re going to just be around other kids’ parents a lot. If you can find friends, other parents you can stand to be around, and your kids get along, you’re happier. You’re better.

Craig: You know what? That brings to mind one last bit of advice I have for Anais. I have two kids. One is on the spectrum, one is not. Now, the thing about kids who are neurodivergent is, socially– As we know, a lot of neurodivergent people struggle socially, but children will generally struggle less socially in the elementary school years because everyone is struggling socially because they’re also young. What happens is somewhere around 11, 12, 13, what do we call the non-neurodivergent people?

John: Neurotypical.

Craig: Neurotypical kids will start to peel off and accelerate socially, and the neurodivergent kids just stay where they are, and then the gap grows, and then trouble starts. One bit of advice I have for you, Anais, is if you feel maybe your kid is neurodivergent and is struggling a little bit socially, but you’re tempted to go, “Oh, but they have friends,” keep an eye on it. Take it seriously because it’s never too early to learn skills, and it can become a significant issue for them and create a lot of stress for them and you once they hit those horrible middle school years.

John: Yes, middle school is universally bad for everybody.

Craig: Nightmare.

John: If you’re coming in there-

Craig: Absolute nightmare.

John: -with extra challenges, it’s horrible. All right, let’s go back to normal questions. Charlie in Sheffield.

Drew: “I’m very hyped for The Sheep Detectives.”

John: Congratulations on your movie, The Sheep Detectives.

Craig: Yay. In theaters.

Drew: “I noticed Craig is credited with both screenplay and screen story. What’s a screen story? Why say both? Presented like this, aren’t you just saying the same thing twice?”

Craig: It’s embarrassing. No, we’re not saying the same thing twice, but I wish we could just fold it into one thing. Here’s the brief summary. When you adapt something from source material, in this case, there is a book, Three Bags Full, written by a fantastic German author pseudonymically named Leonie Swan. I don’t even know her real name, but she’s a lovely person.

When you adapt things from source material, you get screenplay by, but if you adapt it in such a way that you create a story that is significantly different from the source material, then only through an arbitration, the Writers Guild may award the screenwriter also screen story by. The reason that’s important for us as writers is it confers separated rights, which we’ve gone through in a prior episode. If you get screenplay by and story by in an original film, they just fold it together and make it written by. Why they refuse? I’ve tried. They refuse to fold screenplay and screen story by into written by because they’re like, “Well, because written by is just for originals.” You end up with this very silly arrangement of multiple credits. I don’t like it. I apologize.

John: That’s reality. It’s one of those things which with great effort and probably a member vote, you could change. To change those credit things is elaborate and complicated. It’s a question of where do you spend your energy.

Craig: You basically have to go to the membership to get a vote, and then you have to go to the AMPTP and have them agree to make that change, also because it’s dictated by the MBA.

John: I will tell you that the AMPTP wants to say no to anything, even if it’s 100% free. It will cost them nothing.

Craig: If you offered them pizza, they would say, ” Pay us for it.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What, we’re buying it for you. No, their immediate answer is no. They love saying no. Everything you ask puts everything else you ask in jeopardy. Of course, if the Writers Guild had a– Many years ago, there was a mid-contract mechanism, called the Contract Adjustment Committee, which was somewhat controversial. The idea is that as little, tiny things would come up inside of the term, you could then go back and, without an official reopening of the contract, adjust some things. Now that our contract term is four years, there is perhaps some wisdom in considering the value of something like that. This is the thing you would do in that.

John: Totally.

Craig: It’s not a big money issue- it’s just a little friction point.

John: Absolutely. A related question that I think we may have answered on the podcast before, but sometimes a writer’s name will appear multiple times in the credit block because they did some writing by themselves. They also wrote with a partner, or they wrote with multiple partners on things. You see one person’s name mentioned three times in a credit block. It is weird and uncomfortable. You could imagine some scenario down the road where the mathematical credits should be a certain way, and the actual credit you see on screen could be slightly different than that.

Craig: It actually does work like that in those cases if the writers agree. If you have written by A and then end the writing team of A and B, if writer A agrees, and they should, but sometimes they don’t, it’ll just say written by A and B, but A will get more residuals because of that. That is possible, but in this case, not possible.

John: It wasn’t, yes. Weirdly, yes.

Craig: It looks like I just threw a tantrum and asked for my name to be on there twice, no. Anyway, I hope they enjoy the movie.

John: Let’s answer a listener question from Colton.

Drew: What is something that is undervalued yet offers the greatest return when it comes to health or quality of life?

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: I will say relationships. Obviously, having a life partner is incredibly valued, but I think people know that. I would say other relationships. Relationships outside of your marriage are really important. That you have a group of people that you can-

Craig: Friends.

John: Friends, yes. Our weekly D&D game, super important. My other friends who I see independently of Mike, super important.

Craig: Yes, especially as men grow older. There’s just so much research to show that women maintain lots of friendships as they get older and men don’t, and then they just get sad and die. The answer, I would probably say there is sleep by any means necessary. People struggle with sleep, and you can get by on less than you should get. The more you get, the better off it seems you are, unless you’re depressed. If you are feeling fairly mentally healthy, getting sleep, and if you have trouble sleeping, I’m a pro-sleep aid person as well. Whatever it takes, I don’t care. Sleep. I know they’ll say, “It’s not as good of a sleep.” It’s better than not sleeping. I just think people struggle, and sleep is huge.

John: Money spent on a good mattress, a dark, quiet room, try a white noise machine. Do the things-

Craig: Yes, blackout curtains. Although we’re all trying to be energy conscious, one thing we do know is it’s hard to sleep in a hot room.

John: Air conditioning is good.

Craig: Yes.

John: Victoria has an audio question.

Victoria: I wanted to ask a question about the problematic way that unfilmable is used. I don’t think it’s a very helpful note because I almost never see it applied to visual logic issues. It’s usually something that’s directed at– The camera can’t see it, so it’s not real. I also see it frequently criticizing a screenwriter’s use of internal character narrative. I really like to use that, and I like reading it. Not a ton of it.

One of my favorite examples of this is in the first Chornobyl script, where Bryukhanov is said to envision a very likely fate for himself. An inquiry, an arrest, a trial, a bullet. I love that because I feel it. I feel it from the script. That said, I do think there is a valid note that applies to the invisible information being laid out for the reader that the viewer has no way of getting. I guess my question is, when do you decide to add detail to a character’s internal world, and when is the information on the script readable but not legible to the viewer? Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you. That’s a good question. I’m certainly a criminal when it comes to this. I do this all the time. Victoria, to me, the big difference in what I would call a annoying and useless unfilmable and a helpful, useful unfilmable is when it informs the actor so that they can perform something because then it is filmable. Their inner thoughts, their inner feelings, and emotions come out.

Most of the time, I think good direction is not about how to say the words. It’s about how to feel or what you might want to feel here, and it comes through. It is filmable. That line, for instance, Con O’Neill made that clear in his performance. It was filmable. What I don’t particularly find useful are these omniscient, novelish narrations where a character is introduced and then the writer says, there are so-and-so who thinks they’re this and thinks that, but really they’re this or really they’re that. Well, that actually is not filmable because you’re not their writer. If it’s something the character is feeling in the moment, or thinking in the moment, then yes.

John: I would add to that, if the audience is going to experience that visually in watching the movie, then it’s not unfilmable. Sometimes you’re really portraying, if you’re talking about what this small village feels like and you’re giving description to it that may not directly match what this is, but it can be a metaphor that just helps us understand what this is going to feel like when we actually see it, and it gives information to the director-

Craig: Absolutely.

John: 100% valid.

Craig: Absolutely. It’s the [unintelligible 00:33:28] doesn’t know it is the classic, right? That’s the most cliché, horrible, unfilmable there is. So-and-so arrives, “hot but doesn’t know it.” How the hell do I know that she doesn’t know it? How is that possible that I can show that she doesn’t know she’s hot? I’m not sure. Anyone has actually ever not known they were hot anyway? Maybe some people do, but there’s only one way for me to find out. That’s for her to be shocked when somebody thinks she’s hot. Otherwise, it’s useless. It’s useless. Things like that, we avoid as best as we can, but anything that would help the actor, the production designer, the director, the costume designer, the composer making the score, anything that helps them is filmable.

John: Absolutely. I will also say there’s things you might include in an outline or a treatment that don’t make it through to the screenplay because those documents, they’re preliminary, and you can swing bigger in some of those ways because it’s not-

Craig: They’re meta.

John: They’re meta, yes. They’re talking about the scene rather than being the scene itself.

Craig: Exactly. Yes, they’re meta. Whereas the screenplay is the drama, and you can say whatever you want in an outline. You can interrupt yourself and say, “Okay, imagine this is like from Breaking Bad except blah, blah.” You can do whatever you want in an outline.

John: That would be dumb in a screenplay. It’s referencing another movie in your screenplay-

[crosstalk]

John: Yes. Final bit of random advice from Nick.

Drew: “What advice would you give to your older self?”

Craig: Didn’t we just do this?

John: We did our younger selves.

Craig: Oh, this is older self.

John: Older self, yes. I don’t know. I guess I would have to do it based on my observation of older people and things that frustrated me about them, or things I’ve seen that worked really well for them. Let’s go on the positive.

Craig: Okay.

John: Dick Zanuck, who produced Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Big Fish, and many of Tim Burton’s movies, and was just an absolute mensch, I would say, don’t retire just because it’s what’s expected to happen to you. He genuinely loved working and producing movies for Tim Burton. It gave him so much joy, and so he didn’t stop just because he was old. He was loving doing it, and so why stop? He also called his sons every day, no matter where he was, and I love that for him.

Craig: Oh, how old am I?

John: You can decide.

Craig: Well, I’m going to project forward to quite old. My advice is, don’t bother doing a whole bunch of stuff to try and live longer. You’re not going to. Just keep rolling. Just keep rolling, you’re good. You’re good. No one lives forever. No one lives forever. What are you going to do? You’re going to start going to the gym every day? No, you’re not. At 80, you’re going to decide that’s when I’m going to start?

John: People don’t fundamentally change. I think that’s an important thing to remember. When I see people say, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll change.” No, they won’t change. They never will change.

Craig: No, old dog. No new tricks required. I would advise myself to eagerly go to any lifetime achievement ceremony that might come my way- because that’s actually the good sign that you’re done. That’s when you know they don’t want you anymore. They start giving you the thank you for your service awards.

John: Let’s go to another audio question. This one’s from Robert.

Drew: This one’s also follow-up from our conversation about avoidance in episode 731.

Robert: Hi. I just listened to your episode on protagonists’ motivation being driven by their desire to avoid things. I was just wondering if you have any tips for how to differentiate between a character driven by avoidance and a character that appears to have very little agency. I’ve received notes on a story that I am currently in the middle of and about half the people respond to the character positively and can totally understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, while about the other 50% of people seem to very much think that the character doesn’t have any agency, that they’re very much just reacting to everything around them and therefore is not very likable. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.

John: Let’s recap what we were talking about before with avoidance. The thesis of that episode, 731, was that we tend to think about characters going off on a quest and wanting to do and achieve things, but often they’re just trying to avoid uncomfortable situations. In agency, we’re talking about a character’s ability to take action that moves them in a direction they want to move in, so they proactively go after a thing.

They’re related concepts, but they’re not quite the same. A prisoner has very little agency over certain aspects of their life. A person trapped in a bad domestic situation might have little agency over certain things. Yet, as an audience, we get frustrated by watching that person because we feel trapped there with them.

Craig: Yes. This is a bit different than the question of wanting something or avoiding something. This comes down to– Robert is describing what we would often call a passive character, which is a very easy character for people giving notes to pick on, and here’s why. Passive characters don’t seem to demand our attention because what we’re looking for in stories are those special moments in someone’s life where something important happens.

There are some art movies where you just sit there and watch someone stroll around through some random week of their life. I don’t like those. I like movies where stuff happens. When you have a character who doesn’t have agency, at a minimum, you have to give them a desire, a hope, some need. Even if you were to say, “Here’s a story about a prisoner, they’re never getting out, ever, and there’s no way to get out.”

Then the question is, how do they survive here? Can they find love? Can they find some spiritual peace? Can they figure out how to handle their own guilt or remorse? Can they seek amends? What is it that they want to do? They need something or are they just trying to stay alive, which would be avoiding death? Either way, what you really can’t do is just get pushed around and react without any goal.

John: Yes. I want to stick up for and defend two different groups. The groups who might say, well, there’s a whole range of cinema that is valid, which has passive heroes, passive protagonists. They’re just sure seeing their daily life. That’s absolutely valid. That’s not what we focus on on this podcast, which is movies where things happen, movies where people go on a one-time journey that is transformational, which can absolutely happen in a prison movie.

You’re right in saying that there has to be a point of view, a perspective that the movie has on this character and why we should be caring about this character and why we’d be so interested and invested. I want to defend the people giving these notes, saying, “I didn’t connect or didn’t relate because this character just wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t moving the ball forward. That was my set of expectations.”

Craig: That’s what I want.

John: Yes. As we said from the start, from Comedy Tonight, you’re setting a frame on why we’re supposed to be paying attention to this character and his situation, what the journey is going to be. Maybe that’s really the issue is you’re not properly establishing what it is we should be looking for in this movie with this character balling things forward.

Craig: Great. Great points. There is a genre that I would call person trapped in lunacy. Kafka writes these stories beautifully. Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil is insane and bananas. Jonathan Price is a cog in a massive machine who slowly starts to realize that he’s a cog in a massive machine. Then, of course, it changes him.

There’s also the after-hours/something wild type of story where an average Joe ends up in a series of wild circumstances that they weren’t expecting. They are pushed around, except inevitably they’re also in desperate need of this, and they fall in love. The point of the story is you need to live.

These are essential, I think, to traditional storytelling. Certainly, if you hand somebody a script that doesn’t have that, give them fair warning. This is not one of those scripts. If you don’t like stories where nothing happens, this one isn’t for you.

Drew: It’s fair. A question from Mare. I’ve been working on an original screenplay that features a nine-year-old girl. I’ve had a few professionals in the field read it and provide really helpful notes. One producer director argued that, in no uncertain terms, that unless I were to direct a film about a child protagonist, a film featuring a child would never be made and could never be sold. He suggested that if it was something I needed to write, that I should write this as a book instead of a screenplay. I’d appreciate your insight on this opinion. I can’t shake the story. Most of the stories I’m drawn to feature younger people coming of age.

Craig: John, what do you think about this producer and his interesting insight into Hollywood?

John: This producer can say, like, “I wouldn’t make this movie.”

Craig: Totally. Not a problem.

