Scriptnotes Podcast

In today’s edition of “How Would This Be a Movie?” John and Craig convert felonies into films. Together, they take a few crime-related news stories and decide how they might be adapted for the screen.

They also discuss paracosms and the importance of daydreaming for budding screenwriters.

In our bonus segment for premium subscribers, John and Craig discuss prediction markets. Bet you can guess how that goes.

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Get your copy of The Scriptnotes Book and become a Scriptnotes Premium member today! For more content on the craft of writing check out Inneresting our weekly-ish newsletter about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Scriptnotes is produced by Meredith Stedman and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our Coordinator is Lauren Loesberg.

Email us at [email protected].

Download the full episode here.

Buckle up! John and Craig discuss the elements that make up a classic road movie. They cover the quintessential scenes, common pitfalls, and the economic quandaries you’ll find in the genre.

They also answer listener questions about editing novels (versus screenplays) and the aesthetics of outlines and breakdowns.

In our bonus segment for premium subscribers, John and Craig talk about their own memorable road trips.

Links:

Get your copy of The Scriptnotes Book and become a Scriptnotes Premium member today! For more content on the craft of writing check out Inneresting our weekly-ish newsletter about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Scriptnotes is produced by Meredith Stedman and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our Coordinator is Lauren Loesberg. Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!).

Email us at [email protected]

Download the full episode here.

John and Craig invite over Rashida Jones and Will McCormack to chat about their new film The Invite, out in theaters now.

Rashida and Will divulge the origin story and dynamics of their own writing partnership, as well as discuss the process of adapting an adaptation and writing to the truth of relationships.

In our bonus segment for premium subscribers, the four swap stories about saying goodbye to creative projects that never came to pass.

Links:

Get your copy of The Scriptnotes Book and become a Scriptnotes Premium member today! For more content on the craft of writing check out Inneresting our weekly-ish newsletter about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Scriptnotes is produced by Meredith Stedman and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our Coordinator is Lauren Loesberg. Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!).

Email us at [email protected]

Download the full episode here.

How do you keep doing creative work when the world is falling apart around you? To sift through the despair and doubt, John welcomes back legendary Scriptnotes guest, writer-turned-psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo. They discuss the many feelings that catastrophic events can bring up in artists, the personal narratives that often inform those feelings, and how to keep moving forward when you feel like the band on the Titanic.

We also follow up on AI, and answer listener questions on competing with brain trusts and how to support a friend embroiled in controversy.

In our bonus segment for premium members, Dennis guides us through the best examples and worst mistakes of portraying therapists on screen.

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Email us at [email protected]

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 676 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you keep doing creative work when it feels like the world around you is burning to the ground, sometimes literally? To help talk us through that despair, self-doubt, and anxiety, we welcome back a beloved guest from episode 99, Dennis Palumbo, a writer-turned-psychotherapist who deals with these issues every day. And in our bonus segment for premium members, Dennis and I will talk about how therapists are portrayed on screen with suggestions for getting it right.

But first, Drew, we have some follow-up.

## Follow-Up

Drew Marquardt: We do. We had a few people write in following up on our conversation on AI from back in episode 669.

Imran writes, “Recently, a production company added my original TV pilot onto their slate and paid me to craft its pitch deck. This particular script is a lo-fi sci-fi with a South Asian female lead.”

John: I want to stop on lo-fi sci-fi. I just love that as a term.

Drew: “Now, obviously with pitch decks, the visual job is finding comps, stills, actors, et cetera, to show what we’re making. Finding stills of South Asian female leads in Hollywood roles is a very limited pool. Then trying to find them in any sci-fi context is an almost impossible task.

My past experience is that decision-makers often have what I lovingly call “raciaphantasia.” So I got to show them, but what do I show them? Enter AI. I was able to concoct stills from a show like mine that doesn’t actually exist but feels familiar, allowing me to center a South Asian female lead, like a show from a parallel universe that’s already solved its representation problem. Decks generally just use images ripped from TV and movies and they’re not for public consumption, so I feel like I didn’t go against my general philosophy of not replacing a human with a toaster. Could this be considered an instance of AI-enabling opportunity rather than the opposite? I feel okay with this particular usage, but what do you think?”

John: Yes. So Imran, you’re right at that sweet spot where I’m actually wrestling with the same questions myself because I’ve had to put together pitch decks. Let’s talk through what you’re usually doing with a pitch deck, which is you’re looking for images from existing movies and TV shows that sort of give a sense of the feel and the style of what you’re going for. If I’m putting up things for the female lead, I’m talking about like, “This is Rebecca…” I might put up a series of images of split screens of like a couple of different actresses who could play that part. Here’s Zoe Saldana, here’s Jennifer Lawrence. Here are people in that space.

That’s great, but sometimes you need to show what’s actually happening in the moment in that scene. My go-to source for all this stuff is I pay for a subscription to ShotDeck, which is a really good site that pulls stills from all sorts of images and does a really good job cataloging and tagging them. You can say like, I need a close-up shot of a man looking down. I need this thing. It’s really useful for building that and for building mood boards.

But Imran, exactly the situation you’re running into, sometimes that shot doesn’t exist because it’s just never been done before. Particularly with issues of representation, yes, you’re not going to find enough young Asian female leads in a sci-fi franchise that’s going to probably work for you there. I get what you’re trying to do. I would say, listen, don’t pretend that you’re not doing it. Don’t hide from it. Also, I think you need to put some guardrails around yourself. You’re using this stuff to be able to convince other people to embark on your project, but this is not the final product. The fact that it’s internal is a helpful delimiter for me.

Always just be asking yourself, am I taking away someone’s job by doing this? Because what are the alternatives? You could go out and do a photo shoot with a model who does these things. That’s just not realistic. That’s not how these things are done. You could go to a Photoshop professional who could comp together a bunch of other images to find that thing. That’s maybe possible.

As you go out further with the project, it may make sense to enlist some of those folks in terms of building this deck so you can go out. If you need to show it to networks and other places beyond that, that might make some sense. For what you’re doing right now, I don’t personally have a problem with it. Some people would.

Drew: That makes sense. Next comes from Rita. Rita says, “I work at an animation studio, and while our policies are all strictly against AI use, the message from above is that if it’s going to help us work faster, go right ahead. This isn’t being communicated in anything written or over Zoom since our meetings are all recorded, but rather has been said to me with a wink-wink when I’ve been physically in the office. I suspect this is the case for a lot of studios.”

John: Yes. I would be really curious to hear from our other listeners about what they’re finding in their actual working environments. I was on a studio a lot yesterday in a TV space and I saw a lot of people with a lot of really big monitors. I was wondering how much they were using AI to do some stuff in there, and I don’t know what it is. Listen, like what Imran’s question is, I guess I’m wondering what kinds of things are they saying maybe it’s okay for you to use AI to do some of these things?

You mentioned that the Zooms are all recorded, so great. A lot of times they’re using those Zooms to actually generate notes about what was happening in the meeting. I’m kind of okay with it. Again, are you taking a person’s job who normally would be there to do that? For most of these meetings, probably not. In the case of a writer’s room, yes, a writer’s assistant was supposed to be there doing that stuff. I think when you have policies that are written down but then you’re actually not enforcing them, I think it’s in some ways worse than not ever actually having a policy because it’s basically a question of whether there are any boundaries around anything. Drew, what’s your take?

Drew: I know Rita works in editorial, and so there’s different facets to that too. When we had Mike Schur on the show, he was talking about using his audio engineer, using AI to pull seal noises out of the back of a shot, and that feels like a tool. That feels like a useful thing. These editorial programs have little tools and wizards and things that can clean stuff up. If AI is being used in that capacity, I don’t have any problem with it. That feels fine to me.

John: I think I said this on an earlier podcast. If the person whose job it is to be doing that thing is using the tool themselves, I have less of an issue with it than if someone whose entire job is in that space is using that to replace the person who would normally be doing that work.

Drew: But an interstitial shot? That feels bad.

John: Yes, it does feel bad. I think we’re going to be wrestling with this for a long time. Rita, I would say that it’s good to clock how you feel about these situations. When you feel like something is crossing a line or you wonder if something’s crossing a line, talk with others around you. You may not necessarily be able to go up to your supervisor and say like, this is a problem here. If other people at your level are feeling a similar situation, there may be some logic behind that.

Post is one of those areas that’s going to be affected earlier because it’s people sitting at machines doing things and maybe they’re using the next generation of those existing technologies to do stuff. It may be fine, but it may also be disruptive in a really bad way.

Drew: I’d be really curious where the line is for a lot of these people in post, for our friends at VFX, the ethical boundaries that they’re pushing up against. Because to me, a lot of these just feel like extensions of tools that they might already have, but that’s probably not true.

John: Anyone who’s actually edited a movie or TV show will tell you that most of the dialogue you’re seeing coming out of an actor’s mouth is not necessarily what was recorded in that moment. You’ve slipped lines from other takes and you’ve moved stuff through. It’s all artifice and all manufactured. If you’re sweetening or changing the audio to do that, or you’re doing clever things to people’s mouths so that you can slip frames, we’ve long had issues with how authentic and how real a thing is that we’re seeing on screen is. This is amplifying that. I think people are going to have to make choices about what they feel comfortable with and what they don’t feel comfortable with.

Drew: Yes. Please write in with more on this because —

John: Yes, I’m glad we were able to solve all the AI issues. Now let’s talk about our brains.

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Dennis Palumbo: Oh, thank you, John. It’s good to be here.

John: You were on episode 99, which was a zillion years ago, but it’s one of our most popular episodes. It’s one of the ones that we replay most often because it has such timeless advice for writers facing imposter syndrome, and just really the struggle of sitting down in the chair each day to write. Thank you for that.

Dennis: Oh, my pleasure.

John: What got me thinking about you in this moment was an article you wrote just a couple weeks ago titled, Am I Just Fiddling While Rome Burns? Can you give us a little setup behind why you wrote the article and what you were finding?

Dennis: Yes. The article was actually one of the columns in a column I do for Psychiatric Times called Creative Minds, and it’s a therapist looking at dealing with creative patients. The audience is primarily psychiatrists and psychologists because it’s a clinical journal, but apparently, somehow it got a little more. It’s not viral, but it got big for some reason, and I’ve heard from a lot of people. What got me writing about it, frankly, was the LA fires.

One of the things that writers deal with all the time, the two aspects are relevance and perspective. Is what I’m doing as a writer relevant in the world today? And perspective. Relevance to me means, gee, does anybody care about what I’m writing about? Does it help anybody? Is there a reason for it to exist? And perspective is like, here I am complaining because I can’t get the second act to work and people are dying in Syria. People are dying in Gaza. From the 10,000-foot perspective, what I do doesn’t matter.

That really came home to me during the LA fires because I had so many patients who were just saying, look, people are losing their homes, people are dying in Gaza, what the heck am I doing writing my fourth mystery novel? What am I doing writing my 28th episode of an NCIS series?

When you are an artist in particularly a commercial marketplace, it’s really hard sometimes to justify what you’re doing in the face of difficult times. We’re also in a quite erratic and revolutionary political time that’s confusing and disheartening to a lot of people. This is something I noticed in my patients, so I decided to write a column about some of the people that I’ve worked with and some of the things they’ve said about it.

John: Let’s start local, let’s start with the fires because when you think about Gaza, you think about turmoil in the world is not new, but having such incredible turmoil in our backyards, and in many cases, I’ve had 10 friends who lost their houses in these fires, it brings it home very directly. It makes you question, what is it that I’m doing here? What is keeping me in Los Angeles?

Let’s take it from the perspective of the extreme case of a writer whose house burns down in the fires. If you are the therapist talking with that writer about getting back to work, what are the points of the conversation? What are the things that you’re trying to get that writer to see, what’s the conversation like?

Dennis: First of all, I think it’s important for someone to acknowledge the traumatic impact of something like that. You end up with two kinds of patients. There are those who are bowled over by an experience like that and become immobilized. Then you have another kind of patient who says, “I don’t care that my house burned down yesterday, I’m going to get this in on deadline.” To me, they’re two sides of the same coin. They’re magical thinking.

The first thing I would do with any, I have had actually a patient lose her home in the Palisades and we dealt with it like any trauma, any tragedy. People are going to have PTSD symptoms after a tragedy like that. For those who don’t know post-traumatic stress disorder, the kind of symptoms you have is a hypervigilance about bad things happening again, a belief that maybe you could have avoided this by not living in the Palisades or by having one of those automated sprinkler systems that watered down your house. Then if your house didn’t burn down but your friend or your relatives did, then you have survivor guilt.

These are all functions of PTSD. And these traumas have to be experienced and processed and held by the therapist so that the person can move through them. We’re not saying, no, we don’t think you should ever write again. In fact, I’ll make the argument it’s crucial that you do so. I also think it’s crucial that you allow yourself the initial experience and the feelings that you’re having about it and then to challenge the meanings that usually associate themselves with a trauma, primarily meanings that are self-recriminating, that are self-blaming, or that make you feel as though the universe doesn’t like me, my house burned down and this guy’s house didn’t, so God hates me. You would be surprised where people go in the face of a tragedy.

John: Also, we’re dealing with writers who it is by their nature to narrativize, to create stories around these situations and to see themselves as the protagonist in the situation and that they’re in some act of a multi-act story, which is understandable, but may not actually be helpful for them processing what’s happened and to move on with the next stage. You make some examples in your column about great art that came out of really difficult times with Picasso with Guernica. I was also thinking about like Virginia Woolf or Kurt Vonnegut or Auden who are writing about the profound grief and anxiety that they’re encountering.

Some of us will have a chance to channel what we’re feeling into art, but some of us are going to have to write that next episode of that comedy series and go back and do that. That feels like that’s a real tension. You are probably uniquely faced with these things because some people who lost their houses are going back to investment banking and it’s like, okay, that’s a thing. The folks of us who have to go back and write comedy or write things, that feels like that tension is going to be hard to balance.

Dennis: It’s hard to balance unless you look underneath it. I wrote sitcoms for years.

John: You wrote Welcome Back, Kotter.

Dennis: I got to tell you, if you’re not angry and aggrieved and filled with pain and bitterness, you’re not funny. [chuckles] The only good thing to come out of it, it’s like the old joke, hey, the war was terrible, but a lot of great songs came out of war. The reality is you can write comedy coming out of tragedy, because sometimes it’s the only way you can survive. A whole race of people, the Jews, that’s to me how they’ve gotten through the last number of centuries. But I know it’s very, very difficult.

It’s interesting too, because for a lot of artists, they think, well, the way to be relevant when a tragedy happens is to only write about the tragedy. Like John Hersey writing Hiroshima, or like you said, Picasso painting Guernica. There’s a great story where a former German officer was looking at Guernica on the wall and said to Picasso, “How did you do that?” Picasso said, “Actually, no, you did that.”

The thing that’s really important to remember is you don’t have to write directly about something to write about its emotional impact, because one of the things that writing does that’s so amazing, no matter how small or far off or idiosyncratic an idea is, or even a time zone is, or even a historical era is, if the stakes are real and the people’s feelings are real, anyone can relate to it.

You can write an episode of a sitcom in the wake of a tragedy, because every character in that sitcom wants something, has felt denied something, yearns for something, and has been disappointed about something. You can craft a story about the smallest thing, like not getting invited to the prom, but you can work in it all the ideas about yourself. I’m not worthy, I’m not good enough. If I were pretty enough, if God loved me, I’d go get a prom date. All the things that concern us about ourselves can be filtered through something as silly as a sitcom.

John: Let’s talk about writing as a therapeutic practice, because one of the things that writers have that is unique among some of the creative arts is that we don’t need anyone’s permission to do a thing. Even painters, their studio is burned down. Writers, we just need a piece of paper and we can write stuff. I guess there’s probably a double-edged sword there because because we need so little, there’s an expectation we should be able to get back to work quickly. We don’t need all this stuff around us. We don’t need these permission structures around us. What advice do you have for someone who is sitting down for the first time after a fire tragedy or loss of a loved one or some other profound loss in their life? How do you recommend they start, or do they just start and grapple with it as it comes?

Dennis: There’s no one-size-fits-all model for how you work with a patient. It would be dependent on what I know about the patient’s childhood, their core issues, their values, the kinds of themes they tend to write about. Just off the top of my head, I would suggest that someone write about how they’re feeling right now. Even if what they’re feeling right now is I don’t want to write my episode of this procedural or I don’t want to do this rewrite of this comedy film I’ve signed up to do, write about what you feel and how you don’t want to do it and what’s preventing you from doing it. And then I would probably look at what’s the meaning behind preventing it.

In other words, there are people who would feel, what business do I have of writing about the time my sister broke up with her boyfriend when people have lost their homes? Then I’d say, okay, now we’re talking about how relevant you are, how important what you do is. It’s crucial to remember too that like everyone, writers come from a family of origin that contributes to their mythology of how the world works.

I have a very famous director patient whose parents don’t have much regard for what he does. Now, he has a sibling who’s a union organizer and another sibling who’s a social worker. The parents who are good dyed-in-the-wool liberals think that those two siblings do something that’s important. And one of the things my patient struggles with and, in fact, feels as though his success mocks him is how relevant what he does is, how important what he does is.

If I don’t know that, having worked with him for a long time, if I don’t know that about his core issues, I’m not going to know how to talk to him about what is preventing him from going back to work, which may include the idea that if he were really moved by what was going on in the world or in the Palisades, for example, he wouldn’t be able to write. He wouldn’t be able to work.

One of the things that’s very important is, what’s our self-concept? What meaning do we give to the fact that we can’t work? What meaning do we give to the fact that contrary to what everyone seems to believe conventionally, we’re quite able to work? Does that mean we’re heartless or have no empathy? For some people, what it means is you’re escaping into the work. Doing the work saves your life.

In my experience, writers save their ass by writing. I don’t care if they’re going through a divorce or the loss of a family member or their house burning down. For most writers, the way they connect with themselves is to utilize and manifest their skill set. It’s like True North. If their needle isn’t pointing to True North, they get wiggy. That’s a clinical term. [chuckles] They get wiggy.

John: I want to segue from this incredibly local situation of the fires and the loss of what we see in front of us to something I’m feeling a little bit more personally, which is I feel like I’m grappling with this sense that I’m not sure that the world, as I understand it, is going to exist in two or three or five years. I just feel that it’s an acceleration of things. You touched on part of this, that sense that the administration is trying to rip apart the government, that we have the rise of very powerful AI without any guardrails around it, and the sense that this cold war we’re in with various nations could become hot.

Those are all anxieties I have that the stuff that I’m working on right now may not be relevant, and relevant is a loaded word, but it may just not make sense to do. I find myself in some cases racing to do certain things, like travel to certain places and the belief that it’s going to be harder to do so after, but also holding off on some projects that might take a little bit longer because I feel like, wait, is that even going to be meaningful when it comes out?

A concrete example would be Craig and I have the Scriptnotes book, which should be out at the end of the year. I feel really good about that. We’re going to get it done. I’m excited people have it in their hands. If I were starting a project right now and it was 2027 that was coming out, I would feel a little bit different about that because I just don’t have a clear vision in my head of what 2027 looks like. I see you nodding, so these are not new ideas to you, but how does one start to process that as a writer, as someone who’s trying to work on things that are going to take a while to do?

Dennis: Again, there’s not one way to look at this. My overall view is that art speaks to something when we are in existential angst. The science and reason and even the ability to prognosticate the future doesn’t. That’s the thing that’s so magical about art, is that it transcends what rational or cognitive thought has to say about the situation we’re in. Yes, the world seems incredibly unstable right now and quite dangerous. This is a terrible period to me. It feels like the industry seems like it’s gone sideways. AI scares the living hell out of me. The only thing good about being old is I missed AI as a writer.

I began writing before there were word processors and computers. I wrote the first draft of My Favorite Year on a Royal Portable typewriter, which I still have, by the way, and I had it oiled up and detailed and everything. I figure when the big, massive electromagnetic pulse happens and we all go back to the Stone Age, I’ll be the only guy that can type. That’s my theory.

Anyway, to deal with your question in somewhat more serious terms, I’m hearing this from a lot of patients. I don’t know what the world’s going to be like in two years or five years. I don’t know what my life is going to be like, what the industry is going to be like, what America is going to be like, how it’s going to feel. It’s very frightening for a lot of my patients who found themselves in the Midwest over the holidays and seeing nothing but Trump signs and MAGA hats and feeling literally like they were in a different world. They literally felt like, boy, do I not belong here?

That feeling is encroaching on a lot of people with sensitivity right now. It’s very, very tempting to become overly pessimistic and go, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, so what I do doesn’t matter. I would flip it on its head. I would say, because you feel everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, it’s never been more important to do what you do. In my article, in my column that you referred to, I talk about two films that speak to that.

One is Sullivan’s Travels, the Preston Sturges film, about a director, filmmaker, a comedy filmmaker who thinks that what he’s doing is irrelevant given the troubles people are going through. He learns throughout the film that his work provides solace and relatability to people. Even at a further end, in Woody Allen’s Stardust, when he’s speaking to some aliens who have come down from outer space and he says, “What can I do to make things better?” and they say, “Write funnier jokes.”

Even though that’s a joke in and of itself, I think the intent’s very serious under there. The role of art is to transcend and help us cope with stuff that reason and science and logic cannot contain, it cannot contend with. I defy anyone to look around the world right now and go, well, through reason, I can contend with what’s happening and feel reasonably certain about what the next five years is going to be like.

John: You can’t even trust the ground underneath your feet. It does feel like everything is just shifting very, very quickly. But your point, which Craig often will get back to as I spin into my, not quite apocalyptic nihilism, but approaching it is, well, our job is to entertain. Our job is to, our function, and this is obviously each individual writer’s going to have their own sense of what our purpose is, but our job is to provide that storytelling, to provide that sense of reflecting the moment that we’re in, but also carrying people outside of that moment that we’re in. That’s really what our function is.

Dennis: I agree with that. See, where I would differ slightly is I don’t think of entertainment as outside of relevance. I think there’s value in any kind of creative entertainment that you do because it’s an expression of what’s in your mind and heart. An expression of what’s in your mind and heart, no matter how silly or outrageous it is, is relevant to others who can have us. You don’t have to have been Rocky Balboa to know what Rocky wanted in that boxing match. He wanted to be taken seriously, to felt like he wasn’t a bum. We all understand that.

You didn’t have to have been raised in poverty to understand what Frank McCourt was writing about in Angela’s Ashes. We all know what it’s like to feel like we’re trying to reach beyond what people think is capable for us. Look at Neil Simon. Everybody says, wow, I really love his plays that were so serious toward the end of his writing career and how relatable they were. I think Come Blow Your Horn and The Odd Couple is relatable because it’s about intimacy. It’s about human connection. If anything is important when times feel crazy, it’s anything that supports the human connection.

John: I wanted to emphasize that, because I think a natural tendency towards when you see things all going crazy is to pull back, is to retreat. I think we also, because we went through the pandemic together, which is also a shared PTSD, which was a function of retreating and pulling back, that there’s a default posture of that, which is just, okay, I’m just going to get in my little bubble and protect myself and protect myself around you.

That’s not generally the right instinct. The instinct is to reach out and to find connection with others and making art, sharing art, being part of a writer’s group, getting a chance to actually show what you’re doing and pull that feeling back in is probably what gets you through it. It also creates meaning in a world that feels increasingly meaningless or where meaning is harder to find.

Dennis: Psychiatrist Rollo May wrote a book called The Courage to Create, and it’s the same as Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The goal for a human being, I think, is to be authentic. Then out of that authenticity, where do they find meaning? There are people who find meaning in animal rescue or in working for Greenpeace, but there are also people who find meaning in writing a 700-page book about their family history. All of it is okay, because art pushes against existential angst.

Imagine going through the pandemic, going through the fires, going through Gaza, going through the Holocaust, going through the Black Plague, going through the Dark Ages. Humanity has managed to get through all of these things by somehow finding a mode of expression for what’s in his or her mind and heart. That’s the courage to create, and just like anyone else, my instinct is to never read a headline anymore. I don’t want to hear– I can’t listen to him actually speak and I can’t look at him. It’s tough to know what’s going on at the White House if those are your rules. I’ll skim a headline just in case there’s an alien invasion or something. But I’m going on a news diet.

Another part of me thinks, well, what are you doing? You copping out? Shouldn’t you be involved? There’s a real dichotomy there. I think for a writer, unlike other people, by writing about a narrative that’s going on in our head, we are involved because that narrative is infused with the context we’re in.

I could argue that reality is only subjectivity in a context. I would say, John, your reality is your subjectivity in the context of what’s going on in the world right now. Whether you write a joke or whether you write a horror movie, if it’s coming out of where your subjectivity is in the context of the world we’re in now, it’s legitimate and authentic. And given how much bullshit there is in the world and how little authenticity we find, whether online or in politics, every authentic expression of your inner world is a candle against the darkness. It really is.

John: We speak of authenticity in a time where the question of whether a work of something that looks like a work of art or a piece of writing was written by a human being or an AI is also relevant. The fact that you did this thing yourself lets you know that you did this thing yourself and you have the skills to put this thing down and you had an original idea and you created an expression of that original idea and you can share it. You can actually have it resonate with other human minds that are out there.

Dennis: Absolutely.

John: It’s a gift.

Dennis: Yes, my feeling is why give the world more impact on you than it needs to have? If you don’t create because you’re battered by what’s going on in the world, you’ve allowed the world to take away your skill set, which is the thing that is so important to your self-concept. It really is.

John: Great. We have two questions from our listeners, I think, were perfectly suited to your skill set. Drew, do you want to start us off with Shiloh’s?

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Dennis: [laughs] That’s a great question.

John: That’s a great question.

Dennis: I’ve never heard that question asked like that before.

John: I hear little bits in there that I think do speak to things we talked about in episode 99 and also in this conversation, that sense of like– It’s almost an imposter syndrome. “I couldn’t hope to compete with that.” Also, the idea of competition is a thread we can pull on as well.

Listen, Pixar has a bunch of really smart people who look through all their stuff and critique it and make it work, but so do all other filmmakers you’ve ever encountered. They have selected groups of people who they trust to help them figure out how to do a certain thing.

The good news is, Shiloh, you don’t have to make a Pixar movie. You don’t make a Pixar movie. Make your own movie, and it doesn’t have to be done in a Pixar-y way. This is me as an amateur speaking. Dennis, dig in. How do you help Shiloh process that?

Dennis: First of all, I haven’t heard it quite put like that. Funnily enough, of course, I’ve had a number of writers who’ve worked for Pixar and it’s like the Bataan Death March. It’s not a great experience.

John: Yes. Let’s make sure that Shiloh hears this, because I, too, know folks who’ve worked up there and some had good experiences, but some also felt like, oh, my God, I spent four months and we worked on like two paragraphs, and it doesn’t feel like it’s my thing at all.

Dennis: See, I used to work in sitcoms. My first years in show business were sitcoms and we had writers rooms with– it’s not like it is today. We had 10 or 11 funny people in a room so that by the time the script came out and you were about to shoot it on Tuesday, I didn’t know who wrote what joke. One thing I knew for sure is the script wouldn’t have been as funny if it had just been me, because that gang-writing of a comedy really helps make it funnier.

Now, if that’s your only goal, that’s fine. But one of the reasons Neil Simon left your show of shows and began writing plays is because he lost his own voice in the writers’ room, which is the reason I started writing prose, because I began to think I’m not a writer, I’m a funny talker. Yes, you can group-write something and over five years distill it down into something as good as Inside Out. I agree. Or Finding Nemo. I agree. But each of those people involved brought their own sensibilities in it. The Brain Trust up there put it through the sieve and took the best from column A and the best from column B.

That’s not how individual writers work. It’s not your job to compete with anyone. See, even if you– God, I always remember one of my patients who won an Oscar for best screenplay. He brought his Oscar in and I said, “Congratulations.” He said, “Thanks, but I’m no Billy Wilder.” What I didn’t tell him is that in an interview where people were praising Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder said, “Thanks, but I’m no Ernst Lubitsch.” It’s like Hemingway said. “Boys, Shakespeare got there first and better, so relax and start writing.”

These kinds of questions, I think, speak to issues of meaning where you’re competing to prove that it is worth it for you to pursue your goals unless in your mind you see it as equal to the material that has inspired you, you’re not entitled to do it. I see this in my practice all the time, this lack of entitlement. The feeling that, well, the thing that got me to be a filmmaker was Citizen Kane or the thing that got me to be a TV writer was The Sopranos, but I can’t do something like that. Those jobs have been taken.

John: Yes, no one’s trying to do Citizen Kane 2. They were trying to do new things that are relevant to 2025.

Dennis: That’s exactly right. That’s why you should never follow trends, because by the time you think you’re following one, it’s no longer a trend. More importantly, some idiosyncratic approach was the beginning of that trend.

John: Definitely. Second question here from Ethel.

Drew: Ethel writes, “I was recently approached by a major publication that wanted to interview me about my experience working with someone embroiled in a controversy, and my reps have advised me not to touch it with a 10-foot pole. They say nothing good can come of it, and it’s a lose-lose to speak up, even if it’s only about my own personal good experiences with someone I deeply care about. It’s just business, they say, but is that an excuse not to speak up for a friend?”

John: All right. Grappling with the ethical concerns of like, I want to speak up for my friend. Would it be helpful to speak up for my friend? I don’t want to get embroiled in that controversy. I’ve been there. I understand this. Actually, I very much understand the rep’s point of view of like, no good will come from this. Dennis, I see you nodding here. What’s your insight?

Dennis: I’ve been in this position too because in my 17 years of show business, I knew a lot of people. I worked with a lot of very famous people, and I’ve been approached by people who are writing unauthorized biographies or writing profiles and stuff. My position is always that I will not comment. It’s because I never know how it’s going to be taken out of context or whatever, how it will be used by the writer or the editor. We don’t know if it’s a hatchet job or not. The thing is, we just don’t know.

I think you’d do your friend a disservice even if you say, “I think he’s the most wonderful guy I’ve ever worked with.” Then the writer puts underneath, “Well, that’s the only guy I found that felt that way. Everyone else said he was a son of a bitch.” You actually don’t help your friend by saying, “Well, my personal experience was he was great.” You’ll find someone who thought they had a great experience of Harvey Weinstein. You’ll find someone who thought they had a warm encounter with Bill Cosby. In fact, I know someone who did.

See, if you say, “Yes, well, I don’t know. I thought Bill seemed like a great guy,” you look like a moron because you’re not aware of the totality of the context. Because we don’t control the context outside of our own subjectivity — I know I sound like a therapist, but I can’t help it — because we don’t control the context outside of our own subjectivity and our own intent. It’s usually not a good idea, I think, unless you’re willing to go do it off the record or anonymously. I have a number of patients who’ve said a lot of outrageous things and were just called an unidentified source. My experience is it gets back to who they are sooner or later.

John: Going back to Ethel, I don’t know whether Ethel is still in touch with this person who is famous, who’s embroiled in a controversy. If Ethel wants to be there for that person, for that friend, be there directly for that person and for that friend. That’s reaching out to them and say like, “Listen, I’m here for you. What you’re going through feels like it really sucks.” Let me be helpful to that person. You’re not going to help them by publicly speaking out on something because what Dennis said is exactly right. Outside of the context of you just don’t know how it’s going to play.

Dennis: Yes, you’re much better off to personally just say, “Let’s go have a cup of coffee. You can cry on my shoulder. I think these guys are pricks, but you’ll get through this,” and stay with them as a friend.

John: There are situations where you’re dive-bombed, like you are doing press for something else and they start to ask you a question about that. Just be ready for it and be ready to, you don’t say no comment, which is a sort of a Succession joke I think they had in there, don’t say no comment. No comment is not the thing you want to say. It’s just like, that’s where a publicist or somebody else can help guide, like that’s not what I’m here to talk about today, and you can move on from that.

Dennis: Yes, I agree. I do think sometimes with a little bit of due diligence and thought, you can prepare for certain questions in case they come up. One of the things that was so disheartening for me in Kamala Harris’s campaign was when I think she was on The View and somebody said, “Is there any difference between you and Joe Biden?” and she can’t think of anything.

I thought, her whole team never thought to prepare her for that question? I could have prepared her for that question. Anyway. I think if you’re going to comment to any reporter or journalist or TV reporter about a certain subject that’s embroiled in controversy, at least do some due diligence as to kind of questions they’re going to ask and how you’re prepared to answer them. I wouldn’t do it. I just wouldn’t do it.

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Dennis: Yes, I want to share a book that I read and I absolutely love. It’s by Sarah Bakewell and it’s called At the Existentialist Café. Now, I don’t know if your listeners are interested in existentialism, but the subtitle is Freedom Being & Apricot Cocktails. It’s the private lives of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Camus. It’s delightful and funny and talks about where existentialism came from and the lives of the people who pushed it without living it. [laughs] It’s a wonderful, warm, funny, but very intelligent overview of that post-war time in Paris where all these existentialists came from.

When you read it, one of the things you’re really struck by is the impact and influence, particularly if you’re a writer, that this train of thought has on modern writing. The perspective, the cynicism, the valueless aspect, the sense that things are absurd has seeped into especially all of our premium stuff, all of our top tier stuff.

When you read it, one of the things you’re struck by is, oh my God, some of the material and themes and viewpoints of these authors from the late ‘40s and ‘50s has filtered into not only our literature, but our film and television, our comedy, particularly, our satire, particularly. I could make an argument that most of our best stand-up comics nowadays, male and female, are existentialists. I could make that argument, but I wouldn’t take your listeners’ time to do it, but I could make that argument. So I recommend At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell.

John: I shall purchase it today. My one cool thing is River Runner Global, which is a website that I found this week. The idea behind it is it’s showing you a map of the world, a detailed map of the world. You can zoom in to incredibly close things. I was able to find my house that I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Once you zoom to whatever level you want to get to, you can place a single raindrop. Then we’ll take wherever that raindrop falls and we’ll figure out, based on geological data, where that raindrop is going to go. It’s going to show you from what’s going from this into this creek, into this river, into this, and how it’s making its way to whatever ocean it ends up at.

It is a fun way to waste some time and also just sort of zen out and figure out like, okay, where does this all go? It not only shows you the path, but it literally shows you the point of view of this raindrop entering all the different rivers as it’s going its way to the coast. It’s just a good reminder of like, there’s a giant physical world out there that’s going to exist no matter what. I always find that in times of uncertainty, the recognition that the natural world will continue on without us is somehow reassuring, that it’s beyond all the craziness of the day. This is a version of that that’s just on your screen and gives you a sense of like, oh, that’s right, the world is huge.

Dennis: Yes, it reminds me of the thing the Buddhists say, a tree has more to teach us than a zen master.

John: You have taught us a tremendous amount today, Dennis Palumbo. Thank you so much for coming back on. I can’t believe it’s been all these years. We get to repeat your episodes, so we get to you more often, which is nice. This was a really great conversation. Thank you so much.

Dennis: Oh, John, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me back.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. To get an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber or attached to this episode.

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes like episode 99 with Dennis Palumbo, one of our most requested episodes, and our bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on how psychotherapists are portrayed on screen. Dennis, thank you again very much for being on the show, and we’ll talk to you next week.

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Dennis: That’s a very broad question and I do have a lot of opinions about it. I’m glad you asked me. [laughs] As some of your listeners may know, I was a consulting producer on the recent Hulu show, The Patient, which was about a serial killer who kidnaps a therapist in the hopes the therapist will use therapy to talk him out of his homicidal rages. The two creators of the show, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, who created The Americans, one of my absolute favorite TV shows, reached out to me and said, we want to know what a therapist sounds like. Are we anywhere in the ballpark of what he would talk like?

It got me thinking about how therapists are portrayed on screen. Probably my favorite depiction of a therapist on screen is Gabriel Byrne in HBO’s series, In Treatment. That was the most accurate representation of how gloomy, pessimistic, humanistic, and struggling against his own doubts the therapist is. I thought he did a great job. Where I have a concern is in most procedurals, whenever they have a psychiatrist or psychologist character, and this is when they’re not a predator or a serial killer, which they are– hell, every other dick will kill.

John: The Basic Instinct problem, yes.

Dennis: Yes, the villain is a shrink. When they’re supposedly a “good guy,” they have a tendency to rattle off diagnoses about the personality and the mental status of a person they’ve never met, and it’s very clear-eyed. It’s like a list of diagnostic categories and symptoms right out of the diagnostic manual. On a typical procedural, they’ll go, well, this guy’s leaving baby dolls with knives stabbed into his eyes. They go, “Well, obviously he hates his mother. What we have to do is go back to his hometown…” It’s obviously nothing. Humans are too unique.

One of my favorite real-life examples of this is the DC sniper, where every FBI profiler said it was an unemployed White man in his early 30s. It turned out to be an older Black man and his nephew. No profiler in the FBI was even in the ballpark of that. Which is not to say profiling isn’t a valid thing. It’s a very valid thing. You want to be careful when a therapist on screen. Do they know more than they should? How certain?

We want our therapists to know. It’s part of the transference we do. There’s a powerful parental transference that viewers have on lead characters in TV shows, particularly therapists. We want them to be right and we want them to know. Now, way on the other side of that continuum is Hannibal Lecter, Donald Trump’s favorite guy. Everybody was so upset that here he was, Hannibal Lecter, a guy who ate people. I don’t think it’s the fact that he ate people that made him so horrible. I think it was the fact he was a psychiatrist and he was a good one.

What’s interesting is that he is the classic manifestation or avatar of a psychiatrist gone bad. The metaphor that he represents is he eats you. It’s that fantasy people have about therapists that they take your soul, they take your feelings, they open you up and look inside. Hannibal Lecter literally opens you up and eats what’s inside, eats your heart. I think he is the classic manifestation of what we fear in clinical workers.

Now, if you want to go back to a wonderful one, in my mind, you have to go back all the way to the Bette Davis movie, Now Voyager, where Claude Rains plays a really warm, thoughtful psychiatrist as opposed to I want to say Claude Akins, but that’s wrong. The actor who plays the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho, who neatly wraps up everything having to do with why Tony Perkins was the way he was. No real legitimate clinician speaks with that kind of certainty.

John: I think one of the reasons why therapists and psychiatrists on screen are so compelling and so fascinating for writers is because it’s just a conversation. A lot of the work inside that room is a conversation. A question I have for you is that as writers, we are thinking through our dialogue and we’re thinking through we want both characters to be listening. Yet as a therapist, you’re listening, but you’re also trying to direct the conversation. You’re trying to help a person achieve an insight. This is a weird question to ask, but how far ahead are you of the patient generally? How much are you leading versus listening? What is the balance there? Do you see that portrayed accurately on screen? Because I feel like a lot of the psychiatrists I see or therapists I see on screen have this brilliant insight and are like 19 steps ahead of their patients.

Dennis: Yes. That’s not how most of it– That’s not how it should work and how it isn’t really good clinical work. I think of good clinical work as shuttling over between your own subjectivity and what you’re picking up from the other person, what they’re saying, which then triggers the next thought of yours. It’s a bidirectional encounter. You and your patient are co-creating the session. That’s why when I say, oh, there’s not– when someone says, what do you do about a guy who can’t sleep? There’s no one-size-fits-all model. Give me the clinician. Give me the guy that can’t sleep and let them interact with each other and learn from each other what the therapy is.

To me, it’s a little bit like writing because I think writing is bidirectional. The moment you write a sentence, you’re simultaneously the reader of that sentence, which makes you go, “No, that sentence isn’t right. I want to do something else.” You and your writing are co-creating the text, kind of. I think that’s the way good therapy works. There’s a shuttling back and forth. It’s very similar to what Martin Buber, the philosopher, calls I and thou. A really good therapist is engaged in I and thou. The only thing therapist has is the tools to see where they might be going. Not to direct it, but the tools to recognize where they might be going.

