Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew: But an interstitial shot? That feels bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s welcome our guest. Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in working with creative patients like writers. His screenwriting credits include the feature film, My Favorite Year, for which he was nominated for a WGA award for best screenplay. He was also a writer for Welcome Back, Kotter, among other series. In addition to his therapy practice, he writes mystery thrillers, which you can find in bookstores everywhere. Welcome back to the program, Dennis Palumbo.

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

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

Dennis: Oh, my pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: You wrote Welcome Back, Kotter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis: Absolutely.

John: It’s a gift.

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

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

Drew: Shiloh writes, “Pixar movies have some of the cleanest and densest storytelling in the business, but I’ve heard of the Pixar Brain Trust and I find it disheartening. If it takes 15 of some of the most creative people in the business five years to make a brilliant Pixar film, that’s about 75 years of brainpower being directed into one story. How can one screenwriter writing specs ever hope to compete against that? Is it achievable to write something of Pixar quality by yourself? Because I don’t have 75 years.”

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

John: That’s a great question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Definitely. Second question here from Ethel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: All right. It’s come time for our one cool things. Dennis Palumbo, do you have a one cool thing that you can share with our listeners?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we are back. We’ve had other specialists come on the show to talk through about how we are portraying different professions on screen. Ken White was on to talk through about lawyers and the legal system and how it’s portrayed on screen and what’s the actual reality behind that. Therapists are often characters that we’re seeing on screen. As a therapist yourself, give us a report card. How often are you seeing therapy portrayed accurately and the role of a therapist being portrayed accurately? What are some things that stand out as like, oh, that’s a good example, or, oh no, this would never ever happen?

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

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

John: The Basic Instinct problem, yes.

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

One of my favorite real-life examples of this is the DC sniper, where every FBI profiler said it was an unemployed White man in his early 30s. It turned out to be an older Black man and his nephew. No profiler in the FBI was even in the ballpark of that. Which is not to say profiling isn’t a valid thing. It’s a very valid thing. You want to be careful when a therapist on screen. Do they know more than they should? How certain?
One of the guys who walked that line pretty well was J.K. Simmons on Law & Order as Emil Skoda, the psychiatrist they used. He was fairly forthright. He would say like, “The guy’s a sociopath,” or whatever, but then he’d go, “Well, what do I know?” Often he would say something like, “Well, that could be true, but on the other hand, it couldn’t.” Sam Waterston or someone would go, “Ain’t science wonderful?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, I get that.

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

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

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

John: Thanks.

Links:

• “Am I Just Fiddling While Rome Burns?” by Dennis Palumbo for Psychiatric Times
• Scriptnotes 99 – Psychotherapy for Screenwriters
• ShotDeck
• River Runner Global
• At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, I will be solo hosting, but joined by the creator and showrunner of FX’s Say Nothing, Joshua Zetumer.

We’ll talk about that show, which is one of my favorites of 2024, if not my favorite of 2024, as well as answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, and this is probably going to be a surprise to Joshua, he and I will put on our urban planner and civil engineer hats to answer what I think is a fairly easy question. How would we make Los Angeles function better? Joshua, welcome to the show.

Joshua Zetumer: Thank you for having me. I’ve listened to the show. I love the show. I’m a big fan of yours as well. So I’m really excited to be here.

Craig: Oh, go on.

Joshua: No. I can go on. I can go on.

Craig: Please don’t.

Joshua: No, I’ll just say one thing, which was Chernobyl was very much a model in my mind in how to do a limited series right and was a huge influence on Say Nothing. I’ll be excited to talk to you about that.

Craig: Well, we will get into that. Whatever influenced you, tip of the hat, because as I said, it was one of my favorite shows of 2024. I think it’s a fantastic show, and I really want to dig into, from the writing point of view, how you put it together and ask you some interesting questions about both the nature of your process and the show itself, the story.

Before we do that, some interesting little bits of biographic detail on you. First, your parents are both psychiatrists, so I think I’m really, really sorry, but I’m not sure. I think that’s better than therapists, probably.

Joshua: I feel like it’s worse than therapists. I feel like neo-Freudians at the dinner table is like maybe worse than like a touchy-feely LA therapist because they’ll really just put it all on themselves since that the Freudians blame the parents for everything.

Craig: Right. I’m sure they were blaming their parents at the same time. Poor grandma and grandpa.

Joshua: That’s right.

Craig: That’s right.

Joshua: It echoes down the line.

Craig: Oh, yes. More interesting than that to me, I guess when you were in high school, you were a jazz drummer.

Joshua: This is true. Yes. I was a drummer, and I was going to try to be a professional drummer for a long time. My childhood was very much like shrinks and punk in San Diego, which is where I’m from, and which is infinitely uncool to be from San Diego. I was like the indoor kid, having an existential crisis while everyone else was enjoying the beach.

Craig: Well, that’s what I would have done also, just so you know. Also, love playing the drums, probably not as good as you, and people that say jazz drummer are always very, very good, I feel like–

Joshua: Or just very pretentious, or just deeply lame. [chuckles]

Craig: Fair. Fair. You can play poorly and call it polyrhythm. I’ve seen this happen.

Joshua: What kind of stuff do you play, may I ask?

Craig: I was mostly just good old– still occasionally I’ll play, but just good old standard rock and roll stuff. Nothing– I actually never got into like the full punk, tu nda, tu nda, tu nda. Jazz drumming to me is– well, first of all, I just couldn’t do the traditional grip anyway, to start with. Then I was like I’m decent with rudiments, but not like jazz drummer good. I always felt like jazz drummers are like the wizards of drummers, and guys like me are just like the warlocks of drummers.

Joshua: [laughs] I definitely– it may be a stretch to call me a jazz drummer, I certainly studied a lot of jazz in college, and I felt like I tried to apply it to other styles. I think for me, those were always my heroes. The jazz guys were always my heroes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, because they were so unapproachable in their skill level, and it was something I really aspired to. Ultimately, I remember there was a really dark joke that I think someone told me when I was 20 years old, when I was really studying, which was like, maybe you’ve heard it, “What’s the difference between a jazz musician and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.”

Craig: Oh, wow.

Joshua: That’s-

Craig: A fact. It’s a tough life. You picked, I think, a similarly tough path. “Oh, I think I’ll try and do the thing that’s even less likely to work out,” which is becoming a professional screenwriter, and yet you have. You, like me, mostly working, were working in features, you worked on Quantum of Solace, I’m jealous that you got to work on a James Bond movie because I’m a huge Bond nut, you did the RoboCop reboot, which I thought was terrific, and you also did Patriots Day in 2016, which is also an excellent film. Then you went, “I think I’m going to–“

Let’s talk about Say Nothing and some facts for our listeners. Say Nothing, the limited series, is based on the book, Say Nothing, A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, who’s also a lovely man.

It is a nine-episode series that follows the story of two sisters, Dolours and Marion Price, who joined the IRA as young women in the early ‘70s, and through that story of idealism, liberation, oppression, terrorism, imprisonment, and murder, we get what I think, this is me editorializing, the best and most complete portrayal of the complicated reality of who the IRA was, and what they achieved, and what they failed to achieve. This miniseries was not your first attempt to write about the IRA, as I understand.