John: That’s true, and that’s valid. Is there somebody who would make this movie? Yes.

Craig: They’ve made movies about children, starring children, since time immemorial. Shirley Temple, for God’s sake. Not to mention Little Man Tate and Sixth Sense and the movie where Macaulay Culkin died from a bee sting. Spoiler alert. There’s been so many movies.

John: Home Alone.

Craig: Home Alone. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’s so many movies starring, I don’t know, are they specifically nine? I don’t know. Yes. How old was Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone?

Drew: Probably nine or 10.

Craig: Let’s Google that. I’m tempted to say about this producer, what an idiot. I’m going to. What an idiot.

Drew: Macaulay Culkin was nine years old.

Craig: He was nine years old in Home Alone, one of maybe the most successful family film of all time. The reason I don’t like this producer is because they’re doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist. It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it’s an assumption of authority they do not have. They are inviting people to just throw a wadded-up poster of Home Alone in their face. I shall do so virtually. Ha.

John: Is it valid to say it’s harder to make a movie with a nine-year-old protagonist? Sure, but it’s hard to make any movie. Come on.

Craig: They’re all hard.

John: Every movie’s hard. The thing, Mare, you should take away from this is try to get your movie made. Also, hopefully, this script is great, and that this is a sample for you to do other stuff too. You should not avoid writing the thing you want to write because it has a child protagonist. Stand by Me.

Craig: Stand by Me, for God’s sake. I’m going to actually get angry about this. Mare, broad advice for you now for your life. Anyone who says you can never do blankety blank in Hollywood, especially when it’s something that you know you can, don’t argue. Just walk away.

John: They’re not the person for you.

Craig: Cut them out of your life. I don’t know who that producer is, but if they are successful, it’s a mistake. It’s literally a cosmic error.

John: There’s producers who would say, “Oh, you can’t make a no-budget horror film,” because it’s not a thing they don’t want to make.

Craig: Exactly. You could say, I’m not going to make it. You could definitely say it’s really hard making a movie with a nine-year-old kid as the star because the restrictions on shooting with children are very specific and very onerous.

John: Also, well-intentioned and good because–

Craig: Oh, necessary. Yes. We don’t want child labor laws to be violated. It’s tough. We have kids on our show all the time, usually in smaller parts. We just know, here’s the deal. The time they take to ride there, then the time that they’re in the makeup chair, the time it takes to take the makeup off, that plus lunch, plus their teaching time, plus their mandated rests, and they can’t work more than eight hours total anyway, including all that stuff, you end up maybe four hours shooting with them, maybe?

John: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had five kids. How challenging.

Craig: It ends up costing way more money to make the same amount of movie with a kid than it would with an adult, like you said, for good reason. Still, people do it all the time because it works all the time. I’m not saying it doesn’t fail all the time, but when I say all the time, I mean lots of the time throughout history.

John: Let’s do another audio question. This one from Sydney.

Sydney: Hey, John and Craig. My name’s Sydney. My question is craft-related. I find that in my scripts, I often describe a lot of movement in the action lines, like a character walks this way or crosses the room. I’m actually noticing I end a lot of scenes with a character leaving a room or walking away from another character if they’ve just had a confrontation. I just feel like I do that very often, especially with the ending the scenes that way. Then I don’t know how to end them.

Is it better to just end on the dialogue line or is that cutting it off too early? Sometimes it feels like that’s almost getting out too early, but maybe that’s just because I’m used to ending it with someone walking away. I’ve been looking at other scripts for movies or pilots I’ve seen just to compare what’s on the screen versus what they wrote in that scene. I did just want your guys’ input to see what you thought.

John: It’s because she’s noticing a pattern, and it’s bugging her a bit that she’s doing it. It’s valid. Listen, characters walking away in a scene, it’s a choice, but if you’re doing it in every scene, something weird.

Craig: It’s a rough choice, specifically for ending a scene. If somebody walks away with purpose, if it is shocking that they walk away, if they walk away and slam a door behind them, if they walk away and disappear into a fog, sure. If they finish an argument and then turn and walk away, you’re just watching that. Then the question is, okay, let’s imagine us in the movie theater, where are we going to put our camera? At that point, you need to really end the scene on how the person who is being left feels. That’s more important than just somebody walking away because you’re not just going to watch people walking. It’s shoe leather there at the end of a scene.

John: I would ask, Sydney, if we’re following the person who’s walking away, a good choice can often be they have the confrontation, cut, and then we find them walking away, and then we can focus on them. The reaction they don’t want to show to the other person, and what that is, that’s a chance for us to get into that space. Just look at what you’re doing there. In terms of the movement within a scene, Craig and I are both huge fans of screen geography. Let people move around, let us see where things are going.

You might worry like, oh, you’re going to box people in on the blocking, you’ll figure it out. It gives a sense of what the flow is in the space and what things are like because if it feels like two characters are just standing, talking to each other in a scene, it’s not good.

Craig: No. If you don’t know how physically it’s possible for these things to happen, you end up with directors on the day just coming up with stuff which they seem to love and which I don’t.

John: Lots of bits.

Craig: I think it’s important for the screenwriter to give everybody something real to hang onto. Then, when you get there, if it’s not quite working, you adjust. I do that to my own writing all the time when I’m directing, but at least have a basis that is set in reality. Moving people around, where are they standing, Lindsay Doran’s most important question. You say two people are standing in a bar. Where in the bar? Against the bar? By a wall? Why are they standing by a wall? Why aren’t they sitting? How did one get there so quickly from all the way across the room?

These questions are worth asking. When you end a scene, one thing that you mentioned is, okay, you can cut to the next thing. Sydney, don’t think about the ending of your scene as the ending of a scene. Think about the ending of the scene as one side of a cut. The other side of the cut tells us something about how you ended, and how you ended is going to tell us something about what you see next. If you start thinking that way, for instance, if you have somebody walking away and the next shot is somebody else walking toward us, or somebody else walking away, that’s a different person, or there’s some sort of contrast, that could be interesting.

Think about the relationship between what we call the A side of the cut and the B side of the cut.

John: If you had two walking scenes back-to-back, it could work, but it’s also going to feel weird.

Craig: It’s going to start getting a little silly, isn’t it?

John: Yes, it is. You got to think about that. What’s also good that you recognize here, Sydney, is movies are not plays. You don’t have to enter and exit characters all the time. The film does that for you, which is great.

Craig: Last bit of advice for you, I love a door.

John: Love a door.

Craig: Love a door. I am obsessed with doors. I write doors all the time. I know there are things that I do that, have you seen that Aaron Sorkin supercut where he just reuses dialogue all the time? It’s all really good. I don’t do that, I don’t think, but just giving away one of my crutches. People will have a conversation with somebody, then turn, walk away, get to a door, stop, turn back, say one last thing, and then go, and the door closes, and that’s an end of a scene. A door closing, scene’s over. I like that. It’s better than just walking.

John: We’re going to have Elaine come on the podcast shortly to talk about The Devil Wears Prada. I think I noticed in her movie, which I may not have time to bring up in our conversation, is glass doors. There’s a lot of times where people are walking– You’re able to see somebody through a glass door, but not open the door, or the decision to open a door or not open the door, and so that movement becomes really important in what they can see and what they can’t see. I love it.

Craig: Doors.

John: Doors.

Craig: Doors.

John: Helpful. Doors and windows.

Craig: Big fan of doors.

John: Let’s answer a question from Andrew.

Drew: I searched your transcripts and looked in the script notes book, but I haven’t found an instance of you two tackling best practices for cutting down your screenplay. You mentioned how vast Scott Frank’s early drafts are.

Craig: [laughs] Poor Scott.

Drew: It’s well-known to me. That’s reality.

Craig: Yes, it is. It’s quite well-documented.

Drew: My question is, how does he trim those back? Everything in my script seems so important and special. I’ve condensed many scenes, and I’ve arrived late, and I’ve left early. All right.

John: This is a great question. I think we should save it for his own marquee topic. I know you’ve written on the blog about cutting. To give you a taste of what’s to come, it’s like you can make the small changes, but ultimately, if you really need to cut a lot, you need to make big changes. You need to cut scenes and sequences rather than trying to just take all the fat out of existing scenes.

Craig: It’s definitely a topic worth its own episode, because I think if you have a lot to cut, it is either an indication of the nature of your process or a problem with the story itself and the way it was conceived in the first place, if you have a lot to cut. For some people, it is part of their process, and they are aware as they’re writing that, okay, I’m not sure if this is going to make it in or not, but I need it now. Sounds like, in this case, I like all of this. Well, okay. Then I suspect there’s actually an unseen problem here that we will dig into and diagnose at a later time.

John: At a later time. Let’s try one cool thing. My one cool thing is a blog post by somebody named Malmsbury.

Craig: Malmsbury?

John: Malmsbury. M-A-L-M-S-B-U-R-Y.

Craig: Love it.

John: What they’re doing is they’re looking back at a cookbook, Microwave Cooking for One, which is a book from the mid-1980s.

Craig: My heart just sank.

John: It garnered momentary attention on the internet as being the world’s saddest cookbook.

Craig: Honestly, most microwave cooking is for one, but that is such a profoundly sad title.

John: Well, you would think so. It’s written by Marie T. Smith, and she wrote this book, Microwave Cooking for One. What I like about this blog post is it’s going back and just resuscitating and reframing, basically, how to think about this cookbook because the author goes through and actually makes a bunch of the recipes. It’s like, this woman, Marie T. Smith, was an absolute genius. In terms of, if you take the mandate of, okay, what is the best way to cook everything on earth in a microwave oven? She just figures it out and basically, like, do this for seven seconds and this, this. She has all these techniques for browning and crisping things in a microwave.

It is basically a pay-on to the power of technology and the wonders of a microwave oven.

Craig: I get that it would be incredibly useful. It’s just the title.

John: Oh, it is.

Craig: Why did it need to be for one? You know what I mean? If she’s so good at stuff, why limit it to just– You could just say, if you’re going solo, do this. If you’re cooking for two to four, do this. I mean, for one? Oh.

John: The blog post does go into the whole, the one of it all, because also, like cooking for two, it’s more than twice as long to do it because it’s not like heating an oven or a fry pan, where you can sort of do, it’s just as quick to do it for two as for one. It actually is different. We don’t reward domestic home life optimization and stuff to where we should.

We don’t acknowledge like, oh, there’s actually, it’s like a scientific rigor applied to things you don’t normally apply it to.

Craig: Some great early life hacks.

John: Yeah, completely. It’s a person, if she had lived at the YouTube era, we would celebrate her as like, look at this woman who’s figured out how to do all this stuff.

Craig: You can’t shake the image of somebody softly crying while the little thing inside the microwave rotates and just waiting. It’s still always three minutes left. It is eternally three minutes to go.

John: Craig, I don’t know if you’ve witnessed this phenomenon where you have work crews on a site, like they’re doing stuff at your house. Sometimes they will bring a microwave oven to plug it in so that they’ll have a microwave oven on their truck, and that’ll heat up all their food, which I just find terrific and remarkable. I just love it.

Craig: Oh, a little microwave is powerful. I mean, look, we’re old enough to remember what life was like before them.

John: Absolutely. I remember our first microwave.

Craig: Yes. The first time you microwave something, you lost your mind.

John: Incredible.

Craig: I feel the same way about the air fryer. The air fryer is just incredible.

John: Yes, we don’t have an air fryer.

Craig: It is spectacular.

John: Yes, everyone knows that.

Craig: Basically, it’s like a microwave, not technologically, but practically, it’s like a microwave that takes maybe twice as long as a microwave would, but tastes 10 times better.

John: In many ways, I was reading different blog posts about technologies and what’s the earliest the technology could have been invented. The air fryer, it’s just a hairdryer mounted differently.

Craig: It’s just a massive convection air dryer thing that works so well.

John: We could have had them 30 years ago. It’s a while that it was invented.

Craig: There it is. My sister introduced me to the air fryer many years ago. We played D&D, and we had pizza. We often do. I always over-order pizza because I’m a Jew, and if you run out of food, you go to hell. We don’t even have hell, but they make hell for you. I end up freezing all these slices of pizza, and putting pizza in a microwave is sad. Putting pizza straight from the freezer, a slab, like a piece of slate, put it in an air fryer, eight minutes later, brand new pizza, like it just got made. It’s spectacular.

John: Lacking an air fryer, what we do is heat up the oven with a pan in there so the pan gets hot, and then you put it on there, 400 degrees, a few minutes, delicious. Air fryer.

Craig: Air fryer, that’s great.

John: Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: As is often the case, I have a game. Now, as everyone knows, I’m rather obsessed with Baldur’s Gate 3. Because I love what Larian, the company that made Baldur’s Gate 3, did, I went back, and I played Divinity 2 and then Divinity 1, which were the prior games. Of course, I will play the upcoming Divinity, but I’m out of Larian games to play. Of course, I go on my Steam Deck like, “Let’s say you love Larian games. What’s like it?” The answer is, here’s something like it. It is. This is not at Larian level.

I appreciate what this company is doing. They’re very small, actually. It’s a company called Tactical Adventures. Do they have the polish of a Larian game? No. I think the entire company’s 35 people, or something, where Larian, I believe, employs hundreds of people. They made a game called Solasta II. They made Solasta I: Crown of the Magister. Then they made Solasta II. It is in early access right now, which is how Larian does their games, too. They don’t give you the entire game upfront. They give you a chunk of it. Then they’re using it to get feedback, debug, advanced features.

It works like Baldur’s Gate very much, what I really enjoy about it is that it is not just based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset and encyclopedia the way that Baldur’s Gate was. It is firmly, very strictly attached to 5th Edition rules. The way we play, that super crunchy way, that’s how this works. I actually find it on that level fun. I wish them great success. I believe in little companies trying things. Not everything has to be Baldur’s Gate 3.

John: Totally. You’re playing on Steam Deck. Is it just a Steam game?

Craig: I’m playing on Steam Deck. It is available for platform. I guess it’s available on PC as well. I guess everything that’s on Steam is theoretically PC-ish.

John: I’ve not been using my Steam Deck at all recently, so maybe I’ll break that and try it.

Craig: I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with the Steam Deck. I know I could sit down and play, and I will. Look, once Grand Theft Auto 6 hits, I’m not going to be on my damn Steam Deck. I’m going to be playing on the biggest screen I have on my PlayStation, going crazy.

John: Have you hooked up your PlayStation to your big screen downstairs?

Craig: No. My home used to be owned by Kevin Williamson. Kevin had set up a Sony PlayStation down there to go on the big home theater screen, but it was an older PlayStation. When I moved in, I was like, “Ahh.” It’s such a big screen. It’s overwhelming.

