Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 537 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on a mountain somewhere, which is fine, because that means I get to ask all the questions of our guest this week. Michael Schur is the award-winning writer and creative force behind so many of my favorite TV shows, including Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place. His new book, How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, is a New York Times Bestseller. Michael Schur, welcome to Scriptnotes.

Michael Schur: Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be number 537. That feels appropriate. That feels right on the money.

John: Now, I put a lot of credits in there, but you have so many more credits and also expertise in podcasting because you have your own podcast.

Michael: I do. My friend Joe Posnanski, who is a sportswriter of great renown, and I started a decade ago, just talking about sports and literally nothing, just blabbing incoherently. It has somehow continued for the better part of an entire decade. Now we are part of the Meadowlark Media family that Dan Le Batard started out of Miami. It’s an actual legitimate podcast that has a logo and stuff, which is very, very exciting. If you’re interested in hearing Joe Posnanski and me talk about literally nothing, but sometimes sports, you can find it at the Meadowlark, Dan Le Batard and Stugotz feed on Meadowlark Media.

John: Fantastic. A decade, but how many episodes does it… You haven’t hit 500 episodes of your podcast.

Michael: We have no way of knowing because it’s been so piecemeal over the years. It was just on his blog for a while. For the first six years it was just two people shouting into their computers, and you couldn’t even hear what we were saying. We really honestly don’t know how many we’ve done. It’s a large number of nonsense.

John: Now, on this podcast, are you the John or are you the Craig?

Michael: That’s a good question.

John: Are you prepared going into it? Are you just winging it the whole time?

Michael: I think it’s a little of both. We’re mostly winging it, but we do have a brief text exchange beforehand where we talk about what we’re going to cover. The hallmark of the podcast, if there is one, is a draft, where we draft ridiculous things. We’ll draft kinds of fruit or numbers between one and 10 or something. We at least do a tiny bit of prep to think about what we’re going to draft. I think maybe somewhere in between I guess is the answer.

John: That’s fair. We should also say that on Twitter you are @KenTremendous. I think I’ve told you this, but I followed you for years, not knowing that Ken Tremendous was actually you. I knew you in real life, and I followed you on Twitter. I didn’t realize they were the same person.

Michael: That’s a fairly frequent thing I hear is, “Oh, you’re that guy.” I started that Twitter handle just with… I didn’t think twice about whether I should use my real name or something. A lot of people follow @KenTremendous and don’t know it’s me. The funny thing is that I’m verified, which I think maybe lays bare the absurdity of verification on Twitter, because I’m verified as a fake person. Do take from that what you will.

John: I love it all. We will not talk baseball at all on this podcast, unless it is relevant to something else. Then I’m happy to talk baseball. I just don’t understand it whatsoever. I do want to talk a little bit about moral philosophy. One of the things I liked about your book is that you lay out that there are frameworks that can help us understand moral and philosophical issues. I’m wondering if we can apply that to writing and the choices we make both as writers and the choices we make for our characters, the frameworks of decision making. As we go through your comedy career, I wondered if we can wrap this all together in how characters are making choices and how writers are making choices about those characters.

Michael: That sounds very fun. I’m all in. I’ll say nothing about baseball. We’ll only talk about that topic.

John: Fantastic. For our bonus topic this week, I want to talk about writers room lingo, the special terms you just use inside a writers room and what they all mean.

Michael: Very cool.

John: Let’s get started with your career. Maybe just start at the beginning, because I don’t really know how you all got started as a writer in this town.

Michael: I was on the Harvard Lampoon. I’m one of those people.

John: I’ve heard of that.

Michael: I didn’t give any thought at all in college to being a professional writer, even though it was all around me. I really loved college and wanted to just be in college and take classes that I thought were interesting and stuff. Then when I graduated, I decided to give myself a year to see if I could make it as a writer. I’m too practical and timid a person to just commit to something as risky as screenwriting with no backup plan. My plan was one year, if I get a job, great. If I don’t, I was going to apply to grad school. I moved to New York, and I borrowed a thousand dollars from my Uncle Steve to pay rent, to put a down payment on an apartment. This is back when a thousand dollars was enough for that.

John: That’s amazing.

Michael: In Manhattan. I just started writing stuff. I wrote a packet for Letterman and for Conan and for SNL. I had some meetings with various people here and there who needed writers. I got interviewed by SNL in July of ’97, right after I graduated, but I didn’t get hired. I remember, I have a very distinct memory of, they were walking us around in pairs. I was paired up with this woman. I rem thinking, “Oh man, I’m never getting this job, because this woman is so much funnier than me.” It was Tina Fey, and I was right.

John: You were right.

Michael: Absolutely right. She got hired and I didn’t, which at the time I was like, “Yes, that is correct. You’ve made the correct decision.” Getting that interview made me feel like I at least had a shot. I kept on poking around and writing submissions and making small inroads. Jon Stewart hired me to pitch ideas to him for a book he was writing. Over the course of three months, I pitched him probably 200 ideas for comedy pieces, and he used maybe half of one, I would say, but it didn’t matter, because he was paying me just enough money to pay my rent and buy food.

Then in December of that year, December of ’97, there was this big shakeup at SNL where Norm Macdonald got fired from Weekend Update because he was making too many jokes about OJ Simpson, and Don Ohlmeyer, who was running NBC, was friends with OJ Simpson and he didn’t like that. He fired Norm. The whole writing staff of Update got fired. There was this big kerfuffle. They just needed writers. They called me and said, “You start Monday.” I started at SNL in January of ’98. That was my first job in TV.

John: Now, were you hired specifically to write for Weekend Update and those desk jokes or were you also writing sketches? I don’t know what the division of labor is on the writing staff there.

Michael: I should’ve clarified. I was hired just as a regular sketch writer. Update is its own little fiefdom within SNL. It has the host obviously, but then it has its own dedicated writers who don’t write sketches normally. Sometimes they do if they have an idea. Mostly they’re just writing jokes over the course of the week. I was just hired as a regular sketch writer. Then I was there for two and a half years or so. Then Rob Carlock, who was running Weekend Update at the time, left to move to LA and work for Friends. I then took over his job producing Weekend Update. In the second half of my time there, I wrote sketches at the beginning of the week, but then if they got chosen, I didn’t produce them. I handed them off to someone else and switched over on Thursday and just only produced Weekend Update. I was there. I was producing Weekend Update during the Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon era. That was my time there.

John: That’s an amazing time.

Michael: It was a great time. I was there for three years and then I left.

John: Now, talk to me about the transition between… You were just a writer. You’re pitching sketches, you’re pitching jokes, you’re trying to make things funny, so you’re more of a manager. As a producer you have other people who are working under you and you’re having to steer the ship a bit. How did you develop those skills?

Michael: It was a great training ground. It really was, because everything at SNL is sink or swim. They throw you into the deep end of the pool. If you sink, you’re dead. If you swim, they’re like, “Okay, you can stay here as long as you want.” No one really explained the job to me, except for Robert. He was like, “Here’s how you do this job,” on his way out. At the time I think there were three full-time joke writers, and then also people fax in jokes from everywhere. You have these people all over the country who will send in jokes. Most of them aren’t amazing.

At the time there was this guy named Alex Baze who was faxing in jokes from Chicago. Every week this guy would get a joke on the air, all the way to the end. You’re only doing 10 or 12 jokes. It’s really, really rare for a faxer to get something on the air, and this guy was consistently doing it. We ended up hiring him full-time. He became the head writer I think of that segment, and then now he’s the head writer of Seth Meyers’s show. I got a little bit lucky. Not only were there three very, very talented joke writers who were full-time workers, there were also people like Alex who were faxing in jokes and making the segment great.

Basically, what you’re doing is every day the writers will write 20, 25, 30 jokes. You’re collecting them, looking at them, editing them, trying to make them punchier, punching them up if you can. Then what happens is on Thursday night and Friday night, the host – at least this is the way it was when I was there – Tina and Jimmy and I and the writers would sit down. Tina and Jimmy would read the jokes that I had picked all the way through, just out loud, just read them out loud. We would throw them into one of two categories, no thanks, or this is good, we like this. You would end up with, I don’t know, 50 jokes that you thought were possible. You would winnow that down to 25. You would probably take 25 of them to dress rehearsal, maybe 20 to 25 to dress rehearsal. Then you do the dress and then you cut half of them basically for the air show.

As a producer what you’re doing is you’re trying to manage obviously the content, but then you’re also talking to the graphics department and you’re talking to the production department to say, “Hey, we have a bit on this thing where Chris Kattan is going to come on as this crazy character. We need him to be dressed like this. Here’s the props we need, costumes we need.”

Then the really tricky part is between dress and air, sometimes a joke would work pretty well, but you would think the key art that’s over Jimmy’s shoulder there is wrong. You’d have to run down, in real time. It’s 10:23 p.m. and you’re going on the air in 90 minutes, if you’re Update. You’d have to run down to say, “Hey, can you change this to this and this and make this change?”

It’s very, very good training, because the show is live. You get really good at editing yourself very, very quickly, throwing away everything that isn’t working, and quickly coming up with solutions for problems that you have. That happens because you have no choice, because if you don’t get good at that, then you’re going to be humiliated on national television. It really was great training for being a producer in a long form, a half-hour format, because it drove the ego out of you and it just made you very non-precious with your own material.

John: Now, talk to me about, you have an audience there, so you can get the immediate feedback, like that is funny, that is not funny. When you’re just going through the jokes with Tina and Jimmy, how do you know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work?

Michael: If you’re a once-in-a-generation comedic talent like Tina Fey, you have a pretty good instinct for what you can make funny and what you think will work. By the way, the same with Jimmy. Jimmy has a very good instinct for just punching this and relating to an audience. He’s really, really good at that. Some of it is just gut instinct. Sometimes it’d be like, “I don’t know about this one.” It would be like, “We can try it.” That’s the benefit of the dress rehearsal is if you’re iffy on something, you might as well try it, see what happens, and there’s no harm done. A lot of it is just purely them knowing their own voices and them understanding what they can make funny and what they think will work. Then of course there’s other considerations.

You always had to do at least one joke about whatever the big story of the week was. You can’t ignore… Right now, today, this week it’s Justice Breyer retiring or those documents being found in Mar-a-Lago that Trump took illegally out of the White House. If there’s a show on Saturday, right now they are trying to figure out what their joke is about those topics.

John: Yeah, about Trump eating paper or something like that.

Michael: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It’s a little bit of everything. It’s not one thing. It’s a little bit of guesswork, a little bit of just knowing your own voice, and a little bit of a feeling that you need at some basic level to cover whatever the big story of the week is.

John: You’re doing this job. You’re doing it well. Why leave?

Michael: Great question. I had been there at that point for six and a half years. I was dating a woman who is now my wife, who was in LA. She was working for sitcoms out here as a writer. We got to this point where it was like, if this is going to really work, one of us has to move. It just made more sense for me to move to LA than for her to move to New York, because there were more jobs in LA. It was mostly that.

Then maybe 10% of it was this nagging feeling I had, which was SNL, unlike every other show essentially on the air, is never going away, which means you can stay there. If you succeed there, you can essentially stay there forever. There are people there who have been there for 30 years because it’s a really good job, you get to live in New York, it’s really fun. When you go to a cocktail party and tell people what you do for a living, they’re interested in what you have to say. I just had this sense of, if I’m ever going to be anything more as a writer than what I am now, I can’t stay here. It’s a little bit of a golden handcuffs situation. Everything aligned for me to move and to say, “This was really fun. This was a great start to my life, but now I want to do something else.”

I wrote a spec script. I wrote a Curb Your Enthusiasm spec script. That shows you how long Curb has been on the air. I took a bunch of meetings in my off weeks. I got one job offer. It was from Greg Daniels, who was adapting the British version of The Office into an American version of The Office. I thought, “This is never going to work. It’s a terrible idea to do this.” My meeting with Greg was so interesting. I found him so fascinating. I wrote an email to my agent at the time. I said, “If that guy offers me a job, I’m going to take it, because I think he’s going to teach me how to write.” That’s exactly what happened. I took the job. Greg led a master class in half-hour comedy writing that was taken by me and BJ Novak and Mindy Kaling. He literally just taught us all how to do this job. It was the greatest good fortune and good decision of my career.

John: Great. This is a wonderful time to talk about frameworks of comedy, because really let’s talk about the half-hour comedy as a form, because that half-hour television comedy, we think we know what it is, but in your book you talk about all moral philosophy and really all philosophy in the Western world goes back to Aristotle. What is the Aristotle of the half-hour comedy? What is the baseline from which everything’s evolved? Who are the important steps along the way in the transformation of the half-hour comedy? In your mind, where does the half-hour comedy start?

Michael: If you are Greg Daniels, what you would say – or now me, because I essentially adopted his worldview wholesale – there has been, traditionally speaking, a percentage give and take in the half-hour comedy world in terms of how each episode is divided up. If you imagine it as a pie, 70% of it is jokes and 30% of it is emotion or warmth or kindness or whatever you want to call it. When we were kids, when you and I were kids, because we’re old, there were things called very special episodes, which would happen during sweeps and which would change that ratio. Suddenly a given episode would be 30% jokes and 70% emotional or serious stuff.