John: Yes. I do feel like sometimes my function on the podcast is that, where I’m trying to be simultaneously in the conversation, but also be thinking down the road where it is that we’re trying to go. Over the course of 12 years doing this podcast, I hopefully have gotten better at being able to do that and understand. The other metaphors that may be relevant here is like it is a bit of improv where you’re trusting that you are the partner there and you’re picking up each other’s cues to create something that neither person could do alone. You as the therapist could not read someone’s whole writing. They couldn’t write a whole thing and give it to you and tell me, help me out here. You need to have a conversation. There needs to be a back and forth.

Dennis: Absolutely. Also, I think one of the things a therapist does is he or she models congruent behavior. If somebody tells a sad story, I’ll find myself tearing up because it’s impacted me. Then if the patient reacts, I’ll go, what’s it like for you to see how much that impacted me? We follow what happens, and you get a range of answers. Some people go, “It weirds me out.” Other people might say something like, “Well, you’d be made a stone if that didn’t make you sad.” You learn each other, and mostly you learn what the therapy needs. Just like you learn what a script needs by writing it.

John: Generally on film, we want to see characters in a room together doing stuff because it’s more interesting. Starting with the pandemic and I think beyond the pandemic, a lot more therapies move to Zoom or online. What is the difference there and what has been your experience working with patients online versus in person? How does that translate on screen?

Dennis: I have mixed feelings because I do a lot of therapy on screen. I have patients all over the world. I have patients in London and Prague and Budapest and South Africa, all over the place. I do it all on Zoom or Skype. I prefer in person only because I like that shared space, that intimacy of the shared space. I also find that you’re able to lapse into silence a little more easily if you’re in the room with a person. You can just let a feeling lie. I think the part of us that are social beings, sometimes I find my patients feel a need to keep presenting something because they’re on a screen.

John: Yes, I get that.

Dennis: It’s not a performance, but it’s a sense of obligation to keep feeding this. I have many sessions where we just both go silent for a minute and it’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s moving and it’s human. I miss that part when I work on Zoom. It’s the future and it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going to be replaced by AI. Not too many years after I retire, there’ll be an AI version of me.

John: We’ll hope to get you back on before that happens. Dennis Palumbo, an absolute pleasure talking with you about– I’m gesturing with my hand to indicate all the world around me. Thank you very much for coming back on the show. This will be another episode I think we’re going to be re-airing frequently.

Dennis: Okay, well, thank you so much again for having me, John.

John: Thanks.

John and Craig sit down with Ryan Condal, showrunner of House of the Dragon, just as its third season airs.

They dive into Ryan’s late start in Hollywood, spec scripts, the anatomy of a writers room, and thinking as a product of movement. They also answer a listener question about the mechanics of writing a sequel.

In our bonus segment for premium subscribers, John, Craig and Ryan discuss perhaps the most popular fictional creatures ever: dragons!

Links:

Email us at [email protected]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 743 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, today on the show, I want to discuss setting and character movement with a writer whose show must be setting records for the number of characters and locations per episode. Ryan Condal is the co-creator and showrunner of House of the Dragon. Ryan, which has just started its third season on HBO. Welcome, Ryan.

Ryan Condal: Thanks for having me, guys. This is very exciting. I listened to you– I still listen to you at points, but I was a deep, heavy listener when you first launched, when I feel like there were five podcasts. Now there are 13 million. Thank you for the service that you do to our writing community.

Craig: Thank you. This is great to talk to you in this format because you and I have spoken many times, but it’s always been under the context of, “Hey, this person you are using–” or, “Hey, what do you think of this director?” We’ve been helping each out over the course of the last few years, but it’s nice to be able to talk about stuff that is not that, but just craft.

John: Craft, yes. Also, as the one person on this Zoom who does not have a highly successful HBO show, I just want to ask some questions and learn from the two of you about doing this.

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Ryan: Yes. I was working in marketing and advertising. I’d always wanted to be a screenwriter. I was the weird kid that knew I wanted to be a professional writer when I was 12 or 13. Then at some point, I had a really great humanities teacher in high school who had worked in the development world, I think with Disney, and taught us three-act structure. This was back in the 1990s. Just as Netscape Navigator was coming online. All of this stuff was not readily accessible the way it is now.

John: I remember that site.

Craig: I think it’s still there.

Ryan: It’s great. It’s a great resource. It still is a great resource. I printed all those out, put them in a binder. Then I just started writing feature screenplay specs. I had a business degree, so I worked in media advertising, then pharmaceutical advertising. I wrote at night and then eventually got my company to move me to LA. I kept writing at night. Eventually, number 13, my 13th spec, I sold just after the 2007 Writers’ strike.

John: I want to go through all of that because I also want to dig into more what you were doing while you were doing copywriting for a pharmaceutical company because it’s related. That’s actually similar to my story and a path that I was going to take if I hadn’t ended up in film school. I want to dig into more of that because I think it’s very relevant for a lot of our listeners in terms of how do you make the most of what you can do where you are and how you learn from that. Also, at a certain point, you’ve got to jump and make the move to the town that does what you want to do.

In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about dragons overall because Craig and I play Dungeons & Dragons every week. There’s a lot of dragons in the world. The dragons in your show are very specific and move beyond what we are used to from the original series. I want to talk about dragons and their use in your world, but also dragons as probably the most depicted onscreen creatures that don’t actually exist in the world, and what it is about dragons that makes them so appealing.

Craig: They exist.

John: They exist, indeed.

Craig: They’re real.

John: In us, there are two dragons.

Craig: By the way, I also was working in advertising-

John: That’s right. Oh, great. I didn’t know that.

Craig: -and copywriting, yes. It was for a company that made promos for CBS shows. It was entertainment adjacent. In a weird way, the closer you get to entertainment through advertising, the worse it is. I would much rather have been trying to sell pills than bad sitcoms. I’ve always said, and I’m curious if you had the same experience, that one thing that advertising taught was concision because they said you have 30 seconds, really 28.2 seconds, to tell a story, beginning, middle, and end with a point, and it has to somehow stick in people’s heads. That was a skill that I still, I’m not sure I actively use it, but I think I passively use it all the time. Curious if you still feel that, the siren call of the concision of advertising.

Ryan: For sure. I worked in specifically print advertising, so on the professional side. Whereas you were entertainment adjacent, I was basically the creative person that was as far away from entertainment as possible. If the first creative job that’s furthest away from entertainment, that’s where I was. I was doing direct-to-professional, direct-to-doctor advertising, this highly technical, science-driven stuff. For me, it was extremely creative. Actually, I worked on both sides because I have an accounting and economics degree, because my parents wanted me to get a real job, which, thank you, I understood why.

I actually started in account services. I started as Pete Campbell and then desperately wanted to make my way over to become a Peggy. It took years, but I eventually made my way over there. I had seen it from both sides, but it is really important. It’s even more so when you’re not in a filmed medium, because you basically have an image and a headline, or maybe a headline and a tagline. It’s basically matching words to images in a way that they work in harmony, but it’s not saying the same thing. You’re not showing people a picture and then saying what the picture is.

It’s lateral thinking to try to tell a whole story in a still image and arrest people and stop them as they’re flipping through their medical journal or their prescription pad or whatever.

John: My advertising degree was in Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. The local businesses there were a lot of agriculture advertising. How do you talk to farmers about this new seed, this new product? I really enjoyed the classes I was in, but quickly realized, “Man, I don’t want to do this for a living.” You would see people who were winning the local advertising awards, and it’s like they were so happy to get the award, but I did not want that life. I loved the classes I was in. I loved the graphic design of it all.

I loved the really precision copywriting and recognizing who your audience is, what are they expecting, how do you surprise them, how do you deliver what they need to hear. I think it was also relevant to the business we all ended up in. You’re working with a team, and so you might be the copywriter, but there’s an art director, there’s a creative director. There’s an account executive, there’s the client, and there’s clear parallels to everything we deal with in terms of here’s the studio, here’s the director, here’s the producers.

It’s making sure they all feel heard, but also that the thing you’re delivering makes sense and is the best work possible. That’s a skill you develop just from practice. I was lucky to have a lot of practice in those couple of years in college.

Ryan: Yes, and also, as I moved up. I think I worked in advertising for seven years before I eventually broke in. I’m moving up. I was a mid-level person, but I had a group with me, and I had to go out and pitch and pitch these places that definitely wanted an ad campaign, but they didn’t necessarily want you. That experience set me up in a way that I didn’t even realize until I went into my first pitch, because you sell a spec, you work your whole life to just write something that people want to buy, and then you do it.

Then the next job you get, you have to do this entirely different skill that you haven’t learned. Then it’s actually contrary to everything that makes you want to be a writer, where you want to sit in a room by yourself and not have to talk to anybody. Then suddenly you have to go in and sweat it out and explain your ideas to people who are not necessarily dying to buy your thing. All that stuff really lined up, and you make a great point, John, about the collaboration of working in a team. It’s so similar, right? The art director, the creative director is sort of the director.

The account executive is like the studio executive. The copywriter is kind of the writer. You have editors. You have traffic coordinators that are moving things around the set.

John: You have media buyers who are very much like the exhibition people.

Ryan: Exactly.

Craig: There’s a skill that you learn along the way that, like I said, I was doing the same thing. You did this too. You transitioned into feature film writing. That’s where John and I were feature film writers, and John still is doing both. Feature film writing can be very solo. It’s very monk-like. Eventually, once the thing gets made, it’s like an advertising agency where they weirdly tell the copywriter to go away. [laughs] It’s the stupidest ad agency ever. When you come around to writing television, you begin to work with Carlton Cuse, and you’re working on Colony.

I presume, because Carlton Cuse is a traditional television drama developer, that there was a room, that there was a writer’s room, that there were people in there. I know for sure that on House of the Dragon, you have a writer’s room. I’m super curious about this because I continued my monk-like deal for Chernobyl and for The Last of Us, but in looking ahead to what I do next, I’m not only for a change of pace, but for creative necessity, I know I’m going to need a big, large room.

I would love to hear from you how you use a room to your advantage, what the challenges are of a room, especially when we’re dealing with a story this big. The temptation might be, “I need to focus all of these thousands of plotlines and people through one mental lens,” but you also need all of these people to generate all of these different points of view because there are so many characters. You can’t write that. I’m going to show that basically he’s writing two characters at a time. I can do it. Talk me through the pluses, the minuses, the values and strengths, and the challenges and the wins of a big, old writer’s room. Teach me.

Ryan: It was definitely something that I had to learn. I was solo, only a feature writer for five years. I was working. I managed somehow to work that whole time. Look, 2011 was a pretty lean year, but I reported income every quarter. I worked getting polishes and rewrites and other jobs. People liked me, and I was cheap also. I would get hired to do a lot of–

John: Great combo.

Ryan: Absolutely. Talented and cheap. They love that. First drafts. Lots of first drafts. Then I ended up signing with WME. I changed agencies, and I was looking for a new features agent. My TV agent now, Ryan Drazen, and then Theresa Kang, who’s now still in the business but no longer an agent, came in, and they were like, “We want to make you a showrunner.” I was like, “What?” Because I had been writing in all this big genre stuff. They’re like, “We see you as a creator.” They put me out during pilot season.

I pitched NBC on this property they had that Carlton was attached to. It was called The Sixth Gun. We sold the pilot. Then I wrote a pilot, and they really liked it, and then they made it. The reason you’ve never seen the TV show is because they made it, and then they threw it away.

John: That’s a classic pilot.

Ryan: You choose to do.

John: I have those too. You’ve got the experience of learning how to make a show and how to take something you’ve written in your head and actually produce it. By this point, had you had features produced? Had you had Hercules or A Knight of the Seven–

Ryan: Hercules went into production while we were filming Sixth Gun. 2013 was a pretty great year because that was finally after it felt like I’d been wandering the desert for six years, but it all happened. Further, Craig Mazin crossovers with Ryan Condal, number six on the call sheet in my pilot was Pedro Pascal. Should have been number one on the call sheet. Then maybe we’d have a television show, and you and I would both have very different careers.

Craig: You know what? Even Dan and Dave had him at number 105 on the call sheet. It took him a little while there.

Ryan: He knew I was a massive fan of Game of Thrones because we talked a lot about all this stuff. Then, about six months after the show had gone away, he called me out of the blue, and he was like, “I’m up for Game of Thrones. I need to take you out to lunch. I need to know everything that you know.” We sat down, and we chatted. At some point, he just sent me a picture of him in Wushu spear training, and I was like, “This is insane.”

John: Pedro Pascal, it’s crazy.

Craig: He was always Pedro Pascal.

John: Yes. Sixth Gun was a pilot that you shot, but you didn’t have a room for that, right? That was still just you writing a thing. It wasn’t the next show that you actually had to have a room, correct?

Ryan: Correct. I had the depressing experience of hiring a writer’s room for The Sixth Gun and then not calling anybody into work. It’s also run and gun that they make you do all that stuff if it gets picked up so you’re ready to go, and then it didn’t. I had a test of interviewing and reading writers for the first time and all that.

Craig: It comes to fruition when you and Carlton get Colony on the air.

Ryan: Yes, correct.

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Ryan: I just went out looking for the best samples that I could find. That’s where I started. It was definitely a process I refined over time. I think I went into it assuming that, “Everybody here is a professional writer. I think the tone of the show is rather apparent on the page. It’s the Nazi occupation of Paris, except it’s modern-day Los Angeles, and the Nazis are aliens, and we never see them. We deal with the Vichy government, which are the evil human collaborators who have decided to work with the aliens against the humans against their own interests.”

It was much trickier than that. That first season was pretty fraught because the pilot had a certain tone to it, but then we had to expand the story. I knew where I wanted to go with it generally, but I don’t know that I had– We did 10 episodes in the first season. After that, it was actually 13 in seasons 2 and 3. Learning how to break something, because my brain was so wired for three-act structure, 120 pages, to try to expand out to doing that and making also individual episodes within it, there was a lot of trial and error.

We didn’t have a ton of time with when they wanted on the air. The first season was very fraught, but I went out and tried to hire the best writers that I could. I tried to get a bunch of different people from different backgrounds with different experience. Look, they all came to the room with really interesting stuff. It was also going through an experience of figuring out what USA wanted for the show. We knew NBCUniversal wanted it. We expected sci-fi was going to pick it up because that’s where all the sci-fi shows were, but this is in the Mr. Robot period when they were like, you know.

John: “We’re no longer blue-sky crime shows.” Yes, I do think.

Ryan: Exactly, but also trying to figure out what they wanted to put on the air and all that. It was really just trying to read the best samples I could. I did a lot of background research calling people that they had worked with previously. We did deal a little bit with budget stuff in terms of writer budget because it was a basic cable network, so the rates are such and this and that. I actually hired a bunch of people that didn’t have a ton of experience because I was trying to find the drafted free agent-

Craig: Yes, I can remember.

Ryan: -in the rough.

Craig: Let me interrupt you for a second. Reading samples, let’s talk about that because that’s something you’ve had to do now for all the shows that you do. I don’t know if this is the case, but even going from season to season to season of House of the Dragon, some writers may drop off to go do other things and you may want to bring in– You never really probably stop going through this process. When you pick up a script to read, typically they are not spec scripts. I think that’s probably not a thing that people do anymore.

John: There are still a few of those left. We’ve had some people on recently talking about actually still loving to read spec scripts because it’s a chance to see that someone can write in another writer’s voice and tone.

Craig: Do you still get those, maybe for House of the Dragon?

Ryan: I never did, but I agree with John. I think everybody should go back and do it. I know it’s never going to monetize itself because nobody buys specs anymore, but I just think that that’s actually the best way to show that you can ape somebody else’s thing.

John: Style, right.

Ryan: I was reading plays. I was reading a lot of features, TV pilots, basically all original material. At some point, I read a short story that somebody submitted.

Craig: As you go through that process, how long do you read typically? If you’re on page two and you’re not immediately like, “Woo-hoo,” how far do you go in all honesty?

Ryan: Great question, Craig. At the beginning, I was like, “This is my job and I have to read it until page 58.” Now it’s much more just looking to be hooked and have somebody convince you to stay on from page 5 and then page 10, much, I think, the way a studio would go through reading a submission.

Craig: There’s just too many submissions to–

Ryan: Yes. I’m just looking for somebody that can write and that can surprise you and delight you and deliver complex ideas in a simple way, write great characters, write interesting scenes. Look, it would be great to fill a room with the “five-tool” player across the board, but really you need a bunch of people in the room that can break story, move story along in the room, and be tireless in just pitching, pitching, pitching. Then you need a few draft writers. It’d be great if you had all draft writers, but you need a few people that can write a draft that then you can rewrite. Because in most cases, you’re going to want to go in and–

Craig: You have to do what you do.

Ryan: Yes. Just to put it in the voice of the show. Also, at some point, you’re just in production, and there’s budget and actor notes coming in and whatever, and you just have to take over and do it. At first, I was trying to just basically draft the 1927 New York Yankees.

Craig: You’re right. [laughs]

Ryan: Then I got much more easy on myself after that, where it’s just trying to find, “This writer has a ton of experience. This writer’s done a show like this before. This writer knows– I have this writer, this writer, Ti Mikkel, in the room, who is like a scholar of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Craig: A lore master.

Ryan: Yes, exactly.

Craig: Right. You need some lore masters. How do you determine who your drafters are? Do they all know at the beginning, or do you– as you break the story, you go, “Okay, I’m going to have you write a script, and you write a script”?

Ryan: Yes. They reveal themselves through the writing process. I will say, I was very lucky in both cases. On Colony, I had this wonderful writer that I worked with, Wes Tooke. He was the most senior-level person in season 1, and then just became my writing partner throughout. This is the way I’ve pursued my shows from there. It’s just something that works really well for me to have a senior writer who, essentially, we do everything together because the show is so busy. It’s you and me. Then on House of the Dragons, it’s Sarah Hess, who, infuriatingly, her first job was on Deadwood with David Milch.

John: Find Sarah.

Ryan: She had gotten her MFA in, I think, dramatic writing. She just thought that writers’ rooms were the brilliant, uber-genius writer would just lie on the floor in the writers’ room and then just dictate Shakespearean dialogue to everybody, and you’d furiously write it down. She had very different experiences after that. She worked on House and Orange Is the New Black. She’s amazing. For me, once I had that, then it’s like everything else is a bonus. I had that with Wes on Colony. People would come in and out of the room, but Wes was with me all three seasons.

Then with Sarah, we’ve had a similar experience. There was a lot of turnover after season 1. Actually, one of those writers, Ira Parker, went on to create A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. A terrific writer and actually tried to get him to come help us produce season 1, but it was COVID, and they were trying to have children. He’s like, “I’m afraid to come to Europe.” It worked out great for him and great for the franchise. Now, in season 3 to season 4, we basically have the same writing staff.

Craig: Yes. The story of showrunning is you’re surrounded by thousands of people who are desperate to help you, and almost all of them are hurting you. [laughter] They don’t even know it. They’re trying. They want to help. They’re just something’s wrong in what they’re doing, and it’s hurting. Then, when you find somebody who wants to help you, who helps, you cling to that person.

John: Do not let go.

Ryan: Do not let go.

John: Yes. Craig, I’m realizing a meta thing that’s happening here is you’re asking very questions about how to run a writer’s room and stuff like that. Craig, we’ve talked about this on the show so many times, and a lot of listeners are probably voicing this. It’s because it’s usually episodes that I’m just talking to a showrunner, where you’re not here. We’ll put together a playlist of just me asking these questions because every showrunner has similar but different answers. I’m thinking about Jackie Schaffer talking about how she casts a writer’s room.

Basically, she knows what she’s really strong at, and she knows what she’s lacking in terms of what she needs for herself to have the best chance at making this show. Who are the writers that she’s able to bring in, and who can help her in her weaknesses? Both as writers, but also, this is what I’d like to talk to the writer about, is that what you need in the room, because it’s great to read these writers, but then you meet with them, and then you do the background checks. You must be thinking about how is this going to gel in the room and how much are you physically in a room together?

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I was like, “What does that mean? How are we going to get home?” They were like, “No, you can go to that airport. Just don’t go into any of the other airports.” We just got in a closed-air van with everybody breathing on each other and drove around and did scouts that way. We were able to be in person. We weren’t forced– because by the time the season 2 room came around, everybody was vaccinated and had to be vaccinated to be around. Then we got on. It was a very old school room, corkboard and cards.

I like the physical satisfaction of finishing an episode and being able to put all those cards together in a neat little binder stack and taking them off and putting them on and moving them around on the board. I like all that sensory stuff.

John: What would be on a card for this? How many words is on a card? Is it just describing a scene? Is it describing a beat? What does a card look like in this big writer’s room corkboard?

Ryan: It’s usually beats, but a beat usually is a scene. In the way that we break TV, Rhaenyra does a thing. Daemon brings Rhaenyra her crown, everybody kneels to her. That sort of thing. Because you want to be able to read it from wherever you’re sitting in the room. The writer’s assistant sits there and keeps all of them cataloged. Then writes all the bullets that are informing the scene beneath it. We really try to break everything out as detailed as possible. When the writer sits down with the outline, they know basically all the slug lines that are going into the script, the order that they’re going in, at least on that first pass.

Then here is what the scene is about. This is where it begins. These are who are in it. This is where it ends. This is the dramatic experience that we’re taking the audience through in this scene. This is whose POV it is, et cetera.

John: How long is the outline that the writer is going off with?

Ryan: We give them a room break, essentially. The writer’s assistant has a room break outline. That’s maybe, I don’t know, maybe six, seven, eight pages. Then they come back with, like, a 10- to 13-page sort of Microsoft Word, not final draft, but like a prose.

John: A plan.

Ryan: Yes. It’s like putting flesh on the skeleton. That’s a layer of flesh. Then the first draft is a layer of flesh. Then you just keep concentric circles of detail.

John: When that outline draft comes back or when the first draft comes back, is that a thing that is discussed in the room or is that there’s just a thing between you and the writer? What happens with that draft?

Ryan: Sometimes. It just depends on, unfortunately, with the way this particular show is made, and Craig knows this, I’m never doing one thing at one time. Everybody thinks that because Craig and I make shows that take 2 years between seasons, they imagine that there’s like 6 months of work and then it’s 18 months of us just like walking our dogs and just thinking. Thinking of ideas and all that.

Craig: Oh, that sounds nice.

Ryan: Yes. It’s Fallujah the whole time. We are usually breaking story in that phase while we’re in the teeth of the first cuts and posts. I have two offices in London, and I just run between them. It depends on what’s going on at the moment. Half of my day goes to posts. Half of my day goes to meeting with the writers. Generally, what we do is everybody reads the draft, but then it’s Sarah and I reading it, taking a meeting between the two of us, making sure that we’re going to give cohesive notes together to the writer, sitting with the writer, giving them notes, and then sending them off.

At the end, I like to “Okay, here’s where we are with all the scripts.” Sarah and I have done a pass, or I’ve done a pass, or Sarah’s done a pass. It’s gone into the network. “Here’s the first two episodes. Here’s the first four. Let’s get together and talk about them. Does anybody have any concern?” We do a lot of that, but I know in the network model, there is a lot of the whole room reads the scripts. There’s notes, especially in comedy and things like that, where looking for better jokes and punch-through things and all that.

John: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, like an Aline classic, she would project it on the wall and just go through line by line and look for all jokes and things like that. That’s a very classic way to do that. Because you are preparing to shoot this show and you’re probably shooting multiple episodes at once and you’re cross-boarding, it’s just not realistic to do all the times.

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Ryan: No. All of the scripts have to be done. Season 4, we have essentially written already. HBO will have all of the drafts this summer, first drafts. Our first drafts that we’re choosing to share with the network, so it’s probably the sixth draft. We won’t start production until early next year. Early 2027 because the schedule is such a Jenga tower. Everything is scheduled to set and location and all that. The schedule affects the budget and all that. My producer actually has to sit with all of this stuff this summer and build it into a schedule and a plan, and when we’re going to be in this country, when are we going to be in this country.

Craig: You sure you don’t want to do what I do?

John: Oh my God, Craig.

Craig: Why don’t you do what I do? It’s so much more interesting. [laughter] Don’t have all your scripts written. Just have a plan for the season. Write three scripts. Start shooting. Know that you have six more scripts to write while you’re shooting and directing. It really, I’m telling you, it keeps you alive.

John: Yes, that spark.

Craig: Do that.

Ryan: I have such anxiety that the very idea of that would just paralyze me. I am a–

Craig: Guess what? I have that anxiety too. [laughter] It’s still this way, but this is why, even though– yes, John’s right, there’s been many showrunners on. There are certain stock questions that I suppose a showrunner will be asked about rooms, but I particularly go, “Okay, here’s a guy who makes a big fantasy epic at HBO.” If all things go well, my next show is going to be a big fantasy epic at HBO.”

Ryan: You’re going to be doing one of those.

Craig: I’m really interested in this. [laughter] You have all the scripts done before you start shooting, which sounds like a dream to me and probably a dream to everybody.

Ryan: We, of course, rewrite while–

Craig: Naturally.

Ryan: You’ll rewrite a scene. You’ll realize you need a scene, and then you can make little moves.

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Ryan: I just go for as much a kind honesty as much as possible. I think there are showrunners that don’t address it at all, and then that’s weird. I think there are people that try to address it and soft-shoe it, and then they read the draft, and there’s not a line in it that they’ve written. I just try to have an honest conversation with the writers. It’s like, “Look, it’s a very specific world. It’s a very specific syntax. I’m weird and specific myself. This is what I had to do. Read it. If you want to talk about it, we can talk about it.”

Craig: Makes sense.

Ryan: Also, I have Sarah, which is awesome because a lot of times I’m doing the pre-production stuff and whatever, and she’s doing the “Can you please do this scene or do a scene where this thing happens?”

Craig: Can you send me Sarah, please? Can I have her now?

Ryan: Now, Craig, actually, she’s in an HBO deal.

Craig: Oh, interesting. That means she’s literally free to HBO. I understand what you’re saying. Interesting.

Ryan: She’s available in a year.

Craig: No. What about you leave her there and you come over with me?

Ryan: Dude, I want to do that as my next job. I want to be the number two. I want to be the right hand. Where like, “What can I do? How can I be your hero where I can go home and sleep at night?”

Craig: I have talked about this with Justin Marks a bit.

Ryan: Not get balder.

Craig: Yes, exactly. Justin is making Shogun season 2 while we’re making The Last of Us season 3, and his offices are right below ours in the same lot.

Ryan: Oh, nice.

Craig: Every now and then, we just walk over and complain to each other about our lives, which is great. There is this strange desire to either, yes, not be in charge, or their fantasies about just being murdered. [laughter] Then you don’t have to finish.

Ryan: It’s a dark place.

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John: Yes. We should talk about it. The naval battle is just like, come on. Thank you.

Craig: I watch this, and here’s my curse. I am enjoying this thing, and I am in awe of this thing. Then there’s this third part of my mind that’s like, “Oh, no, the meetings. The amount of meetings.” Just for that shot, there were meetings. I just feel for you.

John: Which scenes actually have to be on the water versus which things are going to be just blue screens? Just like, ugh, yes.

Craig: When he falls through, the special effects guys are like, “We can practically have the wood go, or do it–” It’s like there’s four million effing meetings. It is exhausting. That episode looked like there were many meetings.

Ryan: Yes. We stole it from original Game of Thrones, but original Game of Thrones called it Game of Meetings because that was what pre-production was.

Craig: Worst novel ever.

Ryan: We’re House of the Meetings. Yes, you have your eight episodes, and then each set piece that’s that size, like the Battle of the Gullet, and we have a number of those this season, those become episodes unto themselves. They have their own production meetings. Their own office staff that follows them around and notes them. Even with that, as you know, you can’t be in multiple places at a time. Sometimes you’re off in a different country filming that day, and because prep continues all the way through the production, that was first up. Luckily, we did all of that before we started. We did the prep for it before we started shooting. It’s a lot.

Craig: It’s intense. It’s intense. So much of what is difficult about making a show like yours is that you have the work of putting this down on paper. I presume you have the same experience I have that the more you do this, the more you realize you can’t put enough detail on the page. Every time you write a little extra detail, you save yourself a meeting, but you can’t make a 900-page script. You’re looking for that balance, and then there is this brutal process of, “Okay, how are we going to do this?” Sometimes it gets in my head when I’m writing, where I’ll start to write something and go, “Okay, then how are we going to do this, and how many of me–” Then I’m like, “No.”

John: No. That’s not your responsibility.

Craig: You know what? I get one chance to write my draft, and everybody gets it, and people go, “Wow.” Then someone goes, “We can’t do it.” Then I’m like, “Okay, now we can discuss what we can and can’t.” I wonder, as you’ve gone along, in response to budget realities and just the logistics of doing things, has that leaked back into the writing process at all?

Ryan: For sure, because I just want to save myself time. We do a lot of breaking of the big set pieces. We try to break them out ahead of time in a way that you want to preserve that creative experience. Going back to me as the 12-year-old, I am one of those weird writers that actually still really enjoys sitting in front of Final Draft. It’s actually my happy place within the craziness of making this show. It’s probably because I just get to be alone, and it’s the only place where I’m not being asked the question.

I do enjoy that kind of monastic pursuit because it’s such a small facet now of this massive thing that takes two years to make. You really only write a first draft for, I don’t know, a few weeks out of that entire two-year cycle. Just because it’s so complicated, we try to actually break it out in the room first, and then talk about production methodology, and “What is this?” and talking with my producer. My producer and production designer are basically on, they take a few months off during the teeth of post, but they’re basically on 18 months out of the 2-year cycle.

They’re very accessible, so I can talk to them about, “Is this a thing that we can make? Is this a thing that you think we can do?” Figuring out that stuff in advance. Of course, you rewrite it a million times as you get into the making of the show. With the Gullet, we did this, Loni Peristere, the director who’s actually a neighbor of yours right now, because you’re in Vancouver, right?

Craig: Yes. Not physically at the moment, but two weeks from now, yes, back to Vancouver.

Ryan: Yes. He’s up working in Vancouver right now, making big television. He and I talked about this. He had worked on the previous season, so I knew he was going to do this episode. We talked about it for months, going into it, production methodology, and all that. Then, through pre-production, he actually made this thing that we ended up calling the Supercut, which was basically a really fancy animatic that was previs with the dragons. It’s pre-animation storyboards that he had storyboard artists cut and film, almost like a Ken Burns documentary, to try to put movement into the storyboard.

Sometimes it was just slug lines from the script, but just to understand the structure of the battle. Then we ended up rewriting. We found a whole bunch of this stuff, the individual ideas works, but how are we intercutting all of this so it feels like you’re building and building and building? We actually edited the sequence before we ever even made it with this multimedia thing, shared the Supercut with all of the crew so that everybody knew what we were making. Honestly, I don’t know why it took until the third season to do it.

We always have previs with the dragon sequences and all that because they need to know exactly where the dragon is, what it’s doing, because that’s how they program the moving saddle and the camera moves and all that. It’s all programmed to what’s going on in the previs. The stuff with the ships and the guys fighting on the deck, that’s stuff that you tend to figure out closer to the day when you’re actually going to shoot it. Some of it gets figured out on the day. We were able to rewrite the sequence and put in story beats, and cleverly disguised explainy dialogue, and things like that so you knew where you were going.

It was such a wonderful thing to have because otherwise I would have gone into filming that sequence. I went into filming that sequence in a total state of terror because we spent so much money on it, and everybody was waiting for it, and so much was riding on it. I knew what it was going to be in the end, and I could see it. I just knew that as long as it’s in the little video monitor, we have it and we can go make this thing. Sure enough, when I’m more clear of it, I want to go and watch the Supercut again because I’d love to see how close it is to the final thing that we did.

Craig: It’s a hell of a thing, I will say. I texted Franny, who is our collective boss over there at HBO Drama, and I was like, “Ugh. No.” We had a pretty big battle sequence in season 2. I felt pretty good about that. Then–

John: It wasn’t on the water. It wasn’t on the boats. No flying creatures.

Craig: No. Then I saw this thing. I will say we do have a sequence. It’s very different in nature.

John: Stuff’s coming.

Craig: I’ll say, you guys, really, the bar is so high. First of all, the amount of people that watch your show is just insane and remains insane, which is great because over the course of time, these big shows will start to slough viewers away, and you guys still are just absolutely crushing it. The quality of the storytelling is so evident, and also the quality of the craft, because I’m sitting there looking for bad comps. That’s all I do all day, and post, like when we get there, it’s look at one shot 500 times until it’s correct.

It was just so well done. I know how hard some of those shots are. To see it all put together so expertly, it just inspires me to do as well as I can do over in my end of the mushroom spectrum.

Ryan: Thank you.

Craig: It was a hell of an episode. It really was, and emotional.

Ryan: Yes. That’s the key of the thing. It all comes back to the script because if it’s just empty spectacle. We tried to put as much drama, tension, emotion, all those things into it.

Craig: You did.

Ryan: I have to say I’m surrounded by an incredible team. I just have an incredible team. It’s like I work with a proper British film crew, like a high-end British film crew, everybody at the top of their game. Lonnie should be directing features. He’s an incredible director, so collaborative, so patient. It really takes a whole village.

Craig: No, it takes apparently a city.

Ryan: Yes. Now everybody’s in an arms race with each other. We’re in an arms race with the original show. It’s like HBO projects are in an arms race with each other. You just keep having to push it and push it and push it. Eventually, we’re going to, I don’t know, find the singularity or something and collapse into a black hole.

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That what differentiates plants from animals, and Craig, maybe your fungi people have a sense of this too, is that plants don’t need to move anywhere. That’s why they don’t have brains. Animals have brains because we need to move someplace. The idea of moving someplace, the need to move someplace, makes you have to model the future. It has to give you deliberate action, the idea of going from here to there and actually thinking as we, as characters, think and as we, as writers, think. Really, that’s the reason why we use so many words that are related to movement.

We talk about pushing an idea forward. We talk about getting inside something, like looking at something from the outside. We move forward with something. So many of our words that we use to describe thought really come from motion. Ryan, the reason why I was thinking about you for this is that, watching your show over the last, now three seasons, you never have characters sitting down. Characters are always on their feet. People pointed that out. As opposed to the original Game of Thrones, which has a lot of chamber things where people will take a seat.

I’m pressed to think of many examples where characters are sitting in your show. There’s a couple of small council meetings where they’re there, but you keep people up and moving a lot. I want to talk about character movement, but also how character movement relates to characters thinking and characters making choices, and if they’re not moving, we can’t see the thinking behind them.

Ryan: That’s really interesting. I had never thought of it that way. It’s funny because I feel like we are a castle-bound show more than Thrones was, and maybe this is my anxiety thinking about how much we are bound to the castles. Because really, I’ve talked about this show as the original series is this sweeping epic. It’s Lawrence of Arabia. It’s pure David Lean, the whole thing. We have elements of that, but then we are more of this family saga. I’ve talked about this as a gangster epic where basically the capo de capos dies, Viserys dies in the first season, and then all of his other capos and the soldiers are fighting, and they all happen to be family. It’s this Greek tragedy gangster epic. Because it’s just based on essentially these two factions, the greens and the blacks, they are bound to their castles a lot. There’s less Western going on in this show than in original Thrones.

John: It’s a civil war within the Targaryen family, but it’s just these two houses, and you’re centered on those two places.

Ryan: Yes. The original show is figuring out who is going to be king, whereas we have two sovereigns. We have a king and a queen, and they are protected in their castles. So much of the story is based around them and what they’re plotting and doing at the time. I think it’s probably my anxiety just saying, “Well, we’re castle-bound, so we should be on the move and on our feet.”

One of the big reasons for that, thanks to the incredible resources that we had to make this show right from the very start, I’m incredibly indebted to David and Dan for making the most successful TV show of all time because it meant that we came right out of the gate with a tremendous amount of resource. We had the equivalent resources that they had in Season 5. We had coming out. We’ve built these incredible composite sets. We have multiple sets that are built on these 50,000- 60,000 square foot stages, where they are built to the walls of the stage.

The Red Keep, everything but the throne room, which is its own set, the Red Keep, you can move from room to room and film continuously, and you’re not hiding blue screens or anything like that. Of course, the directors take advantage of that. There’s a lot of steadicam. There’s a lot of movement and a lot of walking where somebody doesn’t leave the room, and you have to cut to bring them into the next room. You follow them out, and it creates this sense of movement. I’m very glad to hear you, a filmmaker, say that because it’s certainly, definitely in the DNA of what we’re making.

Craig: I like this idea. I think this is a very cool idea, that I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out exactly what the secret of consciousness is because it’s a microscope looking at itself. I do think there is something compelling about how movement underpins a lot of this. Even if you watch something where no one moves, My Dinner with Andre, no one moves, but they talk to you in ways where you are going places.

In scenes, I find where two people are sitting– and I love a good sitting-down scene. Last season, there’s a scene where Dina has to explain to Ellie she actually knows who killed Joel. Spoiler: he died. In shooting that scene, we really dialed in on when someone would lean forward. There’s a moment where she slides cookies over to her, which is like– Then micro movements become big things, but there is always some movement happening. I think this is very smart. When you’re directing, it’s almost the first thing that happens in the day because your actors come in and you just start blocking, and blocking is how are we moving? It does make a huge– I think about it too when I’m writing all the time.

John: There’s a scene I was working on yesterday where, because of stuff moving around in the script, I needed to move it from a sitting scene to a location where it was not going to be possible to sit. It’s largely the same dialogue, but it feels so different to have the characters on their feet and moving around during the scene. I had to find different ways into it and out of it because it’s just a different vibe when characters are standing at a place versus sitting in a place.

Craig: You have to look down. It’s the point of view. If you’re sitting, you can’t quite see the full-

Ryan: Got to see the map table.

Craig: Got to see the map.

Ryan: There’s lots of standing in that room for sure right now.

John: Also, we’ve talked on the show countless times, characters sitting on a table, it’s difficult to shoot. One of the great things about characters standing is that you can cover that more easily than you can if they’re actually sitting down at the table.

Craig: You still have some eyeline issues.

John: Yes, there are going to be some, particularly as characters are moving around, but it’s also more dynamic, and you could probably also stay in the wides a little longer for it too.

Craig: There’s something, too, about the notion that sitting implies a temporary safety. The person you’re with, you are safe. This is a break or a moment where characters are allowed to turn away from what is immediate need or immediate threat and can become a little internal.

This is why, even though I really do not personally enjoy shooting scenes where characters are on horses because they’re annoying to do– they’re really annoying. The problem is where the camera goes. It’s very annoying. It’s hard to do. Those are the best sitting scenes because they’re moving, but they’re sitting, and it is a much more interesting, safe discussion. Whereas, yes, when you’re standing, there is always the implication we might have to turn around, run, and start killing people immediately, and I like that.

Ryan: Yes. I would also say the counterpoint to that is in our sitting council scenes, and probably have more pages shot in the small council chamber in the Red Keep than any other set on the show thus far, just because it’s existed since Season 1, and there are so many multi-page scenes in there. When everybody is sitting, you can create movement in the edit by having the overlapping dialogue of the person who’s talking. You’re not watching them. You’re watching the reaction somebody else is making.

Thus, you create this sense of layering and complexity in the scene because it’s like, well, Damon’s ranting about something, but it’s not necessarily what he’s ranting about. It’s how the other people are side-eyeing each other. We’re not a cutty show, but you can, in those moments, take those big static stage scenes and bring a lot of life and movement and energy into them that way.