Joshua: No, that’s right. My first job writing in Hollywood was writing a script about the IRA, actually for Leonardo DiCaprio, when I was 26 years old, and that film never got made, but it got me steeped in the troubles long before taking on Say Nothing. The movie that I wrote for Leonardo DiCaprio was going to be– I didn’t want to call him Leo, just there, I had a moment of being like, “I can’t call him Leo,” but it was going to be produced by David Benioff, who created Game of Thrones, of course, and then Brad Simpson, who’s one of the producers on Say Nothing.

So when the book came out, Brad had a very early option on the book, and I think I was one of the first people he thought of because I was good friends with him and I’m one of his friends who happened to be a writer who knew the history of Northern Ireland pretty well. He slipped me the book and it just instantly became my favorite book. I thought it was just an extraordinary piece of writing, and also, I just thought, upon reading it, there’s just no way in hell it’s ever going to get made, just because Hollywood is so fear-based and the idea of doing an ambitious period show set in Northern Ireland, the odds of getting it greenlit seem like they were maybe 5%, no matter how good the book was.

The show was also like un-pitchable. It’s a very awkward pitch. If you pitch it, it’s about two Catholic sisters in Belfast who joined the IRA, and then you follow them on a 30-year journey from idealism to disillusionment. That pitch does not make studio executives see dollar signs. Now, when I look at it on the platform, it’s on Hulu, I can’t believe that it got made. It feels like I got away with robbing a bank, honestly. It’s on Disney Plus outside the US, and so I see this show about Irish paramilitaries like up there next to Buzz Lightyear, and I just cackle at the very idea that somebody was ballsy enough to make it. I spent five years doing the show that I actually got it done.

It is a testament to everybody involved that it got made. Not only my producers who are Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson at Color Force, they’re super pugnacious. They really fight for the projects. Then also John Landgraf and Gina at FX. I don’t want to shill for FX, but truly like they believed in the book, they really believed in the scripts, and they believed in the cast, and that they were willing to make a show that was period, that had no stars, that was limited, that was doing everything that you’re really told not to do. I’m just really grateful that they said yes.

Craig: I know a little something about that process because I went through it with HBO, and you’re right, you have to find some people who are willing to do a thing that probably won’t work. By won’t work I mean gathering viewership and capturing people’s imaginations. Because when we tell these stories based on real-life events and we spread them out over the time they require, there is a worry, I think, in everyone’s mind that it’s going to turn into the thing that substitute teachers show when they come in because they need to do something for the social studies class. And our job, I think, is to try and convince people that, in fact, this story isn’t going to be homework, it’s going to be gripping.

I think what you achieved, we’ll go through how, but I want to ask a simple question. When you set yourself down to lay this thing out, how much were you thinking about the audience and how much were you thinking about how to keep people riveted? Because you kept me riveted through every episode, and because it’s over 30 years of time, you are telling stories about barely young adults. You’re telling stories about women who are, in their 50s and they’re the same people living completely different kinds of lives because of the way things stretch out.

All the events that occur, all the people– you had the same problem I had with Chernobyl. Everybody sounded the same and looked the same. It’s like a collection of white people with Russian names. You have a collection of white people with Irish names. How concerned were you about grasping the audience and holding them?

Joshua: I love a show that doesn’t tell you too much. I love a show that does not spoon-feed. I think there’s a certain amount of table setting you have to do with Irish history that is mostly just jammed into the pilot that I just had to do. The show had to do two things to me. This is actually what made the adaptation such an extremely high degree of difficulty was I wanted a show that was like The Wire. I’m not going to compare it to The Wire because it’s not The Wire, nothing is The Wire. I want a show that was extremely authentic down to all the granular details. And I wanted to capture the spirit of Belfast, which is like very contradictory at times.

At the same time, I wanted to make Say Nothing for a global audience– needed to make it for a global audience who had never heard of the troubles, frankly. I think that was the tightrope of doing the show. When it came to exposition and telling the audience things, you have your narrators, which Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes are looking back on their youth and the world can be very forbidding at times. You need a guide if you’re unfamiliar with the troubles and that device, though a little shop worn, I think is very organic to the story and so it was very useful.

Then beyond that initial table setting, I really want the audience to play catch up. I love getting invested in a world. I love when I don’t know everything and I’m not spoon-fed. I think that was actually honestly a big creative, not argument, but discussion, because as a writer, I’m like really, really allergic to exposition. I love the paranoid thrillers of the early ‘70s where you just dropped into a situation with like Harry in the conversation and you’re just wondering who this guy is and what he does and you’re not spoon-fed any information.

Craig: It sounds like there was a little bit of give and take on that because I have the same thing on my end of things. There’s always a request for clarity, I guess, is that. You’ll say spoon-fed and the people on the other side of the argument will say clarity. For writers who are moving through the system maybe for the first time, that can be quite a shock. How do you navigate those conversations and get what you want?

Joshua: You underline things in the script.

[laughter]

Joshua: You just go back in your second draft and you underline multiple times.

Craig: That works?

Joshua: No, it does work. No, I have done that. I’ve definitely, not on Say Nothing, but on another project, I definitely did get some notes. I felt they had already been addressed, and so in the next draft, I went back and underlined and the executive probably got what I was doing and was like, “I’m going to leave him alone.”

I think there are the compromises you can make that will destroy your work and there are the compromises you can make that will actually be really useful. You have to know the difference, I think, because you can’t be a horrible dick the whole time. You can be really close to a horrible dick the whole time, but you can’t cross that line. You just have to know where that line is, I think.

There’s that book, Difficult Men, about all the showrunners. Running a show, you realize how they became so difficult because there’s such a degree of control that you have to maintain. Really, it’s just about how do you maintain the level of control to get what you want without turning into a monster. That’s–

Craig: Let’s dig into that because like you, I came from features where we don’t have the authority. In fact, we are often in this unenviable position of being the person who knows the most and yet has the least amount of decision-making to do because they put the director in charge. Now, over here in television, you are put in charge. This may have been your first major dose of authority, but not only just over the creative aspects of the show, but also other people working on the show. Did you have other writers on the show or were you a–

Joshua: I had a brilliant writer’s room, honestly.

Craig: Fantastic.

Joshua: If I have time, I would love to just tell you everyone who wrote on the show because–

Craig: Run through it and talk to me a little bit about how you went from a guy alone in his room writing stuff and being told by directors or producers, “Mia, mia, mia” to a guy who is in charge of a show and also now in charge of writers.

Joshua: I think you’re only as good as your writers, I think, especially in a show like this. I was an outsider telling this story, which meant that I’m an American telling a story whose characters have a life that is as far from my life as you could possibly imagine. That meant that I had to treat it with a fundamental respect. I think it meant an insane, like a crazy research process for me, which was years long. Honestly, I think I probably spent nine months just writing the pilot because of the language, frankly, and trying to teach myself to write in a Belfast accent without speaking in a Belfast accent myself, which was just a whole exhaustive process. This is not your question though.

I wanted to make sure when I had my first writer’s room that we had a ton of different perspectives. We had a multitude of different perspectives. The writers who also worked on the show with me, we had Joe Murtagh, who created Woman in the Wall and is a show runner in his own right. Joe is a writer who is of Irish descent, was raised in London, and writes amazing action and his dialogue is hysterically funny. We had Claire Barron, who is a formidable New York playwright who’s been nominated for a Pulitzer and had brilliant insight, particularly into the sisters.

