Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is a very special Christmas episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, when I say a Christmas episode, what comes to mind? What are the themes or the plots in a Christmas episode?

Craig: There’s somebody who’s coming home to see their family. I’m just going to Hallmark this. She’s been putting her career in front of her personal life. Then there’s that guy that she remembers from high school who’s back, and he’s raising a kid on his own, because his wife died, at 23. She’s just woken up to the possibilities that maybe she doesn’t want to be in the big city anymore, and she’s going to live here in the small town and get together and become a stepmom but still work. She doesn’t give up anything. Actually, she gets everything.

John: That’s a Christmas movie. That’s a onetime story that happens. I’m thinking about more a Christmas episode of an existing series.

Craig: Oh, a Christmas episode. Everybody does a little Secret Santa. They each give each other gifts. Those gifts prompt memories, which then go [imitates magical sound effect] and you get clips.

John: Remember back, like a clip show.

Craig: Clip show.

John: It’s also the opportunity for actors to sing.

Craig: Oh, boy.

John: They reveal that one of them actually can sing really, really well.

Craig: Because they hate that.

John: They hate that. Never let an actor sing.

Craig: They’re like, “Oh, no, don’t make me. Okay.”

John: The other thing that’s often a hallmark, I want to say, of these Christmas episodes is A Christmas Carol. There’s some version of a Christmas Carol where they are visited by ghosts of past and present, which is actually the case for us here today, because we are visited by the ghost of producers past in the form of Megana Rao is here.

Megana Rao: Hello.

Craig: Yay! I know we have producers present.

John: Drew Marquardt is here.

Drew Marquardt: Hello.

Craig: Is a producer’s future going to show up and do that weird, creepy bone hand point to my grave thing?

John: We don’t have a producer future yet, but for all we know, one of the listeners is the future Scriptnotes producer.

Craig: That’s pretty deep.

John: That’s pretty deep.

Craig: Everyone, it could be you.

John: We’re going to learn some valuable lessons today-

Craig: Yay!

John: … hopefully on this podcast. We are also going to do a bake-off. We’re going to talk about bake-offs, and we’re going to eat delicious cookies, and we’re going to discuss these delicious cookies in front of us.

Megana: I cannot wait. I won’t be able to focus on anything else.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Lambert, your dog. He just keeps cheating, looking over like, “You’ll pet me now, right?” Megana’s like, “I’m talking, but really-”

John: The cookies are right in front of Megana Rao.

Craig: Can we give any preview?

John: Please describe these cookies for us.

Craig: There are three cookies. One appears to be a standard good old-fashioned chocolate chip. The other one might be oatmeal raisin. Hard to tell. It’s a darker brown. Then the third, it’s a brown-black kind of color. It looks like white chocolate chips in there. Maybe macadamia. Who knows? That’s the one that’s tweaking me right now. That’s where my eyeballs keep going.

Megana: It looks decadent, like it’s got a good mouth feel.

Craig: My understanding is these are from different places.

John: These are different bakeries across Los Angeles.

Craig: Wow.

John: Drew and Megana consulted about the best cookies we could get.

Craig: I see.

John: We will be discussing this bake-off as we talk about writing bake-offs and the scourge of Hollywood.

Craig: Fantastic. Are we going to do this wine tasting style where we take a bite, chew, spit it in a bucket.

John: Yeah, absolutely. You see the bucket in front of you. That bucket is for spitting.

Craig: That’s what that’s for?

John: Yeah. You wouldn’t actually eat a cookie.

Craig: No. God. Yuck.

Megana: Over my dead body. You will have to scrape it out of my teeth.

Craig: Megana’s going to eat the plate.

John: We’re also going to talk about Netflix, who released a bunch of viewership data.

Craig: You said that like the Berlin Wall didn’t just come crumbling down. This is insane.

John: It is insane. We will get into that. We’re going to answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment of premium members, let’s talk about gifts and the best gifts we remembered getting as a child or afterward. Let’s talk about gifts, because that’s the season.

Now, before we even get started here, Megana is here because we really wanted her to come. I texted her to say, “Hey, Megana, we had to postpone the live show, but would you want to come over on Sunday to record an episode with me and Craig?” Megana texted back, she wrote…

Megana: I said, “Oh, I would love to, but I think I’m going to prepone my flight. Any chance Saturday works?”