Craig: Yes. I like to remind myself of that when I’m shooting the first wide. It’s like, “Well, this is a school play.” It’s like, “Okay, it’ll get better. It’ll get better. It’ll get better.”

Ryan: That’s right.

John: In the show notes, I’ll put links to some of the things that I was thinking about as I was putting together this little segment. Barbara Tversky has a book called Mind in Motion, which has a lot of stuff about this. There’s a neuroscientist, Rodolfo Llinas, who also talks about this. The idea that what we call thinking is actually the evolutionary internalization of movement. Thinking is basically just imagining action. It’s imagining things. It also may help explain why we can only think about one thing at a time. We should, in theory, be able to think multiple things at the same time, but you can only move one direction at a time, and so we’re just adapting that system to do our thinking. I’ll put that in the show notes for people who want to explore more.

Ryan: I love this. This is really great. I want to read this.

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Meredith Stedman: Anna writes, “John and Craig, eight years ago, I wrote in about my anxiety surrounding the decision to quit my salary job and pursue screenwriting full-time. You gave excellent encouraging advice. Since then, I’ve written several films for major studios. I can’t thank you enough. Your encouragement was exactly what I needed to hear, in some of the darkest, most imposter syndrome-fueled moments.”

John: That’s great.

Meredith: That’s very nice. “My question is about sequels. One of my films coming out later this year has commissioned me to write the sequel. I’m thrilled, but I’m finding myself oddly tripped up by the craft of reintroducing characters the audience will have already seen on screen. Do I give them a character description, even though we’ve already met them? How much context do I provide for moments from the first film that we’ll flash back to in the sequel? Essentially, how much catching up should a sequel screenplay do for the reader? How much can it assume they already know?

You’ve both written hugely successful sequels. I spent all my allowance to see Charlie’s Angels full throttle, no fewer than eight times in theaters as a preteen. I’d love to hear how you approach the craft of returning to characters and worlds the audience is presumably already familiar with.”

John: Oh, that’s a great question.

First off, congratulations, Anna. It’s interesting talking about television and then thinking about feature films because season to season, episode to episode, how much do you need to reintroduce those characters, but with a feature film, there’s no guarantee that people saw the movie before this, or they even remember the movie before this. You do need to find some way to meet those characters again in a way that is rewarding if the person knows who the character is, also makes sense if they don’t really know who the character is. It’s some degree of reestablishing the premise of who this character is, so we understand their function within this world.

It’s not the same as we can assume somebody who’s watching the second episode of Season 3 of House of the Dragon has a sense of who these people are, but you cannot do that for a feature film.

Craig: We also have this wonderful tool called previously on.

John: Previously on. It’s gorgeous.

Craig: Which is massively important.

John: Unless you’re on Netflix, which doesn’t do it.

Craig: Right. Because Netflix doesn’t want you to have ever stopped watching anything. That’s their punishment. On HBO, where there’s a week between episodes and then time between seasons, we have previously on, and it is important, even if you’re mid-season and you’re coming up to an episode and not watching it. I have a suspicion this will occur frequently for you, Ryan, in this season. There’ll be a previously on, and it will refer to the things that happened in the prior couple of episodes. Then there’ll also be one thing from season one that you throw in there because it’s going to be relevant. This is something that the nature of our show certainly will be doing that, because we are replaying, essentially, three days from a different perspective. It’s a lot easier.

In movies, you don’t have that. When you introduce these characters, since you’re specifically saying, tripped up by the craft of reintroducing characters, put them in a context that either is a familiar one for where they started. Stu is a dentist in Hangover. I think he’s back doing dentistry in Hangover 2. Meet them where they are and see that they’ve tried to return to their normal lives, but you can’t or show them having changed dramatically because of the events, but whatever it is needs to somehow be in contrast or comparison to where they were. Just have characters comment a little bit on the time that’s passed.

There should be some bit of overlap, some little piece of something that, even though a movie professes to have wrapped everything up by the end. Introduced that really there was one little thing, one little flappy bit that wasn’t wrapped up. Have that be your way into some of these characters so that not only are you meeting them with some context, but you’re also beginning to imply why this sequel needs to exist, which certainly isn’t because the studio wanted to make a lot more money. That would be crazy. That would just be silly.

John: No, that never happens.

Craig: No, that’s not why we do them.

Ryan: I would also say, do what I do, which is go watch your favorite sequel movies and just see what they’re doing and see how those new characters are introduced. Have they jumped forward years in time? Is it the next day? How are they doing that? What are the things that you like? Then just steal it. I mean steal it in the way that you steal it and adapt it for your own.

John: I think about the Indiana Jones movies. They don’t have to fundamentally reestablish Indiana Jones, but those initial scenes with him or with any character who’s coming back need to have a quality of that original thing that’s in conversation with the first movie. People who are rewarded for remembering who that character is, but can also quickly be up to speed if they don’t know who that person is, if they know what their function is. James Bond movies are the same kind of situation. It’s like, who’s Q? Who is M? What is their function? We’re ready to go.

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What she did is actually take the AI out of it. It’s just like it makes good sense, which is she was tracking and logging her symptoms. She was doing the tests that made sense. She was analyzing them, but most crucially, she was using that analysis to figure out who are the experts who could actually maybe address this thing? Who should she actually go talk to? Because so often, I think we go to the first person who seems to be relevant, and they’re going to only answer to their limited expertise. Which, it’s just a chance to– what I like is that she felt like a protagonist in a story faced with a situation who’s doing protagonisty things and taking agency to figure out what to do next.

I would just recommend people to read this, especially if you’re facing something where, this is vague and weird, and I don’t know what this is. It may be a good place to start thinking about other ways through something.

Craig: Just to challenge the headline here…

John: Please.

Craig: Her mystery fatigue wasn’t solved by AI. It was solved by a doctor that she found through AI.

John: It was solved through her taking agency to find the right doctor to do a thing.

Craig: The doctor did it. I’m just saying that, yes, you can also say, “I’m going to take the time to research the best doctors out there with AI or without AI.” The headline is, I Solved My Fatigue with AI, the implication being AI told me, stop eating this, start doing this, and take this medicine, which it did not do in this case.

John: No, it did not. No.

Craig: Yes. The idea of, I figured out the right doctor for me through AI, that is the kind of thing that I think AI– yes.

John: Yes. I think you and I are often spoiled, and Ryan is in London right now, we have, in Los Angeles, access to all the specialists to do all the things. Craig, with your diabetes diagnosis, you were able to find the doctor who was the right person for this. Had you been in a smaller market that didn’t have that person, you could be struggling.

Craig: Exactly. Yes.

John: I’d say, yes, 10 years ago, you might be able to Google this, but would you be able to find the right path through this? I think it does help in these situations.

Craig: Yes. I can see that completely. I’m just challenging the slightly clickbaity headline there.

John: You should challenge it.

Craig: Yes. I have a game, John, again.

John: I can’t even imagine.

Craig: I’m really enjoying this one. John, you’ve played Myst, I assume. I don’t know.

John: Oh, yes. I loved Myst. Oh, my God.

Craig: Ryan’s nodding his head. Okay.

Ryan: Yes.

Craig: You’re one of us.

John: They’re trying to make a Myst series. I think it’s a really challenging series to make.

Craig: The book-based, metaphysical lore of Myst was not why I played Myst.

John: No.

Craig: Not sure.

John: Was it puzzles, Craig, that you loved?

Craig: It was puzzles. No offense to those guys, the great brothers who did those things, but the story was not necessarily– It was rather opaque and not the most compelling part of those games. There have been Myst-ish kind of things that have come along. This one is rather Myst-ish and quite stylish. It’s called Dimhaven – The Lost Source.

John: I’m clicking through the link. It looks nice. It’s at dimhaven.com.

Craig: Yes. They made Quern, which is another cool game. What I like about this one is it’s got a particular, really weird style. You arrive on an island that is in some vaguely Eastern European-ish kind of place. There’s a mystery, and you’re looking for your uncle, and stuff is happening.

What is particularly nice about this, and I find these games really struggle with this, is that they’ve tuned it to a pretty good difficulty level. They tell you, “We’re not going to hold your hand. You have to figure this stuff out on your own.”

I’ve made it past the first and second sections. I’m on to the third now. I’m really enjoying it. It plays fairly well on the Steam Deck. It’s not really great on the Steam Deck. There’s some funky stuff. I’m so happy by having a game four inches from my stupid eyes that I’ll deal with the Steam Deck issues. It’s on Steam, so you can play it on anything, really.

John: I’m looking at the Steam page here. It looks like it’s also playable on the Steam clients for PC and for Mac as well.

Craig: Exactly. Yes. It would be preferable to play it probably on those than on the Steam Deck.

John: On a desktop. Yes?

Craig: Yes. You can play it on a desktop, exactly.

John: Then, of course, we’d have– I’ve been installing a game on my computer, which I’m not allowed to do. Therefore-

Craig: Why? Huh?

John: -if I have a game on my computer, Craig, I’m going to play this game on my computer rather than doing the writing I’m supposed to be doing. That’s why. Games are for iPads for me.

Craig: All work and no play, John.

John: Ryan, do you have something to share with us, a one cool thing?

Ryan: I do. John, I know you’re very techie, so I’m sure you’ve brought up VPNs before, but I have a very specific VPN thing that I uncovered over the last year. I’ve lived in London since 2020, so a lot of the things that I like and enjoy, sports in particular, have been taken away from me. NHL hockey is very hard to follow when you’re living in London. There’s also time issues. I haven’t seen a Super Bowl in six years. I haven’t seen an Oscars in six years. That’s a separate thing. I’m sure there are others that work.

I use this Nord VPN, and I actually put it on my Apple TV. For anybody that’s also marooned in another place where you can’t get the things that you want, it’s very easy to toggle on, toggle off. Actually, I used it for a year to access HBO Max, because HBO Max just launched here two months ago.

Craig: It used to be Sky.

Ryan: I could not bear to watch our shows on Sky because they put commercials in it, and they compress it and crush it to death. It was just very depressing to me.

Craig: Yes, they do.

Ryan: Peacock, Paramount+, the other things that aren’t yet available here in the UK, it defeats the things that– Look at it. I’m not stealing these things. I’ve subscribed to them. I’m just not in a locale where you can get it.

Craig: You’re busting the geo fence.

Ryan: Exactly. It sits on my Apple TV. Turn it on and off. It’s been great for watching sports.

John: That’s great.

Ryan: MLB is really the only thing that doesn’t like it, but MLB you can actually get over here with the MLB app. I’ve figured out everything other than the time problem of the Super Bowl starts at 1:00 in the morning.

Craig: I use it because I’m in Canada, and a lot of stuff gets geo-fenced out of Canada, including HBO, which, up there, they don’t have HBO Canada yet.

Ryan: I didn’t know that.

Craig: It’s Crave.

John: Crave, yes.

Craig: Then I got a Crave subscription, so you know. Sometimes, I’m like, “What did we do in that scene?” I’m like, “I can’t f– Just go on HBO Max and put– Okay. Crave.” What’s annoying about our production facility is that their whole WiFi IT thing prevents any VPN from being used.

Ryan: Oh, correct.

Craig: We can’t do it at work. Yes, when I’m at home, and I want to watch something on HBO Max, absolutely. NordVPN, that’s the same one I use. I just put myself in Los Angeles and off and running.

Ryan: Great. Then, actually, HBO Max, now that they’re available here, it’s different content based on where you are, so you can toggle between them.

Craig: Oh, that’s cool.

Ryan: I had not seen Chernobyl. I was alone last summer because we were shooting, so my family went away. I had not seen Chernobyl since it came out. I was like, “I’m going to fire up Chernobyl again.”

John: Feel good.

Craig: Let’s feel depressed again.

Ryan: HBO Max, Europe did not have it, and why would they?

Craig: Which surprised me because I was like, “It’s a European story. Why would they not have it?”

Ryan: Right. It was just so strange to me. I was like, “Okay.” I toggled back, and then I found it.

Craig: I wonder if the reason is because it was a Sky co-production. Sky, in fact, paid more for Chernobyl to be made than HBO did.

Ryan: How interesting.

Craig: I wonder if in the split that became something that-

Ryan: They got in the divorce?

Craig: They got in the divorce.

Ryan: Interesting.

John: Yes.

Ryan: Crazy.

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Craig: Supposedly.

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Eh.

John: Our intern is Lauren Loesberg. Our outro this week is by Matthew Chilelli. He’s dusted off his Game of Thrones outro.

Craig: Oh, nice.

John: I think he added some drums because there’s a lot of new drums in your music there. I love it very much. Also, great, I really like the tapestry, the embroidery intro now. It’s great.

Ryan: Yes, yU+Co is the maker of our title sequence. They’re incredible. Love those guys.

John: Good stuff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the one 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. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. If you buy it in London, there, it’s a narrower book, but it’s the same content.

Ryan: Yes. Learn something, right?

John: Learn something. Absolutely. Stop watching Chernobyl and read a book.

Ryan: Seriously.

John: You can find clips and other helpful videos 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 us at Cotton Bureau. The show notes with all the links to things we talked about today are in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers. Craig, why do you love our premium subscribers?

Craig: Well, John, they help pay for all of our wonderful people, including our producer, and our editor, and our equipment.

John: Our intern. Our paid intern.

Craig: Our intern, our paid intern, and of course, the fees that are required to host the show. When all is said and done at the end of the year, if there’s a little bit left over, charity.

John: Charity, yes. We’re supporting the Entertainment Community Fund and other great work here in Los Angeles.

Craig: Basically, we’re angels.

John: That’s what it is. Nobility.

Ryan: Good people.

Craig: We’re saints.

John: Saints.

Craig: I can’t even say it without laughing.

John: You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on, dragons. Ryan Condal, an absolute pleasure talking with you about your show. Congratulations, and keep doing it.

Craig: Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan: Thank you, guys.

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Craig: Some of them have ridiculous underbites that need some sort of-

John: Orthodontist.

Craig: -oral maxillary surgery.

Ryan: Sheepstealer actually just had a blog post about how AI solved his underbite.

John: Oh, good. That’s nice.

Craig: Finally, because it found him a great underbite doctor.

John: What I love about dragons, as I said in the intro, is that they are universally known and discussed within our minds and our consciousness, but of course, they were never real. There’s just so many varieties of them. These are not talking dragons, but of course, we had talking dragons from early fantasy, from Smaug going forward. The dragons in your show, they function as weapons of mass destruction. You’re always concerned about who has a dragon and who doesn’t have a dragon. They changed everything we know about land combat, sea combat, air combat. The only defense against the dragon is another dragon, except that there’s also giant grappling hooks-

Craig: Grapnel.

John: -and crossbows that people have to be prepared with. Talk to us if you could about how you think about a world that has dragons in it and how that world would have to function differently because dragons exist.

Ryan: Well, what is unique about our show versus what Game of Thrones had is there were no dragons in that world. It’s the reason that we’re telling this prequel story is because we want to understand where Daenerys is when we find her in that first episode, and why the great have fallen. This is the beginning and the end of the dynasty because they lost their superpower, and then they became just like everybody else.

In her world, dragons return for the first time in 150 years, 130 years. In our world, they are an existing part of the ecosystem. There’s this whole dragon economy, dragon infrastructure. That was really fun to design, and I felt like that was the thing that, yes, we’re doing the sequel prequel to Game of Thrones. Of course, we are very happy to be drafting behind that particular indicar, but you also have to have your own reason to exist, and you have to find ways that this world is very different.

We find the Targaryens at the height of their power, the richest, the longest period of peace in the realm’s history, because they are so powerful and because they have so many dragons. That means there’s a dragon pit and a dragon mount, and these structures that are built to house them. Then there are dragon keepers. There’s this monastic order of people who take care of them and train them. There are saddles, which Daenerys never had on Drogon, or Viserion, or Rhaegal. All of these things fit into our world very specifically. All that stuff was really fun to design.

Even going into incredible levels of detail, we were like, “Well, how do you mount a saddle to a dragon?” I guess it could just sit up there, and you just put it on really tight. Then you’re doing, well, with the reins, you’re not putting a bit in the dragon’s mouth to steer them, so how are you steering them? We actually crafted this whole story where when they’re very young, the ones that are born in captivity, essentially, they have this hardware that is basically surgically implanted into them to mount the saddles to and then to mount the steering implements to.

Their armor heals around it as they grow. Then eventually, it’s like a piercing or an implant that sits beneath their skin. When you pull on it, they learn to, that means go right or go left or dive or whatever. Then a big wild dragon like Sheepstealer doesn’t have those implements, so he doesn’t have a saddle. He’s ridden bareback, as we saw. The difference between a wild dragon and a domesticated Targaryen dragon, fancy purebred dragons.

Craig: The wild dragon is an asshole.

Ryan: Yes. Well, Craig, he was minding his own business. Then this woman got in his kitchen, claimed him, and then rode him home and then took him into the Battle of Trafalgar. He was reacting to-

Craig: He did what you’d do.

Ryan: -the stimulus that he was there. He was not doing anything bad. He was protecting himself, protecting the rider. That’s the danger– If you had jumped on the back of a grizzly bear and ridden it into your-

Craig: Then who’s the asshole? Is what you’re saying.

Ryan: -nephew’s birthday party, you’ve got to expect that there are going to be some kids that are not going to have a good time.

Craig: There is a very funny scene where, as the bear is eating children, you’d stay on the bear, and you’re just like, “Stop it. Stop. No. These are good kids.” The bear just keeps eating.

John: It’s a very dark sequel to Paddington there.

Craig: I’m curious, as you explore the morphology of dragons, and I think a huge underbite is a fascinating thing to do, and you can see how, like in the animal kingdom, there isn’t as much uniformity as we might expect, but there is a general shape and style to these dragons. I think it’s perfect. Meaning, if I were to, say, be doing a show where there might be dragons, which I might be–

John: Might be happening.

Craig: Might be happening. My initial instinct is to say, “Let’s hold back on the dragons.” Because, at this point, it’s going to be tricky to create dragons that don’t feel like Westeros dragons. We have this general platonic sense of what a dragon is. They got it down pretty good. I’m curious if you guys have ever thought, what if we built an entirely– is there a different kind of dragon, or something like that, a worm, where you get the weird cousin of a dragon?

Ryan: Yes, we might have something like that coming down the pike. That’s where we get to every season, is there has been dragon growth from seed of the season in terms of either new ones or just the number. Just introducing new ones, or there’s a birth or whatever. The dragons, they’re great fun. They do everything you ask them to do, which is one of the great–

John: They hit their marks.

Ryan: Yes, they hit their marks. They take direction very well.

Craig: Don’t complain.

Ryan: Yes, that’s right. They don’t take lunch breaks.

John: A question for you about conception of the dragons within the world. They’re magic in the sense that they feel real within the world, and yet if we stop and think, nothing that big could actually fly. It doesn’t actually fit our rules of physics. How often are you thinking about how would this thing be able to turn around that quickly? How often can it breathe the fire? What are those discussions like? Because as the writer, you must be making those choices, but then as you’re seeing shots come together, you’re like, “Ah, does that actually make sense?” Talk to us about what you’re thinking about the in-world reality of dragons.

Ryan: Yes, and we try to keep it really real. That’s the wonderful thing about Game of Thrones is that everything just feels real. It’s real with about 15 degrees of fantasy, which is what you need. That’s why people read the books and come and watch the show. We try to keep it very real. I remember David Hancock, one of our executive producer-writers on the show, referred to them in Season 2 when we were planning, mapping out the show as big stinky war planes. They need fuel, so they need to eat.

This has actually became a thing where we had this thread in Season 2 that some of the pressures of the war and the scarcity are actually caused by the dragons because people are– now that they’re really active, because a lot of times they’re in this kind of torpor, hibernative state where they’re not taking in a bunch of energy, but when you’re taking them out and flying them and burning things with them all the time, they need more sheep to eat and more goats and more cows. That means the people don’t have those to eat, and they were being requisitioned by the crown.

The way all of that stuff swirls in the ecosystem, and they need rests. We made a point at some point about Vhagar needing to– it was so big that with every movement that she makes, she then also needs an equal amount of rest to restore herself. Vhagar is so big that she can’t even fit in the dragon pit anymore. She’s actually outgrown even the crazy-sized human structures that we’ve built. She’s the one dragon that outgrew captivity.

We talk about all that stuff all the time, and trying to make them sentient magical fantasy beasts that are also just real animals at the same time. We try to walk that line all the time. Grizzly bear at the nephew’s birthday party, that’s where a Sheepstealer, he’s mystically bonded to Rhaena. Then also does this very understandable wild animal thing afterwards.

Craig: He couldn’t tell those people apart.

Ryan: Yes.

Craig: He just couldn’t tell them apart.

Ryan: He doesn’t know sales.

Craig: No.

John: The mystically bonded thing is an important aspect that was established because with Daenerys in the first season, she was the mother of dragons, and then it was the fire that– there was a whole thing that made sense why she could. A plot point that becomes very important is, well, who can actually ride these dragons? There is a mystical, magical thing that is part of that.

Craig: It’s in their genetics.

John: Yes. It’s genetics. It’s some magical thing that’s happening through it. It’s the force. It’s a thing that actually connects the rider to the dragon, which I find really interesting. That’s why, as we see Sheepstealer in this moment, who’s raised outside of this space, we wonder whether is he actually able to understand her or is she just interacting with a wild animal that seems-

Craig: I got to tell you, that feels like a story that might go somewhere. That feels like an interesting narrative challenge that will end up with either a satisfying or tragic result, or both.

Ryan: Possibly both. The whole notion of the bond with the rider is something we’re really interested in. It’s not something you want to overexplain because the characters in the show, they understand it to a degree.

John: You don’t want to get to Midichlorians. Yes.

Ryan: Yes, exactly. Only binds to one rider at a time. The bond is for life, either the life of the rider or of the dragon. Beyond that, we don’t– Some people have stronger bonds with their dragons than others. Just like Anakin Skywalker was a much more powerful Jedi than many of the other Jedi around him. We play with all that stuff. It is that walking the line of, you want that 15% of mysticism, but then you want the rest of it to feel really grounded and real. When a dragon lands, you want to see this big bit of earth turn up. When they jump off a cliff to fly, you want to see them immediately swoop down.

John: Fall first down.

Ryan: Because you want to see gravity take over. You don’t want to just have the sense that their wings are just guiding them.

Craig: They’re weightless.

Ryan: They’re flying via some internal anti-gravity device. It’s not that. They need to eat. As Viserys warned us in Season 1, the idea that Targaryens control the dragons is an illusion. Viserys has had the strong belief that we control them enough for it to be dangerous. That was all really interesting. Then you get into the themes that they bring to the show, like mutually assured destruction. Craig has also experience working with nuclear power and how dangerous it is.

Of course, the characters don’t have the term mutually assured destruction, but they understand that if I deploy my dragon to overtake a castle, I could burn the castle to the ground and destroy everybody that I’m trying to get to bend the knee to me as my subject. Or on a different level, on a chess game level, this is my queen. It’s the most powerful piece I have on the board, but I don’t want to expose my queen such that I’m going to have my queen killed, because then there’s probably some statistic of once the queen is off the board, most chess games go in the other direction.

We’re playing with that thing too, and it’s fun. Then also, they can be really confounding to the writers at times because they are so all-powerful. There’s a lot of dragon math going on all the time. Who’s where? How quick can they get to where? Why can’t this problem just be solved with a dragon?

Craig: There you go. Why exactly aren’t we just sending the dragon to burn the thing? That is tough because you want to preserve the right to be awesome. When a dragon shows up, those wonderful, dramatic moments where a dragon shows up and just obliterates everybody. You love those, but every time you use one of those, you are telling the audience, “We can do this.” It is an interesting narrative to figure out, like to put these limitations on, they need rest, they need food. Having the rider go out and do that exposes the rider. Restraint in the use of these big, stinky warplanes makes sense.

Ryan: Then there’s also the math of everybody’s terrified of Vhagar because that’s the big one that, until Rhaenyra claimed Vermithor and Silverwing with Ulf and Hugh, or Statler and Waldorf, that was the terror of, I don’t even know if Syrax and Caraxes, my dragon and Damon’s dragon, together could take Vhagar. Maybe they could. We would certainly give her a bad time, but we might not also be able to overtake her.

Craig: They don’t do great with boat anchors.

Ryan: Yes. That’s very true.

Craig: It’s their one Achilles heel, boat anchor.

Ryan: That was the bummer for Rhaenyra with the dragon seeds not– She signed up these guys to be her air force, and they don’t understand the chain of command and what following an order is, because if they had done that, either Vhagar would be dead or they would have come to the Gullet. Because those things aren’t taking down Vermithor. He would have ripped the ship out of the water.

In the writing, that’s some of the work that we have to do to make these things engaging and compelling and also suspenseful because in the book, Vermithor and Silverwing and Seasmoke do actually show up at the Gullet. Stay tuned. I think this is airing after this has happened, but they do show up at the Gullet because at the end of episode one, the Gullet’s not over. You see the cleanup going on in episode two. That’s how we honored what was in the book. If they were there, it just wouldn’t have been as suspenseful what was going on down on the ship.

It’s nice because we have a bunch of different-sized dragons, and then we have baby dragons you can’t even ride yet. That stuff is fun, and that’ll come into the narrative as well. We get to play with a bunch of the different toys, but there are some times where you’re just sitting there staring like, “Why doesn’t the dragon just solve this whole problem?”

John: I do like that you mentioned that one of the fundamental things that it gives you is the power of flight and the power to move a character from one place to another place.

Ryan: Incredible.

John: Because one of the challenges of a medieval-ish world is that it’s just hard to get places, and dragons solve that. It’s the transporter of Star Trek.

Ryan: Or you just get yourself a good teleportation…

John: Craig, I was going to say, Last of Us is so much about just how hard it is to get a place. Did you consider adding some dragons? It would have made your show significantly better.

Ryan: If you can get a bloater early on and saddle it.

John: Just float it like a balloon.

Ryan: Just saddle a bloater and ride it.

Craig: We’re stuck with horses.

Ryan: Is it possible we could get a fungus dragon? Could we merge our worlds and see what happens when–

John: Love it.

Craig: In Baldur’s Gate, you absolutely could because in Baldur’s Gate, there’s a race called the Myconids. This is in D&D lore, and the Myconids are sentient fungal beings. When they defeat creatures, they absorb them into the fungal colony and turn them into fungal zombies, essentially.

Ryan: Excellent.

Craig: Well, they could do that with a dragon.

John: Absolutely, 100%. The story writes itself.

Craig: They already did that. They did that in Game of Thrones.

John: The undead dragon did happen.

Craig: Did it.

Ryan: That’s fair.

Craig: Oh, but there are great undead dragons, though. There’s the whole world of undead dragons in D&D.

John: In the Umbral Moths, the Shadows.

Craig: You got dracolich.

John: Oh my god.

Craig: Run. You see one of those, run.

John: Illithid dragons, come on. That’s the good stuff.

Craig: I don’t think there’s an illithid dragon. I think–

John: No, I’ve seen them.

Craig: Really?

John: I’ve seen them where a master brain, one of the Great Brains, takes over.

Craig: Oh, the Elder Brain?

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: It makes an illithid dragon?

John: Yes.

Craig: I haven’t seen a picture of them.

John: I’m insanely jealous of your next show, Craig, but I’m also so glad that I don’t have to do that, and then I get to just watch it as a fan and not stress out about.

Craig: Maybe you do have to do it. Maybe you should.

Ryan: I can get all the things that I want. I cannot be in charge.

Craig: We can line stuff up. I’m just saying.

Ryan: Let’s talk.

Craig: You know.

John: After this show, Ryan Condal is going to go off and do In Therapy, a show of two characters sitting across from each other on chairs. Love it.

Ryan: Or no chairs, John.

John: No chairs. They’re standing. It’s like a therapy, but people are standing up.

Craig: One person seats. [chuckles]

John: It’s just a monologue.

Craig: I simply–

John: He’s going to do a podcast. That’s what it’s going to be. It’s a one-person podcast.

Craig: Listen, I rarely can say to somebody, “I know exactly how you feel,” but I know exactly how you feel. You’re doing a great job.

Ryan: Oh, thanks.

Craig: Congratulations on a fantastic start to Season 3.

John: Congratulations.

Ryan: Thank you.

John and Craig welcome Curry Barker, the writer-director behind this summer’s surprise blockbuster, Obsession. It’s a rom-com, a horror film and a great example of trusting your audience.

We discuss Curry’s roots, his writing process, learning from YouTube, as well as the pressure to follow up a hit.

In our bonus segment for premium subscribers, John and Craig pose the #1 most important question for all filmmakers to consider: What will the popcorn bucket be?

Get your copy of The Scriptnotes Book and become a Scriptnotes Premium member today! For more content on the craft of writing check out Inneresting our weekly-ish newsletter about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Scriptnotes is produced by Meredith Stedman and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our Coordinator is Lauren Loesberg. Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!).

Email us at [email protected]. 

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

Craig Mazin: No, no, no, no. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 742 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome the writer-director of one of my favorite films of the summer, which has become a surprise blockbuster and the subject of countless articles.

Craig: A few think pieces here and there.

John: Yes, positing, what does this mean for the future of Hollywood? No pressure here.

Craig: No pressure at all. [chuckles]

John: The film is Obsession. The writer-director is Curry Barker. Welcome, Curry Barker.

Curry Barker: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Craig: So nice to have you here. I’m going to go a little further than you. Maybe it’s my favorite movie of the year so far.

John: Wow, that’s crazy.

Craig: It’s not that long of a year. I don’t know. It’s not that–

John: No, absolutely.

Craig: It’s really good. It’s really, really good. I just loved it.

Curry: Thank you.

Craig: Loved it.

Curry: That’s so awesome to hear that.

John: We want to talk about the movie. We want to talk about the process of getting it, but really kind of focused on the crafty things. As we said in terms of the warm-up, I’m sure you’re sick of answering a thousand questions about the blockbuster of it all. The blockbuster is wonderful, but if this movie had made $5, it’s still a really good movie that people should check out. In our bonus segment for our premium members, I want to focus on one of the most crucial things that no one is talking about in Hollywood.

Craig: Thank God.

John: It’s not IMAX, it’s not 3D, but it’s a fundamental part of the cinematic experience these days, which is the popcorn bucket.

Craig: The popcorn bucket.

John: The novelty popcorn bucket.

Craig: I saw it happening in your brain before you said it. You know why? Because we’re close.

John: Yes, that’s what it is. We’ve done this for a few years.

Craig: Very close.

John: We have a sense.

Craig: Yes, ever since the Dune popcorn bucket, it’s just been a thing.

John: Yes, it’s a thing now.

Craig: It’s a thing.

John: We will focus in on what we want for our popcorn buckets for our films. Also, going back in time, if we could create a popcorn bucket.

Curry: The potential of the popcorn bucket back in the day.

John: Absolutely.

Curry: What was the Jaws’ popcorn bucket?

Craig: How could it have been bad? What could have gone horribly wrong with a– I could definitely see an exorcist popcorn bucket where she’s barfing the– There’s so many ways to go.

John: In our bonus segment for premium members, we will dive deep into–

Craig: We’ll get there. That’s the last free popcorn bucket people get.

John: We will pick the last kernel out of that popcorn bucket.

Curry: Okay.

John: First, we have some follow-up that I will actually, I promise, tie into our discussion with Curry here. In episode 740, we talked about competence. It was a really good conversation. We were centered around this blog post by Iris Meredith, and there was a word in there which you and I had never heard of, ultracrepidarian.

Craig: Ultracrepidarian.

John: We didn’t spend enough time on that, I think. You are a person who loves words.

Craig: I do.

John: Try to figure out ultracrepidarian, what that might come from. It’s Latin.

Craig: Obviously, ultra would mean beyond or above.

John: Crepeda. Do you have any sense of crepeda?

Craig: Crepeda. I’m trying to think of other words that have– It’s C-R-E-P. There’s crepuscule, which is a red blood cell. I don’t know if that’s connected.

John: It’s not, no.

Craig: Maybe that’s Greek.

John: I don’t think we’ll get there. It’s sandal.

Craig: Oh, sure. I would not have gotten there.

John: It’s beyond the sandal, which seems really strange. Iris actually wrote in. She listened to the episode, and she wrote in, just to tell us where the origin of that is. Apparently, it comes from this painter named Apelles of Kos, who was getting criticism of how he painted sandals in his depictions of people from sandal makers. Sandal-makers are like, “You painted that wrong.” He’s like, “Okay, I’ll fix how I paint the sandals.” Then he started making notes about the legs and other things. He’s like, “No, no, no, you can focus on the sandals, but not above, beyond the sandals.”

Craig: Beyond the sandals. This is it. There’s a comic book artist — is it Rob Liefeld? — who’s infamously bad at drawing feet? Or maybe he’s really good at drawing feet. I can’t remember. There’s somebody who’s notoriously bad at feet.

Curry: It’s like my characters always have shoes.

Craig: Why?

Curry: It’s like it’s in my contract. They have to have shoes.

Craig: Even in the shower, the shoes. Ultracrepidarian.

John: Ultracrepidarian. That’s the origin of that word. The segue I want to make to is with the success of Obsession, I feel like there’s a lot of ultracrepidarians weighing in here on sort of like, they’re not just talking about the little bit of knowledge that they actually understand, but they’re trying to apply much more broadly to things beyond their actual scope of expertise. It’s nice to have the person who’s actually the expert on making the film Obsession to talk about Obsession itself. There you go.

Craig: This is better than a million think pieces about, “Everyone’s got a hot take.”

John: Everyone’s got a hot take.

Craig: You know what? I will say that one of the things that I really loved about the work is that there is an elegance to it. The idea is not complicated. In fact, almost nothing about it is complicated. It’s so simple and elegant, but it’s so interestingly done that I think the reason– I’ll do a think piece on think pieces, the reason there are 5 million think pieces is because it provokes an enormous amount of thought. It gives you space, as somebody watching, to theorize and more importantly, put yourself in the shoes of the people that are involved. I found myself being both of them.

Curry: I think I gravitate towards simple stories anyway. To me, people that would say, “Oh, this is such an idea that we’ve seen before or whatever, to me, when I got excited about this idea three years ago, I wasn’t excited about a wish-gone-wrong movie. I was excited about the version that you saw. I was like, “Oh my God, I have this idea about this crazy movie.” Even if you were just to read the logline, you’d be like, “Oh, what? We’ve seen this a million times.”

I love stories that are simple because there’s so much room. Sometimes simple is just better. It’s kind of like a magic trick. Obviously, the movie’s been out for a while, so spoiler alert, but like Megan’s death scene, right? Crazy. If that happened four times in the movie, then it’s a slasher and it doesn’t really work anymore. Because it’s all leading up to this moment, why I say it’s like a magic trick is it’s like, got you, it’s like this movie is going there. In a way that a movie that does it a bunch of times, you would watch it and be like, “The kills in this movie were just as crazy, so why was this one more effective? It’s just because it’s more simple.

Craig: You can’t kill that character more than once because it’s too good and important of a character. The more you kill people, the less important they are, and the more they are functionaries of plot. It was wonderful how under the skin we got with everyone in the film.

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Curry: Yes, I’m from a small town in Mobile. Grew up, went to high school there at Baker. I was really involved. I didn’t make good grades, but I was really involved. I was in there–

Craig: Loved extracurriculars.

Curry: I was in the acting program. I was in the marching band. I was in BH1, which was our news where we actually got a lot of editing skills in BH1. I went to acting competitions out in the States. I was constantly doing things. I even started my own film club in school.

John: Classically, you did a lot of the things you could do as a high school student, but it wasn’t like there was a giant film community in Alabama. We made Big Fish in Montgomery. We had to hire everybody from every place else to get up there.

Curry: It was non-existent, really. There is community theater out there. It’s actually kind of a Baker thing. If I wanted to act in film, I had to make it myself. I started really even editing and putting things together at a pretty young age. I think what I really got a sense for is my instincts of storytelling started growing at an earlier age that I think has really given me an advantage. I think there’s a lot of instinct with storytelling sometimes, right?

Craig: No question. There is talent, and a lot of it is connected to that. What is interesting about somebody like you, especially now, as people are coming to their own in their 20s and 30s, is that you do grow up with all the tools to make things, whereas we did not have those. A lot of times what started for us was writing. The first interaction you have with a professional writing is you read a screenplay, and you’re like, “This is what it looks like? Okay.” Can you talk about that aspect of it? There isn’t a lot of practical instruction or do-it-yourself-ishness to that.

Curry: Right. What’s really funny is I never would have saw myself as a writer. If a 12-year-old me were to look up and be like– to see me now and see that I’m a professional writer, and I did air quotes for people that are just listening.

Craig: They were implied in the way you said–

Curry: Yes, right. My 12-year-old self would just not believe. Would be like, “No, you’re not. You’re not good at English class, and you don’t understand grammar too well.” It just didn’t seem like it was in the cards for me to be a professional writer. It’s really about storytelling and the human raw– My bread and butter is conversation and how it can get uncomfortable. Also, I learned a lot from– I did the Aaron Sorkin MasterClass. That was a big thing for me.

Craig: Finally a MasterClass paid off. I’ve been waiting for one of these Masterclasses to pay off. Aaron Sorkin, we salute you.

John: Tell me about the Aaron Sorkin MasterClass. This is an online class where it’s several lesson.

Craig: By the way, this podcast is brought to you by the Aaron Sorkin MasterClass. We’re not getting paid anything. This is outrageous.

John: Tell us about that.

Curry: This thing called MasterClass came out. It’s like this app you can download. There’s a director MasterClass. There’s all these MasterClass. I think when I moved out here, someone suggested, maybe it was even my dad, was like, “You should do the Aaron Sorkin MasterClass,” or something. I just started taking it. I learned so many rules about storytelling.

John: It’s great. It feels like, at some point, someone needs to sit you down and tell you these fundamental things or at least point them out in ways that maybe you could have discovered over the course of years. It’s nice to have someone do that.

Curry: Totally.

Craig: The great mystery and magic of it all is that you can– A lot of people have taken the Aaron Sorkin MasterClass. I always feel like, even with our podcast, we’re really broadcasting to some group of people that we’ll be able to convert, which is not everyone. You found it one way or the other. You found what you needed, understood it almost immediately. It was like right into your bones and then, boom, out came something great.

Curry: It’s an instinct thing, really. It’s like you understand that if something doesn’t feel right, it’s probably because it wasn’t paid off correctly. Or if something doesn’t feel satisfying or– What is it that you want to feel fully satisfied at the end, but then also the art of knowing what doesn’t need–

John: To be paid off.

Curry: What doesn’t need to– That’s really hard. Sometimes I just want to ask other people. If I’m writing something, I’m like, “Does this matter to you?”

Craig: Do you?

Curry: Right

John: Did you ask people?

Craig: Is that part of your process?

Curry: Yes. The thing I learned is that you’ll never get an answer.

Craig: There is no answer.

Curry: Yes, that’s the problem.

John: Here’s another thing that’s actually different about how you learned versus how we learned is that you were making things constantly. Talk to us about when you first post– You’ve shot something and you’ve put online for strangers to look at.

Curry: I think the first time I ever– when I first moved out here, we were doing this show called Roommates. It was just about–

John: Who was the we?

Curry: Me and Cooper Tomlinson.

John: Who is one of the co-stars of the movie?

Curry: Yes. He’s my writing partner in crime. We do our sketch comedy show together and everything. He’s great. I’m talking week one. We met in school and we were already doing this thing called Roommates. We were just like, “Let’s make something.” We just had the bug. That was interesting. That was getting 200 views, 500 views, small things. Then the first thing that really hit it off for me, like, “Oh my God, I’m a director,” was The Chair. It was a short film I made for $2,000, which is funny enough, even more expensive than my Milk & Serial movie.