Claire wrote Episode 6, which is the hunger strike episode, which is one of my just absolute favorites.

Craig: Yes, remarkable.

Joshua: When the cast read that episode, they were crying. It’s just a very powerful episode. Then we had Kirsten Sheridan, who’s the daughter of director Jim Sheridan, who’s–

Craig: Oh, wow.

Joshua: Yes. She’s been nominated for an Oscar for co-writing In America.

Craig: Sure. Sure.

Joshua: Her writing is super earthy and humane, and she’s also great with subtext. I was running it, and we had these four different writers, myself included, whose writing was all just wildly different, as different as could be. For whatever reason, the alchemy in the room was just great. It was the writer’s room that you dream of having, where there were no toxic personalities. Everybody was friends, and it just ended up being a wonderful experience. I don’t want to speak for the other writers because who knows what they secretly think.

Craig: Well, they probably will say that you were almost a complete dick, but not–

Joshua: I actually think they would say that. I actually think they would because I definitely–

Craig: “He’s almost a complete dick.”

Joshua: I work really hard, and I try to get the people around me to work really hard and do their best work. It also should be said, we also had Patrick as an executive producer, who was dropping in and out, talking about the history. We have this murderer’s row of talented people all trying to wrangle this massive book. The whole thing, by the way, took place over Zoom during the pandemic, during peak COVID.

Craig: Oh, boy.

Joshua: Me and Kirsten were in LA, Clare was in New York, and Joe was in Madrid. It was crazy. It wasn’t a unique writer’s room because a lot of people were doing that, but it was certainly the thing that got us through COVID, I think, for a couple of us.

Craig: That is a fairly impressive room. You’re gathering up all this great work from all these people. Of course, you’re generating your own work as you go. The thing that impressed me so much, one of the many things that impressed me so much about Say Nothing is the tone. Because the tone, there’s probably a million ways to go wrong and one way to go right. I think I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong with stories like this. The tone here was so gorgeously grounded. It felt so authentic. It wasn’t trying too hard. I also loved how the show found beauty in the plain, the mundane, the faces, wonderful faces. No one was too gorgeous.

Joshua: I think Anthony Boyle would totally take offense of that, but we’ll move on.

Craig: [laughs] He’s very handsome.

Joshua: He’s a handsome man.

Craig: He’s very handsome. You didn’t have a model suddenly in the middle of it. Everything felt deeply detailed and deeply real. How do you keep that tone consistent when you are pulling in so much work from other people whose minds work slightly– Everybody’s mind works differently.

Joshua: Yes. I love that you asked that question because the tone was the thing that I felt most protective of throughout the process. Really, throughout the shoot, into post specifically, I felt like my job was really to just protect the tone and to make sure that really delicate balance between comedy and tragedy was maintained. I think that that’s a facet of a lot of Irish storytelling, obviously, that you can laugh in the darkest of times, and that idea had to be shot through the whole thing.

Otherwise, it wasn’t going to work because the subject matter is so grim. You have prison, you have a hunger strike, you have orphaned children, you have people who have done terrible things in the name of their country, and then realized it was all for nothing. It’s literally could be as bleak as a show gets. The idea that it had to have humor and heart, that was always at the center of it. I think, to your point about intimacy, I think when you have a historical show, my least favorite thing in a historical show, the characters are talking about history with the knowledge that they’re living in history and you’re like making a show about punk and the characters are like, “This is what punk is” or whatever, when nobody was saying that.

So for me, I was just trying to create intimate scenes between people and then let the scope of the canvas deal with the historical details. It was really about just being very aware of what was happening historically, but then throwing everything out. Fortunately, the conceit of the show, at least for the first half, is that these are kids. These are kids who are suddenly given power over life and death, who are suddenly thrust into the center of history and have to figure out what to do, but they’re still making decisions with brains that are, you could argue, not even fully formed. You stop developing as a person when you’re 25, and these were kids who were 22 and even teenagers.

For me, it was trying to capture the experience of okay, what would it feel like to be 19 when the world around you has suddenly turned upside down and the civilization that you’re living in has suddenly adopted violence and what would it be like if you really wanted social change and thought violence was the only way to get it, but you were a teenager? That’s at the heart of the show.

Craig: That also poses an interesting challenge because, as I’ve said many times on the show, my least favorite note is the character isn’t likable enough because I think that’s a compliment.

Joshua: Yes, I agree.

Craig: However, people need to relate to characters. For instance, you have an incredible character, a British military man named Frank Kitson played by Rory Kinnear, who is in a number of ways, a villain. He certainly represents the oppression of the British Empire, yet he’s also fascinating and you admire him. He’s possibly autistic, it’s hard to get a read on him, but he’s so gorgeously smart that you find yourself leaning towards him. Similarly, at the heart of the story, the two main characters, Dolours and Marian, are doing terrible things. At some point, how do you manage those slippery slopes of both humanizing people regardless of what they did, without drifting into, say, apologia?

Joshua: Yes, I think in the case of Frank Kitson, I would quibble a tiny bit in that I don’t think I’m humanizing him. I don’t think he was– He’s somebody who, when you do the research, he’s virtually impossible to humanize. At the same time, he’s ruthlessly, brutally effective at sowing distrust amid the IRA. He’s really good at what he does despite being, undeniably, a dark, dark individual.

Craig: But brilliant.

Joshua: But brilliant, yes. I think there’s another element of it too, which is you can obviously do the tricks that screenwriters do, which is you make everyone around him dumb, which is an old screenwriting trick. I think you can either make it so they’re keystone cops or you can make them smart and him smarter, which is usually the better thing to do. In the case with this show, I wanted a slightly more comedic tone because I did not want the sort of newsreel version of Frank Kitson that I feel like we’ve seen before from stuff about the troubles. I wanted him to be funny.

On the page, Frank Kitson was very funny. I think it’s one of the reasons they greenlit the show was because the stuff with the British, it was really engaging. It did not feel like a dour political drama. I think they greenlit the show because of the tone, to be honest. Then Rory showed up on set and he was so fucking funny and so deft at understanding what the tone of the show was. Because that’s the thing you have to do. Your actors have to know about the dance you’re doing between comedy and tragedy as well. Otherwise, you’re dead. You get an actor who doesn’t understand the tone, especially in the part like that, and the show completely falls apart.

Everybody needs to know the show that they’re making, and Rory really understood the tone. There was one moment when he showed up– I’m embarrassed to say this, I probably shouldn’t say this. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow night and tell you to cut it.

Craig: Let’s find out.

Joshua: Yes, let’s find out. He shows up on set and first of all, he’s like already Frank Kitson when he gets there. We have one conversation in the makeup chair and then he’s in character and the Director Mike Lennox and I are both intimidated by him and going like, “Is he Kitson right now? We can’t tell, or is this just his vibe?” Then he does a scene– his first scene was when he is with the two lieutenants who are around him, and the guys playing the lieutenants are also incredibly funny. They’re doing it and they’re saying the lines are in the script, but it’s just so funny that I actually went to Mike Lennox, I tapped him on the shoulder and I was like, “Is it too funny?”

I just had a moment of going– because you’re making the show that is incredibly politically sensitive, and you’re finding out the tone while you’re shooting when your actor’s reading out the line.