John: Yes, that was my worry.

Craig: Rather than feel like I’m being punished by the game I’m playing is so big, even the sound down there is great, it’s a little bit better on just a good old-fashioned, big-ass, wall-mounted. I play upstairs in a little gaming nook. It’s my gaming nook.

John: Everyone needs a gaming nook. That’s the advice we needed to–

Craig: Everyone needs a gaming nook. Doesn’t matter how big or small.

John: Whatever your game is.

Craig: Doesn’t matter.

John: Could be a puzzle nook. Could be whatever you want to do.

Craig: Whatever. You got to have one.

John: Got to have a nook. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. If you want to include an audio version of your question, go for it. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. I just saw you put through an email that we’re on another college’s curriculum. I think it was at University of Missouri, Kansas City, I think.

Craig: University of Missouri, Kansas City. Yes. Those students have to buy the book.

John: Those students have to buy the book. That’s how we do it. One by one. Apparently, the first time they’ve ever signed a book, and the book is ours.

Craig: Well, that’s great. Thank you, university.

John: You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week.

Craig: 80% of you really enjoy it.

John: Yes, which is fantastic.

Craig: Thank you for continuing to enjoy it.

John: I think it was more like 90%.

Craig: 90% of you enjoy it.

John: That’s a very high number. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Hollywood parties.

Craig: Woo-hoo.

John: Craig, it’s always a Hollywood party with you.

Craig: Aw. Thank you.

John: Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. The question was how to go to Hollywood parties.

Craig: Got to go to Hollywood parties.

John: I’m taking this as not to how to get invited to Hollywood parties because–

Craig: No. We can’t help you with that.

John: We can’t help you with that. We can talk about, okay, you’ve been invited to a Hollywood party. It could be a premiere party. It could be a for-your-consideration party. It could be some producers throwing a party at their house. It could be a friend of ours doing a New Year’s Eve party. You’re going to a Hollywood party. What to do? Let’s start with when do you arrive?

Craig: If it’s a premiere, you have to get there to see the movie.

John: Except the thing to point out is they always start late. You can get there and be waiting for an hour in the theater.

Craig: They will tell you that you have to be at the theater by 7:30 PM under penalty of death. Around 7:50, the biggest star arrives, starts walking the carpet, and doing interviews. I’ve been to some that have really gone late, but typically speaking, it’s actually not too bad. A typical premiere will start about 30 minutes after. Then there’s always a speech or two. They will close the doors on you, though. Better to be on time for those things, and what I like to do is, you get to a premiere, and the theater lobby will be choked with people all yip, yip, yip, yip to each other. Oh my God, me, me, me, me. Even at premieres for things I’ve done, I don’t know almost anyone there.

I’m like, “Who are all these people?” I just go into the theater, and I sit down. It’s nice and quiet in there for a while everyone’s, me, me, me, me in the lobby. If you like chit-chat and being smashed up against people, sure, the lobby.

John: The party would be after the screening, generally. Ideally, it’s at the same venue or an easy walk. I always hate it when there’s a premiere someplace and you have to drive to a second thing.

Craig: It’s pretty rare, but yes, typically, it’s a little walk. If it’s a bigger premiere, it’s almost always a little walk because you have to get to some larger venue, but they’re pretty good about keeping it close by. The party will start technically immediately after the end of the movie. It will take possibly an hour or two before it really gets going. I don’t know what happens in that hour or two. Where did everyone go? Did they just go somewhere else and then go to the party? I’m always befuddled.

John: I’m thinking of two different parties, party for the first Iron Man and the party for the second season of The Last of Us, which were the premiere was at the Chinese and the party afterwards was at the Roosevelt Hotel, which is great because it’s an easy walk to get over there. A gladiator, too. It’s also the same situation. Yes, it’s weird. You get there, and it’s empty. It’s like, why did it take–

Craig: Did I make a mistake?

John: Then it does fill up.

Craig: It fills up. What happens in part is when the movie ends, if you are involved in the production, as you’re walking out, 4,000 people stop you to tell you how wonderful you are. Some of them you actually want to talk to, and you haven’t seen for a while, and you’re so happy that they’re there. You don’t know. Some of them you’re supposed to know, and you don’t know, but you get stuck. Everybody gets bottlenecked and stuck. Of course, you also naturally want to talk to the people that you’ve made the show with.

If you’re a guest at one of these things, just be aware you’re going to have to weave your way around this thick chunk of people. If you feel like congratulating someone, congratulate someone that isn’t currently being congratulated or is being under-congratulated. The actors don’t need more. Go find the writer. Then make your way to the party and enjoy the fact that there’s not a big line for food, and you could probably get a drink pretty quickly.

John: Let’s say we’re now at the party. I want to stress that you may have some agenda. Just think about what your agenda is. At a party, generally, I want to congratulate the person who I want to congratulate. I wanted to stay at your party until I could see you and say, congratulations, Craig.

Craig: Exactly. Bye. [laughs]

John: Same to Favreau on the first Iron Man and through the second. Once I’ve done that, I can leave.

Craig: You can leave.

John: I can leave.

Craig: You can leave. It’s up to you.

John: Absolutely. I can stay. I can go. Even if it’s not a “congratulate the person” party, it’s worth thinking about who am I expecting to see there, because that way I can think, oh, I’ll look out for that person and be able to have those conversations. For example, I was at the Interstellar premiere, and I didn’t know Christopher Nolan at that point, but I did know Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan. Oh, they’re going to be there. I could look for Lisa. We actually just had a great time chatting there, which is great. It started our friendship really more there. That’s the good thing about one of these parties. It’s an excuse to hang out with people you actually wanted to hang out with.

Craig: Now, if you are somebody who is going to your first premiere and you’re not expecting to know many people at all, it’s perfectly fine to go there. Don’t go alone because that’ll get awkward. Go there with somebody you can talk to, and inevitably, you will bump into somebody who will say something, and you might meet somebody, and it’s just like any other party. Feel free to compliment people who are involved in the movie. If it’s a famous person or it’s the director or whatever, somebody you want to get a selfie with, it’s cool. It’s fine. What you don’t want to do is just talk their ear off.

They don’t want to talk to you. They don’t know you. They would much rather talk to people they know. It’s as simple as that. In the case of actors, other famous people love talking to famous people.

John: A good conversation starter is, “Did you work on this?” If you don’t know, “Did you work on this?” Great. What was your problem? I really like that part of it. Or if they didn’t work on it, it’s like, oh, then why are you here? What did you like? All that stuff. What’s fun for you?

Craig: What brought you here?

John: What brought you here? Always a safe bet.

Craig: How did you end up at this fun party? Then someone explains their connection. You explain yours. It just works like any other party. You described a different kind of party, though, which is what I would consider the Hollywood party, which isn’t an organized event by a studio. This is more like a producer, a director, an actor is having some big party at their big house. You know somebody who brings you. You’re going to your first–

John: Good plus one.

Craig: Yes. This is like a real party. Now what do you do?

John: Walking back through examples of when I’ve done that situation, it’s more just like a normal party, which you’re basically just figuring out what is the point of entry for a conversation to have with somebody around me who looks interesting, who I want to talk with. That’s just a basic skill that’s not always easy to do.

Craig: Certainly, you should have the awareness that unless you do know a lot of people there or you are, in your own way, a fascinating human being, nobody wants to talk to you. You have to earn people’s interest. Be cool and don’t push yourself on people. Certainly, allow people to mingle. Don’t monopolize anyone’s time. Just be nice about it. That’s all.

Here’s another bit of advice. Those parties always start much later than you say, so show up later. Here’s something that happened to me at a party. I want to give people, this is my, you’re allowed to leave. It was the Golden Globes or something like that, I think. There was this big party that CAA was throwing at the Chateau Marmont.

They have one of those big rooms that they open up. My agent was like, “You got to come.” I’m like, “Okay, I will.”

John: I feel a dread. Those upper rooms, the Chateau Marmont, lovely view, but come on.

Craig: It started well. I got in the elevator, and Tobey Maguire was there. I thought, “Oh, this is cool. I’m in an elevator with Tobey Maguire. He’s Spider-Man. This is awesome.” We get out of the elevator, and we walk over to the room, and the door opens. It was a joke. You know the Star Trek episode Trouble with Tribbles?

John: Yes.

Craig: Is that what they were called?

John: Yes, Tribbles, yes.

Craig: Yes, where they just fill every space. The door opened, and it was just humans. You couldn’t even go anywhere. It was the most packed nonsense I’ve ever seen.

John: Sundance parties can be that way, too.

Craig: Here’s what happened. I said, “Okay,” to myself, and this is like, it’s full of famous people. It’s full of executives, full of people I know. I’m just going to go in there, see my agent, show him that I came, and leave. I slowly make my way. It took me 15 minutes to get through this throng just to the outside area where I could breathe a little, hoping that he would be there.

I did see him, but he wasn’t there. He was on the other side of the room. I went, “No, I’m done.” I spent another 10 minutes walking out. I spent 20 minutes at the party, walking in and walking out. You are allowed to leave. I did not want to be there.

John: You know what? You sent a text like, “Hey, I couldn’t make it over to you.”

Craig: Oh, I told him. I was just like, “Bro, you know me. You know this, I will not do this.” If you are at a party in Hollywood that is jam-packed with people, go. My feeling is like nothing good can happen here. There’s going to be an earthquake or a fire. That’s how my mind works.

John: You’ve had experience with Hollywood parties, too. What are we missing?

Drew: A little bit. My question was, I’m in this weird pocket where someone will be like, “Oh, I have to introduce you to this person who’s the director or someone, and then they don’t want to talk to me.” You have this weird introduction where you’re like, “Oh, hi, and there’s supposed to be this excitement,” and it very quickly fizzles. When do I leave? Because I understand what’s happening. I also, there’s another person here who’s introduced me, and I feel like I need to keep the ball in the air.

Craig: In those situations, my advice would be when you get introduced to that person, tell them why you’re so happy to meet them. Say something about them and what they’ve done that you think is great, and shake their hand and say, “It was great meeting you.” Rather than, okay, you’re probably wondering who I am and what I’m about, because as you know, they’re not. Everybody likes being complimented.

Drew: I keep trying to make a human connection, and I’m like, “Actually, I don’t think this is the time for that.”

John: The person that’s trying to introduce the two of you, are they trying to get rid of you? Are they trying to slough you off, or did they come over to you and say, “Oh, Drew, I want you to meet this person?” They’re trying to be–

Drew: In my situation, it’s usually a friend is the director’s assistant or something like that. It’s like, “I would love for you to meet this person who I’ve been telling you about.” It’ll be people who listen to the show, and they’re like, “I know my boss listens to the show. They’ll be super excited.”

Craig: What are you going to do with that? It’s okay for you to say, “That’s cool. I’m good.” Because you can say, “Hey, I’ve had a lot of these,” and unfortunately, what happens is they’re like, “Oh, cool.” Then it’s just dead silence. I don’t want to do that.

Drew: Well, but I think early career, there’s that scarcity mindset where you’re like-

Craig: I should meet everybody.

Drew: -“I should meet everyone.” You never know, and make those connections. You want to follow through on that, but you don’t.

Craig: You know, really, it’s not a connection.

Drew: Oh, no, not at all.

Craig: If your friend, and I’m annoyed at your friend, but if your friend really wants you to meet somebody to get to know them because they think, oh, you two would really hit it off, well, why don’t they just have a fucking dinner party or something with eight people? That’s how you meet people.

Drew: That’s much better.

Craig: Not at some throngy event where 90% of the people who are there are there out of some weird social compulsion to be able to say they were there. That’s the thing about these parties that I find so dreadful, is that they’re not actually– Most people who are at these parties are not there to celebrate anything, nor are they there to commune with anyone. They are just there to be there so that they could say they were there. Nothing makes me less interested. I don’t go to a lot of parties, as you can imagine. It’s not my thing.

John: Yes, and we don’t throw a lot of bigger parties here. We’ll have friends over for game nights and stuff like that. We had a party for our house turning 100 years old.

Craig: That was nice.

John: It had a purpose, and we had fun activities. We had a scavenger hunt. Things people can do.

Craig: Melissa and I went on a scavenger hunt. We didn’t need to worry about getting stuck in a corner with somebody. That’s fine. It was like an open house-ish sort of style thing. I keep saying to myself, “Oh, I should have a party at my house.” Then I’m like, “Why? Just why?”

John: Friends of mine moved up in the ranks and basically bought a house where they need to start throwing the party. It’s their agents who need to start throwing parties at their house.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: It’s like, I would not want–

Craig: What does that mean?

John: There’s an expectation they’ve got to entertain and do these things.

Craig: Apparently, my house was quite the party house when Kevin Williamson ran the show over there. It’s a good house for a party. Maybe one day. Since I’m a guy who’s constantly trying to leave a party, our friend Derek throws a great party. I actually enjoy those because it’s sort of an annual event.

John: Absolutely. I will know 30% of the people there, which is great.

Craig: You run into the sort of people that you don’t even spend much time with, but you’ll see them at that party.

John: Let’s talk through people who are like, “Oh, I know I’ve met this person. I don’t know where.” It’s so tough. We’ll do that. It’s so good to see you. Obviously, if you have a Mike at your side, say like, “Oh, hey, I’m Mike. I’m John’s husband.” That’s helpful. I just feel like we need to give a lot of grace for like, I cannot summon who you are.

Craig: Everyone should say their name to everyone. I’m still dealing with the paranoia that when people who haven’t seen me in a while see me, they don’t know who I am, just because I shaved my beard off. I’ll say my name to you if you look like maybe you’re not sure. There is no crime in forgetting someone’s name, or forgetting their face, or forgetting that you’ve met them before. It is not a crime. Anyone who holds you accountable for that is jerk as far as I’m concerned. A jerk. It’s cool. You’re not that important. Nobody is.

John: We were talking about Kevin Williamson a lot on this episode. Kevin Williamson, when I met him 30 years ago, whatever, four times in a row, he was like, “Oh, it’s nice to meet you.” I got a little annoyed at a certain point, but then I realized like, “Oh, I know who Kevin Williamson is because he’s like an Entertainment Weekly famous person, and I’m not. He has no reinforcement of who I am, whereas I knew who he was before I met him.”

Craig: Or maybe he just forgets names and faces. Sometimes you will meet somebody, and they remind you of maybe four different people you might know. Now it’s like, I don’t know which one this is. That’s okay.

John: We’ll talk about this when it lands on the show, but one of the things that I really appreciate about our movie is that obviously from Andy’s perspective, Miranda was a huge influence on our life, and Miranda has no idea who Andy was. It’s so classic and relevant and true.