Craig: I’m sorry, did you say prepone?

Megana: I did say prepone.

John: That was exactly my response.

Craig: Now we have a problem.

John: I asked her, “Did you just create a brand new word?” Because you know what it means.

Craig: Of course. I’m using logic. Actually, in theory, it should work, although it’s a bit like gruntled, like, “Oh, I’m so gruntled to be here.” No one says that. We only have the negative. There’s only the post and not the pre version of poning something. Did you create this?

John: She wondered if she created it. But I turned to Drew, who was right there, and so Drew did some research.

Drew: Megana did not create it. It is standard in Indian English and South Asian English, but it goes all the way back to Latin.

Craig: Things are starting to make sense.

John: What is your theory now on prepone?

Megana: When I said it and you questioned it, it felt so natural to me. I was like, “This feels like this word has always been a part of me.” It is, because my mom uses the term a lot, as does everyone in my family. I was telling John, it makes sense to me that prepone would be a South Asian English term, because we are so fluid with time and logistics and all of those things that-

Craig: Interesting. It almost implies though that there’s more specificity to time. You’re pulling something forward, as opposed to pushing it later? Is that what prepone means?

Megana: It is what it means. But people in my family are always like, “Just prepone your flight, or prepone this, and then do that.”

Craig: Which means do it earlier?

Megana: Yes.

Craig: It’s actually great. Just like in production, we have a push, which means you’re not going to come in tomorrow at 8:00, you’re going to come in at 9:00. We also have a pull. We’re going to pull your call. But we don’t have that really for standard English or American English. We only have postpone. Prepone makes total sense.

Megana: It’s more efficient.

Craig: I’m fascinated why it emerged in Southeast Asia as an English word that I don’t think the British use either.

John: It traces back to the 16th century, so it was used in British English, but not very commonly. It goes back to Latin praeponere, which means to place in front of.

Craig: Prepare.

John: Yeah, prepare, or ponere would be to place something someplace.

Craig: Pre-place. This is fascinating.

John: If a character said that in a script, we would be like, “What is that?” It would jump out.

Craig: Word to the wise, Megana. Although I feel like we probably did it right now.

John: We did it.

Megana: We’re normalizing it.

Craig: We’ve normalized prepone.

John: Prepone.

Craig: I have a feeling I’m going to get a call from my agent a year from now going, “Hey, can we prepone this call?” I’m going to be like, “Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s a buzzword now.”

Megana: It’s so funny that it rankles you or you immediately recognize it as strange, because it couldn’t feel more natural to me.

John: I’ve never heard it.

Craig: I have never heard it before.

Megana: Wow.

Craig: I just went da-doing. It’s not one of those words that’s offensive. I’m actually annoyed I haven’t had it. I feel deprived.

John: Should’ve been there. Something we also should’ve had this entire time was viewership data for the streaming services. This was a huge point of contention in the WGA strike. Of course, the SAG-AFTRA took the same basic formula. But now, this last week, Netflix released just a ton of viewership data on all this stuff. It is the hours viewed for every title original and licensed, watched over 50,000 hours. The premiere date for any Netflix TV series or film was listed on this chart, whether it was available globally. In total, this report, which they released, covers more than 18,000 titles, 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, and nearly 100 billion hours viewed.

Craig: This is an insane thing. I guess question number one is do we believe this?

John: That’s fair. We don’t have any sort of independent way of verifying that these are the real numbers. I guess my volley back would be, what would be the reason for fudging the numbers on any given title or multiple titles?

Craig: Two potential reasons. One, fudge upwards to look better for Wall Street. Two, fudge downwards on shows where fudging upwards would cost them a lot, because now that the WGA made their deal and got success-based residuals of some sort, and SAG… Is their success-based slightly different than ours?

John: It’s exactly the same.

Craig: Exactly the same.

John: But they get paid more than we do [crosstalk 08:21].

Craig: That makes sense, because they have to split it across a cast. That’s my question. The number one title on this list is The Night Agent: Season 1.

John: Craig, you’ve seen every episode of The Night Agent. You know exactly what it is. Tell me about The Night Agent. Tell me what you love about it so much.