John: Like when Arnold’s friend gets molested.

Michael: Exactly, or when Arnold tried smoking for the first time.

John: Or when he gets rabies.

Michael: Exactly. The normal episode of a half-hour show I think, and this is an Aristotelian idea. It’s interesting that you bring this in. You’re trying to find some kind of balance. You’re trying to say there are people who are coming to this show for different reasons. Some people just want to laugh and enjoy themselves and some people want to feel something. They want to feel an emotional connection to the characters. Other people might want a serious issue to be discussed. People don’t come to these sitcoms for one thing. The most successful sitcoms I think you would say, of all time, with a few exceptions, there’s always exceptions, but the most successful sitcoms are the ones that manage to find this perfect balance between being funny and then also showing human connection or warmth or emotion or something.

The exception would be something like Seinfeld. Seinfeld was 100% jokes and 0% warmth. Famously, the slogan that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld had was no hugging, no learning. They didn’t want to engage in that at all, and because they are two of the greatest comic geniuses of all time, that show was the most popular show in history. I think a lot of people maybe at the time learned a bad lesson from that show, because that’s not a replicable formula. You have to be as funny and interesting as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld in order to pull that off. There have certainly been other successful shows like 30 Rock that similarly went way heavier on the jokes and the humor than they did on any kind of emotional connection with the characters or warmth or anything like that.

Greg’s version of it was to say, look, we only have, call it 21 minutes and 30 seconds, or 22 minutes, and we are going to make sure that if you are the kind of person who wants to watch a show because they want to feel something, then we’re going to carve out time where we’re not undercutting everything with a joke, we’re not reducing this to just office hijinks. We are going to have time where Jim and Pam have serious conversations about their lives and where Michael Scott, when he falls in love with Holly Flax, late in the fourth, fifth season, whenever that was, that there is going to be scenes that are just about that and that aren’t also trying to be funny.

That’s a really tricky little slight-of-hand move to pull off, but when you do pull it off, you get something like The Office or Friends or one of those shows where people can rewatch them over and over and over again, because even though they know all the jokes and they can repeat them by heart, they’re watching it because they feel connected to the characters and to the world of the show.

John: Looking back to the timeline, I’m thinking back to… We had Jac Schaeffer on the show talking about WandaVision. WandaVision is all structured around the evolution of the family sitcom and over the decades and how it grows and how it changes. I think back to I Love Lucy or the Andy Griffith Show. I Love Lucy is all jokes. It’s just a joke factory. Andy Griffith is actually not that funny. There’s jokes in there, but it’s more a happy family, father, son situation. The evolution from there into Norman Lear’s shows, which have actual real conflict and stakes to them. You look at Mary Tyler Moore and the family show as an Office show. When you’re starting on The Office, which at the time was a new format – we had the British show, but the idea that there’s not an audience, we’re not going to get the feedback of the laughter – was it scary going into writing The Office, trying to think, “Is this even funny?”

Michael: Yes, to some extent, although what makes Greg special as a writer is he spent an entire year watching the British show over and over again and taking notes. He approaches writing like a scientist. He really puts scripts and shows under a microscope. He gets down to this molecular level where he can now explain to you, here is why what they are doing is so interesting. There were all these things that he pointed out to us about the British show that were clear but also weren’t the kind of things that you might think about if you were talking about why you liked it.

For example, he said, in the history of the sitcom, the standard is that the love story is at the center. The two young attractive people who are will they, won’t they type people, are at the center of the show. Off in the corner is the wacky boss. The wacky boss has a job. The job is to come into his scene, say something stupid and ridiculous and then go back into his office.

Part of the genius of the British show is it inverted the formula. The wacky boss was the center of the show. The love story was shoved into the margins. That did two things. One, it let a singular comedic talent like Ricky Gervais or Steve Carrell anchor the show and be so funny all the time, and to really delve into the psychology of the wacky boss was a new idea. It also meant that the love story was tantalizingly thin and gossamer and spiderwebby and you only got these little glimpses of it. You only got this tiny, tiny amount. It made you desperate to see more of it.

The studio and network would give us notes in the first few seasons where they would say, “We love Jim and Pam so much. It’s such a great story. We just want to make sure that it’s really coming through here, what Pam is feeling.” Greg would go, “Yes, great note. Absolutely.” Then he would say, “Yeah, we’re ignoring that,” because what they don’t understand is that after whatever story has played out, if the camera is peeking at Pam from behind a plant, and her eyes just glance up at Jim and linger on him for one second and then she looks away, the audience is going to really… That intimacy is so tense that the audience will certainly feel the thing we want them to feel.

We all had a lot of fear about adapting it, because we all revered the British show. We all thought it was essentially non-replicable in America. Greg had studied it and observed it and had understood it at such a deep level that at the end of the day it was much easier to make it good I think than we anticipated, because Steve can do anything. Steve is a genius. Also, that kind of romance was so new to television. No one had ever seen it before. The freshness of it really I think brought it into people’s brains and hearts very quickly.

John: Now, coming from The Office, your next big project is Parks and Rec. What was the genesis for that? Where did the idea come from? Also, how early on did you know that it was going to be in a similar format to The Office? What was the start of Parks and Rec?

Michael: Season 4 of The Office, there was a writer strike. We were picketing. Greg and I were picketing together. He said, “Hey, NBC wants me to do a new show. Would you want to do it with me?” Because I am not a fool, I said yes. They were so desperate to capitalize on The Office and the success of The Office that they basically gave Greg a blank slate and said, “You can do anything you want. We’ll put it on the air,” which now is slightly more common that you get a full season order of something. At the time it was unheard of. He and I started talking during the writer strike as we were walking around picking. Then all of a sudden we started meeting for breakfast a couple times a week at Norm’s Diner, which is Greg’s favorite restaurant in LA by far. Greg is the most thorough human being in the world. We would just pitch idea after idea after idea.

The network really wanted a spin-off, because they were looking at The Office, which was a show that had something like 20 regular characters. The normal network playbook was, this is great, we’ll just take some popular minor characters, rip them out of that show, and build a new show around them. Greg called it The Office: An American Workplace, because he always imagined, potentially, that in success you could do spinoffs that weren’t really spinoffs. You could do The Auto Body Shop: An American Workplace, or The School: An American Educational Institution, or whatever.

John: Were they going to say the same documentary company that was filming The Office was also filming these other places?

Michael: Exactly, yes. That was exactly the conceit that he was imagining. We had a number of options. We had any workplace in the world. We could just say this is the same documentary crew, and the way it’s a spin-off is just it’s a similar look. We also had the possibility of taking say Craig Robinson out of the warehouse and saying here’s the show that takes place in the warehouse. That’s really what NBC wanted, because at the time we were still in the zone of spinoffs are easy sells to affiliates. That would be the best link that we could do.

John: Look at Cheers to Frasier. That was such a nice easy handoff.

Michael: Absolutely. Then we stumbled on this idea of doing essentially for government or an entire city what The Office had done for the concept of the office. The Office was a fake company, but it had this incredible relatability where everybody’s worked in some office. At some point everybody’s had a boss. Everybody has annoying coworkers. We thought what would be really interesting would be to say we’re going to invent a whole city and we’re going to talk about the public sector instead of the private sector. That didn’t obviously translate very well to the idea of a spin-off. It would be a fake spin-off, where Andy Bernard, Ed Helms’s character, would quit Dunder Mifflin and run for mayor and then be the mayor or something like that.

John: It’s a stretch.

Michael: It would be clunky. We broke the news to them that we weren’t going to do a straight Office spin-off, but we had had such success with the documentary format. We loved what the documentary format did for comedy, because talking heads are great opportunities for exposition and jokes and that sense that you’re a fly on the wall and that you’re spying on the activities of the people that you’re watching. It just was like what we had been doing and felt very comfortable doing. We took the format and applied it to the public sector.

Then magically, again, very fortunate – this is one of the things I write about in the book, is all the good breaks that happened in my life – Amy Poehler announced that she was leaving SNL at essentially exactly the right time. We knew that we wanted the main character to be a woman. I was like, “Look, I worked with Amy Poehler for four years. There’s no one funnier on the planet. She’s the only person who can do this.”

Ironically, this is very inside baseball, but they wanted to put our pilot on after the Super Bowl. They ordered 13 episodes. The idea was The Office had the Super Bowl episode that year. The plan was we would start shooting in I think January, The Office would air right after the Super Bowl, and then our pilot would air after The Office. Even though it’s a lot of passive viewing, you’re talking about 25 or 30 million people watching your pilot.

Then Amy got pregnant and suddenly she couldn’t start shooting until March. Our first thought was like, “Oh that’s too bad, she can’t do it.” Then our second thought was, “Getting Amy Poehler in your show is a long-term proposition, and airing after the Super Bowl is a short-term proposition.” In a very risky move, we voluntarily essentially gave up seven episodes of our 13-episode order and said, “We won’t air after the Super Bowl. We’ll air in April.” Amy came to us in March, and we started shooting. We only shot six, and they aired in April and May. We hung on by a thread. Instead of 30 million people watching our pilot, probably four million people watched the pilot. It wasn’t quite as splashy or big, but ultimately it was absolutely the right move.

John: Doing the six episodes though, did it also give you some chance to course-correct and figure out more what your show was? I think that’s that first season of Parks and Rec. It’s great and it’s lovely, but it did change. It did morph after that first season into something more like what I really expect the show to be.

Michael: It changed dramatically. We only had six episodes. We were doing everything on the fly. They did testing of the pilot and the second episode. What came back was not great, frankly. Part of it was an unfair expectation that it would be as good as The Office. There’s no way that a new show in its nascent pilot form is going to be as good as something that’s in Season 4.

There was a lot of feedback just about Amy’s character just specifically and how she came off. The word was ditzy. It was wild to see that, because in our view, she was the opposite of ditzy. She was an incredibly smart, very, very determined person, whose singular goal was to improve her town and the public facilities available in the town. In our mind the problem was she just had no political acumen. She had no game is the way we thought of it. We used to describe it as a person who has read everything about golf and can tell you every winner of every major golf tournament for the past 100 years and can analyze a swing perfectly, but can’t play golf, but is terrible at golf. She was supposed to be this really smart and determined and positive person who just couldn’t be a political animal, because that requires a sort of cynicism or toughness or edginess or something that she just didn’t possess. Ditzy was just, oh no, we’ve blown it.

What was very clear was that we had an amazing comedian at the center of our show, and all of these other incredibly funny people, Aziz and Chris Pratt and Aubrey Plaza and Rashida Jones and all this incredible cast, and we just weren’t writing it correctly. Very quickly, even before that first season was over, we started to course correct very intensely. If you watch the sixth of those six episodes, it’s called Rock Show, that was the first episode that we were able to really make big changes to in terms of the way the characters came across. It’s by far the best episode I think of that first season. It does point the way toward what the show would ultimately become.

John: Mike, talk about this having to course-correct, because as writers, we all get these notes about, “Okay, this is not working. This is the problem. We need to fix this,” but the train has already left the station. It’s running. You have to have conversations with you and with Craig Daniels and about the show, but then with the writers. Then you have to have conversations with Amy Poehler about, this change that you’re making, you actually are changing who her character was to who you want to be. That’s got to be terrifying.

Michael: It was, yeah. It was very terrifying. I had a lot of sleepless nights in that first season, because I thought to myself, I’m going to be the person who ruins Amy Poehler’s career. That thought got into my head once I saw the testing and once I understood that as much as I wanted to ignore the testing, that I couldn’t, that what they were saying had a point. Amy was one of the most beloved SNL cast members maybe ever. I thought, oh my god, if I’m the one who causes her career to get derailed, I will never forgive myself.

This is where that SNL training really helps, because again, I likened it at the time to being in a NASCAR race, seeing that there’s a problem with your engine, and having to someone fix the engine as you’re still rolling around the track. You can’t pit stop here. We are shooting something on Monday. It’s Tuesday now. We have four days to fix whatever it is that we’re supposed to shoot and try to rescue the show.

There was a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of conversations with Greg, a lot of conversations with the writers, a lot of conversations with Amy. We started sifting through the detritus of the first stuff that we had shot, stuff that we had cut or stuff that hadn’t made the episodes or whatever, to just examine it, be a scientist, the way Greg was, and say, “What are we missing here? What did we cut that would’ve been better if we had left in? What did we leave in that would’ve been better if we cut?”

I remember there was one little moment where there was an episode called Boys Club, and Amy was giving this talking head. There was a bunch of guys who met for beers in the courtyard. She wasn’t invited, in her mind because she was a woman, but in reality it was just because nobody thought to invite her, because they didn’t think that she was the kind of person who wanted to have a beer in the courtyard. She went out, she crashed their boys club party, and then she accidentally knocks over the table and all the beers shatter on the ground. Then she gave this talking head where she was saying… The joke we had written for her was like, “Am I shattering a glass ceiling? I’m shattering the glass beer bottles, so that’s a start,” or something like that. It was meh.