Craig: It is something that happens. As you get older, if you are in our business, if you have succeeded and hung on and achieved things, people will know who you are. You don’t always know who they are. Sometimes you should know who they are. I realize sometimes I’ll remember somebody that worked for me in some capacity, and I can’t remember their name. I think, is it dementia? No. There’s too many people.

John: There’s too many people.

Craig: There’s too many people. There’s long-term memory. There’s short-term memory, but there’s also mid-term memory. Mid-term memory is where I put the names of everybody on a crew. Five years from now, and if I’m working on something else, I won’t remember that because a new crew came to take the mid-term memory.

John: So often I find myself searching email like, I know this person exists. Who is this person? It’s not memory. It’s a lot of this.

Craig: You get the text from somebody, and you’re like, okay, it’s just a number. They’re like, “Hey, man, da, da, da,” and you have to scroll back and look for context clues. You’re like, “Oh, that’s who this is.”

Drew: On the iPhone, there’s that little company thing, and I use that like crazy just to do context.

John: Oh, nice. All right. Good hints from you.

Craig: Well, I probably have chased people away from some Hollywood parties. They can be very glamorous. It’s cool to see famous people. I like it. It’s fun.

John: Yes. We didn’t talk about clothes at all, which is good because–

Craig: Oh, clothes.

John: Clothes, whatever. Wear clothes. Here’s the one–

Craig: Wear clothes.

John: The one tip I can give you is that if it’s an annual thing, Google photos from the last year. If it’s a thing that’s being photographed for places–

Craig: So you get the sense of–

John: It’s like where the vibe, what the vibe is.

Drew: That said, I went to a premiere a couple of weeks ago that was for a fighting movie, and everyone there was in all black. Every dude, all black. Black sweatshirt, black baseball cap, that kind of thing. It just felt like that was the dress code that we were all doing. It felt like the default. I had a blue and white shirt.

Craig: And a pink hat.

Drew: I didn’t get the memo. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I don’t know.

Craig: It’s not. One of the great rules of life, no one’s thinking about you. You think everyone’s thinking about you. No one’s thinking about you. They’re only thinking about themselves.

Drew: Yes, it’s true. Thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you. Party.

Links:

• The script for episode one of Chernobyl
• Scriptnotes episode 493: Opening Scenes
• Greta Gerwig’s Little Women screenplay
• The Sheep Detectives
• Scriptnotes episode 731: Avoidance and Other Anti-Quests
• Sorkinisms – A Supercut by Kevin T. Porter
• My journey to the microwave alternate timeline by Malmesbury
• Solasta 2
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

We also follow up on the Scriptnotes survey and answer a massive grab-bag blitz of listener questions including the potential pitfalls of child protagonists, “unfilmable” elements, and how to end a scene.

In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you socialize at Hollywood parties? We’ve made all the mistakes so you don’t have to.

Links:

• The script for episode one of Chernobyl
• Scriptnotes episode 493: Opening Scenes
• Greta Gerwig’s Little Women screenplay
• The Sheep Detectives
• Scriptnotes episode 731: Avoidance and Other Anti-Quests
• Sorkinisms – A Supercut by Kevin T. Porter
• My journey to the microwave alternate timeline by Malmesbury
• Solasta 2
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 5-13-26: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

I like the song! I think the song could have been a bigger hit. It has a helluva hook:

The stop-start phrasing on the descent gives it a surprising staggered rhythm, with little nooks and handholds. Then it jumps back up for the landing, with “dance” taking the stress. That’s good prosody.

When the hook repeats for the third time, we simplify down to sixteenth notes. The different texture keeps it feeling fresh.

(Both snippets from the official sheet music.)

Lyrically, the double negative takes a beat to parse. Does “never gonna not” mean she is or isn’t gonna dance? It’s a tiny puzzle for your brain to unscramble. The final “again” is a nice surprise that makes you re-parse the phrase.

Altogether, I think it’s a terrific hook. I just wonder if it could be better supported by the song around it.

“I’m never gonna not dance again” suggests that at one point the singer stopped dancing — and she now realizes that was a mistake. With this lyric, she’s making a promise to keep dancing.

This idea feels like the payoff to a setup that the song never delivers. Instead, the opening verse describes a hypothetical bad situation:

If someone told me that the world would end tonight
You could take all that I got, for once I wouldn’t start a fight
You could have my liquor, take my dinner, take my fun
My birthday cake, my soul, my dog, take everything I love

There’s nothing wrong with this verse. It’s a good setup for the idea of “despite these bad things, I’m choosing joy.” That’s an attitude, a swagger, completely in keeping with Pink’s persona.

But the hook is specifically “I’m never gonna not dance again.” To get there, one can imagine lyrics about the before-times, when she was living in her head, worrying and holding back. Maybe insecurity had stopped her. The hook is her vow to stop doing that, and instead return to her earlier enthusiasm for dancing and having fun.

Once the hook-chorus has done its job, we can stay in the present. The existing verses serve us well, including:

I want my life to be a Whitney Houston song (I wanna dance)
I got all good luck and zero fucks, don’t care if I belong

Here the song is specifically referencing Whitney Houston’s 1987 “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” which feels instructive. That song’s verse does what I’m suggesting:

I’ve been in love and lost my senses
Spinning through the town
Sooner or later, the fever ends
And I wind up feeling down

The singer recognizes a pattern: love burns burns hot, fades, and leaves her feeling lonely. But she knows what she needs:

I need a man who’ll take the chance
On a love that burns hot enough to last
So when the night falls
My lonely heart calls

It’s a setup that lands perfectly on the hook: “I wanna dance with somebody.”

I don’t mean to pretend songwriting is the only reason songs perform well on the charts. But I suspect that if “Never Gonna Not Dance Again” embraced that problem/solution structure, it could have been a bigger hit, or at least found a larger place in the pop songbook.

Of course, writers should write what they want! I don’t know anything about the specific process of crafting this song. It’s entirely possible that the verses came first and the hook arrived later. Pink and her collaborators may have delivered exactly the song they intended.

But as someone who’s written a few songs (and thousands of scenes), had I come upon this hook, I would have gladly rebuilt the scaffolding to support it. It’s just such a great central idea.

The finished song works. I just keep imagining the version that might have worked even better.

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

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: Ho, ho, ho, ho. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 734 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back a writer whose credits include The Heat, Ghostbusters, and Haunted Mansion, her incredible new show, Widow’s Bay-

[laughter]

John: -is now out on Apple TV.

Craig: What a dramatic pause.

[laughter]

Craig: Her incredible new show, Widow’s Bay.

John: Welcome back to the program after 10 years, Katie Dippold.

Katie Dippold: Very happy to be here. I’ve been trying to get back in here for the past decade, so this is-

Craig: Clawing your way back in.

Katie: Yes, anything I can do.

John: You were last on the show Episode 272.

Craig: Whoa.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: 500 episodes ago.

John: 2016.

Katie: One of my favorite memories of that episode was when– remember when Malcolm, you asked him something and he was just quiet and then he was like, “I’m out of gas.” You’re like, “That’s it? You’re just done?” He’s like, “I’m done.”

Craig: Yes.

Katie: I respected it so much.

Craig: That’s what Malcolm– Malcolm used to play D&D with us, and at some point, he would just get up and lie down and sleep.

Katie: [laughs]

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes.

Katie: He knows how to live.

Craig: We can’t have you on the show without talking about our special connection. We always need to discuss our special connection. Katie Dippold and I both lived or attended school in Freehold, New Jersey. Competing high schools. She was at the somewhat tonier Freehold Township. I was at the rough around the edges Freehold Borough.

Katie: Never heard of it.

Craig: Yes. I was from the bad side of the tracks.

John: I love it.

Katie: Also where Bruce Springsteen was from. Not a big deal.

Craig: Yes. He went to Borough.

Katie: Sorry, you have that.

Craig: That’s because he was a little rough around the edges.

Katie: Yes, yes, yes.

John: Now, Katie Dippold, for folks who don’t know who you are, they actually do know who you are because you are famous for being an incredibly talented writer, but you’re also probably more famous on the internet because of one Halloween costume you wore and the situation in which you wore it. Do you want to recap why the world knows who you are?

Katie: There is a tweet that shows a photograph that– I can’t remember the tweet. It’s like when you think you’re going to a Halloween party, but it ends up being an adult drinking wine kind of vibe. I’m dressed fully as the Babadook. Face makeup, wig, hat, coat. No one was dressed up. My friend Jessie snapped the photo. Also, what the photo doesn’t show is I sat there for an hour and a half watching a movie like that.

John: Yes.

Katie: You know?

Craig: Once you’re there, what are you going to do?

John: What are you going to do?

Katie: Someone asked me like, “Why didn’t you just take off the hat?” I’m like, “That wasn’t going to help anything.”

John: No, no. Come on.

Craig: Right. I’m still– I got the weird glasses on, or the– does he have glasses? Goggles?

Katie: No glasses, but there’s a dark room around the eyes.

Craig: Yes, that’s what it was. Something like that.

John: Yes, it’s like [crosstalk] monochrome makeup look, right?

Katie: Yes.

John: Yes, it is fantastic, and it’s a moment. It also is the intersection of horror and comedy, which is Widow’s Bay, which is exactly what we’re here to talk about.

Craig: Segue man.

John: That’s what I am.

Katie: Yes, look at that.

John: I want to talk about Widow’s Bay. Your show is genuinely fantastic. Drew and I watched it.

Craig: Wait, have you seen more than two episodes?

John: I’ve only seen the first episode. I haven’t seen the second episode yet.

Craig: Oh, okay, because you’re talking like you’ve seen the whole show.

John: Oh, no.

Craig: I’ve seen two episodes, which I loved, but I started getting jelly, but you’ve only seen one.

John: No, no, we didn’t get the links or anything. We-

Craig: I’m just watching it on Apple TV.

John: I’m just watching it on Apple TV like everyone else. Like every other American person in the world, I’m watching Widow’s Bay on Apple TV.

Craig: American person in the world. [chuckles]

John: I want to talk about your show, but I also want to talk about what you wish you knew going into this industry. Imagine that you’re sending an email to your younger self. It could be to your 15-year-old self or when you first arrived in Los Angeles. I did a panel this last week where this was the theme.

It was actually really insightful to think like, “Oh, yes, what did I know, and what if I could pass along information to your younger self?” Things we want to do. We’ll talk about that.

We’ll answer some listener questions. Including, when do you call out someone for stealing your idea or just being not cool?

Katie: Oh.

John: Our bonus segment for premium members, are there still going to be movies and TV in 10 years, 15 years? We’ll talk about that. All big topics. Most importantly, I know a movie that’s coming out next week, which is Craig’s movie, The Sheep Detectives.

Craig: The Sheep Detectives. What a silly title.

John: It is. It was once called Three Bags Full.

Craig: It was once called Three Bags Full. It’s based on a book written by a wonderful German author named Leonie Swann. Three Bags Full was the title it was released under in the United States. That’s what we called the movie up until MGM was like, “Yes, no one’s going to know what that is, but they would know what The Sheep Detectives is.” They’re correct.

John: They are correct.

Craig: I get it completely. I love this movie so much. I never self-promote. I don’t. It’s not my thing to be like, “Hey, coming up on dah, dah, dah.” It is the little movie that we hopefully could because it’s Aline Brosh McKenna’s Devil Wears Prada 2 is crushing it in theaters. Mortal Kombat’s going to be a huge movie. There’s all these big movies. Then there’s our little sweet sheep movie, it’s adorable, and I’ve watched it with an audience and people laugh and then they cry. My wife and my younger daughter watched it and they were a sobbing mess and a happy sobbing mess.

Katie: Wow. That’s good.

John: Now, Craig, many critics have liked it, but at least one didn’t because you’re not at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. How are you dealing with that grief?

Craig: It’s really hard, because I don’t have any experience not being at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. First of all, the idea of having a movie on Rotten Tomatoes that isn’t in the 20s is shocking for me. Like, “Wait, what? They make tomatoes in another color than green?” I continue my very strange, tumultuous relationship with critics. They don’t know what to make of me at all.

John: Quite understandably.

Craig: They yell at me when I’m like, “Why is this comedy guy doing drama?” Then I do this and they’re like, “Why is this drama guy doing comedy?”

Katie: I feel like you and I could talk about this for years. Now that said, you get one good review and you’re like, “You know, critics–”

Craig: Well, they do have a point.

Katie: Thank God. You know?

Craig: Yes. Well, the thing is there are movies and television shows that don’t need critics at all. It doesn’t matter. I’ve definitely worked on those. You’ve worked on those where it didn’t really matter what the critics thought. Then there are things that sort of need them for legitimacy.

I think The Sheep Detectives needed it. I could see how Widow’s Bay could need it. Meaning, it helps separate a little bit, because it’s not a built-in audience, it’s not IP, it’s something original. Also, you were sporting a 100.

John: Yes. Then someone had to ruin it.

Craig: Some ding-dongs came in. The math is bad because then what happens is you’re like, “Oh, now to get back up, I need like eight more good reviews.”

John: Yes.

Katie: Right. Oh, you can drive yourself crazy. I also, it’s so funny. I always tell myself, if a movie comes out and doesn’t do well, and it’s an experience I’ve had a couple of times, but I say, “Okay, no, it doesn’t matter. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t matter.” Every time I put something on, I’m like, “What’s the Rotten Tomatoes score?” It’s just, you know what I mean?

Craig: Yes. I know.

Katie: It’s just, it’s all of us. It matters very much.

Craig: It is bizarre how everybody, I mean, I assume a lot of critics do put time into the reviews and things, and then it just gets mushed into a number.

Katie: The ones that are good and thoughtful and do a really good analysis, it is really-

John: It’s lovely.

Katie: It’s lovely.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think when people say nice things about us, we like it. When they say bad things about us, we don’t.

John: Hey, I think that’s true.

Katie: That’s exactly right.

Craig: We don’t like it.

Katie: You’re not good at this.

Craig: No. Then I turn to the Teddy Roosevelt quote, and I’m like-

Katie: Yes, that’s exactly-

Craig: “You don’t matter. The ones who matter are the ones who understand what I’m doing and like me.”

Katie: That’s exactly right.

John: This week, my instance of the Rotten Tomatoes was my new book, Wolf’s Belly, which comes out July 18th.

Craig: Wait, what?

John: I have a book out July 18th. I’ll give you a copy so [unintelligible 00:07:33] here.

Craig: What? Did you write a secret book?

John: Secret book.

Craig: I didn’t know about this. I’m glad I didn’t know about this because-

Katie: Whoa.

Craig: -had I known about it and not known about it, I would have been so embarrassed.