Craig: As you guys know, I love agency-based stuff, agency-based narratives, whether it’s a travel agent, a secret agent. When I have a choice of viewing, and I know, okay, this whole thing takes place during the day, as opposed to this happening at night, I always go to the night. It just looks cooler. That’s what drew me to The Night Agent: Season 1.

John: I think you’re getting confused though, because it’s not about an agent that works at night. It’s actually about an agent who helps you find the right night for you. It’s like a real estate agent. What is the right night for me?

Craig: I see.

John: It’s that fulfillment kind of show.

Craig: Buying and selling knights.

John: No, it’s not that at all. It’s a Shawn Ryan show. Shawn Ryan, who’s a [crosstalk 09:17] guy. It is his show for Netflix. It is by far the top title.

Craig: He’s destroying. Is this a crime kind of thing or a spy thing?

John: It’s not. Let me give you the description of it.

Craig: It’s like I don’t work in this biz. Literally, so oblivious.

John: Here’s a summary that’s on IMDb. Low-level FBI agent Peter Sutherland works in the basement of the White House manning a phone that never rings – until the night it does, propelling him into a conspiracy that leads all the way to the Oval Office.

Craig: As they often do.

John: As they often do. It has no stars to speak of. The two people I recognized in the cast are Hong Chau and DB Woodside.

Craig: They’re both very good.

John: Both very good, but there’s no marquee star. That’s not either of those people. It’s based on a book by Matthew Quirk. Seven writers in the room. It seems like a very conventional show that is a giant hit.

Craig: It’s a giant hit. That’s my question. You mentioned no huge stars. I don’t think the star thing necessarily would connect to these hours viewed, although individual actors may make deals with Netflix that say, hey, if you hit this number, you got to pay me extra. Doesn’t sound like maybe they have, like you said, a big marquee A-lister, Bradley Cooper kind of guy. When I look at this, I just wonder. I want to believe all of this. I don’t know what to do with 812 million hours viewed exactly. I don’t know what it means.

John: One of the challenges with hours viewed is it’s hard for a feature to hit hours viewed, because a feature’s just two hours of film. It’s not 10 hours the way that a limited series would be.

Craig: I don’t know. I assume they keep track of people rewatching things, although I’m not sure how you even convert rewatchability into money when there is no advertising. If you rewatch something on a network, you get new ads. That’s money.

John: Ultimately, Netflix will have ads, and so that will be useful for them down the road, the rewatching.

Craig: What is interesting is what we don’t see on here. There’s a lot of stuff on Netflix, and a lot of hoopla around all sorts of things. Every time a new show comes out, as I like to say, Netflix announces it as the most watched show in the history of mankind. Wednesday is not surprising to see here in the top five.

John: We had the creators of that show on here to talk about it.

Craig: You, very popular, people talk about all the time. But then there are these… FUBAR: Season 1?

John: Don’t know it.

Craig: What is FUBAR?

Drew: It’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger show.

Craig: That actually makes sense. That’s kind of cool.

John: Ginny and Georgia I’ve heard about only in the sense that it’s a giant hit on Netflix that I’ve never heard of.

Craig: Same. Giant hit on Netflix, and I don’t know what it is. BEEF: Season 1, very good, I would say for that. There are shows that, now that we’re in the thick of an incredibly compressed award season because of the strikes, everything is happening in January and February, basically. The discussion is, okay, there are these shows that are not necessarily widely watched by audiences around the world, but they’re very hot in our circles. Of course, inside Hollywood, that’s where all the voters come from. Then you think, okay, BEEF, everyone talks about BEEF, everyone’s seen BEEF here, but is it a hit anywhere else? Answer: yes.

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: Yes, it is.

John: It’s important to note that almost all these titles, they’re showing the global hours viewed. Some of these shows may not be huge hits in the US, but they are big hits overseas. The third title listed on here is The Glory, which is a Korean show. There’s actually quite a few Asian shows that show up pretty high. There’s Spanish shows that show up pretty high.

Craig: La Reina del Sur. Physical: 100: Season 1, that looks Korean as well. Physical: 100: Season 1 has two colons in it, Physical, colon, 100, colon, Season 1. I’m into that.