Craig: There is, and this is the burden that we share as writers of things that are supposed to be filmed. It’s different. In and of itself, there is a bit of a craft in trying to take something on the page and add a little bit of extra that maybe sometimes is not even necessary to help get them where you want it to be. Sometimes there are things that just need to be made that you won’t get it any other way.

John: That’s a real benefit, I think, your generation had is that you got the chance to experiment a lot. I’ve seen a lot of sketches you did with Cooper, and many of them are great, but I also suspect there were ones that probably weren’t great that you just didn’t [unintelligible]. It is also a luxury because when you’re making something in an afternoon, if it’s great, fantastic, it’s great. If it sucks, you don’t have to show it to the world.

Craig: I can’t take any of my shit down.

John: Whereas as opposed to a movie, the stakes are so much higher, you have to release that movie at some point.

Curry: Right. Totally. That’s so, so true. The experimental phase for me is over. It’s a scary thing. Even if I were to do a short film-

John: The spotlight will be on.

Curry: -the spotlight would be on it. It would be like, “What?”

Craig: And yet?

John: Yet the stakes are actually lower than you think.

Craig: It will all be an experiment from here on out anyway. It’s just that everyone’s staring at you now in the lab.

John: Craig and I both, I think, wish you the most successful failure at some point.

Craig: Fail out loud just as much as you’ve succeeded out loud. You have no option now anyway. Take big swings.

John: I want to point out that we’ve had smart guests who’ve come on the show who would strongly underline what you’re saying. Courtney Kemp was on recently and she was talking about how if she were starting today, she would get together with a group of friends and just shoot a bunch of stuff and learn how to do it because that’s how you do things now. Mike Birbiglia has been on the show and talking about getting a pizza and getting all his friends around to read drafts of things. That’s smart. What I think is crucial about this is it’s finding a group of people you like and you trust who are trying to do the same things. It sounds like moving from Alabama to Los Angeles was how you got that process started.

Curry: Yes. I got lucky, too. I don’t think it’s always going to happen that way to find a group of people. Going to film school, you hopefully will find people that have similar interests. I think, to me, that’s the most important part of film school is meeting people out. First of all, it gets you out here. I’m from a small town. It was an excuse to leave. It felt like–

Craig: Which film school?

Curry: It was the New York Film Academy.

Craig: New York Film Academy.

Curry: It was in Los Angeles. It got me out here. It didn’t feel like I was just on my own. It felt like at least I had something. I was going to school. I had an immediate schedule.

Craig: You had a structure.

Curry: Right. The thing I got from it the most was just the people that I met along the way. I was there for like a year.

Craig: When you decided to come out, whether it’s film school or not, I think you made a choice that a lot of people struggle with. We do advise this all the time. I feel bad sometimes because people will ask, “I live,” fill in the blank, “Billings, Montana. I really want to make it, do I have to move to LA?” No. It gets easier. Then I sometimes, I think we feel a little worried that we’re luring a lot of people who have no chance. Then I think, “But wait, we also have to lure the people who do have a chance.”

Curry: Right. I think you don’t have to worry because the people that don’t have a chance– I hate to say it like that.

Craig: There are people that don’t have a chance.

Curry: Right, but those people will weed themselves out anyway. The people that have a chance are the people that won’t give up. In that case, at least they got to see a cool city and be here for a little bit. Also, you’re right in that you probably do have to move here because it just keeps you dreaming. You have to keep dreaming. If I was at home, I would probably feel like this stuff was so far away that I would just be like, after two years, I would have given up. Being here and seeing Warner Brothers and wanting to be on the other side of that fence so bad.

John: Because when you’re in front of the cameras, it’s right by Warner Brothers. It’s across from Universal.

Craig: Right there.

Curry: I’m like, “There it is. That’s where I want to–”

Craig: Your group of friends, they’re doing stuff. It’s not like you can sit around and go, “It’s impossible.” Then a week later, three of your friends are like, “Hey, come on over and watch the thing I just did.” Now you feel like a lazy piece of shit.

Curry: Right. Exactly. It keeps you —

Craig: The culture is one of making things.

Curry: It really is.

John: Give us a sense of that first year or two in Los Angeles. You’re going to this program, you’re making a bunch of stuff. Are you also working? What was the hustle? What was the grind?

Curry: First I was in school, didn’t do anything. Then I had a job at a burger joint, and then I had a very small-time editing job, which to me felt like such a cool thing. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” It was editing these little commercials for local things, like a local little kids’ soccer team. I was getting hired to edit these things. Then I worked at Starbucks for a year-and-a-half.

Craig: Got yourself some health insurance.

Curry: Yes, right. At one point, I was working on a show called This Is Us for two years. First, I was a COVID monitor during COVID.

John: I remember that. Yes, I remember.

Craig: Hold up.

Curry: I was the person that everyone hated it. I handed the masks.

Craig: You were the COVID monitor. Everyone hated– The COVID monitor. That’s the worst job.

Curry: It was the worst.

Craig: No one likes you.

John: You were on sets.

Curry: Everyone was so nice on This Is Us. I guess I was a very ballsy guy because I would just go up to Milo or Yasu, who’s a DP, and just talk and talk and ask them questions. They were nice. They were nice enough to even give me their phone– I was sending them short films, and so crazy that they were nice enough to talk to the COVID monitor.

Craig: You know, the thing is, if you’re not crazy and you’re not boring, it’s wonderful to talk to anybody on a set. It’s cool. Every now and then you do get somebody who’s a little boring and/or crazy. People actually do want to encourage the next generation to come on up and come along, I think, in general.

John: What I’m hearing through all these anecdotes is that you just have a lot of agency. You take a lot of agency. You’re sort of like, “This is the thing I want.” You’re not asking permission. In a very kind of an appropriate way, you’re saying you’re not waiting for someone to invite you in. You’re just saying like, “Hey, can I talk to you about this thing?”

Curry: Yes, I guess so. It’s just so funny because I never would have considered myself that type of person. I’m very chill. I did have that attitude of just, “I’m doing what you’re doing. I want to–”

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Curry: Oh, that’s an interesting observation.

Craig: Do you know what I mean?

Curry: Yes.

Craig: I don’t think you could write that character that well if you’re just effortlessly alpha. Do you know what I mean?

Curry: Totally.

Craig: There’s this aspect of it. I’m curious, in your writing process, you do something so beautifully in the movie. To me, it’s very writerly. You are able to occupy two people in a scene with two people, and those two people are so wildly different. They don’t know what’s going on in the other person’s mind. They don’t even understand, really, the truth of what the other person’s saying. We watch them, and we want to be like, “Oh my God, can I do therapy for the two of you?” Not hearing each other or seeing each other.

Curry: I love it.

Craig: How do you get to that when it, because it’s just you?

Curry: I love writing dialogue where two people misunderstand each other, which is exactly what you just described. When you start from a place of wanting that, which is, by the way, just already a captivating way to write any scene, honestly, is like one person wants one thing, and the other person wants a different thing. I wanted every single character in this movie to have different perspectives.

It’s so interesting to have Sarah saying, “Nikki is taking advantage of you. She’s using her opportunity of her dad dying to latch onto you, and that’s not healthy.” It was just so crazy from what’s actually happening. What a fun thing to write, that one person has this crazy perspective, but you know as the audience that– Also, I really, really like to write from one perspective, which is Bear. You can hear what Sarah and Ian are saying, but you don’t follow them home and see their story. You stay with Bear.

John: You have a limited point of view, but we actually understand that the characters are locked to the point of view on him, which makes sense. It reminds me of Jon Favreau in Swingers. This character who we appreciate, we adore, he’s making bad choices, and we’re with him while he’s making bad choices. You set up a character in Bear who feels like he is in a romantic comedy, and yet the genre of the movie isn’t letting him be in a romantic comedy.

Curry: That’s great.

Craig: The voice message seen in Swingers is like the comedy version of Obsession.

John: It’s cringe because-

Craig: It’s cringe.

John: -we were so embarrassed on his behalf, and yet it just keeps going worse and worse. That is what’s happened with Bear up until he cracks the willow.

Curry: Yes.

Craig: Again, credit to the way you approach things because I think you never villainized anyone, really. Even what he does in and of itself, it’s not an act of crime. He’s just going, “Ah, I wish.” If it’s a crime, it’s a crime of cowardice, but there was no expectation.

Curry: Absolutely not, which is so funny, because I see people make these videos of like, “If Bear would have worded his wish differently.” Like, “I wish that I–”

Craig: Oh, [unintelligible].

Curry: I’m like–

Craig: That’s not what this is about? If only he were a lawyer, this would have worked out great.

Curry: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: No.

Curry: Or like, “I wish I had the confidence to–” which I get that, like, saying the correct thing, but it was a toy.

Craig: A toy.

Curry: He didn’t know it was going to work. That’s the whole point.

Craig: That’s the whole point. It was just this goofy set. It was almost like when he does it, it’s like, “This is how much I suck. I’m doing this.” What I appreciated was how I understood how he felt. I felt that way. I think actually everyone in the world at some point or another has experienced obsession or– what’s the wo– limerence? Is that the word that people use a lot? of wanting another person and feeling helpless.

It’s not even that you think they would want you back, you’re just scared to ask. You know they don’t. You’re lost, but you can’t seem to get out of it. Everyone’s had this feeling. It’s incredibly relatable. Also, I think maybe not everybody, but almost everybody’s had the feeling of understanding, “I think that person wants me. Eh, it’s not going to happen. How do I deal with that?” I was both of them the whole time.

John: One thing that’s so important to note here is that Bear is making a choice and Bear is kicking off the action of the movie. He’s protagonating the way you want him to start the story. Yet, you as the filmmaker are still doing the thing we always urge our writers to do is you are torturing your hero. You are making things awful for your hero. You’re building this moral staircase where he keeps making choices that are reasonable in the moment that are actually worse overall for him and for everyone else around him. To your credit, it works. We can feel your hands doing that. We’re delighted because that is also the genre. It’s the nature of the kind of story we sat down to see, which is fun.

Curry: It’s interesting to talk about it at such a high emotionally intelligent level at this point because when I first was writing it was just raw. You know what I mean?

John: Tell us about those early drafts. Tell us about what you thought the movie was as you were sitting down to start writing it.

Curry: I knew that I wanted to do some crazy things with Nikki. In The Chair short film that I did, there was this girl character who would flip from different emotions. I was like, “I want to do a movie where that’s the whole gimmick.” Then this came to me. I was like, “Oh my God, I can do that chair thing that I really liked with the girl. This can be that movie.” Something that’s really cool about this movie is that it lends itself well to being in the horror genre in a way that other ideas I have don’t, where I’m like, “Oh, where’s the scary angle?” This idea, just the obsession of something, it’s scary. It’s scary to have someone feel so strongly about you. In real life, it really is.

Craig: It was really, I thought, so smart. Even though Bear’s the protagonist, he’s the character we’re following, and so much of it is through his perspective, we do feel through Nikki like we can see, and you give her moments where she gets to come back, where we understand she’s like those people that have locked-in syndrome, which is the most terrifying thing. Now I’m with her. Now I’m just imagining the terror of what this must feel like.

On both sides of it, the desire to love someone that doesn’t love you, we all know the power of that feeling. The feeling of not being in control of yourself, we also know that feeling. If I were to write a think piece about why this movie works, it just comes down to it is a hyper-presentation of stuff we have all felt. We must feel it because it goes to what love and desire is, which are beneath our forebrains. That is where the scary stuff is.

Curry: Right. Wow, that’s interesting.

John: As you were working on this, in the writing, in the directing, and in the editing, where did you find a line between, we are in a horror space and this is a comedy? Because so much of what you’re setting up is essentially a comedy press, where this girl is so obsessed with you. That’s a comedy.

Craig: There is a Jim Carrey version of this movie.

John: Totally, yes. Where did you find moments where you had to pivot between those two?

Curry: The funny thing is that it just hums naturally for me because I’m not– When I was, I think, 17, I was still in high school, and I saw JJ Abrams say on a podcast or something, “The most successful people in life don’t take themselves too seriously.” I don’t know what it is about that statement that just stuck with me. It was like, “Whoa.” It just freed me up because I was like, “So I don’t have to take this seriously?” I know that sounds like, “You don’t take it seriously,” whatever, but don’t take the art too seriously because there’s something freeing about– You watch these horror movies that are so brute and like, “This is serious. We need to figure this out.” It’s like, but what if that was real? Then you would probably be– You would talk different. You would say–

Craig: What if that were real? I cannot tell you how often I will say some version of the following thing. “Okay, but what would really happen?” When I read somebody’s script and I’m like, “This moment is a very interesting moment, but everything that happens after that.” We do this with our– How would an actual human being respond in this circumstance?

Curry: Exactly, man. Yes.

Craig: It’s a good thing that JJ said that, and I love that you come from a comedy background, and there is something about comedy and horror that just they’re like twin siblings.

John: They both revel in being uncomfortable and just sitting in a really uncomfortable place and not letting it resolve.

Craig: Getting to squishy stuff underneath without taking itself– it shouldn’t take itself so seriously.

Curry: Here’s an example. People would think, “Oh, this is a comedy scene,” but the morning after when Bear wakes up, he’s checking his hair in the mirror. He goes up to her, and he’s like, “Let’s not do that anymore.” That’s funny, and people think it’s funny, but it’s also honest. In every horror movie, crazy things happen, and then the next day, the characters just ignore it. They’re like, “Dude, you just saw some crazy shit. Let’s talk about it out loud because that’s what you would do.”

Craig: What would you do in this circumstance?

Curry: Exactly, yes.

Craig: There are kinds of stories where everything just feels a bit elevated because of the nature of it, if it’s a fantasy or something like this. We understand that in Lord of the Rings– I always think it’s funny, when people die in a movie like Lord of the Rings, everyone should just stop and vomit. Do you know what I mean? They don’t because that’s the world they live in, and I get it. It’s fine.

Curry: Maybe you can accept in a world where war is every day and people die left and right. It’s like, “Fine.”

Craig: Yes, fine. In a story like this where I’m basically a kid and I work at a music shop and I really like this girl, even blood, anything-

John: Literally.

Craig: -is enough to shatter you. If nothing else happened except that one night, he would be in therapy about it for a while anyway. I love that you go right to that question, like, what would really happen?

Curry: It’s almost like when you ask that one question, it opens up so many genres. Now you can think about, “Oh, but what’s the version of this movie that we’ve seen 100 times? What’s the version of it where it happened in real life?” It just kind of excites you. That’s why a simple idea doesn’t scare me off. It excites me because I can think about, “Oh, but what if it’s raw and real and the reactions are–”

Craig: The more real you’re going to be, the simpler you want the idea to be. The more complicated and large the concept, I think then almost the characters start to have to drift away from grounded.

Curry: Because there’s no way to push the plot forward without them doing– You would go to the hospital. Okay, well, that’s boring. Now the rest of the movie takes place at the hospital. There’s so many things that do drag– Even this ghost movie that me and Cooper just wrote, so many times we were like, we want to do the absolute most bonkers crazy thing. It’s like, “Oh, what if we killed off this character right here? It’d be crazy.” It’s like, “Yes, but there’s con artists. They would just give up and go home and be sad.” They wouldn’t carry out the rest of the– We’re constantly thinking about that. Also, not wanting to answer anything is such a challenging way to write. Because when you’re saying to me, we understand that she’s popping into her body at this point in the movie. I never had a scene where Bear’s going to Ian and saying, “I think she’s popping back into her body.” [laughter] You just understand it. When you write that way–

John: You have to talk to people and be like, “Did you understand like this?”

Craig: For this particular movie, was there a process where after you make the movie and you cut it together, did you, for lack of a better phrase, test screen?

Curry: Oh, yes. We did a test screening with– I had just gotten with UTA, and they let us use their screening room. Hayley, the producer, put on Instagram, free movie, because we didn’t want to get friends and family. We wanted to get random people.

Craig: [unintelligible]

Curry: It was just us doing it. It wasn’t some super–

Craig: NRG or any of those research companies.

Curry: Yes, it wasn’t. It was just us. We got as random as we could of people, and we all gave them papers and made them write down things. The number one thing that people said is they were frustrated with Bear and that they didn’t understand why he wasn’t making more effort to fix it. By the way, you’ve seen the movie as it is. You haven’t seen the movie before the reshoot.

John: Talk to us about that.

Craig: There you go. You learned something.

Curry: I did learn something. What’s really interesting is that I did the thing that you hear about in stories where I didn’t take the note. I took the note behind the note, which is everybody wanted me to fix Bear and make him go to that crystal shop sooner to find the One Wish Willow and try to fix it sooner. I was like, “Okay, I get it now.” The problem is that I haven’t done a good enough job of telling people that Bear wants this to work.

Craig: Exactly. He’s not ready to undo it yet.

Curry: Yes. That scene that I was just talking about with the haircut, and he comes and he explains that to her, that was a reshoot. Before, we had this other scene where he’s like, “Where were you?” She’s like, “I was in the room.” The twist is that she was on the ceiling. It was cool, but then I was able to come up with an idea of a scene where he’s trying to say, “Please don’t do that anymore because it freaks me out.” Then she says, “I promise you I won’t.” He goes, “Good.”

Craig: She gives him permission to keep going. Here we have one of our favorite and most horrifying things in writing, which is logic. It is remarkable how people need it. They need logic because–

Curry: Even if they don’t know.

Craig: That’s right. We will trade on this concept of, what would people really do? We will get very far with it until we forget that maybe also people would really do this or this. We forgot to do that. Boy, they go right to it, don’t they? That’s amazing.

John: Two examples I can think of on terms of, what would people really do? I just rewatched Get Out, which we should do a deep dive on Get Out. It’s so spectacular. You are right there with your hero in terms of something is really messed up here, and I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave. We’re going to go right now. He tries to leave at the right, appropriate moments, and there’s the social pressures to continue to stay, but he doesn’t. Also, Blair Witch Project, in terms of these are characters who are encountering these weird things, and they’re responding the ways– They’re freaking out in the ways that they should freak out. A lesson we tend to forget in genre is that people don’t know they’re in a genre. They’re just experiencing life.

Craig: Therefore, it does become corny when they don’t appear to be behaving the way we do. Then you get the classic movie theater moment of, why are you going in there? Get out.

John: Why are you going into the house?

Craig: I think it’s great that you had that experience. It speaks to why I think– Anybody who is going to do this for a long time, right off the bat, you’ve said two things that are very important. One is, okay, I don’t take myself so seriously. I take the work seriously. I don’t take myself seriously, which means I leave room to be wrong. I’m not wrong because they say they don’t like something. I’m wrong if I say, oh, wait, I know why they don’t like something. I did something wrong. I see what it is. Let me fix it. That’s a big deal.

Curry: Thank you. I appreciate it. It comes from that JJ Abrams quote from a long time. I’m just like, “Dang, it is that.” I see people that do take themselves too seriously, and it paralyzes themselves. I went to a film school where friends would have these short films, and they would spend years on this one short film because they just wanted to get it right. It’s like, “Bro, release it.”

Craig: There is no right.

Curry: Yes. “Work on the next one.”

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Curry: I mean, honestly, I know I didn’t win an Oscar, but I’m feeling that pressure now. All these awards are breaking. Like, “Better than E.T.” came out. “Beat Beat Blair Witch…” I’m almost like, “Stop. Stop.” I’m like, “Slow down, slow down. I didn’t ask for this.” It’s just a crazy amount of success that that movie is having.

John: One of the advantages you have here is that you already shot this next movie. If you were prepping another movie right now, or that was–

Craig: Or you didn’t know what you were going to do next.

John: Or, here’s this $100 billion thing that you’re going to do… We would turn off the cameras and we would caution you to stop you from doing this. I do think the fact that you have another movie that you already know is going to happen, you’re actually already editing, is a good step.

Craig: It’s in your mind now, right? Partly, you just have to now go through the miserable exercise of forcing yourself to stop thinking about it and to not put what you do now in the perspective of what just happened because it can be terrifying. By the way, it’s okay if the best thing you ever did is– Something has to be the best thing you ever did. It may be that this is not. I’m fully rooting for you that there’s something bigger and better. You just have to forget about it.

John: One thing, you do tend to look to other people and say, “Oh, what did they do?” This may be a good moment to look at other folks who were in similar circumstances and learn from them in terms of what filmmakers you loved who followed up a big hit with another thing that was really great and interesting. That’s the track to follow and not look at the negative examples of the people who just then spun around for years and years because we know them. It’s tough.

Craig: It’s hard. You’re in it now. It’s impossible to see when you’re inside of it. When you look back 20 years later, you may say, “Oh, this is crazy,” because there are filmmakers like this who their first six movies out of the gate are massive and awesome. Then there’s 10 more movies that nobody wants or likes. There are filmmakers who go on, off, on, off, on, off. There are ones who come in clumps. There are ones who just ride along on a B- the whole time. You don’t know. All you can do is what you do in the moment as best you can do it and not repeat yourself. Just trying to not repeat yourself.

Curry: That’s scary. That’s hard.

Craig: It is. It’s scary.

Curry: Harder to say because I want to repeat whatever happened with–

Craig: Of course.

Curry: You’re comparing, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, what worked with this? Why was it resonating with people? Is my next idea, is it deep enough? Am I known as the deep guy now?” All these things that I’m just trying, trust me, and I am. I’m trying to push them out.

Craig: You can’t completely. Listen, I went on many long walks, talking to myself, trying to figure out which disaster would be the best disaster for me to make a television show about after I made a show about a disaster. Okay, well, that’s what I do now.

Curry: I’m a disaster guy now.

John: There was no Chernobyl Two.

Craig: I would be insane to not keep doing the disasters now. Then I would just have to repeatedly hit myself in the face and say, “Do not.” You have to almost forgive yourself for all of the instincts to be afraid. By the way, if you do repeat yourself, you repeat yourself. That’s okay too because, God knows how many sequels I did in my life. I was being paid. It’s all in service of something, all of it.

John: I love this is the most niche advice we can give to a person. After your giant hit, here’s how to follow up the giant hit.

Craig: We’ve had them. We might as well talk about it.

John: Something that would be very practical for a lot of our listeners is, how do you make that first movie? Because you’ve made a ton of shorts. You made sketches. You know how to shoot stuff, but now you have a script, and you actually have to go try to film a thing. What was your process? You mentioned a producer. Ultimately, you mentioned UTA, but how did that all come together?

Curry: I’d already made Milk & Serial, but nobody had seen it.

John: Milk & Serial is found footage.

Curry: It’s a found footage, 60-minute movie. It’s almost considered a short film, but it’s just long enough to be considered a feature.

Craig: It’s a long short.

Curry: Yes, it’s a very long short, which the first cut was an hour 20, which there’s no doubt that it’s a feature. I’d done that, and I’d done The Chair and I did one more horror film, but this producer, James Harris, reached out and said, “Hey, listen, I have this program where I find a filmmaker, and I give them X amount of money and give them basically a shot. If you have an idea– I liked your Chair, are you doing a feature of The Chair, or is that something?” At the time, I had actually written a feature for The Chair. I was like, “Oh my gosh, yes, I have The Chair.” My manager was like, “Well, The Chair could be a cool IP,” which by the way, we’re doing nothing with now.

At the time, it was like, “You’d already written The Chair, why don’t you see if there’s something else for it? Maybe we could have a bigger budget for The Chair, and we could save that, and maybe there’s a different idea.” I was like, “Well, I have this obsession idea.” I’d written the short film of it. I’d had the idea. This was after The Simpsons episode. I was excited about this. I told him, I was like, “Okay, I’ll do Obsession.” I pitched Obsession to James. His response was basically, “I like this idea, but why don’t you write the script?” [crosstalk]

John: What you pitched him was a lot of what we saw in the movie, the four characters that set up.

Curry: I pitched him that it was a movie about a guy that makes a wish that this girl becomes obsessed with him, and she becomes– and I pitched it as a Possession movie, but it was a love story, Possession movie, gone wrong thing.

John: Possession, yes.

Curry: He dug it, but he was also like, “Yes, it’s been done before, but I dig it. Why don’t you write it?” I started, “Oh my God, this is a huge opportunity for me,” which you know what? Looking back, that gives me some hope or makes me feel better that I was still under pressure then, or just a different type of pressure. As a matter of fact, maybe it was even more pressure because it was like, “This has to be good.”

Craig: Oh, yes.

Curry: I never thought about that. I never thought like, “This just has to be good.” I always just was like, [hums], just stream of consciousness.

Craig: When nothing’s happened yet, you are about as free as you’ll ever be. In a way, trying to shut everything out to be that free again is part of the challenge.

John: When I wrote Go, there was no expectation that it had to be a thing. I was writing the movie I wanted to write.

Craig: Yes. Sometimes you just have to turn all– You do, you have to turn all of it off. Everybody out there will drown you. Even their love will drown you. Their hatred will drown you, the love will drown you, the think pieces, the criticism, the awards, all that, which is designed to celebrate what you’ve done, in a way is corrosive because what you’ve done, you did. We’re always dreaming.

Curry: It’s so crazy, humans. I think about this. I’m like, “I’m having the biggest hit ever right now, and I’m thinking about what’s my next movie.” I can’t even for one second-

John: Enjoy.

Curry: -enjoy this. I’m already thinking about what’s my next one, next one, and even next one.

Craig: Okay, so good news, bad news. Bad news is you will never enjoy it. Good news, this is the best, most striking sign that you will continue to succeed. That is the thing that keeps people going. Because the people who were motivated by success, when they get it, they don’t realize it, but they just got fed. They’re not hungry anymore. If that’s not what you’re hungry for, if what you’re hungry for is the next dream thing–

Curry: It’s crazy how it means nothing to me. It drives me nuts, actually.

Craig: I’m really sorry, and I get it.

Curry: It’s like, “This should mean so much to me.” This is so crazy, but I’m like, “Nahh.” It almost just makes me angry. It doesn’t make me excited. I’m jealous of myself. How is that even possible?

Craig: Jealous of yourself, disappointed in yourself for not being enlightened enough to enjoy it. Jealous of the guy who did that thing because you don’t know how he did that, really. Sometimes you’re like, “Did I even do it?” [laughter] It’s terrifying, and then you do it again. This is your personal heaven, hell. I think the people who do what we do, and who do it at length, and who have– everything’s not always a success, but repeated success, this is part of it, is this feeling. I’m suspicious of people who are, “You know what, for the next four months, I’m just going to enjoy this moment.” What?

Curry: What.

Craig: What?

Curry: How are you not thinking, “Oh my God, I got to do that again, and how am I going to do it?”

Craig: If I get to not terrified, that’s a huge day for me. I love hearing this. This means we’re going to get a lot more movies out of you. This is great.

Curry: That’s a thing. I’m trying to figure out what my pace is because some of my heroes, like Ari Aster, even Zack Cregger, even Jordan Peele, they don’t come out with movies every year.

John: I think Zach Cregger’s working pretty hard.

Curry: Yes, he is.

John: Jordan Peele’s taking it at a slower pace.

Craig: Your heroes are not you. Your pace is your pace.

John: Is your pace.

Curry: If I’m not doing something, I would go crazy.

Craig: Then your pace is your pace. There are people who put out a movie a year, some of them famously, and no one who puts out a movie a year makes all good movies. They make a lot of movies. Luca Guadagnino is out there making a movie every 60 days.

Curry: Soderbergh.

Craig: Soderbergh, who retired 20 years ago, makes a movie every month. They just keep coming. That’s the pace. Your pace is your pace. You don’t have to worry about that.

John: Quick questions before we move into one cool thing. You wrote the script. You gave it to the producer. The producer said thumbs up. You shot a ton of shorts. You shot a bunch of sketches. What, from your YouTube experience, applied and what didn’t apply? What things did you have to figure out is different?

Craig: That’s a good question.

John: Because you’re working with a professional set. You’re working with probably a much bigger team than you’re used to.

Curry: Oh, yes, definitely. I’ve said this a lot on other platforms, but the YouTube comments have taught me a lot about that people are really smart, which is not always the thing you learn online.

Craig: You don’t hear that about YouTube comments.

Curry: It’s just people are picking up on things. You know that thing we talked about that was like, when you don’t give any answers, you almost have to ask people, “Are you getting this? Do you understand?” The answer is yes. As long as you’re telling it through subtext enough, people are getting it, and learning that through YouTube has given me the confidence to treat my audience like they’re smart in a way that maybe I wouldn’t have learned. I like to give credit to that.

John: What’s the difference between YouTube comments and reviews? Are you reading reviews?

Curry: Reviews are the new modern YouTube comment.

John: It’s just the same thing.

Craig: It’s just long-form YouTube comments.

Curry: It’s so funny because people were like, “What’s it like going into a medium where there were comments and now there’s not?” I was like, “There are. There are comments.”

Craig: I’ve struggled with this my whole life, or at least my whole professional life. Where I landed was, I think that it’s me as my most childlike, trying to get what I should have gotten and didn’t, which is some sort of perfect, beautiful, unconditional love and acceptance. You look for that, and you will get it from some of that stuff. It will mean nothing, and then the punches come, and you will feel those so much more.

Curry: I know.

Craig: 200 I love yous and 1 punch, and all you think about all day is the punch-

Curry: Is the punch.

Craig: -because it was not a healthy exercise in the first place, because you’re looking for something that ultimately you don’t actually need or even want. You just have to sit with your own awareness that you didn’t make something perfect. You are trying to get better. There is a corrosive aspect to it, and there is almost an indulgence. It’s almost like a suicidal indulgence, like, “Kill me.”

Curry: It is. You literally are like, “I hope the next one’s not negative,” but you’re still scrolling. Stop doing it.

Craig: You’re waiting for it. It’s like people who don’t stop gambling until they’ve lost everything.

John: It is the emotional slot machine.

Craig: It’s emotional slot machine. It’s bad for you.

John: Let me try to distinguish between there’s the comments you get on the thing that’s still in process. Someone who you want to read an early draft of your script to see, are they getting it, or people who are seeing this at the UTA, the test screening to see, “Oh, is this working?” At a certain point, when the thing is finished, you just have to be finished with it and stop reading.

Curry: Because there’s nothing to be-

Craig: You can’t do anything.

Curry: There’s no such thing about constructive criticism, because there’s no construction.

Craig: There’s no construction anymore. Construction completed. You just don’t like it, and it is me. You don’t like me. You rejected me, and you can see how intense that feeling is. In your movie, the feeling of being rejected and unwanted is baked into the movie. I would strongly urge you. It’s hard. It requires an enormous amount of ego strength. I’m going to deny myself the cheap thrill of fake love to protect myself from–

Curry: It’s so true.

Craig: It’s hard, though. It’s hard.

Curry: The difference is videos and stuff, because I know you asked what’s the difference between YouTube stuff versus the more traditional stuff. Nobody makes video essays about— People did about Milk & Serial and stuff. Arguably, that was a feature film. It’s really cool to see the videos of people talking about it. That just feels so much more different than– Because you can read the comments of that, and that’s a bad thing.

Craig: Don’t read that.

Curry: The videos–

John: Where someone’s actually taken the time to look at, pull apart, to contextualize things, sure, I can see that being helpful.

Curry: I’m just also really lucky that it’s been mostly positive for Obsession as far as people having opinions about it.

John: You may still need to stop watching those.

Curry: I know. I will, and I should. [laughs]

Craig: You can have somebody in your life who curates a little bit for you. You can say, “Listen, if you see something that it’s not just somebody going, best thing ever, or it sucked,” but somebody who goes, “Okay, I’m going to make a 10-minute video about the use of perspective in Obsession, that is some thoughtful analytical thing that isn’t about praise or condemnation, just an exploration of something that we do out of respect. Maybe somebody in your life can say, “Hey, this one’s safe for you.”

Curry: Check it out.

Craig: Check this one out.

John: We have curation on the Scriptnotes book reviews.

Craig: Oh, we do?

John: Yes. On the good reviews.

Craig: I’ve not looked at them.

John: I think I sent one thing through to you, which was this essay that I couldn’t believe how long it was. It was actually really smartly done. The fact that this person had spent all this time really looking at what we did on the Scriptnotes book was actually meaningful. It’s like, “Oh, that connected.”

Craig: Well, they spent time on it.

John: They spent time on it.

Craig: It mattered to them. It wasn’t just some barf. So much of it out there is just somebody going, “Blah, blah, blah, next.”

John: They don’t even think about how it could affect somebody at all.

Craig: They don’t think about what they just wrote within a millisecond after they hit send. It’s gone.

Curry: That the funny thing, they may even change their mind the next day.

John: Yes, but they’re not going to go back and change their comment.

Curry: You’re just stuck with the comment. Forever.

John: Forever.

Curry: Forever.

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Craig: They have to turn. Straight ahead is not an answer.

John: They can move straight ahead, but an empty field, and so eventually they’re going to start turning around. They’re not going to just wander off forever.

Craig: My gut is that most people are right-handed. They’re going to go towards their dominant hand, and I’m going to say to the right.

Curry: I also thought it was this way.

Craig: Yes. Clockwise.

John: Clockwise.

Craig: Yes.

John: It’s counterclockwise.

Craig: What is wrong with us?

John: Universally around the world, and they can’t figure out why. They’ve done all–

Craig: Even in upside-down places like Australia?

John: Yes. I’ll put a link to The New York Times article about this. It’s written by Rachel Nuwer. If you look at the comments on that, everyone says, “Oh, but they should do it in the southern hemisphere because of the Coriolis effect.” That’s not true.

Craig: There’s no magnets.

John: That’s not real.

Craig: Can I tell you something weird? I don’t know if you’ve had this experience. In fact, I know you haven’t. No one else has except for me. This is far beyond random probability at this point. When I write something, I try and be very visual about the space, and I imagine the moments happening. I’m going to say 90% of the time when the production designer comes and shows me, or somebody does a previs or an illustration or a storyboard, they’ve put everybody in the other direction.

Curry: It drives me crazy. Oh, yes.

Craig: I go, okay, “Well, I imagined them the other way.” Everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s weird. We all imagined it like this,” and I can’t explain it. I’m backwards in my head from everybody, and I don’t know why it’s actually terrifying.

Curry: I know what you’re saying because anytime, if I didn’t explain exactly where the couch was supposed to go, then it’s always in the wrong spot.

Craig: Okay, so what’s going on?

Curry: In my head, it’s so clear-

Craig: So clear.

Curry: -that the couch is right here.

Craig: Is it like how our retinas have an upside down image that gets flipped back into our brain? What is happening?

John: As far as this study goes, they’ve a bunch of different theories and none of them pan out. They really have no idea. Scientists, it’s an active area of exploration. It could just be like we are biologically inclined to turn to the left, and they’re not sure why. If you blindfold people, it doesn’t-

Craig: It doesn’t work.

John: -work the same. If you blindfold people and tell them to move straight, I think that bias isn’t there, but it’s just a natural tendency to move.

Craig: It’s all a simulation, obviously.

John: Handedness doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Craig: It’s so weird.

Curry: But we both said right.

Craig: We both said right.

John: I was like, “I’m going to go there.”

Craig: Because I imagined in my mind, and I think maybe this is the problem, is that whatever my brain does spatially, I can see it clearly, and then when I put it, however it comes out on the other end, people are getting the flipped image. It’s so weird. It’s so weird.

John: I would say in probably 80% of scenes where I’m picturing a character entering into a space, I picture them entering in through the left. I picture them moving left to right across the screen. I’m sure statistically if you actually look at the movies I’ve made and things, that’s not the case, but I’m almost always picturing them entering into the frame from the left side of the frame.

Curry: You read from left to right. That’s part of it.

Craig: Then do people who read Arabic or Hebrew go the other way?

John: It’s wild.

Curry: I just learned that books– I don’t know if it’s in Japan or China or just Asia in general, but books are flipped.

John: I didn’t know that. There’s a lot of different cultures where what we consider the back of the book is actually the front of the book, and you’re going the other way through.

Curry: I don’t understand.

John: Manga comics, I think, are back to front.

Craig: You’re reading left to right, but you’re flipping progressively this way?

John: There’s different ways it can work-

Craig: Oh, I see.

John: -in different languages.

Curry: Manga comics is exactly what I’m talking about because I just got one. I was like, “This looks like the back of the book. I had to flip it.” I’m like, “Wait, this feels so weird.”

John: It does feel so weird.

Craig: Now that I think about it, when I went to Hebrew school, where I learned zero Hebrew except the Hebrew phrase for shut up, which every kid who goes to Hebrew school, [Hebrew language] that’s all I remember is the teacher telling me to shut up. This is great education. The books were– the cover was like this, except you would read right to left as you were turning pages this way, which is very weird. It’s all backwards. You should make a movie about that. I don’t know how many of you get that now. This is being weird. We should make a movie about that.

John: We should make a movie about that.

Craig: This is weird. Something happened that’s vaguely and boringly weird to me.

John: Crazy. One cool thing?

Craig: I do. It’s a little bit of a throwback to an old one, I’m pretty sure. It’s a game, but it’s fairly newly released on iOS. I think a long time ago, I did a one cool thing for a game called Curse of the Golden Idol, which was available on Steam. It’s this very strange game. It’s very surreal. The artwork is– sometimes there’s art styles that are aggressively, purposefully ugly. This is that. Grotesque somewhat. It’s a logic deduction game. You get a scene, you find these clues, and you have to piece together what’s actually going on. The scenes become progressively more and more difficult to figure out.

John: Curse of the Golden Idol?

Craig: Case of the Golden Idol. I’ve been saying Curse of the Golden Idol the whole time. It’s Case of the Golden Idol. I think the people who make it, they have their company name, which we’ll dig up here. It’s like a Pantone or a hex code for a color, I think, which I thought you would enjoy. Yes, Color Gray Games. Their logo for Color Gray Games is like the hex code Pantone. Anyway, the Case of The Golden Idol.

John: The Case of the Golden Idol. I heard you have one cool thing to share with us.

Curry: My dad, for Christmas last year, got me the Scriptnotes book.

Craig: You weren’t a little insulted? Like, “Dad, I know how to do this.” [laughs]

Curry: No, because I’m always trying to learn. I still feel like I know nothing about writing. Every day I’m like, “Oh, how do I learn more? What’s the answer?” I’m constantly chasing. I want the Aaron Sorkin Master Class again. What else can I learn? I’m studying Save the Cat. I’m studying Hero’s Journey and trying to figure out what works better for me and also trying to throw it away at the same time. You know what I mean?

Craig: You’ll find one day you will be teaching a master class where you have digested, synthesized all of it, mushed it with the things that are uniquely you, and you will then give something.

Curry: Three-act structure is important, and that’s what I’ve figured out, I think.

Craig: So far, so good for you, I would have to say. Yes, I wouldn’t dig too– By the way, here’s the one cool thing. You’re wearing a Members Only jacket, and that is the actual– is that like a vintage Members Only jacket?

Curry: No, they still have them.

Craig: That’s like a new version of the old Members Only jacket?

Curry: Yes, but it’s the same exact thing.

Craig: It’s the exact one.

John: [crosstalk] in high school. Oh, that’s cool.

Craig: I had that in 1985, I think. Members Only in whatever the early ’80s was the coolest thing ever, and then one day later, the least cool thing ever. It wasn’t like there wasn’t a middle ground. It was like everyone had one, and then suddenly, “Oh, my God–

John: If you’re wearing one, you’re lame.

Craig: -are you wearing a Members Only jacket, you loser?” I’m like, “It was cool yesterday. What?”

John: Wow, that’s crazy. I didn’t even know that.

Craig: It’s all–

John: Yes, so I assumed it was ironically cool, but it’s just genuinely cool. That’s the generational split.