Then what we liked to do on that show, and on The Office, was just have Amy improvise stuff, like, “Hey, do a couple where you just say whatever you want.” She was like, “Okay.” She improvised this thing where she was like, “Am I shattering the glass ceiling? I don’t know.” She turned around and pointed behind her. She said, “I don’t know, look at all those bitches cleaning up after me.” I was like, “God, that’s so much funnier. That’s a billion times funnier.” We were like, the answer here is to lean into Amy’s actual comic persona. She’s still playing a character, but she does have a funny, edgy side of her that can come out and it will still be okay. We latched on to that and we latched on to a couple other moments, and we just started writing towards those things. Luckily, we had just enough time to save the show by a hair. We saved the show, and it ran for seven years.

John: That’s amazing. Just a quick little sidebar on the talking head as a format, as an idea, because it is so fundamental to The Office and Parks and Rec, and also Modern Family, which doesn’t even have the documentary crew framework around it. Just the ability for a character to actually tell you what they’re really thinking and what they’re actually really experiencing is so unique and strange. As an audience we’ve just accepted it. It’s an innovation.

Michael: It really is. It has 50 different uses. On The Office, to have Michael Scott look at the camera and say, “Today is Diversity Day. We are getting diversity training from this guy who’s coming in and he’s doing XYZ.”

John: So useful.

Michael: To not have to work that pipe into casual conversation or dialog is incredibly useful. Then, by the way, once you get that pipe out, you can just write a punchline and have him end it with a joke and it’s great. It’s one of the most efficient plot delivery mechanisms I think that’s ever been invented. That’s not all it does. You can also just go to it for a joke. You can enter up any scene and just go quickly to any character for a funny joke.

Then when you’re talking about the more emotional relationship stuff, you can do a thing that we did all the time on The Office, less so on Parks and Rec, but all the time on The Office, which is you go to Jim, and the question that has theoretically been asked is like, “What do you think of Pam?” He says something like, “Oh, Pam’s great. Pam’s one of my best friends. She’s really great. I’m so happy that she’s with Roy. It’s so wonderful that she’s dating Roy.” Then you intercut that, or you cut right from that talking head to a scene or a moment that betrays the fact that Jim is straight up lying to the camera. The idea that you can use it as a weapon to say people are different when they know they’re being listened to and when they don’t know they’re being observed. It just has all of these amazing uses.

The last couple things I’ve written for, like The Good Place, for example, we didn’t have that, obviously. You can’t make a documentary about the afterlife. I was like, “Oh god.” It struck me again how useful that device is and how many different ways you can deploy it. It really is a wonderful innovation.

John: Let’s get to The Good Place. Let’s start with a listener question here from Grant and talking about the genesis and the idea. Megana, do you want to read Grant’s question?

Megana Rao: Yeah. Grant asked, “The hardest part of the creative process for me has always been the initial idea. Things start to flow once I get going, but I really struggle with coming up with the initial idea that I feel confident enough to commit time and effort to. I know a big part of this is that I need to practice creating ideas and eventually just make the decision to commit to one. I was wondering if you had any resources or methods to help with idea generation or could share any insight into how you come up with ideas.”

John: Talk to me about the idea behind The Good Place, because I know that this was something you had been working on on a slow way for 10 years. What was the initial thing that got you interested in the idea of moral philosophy or that there’s something about the ethical choices that we’re making?

Michael: At various times in my life, and I write about some of them in the book, I would blunder into a situation in which I didn’t fully understand really what the dilemma actually was. I certainly didn’t understand what was better ethical choice. I would make a terrible mistake and cause people pain, anxiety, anguish, and suffering. I would think to myself in those moments, if I knew anything about what the hell I was talking about here, I think I would’ve caused less pain and anxiety and anguish and suffering. That led me, in a very casual hobby way, to reading some moral philosophy, some very simple introductory books about theories of ethics and kinds of behavior and why some kinds of behavior might be better than others. That just became a very casual interest of mine that I would think about or read about or talk about with various people.

Then when Parks and Rec ended, there was an opportunity for me to do… I got what Greg got back in 2007, which was you can do whatever you want. NBC basically gave me a guarantee of one season of a show on the air. When they did that, I thought, I could write some version of what I’ve been doing, a collection of funny people in a workplace setting, and maybe it’s a mockumentary and whatever. Because I had been granted this genie in a bottle wish, I really felt like I ought to take a big swing, because I owed it to the concept of ideas to take a big swing. For a while, I had been wondering whether my casual interest in moral philosophy, whether there was a show there.

I played a game as I drove around LA, where if someone would cut me off in traffic or something, I would think to myself, “That guy just lost 18 points.” I had invented an afterlife calculator that was weighing all of our decisions and all of our actions with a point system, that we were all playing a video game we didn’t know we were playing, and that when you die, you get a score. Then the highest-scoring people, instead of getting your name on the board of the Miss Pacman machine, you get to Heaven essentially, and if you don’t, you get tortured. It started to coalesce then.

To get back to Grant’s question, I think that one of the problems I’ve had, I don’t know if this is Grant’s problem, but one of the problems I’ve had sometimes with ideas is there are really two ways to select an idea and then develop it. I think of them as outside-in or inside-out. The outside-in idea is there’s no show on the air about teachers in high school, or you know what would be an interesting setting, the International Space Station, or whatever, where you start with the location or the very simple explanation of what the show is about. Those ideas, in my experience, go nowhere, because that’s not an idea. That’s just a location.

The more effective way for me is to start inside and move outwards, where you say, “I want to do a show about what it means to be a good person.” That led me to say, “What if it’s a show about a woman who has made some really bad choices in her life, and she is now being judged for those choices?” That led me to, “Oh, what if it’s the afterlife? What if there’s an elitist country club perfect eternal paradise where the highest scoring people get in, and she gets in as a mistake and is then trying to prove herself as a good person so she doesn’t get caught?” Then that led me eventually to, “What if that whole thing, spoiler alert, is a torture chamber where this demon has created basically No Exit by Sartre and is torturing people and using them to torture each other?”

When I was asked to write a description of the show early on, after I sold it, I said, “The only thing you should say publicly about this show is that it’s a show about what it means to be a good person. That’s all you should say, because that really is what it’s about.” I knew that it would be grabbier and more interesting to say it’s set in the afterlife, it’s in Heaven or whatever, but I always wanted to go back and work on the show from the inside out, and to say everything in this show is going to be about what it means to be a good person. It happens to be set in the afterlife. It happens to have this very flashy, a high degree of difficulty premise, but I don’t want that to be what people focus on. I want people to focus on the internal stuff.

Sometimes in my life, I guess I’ll just say to Grant, when I run into a roadblock… Greg and I, for example, when we were developing Parks and Rec, the first idea, they really wanted us to do a family show. They essentially pitched us Modern Family, which wasn’t on the air at the time. They said, “You should take the mockumentary format and just apply it to a family.” We thought that was an interesting idea. We talked about it for a while. We just couldn’t get anywhere because we were starting from the outside in. We weren’t starting from a character or a central relationship or a dynamic or anything like that. We were just starting from the location and the setting. That usually makes you run into a brick wall at some point.

John: Getting back to Grant’s question, and thinking about what you were going through with The Good Place, you have this idea like, “I want to do a show about what it means to be a good person.” That’s all well and good, but it’s not until you have the idea of like, oh, Eleanor Shellstrop is a bad person who has to pretend that she was a good person, she’s basically caught, that’s the comedic premise. That’s the engine that’s getting you through especially that first season, that she has to pretend that she’s something that she’s not. That’s an opportunity for comedy.

Michael: Exactly. The stakes are immediately evident. It’s basically you snuck into a wedding where you weren’t invited and then you suddenly realize that everybody at the wedding, if they discover you, they’re going to murder you. It’s a double comedic premise, because she’s a bad person who has been mistaken for a good person, and also she has to act all the time in a way that prevents her from being revealed as a bad person. She has to cover up all of her instincts and all of her bad behavior and simultaneously try to learn what a good person would even look like, because she’s so far away from knowing.

Again, I don’t think you get there, I don’t think you arrive at that location if you’ve started from, “Oh, you know what would be fun is a show in the afterlife.” That’s too broad and there’s too many options there. If you start from a central plot idea or the central relationship of, in my case it was a woman who was a bad person, was mistaken for a good one, and was partnered up with a guy whose whole life was dedicated to writing about and thinking about what made a good person.

John: Chidi.

Michael: Chidi, yeah. You start from that orientation, and now everything else falls into place around you.

John: Now as you’re fleshing out The Good Place, you have Eleanor, you have Chidi. When do you know who the other people are in that world and who are going to be your central characters?

Michael: Again, this is the inside out thing, because I was like, “Okay, you are Eleanor Shellstrop and you have been deliberately sucked into a fake paradise in order to torture you. Who do we put around you if you’re Michael, if you’re Ted Danson’s character? You make your soulmate an ethics professor. That’s a no brainer.”

Then I was like, “What are her main flaws? She has a chip on her shoulder. She’s an incredibly jealous person. Her radar for phoniness is very, very highly regulated.” We used to say that she had a very good antenna for BS. That was ultimately what led her to figure out Michael’s whole plan. Because of that, it was like, there needs to be someone right near her who drives her crazy for 50 reasons, among them that she’s full of shit. That was Tahani. We invented this character who on paper was everything that Eleanor wasn’t. She was very tall. She was flawlessly beautiful. She was stylish. She was friends with all these famous people. She was a do-gooder, where she had raised all this money for charity. This is the important part. It was all for show. Eleanor was on to her from the very beginning. That’s where Tahani came from.

Jason Mendoza, I immediately, once I came up with the premise, knew that there should be at least one other person there early on who reveals that he is also a mistake for being there. Then we just were like, “All right, every show needs a dumb guy. We’re going to create the ultimate dumb guy.” I said at the beginning of the show to the other writers that I wanted Jason Mendoza to be so dumb that he made Andy Dwyer, Chris Pratt’s character from Parks and Rec, look like a Mensa level genius. We were going to just go full bore, no holds barred, make him the dumbest dumb guy who’s ever lived on TV. We invented him. That was also a great thing, because Eleanor and Jason had a lot in common. They were both fun, partier, trashy people who just loved to goof off and not really think about anything important. He served three or four different functions in the show simultaneously.

Again, if you’re working from the inside out, you put Eleanor at the center of this wheel, and these spokes are going out in different directions. It’s very easy to naturally fill in the blanks around her in terms of what other pieces of the puzzle you need to complete it.

John: Eleanor needs to learn moral philosophy, essentially. One of the real challenges you set for your show is that essentially the audience has to learn moral philosophy along with her. She’s there to literally give the textbook lessons. You had to think not just what is she trying to accomplish, but what is the framework in which we’re actually exploring this week’s issue. Talk to us about incorporating moral philosophy. Also, you brought in actual philosophy professors to help you and the writing staff figure out how to talk about some of these issues.

Michael: I did my own reading. In classic 2022 fashion, I’ll say I did my own research for the show. I had a pretty solid understanding of the main theories. I realized at one point if I were writing a medical drama, I would certainly need some actual surgeons and ER doctors to be consultants, to help us write the dialog and to explain what was happening to people. Grey’s Anatomy has that. We’re doing a medical drama, but it’s a metaphysical medical drama.

I read a book by a professor named Todd May who wrote about essentially what happens to the concept of ethics when someone is immortal. That was literally exactly that show we were writing. I emailed him and chatted with him for an hour. Then I asked him if he would like to advise us. He would Zoom in sometimes to the room. He came into the room a couple times. We had a list of topics for him that we wanted him to explain. There were multiple times when we would be writing about some kind of specific theory and we would get all tangled up. This happened a lot with something like existentialism, which is very, very thorny and slippery, simultaneously slippery and thorny. It’s the most dangerous of the philosophies.

John: Absolutely. You could hurt yourself.

Michael: We would email him or call him and say, “We have a philosophical emergency. You have to help us.” Then there was a woman named Pamela Hieronymi who teaches at UCLA who came in and taught us about the trolley problem, among other things. We had these people, these incredible smart people who could explain to us what the hell these philosophers were talking about when we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves.

When I pitched the show to NBC, I said to them, “Moral philosophy is baked into the center of this. It’s not going to be a casual aspect of the show. It’s going to be in every episode. We’re going to really be delving into this stuff. I promise you I won’t make it feel like homework.” That was my solemn vow is that it wouldn’t ever feel like it was homework. I don’t know, the third episode or something starts with Chidi standing at a blackboard and it says Philosophy 101 on it. I was a little bit nervous. Because the writers are funny and because the actors are funny and because we always made sure that the show had to be funny, I think we were able to get those tricky ideas across in ways that were at least in theory entertaining. That’s the difference really between audiences enjoying your show and not enjoying it is like, am I being entertained at a very basic level.

John: I think it’s come time for our One Cool Things. You have a similar thing in your… Your draft in your podcast, is that your One Cool Things, or is that more a collective bit where you’re upping the ante on each other?

Michael: Our draft is we come up with a topic of pieces of furniture and we just draft. Someone gets the first pick, and they pick a couch, and then explain why they think that’s the best pick. We do do a thing on our podcast at the very end called One Last Meaningless Thing, which I think is maybe closer to yours. Go ahead.