You have the tone on the page, you don’t know what it’s going to look like. I’m like, “Should we get one that’s a little more serious, just to have it in our back pocket, in case this is too far?” Mike goes over, and Mike directed all of Derry Girls, so he knows his way around a comedy. He goes over to the actors, and talks to them for five minutes, and then comes back, sort of like hangdog, and he looks at me and he just goes like, “I don’t know how to make them any less funny.” He’s so good. I guess this is the tone.

Craig: It starts when he lands. He gets out of a helicopter and his lieutenants say, “How’s the trip over?” He looks at them with dead eyes and goes, “45 minutes,” which is awesome. Maybe it was 48, I don’t know.

Joshua: That was right.

Craig: He’ll do everything in an instant. I love how compact and efficient that was. Let’s talk a little bit about the big argument at the heart of this. You touched on it, but if you could, I have my answer. I know what I think this show is about, and I’m right, of course. I’ll give you a chance to see if you’re correct about your own show. This is, I think, of value to anybody that’s trying to write something that is a sprawling historical epic that covers many, many years. You and I have both done this. I think what we both know is the events themselves aren’t enough. There is some glue that makes a cohesive point, even if that point is debatable, and hopefully, it is. What was there for you in the very center of this?

Joshua: The challenge, of course, is that with something like this, there’s not one thing. There’s actually like three or four. I’m really curious which one is the right one according to–

Craig: I’ll tell you.

Joshua: Don’t worry, you’ll let me know.

Craig: I’ll tell you. Yes, I’ll let you know.

Joshua: No, I think for me, there’s so much there and I would actually make two thematic points about it. I think the big one is that it’s about both the romance of radical politics and also the cost of those politics, that you can have acts of violence that have a terrible cost to them for both the victims and for the perpetrators as well. That you can get swept up in something when you’re young and then have to live with those decisions for the rest of your life. This idea that there would be an emotional cost, not only for the individual but also for the entire society, I think that was something I was really interested in. That was point one. Then there’s another thing, I don’t know if that’s right. You tell me if that feels right.

Craig: You’re almost right. Let’s hear what number two is.

Joshua: I think number two was just about this idea of silence and this idea that the price of peace is silence. That if you are going to have a country go from violence to peace, I think for a lot of people in Northern Ireland, people who’ve committed acts of violence and had acts of violence done to them, that the cost of that is that you don’t talk about it, that you don’t talk about the past and you bury it. I think the reason that I wanted to do the show in the beginning– this is actually deeply embarrassing, but I was raised by therapists, as we said, and for me, it was like all emotions are on the table. I was in a house where you were expected to talk about your feelings. That can be good and it can also be bad.

The alternative is having all this trauma– we all have trauma. Having all this trauma and not talking about it. For me, it was about the idea of the destructive power of silence and what it can do to a person to have this thing inside you and not be able to get it out. This idea of unprocessed trauma, both for the victims and the perpetrators, I think that was something that was at the heart of it for me.

Craig: Those are pretty good answers. I’m going to combine them a little bit in my answer, which is the correct answer. I will say to people, if you have not yet seen Say Nothing, you will experience a series of shocking events and startling events that you can imagine having to hold inside as a secret would be very difficult. I assure you, as you’re going through that process, you still have yet to see the thing that is the most upsetting and the one that really feels like, how can you hold this inside? I’ll tell you for me, and I’m joking, I don’t really know, but as a viewer, what struck me about the show was that it articulated something that I think we all struggle with when we have hopes and desires to make the world a better place.

That is that it may be impossible to experience an ideological war and still remain idealistic when it’s over. That it might actually be impossible because the people who inspire everybody through ideas are necessarily throwing a lot of those people onto a fire, whether they are murdered or killed or injured themselves, or spiritually, they die because of things they do to other people. They become pawns in a larger movement that ultimately becomes political. I found that tragedy to be beautiful and moving. The story of people who cared so much because they were inspired to care so much and were possibly necessarily abandoned and betrayed, which, by the way, and I don’t know. Does that sound like something–

Joshua: No, I love it. I love it. I think you should just– You send me the recording and I can just play it back. I can transcribe it. I can start using it in interviews. I think it’s really good.

Craig: You just, you just Venmo me and you can have whatever you want. That leads us to, I guess my final question that revolves around the narrative of the show, and that is Gerry Fucking Adams. Gerry Adams– here’s what I knew, going into things. I was not a student of the IRA. What I knew was there was an ongoing battle between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants/the British government in Northern Ireland, which was possessed by the UK. That battle was between the IRA and the British primarily than the, I guess the Northern Irish police. It involved bombings and it also involved terrorism perpetrated by the IRA and oppressive acts perpetrated by the government.

I know Sunday Bloody Sunday, we all do because we love U2. I knew that Gerry Adams, was– this is what I thought, as an American I thought, “Oh, and then there’s this guy, Gerry Adams, who helped make peace. He’s good. He’s the head of Sinn Fein, which is the political party in Northern Ireland that is part of the British Parliament that figured out how to get to the Good Friday Accords,” I believe it’s called. Good Friday Agreement?

Joshua: Good Friday Agreement. Yes.

Craig: Good Friday Agreement, which essentially ended the troubles. Here’s what your show taught me. Gerry Fucking Adams, as they refer to him over and over, “Gerry Fucking Adams,” was the head of the IRA. He was in charge of the IRA. He was the person who was ordering the terroristic attacks. Perhaps more distressingly, or at least equally distressingly, he was also the person who was ordering the internal purges of people, Irish Catholics, who were believed to be touts, informants to the British, whether they were or not. The show, in fact, is framed around the story of a mother of seven children, or nine?

Joshua: 10, actually.

Craig: 10?

Joshua: I think in the apartment you only see, I believe, eight.

Craig: I was trying to count. There’s a lot of kids. A single mother of 10 children who was murdered by the IRA because she was suspected to be an informant. Yet, “Gerry Fucking Adams,” who, by becoming this political leader and essentially denying that he ever was part of the IRA, he becomes the interesting villain of the story. It’s his betrayal of everybody around him that’s so shocking. What you do, and this is fascinating to me, you are telling this story, and he’s still here. Gerry Adams is still alive. Gerry Adams was a member of the UK Parliament as leader of the Sinn Féin party for 35 years.

He only stepped down six years ago, in part because of some of the revelations about what happened back then. He still denies that he was even a member of the IRA, much less the leader. You found what I think is the most brilliant way to tell the story exactly the way you wanted without getting sued and it made it better. Talk to me about the amazing disclaimers that you ran at the end of every episode.

Joshua: The disclaimers are a way for us– really, this is not an answer that’s going to be satisfying for you. The disclaimers are actually a way to give Gerry his due in a way. I think it would have been morally wrong to not include them. I think on the one hand, we needed people to know that Gerry has always denied being a member of the IRA. I think when to do it and how to do it was obviously a conversation between me, the producers and the legal department. The answer that we came up with was we’re going to do it after every episode.

That kind of repetition, I think for people, creates its own feeling, which is purely unintentional on my part. I would give a disclaimer to the disclaimer and I would say that any feelings you may have about Gerry Adams are not the intention of the artist creating the show and are purely up to the viewer and their own emotional state.

Craig: Well this viewer over here, every time that disclaimer came up, I went, “Wow.” It’s an incredible story, so beautifully told, gorgeously cast. I looked up, I was like, “Who cast this? Oh, Nina Gold. Of course.”

Joshua: There you go.