Craig: I think now it’s all the way just cool.

John: Everything my daughter wears is found at vintage stores and thrifted.

Craig: My daughter as well. They could go thrifting together. She loves it.

John: It’s reminding me, your daughter is in a similar situation with Curry. She’s just making stuff herself, and she’s making music herself rather than making films herself, but she just was able to do the thing that she wanted to do and didn’t have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

Craig: She didn’t have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up. They just met her there, which is really– it’s cool, and it’s exciting, but she goes through these same things too. Not everybody survives the withering gaze of the world. It is slightly monkey’s paw. To be ironic, you get what you wish for, and then you’re like, “Oh, no.”

John: Craig Barker, we wish you all the success and luck. We wish all these things for you. It’s going to happen.

Curry: By the way, because I don’t want this to come out a year later, and you’re like, “Wait a second,” you might see more Members Only jackets from me.

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, nice.

Curry: In a weird way that I won’t say, but you’re going to see it in less than a year, and you’re going to be like, “What? We were there at the birth.”

Craig: We were there at the birth, or the midlife.

Curry: It’s not as random as you think.

Craig: Okay.

Curry: A little teaser there at the end.

Craig: A little Chekhov’s Members Only jacket.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Meredith Stedman. Our intern is Lauren Loesberg. Our outro is by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro, we could use more outros. Please send links to those to [email protected]. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we often answer on the show. 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. The Scriptnotes Book is available wherever you buy books, just like Curry’s dad did.

Craig: Yes, cool guy.

Curry: Cool guy.

John: 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 drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau.

Craig: I got to get some drinkware, by the way.

John: Yes, drinkware.

Craig: I need some. Why not have the drinkware?

Curry: I don’t know.

John: I’m going to get some.

Curry: Get the drinkware.

John: Drinkware.

Craig: Yes, drinkware.

John: You’ll find show notes with the links to things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers. They’re the best.

Craig: They make this all possible.

John: You’re going to be getting a notice soon, premium subscribers. We’re also going to email you about special things. You’re going to get a special little email soon.

Craig: Possibly a Scriptnotes themed Members Only jacket. Because my understanding is that stuff’s about to go.

John: Can you imagine an orange Members Only jacket?

Craig: We screw them over. We just salt the earth. The members are like, “Oh my God, it’s so overdone.”

John: Absolutely.

Curry: Yes, I don’t want the Members Only to be done before the thing.

Craig: No, we won’t do that, too. We promise.

Curry: I want them to come back when they’re supposed to come back, which is coming soon.

John: Curry Barker, attempting to time culture, which I love.

Craig: So far, so good. So far, so good.

John: You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Popcorn Buckets.

Craig: Popcorn Bucket.

John: Curry Barker, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a delight.

Curry: Thanks for having me. This has been so fun.

Craig: Oh, excellent.

John: Yay.

[music]

John: Craig, all right, you had a movie on theaters this summer, you had Sheep Detectives. Was there a special collectible popcorn bucket for Sheep Detectives?

Craig: I didn’t know. Sheep Detectives snuck on into the movie theaters all meek, like a sheep.

John: Meek. Like a sheep.

Craig: It stuck around for a while. Look, I was trying to punch above its weight there. Had Obsession out there.

John: Yes, sorry.

Craig: No, listen, man. Honestly, the fact that our movie got a theatrical–

John: Were you the same weekend?

Craig: No. What weekend did you guys open?

John: It was June 15th.

Craig: We were before that. No, I don’t even know what we were opening.

John: It wasn’t May 15th.

Craig: I think we were like a week before that.

John: Sorry, it was May 15th. Yes, it’s all a blur.

Craig: The movie, which, look, for 10 years, it just sat on a desk at a studio.

John: They weren’t doing popcorn bonanzas.

Craig: No, and then suddenly it got made, and it happened, and we were very–

John: Dude, that movie got praise.

Curry: It got praise, yes.

John: So much praise. It’s like–

Craig: No one saw that. Everyone was like, “Well, that’s going to be dumb.” By the way, advice, make a movie that looks like it’s going to be stupid that would not be stupid. I used to make movies that looked like they would be stupid and they were stupid, but I realized the trick is–

John: The trick is to make them good.

Craig: No, so there was no— We barely got a standee in theaters. Certainly no popcorn bucket.

John: No, the popcorn bucket we can find for Obsession, but only online. I don’t think there were–

Curry: No, it was at the AMC.

John: It was at the AMC?

Curry: Yes.

Craig: What was the popcorn bucket for that?

Curry: It’s funny because I was also aware that this popcorn bucket thing was happening. One of the first things I asked people when the bidding war was happening, I was like, “Well, are you going to do a popcorn bucket?” They were like, “Yes, we were.” The popcorn bucket, it looks like a One Wish Willow–

Curry: Oh, great.

Craig: Makes a lot of sense.

John: Not like the box–

Craig: It’s like a triangular box in the movie. Yes, but it more looks like the container that would hold the triangular boxes.

Curry: Oh, for sure.

Craig: Oh, like for the group sale stuff. Those things, yes.

Curry: Right, but it holds the popcorn, and it’s made of tin, so it’s metal. It feels high quality. I have three of them, but they sold out very quickly at the AMC all around the world. They’re gone. You can’t get them anymore, which is something cool about that. I also am like, “Should have made a little more of them.”

John: Aline had a similar situation with a Devil Wears Prada. It was like–

Craig: What was hers?

John: It was a shoe. It was like–

Craig: Makes total sense.

John: They’re really constrained supplies. That’s partly the design.

Craig: Yes, there’s not really– It makes sense. Yes, because you don’t want to drench the earth in those things. The popcorn bucket, I was not aware of the popcorn bucket even existing as a thing until the infamous-

John: The Dune.

Craig: -Dune popcorn bucket, which–

John: Looks like a sex toy.

Craig: It was a butthole. It just was. It was a butthole and it’s awesome. I think that after that, everyone was like, “Guess this is what we’re doing now.”

Curry: We missed out on the Jaws popcorn bucket, but did you have the Jaws toy, Craig? Were you trying to get the things–

Craig: Of course.

Curry: Yes, trying to get the hook, the thing out of Jaws’ mouth?

Craig: You had to fish the thing out of Jaw’s mouth, and there was a little piece of plastic, and if you caught the piece of plastic, then the–

Curry: Snapshot, yes.

John: What?

Curry: Oh, yes. It’s amazing.

John: They handed that out at theaters?

Curry: No. This is a toy you bought.

Craig: No, you had to bother your parents to let you buy this plastic piece of crap. Milton Bradley probably made it.

Curry: I’m sure. Absolutely.

Craig: It was a real piece of crap, and it would break fast.

John: What’s so fascinating is that was a toy, but we can totally imagine the popcorn bucket version of it, and these essentially are toys. I was looking at the ones for Masters of the Universe, which was a castle gray skull, and the drawbridge opened, and there was all the powers.

Craig: That makes sense, because it was a toy.

John: It was a toy, but I can’t even imagine being the theater employee who has to put all those things together, or just like, where are you storing them at the theaters?

Craig: I don’t know. I do think now I don’t even know what, for the sheep movie, what would it have been like? Just, “Oh, hold the top of a sheep’s head up so that they’ll reach inside and eat its brain?”

John: It could be his trailer.

Craig: Oh, I guess. Who cares?

John: Who cares?

Craig: Yes. That movie shouldn’t have a popcorn bucket. You need to be, I don’t know– The Sheep Detectives is not a cool movie. It’s quaint. It’s throwback. It’s cozy.

John: If you can’t come up with a good popcorn bucket, there’s an argument for should the movie even exist. No, I’m kidding. Oh, my God. Dang it. That’s a joke.

Craig: That’s a total joke.

John: It’s all about the popcorn bucket.

Craig: It’s all about the popcorn bucket.

John: It’s not about the story.

Craig: The bucket.

John: We had Joakim Truer on the show talking about sentimental value. I should have asked about the popcorn bucket–

Craig: The popcorn bucket for sentimental value.

John: I felt like that was really a missed opportunity.

Craig: Yes, because there’s probably somebody that does have a site where it’s like they make modern popcorn buckets for old films.

John: If not, then right now, that should be the thing.

Craig: I would love if somebody is doing that, but all of them were just slightly off, like the doing popcorn bucket, like E.T.’s finger, and it’s just obviously a dick.

John: Yes, I love that.

Craig: Everything’s wrong.

John: It’s like every popcorn bucket should be like, why does it look like that? That would be really funny. I tend to be sort of anti-junk, and so I want to be against it, but I truly am not against it because let people have things that they love, and if they really love a movie and they want that collectible thing, go for it.

Craig: At this point, anything that makes people happy about going to a movie theater is a wonderful thing.

John: It is. You were part of this giant summer. Independent of your movie, it’s been just like a hugely wonderful, I guess really started before that with Project Hail Mary, but it’s just been great.

Craig: This year’s been a big year for movies. It really has.

John: It’s so cool to be even a part of that at all, because I want to keep going to the theater so much, but people keep asking me as if I’m some sort of representative of Gen Z going to the movie theater, but they keep asking me like, why is it that you think your generation goes to the theater more than, by the way, any generation right now? It’s just a statistic. I think it’s because we’re tired of the phones. We’re wanting to grasp onto any reason to get out of the house nowadays, and the movie theater is a place where there’s no social expectation. You’re expected to put away your phone. You’re encouraged to shut up, not talk, and watch the film. I think people really want that, or are craving that more than ever.

Craig: I also think that Gen Z had a chance. They were the first generation since the first generation where movies happened where they could go. We are now going to discover the joy of going to movies because they’d been robbed of it. They were robbed of it by video, and then COVID, and it just wasn’t as big of a thing. Whereas for us, you turn six, you’re getting dragged out to the movie theater. I think Gen Z got to say, “We’re choosing.”

John: Craig, did you have summer movie programs? Was there a thing where local theaters would, for kids over the summer, they would have basically a film series for kids where they’d buy a pass for the whole thing?

Craig: I grew up on Staten Island. Everything was, “Screw you, buy a ticket.”

[laughter]

John: I remember the Basemark Theater in Boulder, and it was Tuesdays and Thursdays, afternoons, and so parents would just drop us off. You basically pre-bought for the whole summer.

Craig: No, we didn’t have that.

John: That’s where I saw Herbie the Lovebug.

Craig: I went on my very first date, which wasn’t really a date. It was me and my friend took two of the girls from our class, and we were all 10. We went by ourselves to see 9 to 5.

John: Wait, let’s share an experience. It was an inappropriate movie for us to see at a young age? Love it.

Craig: Almost every movie back then was inappropriate for us.

John: I learned so much.

Craig: I learned so much.

John: They’re smoking pot in the movie.

Craig: They’re smoking pot. There’s S&M gear at one point.

John: I feel like that’s coming back. Just more movies being inappropriate. Obsession is rated R, by the way. You know what I mean? To make as much money as it’s making, rated R. I don’t know. I just feel like that’s crazy.

Craig: Rated R movies, there was a moment when I think it was, I guess, in the 2000s where maybe it’s American Pie, where just suddenly almost everything had to be rated. There’s a weird cycle that occurs where then suddenly everything has to be. The Sheep Detective says PG, a rating that no one has anymore. It’s either you’re G or you’re PG-13. Nobody wants to be PG. We’re like, “Mm.”

John: I feel like that happened on accident, right? I can’t speak for–

Craig: We weren’t trying one way or the other.

John: You get the rating that you get because the movie–

Craig: Exactly. If you’re trying to get PG-13, there’s a whole process you go through to get out of the R into the PG-13.

John: Or if you’re trying to get from PG up to PG-13, you add one word.

Craig: From PG to PG-13, you add a word.

John: Really, people do that. People try to go up.

Craig: It becomes like, where are you going to use your one use of the F word here?

John: What is the context?

Craig: What is the context? Exactly.

John: All right. Thanks for this discussion of popcorn buckets and the success of films.

Curry: Of course. Thanks for having me.

John: This has been so fun.

Curry: Thanks.

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This week, Craig answers listener questions about rewriting on set, AI coverage, when and how to kill off characters, sizing up producers, and more.

There’s also an extra-special guest appearance for this week’s One Cool Thing.

In the bonus segment for premium subscribers, Craig discusses how to be wrong—something he feels he knows all too well.

Links:

Email us at [email protected]

Craig Mazin: Hello, and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin. No John? That’s okay. Don’t panic. I’m handling this stuff not alone. I’ve got intrepid helpers.

Today on the show, we’re going to be doing question-a-rama. Every now and again, we have to do a question-a-rama because questions start to pile up. At some point, we’ve got to make a dent. Today, we’re going to be going through questions, making a huge dent. I will be as entertaining as I possibly can.

Also, in our bonus segment for premium members, I’ll be talking about how to be wrong. This is something I know really well. It’s hard for people to be wrong, especially on the internet. Oh my God, it’s so hard for them to be wrong. Then the doubling down and the tripling down. We’re going to talk about how to be wrong because it’s actually a beautiful thing.

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Meredith Stedman: It does. This one comes from Arabella. I’ll call this one Justice for Drew.

Craig: I’m already against it.

Meredith: Dear Craig and John, you are so wrong about rhubarb. You are not cooking it right.

Craig: Oh, come on.

Meredith: I have some favorite ways of eating rhubarb.

Craig: That’s nice.

Meredith: One, lightly stewed. Poach sections of rhubarb until they are soft. Add sugar. Eat with double cream. Two, rhubarb crumble. Eat with custard. Three, rhubarb and ginger fool. Honestly, this is a flipping treasure of gorgeousness. Four, rhubarb jam. Five, and probably the best, make a rhubarb liqueur by steeping the rhubarb with sugar and a bottle of vodka for a few months. P.S. Use your taste buds. It’s amazing.

Craig: This is obviously somebody who wrote in from the Rhubarb Council.

Meredith: Multiple people from the Rhubarb Council wrote in.

Craig: Now, let me point something out. This is what the suggestion is. You’re not cooking it right. What we should do, oh, and this is so simple, is we take rhubarb, a disgusting vegetable, and we, let’s see, add sugar and cream or custard or ginger fool, or we make jam, which is more sugar, or we put it in a bottle with vodka. Why don’t we do all those things and just skip the rhubarb? All those things are awesome. I don’t need a crunchy piece of gross celery in the middle of it. Rhubarb Council, you need to slow down and back up. It’s not going to work. Not one of these was like, just take a piece of rhubarb, grill it, add a little salt, and it’ll be– no, everybody knows you can’t do that. It’s disgusting. Well, they tried.

Meredith: There will be a lot more rhubarb follow-up.

Craig: Oh, God. What is going on? We’ve gotten ourselves into quite a rhubarb. Listen, this may tie into how to be wrong. One day, I may say I was wrong about rhubarb. That said, I made it to 55. My opinion has stayed solid.

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Meredith: Yes, that’s right. There was a survey. We got 316 responses, all anonymous. Here’s just a few from that bunch for suggestions for thought starters on what you guys should be talking about. Here’s one. How do you find the tone of something? Personally, I need to draft something once or twice until the drama of the pilot or film follows the character logic and main thrust of the dramatic arcs. Then, I can go in and actually write with any enjoyment or flair and make it funny or scary or stylish. Is that the same for everyone? Are there some people sitting down and writing with that confidence of execution right off the bat?

Craig: Well, that feels like a topic that– I feel like we’ve done tone at some point, but maybe we could talk a little bit. This is probably a good topic for me and John to address at some point, which is this final bit. Are some people sitting down and writing with that confidence of execution right off the bat? The answer is yes. The real question then is, why do you care? We have different approaches. I think there’s a good topic here of how to deal with Grass is Greener Syndrome as a writer because I think we all have it.

Meredith: Flagging that for a future episode.

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Craig: Again, these are meant to be topics at some point, or should we answer these questions?

Meredith: You can answer them as questions. I feel like this one would be a good one for you.

Craig: This is a good one. What is it like? Well, rewriting on the set is actually a joy because it means you’ve figured out a problem and you have to solve it. There was something in a scene we were shooting recently, and I could just tell that once it was mounted and things were happening, two more lines, there was like a little exchange, and it was like, “Oh, we just need one more rule of three.” I had to figure out what it was. I just walked off into a corner, and I made everyone stop, and everyone stood there, hundreds of people waiting for me to pick up something, which I did. A little nerve-wracking, but fun. It’s sort of romantic. It’s like, “Ah, the writer.” Most of the time, writing is not romantic. It’s tragic. That’s quite fun, actually, as long as you can do it. The one thing you have to know about rewriting on the set is that you are holding everything up, and time matters. Thinking quick is important, and always having your tool with you, which would be your laptop, probably. There is something about a daily rewriting that I find suspicious. I think it may be that some writers really do like to just keep that way. I think comedy sometimes can be like that. Ideally, when you show up on the day, the stuff you’ve written is close enough, but it can be fun.

Meredith: In that instance, when you had to walk to the corner and think of something, how long did it take you?

Craig: It seemed like it took me 19 hours, but I believe it was 10 minutes. 10 minutes, oh my God, if I told you what 10 minutes of every shooting day costs on our show, you’d vomit. It is what it is. It made the scene better. What can I do?

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Craig: That’s the thing. I wish it weren’t so much of a thing. Obviously, there were always things where you needed to travel because you were shooting stuff that took place in Venice or something. Nowadays, and for decades now, we get displaced because of economics. We go to Canada, we go to Europe, we go to the UK, we go to Australia, New Zealand, Malta. They’ll send you anywhere to save a dollar. Even if you stay within the United States, they’re always shipping you out to somewhere. First things first, you need to make it a home. It’s a tough one. You can live out of a suitcase, you shouldn’t. You can live out of a hotel room, you shouldn’t. I’ve done that before. It makes you feel like you don’t really belong there, like you’re not really there. You need to actually put some roots down, find a long-term rental, unpack everything, put it in your closets, and live there. It’s easier now than it used to be because we can Zoom with each other. We’re all closer together than we used to be. Hopefully, your loved ones will come visit you. You know what? I’m coming up on my 30th wedding anniversary. Can you believe it?

Meredith: Congrats.

Craig: 30th. Thank you. One of the secrets, I think, to making it to 30 years is sometimes you just go away for a year. You know what? The other person gets a break from you, you get a break from them. It’s nice. You don’t have to be together every damn day. It was much more difficult when our kids were young. That was rough. It was rough on Melissa. It was rough on me. If you’re out there living on set in another city, live there is my advice.

Meredith: Good advice.

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Craig: Sometimes, questions themselves are indicative of a problem. I think this question is indicative of a problem. Rough page count benchmarks, I don’t know why. I’m not really sure what the point of that is exactly. I’m not even sure what underwriting means. Does that mean it’s too short?

Meredith: Yes, I think so.

Craig: Then it’s the length it should be. Take Widow’s Bay, for example, the show everybody should be watching. We had Katie Dippold recently. That show is in my mind, it’s like an hour-long drama. We have the half-hour comedies, we have the hour dramas. That’s how streaming works, roughly, except… it’s like dramedy but more tilted towards drama. It’s shot like a drama. Last week’s episode was 30 minutes because that’s how long it was supposed to be. We can do that now. Movies are a little trickier. You can’t show up with a 60-minute feature film. It’s got to be, I think, 82 minutes or something, per German law. Part of this is like, hey, maybe your frustrating tendency to underwrite is your correct tendency to write the length that it’s supposed to be. How long a specific scene should be, it should last as long as it should last. A scene has a point. Sometimes the point is somebody walks in a room, punches someone in the face, and walks out. That’s the scene. Sometimes it’s two people looking at each other talking for eight minutes, and that’s the scene. There’s no way to say how long a specific scene should be. To this person, I would say, you’re worrying about the wrong things. You are trying to exert control through math. This is not math. If you feel like you’re running out of stuff to say in a scene, maybe that scene and another scene are supposed to be smushed together into one scene. Maybe you just write short scenes. I’ll tell you what, there’s no substitute for believing in the work. You’re like, “Hey, this is a muscular 28-page thing.” Show it. See where it goes.

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Craig: There’s also Teeth.

Meredith: Teeth.

Craig: My favorite.

Meredith: When he opens Teeth, it’s just a pair of pliers. Exactly.

Craig: That’s the thing I use to get people to watch the show, by the way. Daddy’s Home is incredible. We’ll include this somehow in our links. Teeth and Daddy’s Home both look like these retro-style 1960s Parker Brothers board games, except they’re off. Daddy’s Home, it’s like a family that’s like, yay, except that Daddy is clearly a drunken savage and everyone’s terrified of him. For situations like this, the writer almost always is coming up with the idea. Someone like Katie or one of her terrific staff will say, “Okay, we all want to do these weird board games. What if one of them was called Daddy’s Home, but it’s a drunk guy? What if one of them is called Teeth and inside it’s just a pair of pliers?” From that point, you can describe as a writer as much detail as possible. Knowing me, I would probably try to describe the game as best I could. For something like that, then, that is made in a bespoke fashion, the art department will work with the props department. The art department is generally responsible for anything that is illustrative. Artists will come up with the illustration. The props department will create the box, the size, obviously the pliers. They will work together hand in hand. Then, weirdly, after the art department and the props department work together, then the set deck department they’re the ones who place it in position and move it around. If you’re like, “Oh, I actually want teeth over there,” that’s a third department that comes in. You wonder why our crew’s rather large. Everybody works together. There’s a show and tell where you get to look at the prop box, and something like that, you would really want to dig into deliciously because it’s awesome.

Meredith: So good.

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Craig: The worst person to ask this.

Meredith: I love that.

Craig: Yes. When, why, and how to kill? Obviously, I’m going to answer. Episode two. Killing characters happens. In movies, it happens for a very permanent reason. Killing characters typically creates the impetus for the journey to begin, or it changes the trajectory of the hero so that they finally begin to confront what they must need to confront. There is also a third kind of death in movies near the end, which is inevitable sacrifice. The old man disappears. In television, for many years, the primary reason that you would kill somebody is because they were asking for too much money. This is notorious. Either they were asking for too much money, this is on serialized dramas, or they were a pain in the ass, or they needed to be killed because they wanted to go do other things, and the show didn’t necessarily need them. There was an infamous example of this. We had David Kelly on the show recently, and he was a writer on L.A. Law, which was a legal drama that aired in the ’80s. It was procedural and had these characters who would repeat.

One of them, and I don’t know why the decision was made that she should die, but it was like an end-of-the-season moment where they’re in the offices, and she says, “Well, I’ll see you on Tuesday.” The elevator door opens, and she steps into the elevator, except the elevator’s not there. She plummets down an elevator shaft. Everybody went, “What?” I still don’t know why they did that. It’s an incredible death. I’m still talking about it. It’s insane. It’s actually insane.

Ideally, when people are dying on shows, it’s for the reason they die. For instance, on our show, it is meaningful. It is always planned. It is always intentional, and it is there to disrupt the course of the hero’s path. If a hero is relying on someone, they must have that person. That person is the one who makes them feel safe, the one who gives them their confidence, the one who is teaching them, the one who is parenting them. That person likely must die. Otherwise, our character’s too safe. Drama is echoing life. I think at this point, I could probably do spoilers on The Sheep movie. One of the characters dies, obviously, in addition to poor Hugh Jackman, who dies relatively quickly. I think everybody knows that. He dies in part to force another character to confront the reality of death through his noble actions. Death must be meaningful to the hero, to the protagonist. If it’s not, it’s just death. Then once you know, okay, this is a meaningful death, the question of when should be clear to you. The how, I believe they asked how?

Meredith: Yes. They asked how?

Craig: Now you got a lever that you can set in many positions. There are grotesque deaths. There are clean deaths. There are off-screen deaths. That becomes a real question of tone and what you want the audience to feel, and what you want a hero to feel, and the nature of the hero. For somebody like Ellie in The Last of Us, who’s grown up in a violent world who has seen her friends die violently. She’s seen people kill themselves. She’s seen all sorts of manners of horrors. Witnessing Joel’s death had to be meaningful to her, not only emotionally, but viscerally, literally viscerally. It had to be a horrible thing, worse than these other ones. For something like The Sheep Detectives, these innocent sheep live on a farm. One day, their shepherd is found dead. He is lying peacefully in the grass. You do not see his face. He’s just quietly asleep. There is no blood. There is no trauma, nor should there be. There does not need to be. The fact that he is dead alone is the thing that is startling to them. In the novel, interestingly, he is found with a spade, like a shovel, buried in his chest, which is a much more violent death. We thought that’s probably one of those things that deserves a little bit of an adaptation massage for general audiences.

In the end, Leonie Swann, the novelist, understood correctly this guy had to die. When you get to the end of that, her version of the mystery, which is quite different, it all makes sense in the end, and brilliantly so, but for us, totally. You have to ask, what does the audience require? What would they tolerate? What would upset them? How do you want them to feel? How do you want the main character to feel? Because blood and guts and all that is a tonal choice.

Meredith: Ash in London has a little bit of a footnote on that, too, which I think might be interesting since you mentioned death being meaningful in these different options. They wrote, “In reality, the biggest losses in life come out of nowhere and don’t have any poetic justice attached. I’ve seen this work in films like Hereditary, where one of the characters dies, and the shock of how random it is makes it even more powerful. Whenever I write, the death of my character feels perfunctory and purely there to serve the story. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.”

Craig: That is correct. Random, shocking deaths do mirror the way life often works. The truth is, most of the time when people die, we understand they’re going to die. They have a chronic illness, or they’re very old. Maybe there’s hospice. We understand. Every now and again, somebody just drops dead. Somebody’s just shot. Somebody gets run over. It just happens, and it is startling. It can be very startling when you do it in a dramatic context because you are making the audience also feel unsafe. We certainly– I think, startled a lot of people when Joel died, especially because of the fact that it was episode two. I wanted to do it as early as I could in the season without doing it in the first episode, which I felt was way too, ah.

The problem I think this particular person is having is that they’re saying that these deaths feel perfunctory because they’re just there to serve the story. There’s the issue. Death should not serve the story. We talk a lot on the show about relationship, and we talk about how characters have these main relationships that teach them over the course of a movie how to go from thinking one thing to thinking another thing. The death has to impact that person’s relationship to the point of the movie, to the way they think and feel about things, not the plot. The plot is a function of all of that. Sometimes people do these things because the plot says there’s a conspiracy, and now I figured out that you’re the killer because this person died, which is math, and that’s fine, but there needs to be something about the relationship between the hero and the victim that matters. That’s the part that makes it feel not perfunctory. As we say in The Sheep movie, the victim is the most important clue, which is a line, by the way, that I stole from a conversation I had with the great Scott Frank when Scott Frank and I were talking about The Sheep Detective way back in the day, which he was a big fan of the book. For a while, he was actually going to direct it, and then it just didn’t get made for a long time, so he moved on. I recall it was Scott who said the victim is the most important clue, and Scott is obsessed with film noir and mystery, and I thought, “Oh, that’s gorgeous.” We might as well say the relationship is the most important plot point. Everything comes down to that. Maybe this person needs to either kill somebody else or ask the question, how will this death change the hero internally?

Meredith: That’s good. There’s a lot of questions about mystery, so I feel like there’d be a good topic coming up.

Craig: Fun.

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Craig: I cannot say how prevalent this is. What I can say is that since the beginning of Hollywood, there has always been an exurb around the industry of charlatans, or let me be a little more charitable, schlockmeisters. People who exist to spend $12 to make $15, guaranteed, and everything is about simple formulas to guarantee small amounts of money, they are not really in the business. First of all, I love that they acknowledge this. They’re like, we don’t even read these scripts. We just have AI barf out something that tells us yes or no, meaning they have no taste or no belief in their taste, nor do they even read what the computer barfed out, because if they had read it, they would have also understood. This just doesn’t make any sense. They’re not reading anything, actually. Then the question is, okay, so the people who would be financing this don’t care what’s in it at all, and there is a grand tradition of this. Again, it goes back to the beginning of Hollywood. I don’t know if you guys have seen Ed Wood. Have you seen the film Ed Wood?

Meredith: Yes.

Craig: Incredible. There’s this great bit where he’s trying to sell this movie to a guy who’s just like, “I just need boobs,” and that’s it, boobs. That was the business for a while, where it was just like, I need explosions, I need boobs, I need this type of star, I need explosions, whatever it is, and then that’s enough for me to shove on a poster and get paid my guaranteed 120% of the 100% of money I put in. That’s it. That’s what I do. It’s all about the poster. This isn’t new. The fact that they’re using AI is just this new tool for idiots. They don’t care about your script if they do this. They simply care about whatever the small issues are that they know they could check off and say, “I can make money off of this.” Right now, I think, given the success of certain movies, Backrooms and Obsession, lots of people are going to try and do this, but they’re useless. If somebody takes your script and gives it to AI, they’re useless. You can give your script to AI. What do you need that person for? Do they have money? Usually not. They’re middlemen talking to middlemen talking to middlemen talking to somebody. The bad news here is, anonymous, you are currently walking through a bad neighborhood getting offered things by people on the street, like brand new Rolexes for $800. Caveat scriptor, be careful. It doesn’t mean that this can’t work out for you. What it does mean is you’re in a bad neighborhood. The best possible thing would be for somebody who is a little bit closer to the inside of the business, to the legitimate business, which is also a horror show, by the way, somebody more in the legitimate business, sees what you wrote, actually reads it, actually understands it, does the minimum basic work that a producer should do instead of this, which is ridiculous. It’s a sign. When people show you who they are, believe them. Poor anonymous.

Meredith: Poor anonymous.

Craig: I know. Stupid AI. So dumb. I can’t believe people are still like, “Oh, yes, we’ll just give it to AI.” Well, it’s obviously not working. They just keep doing it. It’s not working.

Meredith: That was not the only person that wrote in about that specific service, too. We got a couple.

Craig: It’s called what?

Meredith: Greenlight Coverage.

Craig: Greenlight coverage. Well, I’ve not used Greenlight Coverage, obviously. I can’t speak to the veracity of the claims here. What I can say is if Greenlight Coverage is the best possible AI coverage ever, it still makes me ask the question, then why do I need the person who gives it to them? Why can’t I just give it to them? What do I need this middle person for? They’re useless. Looking at Greenlight Coverage, I personally don’t get it. I don’t understand why people would pay for this. I wouldn’t. I would recommend against it. They’re not doing anything illegal, as far as I can tell. They’re just doing something that I consider to be commercially useless. Again, that’s Hollywood. It’s been going on forever. Before this stuff, before AI, and they’re still out there, script consultants. Script consultants, what is this? Useless. Just sucking up money from people, taking people’s money, and giving them nothing of value back except confidence. Just like when you drive down the street, and you see palm reading, it’s useless. This is palm reading, in my humble opinion.

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Craig: Well, it would be nice if there were some sort of Yelp rating. All we really have to go on with producers are their credits and their relationships with others. That said, the credits are often misleading as hell. I know from having been on the inside of a lot of things that there are people who walk around saying, “Well, I was a producer on blah, blah, blah,” and I’ve never met that person. I don’t even know them. They did nothing. Maybe they have their name on it for some reason or another. Credits can be deceiving. Relationships are a little more indicative. If you know that they are friends with so-and-so or they have a good working relationship with this one or that, then it’s relevant. If they are in a business that has financing attached to it, that’s always a sign. Always be cautious. Many producers have a singular skill for self-promotion. That is their skill. They are producers because they’ve convinced people that they’re producers. They are essential because they have convinced people that they are essential. They’re the ones who rise to a certain spot because they’ve convinced everybody else that the other people that could have risen into that spot were no good and should be fired. That is a talent. It’s the talent of surviving. Is it a creative talent? No. Is it, in fact, essential? No. There are very few producers who I would consider to be essential to things who are extremely legitimate, who add value, not just because they know people, but because they have insight and taste, and experience. As you enter the business, you’re going to have to mill around. You’ve been to Vegas.

Meredith: Yes.

Craig: There’s Vegas. the Strip is like, ooh, there’s really cool parts of the Strip. Then there’s a slightly dicey part of the Strip. Then you go to downtown. That’s rough around the edges, but okay, fun. Then you go further out to one of those desert casinos. That’s Hollywood. When you start, you’re in a weird border town desert casino where everyone’s just chain-smoking, and they’re telling you their slots pay out the best, and there’s a prime rib dinner, the best in town. You’re like, “Okay.” You got to work your way to Fremont Street, and then to Dicey Strip, and then Good Strip. The more you go and the further you go, the more likely it is, shock of all shocks, that you will encounter legitimate producers. When you are on the edges, it’s going to be a lot of Greenlight Whatever-the-hell.

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Craig: Well, this falls under the general heading of, tell me how many chews I should do of this food before I swallow it. I don’t know. It depends on the project. There is no clarity. There’s no right answer. If it is something that you feel requires good amount of research, do the research. It will only help you. Do that early. If you’re writing a story about the Donner Pass and the people that ate each other, read some books. Go ahead and read some books. Go a little deeper than that. Try and hoover up everything you can that it’s at least close to your hands. While you’re reading it, read it like a writer. Do research like a writer. When I say that, I mean I don’t just sit there and read through books about how nuclear reactors work. When I’m reading, my radar is up, attuned to moments that I think would be interesting to dramatize, that would be fascinating to imbue characters with. Little tiny anecdotes. In your mind, you can suddenly expand that to be something pretty incredible. If you are attuned and looking for story material as you do your research, it will be of great benefit to you. You don’t want to fall in the trap of just researching all year because you don’t want to write stuff. Sometimes I think people do that. Dig in. Dig in and read it like a writer.

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Craig: So specific. The late ’90s film business. Oh my God. I remember it well. Well, yes, I suppose John and I could talk about it. The late ’90s were actually weird. There was a sense of everybody felt a little bulletproof because of the home video business. Seemingly, you couldn’t lose money. If you made a movie, even if it bombed, there were blockbusters everywhere. Netflix in 1998 was mailing DVDs to your house. That was their service. It’s funny how Netflix, the company that seems to abhor theatrical distribution, was founded on the backs of things that were theatrically distributed. That aside, everything seemed to make money. A lot of movies got made. So many movies got made. Because so many movies were getting made, so many people came into the business. There were, I think, more opportunities certainly in film than there are now, way more opportunities. In television, my guess is there were probably fewer opportunities because we hadn’t yet gone to the explosion that we have from streaming. The network still ruled the day. There was a lot of basic cable stuff that was a little less than. Still, I think it was an easier time for writers. Then things started to turn. I think as the internet began to grow, and then by 2007, also financially, the world fell apart. 2001, there were quite a few convulsions that occurred. The late ’90s, to me, maybe John has some good stories, everybody was pitching all the time. I was going on meetings all the time, pitching all the time. Everybody had open writing assignments. There were so many open writing assignments. There was just a lot to do and a lot of producers. It is interesting how that is a base of a pyramid that, as the years go on, all those people just start to fall away until you get like there are still people left from the late ’90s. I’m one of them, but there are a lot of people that are gone. Weird time, late ’90s. Oh, man. Good movies in the ’90s, though. Great movies in the ’90s because of this. They were making everything with a lot of junk, but, man, the ’90s for movies, maybe my favorite decade. It’s incredible.

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Craig: I think the concept of leverage is a little overstated here. None of us really have leverage over the truth. Some notes are just good. Some notes are bad. Our jobs, and we’ve talked quite a bit about notes, our jobs are to put ourselves aside and look just at the honesty of things. If someone has given you a note that is profoundly bad, part of my strategy has always been to ask them questions about it to get underneath what that might be and to see if there’s just a fundamental difference between what I think this is and what they think it is. It’s also, I think, incumbent upon the professional writer who is getting paid to be responsive and to try. You can try. It’s extra work, but then again, you’re getting paid. Ideally, you can go back to them and say, “I tried, it just didn’t work, but here’s what I think is working better.” Or you can go back to them and even say, “I’m going to show you these two things. Here’s, okay, it doesn’t work, but this one would.” When these people give you these notes, they really are either trying to make it better or more commercial, or they’re just trying to make somebody above them happy. The worst thing for them is for somebody to go, “I don’t want to, or I’m not better.” Just try. I do feel like when a writer comes back and says, “I tried,” you actually don’t want to do this. I am giving you good advice here. Think of me like a doctor. I’m telling you, you actually do not want to do this cosmetic surgery, but let’s take a look at this and this and this. They feel heard. The leverage aspect of it never really changes. HBO has suggestions for me, and I guess I could say, “I’m not doing it, but I don’t,” why? Even if I did, I just think somebody above the person telling me– Eventually, I would get a call from Casey Bloys, who runs HBO, and he would yell at me. You know what I mean? There is no leverage. Good is leverage. That’s really the only leverage you have.

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Craig: No. No, I struggle. I struggle with it sometimes. The need to obsessively go through little things. I think of it sometimes as just, it’s neither a bug nor a feature. It’s just part of it. None of us are perfectly efficient machines. We all come with something. I think people who have the ability to write shamelessly can write much faster than I can. They can write more than I can. Then, though, it may take them longer to get to what they would consider to be good. Fewer of their things may get to the point that other people say. There’s these pluses and minuses, whereas I can take too long, I can obsess, I can make myself crazy in my head, takes longer, but then when I hand it over, it is further along because I’ve obsessed over it and I’ve taken more time. I feel like we just have to go with the rhythms we have and accept that this is part of the deal. I do think as time goes on, the experience of struggling with myself teaches me how to struggle with myself a little less. You start to accept your flaws, and as you accept your flaws, you get ironically closer to drifting away from your flaws towards something that’s better. Even then, the perfectionist must be aware that they are trying to perfect not being a perfectionist. It’s a horrible trap. It really is. What can you do?

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Craig: The weirdest advice I ever give people is to learn to type. I think the faster you can type, the quicker your mind turns to words on the screen. You remove a barrier. There’s something about the slowing down process that I think can diminish the clarity of what’s happening in your own head. It can make the things on the page feel artificial because you had a thought that was legitimate and honest, and authentic. Then you have to rebuild it a little slowly. Learn to type. It goes faster. It just flows.

I don’t think there’s any advice anyone gave me early– oh, well, actually, there’s one bit of advice I always loved. It was an actor who told me this. He said, “Sooner or later, you’re going to get fired. Do not let that define you.” It’s true. In our business, sooner or later, you’re going to get fired off of something somehow. I think for a lot of people, it’s an almost unrecoverable incident because it is like an ego death involved, and because we think of being fired as like, “Oh my God,” you failed. The process is designed in such a way that sooner or later, you’re going to be fired regardless of success or failure. They’re just these circumstances that occur. You have to learn whatever lesson you can learn, if there are any to learn, and then immediately get back on the horse. Oh, that’s another bit of interesting advice. This won’t apply to everybody, but I hope that one day it applies to you. Someone, and I can’t remember who, said, if you are lucky enough in your career to do something where you win major awards for it, you get public acclaim, immediately get back to work on something else. Do not fall in the trap of going, “Okay, now I am an Oscar award winner. I’m an Emmy award winner. I have a this, I have a that.” The next thing must be also worthy of an award. No, just get to work because a lot of great filmmakers and artists got paralyzed by these big wins, and suddenly five years go by because they’re just hunting for the thing that’s worthy. Get back on the horse. Keep going.

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Craig: Oh, boy.

Meredith: In very early episodes, Craig was adamant that he would retire early. Wondering what his thoughts are on that now.

Craig: Well, that’s going to flow beautifully into our bonus segment. How to be wrong. I am not retiring early. I don’t think I’m going to retire on time. I’m not sure I’ll ever retire. As long as my brain is working and as crazy as this makes me, it’s who I am. It’s what I do. I don’t know what else to do. I like it. I hate it. I’m compelled to do it. No retirement anytime soon. To do what? I’m sure Melissa has a long list of things. I’m like, yes, or make another show.