John: My One Cool Thing is a paper I read this week from JPL and JPL folks who were involved in looking for all the asteroids that could hit the Earth. We’ve done a really good job of tracking all those asteroids. If one of them were to hit the Earth or come close to the Earth, we can maybe do something about it. This paper is called Defending Human Civilization From Supervolcanic Eruptions. It’s basically making the case, we know there is the Yellowstone Supervolcano, which is not about to erupt, it’s not going to happen, but at some point could erupt, and it would be world-ending in the way that an asteroid hit would be. This paper is actually asking, we know how much energy there is there, could we bleed off that energy by putting it in wells and stuff to pull the power out of that? The answer is maybe. We actually kind of could. It would be geo engineering. You could actually get a ton of electricity out of there, and over the course of 500 years, as you build smaller and smaller concentric circles, stop the Yellowstone Volcano from ever erupting. It is a very nerdy paper, but I just loved it as a concept.

Michael: Very cool. You were right. That is one cool thing.

John: Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Michael: Yeah. I’m a little prisoner of the moment here. I’ve been going around and promoting this book that I read – that I wrote, sorry. I’ve also read it.

John: Someone else wrote it.

Michael: I, like most people, I think have been living in a world where you feel like the only place to buy books is amazon.com. Then over the pandemic, there was this big push to go to bookshop.org, which is a collection of independent booksellers, where you don’t get it in 18 minutes like you do when you order from Amazon, but you support independent bookstores. I’ve also now gone to a number of independent bookstores around the country. You’re a published author, a bestselling author.

John: I am. I’m not a bestseller. Not a bestseller like you. I’m not on any lists like you. I’ve been to so many bookstores.

Michael: I just want to say that I think it’s really cool that these independent bookstores still exist. I went to one called Rainy Day Books in Kansas City that did this crazy promotion where you could have me inscribe specific messages to people. I signed and inscribed 2,700 books over two days, which was a truly insane thing to do. It was this wild stunt created by Rainy Day Books that was really cool and really interesting. Chevalier’s, which is my local bookstore here in LA, is doing something similar. I’ve signed a bunch of books and inscribed them there.

I just think it’s really cool that in this age in which everything has internetized and immediate and everything else, that these independent bookstores still exist and that people support them. I just want to give a shout-out not only to the bookstores themselves, but to all the people who actually physically go to a bookstore, look through the shelves, and decide to pay $3 more for the book that they wanted to buy to support a local business.

John: A tip for people who have an instinct to just buy the book immediately on Amazon, what our family does is we have a shared note called Books To Buy. Instead of actually just buying on Amazon, I’ll add the book to Books To Buy. Then once a week or so, we’ll put in the order at Chevalier’s, which is our local bookstore. They’ll order them for us. They come super quick, because the infrastructure is there for them to get those books quickly. That’s how we get away from buying books on Amazon is just have a shared note on our phones that we can all add to.

Michael: Great idea. That’s another cool thing. You cheated. You had two cool things.

John: I was just piggybacking on you. You set it up. I was just delivering it and then polishing it there a little bit more.

Michael: Fair enough.

John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Manzi. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Michael’s @kentremendous. What is the origin of Ken Tremendous?

Michael: I was walking down the street in college, taking a fiction writing class, and I thought, “Oh, you know what a funny name for a character in a short story would be is Ken Tremendous.” I went home and wrote it down. I love funny names.

John: It’s good.

Michael: I’m a Monty Python fan. I just always was like, “Someday I’ll use that,” and that’s where I used it.

John: Your production company is Fremulon, right?

Michael: Yes, a similarly dumb, meaningless, funny word, Fremulon Insurance, yeah.

John: I love it. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member the scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Mike Schur, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Michael: It is my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Let’s talk about the writing staff here. We got a question in from Lori. She was asking, “I found this list of writers terms. I was hoping you could talk about writers rooms shorthand.” This article has a bunch of things here. Just quickly, a speed round, could you talk me through what some of these things mean? Hat on a hat.

Michael: Hat on a hat just means there’s a joke where it’s a little bit nutty and then there’s simultaneously another thing happening that’s a little bit nutty or crazy. It’s a bridge too far would be the way to explain it. It’s too much. It’s too silly or ridiculous.

John: Do you ever deliberately do a hat on a hat, just to make fun of the absurdity?

Michael: Another way to say hat on a hat that comedy writers use is joke on a joke. It’s like, you want to tell a joke, you don’t want to tell a joke on top of that joke. Sometimes, Brent Forrester, in The Office writers room, someone would go, “I don’t know, I think that’s a joke on a joke,” and he would go, “Yeah, two jokes. It’s better than one.” It’s not always the case that you don’t want to do that, but generally speaking, your joke will probably read a little better if it isn’t confused by another simultaneous joke that’s going on.

John: A bottle episode.

Michael: Bottle episode is an episode that takes place entirely on a set. You don’t have any other locations. You don’t leave the studio. You don’t have any guest actors. It’s only the main cast and it’s only the main location of the show. It’s usually a way to save money, honestly, because it costs money to hire other actors or to go places. Some of the greatest episodes in TV history have been bottle episodes. The Friends episode, if you think about–

John: Where Ross is trying to get everyone to leave the apartment?

Michael: That’s right, yes. That is a great bottle episode. The Fly, which is the Breaking Bad episode that takes place entirely in the lab, that was a bottle episode. One truism I think about writing is that obstacles are good for drama and they’re good for comedy. If you have no obstacles, you end up doing something giant and bloated and Buddhist. Sometimes when you are forced into a bottle episode, you end up coming up with the best episode that you’ve ever done. Ron and Leslie at the end of Parks and Rec in the final season when it’s just the two of them locked in a room, that was a bottle episode. We didn’t have to do that. We just wanted to do that, because we thought that doing it in this really cloistered environment would make for a good half hour of TV.

John: I don’t know if this is actually a term or something that just showed up on this list. A Gilligan cut. Have you ever herd of a Gilligan cut?

Michael: I don’t think I have.

John: I get what the point is. Gilligan is fixing the boat right now, and then you cut to Gilligan accidentally setting the boat on fire. Do you have a term for that? Is there anything you would call that?

Michael: We would call that a cut-to joke. I think of it as a Lenny and Squiggy thing. It’s like, “Where are we going to find two people that dumb?” and then, “Hello, Laverne.” It’s anything where you tee up exactly what’s about to happen and then you cut right to it.

John: This list calls that a ding-dong joke, when you’re ringing at the doorbell right at that moment. A truck full of ducks or a spring-loaded cat, you ever heard of these terms?

Michael: No.

John: Truck full of ducks is from Silence of the Lambs, where you’re chasing after a thing that you think has the killer inside, and you open it up and it’s actually just a truck full of ducks, you were chasing the wrong thing. Have you ever used the term potato pitch?

Michael: No.

John: Potato pitch is so-called because it provides nourishment in a pinch but it’s not enough to sustain you. It solves a problem, but only temporarily. It sounds like a jokoid. It’s doing the function, but it’s actually not good.

Michael: It’s not a long-lasting nourishment for the episode or the show. I get that.

John: Does each writers room develop its own terms for what these things are or does it usually carry on from writers room to writers room?

Michael: There are certainly some of those terms. Sock barrel is another one. Sock barrel is a term for two aspects of a show that seem like they should be related but aren’t actually related. The A story, someone is shopping for a new car. In the B story, someone just got a new shirt and is showing it off to people, where they’re both about new objects, but it’s not a thematic link. It’s just those two stories are kind of similar. That term has been around forever, and it certainly is–

John: Sock barrel’s generally a bad thing.

Michael: Yes. It’s generally a bad thing. There are certainly terms like that that are handed down from room to room to room. Refrigerator logic is another one, where that’s a term for if it’s 3 in the morning and you go to the refrigerator half-asleep to get a snack and you think about something you watched that day and suddenly, you’re like, “Wait a second.”

John: “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Michael: “Why would that person have done that?” or whatever. That’s a term that people used to say if you’ve raised an objection to something in a story, some minor plot details, someone will say, “That’s refrigerator logic. We don’t need to worry about that,” because that’s not serious enough of a problem to make us not do this or whatever. Some of these are handed down from the early ‘60s or something. Some rooms generally do develop their own lingo and their own ideas about how to approach these things.

John: That’s amazing.

Links:

• Michael Schur on Twitter
• How to be Perfect by Michael Schur
• Todd May, academic papers here, books here
• The Poscast by Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur
• TV Writers Room Terms
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 563 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we’re going to do a deep dive with two VFX pros to figure out how they break down and discuss a sample scene. It’s a master class in thinking about how you turn that scene description into an actual scene.

In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to talk about friends.

Craig: Ew.

John: How to make them and how to keep them.

Craig: Yuck.

John: Especially as we get older.

Craig: That’s really sweet actually. Considering who we are and who our audience is, I think this is a really good topic. We should talk about this.

John: Listening back to old episodes for the book that we’re doing, at the start of the podcast, I said on the air, “We’re not actual friends in real life,” and you were heartbroken.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: Now we’re friends.

Craig: More than friends, John. We’re partners.

John: Oh yes, we are. We are podcast partners. Business partners.

Craig: You keep talking, and you know who’s going to show up, right?

John: Nope, it’s not allowed. Matthew will edit him out. Let’s get to our main feature of the day. A few episodes back, we discussed how writers should think about visual effects and what they look like on the page. That was kind of abstract. It’s like doing a Three Page Challenge without three pages to actually look at. Today we’re going to take an effects-heavy scene and talk through it with two VFX pros. Before we do that, if you want to read the scene, it’s pretty short. Just click the link in the show notes. I’ll also put it on Twitter. Craig, you are a good narrator. Could you just read aloud this scene for us?

Craig: Of course. This scene was written by our own John August.

John: It is. It’s pretty impressive.

Craig: It’s pretty good stuff. Here we go. “Interior/exterior the cathedral, day. Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive. She retrieves the eldenspear. She knows the fight’s not over.

“With one wall taken out by the missile strike, it’s incredible the whole building hasn’t collapsed. The altar has been reduced to flaming rubber. Smoke carries singed bible pages.

“Goodwin emerges from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light glowing in its place.

“He sloughs the flesh off his left arm, revealing the metal skeleton beneath. No sense pretending he’s human anymore.

“Oona gives a thunderous war cry, so powerful it shatters the remaining stained glass windows. Prismatic shards of glass rain down.

“Goodwin charges. Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear right through Goodwin. He’s impaled like a martini olive.

“But he’s not dead yet. With both hands, Goodwin pulls the spear back out and throws it at Oona. She barely dodges.”

That should be easy to shoot.

John: Easy to shoot. Simple.

Craig: Just put it in a volume and shoot it.

John: Half a day.

Craig: There you go.

John: It’s only like maybe six eighths of a page.

Craig: Yeah, we could do that in the morning.

John: 100%. Easy. Easy for me to write, much more challenging for the visual effects pros who have to make the scene come to life, so let’s meet them. Alex Wang cis a visual effects supervisor whose credits include Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Dominion, Terminator: Dark Fate, Fast and the Furious 7, and more. His most recent project is the VFX supervisor on The Last of Us at HBO. Welcome, Alex.

Alex Wang: Thank you very much for having me.

Craig: He’s got such a good radio voice too.

John: It’s really impressive. You have been working with Craig on this series, and so doing all the visual effects for a show that we’ve never seen.

Alex: Yes, that is correct.

Craig: And maybe we’ll never see. No, we’re definitely seeing it. We’re seeing it. It’s coming. It’s coming.

John: They bury your show, Craig. It’s like, “Oh, we’re never going to release it.”

Craig: No one will be hearing about this.

John: Next we have Addie Manis, who’s a visual effects producer/supervisor. Her credits include Marvel’s Agent Carter and Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey. After she VFXed for the first season of Foundation for Apple TV Plus, she’s transitioned to writing, as she and her writing partner were asked to join the writing staff for Season 2.

Craig: That’s amazing.

John: We could really use her help to make this scene possible. If you’re looking at the pdf that we have linked to in the show notes, you’ll see that I’ve numbered each of the paragraphs, which is not necessarily each shot, but it gives you a sense of what the challenges are going to be. Let’s start at the start. We’ll start with you, Addie. Let’s say this scene lands on your desk. What is your first step as you’re looking at this scene in terms of thinking about, okay, this is the visual effects challenge or issues that I see here on the page.

Addie Manis: Excellent question. Let’s say I get this as a script page. I’m going to read it out of the gate. That’s what everybody does with a script page. I’m going to read it with a highlighter. I am reading both for story, character, writing, pacing, tone, because all of that stuff tells me what’s this going to look like, what’s the director going to do, how are we going to cut it, like I am reading the final edit on the page out of the gate.

John: That makes it sound like the actual writing on the page is incredibly important in terms of your first impression. It’s not just like here’s a list of things that are in it. How it actually feels and reads on the page is influencing your choices at this early stage.