John: What will be the actual impact of Netflix deciding to release this? Will it pressure the other companies to do similarly?

Craig: Not necessarily. Probably, if I had to guess, I would say the opposite, that Netflix is the most widely watched streaming service. If I’m Apple, I would probably destroy small countries before I would agree to put out hours viewed, because every indication is they’re not viewed anywhere near this level. Other companies may not have this hours viewed data the way that Netflix does. For instance, Max, or HBO, is still linear and streaming. Do you get the hours viewed like they do? Because that data doesn’t come in. When grandma watches it over her satellite dish, it doesn’t collect the data the way it does on a streaming service. Disney Plus I think might, if they felt they could compete with these numbers. I think Netflix is kind of smart, because they’re like, “You guys want to see numbers? We’ll show you numbers. Now you. Now you do it.” I don’t know if we’re going to see any of these anytime soon from anyone.

John: I guess the counter-argument to that is you can always divide the hours viewed by the actual number of subscribers you have. That’s the reason why Paramount Plus, it’s not going to have 812 million hours viewed, but based on the number of subscribers, they could show what are the hits for it.

Craig: Yeah, because it’s the subscribers that matter. That’s the problem. Paramount’s like, “Our subscribers watch more per subscriber than Netflix subscribers do.” It doesn’t matter, because if you have one subscriber, you’re dead, no matter how much that guy watches. I like the idea of one crazy Paramount Plus subscriber who’s just 24/7.

Megana: It’s me.

Craig: It’s you?

Megana: Yeah.

Craig: It you.

John: Megana, some insights. Are there shows on here that you’re aware of that we’re not aware of?

Megana: Some of these shows like The Night Agent and FUBAR my parents were all over, so I was aware of the popularity of those shows. Something I was surprised about though looking at this is very few comedies.

Craig: Comedies are not global. That’s the problem. That’s why comedies in motion pictures were always questionable investments and always got squeezed on budgets, because it was just hard to make back anything anywhere else, because some comedy just doesn’t travel. But is there anything on here that you’re surprised to see how low it is?

Megana: We only have two sheets of this, and scrolling through this whole report, it’s just endless.

John: It is endless. This is also January through July 2023. Stuff that’s more recent we wouldn’t actually show here. I’m always happy to see things like Never Have I Ever: Season 4 showing up. It’s on the second page, but it’s still pretty high up there. It’s a comedy in its final season. You think about like, the nice thing about multiple-season shows is, was that last season worth it for us to make, and this seems like yes, it was worth it to make that last season.

Megana: A huge win for Aline with Your Place Or Mine right below that.

Craig: Yeah, for sure. In what’s called the national competition, the Olympics level competition, Korea with the gold. There is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 Korean series listed here. That’s impressive.

Megana: I also listened to the media call that they did with this. One point that they made was that Korean series have 40 to 50 episodes. If you are watching and you’re engaged, that’s-

Craig: I see.

Megana: … a lot more hours then.

Craig: It’s going to rack up. Korea, it’s not a massively populated country. It’s nothing like India, for instance. Where’s India on this list? That’s what I want to know.

Megana: I’m not seeing a ton of-

Craig: I’m confused.

Megana: … localized Indian things.

Craig: There’s Netflix India. It’s not like they break it out into a different service.

Megana: There definitely is, and they have really great localized content for India. I don’t know. I feel like most people’s viewing patterns in India, the types of shows that they’re watching, I don’t know that everybody’s watching Netflix stuff.

Craig: It’s not necessarily the biggest thing there.

Megana: I feel like culturally, they are still going to the movies a lot.

Craig: Thank you, India. Somebody has to go to the movies.

John: We’ll see in the future what happens here. I should say that the WGA formula, which became the SAG-AFTRA formula, is that if at least 20% of the streaming platform’s US users consume a new original film or TV series within its first 90 days, that kicks off the payment, and then the bell rings again in future 90-day installments. If a scripted series shows up here in this first page or two, I think it’s a very likely chance that it’s going to kick off one of these residual payments.

Craig: Do we happen to know what the domestic viewership base for Netflix is?

John: I don’t.

Craig: How do we know that we’ve hit 20%?

John: We know how many subscribers there are.

Craig: That’s what I meant.