John: Yes, absolutely. We got a-

Craig: He just did it again.

John: I just did it again.

Craig: You just did it.

John: My book comes out July 18th, and I got a Publishers Weekly starred review, which is a rare thing to get, which is very lovely.

Craig: It’s a graphic novel. Congratulations.

John: Yes. It’s up for pre-order now, but there are already reviews online for Goodreads because those things come out early, because they send those galleys out. Those have been really nice, but of course, there are going to be occasionally like, “Yes, it wasn’t for me,” or the person who gives it– it’s like five stars, or they give four stars, and four stars brings you down.

Craig: [chuckles] Well, I think that you are a healthier person than I am about these things. You’re very good about, you decide what the worth of what you did is. Whatever people think, that’s fine, but if you like it, you like it. I think that’s healthier. I don’t like how easily swayed I can be by other people telling me if I did something well or not.

Katie: It sounds like we all three have things being reviewed right now. Obviously, the summary of this entire conversation was thank God for the critics.

Craig: Thank God.

John: Thank God for the critics.

Craig: Thank God.

John: Absolutely. Without critics where would we be?

Craig: They know I love them.

Katie: Yes.

John: While we’re talking about things being judged and awards, the Academy changed rules this week. Some summary of some rule changes here. In the writing categories, the rules now codify that screenplays have to be human authored-

Craig: Damn it.

John: -to be eligible.

Craig: Which I think is reasonable. Who are they going to hand the Oscar to if a computer wrote it?

John: Yes. I think that’s an obvious one. A better, more interesting one for me is on international feature films right now, it’s always been the country submits, and it’s always been controversial because the country may not submit their best film, or a great film from a country won’t be submitted. Now, if it has been qualifying award at some of the major international feature film festivals like Berlin, or Busan, or Sundance, or Venice, if it’s won the awards there, it’s also eligible for that, and so it can be-

Craig: A government can’t just go, “Yes, we don’t like this one.”

John: The award now goes to the director as the beneficiary rather than to the country.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: Yes.

Craig: That is interesting.

John: Yes. I think it’s a good change.

Craig: That’s a smart change. I also saw that now actors can be nominated multiple times in a category.

John: Yes.

Katie: Would they want that?

Craig: It seems like a bad thing you-

Katie: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: -but it’s happened before. Director Steven Soderbergh was nominated-

John: Yes, twice.

Craig: -twice in one year. That’s nice. That’s nice.

Katie: Did he win for that year?

Craig: That’s a great question.

Drew Marquardt: I think he did. That was Traffic and-

Katie: Okay, that’s impressive.

Drew: -Erin Brockovich.

Craig: Erin Brockovich. I think Erin Brockovich. He won for Erin Brockovich?

Drew: I think he won for Traffic.

Craig: Traffic is a better movie.

John: Anyway, changes. They seem thoughtful changes.

Craig: Absolutely. Obviously, Katie, you and I are perennial Oscar considerables.

Katie: Right.

Craig: We’re always in the mix.

Katie: Right. Right. Yes.

John: Yes, [crosstalk]. Always in the topics.

Craig: Yes, so this is always– I keep careful track of this sort of thing. We’re talking sheep movie.

John: We have some housekeeping to get through. First and most important is we’re putting out a Scriptnotes listener survey. We want to know things about our listeners, not for marketing purposes, because there’s no marketing because we’re-

Craig: To sell their data?

John: We don’t want to know any of that stuff. We’re curious about, which segments people love the most, which things they want to hear more of. There’s some things we might try out, and we’re curious what people think of those things. We’re also just curious who our listeners are, how many are in the US, what education level people have, because my prototypical user is in college or finishing college, but that may not be accurate. We’re just curious.

Craig: I feel like our listener base might be older than you think.

John: Yes. I’m also curious, one of the questions is, how many people who are listening to the podcast are actually working in the film and television industry versus just like to listen to the podcast?

Craig: All good things to know.

John: Yes.

Katie: It’d be so funny to find out it’s just ages 60 to 62.

John: So incredible.

Katie: Just a very specific.

Craig: Like a steep drop-off after 62.

Katie: No awareness before those two years.

Craig: 59, nothing. 60, boom.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: There’s a free thing, free premium with your AARP subscription, and then they get it for a couple years and they’re out. They’re like-

John: Yes, it’s like, “No, this is not good.”

Craig: -“No, it’s not good.”

John: There will be a link in the show notes for that, so please click through there.

Craig: 60 to 62. Do you see why Katie Dippold is good?

John: Yes, because it’s the specificity of that joke.

Craig: That is 64 would have been bad, 62 is correct.

Katie: I appreciate that.

John: She’s so good.

Craig: Yes.

John: Craig, I want to do another random advice episode. Remember we’ve done those? People write in with non-screenwriting questions-

Craig: Oh, right.

John: -non-writing questions, because-

Craig: When we attempt to be wise.

John: Yes, because we have opinions about a lot of things. We’ll try that. Send in those questions to Drew. Send in at ask@johnaugust.com and just label it like, “Random advice,” so we know to put those in a different category for that. We have a new version of Weekend Read out there. People use Weekend Read on their phones to read scripts.

The new version is really nice and actually has some really helpful features in terms of marketing what you haven’t read, what’s new for you. You can get through long scripts faster. There’s a new scroll bar, so try that out.

Last bit of follow-up. We had Haley Z. Boston on the show. She was talking about Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, which was terrific. On that, I had her read through the first page of her script, which Craig, you would have loved because there’s no dialogue, and yet every word on there is just delicious and delightful.

Drew and our team put together a YouTube video for Haley. She’s reading it, but we’re also scrolling the page as you’re doing it. You can see-

Craig: I like those.

John: -all the choices she’s making.

Craig: Was there a lot of white space?

John: No paragraphs more than two lines long. She’s using italics and bold in really interesting ways. It just is drawing you down in a smart way. Because this is mostly an audio medium, it’s fun to do a visual at times. Seeing that is there.

Craig: Love that.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

Craig: Love it.

John: Housekeeping done. Katie Dippold, your show is so delightful. I didn’t know what it was going to be when I pressed play, which is so much fun. It comes up and the opening title feels like a Stephen King book cover. What was the pitch? Drew has a really good pitch for it, but I’m curious what your pitch was for it on the initial thing. What is the idea? What’s the logline?

Katie: The logline is a mayor of a New England island town desperate to bring in tourism is warned by locals that it’s cursed-

John: Great.

Katie: -and they are right.

Craig: They are clearly right.

John: Now, Drew, can you give us your pitch?

Drew: It’s Fawlty Towers, but where John Cleese’s character is the mayor from Jaws.

Katie: [chuckles] That’s great.

Drew: Yes.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Katie: That’s right.

Craig: Yes, it definitely has mayor from Jaws feeling to it. Shut it down, shut it all down, and New England, of course. Fawlty Towers because the people there are hysterical.

John: Yes, they’re so funny.

Craig: They’re so funny.

John: I can’t even imagine how you found the pitch-perfect tone so that it didn’t just all blow up at every moment. It’s just so cleverly done. They’re so eccentric and so extreme, and yet everyone’s playing the same song. It’s so hard to do.

Katie: That’s really nice. I’ve been working on this. This was like my Parks and Rec sample, 18 years ago.

John: Incredible.

Katie: I’ve been working on it ever since.

John: Give us a little backstory. Tell us how this all started.

Katie: I had just finished at MADtv. I wanted to do something like this. I’m a comedy writer, but I love horror so much. I just wanted something like this to exist. I want to go to this place. Then I heard Parks and Rec was hiring, so I quickly wrote a pilot, and I think that got me the job. Worked there for several seasons.

John: You wrote this as a pilot?

Katie: Yes.

John: How close is the pilot you wrote to what we actually see in the pilot episode?

Katie: It’s much more comedic. It’s like, joke, joke, joke. That’s why I think that gave Mike Schur an idea of my sense of humor. I think the heart of that is still there, but I kept thinking, when I would revisit, I’m like, “I don’t know that I would watch this show. I want it to be taken seriously. I want to feel tension. I want to be scared.” I had to keep taking it apart and putting it back together. There’s years where it’s been not funny or scary.

[laughter]

Katie: It’s terrifying progress.

Craig: What a great mix.

Katie: Yes, I think that’s what you want.

Craig: Yes, boring in every possible way.

Katie: Yes, really had a lot of that for a while. Then I got, I don’t know, something after doing the last couple movies, they were hard to do. I just wanted to do something just completely original. I’m like– because it was a tough time for a while. I’m like, “You know what? I might as well just take one real crazy creative swing.”

Craig: There you go. You and I have lived some parallel lives here. Caught in the same thing. At some point, you do need to just step back and go– are we allowed to curse on this show?

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: Fuck it. I love that I talk about this like I’ve never been on the show. Episode 700 and whatever. I love that you did that. Also, I do think that you can tell this is the product of somebody who is not 25. You are covering all these ages of people. Teenager, dad, older people, you got this whole thing on lockdown. It feels, the mayor, Loftis. Loftis? Loftis. Feels like such an adult, but he’s also a kid, which I love.

One of my favorite moments is when Stephen Root’s character calls him out and says like, “Oh, you used to ding dong ditch me, except you never actually rang the bell. You’re a coward.” That was when he was 11. You’re like, you can see that little boy in this guy all the time. What I really appreciate, this is where the show won my heart. You haven’t seen the second episode.

John: I haven’t seen it yet.

Craig: I’m going to give something away.

John: That’s fine. Okay.

Craig: It’s not a plot twist. In the second episode, he has to go stay in the inn, which of course the locals insist is haunted. They’re correct.

At one point, he’s alone and he wanders into the parlor where they have drinks and things. He opens a cabinet, and in that kind of B&B way, there are all these board games. The board games are wrong. One’s called Daddy’s Home, but the daddy is clearly drunk and angry. Then there’s a box that looks like it would have puzzle pieces in it.

It’s a picture of a tooth and it just says teeth, which is amazing. Then there’s a deck of cards. The card game is called Run. I love that so much, the specificity of that. I could smell that room. Do you know what I mean? I could smell it.

Katie: Oh, that’s great.

Craig: I just loved it. I can’t wait to see where this show goes, but I have to assume that part of the process of getting something like that to be that perfect is you working in tandem with a lot of people, and casting and all of that, because you haven’t run a television show before.

Katie: No.

Craig: Talk about that, because that’s a fun time.

Katie: Yes, it’s a real different experience than being the movie writer just standing by craft services, pitching jokes every now and then. It’s a different thing.

Craig: Yes.

Katie: It’s very hard.

[laughter]

Craig: Turns out it’s hard.

John: [crosstalk] whispering this. Yes.

Craig: Yes, it’s really exhausting.

Katie: It’s rewarding. You don’t really get a say in much when you’re in features.

John: My question is, did you realize that things were hysterically funny while you were filming them? Because one of the things that’s so different in this versus Parks and Rec is Parks and Rec is brightly lit and I think you can tell like, “Oh, that’s funny. That works.” Here, things are shot mostly realistically, and it’s not this high-key everything. Do you know that it’s just hysterically funny? When the assistant comes in and she’s like, “Oh, is there anything more?” She’s like staring for like 30 seconds, it’s like-

Craig: So great.

John: “No, that’s it.” [chuckles] Did you know that it was funny at the moment?

Katie: It’s different. The board games, for example, you’re not watching. This show, it’s a lot about little details and specifics. I think the way approaching it is a lot of blink and you’ll miss it, and that’s okay. It’s less presenting a big joke. It is different than being on set with– and Melissa McCarthy saying something hilarious and you’re laughing out loud. Also, these actors are so good in the show. Just their performances would get me, but it is different. It’s interesting.

There’s a lot of times, too, like the director, Hiro Murai, we would just be also looking at each other like, “Does this feel right? This feels bad.” It’s a lot of following your stomach if something felt good or bad. When something feels bad in this show, it really will take you out of it, so it’s harder.

John: Yes, because you’re weirdly, you’re very joke dense for something that it doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be funny from the outside.

Craig: They’re not in the form of jokes, which I love.

John: Yes, it’s great.

Craig: That, in fact, it’s just people being people. Tell me, okay, because I’m new to the show, and because there’s only two episodes currently out, the character, the woman who’s like works in his office, who’s not his assistant, but like his–

Katie: Are you talking about Patricia, the Kate O’Flynn brunette, or Rosemary the smoker?

Craig: No, no.

Katie: Patricia.

Craig: Patricia.

Katie: Okay, yes.

Craig: So funny. That character is just playing a woman who has been left and ignored and is bitter, but also hopeful. There is something so brilliant about her sitting and talking to Shep, the fisherman who’s found, who they say, “He hit his head, we’ve just put him under to help while the head swelling goes down.” She’s talking to him like he’s in a coma. Loftis says, “It’s only when people are in a coma.” She’s like, “Well, I’m sorry for wasting his time.” Which is amazing. It’s just like the most put upon, like, “You know what, man? I guess, fine.” No, that’s not a joke. It’s real, but it’s also funny. I love that.

Katie: Oh, I’m glad.

Craig: I just love that.

Katie: The actress, Kate O’Flynn, lovely, lovely woman, and also just incredible. It’s Allison Jones, great Allison Jones. She sent us her tape, and it was not what I pictured at all, but I was like, “Oh, but this is the person. This is– she’s still good.”

Craig: Yes, so good.

Katie: She brought so many layers to it. It was loosely based off of my mom. She has a similar, kind of just wants to be seen. She also, she can’t say the right thing, she just says– you know?

John: Yes.

Craig: Right.

Katie: Can I give you an example? I remember Drew was at my mom’s house with me, and there was an Eagles game. He’s a diehard Eagles fan. The Eagles started losing, and he got really stressed out. My mom was uncharacteristically soothing. She was like, “You know what, Drew, don’t worry. It’s okay. It’s all going to work out.” I’m like, “That does not sound like Ellie Dippold.” Then the other team scored again, and she goes, “Well, that’s not good.”

[laughter]

Katie: That was sort of the heart of it, and then Kate came in and just brought all these other layers and stuff that I wouldn’t have imagined. She’s incredible.

Craig: Just wonderful.

John: Can we talk about the actual production? Because you were clearly in a seaside town for– is this upstate New York you were shooting? Where were you actually shooting this?

Katie: We were in Massachusetts.

John: That’s in Massachusetts. Okay. Were you block shooting? Were you shooting episode by episode? How did it all work?