Addie: That is completely correct. I have in the last 10 years focused more on event television rather than feature film. Especially the first episode of something, which is often written by the showrunner, the showrunner’s first script is conveying to me very much what the final show is going to look like. Because visual effects lives in a world of edits or cuts essentially, we’ll say how many shots is how many cuts in a scene. I am reading the cuts in the sentences. Every clause, every period, every comma is telling me, okay, this is going to be three cuts, this feels like a master shot and it’s going to be one long cut. It tells me the pace of the action and what’s going to be the rhythm of the editing. I know that’s a funny thing to say, because the writer is not the editor. In my experience, it does flow all the way through.

Craig: It almost sounds like what you’re saying is that the writers are directing on the page, which is something we’ve been insisting writers should be doing forever.

Addie: Alex and myself will start very, very early in a process. What we have is the script. We may have only the script for six months, or a year if we’re doing really long prep. We root down into that script and see what is this show going to look like, what’s our pace, what’s our tone, what’s our rhythm, which I’m sure Alex could expound upon further. I read with that in one side of my brain, and in the other side of my brain, I am already saying, “Interior/exterior the cathedral. Okay, is this a practical cathedral? Are we going somewhere to shoot a cathedral? Are we going to build a cathedral? Are we going to shoot this on a blue screen? Are we going to shoot this in a volume?” Any of the answers to any of those questions kicks off a very long chain of action, building, budgeting, hiring, travel planning.

I think we’re both looking at the final product and what is the piece of art that we’re making and the story that we’re telling, and then also physically how do I get all this stuff? Is somebody building an eldenspear? Are we going to have fire on set that day? Is this all going to be CG? How do I get this actor scanned? It’s of two minds. It’s the artistic mind and the logistic mind simultaneously.

John: Alex, talk through this scene from your perspective. This lands on your desk. You probably are highlighting it also. If it’s for a show that you already know… Let’s say this is Episode 3 of a series. You have some sort of basis for how things are going. What are you looking at? What are your first challenges? What can you do before there’s a director or someone else on board?

Alex: Great question. Typically, when I get an action scene like this, the first step is, I’d say, “We should storyboard this,” because action scenes like this, I think what’s most important is camera angles, what is the scope. I read line by line. I break it down with my producer. We come up with the best methodology. Like Addie is saying, we go into very broad strokes as, “Okay, what is the art department going to be building? What is going to be practical? Do we need blue screen? Are we going to be in a volume?”

Craig: I’m going to interrupt you there, because I think some people at home may not know the difference between these things. Both of you describe this fundamental thing that happens when you’re thinking about where you’re shooting something. We have a practical location. We have blue screen. We have the volume. Can you just quickly give a definition for those things?

Alex: Absolutely. A practical set is essentially a set that is built practically that we can basically shoot in camera.

Craig: You may be in a practical location, which is a place in the world or a set that you built, but then blue screen you will put behind things to allow you later to replace that easily with stuff that wasn’t there, digital stuff.

Alex: Yes, that’s correct.

Craig: Tell us about the volume though. What’s that about?

Alex: The volume is something that is exciting and new. Basically, it is these LED screens where we can project content that is essentially what we would be doing in post early on on the LED screen. We can call it getting that it camera. We could still change it in post if we need to, but the idea is that we’re projecting what we will essentially be doing in post onto the LED screens.

Craig: The volume is essentially a room that is a bunch of TV screens that we fill with stuff. For instance, the Mandalorian, very famously, we shot on a volume. They put Pedro in his suit. They stand him on a ground that has some sand. All the stuff around him is actually not really there, nor is it done later with putting stuff into blue screen. It’s actually like rear projection except for much more advanced. You and Addie, the first thing you’re thinking is where are we doing this?

John: I want to bring up one other possibility for where we’re doing this, because when we say practical, it could be that you’re building a set for most of this. You’re building a set for the cathedral, maybe up to a certain height we’ll talk about, or in theory, you could be at a real location where you’re actually at a real cathedral, but the one wall that’s supposed to be missing, you’re putting up green screens or you’re somehow planning while you’re shooting this for like, “We’re going to take this wall out and put a virtual background behind that.” That would be a very early production decision, are we building anything, are we going to a practical location, versus this is all green screen or is this all volume.

Craig: From this very fundamental thing, is there anything that we as writers should be thinking about when it comes to this big decision of will we be going someplace in the world, will we be building a set, or is this something that has to be created virtually completely, or should we just write stuff and let you guys worry about it?

John: Addie, what do you think?

Addie: You guys should just write it.

Craig: Thank you.

Addie: There’s just a wealth of professionals out there who can bring all their… People want to bring their skill sets. I think all your department heads really want to jump in and solve all these problems. I don’t even want to refer to them as problems, but they’re exciting problems, challenges to have. Tell the story, man, because Alex and I read scripts all the time. We read so many scripts. It’s a function of our job and picking what job we’re going to do next. We’re super jazzed to get a good script or a script that we’re going to be really excited to make. We bring all the visual effects, production and creative solutions to the table. I think the writers should write story and character.

Craig: Good, so one less thing for us to worry about.

Alex: I completely agree with Addie there. I think writers should just write the best script they can write. Close your ears, Craig. Visual effects can essentially do everything.

Craig: Oh, boy. Yeah, I know.

Addie: I would say, if I may-

Craig: You may.

Addie: Craig is now showrunning a show. In the transition from just writing to showrunning, there will become logistic, financial, and practical conversations about this script and the visual effects process, as it were with all departments.

Craig: Yeah, I know. It’s a good conversation to have. I think it is true that as you interface more with these departments from a showrunning point of view, you start to learn limitations. One of the conversations that Alex and I have had I think 4 billion times is this: “Hey, Alex?” “Yeah?” “Would it be hard to do this?” Then I watch his face, because he’ll never say, “That’s not possible.” He’ll say, “That should be good,” or, “Okay, yeah, doable. It’s going to be expensive, but we can do it.” Sometimes he’ll be like, “Uh, we could.” That’s when I know that it’s a problem. The nice thing is, as writers we don’t necessarily need to know what’s going to be a problem. I’m sometimes surprised by what’s difficult versus what isn’t. That’s what you guys do.

One of the things that I learned from Alex is, whenever possible, if there’s something practical… When we say practical, we mean something that physically exists. Whenever possible, if there’s something practical to base visual effects off of, let’s get something practical in there.

The best example I can think of is, let’s see, “The altar has been reduced to flaming rubble. Smoke carries singed bible pages.” It’s going to be hard to practically have singed bible pages where we need them in the air. That’s probably going to be digital. It may be very difficult for the rubble to be on fire just the way we want and for the smoke to move exactly where we want it to go. If we could have the special effects department, which those are the crazy guys that light things on fire, including themselves, if we could have them provide real flame there, just some, and maybe a little bit of smoke, just some, then maybe it will look better when the visual effects department comes on in there. Alex, does that sound about right?

Alex: Yes.

Craig: Tell me why that’s so important.

Alex: That is absolutely correct, because it really is important about the tone of the show as well. If it’s grounded and practical and realistic and the fire needs to look like real fire, though we can do a lot, it’s always that the hardest part of visual effects is trying to replicate what is real. It just takes iterations. It takes time, really talented artists to do that. If we have something practical to even reference off of, that just gets us a step ahead.

Craig: What do you think, Addie? Is that the method that you guys use as well, or when you were doing it?

Addie: Yes, certainly, especially on foundation, we leaned really hard into the practical. It’s definitely a show that has huge swaths of full CG. If we’re blowing up a planet, that’s pretty CG. Practical locations, practical effects, we did miniatures, we did all of it. The producer in the supervisor/producer dynamic is often the voice of no. I’m not going to say no to what Alex said, because I agree completely with him. I would only say the complicating factor is sometimes how much time production has to shoot something. If you had to shoot this scene that we’re talking about in half a day, one day, two days-

Craig: Oh, god.

Addie: I think Alex and I would be having secret meetings about how some of the other departments are going to struggle in that time frame. We are going to have special effects and stunts and everybody do their thing, but visual effects is going to brace to pick it up, because those departments need a fair amount of time to execute at the highest level. Alex might say something like, “Let’s shoot the special effects, but I would really like to get a clean plate.” That means I’d like to do one pass with no fire, and I would encourage producers and showrunners to let Alex do that.

Craig: I’m laughing just because I have heard Alex say, “Okay, and then we also need to get a clean plate,” about a thousand times. For people at home, a clean plate, when we’re shooting things that have… Let’s say we’re shooting this scene here. There’s something that we might want to have be completely CG. For instance, “Goodwin emerges from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light growing in its place.” Lots of ways to do that. Let’s say Goodwin’s body was half-skeleton or something like that, and he was going to be mostly CG. We can take real Goodwin, and we can do the best we can with him with a suit and maybe some green stuff on the suit that would get replaced by other stuff.

We’ll do that, and then Alex will say, “Great. Thank you. Now, just shoot the same thing with no Goodwin at all,” which seems weird. At the time you’re just shooting nothing. That stuff then becomes something where he can put an entirely CG Goodwin in there. That’s called a plate. Anything where we’re shooting something that then we stick something on to, or we’re shooting something that we’re going to stick into something, those are called plates. Yes, I have shot many a clean plate for our friend Alex.

Alex: I still thank you for that.

Craig: You are welcome. Listen to your VFX people basically is what [inaudible 00:17:08]. If they say they need something, give it to them. They need it.

John: Alex, the reasons why you might want that is say you might be inserting a fully CG character, but also you might be trying to paint out some stuff you don’t want there. You might be painting out his arm. There’s lots of good reasons why you might want to have that full plate for a reference to do some specific things, right?

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. The clean plate, like you and Craig mentioned, if I need to put in a fully digital good one, that’s helpful, but also just if I need to replace his arm where there’s a green portion on his arm or part of his head, and you might see his endoskeleton or something like that, what a clean plate allows is just something back there to help us paint back the background.

Craig: A clean plate is the visual equivalent of room tone for the audio guys. There’s a space here where we need the sound of a room without anybody talking. Sometimes you need that clean plate where there’s the space where nothing happened. One of the things Addie’s touching on here which is important to understand, I think, for us when we’re writing is that there are lots of levels of production capacity, and they’re all dependent on budget. Budget will not only drive the things that you can do in post, but they also drive how much time you have to shoot when you’re in principal photography. That amount of time definitely affects how you can go about doing the job of these VFX shots, which will start to head into the thousands when you’re doing a big show.

When you’re writing stuff, we have a general sense of, okay, we’re writing something that’s going to cost $10 million, we’re writing something that’s going to cost 40, we’re writing something that’s going to cost 200. Just be aware that if you’re writing something small, when you write anything that is not something you can shoot without visual effects people, it’s good to at least have a sense that you’re doing something that’s within the realm of reality. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with something rather disappointing like Birdemic.

John: Yes, or you may be making aesthetic choices at the very outset for what your effects are going to feel like. You just have to have a plan going into it. No matter what scale of scene you’re shooting, whether it’s a $10 million scene or a $100 scene, you have to go into it knowing what am I actually going to be able to do in visual effects afterwards, whether it’s something you’re doing in after-effects or you’re doing it on a huge, huge scale. Let’s just walk through the scene. Line 3, “Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive. She retrieves the eldenspear. She knows the fight’s not over.”

Craig: Eldenspear.

John: Two questions for you guys. First off, let’s talk about Oona. She’s badly hurt but alive. A discussion about how much of her being badly hurt is hair and makeup versus how much of her being badly hurt is visual effects. Can you talk us through wounds on a visual effects level? Addie, you want to start us off with that?

Addie: Yes. Sorry, I’m so used to waiting for the supervisor to speak first. It’s like, I’ll let the supervisor go first, and then I’ll fix what he says. That’s how that works.

Alex: I was waiting for John to tell one of us to start.

Addie: “Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive.” At least in the pre-production phase, I definitely flagged that as something to keep an eye on. Frequently, I would just make a note to plan for what I would call makeup effects assistance. I would probably assume that makeup effects is going to do the bulk of it, and we’re going to shoot with makeup effects, and then in post-production, visual effects might be called upon to augment it. There is a trick called heal and reveal, where we paint out the makeup, and then after the wound occurs, we reveal it again, and then we live with makeup effects for the rest of the scene.

John: I like that.

Addie: There might be squirting blood, and so we might remove a blood tube. If there is liquids involved, pus, blood, frequently those become continuity issues. We don’t usually want to stop filming to fix them, because it takes way too long. You might shoot a whole scene, and then by the time you get into the edit, you’ll say, “The blood’s all in the wrong spots. Let’s take it out in some spots and put it in other spots so that this looks even passingly realistic,” unless of course we have blown a leg off. Then that’s a much bigger visual effects process that makeup effects is not going to handle.

Craig: “Oona hops to her foot, badly hurt but alive.”

Alex: Just to really talk about the badly hurt part as well, I think just being as descriptive as possible really helps Addie and I understand how much… Is half of her face scarred? Is there a lot of blood? Just a few more descriptive words would really help us there.