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Craig: One Cool Thing. This week, rather than me doing a One Cool Thing because I’ve done them a lot of times, we’re going to have a guest come and do a One Cool Thing for us. There must always be an August doing a One Cool Thing. This week, we have Amy August.

Amy August: Hi, guys.

Craig: We’ve been promising a special episode of Scriptnotes that’s just you and my daughter Jessie, which I think still needs to happen. It would be amazing.

Amy: It does. We’re both very busy.

Craig: I know you guys are busy, but then John and I are busy.

Amy: It’s different. I’m going to say it’s different.

Craig: Fair.

Amy: I think we’re less busy than you guys are.

Craig: You could fit an hour in somewhere.

Amy: Yes, we could.

Craig: Before that happens, we get to have you here to give us a One Cool Thing. What’s your One Cool Thing this week, Amy?

Amy: I changed my One Cool Thing from what I initially thought it would be. My One Cool Thing is background shows.

Craig: Tell me about background shows.

Amy: Maybe this is just my Gen Z brain, which always needs to have multiple sources of simulation. My absolute favorite thing to do is do one thing and then having a background show on.

Craig: Oh, now I understand. The second screen.

Amy: The second screen.

Craig: Great.

Amy: Not to dig on scripted television.

Craig: Dig on it all you want.

Amy: I’m a reality TV girl. I almost solely watch reality television. Currently, I’m watching Vanderpump Rules, the great mess of a show that is. I will almost always, when I’m doing something, have a second screen onto the side playing Vanderpump Rules.

Craig: Does it get in? Does it sneak into your head?

Amy: No, it absolutely does. To be fair, I can’t really do it when I’m doing important things, but it’s just so nice to have because I feel like my brain is always in two separate places at once, and then half of my brain could be occupied with some bullshit happening on the side. I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear on this show.

Craig: I ask this question literally every time I do it, and I don’t work here. Apparently, the answer is yes.

Amy: I’ll have some bullshit off to the side, and then I can actually lock in and focus on what I’m trying to do.

Craig: Jessie can do this, too. You guys are the same age, I think, and she will have the second screen going all the time. She does watch some reality, but her thing mostly is watching old series or all of Friends or all of Criminal Minds, and it’s just running back there on the side. I don’t know how you guys do it. I have a question for you. I’ve noticed this with a lot of people who are Gen Z. Do you turn the subtitles on?

Amy: If I’m actually trying to pay attention to it, yes.

Craig: Wow. That’s amazing to me. I hear this a lot. People who are Gen Z are like, you watch something with them, you show them a movie, and they’re like, “I just had trouble following the dialogue,” because they like the subtitles. Whereas when I was a kid, subtitles were only in French movies that you didn’t see. What’s going on there?

Amy: I don’t know. This has been more of a recent thing for me, I think. Because in high school, I was anti-subtitles. I thought that they were annoying, and they took up too much of the screen. Now, I like them. I think I’m just more used to reading things instead of just watching them. Even TikToks usually have subtitles a lot of the time. Now, I’m just used to seeing something there.

Craig: You get used to it. Hey, look, it’s reading. At least we got that going for us.

Amy: Hey, I read books. Yes. Every once in a while.

Craig: You read books.

Amy: Yes. Not as much as my dad does, but yes.

Craig: Do you read your dad’s books?

Amy: I’ve read most of them.

Craig: Have you read the latest one?

Amy: The latest one? Yes, I have read that. Very quick read, very good. Very good. Recommend it to my friends.

Craig: Yes, it’s terrific. Well, thank you, Amy. Enlightening. Welcome to the show, by the way.

Amy: Oh, thank you. My first-ever Scriptnotes cameo.

Craig: You have debuted.

Amy: It’s almost like I’ve been doing this most of my life.

Craig: We indeed have been doing it almost– When were you born?

Amy: 2005.

Craig: Yes, I think when you were six. I’ve been doing this since you were six. You’re an adult.

Amy: I know. I’m almost allowed to drink.

Craig: You’re almost allowed to drink.

Amy: Yes, I’ve never had a drink before, so it’s almost my time.

Craig: Well, since your dad’s not here, I’m not going to get into alcohol and how to drink responsibly. I’ll let him handle that parenting.

Amy: He’s pretty good at it, I’d say.

Craig: Well, welcome to the show, Amy. We’ll see if you are a busy person now, and Jessie’s a bit of a busy person.

Amy: Yes, unfortunately, I do have a 9-to-5. It’s crazy.

Craig: You’ve got a job, which is awesome.

Amy: Real adult life is hard. No one talks about this.

Craig: I think we try.

Amy: Feeding yourself three times a day is really hard.

Craig: There’s more. There’s bills and health insurance.

Amy: Hey, I’m on that till I’m 26. I’m not going anywhere. I’m getting that WGA health insurance that my dad fought for because he will not stop talking about it.

Craig: That’s the only reason you use it because he will not stop talking about it. No, it is awesome. Take advantage of that. Well, thank you, Amy. Thank you for coming on the show.

Amy: Of course.

Craig: Hopefully, we’ll get you and Jessie on together.

Amy: Thank you for letting me take up your time.

Craig: Oh, it’s fun. That’s our show. Scriptnotes is now produced by Meredith Stedman. It is edited, as always, by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Lauren Loesberg. The outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions, like the many questions we answered today. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com,

The Scriptnotes book, a beautiful orange rectangle, is available wherever you buy books. You can find clips and other helpful videos on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us at Instagram. We are @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. I love that we have drinkware. There you go, for your one glass of wine a night. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau because when you think drinkware, you think cotton. You can find show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today, and there were many of them, in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Cheaper, probably than greenlight.net. whatever.

Thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on How to be Wrong. Thank you, Meredith. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Amy.

Meredith: Thank you, Amy.

[music]

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Meredith: What do you think? I don’t.

Craig: No. I felt like it was going to be a hard no.

Meredith: I try not to engage.

Craig: Yes. Fighting on the internet is generally bad. It’s generally bad because if you’re right, it doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t change anyone’s mind. If you’re wrong, it’s hard to admit it or change your mind because it’s coming with such personal vitriol. I do think a lot of somewhat famous people or very famous people who have become radicalized internet figures because it all started with a simple, small argument and they were wrong and they can’t deal with that and the doubling down, the quadrupling down, and so on and so forth until suddenly they are some fiery crusader in a corner they never thought they would be, thinking of someone in

Meredith: Me too.

Craig: Yes. It’s probably the same person. Let’s talk about how to be wrong in life, in your home, in your relationships, on the internet, God forbid. I think about this a lot because I have to make, I don’t know, 100 decisions every day while we’re making our show. Some of them are easy. Some of them are difficult. Some of them, my answer is always, “Here’s my theory. I have a hypothesis. I believe this will go this way. Let’s try doing it like this.” I always say, “I’d like to hold space for being wrong.”

It’s important to acknowledge before you start making an argument that you could be wrong so that other people don’t feel uncomfortable telling you, especially if you’re in a position of authority, that you’re wrong. They’re there for my benefit. They’re trying to make things better with their expertise. I want that. I certainly don’t want people to go, “Well, he’s wrong, but no one can tell him.” I want people to tell me. Many times, I will, after doing something, say, “Well, I was wrong. That was not the way to do it. Let’s do it the way you suggested. I was wrong.” There’s no shame in it.

First thing is just leave room for it at the start. You don’t have to come at everything with 100% confidence. You can say something that you believe is true and also recognize the possibility that you might be wrong. It’s okay. On the other hand, don’t presume you’re wrong all the time. It’s okay to have a good gut feeling. “Okay, I think this is correct. I think this is true.” Just acknowledge there’s a chance. Being wrong is an opportunity. Being wrong means you’re about to be right because you realized you were wrong. You’re going to get to right one way or the other. It’s fine.

Certainly, consistency is not the goal. You can change your mind. We’re allowed to do it. It’s fine. There is no shame in it, although we are told there is. The reason that keeps a lot of people from just saying, “I’m wrong,” shame. They feel shame. If you say you’re wrong, particularly on the internet, you’re going to get slapped around. People are snotty on the internet. I’ve been thinking about what the tone is when we think about the bad internet. It’s just snottiness. It’s just snotty people making snotty little comments. It can be infuriating. It can be really infuriating when you say you were wrong, and they just pile on, like, “Good, let us now tear you apart. You’ve shown your weakness.” None of that is real.

What’s real is you changed your mind for hopefully the better. I think you should be grateful when you’re wrong. Be grateful that you have seen the error that you had made, and be grateful that you have this new truth. Relish that. It is a wonderful feeling to me. Certainly, forgive yourself for being wrong because everyone is all the time. I personally like to thank the person that changed my mind, even if they were obnoxious, because I don’t think I’m rewarding the obnoxiousness. I think, if anything, I’m helping them be less obnoxious because they will realize they didn’t need the obnoxiousness to convince me. They just needed the facts. Explain to them how they changed your mind. It will certainly not be, “Well, you yelled really loud.”

Then, of course, leave space, and this is where it gets tricky, for the possibility that you weren’t wrong at all. After you change your mind, you are allowed to go back again. You may believe something. You may go, “Oh, that’s wrong. I’ve changed my mind.” Then later, you may go, “No, actually, that’s wrong. I was right in the first place.” That’s allowable. You don’t have to be a windsock blowing around whichever way. You’re allowed to have a backbone. You’re allowed to have a spine. What do you use as your North Star? Your own curiosity and your own interest in truth. That is what matters. Your ego does not. Being able to say, “I was right all along,” useless. Being able to say, “I told you so,” useless.

Being able to say, “I am incredibly consistent on this and always have been,” useless. Growing and changing is part of what we ought to be doing, and the only way to grow and change is to know that you were wrong. I would say love being wrong as long as you know you’re wrong. Thoughts?

Meredith: 10 out of 10. Being wrong, love it.

Craig: What if I’m wrong now?

Meredith: I don’t know.

Craig: I could be wrong about all that. I could be.

Meredith: You could be.

Craig: You know what? I just presented a theory. I’m holding space. If you think I’m wrong, please write in and tell me.

Meredith: As they did about the rhubarb.

Craig: Yes. Well, now what I’m right about.

Meredith: What about characters being wrong?

Craig: Essential. All characters that matter are wrong about something. They must be, or else they’re just going to be themselves again at the end. There’s no change. Therefore, there’s no purpose for the story whatsoever. They must be wrong. Not only are they wrong, either they don’t know they’re wrong, or they think they’re right for sure, or they know they’re wrong but can’t admit it. That is essential. Why? Because it’s the most human of things. Strange, especially for writers who traffic in characters who are wrong, to sometimes struggle with the idea that they’re wrong. We all do. It hurts a bit. I don’t know why. This is an interesting question. Why we have shame when we’re wrong? We don’t have guilt. We have shame as if making a mistake or missing something, or not seeing something, is self-negating. I don’t quite, because I feel it. I

Meredith: Maybe pack mentality, like you’re going to be alone over there.

Craig: Maybe so.

Meredith: Everyone else will be on this camp.

Craig: You will appear weak or foolish. There is something embarrassing about insisting on something strongly and then waking up the next day and going, “Oh, no, I was actually wrong.” Then there’s an impulse to just deny it. We are so all in on avoiding shame that we will, that’s where the doubling down comes and the denials and all of that, because we just can’t, it’s like anything. Isn’t it admirable when somebody says they’re wrong and changes their mind? It’s the most admirable thing they can do. Nobody, I don’t think anybody goes, “Oh my God,” you were wrong once. Yes. You struggle with it, though.

Meredith: Yes, it’s admirable.

Craig: It’s an admirable quality. Also, saying I don’t know is really important, but that’s a separate topic. I’m a big fan of I don’t know because I have to ask questions of people all the time. A lot of times, I’ll say, “By the way, I don’t know is a perfectly good answer.” You don’t need to tap dance and invent something for me that isn’t true just because you think that there’s no way to just say I don’t know. Totally say I don’t know. Then go find out. Being wrong is unavoidable, so we might as well find the upside in it. That’s the bonus topic for this week.

Meredith: That’s great.

Craig: Go out there and be wrong, everybody.

Why is it so satisfying to watch a highly-skilled character complete their goals? And why can it be equally hilarious to watch an incompetent character bumble through a slew of screw-ups? In this episode, John and Craig discuss how to play with competence in your characters.

We also say goodbye to our producer Drew Marquardt with a thoroughly embarrassing exit interview, and reveal our new producer. However, it’s not really goodbye, because Drew will be staying on to work with John on an upcoming project (TBA).

In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig deliberate on the question: Should you quit LOUDLY?

Links:

Email us at [email protected]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 740 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what is competence and why do we love to see competent or incompetent characters on screen?

Craig: What number of podcast is this?

John: 740.

Craig: Horrible time to start asking that question. What’s good? Should we be good?

John: You can try to be good.

Craig: I don’t know.

John: We weren’t good when we started.

Craig: No. We may not be good now.

John: We’ve gotten better, though. We’ll talk about that.

Craig: Better is important.

John: I want to ask, what does it mean to be competent in the real world, and how does AI challenge our perceptions of competence? Because a lot of things can seem competent when they’re not competent because a person just typed it into a box.

Craig: Look, I drew something with 10 fingers only. How competent.

John: We will also answer listener questions about being ghosted by an agent, and in our bonus segment for premium members, we’ll answer a random advice question from a listener whose workplace has been upended by corrupt goons.

Craig: Oh.

John: Should they stay or should they go, and if they go, should they exit loudly?

Craig: Is this Scott Pelley writing in?

John: It could be Lesley Stahl.

Craig: Got it.

John: You’ll have to wait till the bonus segment to figure out who it is.

Craig: It could be the great Lesley Stahl. It is not Lesley Stahl.

John: It’s not Leslie Stahl.

Craig: She chose to stay.

John: She chose to stay, but we’ll see.

Craig: It’s a situation over there.

John: It’s a situation over there, for sure. We have big news right here on this very podcast.

Craig: Oh, here we go. Hold on, folks.

John: This will be the final episode produced by our beloved producer, Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Oh, we fired him.

Drew Marquardt: Me and my family have decided that it’s good that I take time to work on my own things.

Craig: Transition to…

Drew: This is best for everyone and thank you.

Craig: Respect our privacy at this time.

John: Absolutely. We will respect Drew’s privacy to a certain degree.

Craig: We did not fire Drew.

John: No. We’ve had a lot of fantastic producers over the years. Generally, when we lose a producer, Craig, it’s because he gets staffed on a show and suddenly we’re scrambling to replace them.

Craig: By “we,” we mean you.

John: Me. In this case, I have a project that’s going to require a lot more of my time, and I selfishly wanted Drew to come over to this project with me, which meant we actually had some time to think about the best ways to–

Craig: Succession.

John: Succession. We thought about succession. We didn’t get four seasons out of it. We got a couple of months.

Craig: This particular show right here.

Drew: Justice drama-fueled.

John: We found someone who’s going to be fantastic. Her name is Meredith Stedman. Meredith, some folks might already know who you are. Can you give us a sense of your background and why they might know your voice?

Meredith Stedman: Sure. If you’re a podcast listener, particularly in true crime or horror, you might have heard me before. I worked on Radio Rental for a long time, and Rattled & Shook, and Up and Vanished. Just some titles like that.

John: Fantastic.

Meredith: You might have heard me.

Craig: I’m already very soothed, by the way.

Meredith: Oh, thank you.

Craig: Very soothing.

Drew: I used to listen to her podcast to go to sleep, which is crazy because it’s a scary story.

Craig: That’s not a great compliment. That said, Melissa uses our podcast to go to sleep. We are her sleeping podcast. I walked into the room, this is my wife, seeing her lying there, a little bit of drool coming out of the mouth, soft snore, you and I talking about copyright.

John: Understandable. Meredith, we’re so excited to have you on board, and you actually know how to produce podcasts, which is so great because–

Craig: Wait, so does he.

Drew: Oh, no. I was winging it for a very long time.

Craig: What?

Meredith: Thank you.

Craig: No one told me.

John: No one who’s come on to produce the podcast has actually produced a podcast before they sat down in the chair-

Craig: This was the podcast. This was it.

John: This was how it started.

Craig: You bring some outside knowledge.

Meredith: I think I somehow am the first generation of someone who’s had this job this long. I don’t think it was a possibility before.

Craig: It was an emerging industry.

Meredith: Yes, an emerging industry.

Craig: Understood.

John: To fill out more of your curriculum vitae, you actually did go through the Peter Stark program. You actually have a film producing degree.

Meredith: Yes.

John: Part of the reason I think you wanted to move over here is because it’s a little closer to what you actually learned how to do.

Meredith: Yes.

Craig: This whole place is just a Starkie-

Meredith: You’re surrounded.

Craig: -supply tube. I am personally surrounded. It’s pretty good. I got to say, I don’t want to like it, but my whole thing is that these places basically cheat by picking people who are going to be successful and then making them spend money to confirm it. We can talk about that incompetence point. What a great scam. Here, take this test to see if you’ll succeed. You will? Give me money. Nonetheless, their selection process is on point. That much is clear.

Drew: That’s absolutely true. When I got this job, I had the thought of, “Thank God they didn’t meet Meredith Stedman because that’s the person who should have this. I’m very excited that you’re–

Meredith: Oh, Drew.

Craig: You could have just said it.

Meredith: Oh, please.

Drew: No, I wanted the job. Me first, and then other people.

Craig: I have to be honest.

John: We should talk about how you came into our orbit because you were our intern. The Peter Stark program, which is a two-year motion picture producing program at USC, that I went through, that Stuart Friedel went through, that Megan McDonald went through.

Craig: Did Megana go through?

John: No, Megana went to Harvard.

Craig: She went to Harvard.

John: She went to Harvard.

Craig: She went to Harvard. She was like, “I think we have enough here.”

John: Just the same way that I was an intern at Universal Pictures, Drew was our intern for a summer here and was great. He was helping us out with the Scriptnotes book. Then when Meg and I got staffed on a show, he stepped up.

Drew: Thank God, because it’s changed my life. It’s been amazing. There’s a lot of parents for the Scriptnotes book, but it’s my baby. Seeing that through has been amazing, too.

Craig: Beautiful orange book. I guess we’re going to ask you all sorts of questions. I’m just curious because I don’t know if this would be on the list of questions. When you say it’s changed your life, Megana Rao has mentioned that she’s recognized.

Drew: Oh.

Craig: Do people ever recognize you?

Drew: Very rarely.

Craig: By your voice?

Drew: By my voice, sometimes, but it’s context. If you’re at the New Beverly and there’s a bunch of film nerds around, I’ll get an occasional someone just sticking their head out and looking and I’m like, “Oh.”

Craig: “He’s here. It’s him.”

Drew: The only time I’m stopped is in Austin. It’s usually to be like, “Hey, you’re not Megana Rao.” I’m like, no, you’re right.

Craig: How encouraging and reaffirming-

Drew: Thank you.

Craig: -that comment is.

Drew: Big shoes to fill.

John: Each week, how many emails come in that are still addressed to Megana rather than to you?

Drew: Good question.

John: Have you had any, Meredith?

Meredith: Yes, I’ve already seen them. I’m like, well, you actually missed a little bit in between.

Drew: Probably three or four every week still.

Craig: Megana really did have an outsized–

John: Well, she was the first of our producers who actually spoke on a camera regularly.

Craig: That’s what it was.

Drew: That’s what it was.

Craig: Or on microphone, at least. You’re absolutely right.

John: I’m saying camera because now we have cameras.

Craig: Now we’re one of those.

John: One of those. 588 was your first episode. That means 152 episodes produced plus the side cast episodes during the strike, so maybe 170 altogether.

Craig: Stuart probably has the record still.

John: It’s the third most because Stuart has 259 episodes and Megana has 199. You couldn’t–

Drew: One shy of 200.

Craig: That’s the way you do it. You say, I don’t want the 200. You walk off the field like a stud.

John: Obviously, you’re incredibly central to getting this podcast out each week. Also central is Matthew Chilelli, who’s going to miss you. He put together a special presentation just for you.

Craig: Oh, this is going to be good.

John: You’ve not heard this yet. We’re going to play it for the first time.

Craig: Oh, boy. Here we go. What people don’t know is that John and Drew have the exact same thing they do when they do a verbal flub. Matthew, can you do it for us? I know you know what it is.

Craig: It’s like that.

Drew: Victor writes, “Are you guising?” You point to it as a kitsch, and– She writes, “If you’ve ever–” Free delivery– I’m going to say that again. My friend Simon and I– I’ve organized a schedule that requires– Try that again. I’m going to try that one more time. As with your three– I’m going to start that again.

Craig: Love it. That’s what lets us know it’s not AI.

John: Thank you, Matthew, for that. Thank you for all of your questions being read.

Drew: Oh, my God.

Craig: I was hoping that was going to be what that was.

John: I mess up a lot and people don’t hear that. I think one of the challenges for you is that you won’t be talking for a very long time and suddenly you have to read a question, so you have no warmup into it.

Drew: There’s that. I had to get used to the cadence because I would hit it really fast sometimes and my brain would get ahead of the words coming out of my mouth, and that would be a huge problem. It took a while. It’s going cold into it. Also, I’m bad at talking. That’s a big part of it.

Craig: Let me try that. It is interesting. It’s fascinating. That is something that you guys both– That is your specific thing.

Drew: I think I took it from John because, again, this is the first podcast job I had. I was like, oh, that’s what we do when we screw up.

Craig: I learned it from you, dad. I learned it from you.

John: Meredith, you have a lot of hosts who come through. What do they do? Is it a three, two, one, or how do they do when they acknowledge it’s a flag so it gets cut out?

Meredith: There’s been some good ones. I worked with someone who was like, “Boop, and cut that.” They would literally do it for the editor.

Craig: They would boop themselves.

Meredith: They would boop themselves.

Craig: Incredibly helpful.

Craig: It’s very helpful. She’ll at least get on that.

John: I’ve also heard people clapping so it forms a big spike. Some people can see like, “Oh, there’s a problem around here.”

Meredith: Same deal.

Craig: Fascinating.

John: Drew, what is the most surprising thing you’ve while here or a couple of them?

Drew: Chris Nolan’s car is not what you expect it to be.

John: It flies for sure.

Drew: It flies. When people come to the office, I give them the parking pass because they park on the street. It’s always interesting to see what car people drive at different parts of their career.

John: Does Christopher Nolan have a more modest car than you’d expect?

Drew: More modest car than you expect. I expected a Rolls-Royce.

Craig: Do you know that my strong feeling ever since– Do you know who Jeffrey Katzenberg is?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: Jeffrey Katzenberg was at the height of his powers in the ’90s, I would say, when he was running Disney. His whole thing was, I drive this 1982 Camry. That’s what keeps me real while I get paid hundreds of millions of dollars. I actually think that’s douchier. I’m not saying Chris Nolan is douchey. I’m just saying that the whole look how shitty my– Am I allowed to say shitty?

John: You could have said it. It’s your podcast.

Craig: I’m just saying the whole look how crappy my car is thing, it’s a little performative.

Drew: It wasn’t a crappy car. It wasn’t a performatively crappy car. It was like he got a good deal at CarMax. It was just–

Craig: That is, I got a good deal at CarMax, seems like a crappy car to me. I’m not saying it’s crappy.

Drew: Maybe it’s incognito. You see these cars driving around LA that are big and they’ve got a personalized license plate and you’re like, you are making a scene. I like the incognito of it all.

John: Is my Chevy Bolt or my Nissan Leaf, which are my two most recent cars. Are those–

Craig: Those are high-efficiency cars. I think that that’s fine. Now, I also drive a high-efficiency car, but it’s an absolute a-hole car. Not because it’s modest.

John: You’re also never in town to drive it.

Craig: Correct. It’s beautiful.

John: Let’s get back to Drew here. Anything else that you’ve taken from your experience working here?

Drew: Oh my God, so much. Because I had an acting career before this that fell apart. To have a place, I think I’d always felt like, it’ll be lucky if I get to work in the industry and have that– I think there was a huge confidence hit in that. To come in here and to have you guys be patient with me while I had a lot of nerves early on, and then, yes, to find that again and to– Beyond having a job and being able to learn so much from so many people, just what it was able to do for me in terms of being comfortable and relaxed.

Craig: That’s awesome. I’ve always appreciated that you’re a slightly vulnerable person and that you–

Drew: Thanks.

Craig: You weren’t somebody that hid your– I wouldn’t call it nerves as much as your desire to do a good job. I love that.

Drew: Oh, thank you. I worry that eagerness can be a little off-putting, so I appreciate it.

Craig: Not to me. I’m sure a lot of people hate it. I thought it was quite lovely.

Drew: Thank you.

John: I think, Craig, you haven’t had a chance to read Drew, but Drew’s also a really good writer. You had a bit of a writing career before this and you have a writing career now that’s percolating, which is nice to see as well, as a writer and a director.

Drew: Thank you.

Craig: The impulse is to be like, not at all. No, I’ve never been paid for it.

John: Here’s what’s a little awkward about this is it’s not like you’re going away forever. You’re sticking around. You’re just not going to be producing the show every week.

Craig: You’re sliding one chair down.

John: You will just have one email address rather than two email addresses, so you won’t be answering the Ask Account, which is easily 50% of your job.

Drew: Oh, my God. Yes. This week when it shifted over to Meredith, I was like, oh, look at all this time and mental space I have.

Craig: How many emails do we get a week?

Drew: Oh, not 1,000, but–

Craig: 1,000?

Drew: No, not 1,000, but–

Craig: If you say not 1,000, that means nearly 1,000.

Drew: I bet we’re getting 100 emails a day.

Craig: Oh, my God. 100 emails a day. We’re so behind.

Drew: Well, but it’s not all listeners. There is just random PR stuff. There’s a lot of– Publicists will send through stuff like photo calls and all that stuff.

John: We get a lot of incoming about guests on the show.

Craig: We are just a thing that is on a mass, like blanket it to get my guy on the show.

Drew: That would be 60% of it.

John: Well, Drew, we thank you for your producing of the show week after week, for dealing with the email and–

Craig: Dealing with us, and really, I mean me.

John: Thank you.

Drew: No, it’s long overdue.

Craig: Not knowing where I am, what I’m doing, where I’m going. Great producer. Great job.

Drew: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Craig: Really good work.

Drew: Thank you, guys.

Craig: I won’t miss you. You’ll still be here. How can we miss you if you don’t go away?

Drew: That’s the problem.

Craig: That’s always been the problem.

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Craig: Oh, wait. Widow’s Bay.

John: A second season.

Craig: I was reading a little bit about Apple today, and there was an article that was talking about how they’re becoming the most concentrated version of what HBO has been, or perhaps was, where instead of the Netflix model of fire hose, they’re just drip, drip, drip, but each drip is meant to be high-quality. The viewership does not have to be high, but the impact on culture has to be high. No one has any idea how many people are watching these shows. I don’t know how many people are watching these shows, but Apple does do a good job of making– they’ve got a high signal-to-noise ratio, no question. Widow’s Bay has been amazing. I was just texting with our buddy this morning, and I told her, you’re never getting off that island.

John: It’s very good. We do have some information about viewership on Widow’s Bay because they have released some stuff, and so it has tripled week over week.

Craig: Do they say from what?

John: From like a 100 baseline. I’ll look and figure out where that viewership never comes from. I think what it speaks to, though, is that the weekly release schedule has been a huge driver of the success of that show.

Craig: It generally is a fantastic way to do things. The more we go through these technological convulsions, the more it seems like people who have come to disrupt our business eventually arrive at the most disruptive plan of them all, go back to the way we did stuff. You know what we really should do is stream television, but include advertisements within the programming. Oh, you mean like 1945 Geritol Presents? It is remarkable. Of course, week to week. Widow’s Bay is actually doing something interesting that has brought to mind something.

John: Oh, yes. A little cliffhanger.

Craig: Do you know the length of that episode?

John: Short.

Craig: 30 minutes. Now, I’m sitting there going, why am I breaking my body and mind apart to do these sometimes 80-minute-long episodes, right? Why don’t I just split them in half and they’re only– because I did not mind it at all.

John: No, it was great.

Craig: I didn’t mind it at all. Widow’s Bay has piqued my interest in the half hour– Look, I’m sure Widow’s Bay is currently submitted for Best Comedy.

John: Yes, which is appropriate.

Craig: Which is fair. Unlike The Bear, which was not correct. It’s not category fraud, as they say. It’s also a drama. It’s a dramedy. I can see a world for a 30-minute drama. The reason that we have hour-long dramas is because network television would give a drama an hour. 20, what? Eight minutes of that or maybe 20 minutes of that were advertisements.

John: They were really 40 minutes.

Craig: They were really 40 minutes long. Then you suddenly got this much denser hour-long thing. Now I’m thinking, is there a new category here of half-hour drama? Which The Bear, by the way, was. It is?

John: It is. Still.

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Craig: Your last chance to go [onomatopoeia].

Drew: We’ll see if I get in there. Adam writes, I think you two would be interested in a trick I’ve been using in my D&D campaigns. One of the hardest things about starting a campaign is finding out why this group of misfits starts working together to begin with. Start with the Stewart special. Session one starts right in the middle of the inciting incident as the event that changes the characters [onomatopoeia].

Craig: There it is.

Drew: Session one starts right in the middle of the inciting incident, the event that changes the characters from a group to a party as things lead to a climax, a record scratch. Yes, that’s you guys. Bet you’re wondering how you got here. It all started at the tavern. This can really change the tone for that first session or two. Instead of milling about, it’s now the player’s job to figure out why they were at the inciting incident. If they say, “I don’t think my character would do that,” you can say, well, we know it happens, so what would make your character do that?

Craig: The hangover model of D&D.

Drew: Yes.

Craig: I’m a little worried about a DM who says, if you die, if you get yourselves killed in the first session, I don’t know, maybe ease up on the combat a little bit. Session one. Fudge a roll, let them live.

Drew: Yes, but level one characters are so squishy anyway. It’s just one swipe by a bear.

Craig: That’s why you got to really tune those encounters. Right, Meredith?

Meredith: Right.

Craig: She’s like, I regret everything.

John: She’s like, how do I get out of this job?

Craig: Googling fast exit.

John: Yes, but also, it’s nice if a level one character dies, you’ve established stakes in the world of death. Is it real?

Craig: That’s true. I believe in death in D&D, as you know. I think it’s important.

John: My characters have died.

Craig: I think the coolest thing a character can do role play-wise is die. It’s awesome. We have players who disagree strongly, which is fine. I don’t try to ever do it. It’s best if it happens rarely. I do believe that. Starting a campaign. This was not the point of why this guy wrote in, or woman. The point is that it is a fun way to force everybody to figure out, how did we get here? How are we friends? It is the clunkiest part of things. There’s no question. It’s one of the reasons I applaud Baldur’s Gate for their way to get everybody together was you were just randomly plucked up by mind flayers, all of you infected.

John: And now–

Craig: Now you’re in it together.

John: I think I did on the campaign that you played in recently, Craig, is I required all the players in session zero, it’s like you have to be related to two other characters in the group. It can be they’re your brother, they’re your friend, you have a crush on them, something else, just that there would be interpersonal connections before it started, and you all were in the same small town.

Craig: What we inevitably discover along the way is we find our own connections anyway because we start to get to know each other’s characters and things happen.

John: Bits develop, yes.

Craig: Bits develop.

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Craig: Yes, we enjoy it. It’s incredibly satisfying to see somebody that can’t miss. It’s a weird thing. You would think that the rules of drama are such that we like watching people struggle and suffer, which generally we do, but every now and again, we want to, as they say, park our brains under our seat.

John: You want the person to be someone challenged, but to be able to overcome a challenge without–

Craig: Without question. They’re so good at it. There are entire genres of action movies, the point of which is, yes, you messed with the wrong guy. The Equalizer is the ultimate in competence porn. Denzel Washington plays a guy who does not lose any encounter. He, in fact, is so competent, the only challenge he has is giving himself a challenge of how quickly he can kill everyone in the room, but they are definitely going to die. It is so satisfying to see someone that confident in what they do.

John: Yes. Heist films, in general, are all about competence. They have a plan. They’re executing the plan. You don’t even know how the plan works, but it’s great to see them working on their plan. In terms of systems, a lot of Sorkin’s movies, especially Sorkin Walkin Talks, are people who are incredibly competent, and they’re just doing their thing. Even though a huge thing is happening, they are on top of it.

Craig: It’s comforting. The West Wing was comforting. Oh, look, everybody up there is really smart and cares and is working so hard.

John: We had Tony Gilroy on the show talking about Andor. The rebels in Andor are incredibly competent in what they’re doing, which makes you feel good because, even if they’re facing astronomical odds, they can do it.

Craig: Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton. Competence porn. Michael Clayton can clean up any mess as a corporate fixer. The question only is, should he clean up this mess or not? Not, can he clean up this mess or not? That’s exciting to watch.

John: In science fiction, you have The Martian. Matt Damon’s character is so incredibly competent. No one else can do what he’s doing. He’s doing great. The Pitt is a great example, or ER, of doctors who are really good at doing what they’re doing. Yes, they’re facing challenging cases, but they know what they’re doing.

Craig: MacGyver, from our childhood, every week would take a paper clip and a piece of bubble gum and some windshield wiper fluid and make a bomb. He could do that every single week. He needed to do that every single week and you never-

John: That was the franchise of the show.

Craig: -sat down and expected that one day, MacGyver would go, actually, none of this stuff adds up. Now, is it as good as MacGruber?

John: No.

Craig: No.

John: Let’s flip it around and talk about incompetence porn because I do think that’s actually one of the real hallmarks of comedy. The Office is incompetence porn. It’s people who are above their station. They don’t know what they’re doing. Veep is just incompetence. It’s just people failing constantly. Succession, I would argue, is sort of both because you have people who work– We have Jerry, who’s incredibly competent, but then you have some of the heirs who are competent only in small domains and are flailing around.

Craig: I would put that right into incompetence porn because you have the most competent man in the world, Logan Roy, looking down at his failed sons and failed daughter. The people below him that work directly for him, the non-family people, like Jerry, for instance, are conniving and backbiting and would sell them out in a heartbeat if they thought they knew who was going to be taking over. The guy who wins is not particularly competent. He’s more of a coward.

John: Yes, he learns along the way, though. That’s actually one of the nice things about a multi-season show is that you see Tom Wambsgans’ fans actually develop some skills along the way. Even Greg develops some skills along the way. He has no moral compass whatsoever.

Craig: No. Greg is pretty incompetent. Tom describes his one skill beautifully to the character that Alexander Skarsgard played. I’m a pain sponge. I absorb misery so you, the guy who owns the company, won’t ever have to be touched by it. I am your scapegoat. I’m your sacrificial lamb. That’s a horrible, depressing way to view yourself, but he understood that indeed was the thing that made him strong. Watching the failures there, every time Jeremy Strong’s character was this close and then he would just mess it up, if he’d just shut his mouth. Did you ever see Father Ted?

John: I remember Father Ted, yes.

Craig: Father Ted, great incompetence porn. Faulty Towers, great incompetence porn. The Brits do incompetence porn.

John: Widow’s Bay is incompetence porn.

Craig: Yes. The staff is ridiculous. Rosemary.

John: Rosemary.

Craig: So good. [laughs]

John: What I want to point out about competence is it is not a general trait. A character is not competent across all areas. They’re competent within a very specific domain. That’s what’s so interesting. I personally am a very competent wrapper of gifts. I’m really good at wrapping gifts.

Craig: I’m so glad you added of gifts.

John: I was like, no, you’re not. Oh, of gifts.

John: Of gifts.

Craig: Yes.

John: Don’t ask me to do any sport other than running. I’m just incompetent at all other sports.

Craig: John, I cannot wrap a gift. I’ve tried. It is so triggering for me. In school, I was competent across every class, including PE, except for arts and crafts. Arts and crafts, I was the kid who would end up with a popsicle stick in his hair, glue on the back of his neck, and some horrible mess in front of me, glitter everywhere. Zero abilities. I don’t know what it is. When I’ve tried, I’ve sat there with a YouTube instruction video to try and wrap a gift. It looks like an animal did it. Whereas Melissa could work at Bloomingdale’s wrapping gifts.

John: Yes. I love wrapping gifts. I don’t care about gifts. I love wrapping them.

Craig: You just wrap–

John: Love it.

Craig: Does Mike know how to wrap a gift?

John: He knows. He can wrap a gift.

Craig: But he comes to you, doesn’t he? He’s like, “Can you wrap this?”

John: Yes, absolutely.

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Craig: That’s the juicy stuff or tragedy.

John: Yes. We see confidence before we see competence. We see the character is approaching a thing as if they know what they’re doing, but the situation itself is the only way that we see whether they’re actually competent there. It’s the action the characters are taking that reveals whether they’re actually competent. With confidence, you have both internal confidence, does the character believe they know what they’re doing, and external confidence, do the people around them believe they know what they’re doing? Those are the dynamics of scenes. That’s what creates drama and suspense.

Craig: It tends to work best when we, in the audience, can’t obviously see that this person is competent if only she would take her glasses off and whoosh the hair. That was a very common trope in the ’80s and ’90s. You’re like, no, they’re pretty hot with the glasses on. The glasses do nothing. There’s an off-replayed clip on YouTube of the 1978 Superman, Christopher Reeves, taking his glasses off as Clark Kent and then straightening his body up and getting taller.

John: Let’s look at situations where a character is competent and confident versus competent and incompetent. I want to compare two Andy Weir heroes. Mark Watney is the Matt Damon character in The Martian, is confident and competent. He knows what to do, and he’s ready to do it. Then you look at Ryan Gosling’s character in Hail Mary, he is the least confident person around, and yet he’s incredibly competent. He’s able to do all the stuff to save himself. Our approach to the two characters is so different because we want Ryan Gosling to believe in himself, and he doesn’t.

Craig: You’ve given two good starting points, not necessary starting points, but good ones for drama versus comedy. In a drama, a character is confident and competent and must push through some emotional stressors, some very human things because they’re in an extreme situation. Only they would survive at all. The question is now really, do they have the heart to withstand it all? Whereas, somebody who does not believe in themselves, but has the tools, it’s going to be funny. They’re going to bumble around, and they’re going to feel like an idiot, and we’re going to laugh.

John: I would say that the confident-competent duo isn’t just for protagonists. Miranda Priestley in Devil Wears Prada is confident and competent, and we see that in her, and that’s a huge part of who she is, that she’s both of these things. She knows what she’s doing, and she believes she knows what she’s doing.

Craig: A good villain is typically confident and competent.

John: I can only think of one counter-example. Salieri in Amadeus, he’s not very good, and he knows he’s not very good.

Craig: Yes. He knows he’s mediocre. He is, however, a court musician. He’s one of the best– Salieri was legitimately one of the best composers of all time, just not in the top– He’s not in an A rank. He’s not S tier, and he’s not A tier.

John: I’m saying the character in the movie–

Craig: The character in the movie, what was so fascinating about it, and it’s why we keep coming back to the notion of Salieri, or at least the dramatized notion of Salieri in Mozart is to say, what happens when you are confident and competent, and then you meet somebody who is resplendent? What happens when the mortal man meets the angel? What does that do to us? Which is a very specific sort of thing because he definitely wasn’t incompetent.

The most beautiful moment in Amadeus, to me, is when Mozart is dictating his Requiem to Salieri, and Salieri is scribbling this down, hating him for it and weeping in real time because he can hear the music in his head and being so in love with the product of it.

John: Just to complete the little grid here, we also have characters who are confident but incompetent. Michael Scott in The Office.

Craig: Yes. Always fun.

John: Mostly of the heirs in Succession.