John: We do. I don’t know it off the top of my head.

Craig: You just don’t know, I see.

John: We do know it.

Craig: We do.

John: That’s a public figure they-

Craig: Got it.

John: … are proud to boast about. Cool. We’ve got some follow-up, Drew.

Drew: In Episode 621, John said that one of his goals for the year was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, which led to a whole discussion about words like present versus present, which Craig called homonyms. Andrew wrote in with a follow-up, wrote, “Homonyms are the intersection of words that sound the same and words that look the same. The term refers to both homophones and homographs, but in combination. Examples would be ring/ring or tire/tire. What you described as a homonym is, in fact, a better example of a homograph. That’s two words that are spelled or graphed the same but have different pronunciations and different meanings. Present/present is a great example of a homograph, so words that look the same on the page but sound different when spoken aloud.”

Craig: The difference between a homograph and a homonym, if I understand what he’s saying, is that homonyms sound exactly the same when spoken, they just mean different things?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: Whereas homographs look the same, spelled the same, but pronounced differently?

John: Yes.

Craig: Thank you. You know what? I don’t recall learning about homographs. I got to be honest with you. That was not something we were taught.

John: No, I think we were just told homonyms.

Craig: Homonyms.

John: Which is only supposed to be the combination of the two.

Craig: They’ve carved off a chunk of what we were taught were homonyms and reassigned them to homographs, which is a much better word. I agree with that.

John: Homophone are things that just sound the same but would be spelled very differently, so eight and ate, or bear like the animal and bare like without clothes. If you have bear with me, that’s an example of a word. Bear can be a homonym in that sense too, where bear the animal and bear with me are the same.

Craig: Right, but a homograph would be like resume and resume.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Got it. I also have some additional follow-up I should mention-

John: Please.

Craig: … that Melissa wanted to add.

John: I was not surprised that we have additional follow-up to the last follow-up from Melissa.

Craig: This was not about cooking. Now it’s about biopic. She said, accusingly, “You said that,” there was another word I use with bio, that we don’t say bai-AH. She said, “But you do say biography. If you say biography, it’s reasonable that somebody might think you would say biopic [bai-AH-pik].” I think that’s fair. That’s a fair point. I still think if you say bai-AH-pik, you’re stupid. I want to be on record with that. It’s not as annoying as the past participle of cast being casted instead of cast. When people say casted, I don’t know what to do. I’m on a crusade. We’re going to get rid of it.

John: Casted.

Craig: We have to stop people saying casted. We have to. Why do they do this?

John: Because they do. You’ll never win that.

Craig: I’m not going to win.

John: You’re not going to win.

Craig: I’m punching against the ocean, aren’t I?

John: You are. You absolutely are. English I think is generally drifting towards just standardized E-D endings for everything. I think ESL learners will always put the E-D on because the instinct is there to do it.

Craig: ESL people are going to learn the proper way because they’re being taught. It’s the non-ESL people, it’s the native speakers of English, who just don’t care. They’re ruining our precious language.

John: During Ramadan, we fasted. During the storm, we lasted through the night.

Craig: Of course, of course.

John: The oil lasted through 40 days and 40 nights.

Craig: It turns out, unfortunately, cast doesn’t work that way. I don’t know. It’s sort of like “I putted this here.” No, you did not. You put it there.

Megana: But “putted this here” is so cute. I’m going to start saying that.

Craig: I putted this here.

John: It’s a very common child error.

Craig: Mommy, did I putted it in the right place? It is cute, isn’t it? Casted is not cute. Casted is repulsing.

John: Putteded, they’ll recognize that something is wrong, and so they’ll put an extra E-D on it again.

Craig: Putteded.

John: I putteded.

Craig: Putteded. Oh, is putted wrong? Oh, I puttededededed it. Lambert is scratching the couch in protest against casted. Correct.

John: We have more follow-up on coverage.

Drew: We talked about AI script coverage. R wrote in. R says, “I interned this past summer at an independent production company that has several movies on a major streamer. My main job was script coverage, but they would have me and other interns do random tasks during my time with them. One was training ChatGPT to provide script coverage. I asked to switch assignments after a day, because it felt like I was actively helping AI to replace me. To make matters worse, I wasn’t getting paid for it. The internship was for school credit. I do want to acknowledge that maybe they weren’t trying to replace script readers, but still, script coverage is a great way for people like me, fresh out of school, to gain experience and meet new people, and I’d hate to see that go away. Not that you guys necessarily need confirmation that companies are doing this, but hopefully this anecdote provides further insight into how other companies are using AI.”