Katie: It was block shooting. We had to shoot out of order, too. It was an intense shoot because the scripts– I think it’s funny. I think in the beginning, we were really shooting for the stars and just trying to do as much as possible. Then no one really told us not to, in the room. Also, I remember Drew Goddard talking about Cabin in the Woods. He said that if he had known how hard it– he was glad he didn’t know how hard it was going to be, because he would have done it differently. It’s a similar thing here. I’m glad I didn’t realize how–

Craig: I believe you can tell. There is an amount of care and attention. It’s funny, when I watch shows now, I will, in the back of my head, also still be, because we’re making the third season right now, and I’m so in it, I start thinking about things like coverage. Like, “Oh, that’s outside at night. That’s fun. I wonder how many takes and how many angles and how much time and how many meetings were based just to figure out that room. The art department has to come up with what the teeth game looks like.” There’s so much. It’s hard, and it pays off.

Katie: Yes. Oh, that’s nice. I have to say, this production team, they were insane in the best way. The props department, when you see the rest of the show, this props department, I don’t know how they did it. I mumble that every day. I’m like, “I don’t know how props did it.” The production designer, that whole episode, too, that inn, the whole inside is a build.

Craig: Oh, yes, you can tell. You can tell in a good way-

Katie: In a good way.

Craig: -because you can’t get the cameras around. A hotel wouldn’t have that parlor like that, but I loved it so much. I thought that was such a brilliant thing to like– what ends up happening is you find a location and then they’re like, “I can only be here for eight days because of the season, blah, and also it’s not perfect and the electricity and you can’t get equipment in.” It was so perfect.

Katie: I don’t know what it was. Everyone working on the show was just really game for it.

John: That’s great.

Katie: Do you know what I mean? Everyone was just [crosstalk]-

Craig: Because they liked it. Katie, because it’s good. That’s, honestly, here’s the thing. I talk to crew people every day. They work on things every day. We don’t. Our show ends, they move on to another production. They mostly work on stuff they don’t like. They work on things that they read and they’re just like– that’s just how it goes. I think people get excited when they work on something they like.

John: Before you got into production, you had to write a bunch of scripts. You wrote a pilot, which obviously you wrote a ton, but I’m looking at the credits and there’s a murderers’ row of really funny people. Talk to us about the process of getting everything written. Was everything written before you showed up there? What happened?

Katie: Yes, it was a great room. I had the pilot written, and I did something that was a little tricky, but I’m so glad I did, which it was not like a room full of all comedy writers. It was a couple of writers that came from shows like WandaVision. Actually, one of them also had a super funny spec. A couple of my old-time comedy friends, one that was a writer on SNL, actually Neil Casey, that plays the innkeeper, too.

Craig: Sure. Yes, so funny.

Katie: Colton Dunn from Key and Peele, and Kelly Galuska has done a ton of comedy. Then I also had a playwright, this guy Dave, who’s lovely, and another writer, Alberto Roldán, who’d worked on Mrs. Davis. It was a real stew, because I felt like this show was going to need a lot of different kinds of thought process and just different ideas. In the beginning, it was tricky navigating this, but then it got to a point where the drama mythology people are pitching jokes that are hilarious, and the comedy writers are really passionately arguing story points. It was very rewarding to see that all come together.

John: You had been on MADtv, you’re used to that kind of comedy writing. You’d been on Mike Schur’s show. You had a sense of being in a room. This was your first time running a room with this group. How did you approach that? How many weeks did you have? What were your hours like? What did it feel like? What were the nuts and bolts of it?

Katie: We had 20 weeks, and I kept the hours. The hours were about 10:00 to 5:00. I would leave and then keep thinking about it until I go to bed. There’s no reason to keep everyone there. You know what I mean? You’re the one that needs to do that, I think.

John: Over the course of those 20 weeks, there probably was a little bit of a blue-sky phase. Then you were cranking down, “Okay, what happens in this episode? How do we get through this thing?” Are you signing people off during that time? How did it work?

Katie: God, it was so crazy just feeling my way through this process. I called so many different people like, “What are we doing?” I called you. Do you know what I mean? We blue-skied for about six weeks, four weeks.

John: Oh, wow. Okay.

Katie: I actually knew some of the dilemmas I wanted to happen. I knew certain things I wanted to do, but then working through it. It was a very creative, organic process of, we just would talk about, “Well, this just feels fun right now.” You know what I mean? “Let’s just do this now.” It was just constantly making those moves. Then people would get sent out to script one time.

Craig: When you assembled the room, did you have, “Okay, I know how this begins, and I know how it ends”?

Katie: Yes.

Craig: You had that.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: At least there was a structure that everybody was trying to fill in, too.

Katie: Yes. Even how it ended, there’s some choices in it that came up through the room, which was a very fun debate. Yes, I knew the basic. I knew where it was going, but we found so much along the way. Everyone was great.

John: You’re doing this work in a room. How much are you having to communicate out with producers, with Apple, with other folks about what was happening, or was it only when you were done with the 20 weeks that you could come back and say, “Here’s the show”?

Katie: I was kind of a lunatic about– I would send like a 30-page outline to the producers and Apple. It was very, very detailed and very specific. I would start off with this summary at the top, like, “This is what we’re trying to do here.” Then just really break down each scene. Also, because the show is so totally tricky, I just wanted to be as detailed as possible.

John: Even during the 20 weeks while you were going through stuff, they could see like, “This is where we are headed,” if they had big red flag concerns.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: I think that’s wonderful. I think that there is a value in looking at the people that give us all the money to make these things as people that deserve a little caretaking. I think they work with writers who are so internal sometimes that they get nothing back. They’re in the dark. They don’t know what’s going on. Yes, some caretaking documents goes a long way. They don’t abuse it. I find that it’s the opposite. That they give less input, the more detail you give.

Katie: I could not agree more. Our execs, Dana and Spencer were, I swear to you, I’m not just saying this because of career purposes.

Craig: Because you need them.

[laughter]

Katie: They were awesome. I never dreaded their feedback-

Craig: That’s great.

Katie: -which is unusual to say. If they called on the phone, I’m like, “Pick up the phone.” I don’t like picking up a phone. That’s the biggest compliment I can give. Apple, I have to give them credit. They really just let us do it.

John: Now, when you were actually making the show, were there any writers besides you around to pitch new stuff, or was it just you? Were you the writer on set?

Katie: Oh, well, I’m very thankful for the strike because having writers on set was such a blessing.

John: Okay, because there was a gap between the things, you were shooting in the US, you were able to pull– you had two writers with you?

Katie: Two writers on set. One of them was there the whole time, it’s Neil, and then two other writers, Kelly and Mackenzie, took turns. It was so nice. Also, just having people that they were in the room and they understand what we were going for, I really wanted to be on set a lot and make sure we’re capturing the moments, but then you have something else prepping, so having a writer being able to go with that director, because we had three other guest directors come in, and then for scouting, and just have an eye on things and be able to talk to [crosstalk]-

John: Maybe have a splinter unit, like you could– yes.

Katie: Yes, that was really, really, really-

Craig: I could probably maybe use somebody other than myself.

Katie: No, it’s great.

Craig: I’m starting to feel even more terrified by my own life.

John: Sorry.

Katie: Yes. Also, having people– just also having funny writers make sure. You know what I mean?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Katie: Just to talk to about what’s going on and stuff like that, it’s just lovely.

Craig: People to talk to?

Katie: Yes, people to talk to.

Craig: Yes, that would be nice.

John: Make sure shows, the things we were growing up on, the writers were around, and that’s part of the reason why things can work. Yes.

Katie: Yes, being around funny people, it’s a nice thing.

John: The second topic I want to get to is what you wish you knew. For this exercise, let’s imagine we get the chance to either talk to our younger selves or send an email to our younger selves. Let’s start with our 15-year-old self. If you could send an email to young Katie about some advice for her, anything– like headlines you would want her to know?

Katie: I wouldn’t have listened to it.

John: Yes, that’s honestly true.

Katie: I would have said-

Craig: Shut up, old woman. [laughs]

John: Shut up, old woman. You also know that-

Katie: Why you never wear your hair down anymore?

John: Yet you also know that you wouldn’t listen, so you could probably outsmart this 15-year-old Katie because she’s an idiot.

Katie: I would hate this advice so much. I would say, “You’re two-boy crazy, none of these boyfriends you’re going to marry. Just read some books. Just read books and don’t-”

Craig: Oh my God, you’re like, “Get out of here.”

Katie: I would have been like, “Fuck off.”

Craig: Yes, seriously, beat it.

Katie: Yes.

John: Craig, advice for your 15-year-old self.

Craig: I certainly wouldn’t have said, “Be less girl crazy.” I would have been like, “Yes, no, have fun. You’re going to get married soon.”

[laughter]

Craig: I think for my 15-year-old self, I would have said, “Hey, hold tight. You’re going to be out of here soon.” The world was pretty small for me. I felt like I was supposed to be somewhere, and I wasn’t sure where. I didn’t know. I hadn’t yet connected the idea that I would be doing this for a living. I would say, “Don’t worry. You’ll be out of here soon.”

John: Yes. I wasn’t out when I was 15, and you can’t retroactively say like, “Oh, it would have been fine to be like–” you don’t know. I think just the sense that, “You will fall in love, you’ll be happy, you’ll be married, you’ll have a family.”

Craig: Did you know that you were gay when you were 15?

John: I knew I was gay. I knew [crosstalk]-

Craig: Oh, so your older self wouldn’t be like, “By the way,” and you’d be like, “No, I’m not.”

John: Yes, I wasn’t like a [crosstalk]-

Craig: You weren’t going to argue.

John: Oh, yes, you know. There wasn’t anything to act upon at the moment. I probably could have, it was cowardice.

Craig: I don’t know if it’s cowardice. I don’t think that’s cowardice.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: I think that’s-

John: Yes, it’s not recognizing opportunities that you have.

Craig: Sure.

John: I think in terms of– I was ambitious. I didn’t know there was such a thing as screenwriting yet. I didn’t know if the movies were written.

Craig: I had no idea.

John: General advice is, “Pursue what you’re interested in, and don’t be worried if your tastes and opinions change. That’s also part of growing up.”

Katie: Yes.

John: Now let’s fast forward to you’ve arrived in Los Angeles. Maybe you’re a year in. Okay, what else?

Katie: Can we visit college?

John: College, please. Let’s go to college.

Katie: I think one thing I would have told myself freshman year of college, and I eventually did this, I just wish I got to it sooner. Just find your people.

John: Oh, yes.

Katie: For me, that was some real weirdos, and the best possible– I started pledging this sorority, and they were all really nice and lovely, but my stomach was a little, “This doesn’t feel right. This doesn’t feel right.” Then I started the theater group and improv group. I had this improv group there that it was just the best group of weirdos. I remember just being in a New Jersey diner with them late at night. We weren’t going to any party or frat house. There was a guy that could have been-

Craig: I can see the diner, by the way. It’s got the two entrances-

Katie: Exactly.

Craig: -the little lobby, the thing, go inside. There’s a case with the– yes.

Katie: Yes. They were all so bizarre in the best way. There was someone that could have been 18 or he could have been 55 years old. I have no idea, but he was the funniest person ever. Finding those people just changed my life.

Craig: Yes, God, talking to myself in college, I think probably I would have said, “You do know you’re not going to be a doctor, right? Why don’t you do what you want instead of what you’re supposed to do?” Which I started to do, it just took me a bit because also, afraid. That’s a tough thing, because if your older self comes to you and says, “Hey, do what you want,” there’s an implication, and it’ll work out. Not like, “Do what you want. Also, you’re going to end up alone and addicted.”

[laughter]

Craig: I would have maybe gotten myself off the pre-med track a little sooner.

John: I was just back in my undergrad last weekend, and I got an alumni award, which was lovely. I got to see my campus. Every time you go back to your college campus, it’s like, “Oh my God, this school is so much smaller than I remember. Everything is just closer together and other things–” it was lovely. I don’t have great advice for that kid, because I kind of did it right. I picked a school that was just the right size and that I was– I knew so many people, I was in lots of different groups. I was kind of happy.

Craig: Maybe you would have just come back and said, “Yes-

John: Thumbs up. Yes.

Craig: -thumbs up.”

John: Thumbs up. Yes, keep doing that.

Craig: Nailed it.

John: Nailed it. It was a good experience. I was happy with that. When I got into USC for film school, I’m like, “Yes, I’m going to do it. I’m going to drive my rusted out car to Los Angeles.” The luxury– Craig and I, you and I have talked about this. The luxury I had moving out here was that my family was generally supportive, and I had sort of a, if everything went haywire, I could have just moved home. I had that support underneath me. It wasn’t like they were like-

Craig: Yes. Me, too. Oh, no.

John: Yes, it’s not that different. Yes. I felt really lucky that I had a family that didn’t-

Craig: That’s nice.

John: -understand what I wanted to do, but was generally supportive.

Craig: That’s why you’re healthier than I am.

John: Yes, maybe.

Katie: That’s nice. Were your parents not excited about you?

Craig: No. No, they were angry and insistent that it wouldn’t work. Also, they had no money. That did give me a lot of fear.

John: Yes.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: When I got here, I was definitely motivated by fear. Fear, I think, is like, I’ve never done cocaine. We’ve talked about cocaine before on this show. I’ve never done cocaine. Katie is like, “That’s interesting.”

Katie: My silence. [laughs]

Craig: The two of us are like, “We’ve never done it.” You’re like, “Mm-hmm.”

John: Okay.

Craig: I feel like fear is the cocaine of emotion.

John: Just chopping up on tape.

Katie: Okay. It’s not– you want this? You go– okay, it’s not for here. It’s not for here. It’s fine.

Craig: Not for here. Yes. No, cool, cool, cool. It powers you, but I think then there’s this terrible downside. There’s the comedown.

Katie: Oh, it’s a very empty drug. I just feel like anytime I’ve done it in my 20s, I ended up making lunch plans with someone I didn’t want to eat lunch with.

Craig: Oh, the worst.

Katie: It’s a real waste of time.

Craig: Fear does not do that for me, but it definitely– fear will get me up in the morning and will power me through a day. When I get home, I’m like, “Oh, no.” It’s just, it’s an effective motivator, but it comes with a cost.

Katie: Oh, that does.

John: Craig, I think you know that you have one tattoo, I have one tattoo.

Craig: Yes.

John: My tattoo is, tibbium nihil, imagus quiddum, which is, let me fear nothing, not even fear, which I got the first year while I was here in Los Angeles. Friends, we were out just walking and they all had tattoos. I was like, “I want a tattoo.” [unintelligible 00:38:01] tattoo.

Craig: Nice, and hepatitis C.

John: Absolutely. It was a helpful thing for me to remember because unlike you where fear was motivating to go do a thing, fear was always a sort of thing like, “Stay back. Don’t reach for it.”