Craig: Nina Gold who cast Chernobyl.

Joshua: I read an interview with her about the casting process on Chernobyl. That was one of the reasons why it had to be her.

Craig: You chose wisely.

Joshua: I would love to talk about Nina. Can I just go back and say one thing about Gerry Adams just before we move on, just beyond the disclaimer? I think one thing I would say, his role within the IRA, whether he’s running the IRA or not running the IRA, is fundamentally very murky. The IRA had an army council who– you see the old guard, in Episode 3, of other men who are the leadership. His relationship with them has always been very murky. Either way, the show depicts him as being very high up the chain of command in the IRA. I think there is something about–

Craig: The Big Guy.

Joshua: He’s called The Big Guy.

Craig: The Big Lad. The Big Lad.

Joshua: The Big Lad, yes. One of the things I just want people to take away was this fundamental contradiction about Gerry Adams, which is that on the one hand, he has a major hand in the peace process and on the other, his role in the IRA undoubtedly led to the deaths of many, many people. I think that fundamental discomfort that you should feel towards the character, I think that was something I was trying to achieve was that I wanted him, as a character, to make us uncomfortable. We shouldn’t know how we feel about him in the end of the show. I think that’s something that I really wanted, honestly, for all the characters, with the exception of the victims, of course, who are-

Craig: Blameless.

Joshua: -in many ways– No, and in many ways, the heroes of the story. Laura Donnelly playing Helen McConville, is unambiguously the hero of the story and one who is left at the end of the film. I was very adamant that the last shot would be her. She’s left holding the bag. Everybody else, you’re supposed to be kept off balance about them, where they have Dolours, of course, has her sensitivity, her humanity, and also her willingness to kill and die for her beliefs, all of which should throw you off. That was really the goal, I think, with everyone. Anyway, I just wanted to–

Craig: You got there. It was perfectly done in that by the time it concluded, I was uncomfortable with all of them. I wouldn’t know because I ask a simple question when I’m watching these things, “What would happen if I were to walk in a room and meet that person? If I were to meet them, if they were alive– Dolours is not, but if they were, how would that go and how would I feel?” The answer is I don’t know.

What’s so beautiful about your show is that it depicts this very complicated thing, which is violence in service of idea that is almost always depicted stupidly. You depict it with such intelligence and grace. Congratulations on the show. Would you be interested, because you’re so smart, in helping me answer some listener questions?

Joshua: Oh, God. I love the little bit of flattery that’s really supposed to make me say yes.

Craig: Oh, you are the child of psychiatrists.

Joshua: Oh, my God.

Craig: None of my tricks are working. How about this? I’m going to order you to answer some of the questions.

Joshua: I’m good. Unless you want to talk about Nina Gold, I’m good to answer the questions.

Craig: Oh, well, I think Nina would be blushing right now, and I can hear her saying, “Oh, God, no.”

Joshua: She’s a wizard.

Craig: She’s a wizard, and she’s a wonderful person who consistently casts things brilliantly. She casts Game of Thrones. She casts Chernobyl. She casts Say Nothing. She’s just an amazing person. A wonderful person. So well done again, Nina Gold. You’ve done it again.

Drew, would you be so kind as to give us a listener question that we could theoretically answer?

Drew Marquardt: Yes. This question comes from Riley. Riley writes, “I finally got an agent at one of the big three agencies to read one of my scripts, and just before the holidays, he told me we would talk after the holidays, which would be January 6th. I messaged him the morning of the 7th, and he replied that he was currently evacuating his home in the Palisades. On January 10th, I sent him a message saying, basically, I’m so sorry for what he’s going through. I hope he and his family are safe, and of course, no need to respond.
I didn’t mention the meeting or the script.

I haven’t heard from him since, which I totally understand. I honestly can’t imagine what all he’s having to deal with right now. First and foremost, I want to be respectful and compassionate about his situation. I also know the industry is taking an overall hit right now, and I imagine that alongside his personal issues, his current clients are probably reaching out to find out what’s going on with their careers and projects.

Do you think there’s even any time, energy, or bandwidth for him taking on a new writer right this time? And how long should I wait to follow up? I don’t want to reach out too soon and have him say, ‘Never mind. The timing isn’t right. Best of luck,’ but I also don’t want to fall through the cracks or jeopardize this potential opportunity. I also don’t feel comfortable sending the script elsewhere before talking to him first.”

Joshua: We’re going to have to workshop this one because there is not an easy answer for this one.

Craig: No. What do you think?

Joshua: Everything’s upside down right now. I think it’s been upside down for the last couple weeks. I do think that probably Riley is correct in that the agent is probably concerned about their current clients and not thinking immediately about signing new talent. I also know that it can make you incredibly itchy when you’ve turned something in and you’re waiting for a response. I don’t think that Riley should wait for the agent and I think they should try to use any leverage they have to make other inroads.

As far as the timing, the timing is the big question for me. You can wait for months to get an answer from a single person. It’s why Hollywood takes so long to do anything. So I think if they have other relationships, they should use them. Everything is still underwater here. I would at least give it another week for things to get back to relative normal would be my guess.

Craig: Yes, I think you’re right there. Riley, the issue is you aren’t a client there. My guess is this agent is probably not doing a great job of calling back his actual clients because his house may have burned down. If not, evacuation is a brutal thing to go through. I’m going to say I agree with Joshua. You don’t want to stand on ceremony here. He got the script. He has it. He didn’t write back. If you have three other agents that are excited to read this thing, yes, send it. You don’t belong to anybody just yet. I know I like to remind people that agents work for us. We don’t work for them.

I think probably you don’t need to text them again. You just wait now. Joshua says, if you have other opportunities, go for them. There is no hard rule here. He certainly would not be able to say later, “How could you do this to me?” He’s had the script.

Let’s go with Mauro, or perhaps Mauro, in Canada. Drew, what does Mauro wonder about?

Drew: What do you guys recommend to study or watch or practice in order to keep the audience’s emotions in mind when writing? What I mean is taking the reader and hopefully viewer on an emotional journey in an effective way on every page.

Craig: Questions like this always blow my mind.

Joshua: No, but actually, God.

Craig: If you have an answer, that would be great.

Joshua: No. I have sort of an answer, but it’s an annoying answer, which is read the basics, learn the basics, go read the screenplay to Rocky or whatever movie, older movie gets you excited. Find an artist you like and read all their work and then really try hard not to imitate them. I think the bigger thing for me is actually that writers need to go out and live and you have to have life experience truly in order to write something great so that you’re– which is like a corny thing to say, but I really believe it.

When you’re writing, we have a culture that recycles everything right now. A lot of it. For a long time, we’ve been in a backwards-facing culture where we want to make movies that are like the movies we grew up on because that’s the easier thing to do. It’s very easy to go out and say, “I want to make a movie like Fargo, so I’m going to go write a movie that is like Fargo.” Then what you have is a movie that’s like Fargo, but not as good as Fargo. I think the thing that I would really try to do, really recommend is using your personal relationships and saying, “What would it be like if I was writing about my mom?” but doing it on a bigger canvas?

What would it be if– I wrote television and wanted to write television because of The Sopranos. That was David Chase writing about his mom on a bigger canvas. Ultimately, he’s very open about his relationship with his mother being like the seed of The Sopranos. That I think is what artists should be doing. I think you should quietly observe your parents and your friends and just think about writing from the inside out, as they say, after learning the fundamentals. That would be really my recommendation.