John: I have some follow-up on this. I was emailing back and forth with a woman who works in script coverage. She’s a union script reader. She was talking about how in the upcoming IATSE negotiations, script coverage is paneled under IATSE, that is going to be a thing they want to talk about is-

Craig: Good.

John: … making sure that professional script analysts are in charge of the process of doing script coverage. If these tools are used, they need to have the ability to be the people using those tools. I used to do coverage. A lot of us have done coverage. Writing a synopsis is horrible. It’s the worst part of that job. If you could use a tool that would help you get through that, and you could verify that it was correct, great. It’s the analysis that I’m actually most concerned about. That’s the part that we need to make sure stays in the hands of actual human beings with taste.

Megana: Also, when you’re doing script coverage, a huge part of it is you being able to tell your boss, “This was good.” That just can’t be replaced.

Craig: That’s what they don’t know, because if you think about it, let’s say the boss is being paid a lot of money to decide what should be made, meaning what should we spend tens of millions of dollars on. They are turning to somebody who is either an intern or being paid $60,000 to tell them what they should think. The system already doesn’t make sense in that regard, so you can see how, where it’s at least exploitive, those people would be like, “I already am cheating. I’m already asking somebody else to tell me what I’m being paid to know. Maybe I’ll just have the computer tell me what I should know.” I could see dumbasses doing that.

John: Craig, I think what you’re describing is it’s almost like they’ve outsourced the job of reading stuff to a low-paid person. If it’s a free person, it’s not that different, so it’s like a black box of it all.

Craig: I remember when I came to Hollywood, I was shocked, honestly. I thought that the whole point of being an executive was you were being paid for your taste and your analysis, and then I found out, no, you’re not.

John: You’re being paid for your ability to communicate to the other creatives and communicate up effectively and to manage your superiors.

Craig: Sure, but then it’s almost like show business is show business. None of it’s real. I’m still struggling with that to this day.

John: Some more follow-up from Ward here.

Drew: Ward writes, “I wanted to thank Craig for emphasizing that even though we all know California will go for Biden, he’s still planning to vote. What people sometimes forget is that local elections can be very, very tight, sometimes on the order of tens of votes or fewer. Even in states like California, those down-ballot choices don’t always go the way that you might expect. That one vote could really end up making a difference. Your vote really does matter.”

Craig: That is a fact. Facts.

John: Facts and evidence.

Craig: Facts.

John: We’ve actually had episodes where we had… Beth Schacter was on. We had Ashley Nicole Black on to just talk through voting, elections, and local issues, just to make sure we actually understood about them. We agree. Fully agree.

On to a marquee segment here. This last week, I got a call from my agents about a project that was out looking for a writer, looking for a showrunner. It’s a TV thing. It’s based on this giant IP that everyone’s heard of, and now they want to make it into a series.

Craig: Is it the toilet?

John: No, it’s based on a very famous book series that has become a movie series that everyone knows and loves.

Craig: I see. We used to use the slinky.

John: Slinky, yeah.

Craig: Now I’m just down to the toilet.

John: The toilet.

Megana: That’s actually already in development.

Craig: It is?

Megana: Yeah.

Craig: This is the awareness. Toilet awareness is through the roof.

John: Almost everybody on earth knows about toilets.

Craig: Knows about toilet. But this is not toilet.

John: This is not toilet.

Craig: This is quite a bit better.

John: This is already a hugely popular, successful franchise that they now want to make into a series.

Craig: Based on books, made movies.

John: Made into a film series.

Craig: Now making a TV series.

John: [Indiscernible 00:26:24].

Craig: I think we know what it is.

John: Although there’s a couple of choices that could-

Craig: I think we know what it is.

John: It wasn’t The Hunger Games.

Craig: And it’s not toilet, so what’s left?