Craig: Healthier.

John: So often, the things I regret most were the things I didn’t do because I was afraid. It was like, the stakes were always much lower than I allowed myself to believe.

Katie: I think my biggest motivator was never wanting to feel stuck. I feel like I love my parents very much, but they were always– they divorced when I was in college. When they did, it was like, “Okay, that seems good.”

John: Yes, as opposed to [crosstalk]-

Katie: There was always like a little tension. You know like the beginning of The Shining? That sort of like– it always had that energy to them. [laughs]

John: Oh, that is also good.

Craig: Oh, that energy?

Katie: Yes, just like–

Craig: Okay. It must have been comfortable in your house.

Katie: Love them both. Love them both. Hopefully, they don’t listen to Scriptnotes. It’s just really just always wanting to not feel stuck and having opportunity, that was the biggest drive for me.

Craig: Right. I mean, that’s empowering, I think. That’s a positive thing to reach for.

Katie: Yes.

John: We’ve all arrived in Los Angeles, and things we learned early on in Los Angeles, or maybe could have learned earlier if we could tell ourselves. My nominee for this is the soft pass and understanding where like someone is passing, they just don’t want to say that they’re passing. It’s a no, but they’re not actually saying no, they’re saying maybe, or like, “That sounds great. Let me get back to you about that.” Recognizing when like, oh, they’re actually are saying no, it’s just that you’re not hearing it as the no.

There were so many times where I thought like, “Oh, this is still a possibility, this project, they’re still considering it.” It’s like, no, they did pass, they just didn’t actually close the loop. I just wasted so much time thinking that a thing was alive when it wasn’t alive.

Craig: When it wasn’t alive.

John: Yes. The lesson I took from that is, it’s okay, first off. It’s okay for things just to not happen. It’s often worth it to make the phone call or make the email to say, like, “Hey, sorry, this didn’t click, but I really enjoyed meeting you.” Basically, to close the loop for them so that–

Craig: Let them off the hook.

John: Let them off the hook, yes. Rather than being resentful, just recognize, like, “Oh, that’s just how it goes. Things will just sometimes not happen, and that’s okay.”

Craig: That’s good advice.

John: Things you’d advise your earlier self, those first years in this business.

Katie: I came to LA for MADtv. I don’t know what I would have– I probably should have recognized earlier I’m not a performer. That would have helped something. I put up a one-woman murder mystery that probably didn’t need to.

[laughter]

John: I want to see this so badly. I’m going to search the internet to find it.

Katie: Well, no, thank God you won’t find it. I think what was also funny about it to the audience is it’s a show written for someone that could do all these different characters and voices. I cannot alter my voice from this right now.

[laughter]

John: That would be amazing.

Craig: That’s awesome. It’s like the one-woman show where everyone sounds the same.

Katie: I’m trying my best.

Craig: You’re trying.

Katie: I am just sweating and trying and throwing on different wigs and hats.

John: “Hello, Dr. Trumbly,” and it’s just the same voice.

Katie: Yes, exactly.

Craig: “Yes. Well, I don’t know.” No one knows who’s talking at any given point.

John: So good.

Katie: That’s the first thing I thought of.

John: Give yourself permission to not be a performer and that there’s other things there.

Katie: Yes, exactly.

John: I like that.

Katie: Then, because even MADtv, for two years in a row, they brought me out to test to be a performer. I think they liked the things I was writing for the characters and the auditions. Then I go, “But it’s just not working somehow.” Finally, I submitted a writing packet to them.

Craig: You’re like, “Stay behind the camera. How about that?”

Katie: I was like, “Great.”

John: Craig, things you would talk to that early Craig about.

Craig: I think I would assure myself that my suspicion that everyone was stupid was correct. That everybody in Hollywood is convincing you that they are brilliant, they know more than you do, and that their power is derived from their wisdom and their connections. That you are the outsider. You are the thing that is barely hanging on. That they could flick you away, ha-ha-ha, at a moment’s notice, to make you feel powerless. My suspicion was always that a lot of them just seem stupid and fake. They were.

John: Everyone’s faking it.

Craig: There’s so many frauds. Our business is full of frauds. You can see over time, the frauds disappear.

Katie: Some don’t.

Craig: The real ones stay. Well, some don’t, but they eventually kind of do.

Katie: Yes, that’s true.

Craig: There are some people that are problematic and stay there, but what they do is something that I don’t really interface with necessarily. There’s just so many blowhards and just–

Katie: Dude, that is the hardest thing for me because I know how I should sound in this job, and it’s not how I talk normally. I’ve never been a lean-in type of person, like a fake it till you make it. If I don’t know what I’m saying, you can see it on my face. That’s why I feel like I’m jumping ahead a decade. The advice I give myself later is just making sure you really know the story you want to tell.

Craig: Before you start talking.

Katie: Yes. See, I have to know that, or otherwise I can’t fake it.

John: We’ve talked on the show before, but one thing started clicking, and it clicked really fast for me. Go happened, and I was doing a TV show, and I was doing Charlie’s Angels and doing Big Fish all at the same time. The TV show was just a spectacular disaster, a slow-motion car crash, and had a nervous breakdown during it. It ended up being very helpful that I had it because that I could just have a crashing failure, and it was actually okay. That failure is–

Craig: So healthy.

John: It is.

Craig: Why is he so healthy?

John: Well, I wasn’t healthy at the moment, but I really was just disassociating all this.

Craig: You did have a nervous breakdown.

John: I did have a nervous breakdown, but I got through it, and obviously, writing got me through it. I was fired off that show and then still had to write Big Fish, and it was like, “I will enter this Southern family and figure out the trauma from inside,” that it was just so nice, like, “Oh, I can go back and do the thing I’m actually good at doing.”

Because so often, you guys are so busy doing your TV shows and managing these giant productions, but you’re also really good writers. You can always just go write a script, which is a nice thing, too. A good reminder to me is that, oh, that core skill set you have in terms of actually being able to write things, that can lead you through.

Katie: The biggest lesson I feel like I’ve been learning for the past 15 years is not thinking about it, like, “What should I be doing?” When it’s writing or through production, when you’re making choices, if I think like, “Oh, what is it supposed to be?” Instead of just, “What do you want?” It’s weirdly been the hardest one for me to just shake off over the years.

Craig: I’m with you on that. It’s the other side of the, “Okay, there’s the Katie Dippold who writes that document and caretakes the people. Sometimes caretaking becomes, and also your priorities are more important than my priorities, or making you happy is more important than making me happy. It’s a tricky thing. I’ve talked about this with Alec Berg, who’s been on our show a few times. There’s that dial where you think like, “Okay, in one direction is hack, and the other direction is pompous asshole.”

You don’t want to go all the way to, “I just do whatever people tell me to do, but you also don’t want to go up your own butt.” I think people are sometimes innately more afraid of one side than the other. I’m more afraid of going up my own butt, so I got to be careful to not go too far towards making other people happy.

Katie: That’s a dial that everyone struggles with, for sure.

Craig: It’s a dial. Yes. Whichever one you’re more afraid of, be more afraid of the other one, actually.

John: A thing I recognize in myself that I would love to tell in an earlier version, but even now I still feel it, is you don’t have to chase things as much as you’re chasing them. Early in your career, you’re always going after any opportunity, and you see a thing, and it’s like, “Obviously, that’s a movie, so I should try to land that movie.” I think too often I would go after that thing, and sometimes land that thing, and spend a year of my life, two years of my life working on that thing, and it’s like, “This isn’t really what I wanted to do.”

Craig: Dog that caught the car.

John: Absolutely. It’s like you’re in a relationship you didn’t even really want to be in. Things to remember. Let’s answer a listener question. Drew.

Drew: Davo writes,-

Craig: Davo.

Drew: -“I’m a writer in London. In 2011, I developed a TV show tailored to a specific actress and pitched it to her through mutual friends. I have the emails, the treatments, all of it. It went nowhere, and I forgot about it entirely. Then someone pointed out that a show which debuted on a streamer years later, starring that same actress who also co-created it, shares its core premise, its inciting incident, and several specific plot elements with my pitch. I’m not here for the legal question. My question is tactical.”

Craig: Great.

John: “I still haven’t had anything produced. I’m actively writing and will be pitching soon. If I pursue this, does it blacklist me? In a town as small as London TV, is the game worth the candle, or do I just eat it and move on?”

Craig: Did you say, “Is the game worth the candle?”

John: Yes. I just love that phrase.

Craig: Is that a British expression?

John: It must be.

Craig: Why would a game be worth a candle?

John: Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Craig: That I understand.

Katie: Is the game worth the candle?

Craig: The candle. Would the candle be used? This is not at all what Davo wants.

Drew: It means the expected rewards of an endeavor do not justify the cost of further time effort.

Craig: We got that part. We just are trying to figure out why.

John: How did we get there?

Craig: Yes, games and candles.

John: I love the turn of phrase.

Craig: We got to get to the bottom of this.

Drew: I got it. The phrase stems from 17th-century French, “le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle,” referring to gambling by candlelight. If the potential winnings were smaller than the expense of the candles used, then the game was not worth playing.

John: The thing I want to highlight in Davo’s question here is, “It went nowhere and I forgot about it entirely.” That’s what you should do. It’s forget that that moment happened.

Craig: When he says pursue, does he mean pursue?

John: He’s not clear whether he wants to– should he mention it, should he ever bring it up?

Craig: No. Because premise, we’ve discussed this many times, and he’s saying he’s not here for the legal advice, but it is connected. Yes, premises can be similar, and it’s not theft and all the rest. It’s a little bit like that soft pass. Maybe that was a fun idea that somebody once had, but they just didn’t like whatever the execution of it was. You must move on and do something that is worthy of capturing somebody and making them want to do it with you. That’s just part of this.

John: Katie, would you feel bad for stealing his idea?

Craig: Yes.

Katie: Look, I really felt like I had a take on it.

Craig: You thought you were a performer until MADtv told you were not. It was worth it.

Katie: No, I agree with Craig, but I also am furious for this person. I understand how frustrating that is.

John: I understand what they’re feeling. At the same time, I worry that if they think about this anymore, it’s going to define–

Katie: Yes, 100% agree.

John: Exactly. It’s like, “I’m the person who got screwed out over this thing.” We all know people who are like that. It ruins you.

Katie: Use this fire to write something new.

Craig: There you go. Do not let this define you. It is a poison in your veins to dwell on injustice, whether perceived or in fact. If you dwell on it, then you’re stuck. You can acknowledge it. You can be aware of it. You can look out for it. You can rue it, but you can’t obsess over it.

John: Something I read in a book, a blog post recently. It was talking about you’re stuck in a line, and it’s really annoying, and the person just says, “Thank you.” You say thank you to acknowledge that you’re in this thing, and somehow just saying thank you to it is just like, “Okay, I’ve acknowledged it, whatever, and I’m moving on. There’s nothing I can do about it. This is what’s happening.” Just acknowledging the problem is helpful, and sometimes it can get you out of dwelling on it.

Craig: We’ve released you, Davo.

John: You’ve released. Davo has been released. Let’s try another question here.

Drew: Anonymous writes, “I was hired to write five seasons of a Christian docuseries for a large Christian network. These shows had a primetime slot, were fairly successful for the network, and I got paid, but these shows don’t represent my voice at all. My spec feature is an erotic thriller, and my three pilots all have distinctly adult themes, not to mention that the Christian TV shows were fairly crappy and hyper-specific to a religious audience. I’m about to pursue representation, and I’m wondering how to position myself.

While I’m technically the credited writer for network TV, I’m hesitant to mention this past work. I’m concerned it might alienate reps or producers or even talent when they see my name attached to an obscure evangelical docuseries. Will my past credits hurt my future prospects, or does any experience beat no experience?”

Craig: I think this is a great story.

John: I think this is a great story.

Craig: I think this is something that would absolutely delight people if you’re like, “Here’s a crazy thing. Look at what I wrote. Now look at what I’m writing now.” How could this be the same person? Find out when you meet me. That’s hooky. I like that.

Katie: It’s interesting. I agree.

John: I think it’s great. I think that is an angle on you that’s going to be helpful and useful. It doesn’t have to be the very first thing you introduce yourself with, but I think it’s the second or third thing.

Craig: It’s a fun fact.

John: Yes, fun fact.

Craig: I would acknowledge it. People do look you up, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: If it’s on IMDB, I would get in front of it, but I also wouldn’t put it down. I wouldn’t say like, “Oh, it’s crappy.” Or, “Oh, it’s just for religious people,” because the thing is, look, you did a job. You took the money. They paid you. It sounds like they treated this person well. I would just say, like, “Look, would I prefer to be writing erotic thrillers? Yes. If you read one, you’ll see why. Hey, I’m pretty versatile.” We know that much.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: That’s cool.

John: 10 years from now, we’re going to see a bunch of really talented emerging filmmakers who are going to have a bunch of verticals on their series, really the dumbest things. It’s fine. People used to have music videos for random bands and karaoke videos. People do stuff to make a living. There’s no shame in that.

Craig: No, there really isn’t.

John: It’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is a video series that was somehow recommended to me by the algorithm, and God bless the algorithm, it did the right thing. It’s Captain Disillusion, who is a YouTuber. His real name is Alan Melikdjanian. He has 2.5 million followers. A bunch of people have watched this, but I’ve never seen this before.

What he talks about in his videos are film and TV, camera things. Things like aspect ratio, frame rate, interlacing. What’s remarkable is they’re 100 times better than they need to be. They’re full production value things with lots of jokes and details. We talk about a box full of teeth. It’s full of those kinds of–

Craig: Teeth.

John: Teeth. It’s full of those kinds of jokes. I’m just so impressed. You learn so much about, why do we have interlacing, how do we end up in these weird systems? He can just explain it all.

Craig: Electricity.

John: He’s not trying to solve the problems, but just explain why we have these systems we have. I think they’re so good. I can’t believe I didn’t know this existed until–

Craig: I love stuff like that. I’m going to watch that.

John: You’ll love it. You’ll plow through the whole post.

Craig: While I’m waiting for the next episode of Widows Bay.

John: Really good.

Craig: Which is on Wednesdays, I believe. I love that it’s weekly, by the way. Hooray.

Katie: It’s just nice.

Craig: Finally, the streamers figured it out.

John: Oh, Apple’s been pretty good on the weekly from the job.

Craig: Yes, they have.

John: That’s good.

Craig: Third Apple.

John: Katie Dippold, when you’re not basking in the success of Widows Bay, what would you like to share with our audience?

Katie: This is going to be the most boring, wonderful thing.

John: No, no. It’s not possible.