Craig: That is probably a more useful answer than the one I’ll give, Mauro, which is to say, I don’t recommend that you study or watch or practice this at all, because if you’re studying it or practicing it, it’s not going to be right. What you’re really getting at, Mauro, is something that is innate to writing and it has to be developed over time. And I think is probably the function of experience. It is the fragmentation of your own brain so that not only are you yourself taking care of all the things that the script needs to be, but you’re also all the individual characters and you’re also the character that’s listening and not talking.

You are also the audience watching all of it. I return to my audience section of my mind all the time. As an audience member, I’m like, do I care? I’m like, how does that make me feel? Just as you need to quadruplicate yourself into four characters in a scene, you also need to be the audience. That is a developed skill. You have to start with some kind of innate understanding of humans and humanity. I completely agree with Joshua that part of this is just going out there and living, but a big part of it is writing stuff down, shooting it, even if you have to shoot it on your camera, watching people watch it, you’ll probably want to throw up and you’ll learn.

Oh, my God, I remember the very first time I sat in the theater and watched something that I had written on screen. It was like I was seeing it for the first time because I was fully the audience and my level of judgment and scrutiny skyrocketed because now I’m a customer. I don’t give a shit what’s happening in the kitchen. I don’t care if the fish delivery was late or the gas stove wasn’t working. I want an awesome plate of food. I don’t care about anything else.

That was a painful wake-up call. I would urge you more to go through as many painful wake-up calls as possible because it’ll speed the process along.

Joshua: That’s a really interesting answer. You asked this question to me earlier about the viewer and your relationship to the audience. I just agree with you so much that the experience of watching your own stuff, it’s just so important. The idea of going out and shooting something just like, yes, please, everyone should be doing that. Everybody should know, even if you don’t shoot it, even if you just give it to some friends to act, even if they’re terrible. Just doing that feels so important.

Then there’s this thing that happens for me where you ultimately stop paying attention to the audience when you write. You tell me if you disagree, but I feel like the artist or the writer or whatever has to be fundamentally very selfish. You have to just care about yourself and the kind of things that you would want to see. Otherwise, you’re fucked.

Craig: That’s you as the audience, right?

Joshua: Yes, it is.

Craig: That’s my point.

Joshua: It’s the same.

Craig: You’re saying, “I want to see this.”

Joshua: I’m saying don’t think about people who are different from you and what they might like-

Craig: Right, don’t do that.

Joshua: -because that’s when you’re dead, right?

Craig: That’s calculating and chasing and that’s horrible.

Joshua: I really think like I just have a feeling like Chris Nolan likes Chris Nolan movies and Michael Bay likes Michael Bay movies, and ultimately, these are biggest directors are trying to on some level make themselves happy.

Craig: That’s a great point. To amend, Mauro, when you are being the audience in your mind, you’re being you as an audience member. Not imagining a demographic or a room full of people. Just you, like what is this working on you? I’ll tell you, the first time you write something and then start tearing up as you’re writing it, that’s when you know that you’ve gotten there, unless you’re writing a comedy. That never happens.

I think we have time for one more question. Victor writes in with a question about citing sources, which is something that I think Joshua and I know a little bit about. Drew, what does Victor ask?

Drew: “I’m working on a historical drama screenplay based on real events and attempting to stay as accurate as possible. This includes taking notes and at times quoting directly from a few books that have accounts of events within the period, as well as biographies and published collections of letters from people involved to use their own words where possible. If this were to be produced, would I need to cite of these somehow, or only the book that is most directly concerned with the time frame and events that I’m writing about?”

Craig: Did you have to go through this rigorous process that I had to go through on Chernobyl?

Joshua: Oh, yes. There was a cite-your-source process with the legal department for virtually everything. You go first. What was it like for you on Chernobyl, which, by the way, I just have not gotten the chance to wax, poetic?

Craig: Oh, geez.

Joshua: No, I won’t. It’s just, it’s such an amazing piece of work. That like the balance between genre and drama, whatever you would call it, the balance of genre filmmaking and genre writing and non-genre writing was just like really at the heart of-

Craig: Thank you.

Joshua: -at the top of mind. You not only made this incredible piece of entertainment, but then also, it felt like it was capturing a fundamental truth that I think, and I think that’s what we’re all trying to search for. You state it so overtly at the cost of the lie right at the beginning. Then you’re like, “This is the thesis, and now I’m going to decimate you with how I illustrate that thesis.” I just thought, beautifully done.

Craig: Thank you. I’m very happy that decimation occurred. As I was going on the journey towards decimation, I had lots of books I was drawing from, some documentaries. I wish I had known ahead of time that I was going to have to go back and provide the sources specifically for all that stuff for HBO. They have a very rigorous guy who is going to stress test everything. It was really just an inefficient process on my end because I had to go back and go, “Okay, at least I have a pretty good memory. This was from this book, this was from this book.” I can hand all those books over, hand over all those sources, hand over the documentaries and say, “Okay, all of this worked out.” There were some interesting questions and challenges, but overall, I think maybe I had to slightly change one thing for legal purposes. I think it was somebody’s name. How did it go for you?

Joshua: Similarly, just extremely rigorous with the legal team. I think there was, you’re citing your sources for everything you want to do. They know that you’re not making a documentary, which is, I think, they know that a certain amount of artistic license has to be taken in any show, but beyond that, they’re pretty strict. All that stuff is very carefully vetted and it’s a challenging but worthwhile process to stress test the thing that you’re making. I would also say though, I would want to add one thing which is probably not the question and tell me if you experienced this, that the research can become a crutch at times.

Craig: Oh, of course, yes.

Joshua: You can have this desire, which probably you and I both had along with the listener, to make it absolutely as accurate as possible. Ultimately, I think in my case, and certainly Craig in your case as well, you can’t know what was said in every room. Because in the case of Say Nothing, it’s about the IRA, it’s a culture of secrecy.

Craig: You say nothing.

Joshua: Yes, exactly. Yours deals with state secrets and things like that. Ultimately, you have to do the research and do as much of it as you can. It’s like a musician practicing scales. You practice your scales, and you practice your scales, and you do your rudiments, or whatever, over and over. Then, at some point, you have to trust that you’ve built enough of a solid foundation that you can go and you can actually just play. Ultimately, do your homework. Do a ton of homework. Do more than you think you need.

Then, at some point, you got to let it go and go and write. Then if it’s lucky enough to be made, which is, of course, a very high bar, only then will you really have to deal with the scrutiny of a legal department. I think you should probably write the best story that you can first, and then hope it survives that process second.

Craig: Fantastic answer. I think we covered all those bases really well for our listeners. Congratulations to you and me for doing so great. Drew, I think we deserve a gold star. It’s time for our one cool thing. It can be anything at all, small or large. I’ll start with mine because it’s so wonderfully stupid today. My one cool thing is eating ice cream as an adult.

Joshua: I love it. I love this one cool thing, by the way, despite being lactose intolerant.

Craig: Same. Ice cream in my mind for so long has been associated with like sin, a weakness, bad health. It’s also like food for children. Every kid has probably gone a little crazy on ice cream, but a little bit of ice cream every now and then, I have to say as an adult, is a lovely thing. It’s just a reminder of something that is elegantly delicious that has been there our whole lives. It is the ultimate comfort food. My method is to put some ice cream in a tiny bowl. This way you won’t go crazy. Because as we get older, it’s a little harder.