Craig: In fact, this is where you’ll find out as a writer who maybe has been misled to believe that you shouldn’t be directing on the page, because you didn’t listen to us. When you get to a production meeting, there are going to be 4 billion questions. You want to try and limit when you get to those meetings to 4 million questions, because there will be 4 million no matter what. Once you get into the billions, you get really exhausted. If you do say things like “badly hurt but alive,” you’re going to get grilled by everybody. Getting some details in there will at least help the discussion along a bit further, so that Addie and Alex, maybe they can just relax, because “badly hurt” is just going to be blood. Alex, I think we’ve had… I try and avoid spoilers as much as possible, but people do get hurt in The Last of Us. That does occur.

John: Oh no, Craig, really?

Craig: Yeah.

John: I thought it was a comedy though.

Craig: I’m going to give that one away. It’s a comedy of errors. We do a lot obviously with makeup, but there are times where there are certain wounds where we can’t do it with makeup. Sometimes we use prosthetics, which help quite a bit. I think Addie’s brought up the crucial thing, which is continuity. The blood can change. Also, wounds are not static. You’ll notice that on a lot of things we watch in movies and television, somebody gets really hurt, and they’re just not bleeding, they’re just bloody. People bleed. How much do we want to make that wound active? These things are complicated. Hopefully the eldenspear has been described earlier in your script, John.

John: I really hope so too. It really is a question for the writer, who we’ll pretend is not me, and the director and everyone else involved in the project, that like, okay, does the eldenspear glow by itself? Is it like Wonder Woman’s magic lasso, or is it just a spear? Is it simply a prop, or is it a visual effects component to eldenspear from the very start, is something we need to know. Probably three pages earlier we may have found out that the eldenspear glows all the time. Alex, from your perspective, what is the difference between something that’s just fully a prop versus something that is also a visual effect?

Alex: If the prop is relatively static and there’s not much movement to it or there’s not a lot of say magic elements, supernatural elements to it, it should be a prop. We can do a lot on top of it if we need to add a glow, a subtle glow, or have some of those elements. If say the eldenspear has to transform in a way that can’t be done practically, and it constantly does that, then it’s a whole different conversation of, okay, maybe the spear should just be a green spear, so we can replace it later and have it do all those things. If it doesn’t, it’s a place where I would say we should save that money and just make the best practical eldenspear that everyone’s happy with and just get in camera.

John: Great.

Craig: Again, it seems like time is maybe the most precious of all resources, even more so perhaps than money, because if you have time, then the props folks can do some R and D and maybe build something great, but if you don’t, then you don’t. In ongoing series, and Addie, you’ve worked on some of those, there may be a situation where scripts are coming in late, and suddenly you need to have an eldenspear tomorrow. At that point, do you just put a green stick in their hand and figure it out later?

Addie: Yes, definitely I have done that. A funny classic one is photos in frames or newspaper props where somebody… Especially on a broadcast schedule or a broadcast show, you’ll get a script, and you’ll be shooting in five days, and you need all these photos from a family’s backstory. We put little green squares into a picture frame, and we make it later and stick it in in post-production. It’s a silly thing, because of course you could make that practically, but you just don’t have time, or production and design does not have time.

John: Production also sometimes gives you the dumbest looking Photoshops. So bad.

Addie: Sometimes you’re going to plus it up a little bit later on.

Craig: Plus it up.

Addie: I think to your point, I would say time is radically the most important factor in visual effects. It is for many, many of the departments. Visual effects can be such an expensive process. It’s sometimes confusing on even why it’s so expensive. Visual effects budgets on shows are tens of millions, hundreds of millions on feature films. The real component is time. What the money in visual effects is paying for is man hours, because many visual effects could take 20 different people. They could take 20 different people working sequentially over 6 months. You’re paying incredibly highly trained, skilled specialists to do creative bespoke work. Sometimes you can dump all the money in the world on that.

If we do not have enough time to design it, you want to iterate on it so that you can find what you really want it to look like as the director, showrunner. Then you got to stack 16 specialists on top of each other in a time frame, and you’re paying for computer hardware. It’s a complicated process. You’re paying for highly trained specialists to work many, many, many hours together to design something that’s probably never been made before. If you have 6 weeks to do that or you have 6 months to do that or you have 18 months to do that, the capabilities will be different, and the end result will be different.

John: I have a question about Line 4. “With one wall taken out by the missile strike, it’s incredible the whole building hasn’t collapsed.” Let’s assume that there’s either a practical that we are green screening off a wall, blue screening off a wall, or we’re building this a set, maybe set extending at the ceilings. The point is that we are able to look outside of this cathedral, outside this interior space into an exterior space, which could be a mountain valley. It could be a dystopia. My question for you is how much does that background need to be a 3D background, or could that just be a 2D background that’s painted in there? Do we need to send a crew to film what that’s going to look like out there, or is that something that we would do just pulling assets that already exist someplace else? What are you thinking about in terms of that background outside of the church?

Alex: I definitely know a thing or two about collapsed buildings.

Craig: What? Another spoiler.

Alex: I will say that at least if the actors are interacting or walking through this collapsed building, I would say I always would like to have a portion of that build, even if it’s just up to 12 feet. Then we can have blue screen. Obviously, going out and finding a plate of that is near impossible, so that will be all digital in my eyes. As far as 3D or DMP, it really depends on the camera, what the camera is doing. If it’s relatively static, we’re behind the actor, and it’s just an establishing shot, it could be what we call a DMP, which is digital map painting, or if the camera travels through that environment, then it has to be a 3D environment.

John: When you add a 3 in front of something, it becomes much more expensive.

Alex: Not necessarily. DMPs can be expensive too. I would say it comes down to what the camera move will be, what kind of a shot is it.

John: That’s a discussion with the director. You have to be deeper into planning and probably storyboards for you to know what those shots are going to be which would influence what we’re seeing outside of the cathedral.

Craig: In the case of television where you have a showrunner that is often not the director, then the visual effects supervisor needs to basically talk to the showrunner, and then the showrunner has to explain to the director why they can’t do something or why they should do it differently or what the limitations are, because we always have some limitations. I want to talk a little bit about this notion of movement and set extension.

In a very simple way of thinking about it for those of you playing the home game, when somebody is moving in front of something, if we want to replace the thing that is behind them when they’re moving, it’s hard, because every frame we have to basically cut our people out and then replace the background. God help us if they have a lot of hair that’s… If you’ve got Natasha Lyonne in there, oh no, you have to rotoscope Natasha Lyonne’s hair. That’s a nightmare. She has the best hair.

John: I love it.

Craig: For those situations, we try and put people in front of something that’s blue or green, because a computer can basically say everything that’s blue gets replaced, and everything that’s not blue, we keep. It gets much, much easier. Set extensions, what we’ll do is, okay, we’ve got somebody moving, and we want something practical behind them, so we will build enough behind them to cover where they’re moving. Where they’re not moving, it’s easy to replace that. That we can just throw blue on. The idea is to try as much as you can, unless you’re a certain kind of show or the environment is impossible to build, to try and make stuff real where people are.

For instance, in Chernobyl, there’s a shot where we see the firefighters marching up this hill of debris towards this reactor building. We couldn’t build an entire reactor building, but we definitely built that mountain of debris. You could see where the firefighters are moving even as they’re climbing up this thing. That’s all really there. Then everything beyond that, Alex and Addie come in and replace that with, like you said, a digital map painting, or in certain… I actually don’t know if I have one where it’s been a 3D environment back there. Do we have one, Alex?

Alex: Oh yeah, we definitely…

Craig: Shows you what I know.

Alex: Sometimes it’s just easier. Digital map paintings come in when you have to pull reference, whether it’s mixed photography. If it’s an environment that really 100% just doesn’t exist, it’s built.

Craig: Got it. Oh yeah, we do have that. I’m paying attention. I promise.

John: When you’re saying a built environment, is it on a real engine where you’re actually rebuilding 3D assets and creating a space? Is that the idea?

Alex: Very much like that. We have so many different types of software to do that. Essentially, it is that.

John: We talk about set extensions. I would imagine that this cathedral probably is a set extension beyond a certain point, because we have these high walls, the ceiling. On Line 8, “Oona gives a thunderous war cry, so powerful it shatters the remaining stained glass windows. Prismatic shards of glass rain down.” Those stained glass windows feel like a visual effect to me. Maybe there’s something. Maybe it’s the reason why you’re doing models or something else or shattering some real things to capture that. I have a question about what is raining down on our actors there. Is anything raining down there? Is this the time where we do some colored rubber glass? What are the things you’re thinking about as you read Line 8, Addie?

Addie: Line 8 with the shattering glass, so my gut is most likely this is potentially fully 3D, especially Alex had mentioned that maybe you would build a set up to 12 feet, which in that instance you’re aiming to build a set that goes above the actors’ heads so that you can cover the actors, maybe with a practical set. You only see above their heads in the wider shot. It keeps your shot count down. It gives the actors something practical to play against. If the stained glass is way up in the high part of the cathedral, which I think in a cathedral design it probably is, that is likely going to be fully CG, but you could rain what we call candy glass down on the actors to give them something to interface with. Probably a mix of visual effects and practical.

John: Even if you put the candy glass down on them, you would probably supplement it with additional stuff, just to give extra little bits of texture and something for them to react to.

Addie: Again, trying to read the movie in my head on the page, I’m also picturing a dramatic shot of the glass exploding into the camera, which will probably be heavily digital. Then maybe just the shards on the actor are practical. It seems like a very dramatic cinematic moment, where you might want to really art direct the glass performance.

John: Great.

Craig: Glass performance, I love that.

John: We talked a little bit about Goodwin. “Goodwin’s emerging from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light glowing in its place.” We’re assuming that this is a real actor. We’ve seen him as a human being for most of this. He’s wearing a Kevlar vest, so he’s some sort of law enforcement person maybe. The flames clinging to his Kevlar vest, am I right to assume that those are all going to be digitally added? Would you put any LEDs in there to create light on the actor? What are some things we’re thinking about with Goodwin emerging from this debris?

Alex: I would say that the debris should be practical if possible. Maybe we can add some debris on top of it or dust or something like that. The Kevlar vest, I would say it should be digital fire. Because it’s broad daylight, I don’t think I’ll need much LED lights or interactive lights. Only if it was nighttime, that would be helpful. In this case, I will say that that is not necessary. As far as the damage to him, we did a very similar thing on Terminator with Arnold’s character. There was explosion that happens. Basically, post-explosion, half of his face is missing, revealing his endoskeleton, and his arm is revealing the endoskeleton as well. Basically, we just had prosthetics do the burned skin portion, and then the other half would be… On the set, I think we had gray as opposed to blue, but some color of gray or green or blue for replacing that to be a digital endoskeleton.

John: Great. On his face, where they have this digital eye, does he have makeup dots on there so you can track where the eye needs to go?

Alex: Yeah, that would be really helpful. We have tracking markers, but we also have what is called witness cameras for helping, because sometimes if we have a long lens, it’s difficult to understand the position of the actor’s body. We position witness cameras around, which is going to be a relatively wide lens. It helps when we’re essentially tracking. If you think about if somebody’s on a ground getting up, we essentially will track where his body position is, in 3D. If we just have one camera doing that, that can be rather challenging or difficult, time-consuming. Like Addie said, time is the most important thing. Really when I’m on set, I’m trying to get as much data as possible that just buys me more time in post. Witness cameras, I’ll try to place them around the actor. Generally it’s opposite sides of where the main camera is to help me track the body.

Craig: That’s what those things were doing.

John: Alex, those cameras, those are synced to each take, so you can actually know on this frame, this is the same frame from this different perspective?

Alex: In an ideal world, for example on Terminator, we had A, B, and C camera. Generally if A camera’s rolling, then B and C, which is already synced, those can be our witness cameras. Otherwise, we have a poor man’s version, which is we just have our own visual effects cameras or consumer cameras. We just shine a little red light actually. The red light helps us when we’re looking at the take. Okay, we can sync our cameras to this. It’s like a poor man’s version.

John: What you’re saying is every little bit you can get helps, even if it’s just-

Alex: Absolutely.

John: … reference for things down the road so you get to feel what’s possible there.

Craig: It’s so much data being captured. It’s amazing how much data is being captured in a process that used to have no data. When you and I started, John, there was just film.

John: There was film, and we had a script supervisor who was taking pencil notes on paper about what happened.

Craig: That’s data, but I’m talking about digital data. There was zero digital data, and now there’s a gazillion bits of digital data, not only from the cameras that are capturing the actual footage that you see on film, but then there are these witness cameras. Then they’re scanning. Addie and Alex are making sure that characters that they may need to replace digitally, so for instance in this I would imagine Goodwin would be scanned for sure. They stand in a little cage built of a thousand cameras. Then they all just take pictures so that they have a fully digital 3D capture of this person. We had a van that did that. What would we call that thing? Was it a trailer, a scanning trailer? We also had a little portable scanning thing that we could set up. It was pretty amazing.

Alex: We had a scanning booth.

Craig: A booth.

Alex: It was a booth to scan our actors, our talent. What you saw was probably a Lidar scanner, which basically just helps us scan the set, the environment.