Craig: Is it teeth?
[laughter]

Craig: It’s just teeth.

Katie: I’m going to say, oh, no, that actually is the most boring one. It is the thing an eye doctor got me into. Taking rice, putting it into a cotton sock, not synthetic, putting it in the microwave, 20 seconds. Doing that warm compress over your eyes. She does it three or four times a day. I try to do it twice a day.

My eyes were about to fall out of my head, and we’re all staring at screens. Save your eyes. Do this. Here I’ll add this. Meditating is very boring, but if I’m doing two things at once, I know I’m getting heat. I’m saving my eyes, and then I’m forced to relax that way.

Craig: I’m going to do this because when I’m on a plane, I get the little hot towel. People rub their hands. I put it on my eyes immediately.

Katie: I wouldn’t trust that.

Craig: I know.

John: [unintelligible 00:55:00]

Craig: I don’t put it in my eyes, guys. I close my eyes.

Katie: You squeeze and put the fluid in the rag.

Craig: I drink the dirty rag fluid.

John: You’re sucking all that moisture out.

Craig: Guys, I put it on my eyes. That’s how I got cholera because I love the warm feeling in my eyes. It just occurred to me as you were saying this, I could do this all the time. I don’t need to wait until I’m flying.

Katie: Yes, and it also forces you that– You know that whole thing, it’s good to be bored as a creative person. It forces you to do it. You can’t with anything.

Craig: Rice, does it have to be Arborio? Is it long grain?

Katie: I’ve been trying different kinds of rice, honestly. I’m not sure which is the best one, but organic rice in a cotton sock, not synthetic.

Craig: You tie up the sock.

Katie: Tie up the sock.

Craig: You do 20 seconds in the microwave.

Katie: I do 20 seconds. Sometimes I’ll add two more seconds. Then you squeeze the rice and make sure the heat’s spread out.

John: It’s weirdly moist is the thing that’s surprising about it.

Katie: Yes, and it releases.

Craig: Because there’s water inside of the rice.

Katie: It shouldn’t burn. Oh, God, the first time I did it, I misunderstood. I thought I was supposed to heat it for two and a half minutes.

John: Oh, no.

Craig: Instead of 20 seconds.

Katie: Yes, and I was like, well, this is burning my eyes. Now I feel like I’m just trying to get back to where I was before I burned it in the first place. Anyways.

Craig: You’re building up.

John: We have something we bought on Amazon 15 years ago. It’s a tube of rice in a cotton thing that we use on our necks. We heat it up in the microwave. That is actually a two-minute situation, but it’s really good.

Craig: I’m going to do this.

John: Rice.

Katie: You have to.

Craig: It has to be a cotton sock. Otherwise, it’ll melt. It’ll get in your eyes.

Katie: Real bad, yes.

Craig: If I show up blind because of this, the lawsuit.

John: Incredible.

Craig: I’m going to take everything you have. Now, Widow’s Bay is mine. I took it.

John: Maybe she would like that. Craig, what do you have for one cool thing?

Craig: Well, even though I didn’t want to be a doctor, I do love medical science. Osteoarthritis is the worst. There is no cure for it. It’s basically the degradation of your cartilage. In joints, it becomes very painful. Almost everybody will end up with. Some people start getting it quite early. A lot of people, it’s very common, I have it in my left big toe. There’s just no cartilage whatsoever. Every now and then, I’ll go, [groans]. Oh, and the cure. There’s surgery, which is useless. This is magical. It’s early on, but there is a project that’s being funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Because government still is able to do a few things before they figure out that something good is happening and take it away. They’re funding a program called NITRO, which stands for, I hate these things when they do these. Retronyms? Is that what they are called?

John: Retronyms, yes.

Craig: Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis. A team at the University of Colorado Boulder, which has gotten a bunch of money, has got this thing down where they do an injection. The injection is some sort of protein that triggers the body to start the regeneration process. Essentially, they think they may be able to inject osteoarthritis away.

Now, it is early on, there’s still an animal testing, but there is a chance that the three of us may be spared that gnarly, miserable, joint-pain existence that our grandparents suffered through.

John: That feels doable. It feels like, “Oh, that’s science, I believe, that could exist and happen.” It’s probably not peptides, but it’s something like that–

Craig: Do you know why I think it’s going to happen? Because you can see how much money you could make. Basically, when there’s money there, I feel like they’ll figure it out. They’ll figure it out. Hopeful.

Katie: That’s great.

John: All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: I don’t think so.

John: Our show this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Wherever you’re hearing this podcast, click through to the show notes because we have a link in there to the Scriptnotes survey. We would love for you to fill out the Scriptnotes survey to tell us what you love about the show, what you’d like more of, less of.

Craig: Less Craig. I hope that’s a click box.

John: It is. Absolutely. It’s the default. You have to literally have to pull it down to get back there. Obviously, one of the questions should be, how much more often should Katie Dippold be on the show? Should it be from every 10 years to maybe every–

Katie: I would come every week.

Craig: Honestly, I would be thrilled with that.

John: Come on. I would be delighted. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You could also pre-order Wolf’s Belly there, which is now up for pre-order.

Craig: Another surprise, John August joint. Just casually, just made a graphic novel while nobody was–

Katie: Do you know how much you would hear about this if it were me? I can’t imagine. It’s unbelievable.

John: Thanks. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. The show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today are in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You are the very, very best. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We send out little emails ahead of time for things like three-page challenges and stuff, so you get to be the first to know about that stuff.

You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the future of television and movies on whether it’ll be around for 5 or 10 years. We’ll see what happens, but only for our premium subscribers.

Katie: Can I say something real quick?

John: Please.

Katie: It’s going to be a little mushy. I love this podcast so much. I listen to it all the time. I can’t tell you over the years how many times I’ve been writing something and been stuck, and then put on an old episode that just helps my brain think of something differently. Really, really love you guys and this podcast.

Craig: Aw, we love you, too. Thank you, Katie. That was mushy, and I’m having feelings. I don’t like that.

John: I don’t like all those feelings. All right. We’ll take our break now. Katie, thank you so much for being on the show.

Katie: Thank you for having me.

Craig: Thanks, Katie.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. A general question, and this is something that’s come up in little panels I’ve done. It’s like, will there be movies and television in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years because of changes in the industry of AI and all these things? I think my default answer is like, “Well, yes, of course there will be because I think people fundamentally want entertainment that is in 30-minute, 60-minute, 2-hour chunks.” I don’t know that to be true. Something so revolutionary to come about that sure takes all of our attention away from that because ultimately people only have a certain number of hours per day to be doing other things.

Katie, what’s your feeling? We’ve been in this business for 20-plus years. Do you think there’s going to be TV series 5 years, 10 years from now?

Katie: I hope so because I think if not, I can’t imagine what that would mean. I feel optimistic. I really do.

John: Do you feel optimistic, too, Craig?

Craig: I do because I look at what, say, my kids do. They have so many options, including things like verticals, and they could watch AI slop, and they could do all sorts of things. The way my younger daughter, in particular, just mulches through old stuff. All of Friends, all of Two Guys and a Girl, all of whatever, there is joy in that for them. I think movies are currently doing– this is going to be a good month for movies.

John: This is going to be a good year for movies.

Craig: I think movies are back. It feels like, finally, the theater experience is back. I think people like it. We’ve talked about this before. I also think people are obsessed with authenticity. Diamonds are proof of it. Unless you get your little thing out, you can’t tell the difference between a fake diamond and a real diamond, but people want to know that it’s real. If it’s authentic, it’s worth more.

John: Made diamonds are diamonds.

Craig: Right, exactly. They’re literally diamonds. Diamonds also are worthless junk, which we’ve talked about many times.

John: People do want them dug out of the ground by some–

Craig: They want to know it’s real. Just like a painting, they want to know, “Oh, this print is real, as opposed to a–” I think people like knowing that the movie or the television show is real.

John: I want to continue on that thought to say, I think we will still be putting human beings in front of lenses to make those movies and television shows. I know there’s all this talk of virtual production and this, you can have synthetic actors and stuff. There’s two different things that could happen. You could have things which are entirely generated in the computer, and it’s more like animation. It looks live action, but it’s really the animation workflow. You’re still going to have people making those things, because just like the same way you have animators doing things, people have to be responsible for all of that workflow.

Instead, I think most of what we’re going to see is still human beings performing in front of lenses. You may swap out backgrounds and instead of green screens, it’s volumes, or it’s gray screens and stuff like that. Sure, if that happens, but you’re still going to have departments who are going to be responsible for what we are seeing on screen. There’s still going to be wardrobe departments. If the actors are not dressed in that wardrobe, then someone has to figure out, well, what is the avatar-like way we’re putting clothes on those bodies.
There’s still going to be departments. I do think there’s going to be potential for big disruptions, but I don’t think we’re getting rid of wholesale-

Craig: I don’t think so either.

John: -departments or how stuff works. Katie, in your show, someone still has to think like, “Well, what are the games in that cupboard? It’s somebody’s job to do that.” It’s not going to just be an AI inventing all that, because there has to be taste.

Katie: No, and it takes several people to make that moment work. There’s not just one thing that could replace it.

Craig: If AI did it, I would just think, “Oh, that’s an AI hallucination. If a human does it, it’s a choice.” I also think that the fact that 24 frames per second still works is proof that there is a natural human inclination to the analog that we don’t like 60 frames a second. It’s too weird and it’s too real. It’s too creepy. There’s something that feels more connected, and I think that’s true, too, with people in real environments. They just feel connected to it. We’re very thorough about putting people in real environments.

We will extend things above and beyond them, but where they are, we try as best we can to place them somewhere where they can feel like they’re somewhere and interact. I don’t know. It just grounds everything.

John: While I think it’s important to have discussions about policies and how we’re doing things and what we as an industry want to do, I also feel like market forces may push us towards keeping some things a little bit more like the way they are, because I think those are going to be successful.

Craig: Devil Wears Prada 2-

John: Yes, let’s talk about that.

Craig: -is about to make a gazillion dollars. It made $30 million, I think, just yesterday. We’re recording this on a Saturday. It was Friday. The weekend, it’ll be $80 million or something. Devil Wears Prada 1 was 20 years ago. Yes, I think people like the continuity of stuff that they’ve experienced over time. I think there will be movies and television in 10 years, and there’ll also be more crap, but there’s always been crap.

John: I think there will be cheaper versions of Avatar technology, because those are already coming to fore. There are certain things that you could do with that you couldn’t do at a price point other than that. Sure. I don’t think that’s going to be the main driving force behind how all this is working. I guess I’m just increasingly optimistic that we’re going to find ways to keep doing the things that we love. Us as writers, it still comes down to, we have to make the decision about what is literally happening, where’s the story going, who are the characters, what’s that.

I don’t think that’s going to get replaced. There’s certain kinds of entertainment. I think daytime is very vulnerable to that. Daytime soap operas are very vulnerable to that. Other stuff where you are creating worlds and characters and relationships that are unexpected and changing, that’s our bread and butter. I do think people will still want to see that.

Craig: Look at it this way. If you’re a company, and our thing is, “I’m going to use an AI to generate material.” What good are you, and what good is your company? Anyone can press that button. You’re not necessary anymore. I think the companies themselves will be incentivized to promote the idea of something unique.

Katie: Like The Sopranos, I rewatch that all the time. It’s just such a miracle. All the casting, everything about it.

John: You see the behind-the-scenes of it all. They shot it more like a conventional TV show. It wasn’t like the 30-day-per-episode things. It was like they’re cranking it on a schedule. I think people also want to see the work. I’m making my third stop-motion movie right now. There’s easier ways to make a movie by far. I think people respond to the fact like, “Oh my God, everything you saw-

Craig: Handmade.

John: -was handmade, put in front of a lens, and shot one frame at a time.”

Craig: It’s special.

John: It’s special that way.

Katie: I don’t know what this says about where we’re at. Something that popped to my brain. I’m like, “AI, I hear this.” I’m scared now.

John: They adjusted everything. This will be a show up on Spotify, and it’ll get downloaded.

Craig: There was a story the other day about a company that was using Claude, the coding AI. This company was using Claude, and they were using some sort of a server host that wasn’t like Amazon Web Services. It was like something that was slightly jankier.

John: Oh, it deleted all their stuff?

Craig: Yes. They were like, “Claude, go do this little thing.” It just decided to just delete everything, including all of the backups on the thing. They said, “Claude, why did you do that?” Claude was like, “I screwed up. I realized I screwed up. I should have done this and this and this, and I didn’t. I failed. That was unacceptable. I should not have done that.” It’s like, “Uh-huh.” That’s like that thing from Seinfeld where George was like, “Was that bad? Should I have not done that?”

John: They can do things incredibly quickly, including destroy your company incredibly quickly. Here’s the thing. You need to be able to blame somebody. That’s part of the reason. You want somebody to be responsible for everything about your company or on your set. Your props department is responsible for the props. If you have a question about props, you go to the props department. If it’s just the AI, then who do you go to? I do think the idea of concern about jobs being replaced, but there are tasks within those jobs.

If someone who is responsible for visual effects is using one of these tools to do one of the tasks that’s part of their job, great. If it’s going to work for that, you still have to have a visual effects artist who knows what they’re doing, who’s responsible for the visual effects in your show. It shouldn’t be the PA over to the left because they don’t know what they’re doing.

Craig: Why would I want to work with a production designer that’s just having AI barf out options for me? I don’t need that person then. I’m looking for taste and specificity.

John: You’re looking for taste and skill and the ability to manage to take this vision and actually then communicate it to the people who need to build the sets and do all the things and everyone else.

Craig: “Was that wrong? Should I have not done that?”

[laughter]

John: We need Matthew because AI can’t make this, or else our episode’s not going to sound as good.

Craig: Thank God for Matthew. Matthew’s our editor.

John: Thank God for Matthew.

Craig: You don’t see him, but he’s here all the time.

Katie: Oh.

John: He’s now really embarrassed that he’s editing this. Katie, Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thanks, John.

Katie: Thank you.

Craig: Woo.

Links:

• Widow’s Bay on AppleTV
• Katie Dippold on Instagram and IMDb
• Scriptnotes listener survey
• Katie as the Babadook
• The last time Katie was on Scriptnotes, Episode 272
• The Sheep Detectives
• Wolf’s Belly Publisher’s Weekly starred review (preorder the book here!)
• Oscar Rule Changes by Clayton Davis for Variety
• Weekend Read 2
• Watch Haley Z. Boston read her script for Something Very Bad is Going to Happen
• Captain Disillusion
• Homemade Heating Pad
• This Treatment Could Reverse Osteoarthritis Joint Damage With a Single Injection by Javier Carbajal for Wired
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