Do not eat out of a carton. Folks, stop eating out of a carton. Only bad things will happen from that. Also, you have permission, I grant you permission, from one adult to another, to just eat regular ice cream if you want. You’re not obligated to chase the adult flavors. If you want, whatever, rosemary, chive and black pepper ice cream, that’s fine, do it. If you like vanilla, that’s awesome. One cool thing, if you’re an adult, give it a try, just a little bit of ice cream.

Joshua: I love that. My postscript ritual, whenever any draft goes in, is McDonald’s ice cream and bourbon, which is embarrassing to admit as an adult man-

Craig: Wow. Nice.

Joshua: -but it should be like cigarettes, and I don’t know, something more grown up, but it’s not.

Craig: That’s awesome. What is your one cool thing this week?

Joshua: Mine is less fun and whimsical. Mine is a book that you have maybe read, which is a book about the origins of punk rock called Please Kill Me. Are you familiar with this book?

Craig: I have not, no.

Joshua: Oh my God, it’s so good. It’s an oral history of the early days of punk in New York and then in London from the late ’60s to I think the ’80s. It’s an incredible oral history that really captures a scene and a particular moment in time and makes you envious to not be living in the center of culture, during the peak of culture. Even more than that, I think I’ve said this a few times, but there are moments in the book that you really can’t get out of your mind, that go beyond just rock and roll excess.

I think, I may be getting this wrong, but Iggy Pop is up there doing his very particular thing, birthing a new genre of music, inventing punk. In the process, people are pissed off, and they throw bottles, and he proceeds to roll around in the broken glass as a power move to be like the ultimate “fuck you” to the audience and shock and appall people and continue the show while he’s all cut up and things like that. I think the thing about it that is so incredible to me is that it was this time when art was really dangerous.

It was this time when you could go to a performance and anything could happen. I feel like that is the thing that we’re missing in the age of corporate consolidation. That we’re missing this element of danger and we’re missing this element of like– This is extremely lofty, so forgive me if this is like really pretentious, but I feel like on some level, the question that artists need to ask themselves is, what am I risking by saying the thing I’m going to say? In the case of Iggy, it’s like great bodily harm and death, right?

Craig: Right.

Joshua: I feel like that idea that the artist is supposed to be a risk taker, which is so hard right now with got-you culture and cancel culture and all these things, I feel like that is an important thing to remember that somehow there should be this element of danger. That book captures that spirit in incredibly vivid ways. That would be my–

Craig: All right. That’s Please Kill Me, which is what I say every morning when I wake up, just to myself. Just to myself, please kill me.

That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. 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 questions like the ones we answered today so adroitly. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. I love drinkware, this is my new favorite word. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber and thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. Finally, you can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you can get all of the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record now on how to make Los Angeles function better.

Joshua, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Joshua: Thank you so much for having me, I really enjoyed it.

[Bonus Segment]

Craig: Okay, Joshua, so this is magic wand time. We just went through this convulsion here in Los Angeles because of the fires and that prompted me to think about the ways our city, and I believe you live here in Los Angeles now.

Joshua: Yes.

Craig: The ways our city could be improved in a functioning way to help. We’re not going to address social problems like mental health right now or unhoused populations or crime. This is just like civil engineering stuff. Let’s start with this question: Should we, after the fires, start to think about leaving some of these places alone? Meaning, should we rebuild in areas where we know fires and mudslides are going to occur?

Joshua: This is a truly tragic question, right? Because as I go through Los Angeles, the dream of LA is that you can be in nature and also be steps away from the city, that nature is at your door. Now this idea that the neighborhoods that are the most ensconced in nature are the most vulnerable is truly tragic. I live in the foothills and I’m unsure if I have to move. I, of course, like everyone, have multiple people in my life who just lost everything. The idea of whether or not we should be rebuilding, it’s a really tricky one. I feel like, as the idealist in me says we shouldn’t give up on that dream.

I think the part of me that wants to be cheeky, if I’m allowed to be cheeky even in a moment like this, is that yes, we should rebuild and everybody should be legally obligated to get a pool. Every home should have a pool and it should include one of the machines that is a real thing that sucks the water out of your pool and uses it to spray down your house. I know a guy who had a pool, had this device installed, and saved his home because the water from the pool was sucked out and covered his house.

Craig: I think that’s–

Joshua: Not a real answer, but like–

Craig: No, but let’s put that under general zoning ideas. It does seem to me that in areas where we know the homes are going to be extremely vulnerable to fire, that we have to improve the infrastructure and we probably have to improve it through zoning. Some of it has already occurred. There are building codes that make homes far more, I wouldn’t say fireproof, but I would say fire resistant. The problem is that those codes were introduced, I think in 2012 or something or 2008, and nothing is grandfathered in because nobody’s going to rebuild their house to match the code.

So, so many of the homes that were built before then, and that’s the majority of homes in LA, are vulnerable. I think zoning laws perhaps coming up with, okay, if you’re in a vulnerable area, you need to install this kind of thing. That makes total sense to me. The other question I have, or it’s just an idea is, I think it’s important to look at some neighborhoods where we know there’s really only one way in.

There are certain areas where there’s one main road. If that main road is blocked off, you can’t get in there either with emergency equipment or evacuation is incredibly difficult.
Because, if you’re in Benedict Canyon, that’s Benedict Canyon. Should we be targeting some of those places and creating additional arteries for movement?

Joshua: When it comes to the canyons, in a perfect world, yes, of course, you would want more than one way out of Laurel Canyon, right? I suppose there are two, there’s this side of the hill and that side of the hill.

Craig: Mulholland and that’s it.

Joshua: But the actual cost of creating multiple exits feels, I’m sure, incredibly daunting to a city that’s already facing enormous unhoused populations, et cetera. I don’t know. You would want to hope that putting in a reservoir that strategically placed reservoirs might help, but the problem is we also have droughts. That’s another piece of the puzzle. I believe that there was a reservoir that they were supposed to be drawing from for the Palisades fire that was dry. Then I heard that they were taking the water from the Hollywood Reservoir to put out the Hollywood fire, which worked, right?

Craig: Right. I think, from what I’ve read, that the Palisades Reservoir probably would not have made enough of a difference, that that fire was just so brutal. Also, nobody could fly. That debate will be going on forever, probably, whether or not it would have mattered. Again, I’m using my magic wand here, but let’s talk a little bit about cost, because anything we do to improve this is always going to come with this enormous cost. That drives me over into traffic, which is another problem that we have in Los Angeles. I’m just trying to make it function better.

We’ve spent an enormous amount of money on creating public transportation, a metro line. Will we finish all of that in time for it to still matter? Are we heading towards a place where either working from home removes an enormous amount of traffic from the freeways, or automatic driving essentially eliminates traffic, because if every car on the road is automatic, self-driving, there is no traffic because there’s no rubbernecking, there’s no accidents.

Joshua: It’s Minority Report, basically.

Craig: It’s Minority Report, exactly. Do you think our future, that LA will function better with more mass transportation or more self-driving buses and cars?

Joshua: Cynically, I think that it will get so bad that half the people will leave and then we’ll be fine. [laughter] No, I think I–

Craig: That’s also a thing.