John: Now Addie, let’s talk about scanning an actor, because I’m sure your principals for foundation would have to be scanned, because sometimes you just have to replace them. Are you scanning them in their full wardrobe, or are you scanning them just bare so you can put wardrobe on them? What’s important for you on a scan?

Addie: It varies by project. On foundation, we scanned actors both in modesty dress and also in each individual costume that had to be recreated. I think an optimal scenario is as many scans as you can possibly get. That might be as naked as possible within the realms of everyone’s comfort level. It could be in 20 different costumes if each of those costumes needs to be used for something. We scanned extras in costumes, because we were filming during COVID, and we were creating digital doubles to populate large crowd scenes, because we were limited on how many extras we could have at each location for safety protocols. I would say both skivvies and costumes is ideal. A lot of times, that takes up too much time. As we’re saying, it takes too much time for the actors. It takes too much time on the day.

For this scene, you would probably ideally want to scan Goodwin in his costume and with his shirt off potentially so you could get his arm skin. The scan itself is getting thousands of mathematical data points. You can make a geo map of his body. You can recreate him as a digital asset. The costumes are good for that. You’re getting costume texture. Fabric is down into the minutiae of visual effects. Production fabric is a complicated thing to create. In a perfect scenario, we would scan him in his costume, but maybe we wouldn’t need to send that fabric or recreate that fabric. You could just get down to his bare skin, and then he peels his skin off and you reveal a digital robot underneath that.

John: That’s great. Let’s talk about this shot, 7. “He sloughs the flesh off his left arm, revealing a metal skeleton beneath.” I’m envisioning this as not necessarily a locked-off shot, but we’re close in on seeing this thing and this sliding off. To what degree are we talking about Rick Backer practical visual effects versus this being a digital thing? What are the decisions there?

Alex: I think I would do it digital, to be honest, just with the interaction. I would just have the actor give the best performance he can, as if he’s really trying to slide off his skin, so it doesn’t feel like it’s just such an easy thing to do. I think many times I always say just give me the best performance and it’ll make our lives a lot easier when it comes to something like this, because if you can really sell him trying to tear his skin off his arm and revealing what is underneath, I think that will actually make our lives easier.

Craig: From a production standpoint, if we had something practical there, which you could do, and which is the only option that existed prior to all this, the resets eat up your day. You need to do takes two, three, four, five, six, and you’re peeling something off that is a one-use thing because it’s getting peeled off. They peeled it off. Now you got to take 30, 40 minutes to get it back on again with the… They have to make multiples of it. Then you get to shoot it again. You could spend all morning and get three takes of this. Now you just have them act, and you can get 9 takes in 30 minutes and find the one later that you want. Again, time is the most precious resource, and it’s the one we’re constantly fighting.

There were circumstances on The Last of Us where because we were in Calgary, in Alberta, which is very north, we always seem to be shooting at the wrong time of year. We would shoot night in the summer, and we would shoot day in the winter. Things go very fast there. We were shooting some night scenes where we really only had about five hours of darkness maximum. In those circumstances, you have to do things like this digitally. Then the idea is to plan ahead and make sure that we give the actor what they need. That means talking to them as well, so that they understand what’s expected of them, and they don’t just get there on the day and go, “Wait, how are we doing this?” They need to know.

John: Let’s wrap up this conversation of this scene, talking about the stunt here. In Line 9, “Goodwin charges. Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear right through Goodwin. He’s impaled like a martini olive.” Addie, talk us through what parts of this enter into your department?

Addie: Line 9, “Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear,” that’s probably wire work. We are going to look at are we shooting this on a blue stage. What is she wearing, because she will have a bunch of safety harnesses. There will be a wire rig to allow her to perform this. Her costume and how the rig interacts with her costume can be easier or harder, although the first priority is and should be actor safety.

There’s been a few things I think in this conversation, like the fire on a Kevlar vest. Visual effects can pick up a lot of work to make sure that the actors and the camera department are safe, which should I think not get lost in the visual effects conversation. We want to make sure she’s as safe as possible, even if that is more difficult for visual effects, because digital work is very safe. She is going to leap to drive her spear right through Goodwin, so she’s probably going to be holding a practical spear that might not have a sharp tip on it. In post-production, we might add a sharp tip. That is mostly again for actor safety, because we don’t really want anybody interacting with swords.

John: Would the spear she’s holding be half the length so that as she drives it, assuming this is in a shot rather than multiple shots, so that she can hit him and we can imagine it went through him? Are what point are you making those decisions?

Addie: I think we would make those decisions with art department and stunts all together. The departments really have to collaborate to make this stuff go smoothly. She’s probably holding the spear handle, and it has no blade on it. Maybe that handle is built as big as it needs to go, up to his chest. She could drive a safe, blunt object all the way up to his chest, exactly how we want it to look in the end. Then visual effects can add gleaming metal, dangerous blade on it for the full leap. We can do digital blade piercing through him like a martini olive.

Craig: The other option is that maybe we’re doing this with stunt actors only, where we can use a full spear, and maybe the other stunt actor’s wearing a protective vest underneath the costume. It looks like they really are getting stabbed. Then we face replace. Oh, face replace.

John: Exciting.

Addie: Face replace, yep.

Craig: Face replace.

Alex: That is Addie and I’s nightmare.

Craig: Face replace.

Addie: You’ll notice Alex and I did not volunteer face replace once.

Craig: That’s right, but I’m always like, “What about face replace?” We don’t do much face replacing, but there’s a couple moments where there is a face replace. We do try and avoid it, because it is hard and takes up a lot of resources. It’s hard to do well I think is the biggest issue.

John: Addie and Alex though, is face replacement one of those things 10 years from now will be easier, cheaper, and better?

Alex: I think so. I think we’re definitely going with AI these days. Just the deep fake technology is really changing the way visual effects handles face replacement. Ten years ago we would have to do a very high-res scan of our actor’s face. We would have to create a digital asset that is photo reel of our actor’s face. That’s very difficult. Until this day I have to say I haven’t seen a single face replacement through that way of creating a digital face that is very convincing. However, the AI deep fake sort of technology, it really is just building an image library in a very thoughtful way of what is the actor’s emotion and why it looks convincing, because it is that person. It is that actor. It’s just pulling those images and blending them together.

John: I didn’t want to get through your segment without talking about you seemed to repose that maybe Shot 9 doesn’t take place in the same space as the rest of the scene would take place. Is there an argument for taking this one stunt and taking it out of this cathedral where we’re doing everything else and doing it in a different space?

Addie: Yeah, I think potentially. It can go both back to the issues of speed and safety. Let’s say hypothetically we were shooting this at a practical location in a cathedral that was partially destroyed, which would be excellent and would probably make for an excellent scene. It might be nearly impossible for stunts and camera to execute a safe set of wire work stunts like this out in a field, because you might need ceiling rigging and crash pads and all kind of things to make sure that nobody gets hurt.

You would want to control the lighting scenario very intensely, which might be impossible in a daylight location. You could pull a stunt like this onto a blue stage or a green stage, for example. We would shoot the actors in the stunts completely against blue, ideally key out the blue screen and put in the practical environment in the background. I am wandering into supervisor territory there, so I think Alex could speak to that more. You’re probably only going to perform that a couple of times, because like Craig said, the resets are very difficult. You don’t want to burn daylight. You don’t want to drag all your rigging equipment out into Notre Dame, Paris, because the logistics of that are completely insane. We put it in a controlled environment. It’s safer. It’s faster. Then Alex, you could probably elaborate on how all those elements go together into final shots.

Alex: The one thing I will say about the acrobatic spring-off is I think that is when I will walk over to showrunner or director and ask for a creative explanation of what the acrobatic spring-off looks like. If it’s something that is not humanly possible, then I’ll say, “Okay, then there’ll be a digital takeover. We’ll have to shoot it in a way where we can’t take it over.” I think that’s definitely something that I have to consider earlier on as well.

John: I want to wrap up this conversations with some things I couldn’t cram into this one scene, which is crowds, because Addie, you’ve mentioned on foundation, because you’re shooting this during COVID, sometimes you needed to populate things with more people than you were allowed to have in a space. Even things like filling up an auditorium with people or a mob of villagers storming something, can you talk us through… Maybe, Alex, you could start with talking us through how we create groups of people as opposed to an individual character.

Alex: With crowds, I always try to shoot plates if I can, just because it’s cheaper and it looks better. It gets us there faster. If I can shoot plates, then I will. However, if I cannot, then it goes into digital crowds, and I need to create these digital assets of these crowd members. We call them crowd agents. Depending on what they need to do, if they’re just doing a cycle of cheering up and down, that’s definitely the simpler route to go. However, if they have to interact and react to certain things, that’s only software that’s smart enough to know what to do with that. That obviously takes more time, and it’s more expensive.

John: As we wrap up, let’s say we have listeners who are hearing you guys talk about this, and they say, “You know what? This is the kind of job I really want to do. This is a thing I aspire to.” What should that listener do next? Let’s say this was a college student who’s really interested in this. What are the next steps for that person? Addie, what would you say? What advice would you give?

Addie: I have to think about this. It’s a valid question, because there’s quite a lot of discussion about the lack of diversity in the visual effects space, so how to get one’s foot in the door is a good question. For me personally, I started as a production assistant in independent film.

John: Great.

Addie: I think that having some boots on the ground experience on a film set is incredibly important for anybody going into any department. I think the strongest visual effects supervisors, producers, artists, coordinators, are fluent in filmmaking in general. I think having a basis in filmmaking and storytelling is actually more important than the technical, because the technical can be learned, but it’s really integral to know how the whole thing goes together before you start talking about the technical. I would say get a production assistant job, see how the whole thing works.

John: Alex, what would your advice be for someone who wants to start a career in visual effects?

Alex: I think there’s definitely a wealth of knowledge on the internet right now for visual effects, just listening to visual effects supervisors talk to there are podcasts out there. There are tutorials out there. I think there’s just so much that a young artist can grab, that I wish I had when I was starting out. The other thing I would say is be a master at your craft. Be passionate. It is a hard job. It takes a lot of hours, takes a lot of effort. You have to be really dedicated and passionate about it.

John: Great. Craig, any last questions for our team here?

Craig: No, I think you guys covered it well. I just want to thank you both for coming on, because most writers simply don’t know about this stuff. The most important part I think of this discussion was hearing from both of you about how important the script is and how closely you read it. In television where the writers are in charge, this makes sense. In movies where the writers aren’t, this is part of the tragedy that the script is being read so carefully, and oftentimes in the absence of the writer themselves, who’s just not there. You have to ask the person who didn’t write it what it meant. Again, the way movies do it, stupid. The way television does it, correct.

I think I really connect with what Addie’s saying, that so much of what makes somebody good at this, and I can certainly confirm that this is the case with Alex, is how carefully they interrogate the screenplay and how much they care about the point, which is the story, the characters, the relationship, the tone, and the feeling you want to create in an audience, and not so much about the ones and zeros. Those are just tools like everything else.

John: Addie, Alex, thank you so, so much.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Addie: Thank you.

Alex: Thank you.

Craig: Now get off our show.

John: Craig, that was a great conversation. Now it’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Craig: I do have a One Cool Thing, and it’s directly related to my friend Alex Wang, who we were just speaking with. When we are reviewing visual effects shots, oftentimes we are discussing certain details inside the frame. We’re showing this on a television, or when we’re into our later final reviews, it’s being projected on a screen. We can’t walk right up to the screen or the television and start tapping on it with our fingers. That’s not going to work very well. The convention is to use laser pointers. We have all sorts of laser pointers over here. I like the green ones, personally.

John: Aren’t they really dangerous? I’ve always heard that green ones are dangerous.

Craig: They’re all dangerous. They’re all dangerous. Don’t shine a laser pointer in your eye. They’re all dangerous if you shine them in your eye. I like the green ones, because they’re really easy to see, especially against the typical colors of a frame. It’s rare that you have bright green in a frame, which is why, for instance, green screen exists. All the laser pointers we have are weak. I went and I got one on Amazon that I love. It’s $22.

John: That’s not much.

Craig: No. It’s called the Solid Craft High-Powered Green Laser, Tactical Long-Range Laser, Rechargeable Laser Single Press On/Off, Adjustable Focus Hunting Rifle Scope with Carrying Case. I love the way that they’ve just gamed the system now so the product name is just a bunch of tags. Anyway, it’s really good. It’s incredibly bright. Do not shine it anywhere near your eye or anyone else’s. It’s got a nice [inaudible 00:56:23].

John: Or on a plane.

Craig: Certainly not at a plane or the sky or anything like that. I’m so delighted with this thing that the visual effects department here in our post-production office has taken to calling it Excalibur. My Excalibur laser is my One Cool Thing.

John: I love it. My One Cool Thing this week is a Substack post by Gurwinder Bhogal called The Perils of Audience Capture: How Influencers Became Brainwashed by Their Audiences. What I really liked about it is he’s talking through how we always think about how influencers are influencing the people who are watching their videos or listening to them. This really is a case of a classic behaviorism, where these influencers are being rewarded for the kinds of things that their audiences like. They become more and more like that. They fall into a trap of just doing the same thing to more extreme levels.