Craig: Yes. The emperor in Mozart. Too many notes.

John: Absolutely. That’s often a comedy character.

Craig: Almost always. It’s because it is so funny to watch somebody blithely announce to other people, usually people who are competent. Blackadder is a good example of this. You have your Hugh Laurie, and then you’ve got your own Atkinson. It’s always funny. Now, in real life, it’s the worst. You served in the WGA. One of the things that happens when you serve any system is that you come to learn why things are the way they are. It doesn’t mean they can’t change or be improved, but there are things where you always thought, why do they do it this way?

Then you find out, oh, because of law and stuff. Inevitably, somebody would then come along and announce with total confidence and complete incompetence that you’re all stupid because you haven’t done X, Y, and Z, the most obvious things in the world to do. Everybody patiently waits and then says, we’re not allowed to do that by law. You are very confident and you are very incompetent. It’s not fun in real life. On TV and in movies, it’s hysterical.

John: Just delightful. You bring up the systems that may be an obstacle there. I was thinking about, you also have to want to do the thing. Ron Swanson’s character on Parks and Recreation, the great Nick Offerman, he could do all the things. He just doesn’t want to do all the things. He just chooses not to.

Craig: Yes. He’s a reluctant hero. You do know that when the chips are down, that Ron Swanson could probably do anything. Have you ever seen– you’re not a big South Park fan, are you?

John: I’ve watched a lot of South Park, yes.

Craig: Have you ever seen the episode Scott Tenorman Must Die?

John: Incredible. You look at how Cartman is like, wow, Cartman could do all these things. Cartman can murder a child.

Craig: Cartman, as it turns out, when he puts his mind to it, is the most competent person in the world. That episode still has one of the best endings of any work of art I have ever experienced. It’s incredible.

John: It’s incredible. I don’t want to spoil it for everyone to see it.

Craig: If you have not seen Scott Tenorman Must Die, watch it.

John: We also need to talk about knowledge. The character has to have the ability to know what is right and what is wrong, what the actual goal is and whether they’ve achieved the goal. You think about there’s people who are knowledgeable, but incompetent. You think about the critic who can’t actually do the thing that they’re criticizing, the chef who knows every technique, but can’t get dinner on the table. They know the field, but they can’t actually execute the thing. That’s an aspect of competence.

Craig: Yes. There’s a good growth story to be had there. The experience of book smarts released into the world and learning how things actually go. That’s a fun story to watch.

John: Yes, that’s both in comedy and dramas, yes. Let’s just talk about just overall areas, though. We’ve been talking a lot about careers, but it also applies to parenting. The trope of the dad who doesn’t know how to do anything or who has weaponized his incompetence so that he doesn’t have to do anything.

Craig: Oh, diaper.

John: I can’t do that. With any technology. The grandparents who can’t–

Craig: Can I just ask, the very first time you changed diaper, I was drenched in sweat. Drenched. I wanted to do a really good job. This baby would not stop moving. It was my baby, by the way, it wasn’t some random baby. Stop moving.

John: I would say that I’m good at wrapping gifts. It actually really applies to–

Craig: It actually makes sense. It was getting the onesie on and off that really put my adrenaline to work. All new parents begin as incompetent, whether they know it or not. They could be confident, they could be not confident, but they are incompetent. Then you learn pretty fast. You learn fast.

John: You learn fast. Every workplace is a study in competence and incompetence. We mentioned Ron Swanson, but you also have, Leslie Knope, who is so competent that she wants to do everybody else’s jobs, and that’s the source of the friction.

Craig: Yes. She’s an A-plus student, and that is fun.

John: Cooking shows we love to watch because they’re just so good at doing these things. How are you able to pull that off? Same with the fashion design reality shows. How do they make that thing happen?

Craig: We also love watching those things for when people suddenly have an exposed incompetence. Like Project Runway, you have someone that’s doing great every week, and then suddenly the challenge is going to Home Depot and make dresses out of stuff you can find at Home Depot. Somebody who’s amazing with regular stuff is like, I don’t know. I made something out of saw blades and sandpaper, and it’s bad.

John: It’s bad. Finally, we have the characters who are clearly really good in one specific domain, and they try to apply those skills to things that they have no business touching. Elon Musk is a classic example of this. Craig, there’s a crossword puzzle word which I had to look up. Ultracrapadarian?

Craig: I don’t know. Ultracrepidarian. Is that a new coinage?

John: No, it’s an existing word that’s in the dictionary, but it’s a person who frequently professes opinions and judgments outside their area of expertise. Wow, we know some of those folks.

Craig: We sure do. We call them know-it-alls normally. Ultracrepidarian is not a great crossword word because of its length.

John: It’s too long.

Craig: You need quite a large grid for that.

John: Yes, but it feels like a puzzle word. It feels like some thing that you build together out of little pieces.

Craig: Ultracrepidarian. A crepidarian is somebody that–

John: Crep, not crap.

Craig: Crep. Oh, not crap. Ultracrepidarian.

John: Crap feels like knowledge.

Craig: I see. Ultracrepidarian. A crepidarian is somebody that occasionally will profess knowledge outside their area of expertise, whereas an Ultracrepidarian–

John: We’re being Ultracrepidarian right now. We’re assuming that we can get to the definition of this word.

Craig: I feel pretty good about what I just said.

John: I feel pretty good about this.

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Craig: Yes. Even prior to the emergence of AI, the technology that underscored this for me the most was music production. Drumming, for instance, used to require an amount of competence, and now it requires you to have a finger and a button to press. Things like adding reverb, editing music, blending tracks, down mixing, all of that stuff has been automated to a remarkable extent, which has democratized music production to the extent that so much of it is ignorable because it all sounds like the same.

John: Well, I think the challenge is we’re so used to looking at the output and assuming, well, if this output is good, then the person knows what they’re doing, but you have broken those things apart, so the output could look good. We can assume, oh, this person must be competent, but they really have no idea what they’re doing. They just punched buttons and got the right result.

Craig: Yes. You can now generate a college essay this way. What begins to happen is that people who are exceptional become all the more notable and interesting and valuable. We are all pretty good now at dressing ourselves because there’s so much you can read about what colors vaguely to throw together. Everybody can vaguely dress okay, so no one gets credit for it. These guys do, but we three don’t. I feel that’s the way it’s going to be with a well-written essay. No one’s going to get credit for that anymore.

John: Let’s talk about then how do we assess competence in a world where there is AI and where we can’t judge the outputs.

Craig: We become more particular, and we become more refined in our taste because restaurants. People didn’t go to restaurants that often, and now they go to restaurants all the time. Foodies, we didn’t have that many different kinds of opportunities when we were growing up in the ’70s, and now we can eat foods from everywhere, so now we can go, “This Thai is fine. It’s fine, it’s not great.” Thai food did blow my mind the first time I had what today I would call a C-tier Pad See Ew blew my mind when I was 17, because I’d never eaten it before. This is what occurs now with everything. The democratization of what we would call vaguely competent just becomes normal, and then we start to look for the exceptional.

John: I think some of what you’re saying in higher ed may be what we need to start doing in the workplace as well, which is basically it’s interviews, it’s talking, it’s looking at the output and then actually speaking with the person about the output and making it clear that they actually understand the output and how they got there that wasn’t just generated by some outside system. It’s the interviewing references and just talking with people. You want to make sure you have a person who can’t just do the thing once but actually understands it and can do the thing in a crunch. As we’re hiring people, I feel like I’m going to be especially vigilant. I don’t want to hire somebody off just one writing sample; I want to make sure to talk to them about how they got there and what their process is.

Craig: You also are looking for something that feels better than the average.

John: Yes.

Craig: The average is going up and we will then have to redefine what competence is as the average improves, and it is. I do remember reading in college, sometimes we’d all do, “Here, we’ve all written papers, read each other’s papers.” I would read a paper and think, “Well, this is a perfectly well-written thing. It is boring. I am unmoved and uneducated. It is formatted correctly. It’s competent.” That used to be an insult. “Well, it’s a competent paper,” meaning you checked all the boxes, it’s just not special. Now, if I read that, I wouldn’t even get two paragraphs in and chuck it because it doesn’t matter whether a human did it or a computer did it; it’s nearly competent, but it’s not special.

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Drew: Okay.

Meredith: This is from Claudia in London. Claudia writes: “My agent, whom I’ve been represented by for two years at quite an established agency, has completely ghosted me. Before you think it, I don’t believe I’ve done anything to warrant it. I know the very clear answer to the conundrum is that I must part ways with immediate effect, but my question is why would an agent do this? I signed with them when I had a contract come in to write a feature film, and since then, I’ve delivered two spec scripts that are ready for industry circulation, but since checking in mid to end of last year, I now cannot muster any response whatsoever. Could you tell me why agents do this and how we, as writers, can cope with the mental rejection?”

Craig: Very British question. Excellent use of “whom” and “full effect.”

John: Full effect. I love it. Drew, you had a British agent.

Drew: I had a British agent for two years.

John: Talk to me about your instincts here.

Drew: I was dropped because they just took me off their website is how I found out.

Craig: I’m so sorry.

Drew: It’s okay. “We simply don’t represent you.”

Craig: It was that?

Drew: Yes. It was like, “Well, you’re in America now, and it just didn’t feel right for you to be there.” I said, “Well, I feel like I’m an artist worth having on your books and worth putting out there,” and they said–

Craig: They said, “Ah, there’s the crux of our difference.”

Drew: They said, “Well, if that’s the way you’re going to be, then maybe we should part ways.”

Craig: Sweet. They weren’t trying to get rid of you as a client; they were just taking your picture off?

Drew: No, they were, but in that very slow British sort of way.

Craig: British sort of way.

Drew: I do feel like the British industry is much different than the US industry in that way–

Craig: It is, yes.

Drew: -particularly with agents and casting and all that stuff. I guess that’s really my experience. I feel like, especially in the States, I’ve had agents be more directly mean to me, but they’ve been also– It’s a nice–

John: It goes faster.

Drew: It goes faster. I had one agent be like, “Your career doesn’t have a pulse.” I was like, “Wow,” but that guy’s been really nice to me for the rest of my time in LA. When I need an actor for a thing, I’ll reach out to him. He’s at a big established agency, and he’s super helpful.

John: He was honest.

Drew: He was honest, which is different.

John: He was honest. Yes, there is a certain passive-aggressive nature to– I don’t want to tarnish the entire British culture here, but they are infamously, dangerously polite. I have quite a few British people that work on our show, and I, from time to time, have to stop them and go, “I feel like what you’re trying to say is, we should not do this. It would be bad.” They tend to put it all in the form of a question.

Craig: Pose a hypothetical.

Drew: Pose a hypothetical.

Craig: Speak in the subjunctive.

Drew: Yes, and it is cultural. However, culture does not justify out-and-out rudeness. To not return phone calls, messages, texts, emails at all is insufferable and cowardly. Why do they do it? Because it’s uncomfortable for them. It’s the simplest answer. They don’t want to deal with the minimum discomfort of delivering bad news to someone. As the weeks go on, it becomes harder and harder for them because it will become more and more uncomfortable for them. Because now they have to both express why they don’t want to be your agent anymore and apologize for not having told you this for two months now, and it just gets worse and worse. Eventually, they’re just closing their eyes and hoping that the ghost that keeps knocking at their door leaves; they think of you as the ghost. They want you out of their house. It’s not acceptable.

John: It’s not acceptable. I think what Claudia is feeling is, like, “Do I have an agent? I just don’t know if I’m represented or not.” That’s the weird limbo. The answer is that you’re not represented, but I think you’re also worried that if one of these spec scripts sells or someone has interest, suddenly this person is going to reappear. They probably won’t.

Drew: The quickest way to ensure that they won’t is get a new agent.

Craig: Yes.

John: Well, and get a new agent before you’re officially dropped, I think, too. Don’t wait for them to–

Drew: Yes, that makes sense as well.

John: Because you can honestly say, “I’m represented at this agency, they’ve not-

Drew: Serviced well.

John: -serviced me well. I’m looking for this. I have two spec scripts ready to go out,” which is a great thing.

Drew: “I had a job.” Yes. Certainly, inaction here is not an option. She has to do something to get a new agent. To the direct question, why? Cowardice.

John: Cowardice.

Drew: Simple as that.

Craig: Incompetence, too, maybe.

Drew: It’s dishonorable.

John: Yes, it is.

Drew: That’s what I would say. It’s not incompetent. It’s dishonorable.

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Drew: My one cool thing is rhubarb. [laughs]

John: All right. I’m completely opposed to this, so celery and rhubarb.

Drew: Really?

Craig: So am I.

John: Yes, you’re going to have–

Craig: Are you kidding? So am I.

John: Oh, please tell me why we should put celery in our pie.

Craig: [chuckles]

Drew: Because it’s delicious-

Craig: Argh.

Drew: -and it’s super easy to make. Okay. There was a New York Times cooking article that had a little, “Hey, it’s rhubarb season.” I was like, “I haven’t had rhubarb in a while.” It’s super easy to make. It’s a little bit of sugar, and you cut it up and you–

Craig: It’s a whole lot of sugar.

Drew: It’s a quarter cup.

Craig: Okay.

Drew: Quarter cup of sugar, a little zest of lemon, massage that together. I put a little bit of ginger and a little bit of– Trader Joe’s has a vanilla bourbon paste.

John: This is supposed to make a rhubarb pie?

Drew: It’s making a compote. You just have a little rhubarb compote that I put on. I have oatmeal every morning. I put it on my oatmeal. You can put it on dessert at night. It’s like a little summer treat. It’s just been this lovely little thing that’s brightened the start of my summer. I highly recommend it.

John: It’s entirely possible I’ve been wrong my entire life. In believing you, I will make this rhubarb compote, and I will try it to see whether I can do that.

Drew: Do you not like the flavor of rhubarb to begin with or do you not?

John: The texture of it freaks me out. The fact that it is essentially celery.

Drew: Yes, horrible.

John: It’s a stalk. Friends of mine got married, and instead of a wedding cake, they wanted to have rhubarb pie so all their friends each made a rhubarb pie and brought a rhubarb pie. I didn’t care for it.

Drew: If you’re not a fan of the taste, then I don’t think it’s going to change your mind.

John: Maybe I just didn’t give it enough of a shot.

Drew: You don’t want a crunch on it, though, too.

John: Oh, so you have to cook it down enough so there’s a crunch.

Drew: It cooks it down. The recipe that I found, we’ll put in the show notes, it’s 20 minutes in the oven, just super easy, but it becomes mush, basically.

John: I should say this is no celery slander. I love celery for savory purposes, but to take a celery product and put it into a sweet context, I just find it abhorrent.

Craig: Melissa loves this. She’s like, “Oh, it’s tart.” I’m like, “It’s a gross vegetable sitting in the middle of what would otherwise be a delicious– You took a strawberry pie, and you ruined it by shoving this piece of crap in there that nobody eats. There’s no other dish with rhubarb, ever.”

Drew: Isn’t it amazing?

Craig: No, there’s an indication there’s a problem.

Craig: It’s like, “Oh my God, what do we do with this awful weed?”

Drew: It is technically edible,-

Craig: “Shove it in a pie.”

John: -and the leaves are poisonous.

Craig: Yes, they’re poisonous.

Drew: You have to grow it in the dark to get the red color, too. It’s labor-intensive.

John: There’s no value here.

Drew: It’s delicious and–

John: There’s no value.

Drew: It’s fall in the early summer. It’s that feeling for me that I really like.

John: While we’re in the conversation about slightly wrong tastes, can I say about Meyer lemons? No. Meyer lemons are–

Drew: I agree. Correct. No.

John: They’re not really a lemon. They’re halfway between a lemon and an orange in a way I don’t want at all.

Craig: Yes. Incorrect, they’re just not lemons.

John: Yes. You try to use them as lemons in recipes for lemons, though, it’s wrong.

Drew: Screws everything up.

Craig: It’s stone fruit season right now. At the farmers’ market, there are 4 million permutations of different plums and stuff like that. Some of them are amazing, and some of them, it’s like, “Oh, God, no.”

John: “Bad. God, no.”

Craig: “We should not have made that.”

John: No.

Drew: Rhubarb. Rhubarb. It’s got the “barb” in it.

John: I promise you, I will make this recipe and I will try it because as a–

Drew: You’re making this rhubarb recipe?

John: I’ll make this rhubarb– I’ll bring it to D&D so we can–

Craig: No.

Drew: You just need two stalks. It’s a little bit–

Craig: “Oh, just here, pointlessly, throw this in.” It’s like, “Oh, here’s pizza, and then let’s just put this weird thing on top that nobody asked for or wanted.” There’s no place for rhubarb in this world.

John: Yes. I like mayonnaise too, so I’m going to-

Craig: Oh, God. Doh.

Drew: [laughs]

John: -put a little rhubarb compote on top of that mayonnaise sandwich.

Drew: Yes. Try it out. Why not?

Craig: Oh my God.

John: It’s so good.

Craig: [gags]

John: My One Cool Thing is a website by Bartosz Ciechanowski. It’s an explainer on how curves and surfaces work for– you know, Bezier curves, which is those things in drawing programs where you put the little points and you drag the handles in order to make the curves?

Drew: Yes. Spirograph.

John: I’ve never understood the math behind it. I’ve never been able to make those things work properly. This is an explainer that goes through with constant little interactive explainers where you can move the sliders around to see this is what’s actually happening.

Drew: I see.

John: I feel like I understand it for the first time. It’s just so smartly done. It does a good job of compressing the math down so you don’t have to really think about the math, but like, “Oh, if I’m dragging these points out and I’m creating a tangent, I get what’s sort of happening here.” I love to start an experience not really understanding it, and understand, it’s like, “Oh, I get it.” Will it change my life?

Drew: You’re starting to see.

John: Yes, but it’s just good to see this. I really applaud someone putting the time and effort into explaining something for the betterment of the world.

Drew: Do you think that site, that explainer would have been improved by adding a bitter, crunchy, disgusting vegetable-

John: 100%.

Drew: -just in the middle of it for nothing,-

John: Yes.

Drew: -for no reason-

John: Yes.

Drew: -whatsoever.

John: For a treat.

Drew: For a treat. A treat.

John: Just a treat.

Craig: “Here you go, kids. Kids. You know what you would like? Do you like celery? Well, this is grosser. It’s grosser celery. Let’s throw it in dessert.” God, I’m so glad we could [unintelligible].

John: I’m just happy that you got some of this of Craig umbrage, like on your last episode–

Craig: I say finally did.

Drew: Finally. I’ve got rhubarb.

John: Craig, what you got?

Craig: I have a recipe.

John: I’ll be fine for you.

Craig: Yes, and this is a good one.

Drew: Oh, yes?

Craig: Yes, there’s no vegetables in it.

Drew: Impress me.

Craig: Yes, it’s called Cheesecake, my friends. Delicious.

John: All right.

Drew: Aha.

Craig: There are a lot of cheesecake recipes out there. I’ve actually used a few. I’m not even sure if this is the exact one I’ve used, but it’s very, very close. It achieves the things that you’re going to look for. I do like to make a cheesecake. It’s a little tricky, but it’s not too tricky. If you get it right, nothing’s better. This particular one is from Sally’s Baking Addiction. What I like about it is that it follows what I think are just the simple, basic things you need to do to make a good cheesecake. You need a graham cracker crust.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: Graham crackers are one of those things. I like to make everything from scratch. I do not make graham crackers from scratch. It is pointless. Don’t do it. I’ve made shortbread from scratch. I’ll do that. I will not make graham crackers from scratch. Why? I don’t think they even exist in any other form other than here, Honey Maid, boom, done. You want to add some sour cream to a cheesecake. It’ll help it from being dry, but it doesn’t add any flavor. Just a little bit of vanilla, a little bit of lemon, always. Eggs, butter, cream cheese. The key to all this is the water bath.

Drew: Yes, the bain-marie.

Craig: The bain-marie. When you put a cheesecake in an oven, it starts to cook. If there is nothing to moderate the temperature around the pan—you need a springform pan, obviously—it will crack because the outside will cook and get hotter than the inside. The water bath helps the inside keep up with the outside. One little trick that I like to use—the danger when you’re making a cheesecake is you’ve got a springform pan, which you need to pop the sides off to [unintelligible]—you put that in a water bath, water leaks in, you’re done.

John: Disaster, yes.

Craig: It’s over. You might as well have a rhubarb pie at that point. That’s how bad it is.

John: You wrap the bottom in foil, correct?

Craig: Here’s the problem. I use heavy-duty foil. I do two layers. Somehow, water finds some sneaky leak. There’s always some little leak in, but a roasting bag works great. The kind of thing you might put a turkey in. You place it in a roasting bag, lift that up. I like to tighten that around with some tin foil and some elastic. Put that in the water. Nothing’s getting in.

Drew: That’s correct. What a complicated way when you could just cut up a little bit of rhubarb in one pan, 20 minutes, you’re done.

Craig: Why even cut it up? Why put it in a pan? Why not just stick it up your butt at that point and just say, “Look, it’s done”?

John: I just think the barrier for entry on mine is much lower.

Craig: It is for good reason. It’s garbage food. It is a gross piece of garbage food. It’s fibrous.

John: Yours, leaking in the water?

Craig: Yes. Mine requires care so that something good happens in the end. You’re just taking a gross thing, making it hotter, and then handing it to us. Horrible.

John: I want to point out the episode of South Park, Scott Tenorman Must Die, actually refers to a pie-making competition, I believe.

Drew: It’s chili.

John: Chili, but it is food.

Drew: It’s very recipe-based.

John: Yes. It’s recipe-based, so it’s appropriate that this is the final fight.

Craig: It is the final fight. Our first and final fight. I can’t believe he brought up rhubarb at the end. You know what? He knows he’s leaving. That’s why he did it.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: He knew this whole time, this would have made me crazy. Now people are going to write in about their grandma’s rhubarb. “You know, it’s refreshing.” Oh, beat it.

John: I can see Meredith’s taking notes all like, “What will be my final thing to piss off Craig be?”

Craig: Mayonnaise.

John: Yes.

Craig: 10 years from now, and she finally just–

Drew: I had dinner with a British friend the other night, and she didn’t even understand my mayonnaise thing. She was like, “What do you mean? You can’t “not” like mayonnaise. You can’t even like subsets of mayonnaise.” I was like, “I hate all of it.” The worst of it all is salad cream. Have you seen this disgusting thing the British have?

Craig: Yes.

Drew: [gags] It’s like, “What if we took mayonnaise and made it sickly green?”

Craig: And thin.

Drew: Argh.

John: You’re okay with cream cheese. Cream cheese on a bagel, fine.

Drew: Oh, yes. Of course. I’m Jewish.

John: I want to make sure that it wasn’t just all white spreadable foods.

Drew: It’s a lot. For instance, sour cream is not something that I would ever use in any way other than a constituent ingredient.

John: I was going to ask about that. Sour cream on a potato, never.

Drew: Do not. Do not do. I do not do it. I don’t begrudge people who do it, but I don’t.

John: It’s not a rhubarb level of–

Craig: Rhubarb is just stupid. I can eat rhubarb. I just don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s not like I’m disgusted by it, I just think it’s dumb.

Drew: You could put rhubarb on yogurt.

Craig: You could. You could also put gravel on yogurt. You don’t. Or lawn clippings. It’s edible. I guess grass is edible. We don’t sprinkle it on–

Drew: Is it?

John: It’s not actually edible.

Craig: It’s edible. It’s as edible as rhubarb. Rhubarb is not a processable food. It’s just fiber. It’s cellulose that just goes through you. There’s no calories in rhubarb. It has no nutritional value.

Drew: It’s a delivery system for all the sugar and good stuff around it.

Craig: So is a spoon.

Drew: You can’t beat me on this one.

John: That is our show for this week.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help this week from Meredith Stedman.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Ahh.

John: Thank you, Matthew. Our intern is Lauren Loesberg.

Craig: Also, woo.

John: She’s here in person. She’s watching the cameras, helping us out.

Craig: She’s watching this madness.

John: Yes.

Craig: Quietly thinking about how to break it to us that her parents own a rhubarb farm.

Craig: All of her money comes from big rhubarbs.

John: Absolutely. She grew up a rhubarb farmer, just so good. Our outro this week is by Matthew Chilelli. It’s a special one produced just for Drew.

Drew: Is it a blah, blah, blah?

John: No. I gave him two song options.

Drew: Oh.

John: We’ll see which one he picks.

Drew: All right.

John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Drew will not be on the other side of that mailbox anymore.

Drew: Never again.

Craig: [groans]

Drew: I’ll miss you all.

John: All right. 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 in this past week, which is especially great. Please keep reading Inneresting. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. Drew, thank you for all your help making the Scriptnotes book.

Drew: Thank you.

John: You can find clips and other helpful videos on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. You can give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. Lauren has been doing a great job cutting video for our Instagram and our TikTok, also.

Craig: We have a TikTok?

John: We have a TikTok.

Craig: That’s so cool.

John: We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau.

John: 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 again to our Premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You’ll miss the Premium subscribers very much, though; they’re the best.

Drew: They’re the good people.

John: You can sign up to become a premium subscriber like Drew at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on whether you should quit your job loudly.

Craig: Oh, loud quitting.

John: Loud quitting.

Craig: Drew just kind of did that.

John: He did. He went out with a big rhubarb bang. Thanks, guys.

Drew: Thank you.

[outro]

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Meredith: Yes. “A common theme in film, television/storytelling is people who do the right thing in the face of great difficulty. What would you say now to the federal government employee who has spent the last 16 months trying to fight the good fight? Is it worth it? How did you stay motivated when others don’t believe in the work you’re doing? I know it’s hard for people out there to see us and know that we’re still trying.”

John: All right. We have some context behind the scenes that’s not for air, but this is a person who’s been working with the federal government, and their politics do not align with what’s happening in our government at this moment. Craig, what’s your instinct in terms of you’re in a system that you believe is corrupt, that is broken, and yet you still feel like there’s important work to be done, the original mission of the thing? Do you stick around to try to get through this awful place? What’s the calculus for you?

Craig: If you’re in a situation where there is no chance for rescue, that’s one thing. A sinking boat is a sinking boat. Our government is something that has been remade and reformed a number of times. My hope is that good people will hang on. In times like this, I like to share the wisdom of the great Rudyard Kipling. A little section from his poem, If—:

John: This goes back to our conversation about competence, is that if all the competent people in a government or in a system leave, then it’s only the incompetent people doing that work. Either they are incompetent because they don’t have the right mission or the right information, or they just simply don’t know what they’re doing at all, and everyone suffers in those cases.

Craig: We don’t know-

John: Yes.

Craig: -because we’re not in there. We don’t know right now who is being an unseen, unheralded hero. We may never know. We may never know their names. We may never know what they do. That is the nature of service. What did he say in Hamilton? “Legacy is planting seeds in a garden that you never see”?

John: Yes.

Craig: There are people that are working for us right now in government, who are taking care of things or who are preventing the worst of things. We have no choice but to rely on them and to rely on the notion that there is some hope. It’s all we can do for this person who is not yet broken. Emphasize the Not Yet, and think to yourself, “Okay, time moves by pretty quickly.” Seems slow when you’re in the middle of a mess, but retrospectively, it will have gone fast. What do you think you should be doing on day one after this?

John: Yes. There may be situations where you can sandbag or slow down the worst of things, or prevent the worst of things, disrupt the system from within to the degree that it’s useful and helpful.

Craig: Oh, that’s what “they,” some people call the big conspiracy, that the deep state won’t let bad people do bad things. That’s right?

John: That’s right.

Craig: That’s how it works. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You should not be able to just show up and throw everything into chaos just because you say so. The one thing that I think our nation is going to have to struggle with moving forward on a structural level, on a constitutional level– in my life, I’ve never really thought about anything that demanded constitutional amendment. I think there are things that I’ve come to loathe. There’s a lot of problems with the electoral college system, for instance. There are some reasons for it, but a lot of probably more objections at this point, I think, have been emerged.

John: It’s one thing to pass laws or to establish rules, but if no one actually enforces those rules or follows those rules, they’re not really rules. You look at the Constitution of the Soviet Union, probably read really well.

Craig: It did not. That was really boring.

John: I’m sure there are things. You can find good systems of law on paper, but if they’re not actually followed, they’re not–

Craig: That’s right. Then they don’t matter. There are also some aspects of the Constitution that we have to consider. For instance, the Supreme Court. The way the Supreme Court functions over time has become interesting. This is not necessarily something that’s a right or a left thing. The primarily liberal court in the ’60s and ’70s did some things that lit some stuff on fire, and that fire never went out. There were repercussions, and there are solid legal arguments about why some of those things were overreaching. I think we see overreaching now as well because the court is out of whack. There is an answer for that, and it’s one that Franklin Delano Roosevelt almost applied when he was struggling to get the New Deal going, and that is to change the size of the court, which they can do.

John: They do. They have done in the past.

Craig: Yes, and everybody talks about it like it would be some earth-shattering defiance of our Constitution. It isn’t.

John: No.

Craig: Some kind of checks and reins upon the executive branch need to be established, no matter who the president is. There are traditions we have, firewalls between the Justice Department and the executive, that are just gone. Those firewalls were not really legally based. They were traditional. Some traditions need to be put down on paper and enforced.

John: Do you think there will actually be a reckoning, though? Because I feel like after Watergate, it was sort of like, “Well, we’re just not going to deal with that for the good of the nation. We’re not going to pursue seeing this out.” After the first Trump presidency and after the insurrection, there wasn’t a reckoning. We just keep doing that.

Craig: Well, yes and no. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon but all anyone talked about after Watergate was Watergate for decades, including turning every political scandal into something-gate, it definitely had a huge impact. Jimmy Carter became president because of Watergate, but when you look at Watergate now, it’s a goof compared to what they’re doing now. It’s the equivalent of somebody tried to rob a little bank versus now, it’s just full-scale.

John: “Get me out at $1.8 billion.”

Craig: Yes. Just straight-up extortion. There will be a reckoning, but it’s going to be difficult because of the volume of crime. The emoluments clause has been battered. I feel like a lot of politicians are just waiting for this to go away so that they can then speak their minds. You see this over and over. Once a politician is retiring, they don’t have to worry about repercussions, then they say exactly what they think. They all think the same thing. A lot of reasonable people think they’re not getting anywhere saying it from the inside. When this ends, there’s going to be some sort of convulsion, and it will. We’ve talked about this before. America has been in a worse position than this, but I don’t think in my lifetime.

John: To wrap up to the person asked the question, my instinct is, yes, stay if you can-

Craig: Yes, please.

John: -and thank you for staying and doing what you can do in that situation. If you do exit and you have the opportunity to exit loudly, do. Had this been eight years ago, you could exit loudly, and people would actually pay attention. They won’t so much now.

Craig: Nobody cares. In fact, if your “out loud” exiting won’t have any real impact whatsoever, maybe exit in a way where you can then quickly return when it’s safe.

John: Yes.

Craig: My hope is that good people hang on. I thank everybody who’s doing that. I know it’s difficult. We sometimes find ourselves, obviously, far lower stakes here; we’re making entertainment, but you and I have both found ourselves inside of projects where the only thing we could do was to nobly hang on and keep it from getting worse.

John: Yes.

Craig: It is unpleasant.

John: It is very unpleasant. The timeframes are not the same, and we know that the movie will end. We know that, yes.

Craig: It will end, and this will end, too.

John: There have also been situations where I’ve left projects because I am not helping anything here, and it’s just misery for me.

Craig: That’s a normal kind of exit. I’ve been involved in some things where you make something, you feel like it’s got a chance, and then you realize that the system it’s inside of is designed to destroy it and turn it into something horrible. All you can do is try to keep it from getting worse. It is a bad place to be. If you can hang on, hang on.

John: Yes, I agree. Thanks, Drew. Thanks, Craig.

Drew: Thank you.

John and Craig welcome writer and showrunner David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies, Ally McBeal) to look at his process for adapting books to TV, particularly with his latest series Margo’s Got Money Troubles. They explore where to find your act breaks, crafting complicated tones, and when to trust the writer of the book.

We also look at how TV has changed over David’s storied career, how he runs a writers room, creating story engines, the difference between writing for broadcast TV and streaming, and the one thing a TV show should never be.

In our bonus segment for premium members, David coaches John and Craig on how to survive a long running series.

Links:

Email us at [email protected]

John August: [music] Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 739 of Script Notes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome the creator of 20 television series.

David E. Kelley: Oh, my God.

John: Who is also the first writer to win an Emmy for Best Comedy and Best Drama in the same season.

David: It’s too much.

John: His latest show is Margo’s Got Money Troubles on Apple. Welcome to Script Notes, David E. Kelley.

David: Thank you to you both. Good to be here.

John: It is remarkable to have you here. Craig, in front of you see a list of his TV shows. Just remind us of some of the shows that he’s done.

Craig: I’m going to do this. This is a process where I experience just a deep, brutal humbling. You all should. These are the television series created by David E. Kelley. Doogie Howser, MD, Picket Fences, Snoops, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal, The Practice, Boston Public, Boston Legal, Harry’s Law, The Crazy Ones, Big Little Lies, The Undoing, Goliath, Anatomy of a Scandal, Big Sky, Love and Death, Presumed Innocent, Nine Perfect Strangers, The Lincoln Lawyer, which I think is in its 900th season, and now Margo’s Got Money Troubles. What?

John: It’s a what and how.

Craig: I feel so stupid and lazy.

John: Craig, we all are stupid and lazy by comparison. We want to talk to you about all of those shows. We can’t go into depth on all of them, but really the idea of what a TV engine is because you have a knack for understanding how to not just create a show that will last a season but will keep going on.

In a bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk more about those long-running series because most of us are thinking about how we get that one season to happen. You’ve experienced shows that have just gone on and on. You’ll tell us, hopefully, what happens when you’re approaching your fifth or sixth season of a show. We’re excited to have you on just to talk television overall.

David: Amazing. I hope I don’t disappoint because I don’t have a knack or a science, but I’ll do my best.

Craig: Well, you’ve got something. It’s pretty remarkable, the longevity here. It’s not a thing about age, really. It’s just a thing about repetition, how many times you have to start something up. Pitch the idea, get the approval, get the room together, get the budget together, figure out where you’re going to shoot it, and cast it. To do that for a television show once is a lot. What I’m struck by is how many times you had to start over in a way. How did you, and how do you continue to keep it fresh somehow to get excited yet again for another reset?

David: Well, let’s start with the last part of the question first in terms of fresh. There was a point where that did become a challenge. How do I come up with something new and explore new creative muscles? I actually felt that it was around that time I was doing Harry’s Law, which I loved doing, but I felt this is a track I’d run around before. I think there’s a danger for any creative person, especially a writer, when things start to feel facile and the best thing you can do is to go outside of your lane and try to challenge yourself.

Now, the risk is you may fall off the high wire and bloody your nose because you may have picked the lane that you’re not particularly adapted to running in. I think I got a little lucky there because I started adapting projects, working off IP that was very well baked and hatched by excellent authors.

Craig: He’s a great writer.

David: -brilliant at character as well. Both of those particular projects, especially Mr. Mercedes, was well out of my lane. If I had set out and endeavored to write a horror piece just because I thought it would be good to wade into that genre, who knows what would have happened. It could have been a disaster. Having the training wheels of Steven King, having hatching that plot and developing those characters, that gave me the confidence to walk out on a plank that I hadn’t walked before.

Big Little Lies, similarly, I was a little more comfortable with that turf because it had a tonal blend of comedy and drama, which I’ve always gravitated to. It was a character piece. I felt pretty comfortable adapting that book. Again, great credit to Leon Moriarty. She wrote a wonderful book, and that made it easier.

Now, having gone down those paths with those two books, I realized there’s maybe a second chapter, or I don’t know, a third chapter in my own career, taking the IP and the ideas and the characters of others and adapting it.

Craig: Like Presumed Innocent.

David: It wasn’t something that I ever thought would appeal to me because, and you guys know better than anyone, that the true intoxicant of the job is the idea. Coming up with the story, breaking a story, discovering characters that you want to spend time with. That’s a certain form of adrenaline and dopamine that allows you to do the hard work, which is the writing itself.

I always felt, well, if you strip me of that, I’m going to not have the fuel, and it’s going to be all work and no play. To my great surprise, it was neither of that. You could take the ideas of others, infuse ideas of your own, and give occasion or allow yourself to hatch something that was original in and of itself.

John: David, I’m looking at your credits, and you have so many broadcast shows from the peak of, this was broadcast television and now many streaming shows, but there’s not a lot of cable in there. Were you developing shows for cable? Did you just skip over that generation? Tell us about that.

Craig: It was Big Little Lies.

David: No, HBO would be my cable experience. I did Big Little Lies and The Undoing with them and another show called Love and Death. Yes, you’re right. It was broadcast and then to streaming. It was broadcast really forever. It was the first 20-some odd years, maybe more, of my career. I actually quite loved broadcast television and miss it a little bit still. I never felt that I was constrained creatively or content-wise on broadcast television. Certainly, you couldn’t use all the words that you can use on cable, and some violence and nudity, obviously, are not allowed, but that was never my thing anyway. I had the most fun writing characters and ideas and even topical ideas, socially relevant ideas.

What was great about broadcast for that is it was so fast. I could be writing something today that would be on by the end of the month. Maybe by the end of the season when you’re doing 22 episodes, you’re writing episode 21 and 22, which could be airing in 10 to 12 days. You can be very timely. I loved that.

What I got tired of on broadcast is the commercials were rearing their ugly head. The show length, for example, when I was doing L.A. Law, I think we were 48, 49 minutes. By the time we got to Harry’s Law, we were down to 41 minutes.

Craig: Wow.

David: It was a ton of commercials. It became increasingly more difficult to tell stories with any kind of soft build of emotional momentum because it’d be interrupted by a loud Ford or Dodge Ram commercial. It’s just every six, seven minutes you were cutting to the commercial and then coming back and having to restart. That was frustrating.

I also was envious, probably of the talent pool that I saw cable drawing on. I moved to HBO, and Big Little Lies happened, and that worked. The streaming world was proliferating at that time, and there we went.

John: We think about you as this titan who’s made so many shows. In the year 2000, you had 67 episodes of television that you either wrote or produced, which is insane.

Craig: That’s illegal, I think, actually.

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David: That’s a great question because that was the job that imprinted upon me like no other. My first boss was Steven Bochco, who gave birth to L.A. Law. I was a lawyer back in Boston, and I didn’t really even watch much television. One thing I did watch was Hill Street Blues. I was really quite blown away by how good it was, the storytelling, the depth of the characters in it. You could have thrown out any name in the Hollywood industry and it probably would have gone right over my head, and I wouldn’t know who that person was.

Steven Bochco was a name that I did recognize because at the end of every episode, there was his title. His episodes usually ended with your jaw dropped near your abdomen. That name I knew.

I had written a project, a movie idea of my own, and mainly wrote it on my own because I didn’t know anybody in Hollywood to write it. It wasn’t that I said I wanted to become a writer, but I thought it made for a good story, and I liked to write as a hobby, so I started penning it. That happened, and it was a legal piece, and that happened as L.A. Law was being developed by Steven Bochco, and he was looking for lawyers who also wrote because he was seeking some authenticity to the show.

I came out and met him, and that went very well, and I became a member of that staff, and it was an incredible writing staff. In those days, again, forgive me if I sound like a dinosaur, but I am, but in those days, it was only broadcast, so it was a finite number of shows, and the talent pool for writers was just bigger. Those rooms, I think 30-something was on at that time, and Moonlighting was up. Those were all-star writing rooms, and ours was, too, so I was very blessed to be surrounded by a lot of talent.