Joshua: I actually don’t think that self-driving cars will get there to the point where everybody has them in order to get to Minority Report. Everybody needs to have them, every single person. Because you picture Minority Report with the one old Chevy Nova in the middle of the beautifully flowing ribbon of traffic, just causing entanglements. I just feel like, no, maybe in 150 years, but by then, everything’s going to be on fire every other week unless we can fix our global problem of fixing the environment, which is the real issue, right?

I feel, no, just cynically, I don’t think we can look to self-driving cars to save us. Certainly, if the people who are trying to create self-driving cars are the same people who are trying to create them for the next 20 years, make of that what you will, I think we’ll be in trouble. Get over there. No, I think we’ve got to go work it out. I do think that mass exodus is on the table.

Craig: Mass exodus would certainly solve a lot of traffic problems. Here’s something that I think would make Los Angeles function better, at least be more enjoyable. Los Angeles is enormously spread out, we know this, it’s famously spread out, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have, in fact, I think it’s an argument that it makes it even easier to have a very large central park. We have Griffith Park, which is enormous, but it’s like in the hills and its mountains and valleys and hiking.

What we don’t have is that great park in the middle of a city that people can enjoy, that’s beautiful, that is an oasis. It would require, again, enormous amount of public domain and the knocking down of a lot of things, but it seems to me like we could use it.

Joshua: I love that idea. I was just in London for-

Craig: There you go.

Joshua: -a long period of time making the show, and they call the parks, the lungs of London. That was the thing that I liked most about the city. I’d never spent a lot of time there in the past. That was the thing that I think I enjoyed most. I think we could just wipe out everybody who lives in Hancock Park and then just put it all there. No, exactly–

Craig: Wow. That’s where I’m at. That’s literally where I am.

Joshua: That’s where you’re proposing?

Craig: Not in my backyard.

Joshua: No, but where would you put it though? Because I do agree, it’s much better. What we have drawing the people now are like the Rick Caruso mega malls, which are not the lungs of Los Angeles, right?

Craig: No, they are not.

Joshua: We have the Grove and the Americana and that is not doing it.

Craig: There is Pan Pacific Park, which I think could be expanded. The Motion Picture Academy, of which I am surprisingly a member, is certainly screaming right now at the thought that their beautiful new museum and headquarters would be knocked down for park. That seems like a nice place and I also think as you head further south, maybe south of the like the 10, there’s also some nice areas where, again, there’s a lot of commercial stuff which would have to be like, yes, there’s a cost. You have to eliminate things.

You wouldn’t want to eliminate residences, but if we could find some places that are– or downtown, some old train yards and whatever, I would love the idea. I used to live in La Cañada and we would go over to Huntington Park in Pasadena, which is beautiful and we could use one of those.

Joshua: I agree. I would also say that it dovetails into the first question, which is it does feel like the safe way to get nature in your city, right? It is not actually like living in the foothills. It’s going to Central Park. It’s going to Richmond Park or Hyde Park or whatever.

Craig: Hyde Park, exactly. One of the things that I think would make Los Angeles function better is the elimination of jurisdictional fragmentation. I think the rest of the country and the world was very surprised by something we’re all quite used to here, which is 12 different police departments plus the county, plus the state. We’ve got LAPD, but we also have the Pasadena Police Department. We also have Santa Monica Police. We also have West Hollywood Sheriff’s Officers as part of the county. We have California Highway Patrol.

Sometimes they don’t talk to each other. Sometimes you pull up and you’re like, “Oh yes, we’re LA Fire Department.” That’s LA County across the street. The county has to come there and put that fire out. We’re going to put this fire out on this. Everybody else is looking at us like, “Just to make the one thing.” If we could combine it all into one thing, I think that probably would be better. It would be enormous, but I think it would be better.

Joshua: I’m completely with you. I think you see the same thing in medicine, right? Where like, my family’s all doctors. My brother’s a hospitalist. None of the hospitals can communicate with each other because they all speak a different coded language to do their databases. Similarly with law enforcement, I know that lack of communication, certainly when there are crises, and if the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire are any indication, there’s going to be a lot more of those. Responding very quickly is like, right at the heart of stopping some of those events.

I’m in complete agreement. I think, no doubt, they have their bureaucratic reasons, but certainly.

Craig: Oh, yes. Oh, they’re not going to change.

Joshua: I just know mostly the LAPD and the sheriffs, right? There are strange relationships where there will be corruption cases within one department and the other department remains untouched and all that.

Craig: My magic wand is going to try one more thing, and this is perhaps the most magical thinking of them all. The one thing that I think would make Los Angeles function vastly better would be a completely new airport. Air travel, which was once the domain of the wealthy, is now completely democratized. People from every socioeconomic stratus fly, and all of us in Los Angeles, unless we’re lucky enough to go somewhere super local and we can make it to Burbank, we’re all going to Los Angeles International Airport, LAX, which is ancient and stupid.

It is a stupidly designed airport where you have to roll around in a horrible oval loop, everybody’s smashed together. The terminals are subject to refurbishing at great expense, and by the time they’re done refurbishing it, it’s already old and stupid-looking. Security-wise, I think it’s a complete disaster. They’re building a monorail to help move people back and forth, which everybody hates and also probably won’t be done by the Olympics. LAX is just a nightmare. The problem, of course, with building an entire new airport is money, sure, and space.

Airports need an enormous amount of space. If you can build a brand new airport, where would you put it?

Joshua: Oh wow. Obviously, I agree with you. The LAX is the worst airport one could envision. If one were to design an airport built around all the things you don’t want to do, I think you would have LAX. Just to do one Devil’s Advocate, it’s not even a Devil’s Advocate, it’s just, have you ever seen a film called Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round?

Craig: No.

Joshua: There is a film where, I think it’s a heist movie, it’s an old heist movie, the third act of the film takes place at LAX. You get to see LAX in all of its period glory, with the cars that are the right cars, the cars that were intended to be driving there, with all of that beautiful mid-century detailing that it once had before it just became a shit show, and it’s actually really fucking cool in that movie. You realize that it was just built at a time when there was just so much less traffic, and now it’s just congested, it’s worse than the Trader Joe’s parking lot of your nightmares.

If I was going to build it some, can I still wipe out all the people in Hancock Park? Is that still a thing?

Craig: You could. I would take a wipeout here, although that’s really going to be a snarled traffic situation.

Joshua: It’ll be bad.

Craig: And really loud.

Joshua: All I can say is, if we’re waving the magic wand, the Burbank Airport is a delight, I absolutely love flying out of Burbank, it’s quaint. Perhaps if we could just amplify its size and make it our major airport, we would get a chance to redesign the parking, but that would be– if I have advice for anybody moving to LA, it is always fly out of Burbank if you can.

Craig: Yes, fly out of Burbank and take Fountain.

Joshua: That’s right.

Craig: I think we’ve done the best we can to come up with some things that will absolutely never happen to make Los Angeles function better. Almost certainly what will happen is we don’t change at all, and we go through some convulsions from time to time. It is the cost of living here in the city we love. Joshua Zetumer, thank you so much for spending your time with us today, such a fan of your work. Congratulations on Say Nothing, and hopefully we’ll get you back on the show one of these days.

Joshua: That would be great. Thank you for having me.

Links:

• Say Nothing
• Joshua Zetumer
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Difficult Men by Brett Martin
• Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.