It talks through Nicholas Perry, who started out as this vegan YouTuber but became successful with his eating videos, and now he’s 400 pounds. I think this is a really interesting study in how to think about the feedback loops that are natural and probably good in societies that are about 100 people large but really fall apart on the internet, where you’re getting feedback from people you don’t know, who for reasons you don’t know why they’re wanting to do certain things.

Craig: This is an example of the internet amplifying something that has always been part of human nature. That is the way that we respond to feedback. We love applause. We seek approval from the people around us, which in part is correct. That’s part of socialization is making sure that you can read the room and see what might not be working and see what is working. We all then preserve part of ourselves to be resistant to that, because we don’t want to just be the person that changes ourselves for what people want. That’s when we’re dealing with a room. The room on the internet is millions of people. If you don’t have much of an identity or you don’t have much of a presence of approval in your life, and suddenly you have 6 million people loving something that you do, that’s a drug that you’ll become very quickly addicted to. This is very sad to see, for instance, this guy essentially trading his physical health for love, or at least what he perceives as love.

John: We’ve always had people who changed themselves because they’ve come into the spotlight. We have A Face in the Crowd or All About Eve. We have these stories of how fame changes a person. The fact that everyone can be a little bit famous now is really part of the problem and is really the danger. Everyone wants to be a little bit famous right now. I think it makes it really hard for someone who’s growing up on the internet to really have this sense of who they are independently of people looking at them on the internet. It’s a real challenge.

Craig: It’s tricky. My daughter had some internet popularity. She writes songs, and she sings and performs them. There was a song that she wrote that was based on this fairly popular series of stories on Wattpad, which we’ve discussed before. By popular stories on Wattpad, millions of people read it. She wrote a song that was based on it, and it blew up on the TikToks and so forth. She made money, and she got a lot of attention. I remember at some point she said, “I’ve noticed that I’m now chasing that, and I need to stop.” She actually said it. She said, “I think what’s happened is I’m now trying to write a song that will make the people that like this song as happy as they were when they heard this song, and I’m not going to do that now.” She noticed it. She felt it. I was very proud of her, because I think a lot of adults really struggle with that.

What it comes down to is something that Dennis Palumbo said to me once, he of Episode 99, our favorite therapist. He said, “Many people, perhaps most people, get into the entertainment business because they are seeking approval that they otherwise did not get in their childhood.” That is a very dangerous situation, because if you don’t have a baseline of self-esteem, then this becomes your only engine for approval and meaning. That’s terrible, because what the audience will do is ruin you. A wonderful story by Kafka called The Hunger Artist, which is the opposite of the story that we see here of Nicholas Perry, pretty remarkable stuff.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. The outro this week is by Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send larger questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. If you want to download the scene that we talked through, that’s where you’ll find it. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can get them at Cotton Bureau. We have transcripts that come up every week for our show and a weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find that at johnaugust.com. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on friends. Craig and Megana, as my friends, thank you very much for the fun show.

Megana Rao: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Megana, our bonus topic was suggested by a listener. Do you want to read the listener question?

Megana: Yes. Jacob wrote in and said, “As I hit my mid-30s, I fear I am starting to follow in my father’s footsteps. Is it normal for men to have fewer and fewer friends as we get older? As a kid, I always felt bad for my dad, but now I kind of get it. If you’re going to be a good dad and a good husband, how many friends can you really have? Any advice on that balance in keeping/making friends as we get older?”

John: Such a smart question, Jacob.

Craig: What strikes me immediately is how gendered the question is, because there is a presumption here that if you’re going to be a good dad and a good husband, it’s really hard to have friends, but there’s no question that being a good mother and a good wife is incompatible with having lots of friends. I do think this is something that happens to men. Is it normal? It’s common. Is it good? No. Is it necessary? No. Is having lots of friends incompatible with being a good dad and a good husband? No. I do think I have a lot of friends. John, I think you have a lot of friends.

John: I have a lot of friends, yeah.

Craig: Let’s see if we can give some advice, particularly for men, since this does seem like a gender-oriented thing, but hopefully some women will take some value from this as well, on how to keep and make friends as we get older. John, what do you think?

John: I’m going to start doing a very John August thing, which is trying to define our terms.

Craig: Oh, classic. “What is I?”

John: “What is friend? Explain friend.”

Craig: “Friend equals one.”

John: I want to be able to distinguish between colleagues and friends, because I think men will still have a lot of colleagues, people you work with or people you know through different places, but they won’t necessarily be friends. I would say a friend to me is somebody you can call with a personal problem or a thing going on in your life or just to hang out and have a good time, which is different than a work colleague. I might chitchat a bit with a work colleague, but I’m not going to go deep on things. Sometimes you can make friends out of your work colleagues, which is fantastic, but you need to find someplace that you have friendships that are outside of your work environment.

I’m friends with all the folks who have worked with me at Quote Unquote, which is great. I see them outside of the work environment. If those were my only source of friends, that would not be ideal. My other friends are my D and D group. We play D and D every week. That’s a group of friends. While we’re mostly talking about this endless dungeon that Craig is dragging us through-

Craig: It does have an end.

John: We’ll reach Hallister eventually. Is a chance to have a social situation that is not about work or family or anything else.

Craig: I understand, especially for a lot of men who are not socialized to share feelings and to process their emotions and their feelings through talking, that maybe the idea of friends gets tougher. I want to point out that we all as boys had friends. That was a thing we had. We deserve friends. Friends are wonderful, and they’re essential. Part of what I think might help men is a friendship that has something in the middle of it, an activity.

John: Bowling.

Craig: Anything, really. If you have bowling, Dungeons and Dragons, fishing, whatever it is, we generally… Do men have book club? No.

John: Could they? Should they? Absolutely.

Craig: Could they? Yes. Should they? I don’t say should. If they love it, yes. I know from my wife, what book club often becomes is talk club. For some men, that’s hard. Talk club is hard, particularly for men that are struggling to have friends. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they probably aren’t big into the talk club vibe. An activity that you can all agree on that you love is essential I think. It helps bring people together. A hobby-based group is a good thing, finding something like that. If you are married, you may absolutely loathe the following sentence, which I’ve heard a number of times. “My friend so-and-so would love for us to get together with her husband and go out to dinner.” You may go, “Oh, no.” Give it a shot, unless you already have-

John: Give it a shot.

Craig: If you have a lot of friends, then you can say no, which I do all the time. I’m full up on friends. If you don’t, you never know, because what happens is sometimes couples interaction helps you find friends. You may then get invited to a party, and you might start chatting with somebody. If you’re a guy and you meet another guy at a party that you like, or by the way, it doesn’t all have to be gendered friends, or a woman that you’d be friends with, pursue it. Pursue it.

John: That’s the thing is people are I think afraid to pursue friendships after a certain point, because in college it was easy, because you were just around people, and you could strike up conversations. You all had a thing in common, because you were all going to the same school. You have a little less now. Post-pandemic, Mike and I very deliberately tried to make some new friends, because we recognized that so many of the friends we made over the last 10 years were couple friends, parents of other kids at Amy’s schools. That was great while we had that shared interest. Our kids are at the same school. During the pandemic, we weren’t seeing those people. They all fell out of touch. We didn’t care about a lot of them. We weren’t going to get back in touch. We had literally nothing in common other than our kids went to the same school. Mike and I have been trying to make some new friends. Literally, just in line at Outfest, we started talking to the couple in front of us, and we went out to dinner with them, and they’re now friends.

Craig: There you go.

John: Craig, I think I’m going to scare you here, but you have to state it, then manifest it.

Craig: Wow. You may have to state it and manifest. You have to be the change you want to see in the world. That means, by the way, that you have to risk rejection of a kind. When you are pursuing friendships, keep your antenna up for resistance and reluctance, because that means those people don’t want to be friends with you, and that’s okay. You don’t want to be thirsty, as the kids say. You don’t want to be desperate. Just stay open to it. I would say, Jacob, you’re in your mid-30s. Don’t follow in your father’s footsteps. My dad, who he’s been dead for, I don’t know, a couple years now, he didn’t have friends.

John: My dad didn’t either.

Craig: None. My dad lived way longer than your dad. My dad didn’t have friends for decades. For decades. That’s not good. I used to worry about it. Then I realized, why am I worrying about this? This is not my problem. I can’t fix this for him.

John: For your own kid, model good behavior.

Craig: That’s right. Exactly.

John: Make some friends. Take a chance.

Craig: It’s actually part of being a good dad is showing your kid that you have friends and that you’re not just the guy at home that’s a lump on the coach. By the way, I don’t know if you’re married to a man or a woman, but whoever your spouse is, give them a break by going and having your own friends. Otherwise, you’re like, “I don’t know. You’re going out. I’m alone.” Megana-

John: Give us your perspective on this, because you’re closer in age to Jacob.

Craig: You’re Jacob-ish.

John: Do you sense your friends groups changing, your friendships changing? What’s going on with you?

Megana: I definitely sense as I’m getting older, the texture of my social life changing a bit. It’s hard to tell whether that’s because of the pandemic and how that’s affected us the last two years or if I have to admit that I’m just getting older.

Craig: You’re getting older.

Megana: An uncomfortable thing to realize. I wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying. Male friendships fascinate me. I think it’s just beneficial for everyone for men to have more friends, because I think classically, straight male guys tend to expect their significant others to do a lot of the emotional labor of helping them process and talk through everything, and they only feel comfortable talking about that with their partner. It’s exhausting. It’s so much better if you have a group of guy friends or just a group of friends that you can bounce things off of.

Craig: My wife would love it if I talked to her more about my feelings. She would actually love that. I don’t do it ever. She’s like, “Can you please just say your words related to whatever you’re feeling?” I have to make an effort to do that.

Megana: Are you having those conversations with your friends, or you’re just not having them at all?

Craig: Straight guys. It’s time for the straight guy hour. How do straight guys do this? Here’s how the straight… I don’t know if this is typical or not for straight guys. What I do with my friends is we do talk about these things, but we don’t talk about them in emotional ways at all. We talk about them in… The only emotion that we express generally is anger. That’s entirely acceptable for straight men. It’s like, “I’m so pissed off about this.” “Yeah, me too, blah, and here’s why.” Ultimately, it turns into comedy of some kind. You get heard without it being this thing of being heard, because we can’t ever just go right at it. We have to go around it, because again, we were instructed not to, at length, in our childhood. It’s interesting.

That’s why I think guys having friends is so important, particularly straight guys, because we were conditioned to not talk and not share and not listen. If we find friends that we can do that with and feel like we’re not doing it but still do it, if you know what I mean, it’s really helpful.

John: Now this is not a new observation at all, but I do feel like the root cause or one of the root causes of so many of the challenges facing America right now is the epidemic of male loneliness and just men who don’t have anyone to talk to or anything to do, so they’re only reaching out to the internet. It’s not good. It’s not healthy for women. It’s not healthy for society. I’d urge our male listeners to just be proactive about trying to find some more friendships. Just find an activity you want to participate in and do it. Find some other men around you or people around you that you can go do this. It could be board games. It could be hiking. My brother is in a four-wheel driving club.

Craig: There you go. It’s a club.

John: He loves it. Find a club.

Craig: There’s a reason why gangs exist. There’s a reason why teams exist and squadrons. I don’t know, there’s just something kind of groupy about men. They like to be on a team. They like to be a part of a thing where everybody wears the same shirt. Men love uniforms. I don’t know why. It’s just in there somewhere in the bones. That’s a good thing. Just be careful that you don’t end up in a club with a bunch of other people who are super angry about not having friends.

John: That’s not good.

Craig: That becomes a little toxic stew of bitterness. Then that’s where men start to egg each other on to do terrible things. What is al-Qaeda if not a club of lonely men, or what was it? That’s what happens. Just be careful about that. Keep your antenna up for people that are maybe just miserable, because then that’ll be a misery club. Find something that’s positive and fun.

Megana: Like golfing. This is why people golf, right? You are outside, and you’re just walking and chatting.

John: You’re not looking people in the eye. You’re standing side by side doing this.

Megana: You’re also not looking at a screen, which is a plus.

Craig: You are not looking at a screen. Golf is a fascinating one, because you’re also not competing against that person. You’re competing against yourself, which is amazing. Alec Berg, who is an excellent golfer, has often pointed out that golf is one of the only sports where anybody on any given day could be as good or not better than a professional. If golf isn’t for you, or if you’ve got a physical disability and you can’t golf, there are other things, for sure. You just have to make an effort to find them. The internet is a great tool and a terrible tool. More toxic groups on the internet than not. Maybe that’s a way for you to find something there. You have to try. Jacob, it’s really important. You may find that you could also reconnect with some people that you could naturally be friends with, you just lost touch with. Just see how it goes. You need it. It’s really important.

John: It is important.

Craig: You guys are my friends.

John: Thanks, friends.

Megana: Aw.

Craig: Aw.

John: Aw.

Craig: Bye, friends.

Megana: Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Follow along with the sample scene here.
• Alex Wang on IMDb
• Addie Manis on IMDb and Twitter
• The Perils of Audience Capture by Gurwinder Bhogal
• Craig’s Favorite Laser Pointer
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Aguilera (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.