First and foremost, Steven, he was a great teacher, and he really stressed finding stories that were not just good stories in and of themselves in terms of plot and engaging entertainment but stories that were conduits into the characters that allowed you to explore the characters as you were moving the plot. He was very ferocious in his storytelling approach that way, and he set a bar for all of us.

The first show that I did on my own after L.A. Law was Picket Fences. Steven wasn’t part of that show, but then again, he was because, again, his standard was in play. It’s funny, we never worked on the same show again after L.A. Law, and I’ve said it before, so I was never in his writer’s room again, but he was always in mine and is still in mine because his work ethic, his discipline. Everybody showed up at 9 o’clock, and it was 9:00 to 5:00 or 9:00 to 6:00 job, and his attention to detail and his respect for the audience. Those tenets made a big impression on me, and it still do today.

We’ve all gotten the note. Make it simpler so that the audience will follow this or understand that. Steven rejected that note out of hand. He was going to write up to the audience, not down. That was a great lesson that I learned, and I try to live up to this day.

Craig: I would say you have, and then some. What strikes me is that even though you picked up these great lessons from Steven Bochco about what to value and perhaps some notions about how the process should function and finding the reason that the show should exist beyond just “here’s some stuff that happens.” There are things about your work that are you, and there’s a lot of them.

I’m curious if you have any sense, looking back at all of it, maybe with the benefit of the perspective of time. What are the things in your work that feel like a united thread? Are there themes that you approach? Are there particular characters that you like to find? Is it a general intelligence, which I think marks all of these projects? What do you think? If I were learning from you in your writing room, what do I walk away with?

David: I don’t know. I’ve never tried to look at the wiring. I’m afraid if I try to. It’s like asking the golfer, do you breathe in or breathe out as you take your backswing, you can ruin them forever. My compass for any given show, I know, is it’s got to be characters that have some dimensional staying power because, in success, you’re going to spend a lot of time with them. It’s not something I would recommend to people, but I’ve spent my entire adult life hanging out mainly with characters who are not real, who are fictitious.

John: Me too.

David: Speaking to people I have never met in the audience. That’s a weird dynamic. On the other hand, all the characters– we’re all observing as writers. Whether we know it or not, we’re picking up eccentricities or behavioral nuances of people we encounter. It goes into the blender or whatever it is, the creative thing in your head that’s concocting.

It comes out. Picket Fences was the first show that I had. It was personal in that I grew up in small towns. I was always drawing on small towns and the people who populate those particular venues.

L.A. Law, obviously, I was a lawyer before that and in office life. I know I was drawing on that for both L.A. Law and The Practice and Ally McBeal and Boston Legal. I think if there’s one common denominator, I’m not sure there is, but it’s characters that speak to me that I love exploring. My radar is if I can find characters and a story that resonates with me, go to that, and then just cross your fingers and close your eyes and hope that there’s a constituency big enough to support it.

Picket Fences, when that ended. Douglas Wambaugh was played by Fyvush Finkel, and Judge Bone played by Ray Walston. I knew back then that I was never going to be able to write that guy again unless it was derivative. That character now was gone. Because they were so real to me at the time, I actually mourned their creative passing. That’s a good thing. If you finish a project and, well, that character, I can say goodbye to and write another one, then maybe you weren’t pouring yourself into that one as much as you should. Kathy Baker, who played Jill Brock-

John: So good.

David: -on Picket was the same. Of course, I think all the characters on The Practice were very dear to me. Ally McBeal and John Cage on Ally. I miss them still to this day. It sounds a little bit unhealthy, or-

John: Yes, but that’s okay.

David: a form of schizophrenia that you believe they’re real, but at the time they were very real.

John: David, Craig and I, up until Craig started his TV series, we were mostly working on features. With features, we’re writing characters we deeply invest in, but then they get handed off to an actor and then they’re no longer-

Craig: One-night stands.

John: They’re one-night stands. They’re with us for a time, and then they pass off. It’s such a different experience when you have these characters who you have to keep writing for every week. They are part of you, and then they’re being performed by a different person. That’s got to be a strange thing. They aren’t part of you. They are your friends. They are people you know so well. You know everything that they do, and yet they are performed by somebody else. What is the conversation like with you and an actor who is on their third or fourth season playing a character when you know them really well and an actor knows them really well? What is that conversation?

David: It’s a very collaborative process in that by that point, when you’re talking about year three, year four, I’m not writing, maybe I am, but more times than not, I’m not writing the character that I originally conceived of. You’re writing the melding of that character you conceived of with the interpretation of it by the particular actor. Sometimes right out of the block, the cadence and rhythms of an actor are spot on with what you append to your page with. Other times, it’s way off, and you either recast or reconfigure.

More times than not, it’s something in between. You write a character, you cast that character. That character in the hands of the actor is not exactly what you conceived of. You start to adjust and write to their strengths and see what they bring, see the potential that they offer in the character. By the end of season one, really, actually, probably after six or seven episodes, you’re both on the same page or wavelength. That collaboration isn’t always two people in a room saying, let’s do this, let’s do that. In fact, in broadcast television, you just don’t have time for it. The scripts are coming out every eight, nine days.

As soon as one’s done, you start the next. The collaboration is often unspoken. I’m seeing what they do on screen, and that’s in my head as I develop the character. The actors or actresses are interpreting or seeing what I’m putting on the page, and they’re bringing what they bring. If you’re lucky, you would arrive at a being that is fertile for storytelling and is great for your viewing constituency as well.

In broadcast, you don’t have really much time at all to be making big notes because an actor likes the scene or wants to say those words and doesn’t want to say this. In limited series, you do have more time, so there’s probably more input off-camera, but broadcast, when it’s 22 to 24 episodes, once that bus leaves the depot, you’re off. A great amount of trust has to be put in the showrunner by the actors for those kinds of vehicles because you’re running a marathon. You can’t pull over at the side of the road and rest.

Craig: It seems to me that no matter what the format, an enormous amount of trust has to be put into the showrunner because ultimately they are parenting this thing. You brought up actors. Just looking at the cast of Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Elle Fanning.

John: Elle Fanning, who was a child actor in my first movie.

Craig: Nick Offerman.

John: Your show?

Craig: My show. So far, you’ve just taken our people. Okay, now it gets better. Greg Kinnear, who I still maintain is one of the great unsung treasures of acting. Michael Angarano, who’s a great, I think of him as a young actor, but I’m old now, and so I realize he’s not young anymore.

John: Watching your show, I think of him as a young actor, and he’s playing a dad of two kids. He’s playing a professor.

Craig: We grew up. Michelle Pfeiffer, I feel like we know her better.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: So, working with your wife, that must be quite a trip. Then some lady named Nicole Kidman. Wow. In the circumstance like this, what I’m curious about is you’ve got, well, first of all, you’re in streaming, you’re on Apple TV, you have essentially all the freedom in the world. Your episodes could be whatever length you want, you could have any amount of episodes that you want.

John: There’s nudity in the show, which I was surprised by, but it works.

Craig: Nick Offerman loves to get his pants off.

David: We all know that.

Craig: Getting his pants back on is the trick.

John: That is the challenge.

Craig: When you have a cast like this, as the father, as the show dad, do you feel a responsibility to make sure everybody’s getting enough to do, or was the point to make sure that all these characters were worth these actors being there in the first place?

David: Excellent question. The story always comes first. If you’re in a position of having to build up a role to please an actor or to make sure that the page count is what they’re used to getting, it’s not that it can’t happen, but it’s a recipe for a pitfall, if not an outright disaster. Fortunately, on Margo, the story was so good. The book was so great, such a great read for all of us. That was well established before anybody showed up, even for a first read-through.

I mentioned earlier before that, you see what you got with actors on a read-through in the first few episodes, and you’re making adjustments here and there, and then you arrive at what ultimately you’re bringing to the audience. Margo was fairly unique in that the read-through was pretty impeccable. I credit Rufi Thorpe, the author of the book, because I think all the actors and the writers knew what we were buying into. Our goal was to execute the tonal blend and the character’s emotional lives on film, what she had done in the book.

It was shocking, the read-through, how spot on Elle was in every single beat, because she had to hit a lot of different notes, from absurdity to raw emotion to comedy to drama. That script bounced all over the place. The character did as well. I’ve said it before, I felt like Elle owned this character, perhaps maybe before I even picked up my pen to start adapting it, because she had read the book. She was part of the producing team that was chasing it before we all joined forces and got it.

That was one that spared me a lot of time having to convince actors. Well, you may not see it, but you got to trust us and zig where your instinct is to zag because this is what we’re going for. Part of the job is managing. With talent like that, you’re going to be managing up, but on this book, it was so well-crafted. Again, it’s a credit to Rufi that they all showed up and said, “Okay, where are my marks?” Nick Offerman, everyone wanted to work with him.

Craig: The greatest.

David: I remember our first Zoom. I thought, okay, I’m going to have to make a strong play to get him, but I didn’t. He had read the book and said, “Let’s go.”

Craig: I could just hear him say-

David: That was easy.

Craig: -David, I’ve read the novel. It’s strong. You have quite a resume. When are we shooting?

David: Yes, and his cadence, that is a character because my instinct is maybe to pace scenes up more than they need to be paced. Let’s get to the center of a scene quickly because the worst thing any show can be for me is boring. Not terrible, not outrageous, not offensive, but boring. Don’t want to be that. I’ve made mistakes in the past of maybe pushing scenes faster than they need to go.

Craig: I get accused of this.

David: With Nick, we knew what we had in him, that you could give him a pause, and he was going to give life to it. With Jinx, we were allowed to really take our time with him. He supplied such a belly to that character that was a luxury for us writers.

Craig: Well, and I would imagine too that it’s understandable because John and I came primarily out of features, as John said, and you came primarily out of broadcast television. In features and in broadcast television, you’re always running out of time. Before you even write one word, you’re running out of time. It’s squeezed and it’s finite.

Even in the older cable days, I still argue a little bit about this with HBO, where they have this 58-minute, 30-second maximum roll, which I’m always like, “Hmm, yes,” but there’s a little more flow. I remind myself, and it seems like you’re taking advantage of this, that this new format, which people accuse of being this second screen thing, you can take your time with it. You can breathe. You actually have. Like you, I’m paranoid that it will just be boring or self-indulgent to take a pause. It’s good to know that you struggle with this too.

David: Yes, my assumption is that the viewer has something better to do or at least something good to do. If you’re going to ask them to pay attention to your product, then you better entertain them and you better not waste their time. That’s burden number one. Then if you can get lucky and, on top of entertaining them, cause them to think or even move them and stir their heart, then that’s the home run.

John: David, can you talk us through the process of Margo’s Got Money Troubles? Because there’s the book, Elle is attached to the book. It enters into your orbit. Were you writing a pilot first? Were you getting a room together? What was the process for figuring out how to make this adaptation happen?

David: You’re told that you’re going to series but I think the dirty little secret for all these shows is, yes, you are writing a pilot first because if they don’t like that first or second episode, they can pull it. I don’t know for a fact, but I’m told that HBO came very close to pulling the plug on Big Little Lives a week before we started shooting.

Craig: For budget or for creative?

David: Creative. That they just didn’t think a story about these women in Monterey and the first episode was about a kid being bullied, is that enough? That’s not much of a story. I remember having the conversation with an HBO executive, and he said, “It’s just about a kid being bullied at school.” I said, “Do you have a child that’s gone to school?” He did not. I said, “Well, if it’s your child and he’s being picked on, that story takes on a certain severity.” Our job as writers is to convey that storytelling so the audience feels the emotional stakes and the severity of the offense.

So many shows now start out greenlit because that’s how they may attract the talent pool, but there’s an off-ramp if they’re not happy with those first scripts. On Margo, I don’t think there was any pause. Everyone was pretty excited and raring to go from the get-go. The actual process for me was part triage because there’s so much great stuff on that book that you can’t use at all. The biggest challenge was there was a lot of third-person storytelling that you could easily convey in the book, but on film, it wouldn’t be as quite so coherent.

Yet, a lot of that, third-person and first-person internals, interiority of the characters were so rich. The goal is, okay, how do you get that out behaviorally? I remember my mantra for actually both Mr. Mercedes and Margo when I first started. I think the very first thing I said to myself on both was, “Okay, don’t screw it up.” The writer knows what they’re doing. The author had a plan, and it was a good one.

Craig: Don’t screw up.

David: Live up to the bar that they set. Not always that. Sometimes you get an adaptation, which is a great idea and a great springboard, but you’ve got to take it in a different direction to make it commercially viable. Margo, it was all there in the book.

John: Talk us through your writing versus the– You had a room on the show. There’s other writers. Did you write a pilot first and then get a room together? Were you writing a pilot at the same time the room was happening? Talk us through how that all worked.

David: I wrote the first three episodes. Then Eva Anderson came on, and she ran the writer’s room with the other writers. Eva and I went back and forth. She was my point man. I have never been particularly adept at a writer’s room. For example, going back to Steven Bochco, he was genius at that. There were times where Steven couldn’t break a story in his head. He would call all the writers into the room to do it together. We would not say a word. Steven would suddenly break the story. I said, “What gives with that?” He says, “Well, sometimes I need an audience to tap into my acuity, and I get my dopamine rush just from all of you being in a room.”

It turns out I didn’t really need you to break the story, but I needed you to be there. My process was completely the opposite. I can be in a room full of writers, and I can’t solve something, and I have to throw everybody out because my process is to go inside the characters themselves and let the characters speak to me. They tell me more often than not what they want to say and where the story wants to go. It’s a process that’s worked for me as a writer, but as a showrunner, it’s been very frustrating for writers who have worked for me.

It’s not a satisfying answer for a staff member trying to guess where I’m going to go. Often, I don’t know for sure where I’m going to end up. I have a general sense when I dive in, but it’s a little bit like a river. You go where it flows and you listen to it. I try to listen to the characters and listen to the story. I start off every series telling them what to say and where the story is going to go, but many series then take me over, and then the characters start directing me and the story does as well.

John: Can we talk about the engine of an episode? I think back to a Boston Public episode, and there’s a template to it. There’s a sense of, like, well, this is the kind of thing that happens in an episode of the show versus the kind of thing that happens in an episode of Margo’s Got Money Troubles are very different. The audience expectation about what’s going to be happening at the end, the sense of closure, the sense of this, and yet both of these need to have within the episode an engine that’s going to drive us through story.

Can you talk us through, first, in a classic broadcast situation, what is enough of a story engine, or are you pitching the engine as you’re first pitching the show, and then how that changes with a limited series like Margo, what you’re thinking of in terms of the engine, the motor that’s getting you through the episode?

David: With Boston Public, and this is how much the industry has changed. With The Practice, with Ally McBeal, with Boston Public, there was no script, no outline, and no real formal pitch. With Boston Public, I sat down with Sandy Grushow, who was running Fox at the time, and said, this is going to be a high school show. It’s going to be a public high school, but it’s going to be about the faculty. It’s going to explore the lives of the faculty and the adversities they face in trying to do their jobs every day.

We talked about the tone. It’ll be both dramatic and comedic. We talked about the kids will be instruments to explore these faculty members as well as the parents. There was an understanding that would be the DNA of the show, but we would then find the show in the writing. Today, it’s very different. When you’re going to pitch a show-

Craig: They want it all.

John: -the buyers are looking for such a specificity, and there’s a danger to that because you’re not letting the writers find and feel their way. If they’re living up to the notes or the outline that was a product of that goal of specificity, it can have a very creatively constraining effect. With broadcast, again, actually, the process, once you’re doing it, the science of the shows, and all my shows have been fairly multi-story format. With Boston Public, I think there were three storylines going on. With Ally McBeal and The Practice, usually two. With Picket Fences, there was one main storyline, but it was played through three different prisms.

You would take an issue or a story, you would play it through the police franchise. Sometimes the medical, the legal, and also the nuclear family. The experience of watching it would be many different stories happening, but it was really one core thematic engine driving all four different stories. In the days of broadcast with Boston Public and L.A. Law and The Practice, your main storylines would probably have about 8 to 10 beats. You would also be operating with 9 to 10-minute acts, sometimes 11-minute acts.

You were writing acts that would build and have a crescendo at 9, 10, 11 minutes with some version of at least a mini cliffhanger that would leave the audience with the idea that I’m more interested in this story than that Dodge Ram commercial that’s following it, and I’m thinking I’m going to come back and watch the rest of it. Once you’re into the streaming and there are no commercials, you don’t have to worry about those act breaks. You don’t have to crescendo as much over your 50 minutes. You can build and trust the audience to stay with you and not worry about them being distracted by another stimuli and having to earn their trust to come back again.

Craig: I wonder if this is why somebody like Sandy Grushow back in the day could say, yes, based on what you just said, high school, about the faculty, what you didn’t say, but what I will add to that is, “Also, I’m David E. Kelley, and I’ve done this before a number of times to great success.” Because the broadcast format was so rigid and repeatable, meaning, okay, it’s this many acts, the crescendo. That somebody could say, “I’m pretty sure unless David pitches me an idea that, in the simplest form, I hate it. I would be willing to roll the dice on that.” Whereas now they ask for everything because it could be anything.

That is probably scary for them, but I do think it’s wonderful freedom for us. What’s fun and inspiring, honestly, about somebody like you and the length of your career is that we can see how you are not a great writer of broadcast television. You’re a great writer. Then as you go to write movies, or as you go to write streaming series, or originals, or adaptations, you are the thing that keeps adapting to the world around you. We know a lot of writers at this point. You’re probably approaching what, 50, 45 years of this? I don’t know how many.

David: I came out in ’86, so I’m just about 40.

Craig: 40?

David: Yes.

Craig: A lot of writers around year 10 are discovered to be perhaps, I’m not going to say one-note, but maybe five notes, changing the notes and adapting to the world around you and adapting to the new formats. As you said, getting out of your lane but not so far out of your lane that you fall down on your face is in itself a rarity. This isn’t a question. This is just really a hagiography of David E. Kelley. I don’t know how else to put it.

John: Well, I do have a question because I want to talk. You were describing how you needed to write towards act breaks for broadcast TV and stuff. Within Margo, you have to figure out, okay, we have this book, and these are the things from the book we want to do, but we have to figure out which episodes do these things fall into, and you’re not going to match the book exactly. How early in the process did you figure out, okay, this is the beat that’s happening in episode three versus episode four, episode five? When did you have the shape of it? Was that early in the writer’s room? Was it before the writer’s room? When did you know the sequence of events?

David: It wasn’t terribly challenging breaking down the episodes in terms of what was going to happen in each. It felt pretty organic when I was drawing that roadmap. What was less organic, Margo was a little bit like the porridge that Goldilocks was. The process was, in the editing room, that’s where we were jumping through more hoops. A little too hot, a little too cold, a little too slow, a little too fast, a little too funny, a little too serious.

John: The tone of your show, it shifts a lot.

David: Exactly.

John: Honestly, it reminded me of Ally McBeal in the sense like this is a comedy, but there’s also some real serious, dramatic things happening here. There’s a baby at the center of it, so there’s things like Ally McBeal. Finding that right blend must be a challenge. It does feel like an editorial.

David: It is. It’s very unscientific, and it’s very subjective. In Episode 2, for example, I was worried about the first two episodes, especially with Margo, because I thought if this comes out of the gate as single mom with crying baby, will the audience really want to escape to that at the end of the day? I do think you have to offer some form of escapism, the world being what it is today, that when people turn on the television, I think the invitation or the opportunity for the smile and a laugh is important.

The first two episodes, because the character was going through a lot of emotional gymnastics, I remember in Episode 2, there was a meltdown that Margo had over frustration with breastfeeding, the baby wasn’t getting a good latch. The scene was meant to be both absurd and real at the same time. You could maybe laugh at the monologue that the character was spewing, but at the same time, feel that was a very real issue for her.

We had a subsequent scene where Shyanne, the mother, was upset and having a crisis because she was sure that the newborn didn’t like her and deliberately cried when she was being held by Shyanne. It was a form of judgment that this one-month-old baby was passing on Shyanne as a bad grandmother.

Similarly, that was also supposed to be absurd, comedic, but feeling a very real and raw insecurity of Shyanne as a person and a grandmother. In the editing room, I was worried. We all were a little bit. Both of those scenes together in the same episode was just too much. Even though we liked both scenes, but in the aggregate, the episode just might be too wrought and too emotionally draining that it would allow the audience to go, “You know what, I don’t need this kind of angst and anxiety at the end of my day.”

We scratched our heads and asked questions and worried about it, but it was undeniable that the actors in both scenes were phenomenal, Elle in her scene and Michelle in hers. We were also pretty confident that both those scenes advanced story and a character.

Craig: There you go.

David: We said, “Okay, if it’s doing that, we’re going to stick with it.” Maybe the audience might find it wrought, but we bet on story and character at the end of the day. That’s not something always in a playbook. You feel it as you go along. That was that experience. To answer your question more specifically, how do you figure it out? Margo, a lot of the figuring was more in the editing room than I think in the outline. The episodes outlined and mapped out pretty coherently and clearly as we went along. I thought for a while it would be seven hours and not eight.

When I was at HBO, we had the luxury of, because A Big Little Lie was supposed to be eight episodes, and got to the seventh and eighth episode, and went back to HBO. I said, “This really needs to be one. Seven and eight are going to be broken up.” HBO said, “Fine, make it one.” Our finale was a little bit longer, but the series was seven episodes. The business models today, we don’t always have that luxury.

Margo Apple really wanted those eight episodes. We mapped them out with eight episodes. Again, on the page, there was a coherency to it, but the real struggle was in the editing room and figuring out the tonal, the blend, and the spikes and valleys of emotion and comedy.

John: Great.

Craig: Awesome

John: Well, David, congratulations on Margo. Congratulations on a vast career that–

Craig: You know what? Just have to say, fellow Princeton tiger, there’s not a lot of us. There’s not a lot of us in this business. I would say, [crosstalk]

John: What about Harvard somehow?

Craig: Well, Harvard, it was like all you needed to do was to be a friend of somebody, and then you were on The Simpsons. That’s how easy it was as far as I could tell. Princeton was like, “Do you want to be a lawyer? Do you want to go to a hedge fund? No. All right, see you later.”

David: You know what? Princeton really wasn’t putting it on the map. I never came out of Princeton thinking, “Oh, screenwriting was on the menu.”

Craig: No, there was no, it just didn’t– it wasn’t an option. We were few and far between, but you were certainly when I came out to Hollywood, you were one of the people where I went, “Well, okay, A guy can do it from here.”

John: Absolutely. You’ll be the second David E. Kelley.

Craig: I was not, and I am not.

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David: That’s very good.

John: They had posters for it, but most crucially, they went to writers in the Writers Guild and TV writers to try to insert this idea and this message into episodes of top-rated programs such as Cheers, Dallas, and LA Law. Do you remember anything about this, David? Does this sound familiar?

David: No.

John: No.

David: They said, “Oh, yes, we’ll tell all of our writers and then–[chuckles]

John: It did air, and it aired in those shows, but other popular shows in 1988 to seed that idea out there in the world. I think it’s a good, noble thing that I’m happy exists in our culture.

Craig: I didn’t know that it came from Scandinavia. I remember when it happened. I remember designated driver suddenly being a phrase. I remember us making fun of it. First, you start laughing about it, but then someone’s like, “Yes, actually-

Craig: -who is the designated driver?”

John: Absolutely. We all recognize that drunk driving was a problem, but it’s a solution to it. It’s basically, “Oh, here’s how we’re going to avoid us doing that.”

Craig: It was a bad thing to talk about with people who were already drunk.

John: That’s the real thing.

Craig: You could get them before they started drinking.

John: It also became a useful excuse for why you’re not drinking that night.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: For folks who didn’t want to drink, it made it good, or why you bring along that one friend you don’t really like that much.

Craig: [laughs] That was always the dark side of the designated driver.

John: If you rotate among the people, that would make more sense. Anyway, I just thought it was an interesting cultural shift that happened in part because of broadcast television of its era that it was able to get that into the world. Craig, what do you have for One Cool Thing?

Craig: My One Cool Thing is a fantastic article that is in WIRED. It’s on WIRED right now, written by Alan Levinovitz, called The Painful Truth About Long COVID. The subheader is “There might finally be a way forward for long COVID treatment if only you were allowed to talk about it.” What this article talks about, it doesn’t come down one way or the other, but what it starts to investigate is the notion that long COVID, first of all, existed before COVID.

When the flu epidemic happened, the Spanish flu back around World War I period, there were people who, for years, were basically assigned some sort of post-flu malaise is what it was called, with very similar symptoms to long COVID. What’s happened is because so many people with long COVID symptoms were essentially dismissed as lying or just being weak. The people who have long COVID have become incredibly invested in the notion that there is a hard biological underpinning, except maybe there isn’t, because they can’t seem to find one.

What people are starting to come around to is the notion that this is, in fact, a neurological symptom that is quasi-psychological. What really comes out of this article is we’re so judgmental about mental illness and not assigning it as illness. That even people who may have something that is essentially a mental illness can’t accept it because it delegitimizes them. Everybody seems to decide that if something is psychosomatic, it is not legitimate. It is. We know that.

Now, there is no hard proof that it is only neurological and psychological in nature. There is no hard proof that it is all biological in nature. Everyone is at war, but people who are proposing that perhaps there are mental health treatments for this are oftentimes facing the proverbial villagers with pitchforks and torches. A very well-balanced, fascinating article. You can’t help but come out of it primarily with an enormous amount of empathy for people who are suffering from this. Whether it is “hard biology or neuropsychology,” it’s real. Really well done, very thorough, quite long, worth the whole read.

David: What’s the article? What’s the name of it?

Craig: It’s called The Painful Truth About Long COVID on Wired.com.

John: David, I’m now desperate for you to time-travel back.

Craig: I can’t top that.

John: No, but to go back, and I can imagine the Picket Fences episode about this. I can imagine a couple, like a Boston Legal, a Boston Public.

Craig: He may have written an episode while I was talking. He’s that good.

John: He is that good, right? I saw him scribbling.

David: Well, they’re mentally disenfranchised for all our series because I’m always fascinated by neuroscience as well. There’s no such thing as a normal brain. Everyone has what we would call eccentricity and quirks. Others would call mental illness. You’re right. There is a stigma. There shouldn’t be. Everybody’s got their brain. None of them work the same way. They all have things to explore for both entertainment and fear value. I’ve always loved the psychology of people. It’s no secret or coincidence, I guess, that the psychology of characters have been part and parcel of the shows that I’ve endeavored to write about.

John: David, what do you have to share with us?

David: Well, again, I have nothing as cool as that.

Craig: It could be a cupcake. It could be anything, though.

David: Well, I will tell you, one would be a fish.

Craig: A fish.

David: A fish, yes. It’s a salmon. Full disclosure, I’m on a conservation group that’s about saving wild salmon, but the salmon itself has forever fascinated me and stirred me with a bit of awe. It’s this fish. It’s born in a river. The odds of making it out of that river are low because of all the things that can eat it, and because of the water quality and flooding, and the natural hazards that are there.

As soon as that egg hatches, it goes to the ocean and spends three to four years in the ocean, and grows and fills itself with all these nutrients. At the end of that, it comes back. We’re talking, it could have traveled maybe 50,000 miles at this point. It comes back to the very river where it hatched and comes back to spawn and gives life again.

Then, in death, in its carcass, feeds the riparian riverbanks and the eagles and the bears and the birds who eat it and then fly over the heartlands in the middle of the country and take a big dump and drop those nutrients. It’s feeding nature in the middle of the country. It all comes from this fish. That fish continues to fascinate me and to be a cool part of nature. I thought you wanted me to pick a movie or a book.

Craig: Honestly, salmon is– Also, is it not the only fish that is that color? I don’t think there’s another fish that’s that color, right?

David: It’s silver when it comes out of the ocean, and it begins to change colors and decompose. The sockeye will turn bright red once it enters the river, the freshwater. In the saltwater, it’s completely silver. It’s a silver bull.

Craig: All I know is that the delicious salmon that I have for sushi, which I know you’re like, “Please stop eating that. It’s from salmon.” I can see the look in your eyes. [laughs] When I was a kid growing up, New York and you have locks. Was that all wild salmon back then? When did it start?

David: Probably not. I was born in Maine, and we had no salmon because the rivers were dammed up. Atlantic salmon were very indigenous to Maine at that time, but I never saw one because we had dammed the rivers. We’re still in the process of now undamming rivers on the East Coast and West Coast to give them a chance to come back.

John: We have salmon elevators to get them up over certain obstacles.

Craig: I love the salmon. There are things–

David: Yes, it’s a battle, but they’re battlers. They’re warriors.

Craig: That’s actually a great, one cool thing.

John: I love it.

Craig: A fish.

John: A fish. [crosstalk] Not just a fish. A salmon.

Craig: A great fish. A salmon.

John: A great fish. [crosstalk] A big fish, in fact.

David: Nice. This is a great fish. The Chinook salmon, their nickname is King of Fish. There are nature writers who will write a line, “Okay, that’s King of the Jungle,” but that King takes second place to the King of Fish, which is the salmon, because the salmon is such an ecosystem that is vital to habitats far beyond where it actually lives itself.

John: That also feels like a metaphor for David E. Kelley in terms of a King of Fish, in terms of master of one domain, and also traveling to a new domain.

Craig: Soon, we will pick his body up, travel it across, have him take dumps on the ground below.

John: If you go back to broadcasting television, that would be a complete, or if you go back to practicing law, that would be a complete salmon journey.

Craig: That’s the river.

John: That’s the river.

Craig: It gets back to the river.

John: That’s where we started.

David: That’s the river.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptedness is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Congratulations.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: He’s also good.

John: Our intern this summer is Lauren Loesberg. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we often answer. 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.

The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. Lauren has been busy cutting videos for our Instagram, so you can see those.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll find us 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.

Craig: Salmon.

John: salmon

Craig: Just to tell them, like.

John: Thank you to all our premium subscribers who 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 the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on long-running shows. David E. Kelley, an absolute delight having you on the program. I can’t believe it’s been 739 episodes before we got a chance to talk with you.

Craig: It was worth it. I think we had to work up to it.

John: Yes, we did. We had to practice.

David: Thank you both. How do you guys find time to write while doing all these shows? That’s a lot of hours.

John: That’s a lot of hours.

Craig: We’re like, maybe we’ll save this for the bonus segment. The question is, how do you feel when you have so much that you know you’re supposed to be writing, and you just don’t, and you do something else instead? [chuckles]

John: We won’t talk about that in the bonus segment.

Craig: Enjoying, enjoying, I guess, is the trick.

John: Enjoying, enjoying.

Craig: How do you enjoy enjoying?

John: All right. Thank you, David.

Craig: Thank you, David

David: Thank you, both. All right.

[music]

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Craig: I’m here. I am in season three, like, huh. Now, I do write all of it basically on my own, but it sounds like David’s done quite a bit of that himself, too. Even if you don’t, by the time you get to Season 6, you’ve written the equivalent of three seasons. It’s a–

David: You’re talking about Last of Us Season 3?

Craig: Yes, Last of Us Season 3.

David: I would say what you’re doing in The Last of Us, that’s in dog years or broadcast years. Three years is probably more like seven or eight because of the storytelling you’re doing.

Craig: The size of it, maybe.

John: Well, I want to talk about that because in the main segment, I was going to get into characters. You talk about knowing characters and loving your characters, but characters in a 22-episode season, you get to know them deeply, but they can’t change greatly episode by episode. There’s an expectation that they have to be largely the same people who’s like “Craig is killing people like crazy,” and they’re fundamentally different characters from one episode to another because there’s an expectation that people are going to see every episode of Craig’s show, versus they’re going to drop in and see–

Craig: [crosstalk] It’s not serialized.

David: You’re going to drop a jaw or two in every episode. That’s a burden that you’ve assumed. That’s tough. In broadcast, the limited series, I always thought would be less work because there’s less episodes, but you’re mounting a startup all over again, which is the heart. The first five, six episodes of any series is always the toughest. In the limited series world, you’re running a sprint all the time as opposed to a marathon.

Even though Big Little Lies is technically a series now because it’s repeated and now we’re going into the third year, the center you sat in that first year, the storytelling hoops that you’re jumping through, and the expectations of the audience that you’re cultivated, that’s a bear. That’s a real bear.

In broadcast, we didn’t assume that. The construct with the audience is they knew there’d be a legal story or they knew it would be over at the end, would spend time with the characters. They certainly wanted it to be smart and funny if need be, but they weren’t expecting the kinds of plot twists and jaw-dropping WTF moments that–

Craig: You have the benefit, I think, on shows like your long-running broadcast shows to say, we have a conference room, we have an ER, we have an office. We have a high school faculty room. This is where we live. We’re not moving around a lot. We know that there is, I think, a challenge to that, which is how do we have yet another staff meeting without it feeling like the staff meeting that we had 30 times before, but there is also a great benefit in–

John: There is. The same way you can write to characters, you can write to sets. You can write to familiar places. You can think about what’s new in this scene, versus I have to establish what this even is.

Craig: You don’t have to figure out like, “Okay, now, hold on. How do we get this person over to there before that gunshot goes off and this explodes and ta-ta-ta?”

John: In a long-running show like The Practice or Chicago Hope, were you the showrunner all eight seasons, or did you hand off the reins at a certain point? In doing so, how do you even do that creatively? I can’t even imagine what that’s like to have been doing everything on a show and then pull back.

David: The Practice and Boston Legal, I was the showrunner for all of those. Chicago Hope, I was the showrunner for the first one or two years, and then turned it over to John Tinker to run from there. The challenge in broadcast television, especially your audience, their expectations, unlike The Last of Us, is they’re showing up at your doorstep and saying, “Shock us and blow us away.”

In broadcast television, it’s not. Broadcast television is, “Make it the same but different. Don’t be so different by leaps and bounds that we’re not going to recognize it, but don’t be in the same place that you were last week.” The boundaries and also the budget, logistics, and constraints that we have make it challenging, but they also make it a little more comfortable for us because we don’t have to.

If you walk into a Walmart and you see all the opportunities in different aisles, you go, “Well, how do you pick anything?” That’s what’s happening in streaming now. Anything goes, everything goes, so what are you going to find and where am I going to go? Broadcast television, there’s a reason you saw lawyer shows, doctor shows, police shows.

There was a certain convention where the characters could be themselves but with different stories week to week because it was a fertile storytelling ground, the police venue, the hospital, or the law firm. It was not as challenging in terms of plot points for us as storytellers that I think you find in the streaming world today.

Craig: You certainly would never get the note. Why are they in a conference room again? That’s not an objection, whereas in streaming, it could be. Well, why are we always in the blank? I have to say that, as much as it sometimes is terrifying to walk into the creative Walmart and not know which aisle to go to or to consider the expectations of the audience for a large show in terms of its scale, I would be pretty terrified, I think, to be that guy coming in Season 5 of something going, “I have an idea for it.” Simpsons did it. I mean, David E. Kelley did it is probably a thing.

John: Yes. We had Zoanne Clack, who came on to Grey’s Anatomy late into the show, and we were asking her, and so if you have a new staff writer who comes on Grey’s Anatomy, they can’t be expected to have watched all 17 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy. They’re like, “Oh, no, they have to watch all 17 series of Grey’s Anatomy seasons so they know what the show is, which seems impossible.

David: Oh, God, I can’t imagine.

John: I want to talk to you about, from a creator’s point of view, if you’re stepping away from Chicago Hope, you know those characters, you know what that show is supposed to be. Are you still reading every script? Did you back fully away? What is that process of untangling yourself creatively?

Craig: I want to know this because I want that job. That’s the job I want. I want to create a show and then leave. How do I do this?[laughs]

David: I had that on Lincoln Lawyer, [crosstalk]

Craig: Which is doing so well.

David: Lincoln Lawyer was the best gig by those standards because I did the first episode, turned it over to Ted Humphrey, and the best thing I did after that was stay out of his way. I’d read scripts, and I’d watch cuts and not many notes. Honestly, sometimes I would watch as a student of what they were doing. We’re not the same kind of storyteller, but I would watch it and enjoy it and go, “Okay, what are the muscles that they’re flexing and what are the targets that they’re aiming for?” I’m not good at being half in. I can either be all in or I’m better from a macro, just giving macro notes from afar, but being with one foot in and one foot out is very difficult.

John: The challenge is you risk undercutting the person who actually is supposed to be doing the thing, or people are not committing to decisions because they don’t know what David’s going to say.

Craig: You will undercut them because you will put both feet in. You don’t stay one in, one out. You just are like, “Okay, I understand you exactly. Really, what I need is maybe I’ll just get Ted. Maybe I’ll just take Ted. [crosstalk]

John: Ted’s good.

Craig: I need Ted.”

John: The other challenge is going into the fourth or fifth season of a show, we have folks who are coming in who are doing streaming shows. We talk about the start of the season. They have a blue-sky period, like what are all the things that we can possibly do? In broadcast series, was that a thing? Was there like a blue-sky week or two at the start of a writer’s room where you were talking about the big macro things, or was it always just crunched down to like, this is the episode, this is the episode, this is the episode? What was that like?

David: Well, it was neither. There was no real formula for it. What was consistent with all the shows is that they never got easy. Every episode was a bit of a bear. There was also probably deep-seated concern with, will this material or this construct even have legs? I remember in LA Law, the second year, there was a writer’s strike. It had happened around show 15 or 16.

We and the writers in the room thought the blessing of that strike would be that the audience would never tumble to the fact that we were frauds because we had no more stories to tell. We were on fuse. That strike saved the audience from realizing we had no more stories to tell. Then we got to rest and went away, and the storytelling machine replenished, and you found more stories. Where the stories come from is always a search.

In The Practice, for example, we did hit a bit of a creative wall in Season 5. The episodes, I felt, were solid for what they were, but we’d done versions of them before. That’s why we brought in James Spader. By the way, ABC had moved us to Monday nights, or they’d taken away our time slot and given it to Joe Millionaire, which at the beginning of reality television became a huge hit.

John: Oh, I remember Joe Millionaire.

David: Joe Millionaire was opposite us. I can’t really remember, but I do remember is suddenly we were getting crushed. At the end of Season 5, our numbers were bad, and we were really limping in terms of ratings, and we were going to get canceled. That was it. We were going to say goodbye.

I remember the Sunday of the upruns, because those are the days they did upruns. I got a call from Lloyd Braun because their pilots were shaking out this way or that way. He said, “Look, here’s the deal. We’re going to pick up The Practice for one more year if you want it, but at half your license fee. We can’t afford it, half the license fee, which meant I would have to, because the actors were making a ton of money at that time, which means I would have to let go, probably half the cast.

We brought in James Spader and William Shatner for, I think, it was year six. I’m not sure about the math on it. You can check through them, but I think it was year six. The show did very well. ABC came back and now wanted to pick it up for another year. They said, “Well, it’s your choice. We can pick it up for another year of The Practice, or you can spin it off for these two characters and do another show.” That’s another case where I said, “Okay, let the story be in charge of you.” I thought the most fertile storytelling venue was another show. We came back and conceived of Boston Legal. That went five more years back-to-back.

Craig: Incredible.

John: That’s great. David E. Kelley, an absolute pleasure having you on Script Notes. It’s so good-

Craig: And honor.

John: -to hang out with you and chat about television.

Craig: The King.

John: The King.

Craig: [laughs] A fish.

John: A fish.

John: Great.

John welcomes writer and showrunner Courtney Kemp (Power, Nemesis) to ask, how do you find an audience and build momentum on television? They look at how writers can match their voice to an underserved audience, the pitfalls of being boxed in by a niche, and what new writers can do to get people excited about their work.

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:

Email us at [email protected]

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.