John: I passed on this immediately, because I did not want to be a part of it. I asked them, what is the process, how are they going to pick the person to be the showrunner. This was the game plan. They’re not going out to any writer exclusively. They’re going out to a few select writers, but no one’s exclusive. There will be a series of meetings going up the ladder, pitching a vision, so about five meetings going up the ladder.

Craig: Five?

John: Five meetings.

Craig: The ladder’s not that… I know where this is, and there’s not that many rungs on the ladder, so I’m very confused. Do you start with the receptionist?

John: Then they’ll get down to four or five writers who they’ll have write pilots. Then they’ll pick the favorite of those pilots.

Craig: They’ll pay them.

John: Yes, they will pay them. They will pay them to write pilots. They’ll pick their favorite of these pilot scripts. They see this as a 10-year commitment.

Craig: I would agree with them that it’s a 10-year commitment. That makes sense.

John: Let’s talk about the pros and cons of this. I think this is a doomed process, because no person who actually knows how to run a show will agree to go through that process in my perspective. I don’t think they’re going to be agreeing to compete with other experienced showrunners who would go through this.

Craig: Counterpoint.

John: Please.

Craig: Ego. One of the things that a lot of writers have is a belief – and I kind of feel like I fall into this category – that I know what to do, I know the answer to this. They will see that my way is correct. I think there is a little bit of hubris involved here, necessary hubris. How else could you even think to say, “Hey, I’ve thought a bunch of things and written them down. Spend a lot of money to make people see it.” Look. The best showrunners in the business I think generally are probably already running shows. The timing of having somebody roll off something that’s brilliant and then rolling onto something like this is tricky. You’re not going to get people like Vince Gilligan, the best showrunner in the business, because he only does Vince Gilligan stuff, right? There is some trickiness there. I think they will get some good people, but the thing I’m really catching on is, getting people to write pilots like that, only to be… Although isn’t that what development is? You write a pilot, and then they decide if you’re going to do it or not.

John: Yeah, but it feels so different to know that in the classic broadcast model, your pilots can be against all the other pilots at that network.

Craig: But not pilots for the same show.

John: Also, that feeling like, is this thing that I’m writing in my script going to end up in that other person’s script, because we’re all writing the same thing based on this. That’s what’s so tough here.

Craig: In support of your concern, there is something that gets a little bit weird in the water when you know you’re not competing against yourself when you’re writing, when you’re being paid to write, that there’s somebody else writing something. It almost starts to maybe corrupt your own process. You start to worry, like, “I think what would make them choose mine over that one would be if I did this or that or avoided this or that. You could start to get a lot of, as Lindsay Doran says, unsharpened pencils, just blunted, fear-based, appeal to the down the middle committee kind of vibe. Hard to say. Because of the size of it, I understand, and because of the 10-year commitment, I understand. But I don’t know. That’s a new one on me.

Megana: The precedent feels pretty scary.

John: It does.

Megana: To be competing and auditioning like that, because I imagine the people they’re going out to, if you had a conversation about this, are very tenured, very experienced showrunners. To continue to have to audition like that feels…

Craig: Maybe that’s what going to happen is that they’re going to find out just how many fish they catch with this particular trawling net, because if they’re not getting the quantity and quality of writers they want to participate in this particular winnowing Hunger Games process – it’s not Hunger Games.

John: It’s not Hunger Games.

Craig: Then they’re going to have to revise it.

John: We’ll see what happens here. I’m going to keep an eye on what happens with that project.

Craig: Ten years to work on toilet.

John: That’s a long time on toilet. During the strike, I went to this big event at Universal where members were bringing baked goods and competing to see whose baked goods were the best. I was one of the judges for that. It was fun. It was really crowded. Andrea Ciannavei, who came up with the idea, she gave this great speech during the time about what bake-offs are like, why they’re a scourge on Hollywood. I asked her if I could get her speech and we could draft off of that for a little bit while we do our own bake-off competition. We have three delicious cookies in front of us that Drew has brought in. I thought we would start with one of them.

Craig: Megana, you already ate them. There’s nothing left.

John: You have crumbs on-

Megana: Drew, where did you put the cookies?

John: Drew, why don’t you pick the first cookie that we’re going to taste? We’ll describe it and give it an assessment.

Drew: The first cookie we’re going to taste is the OG cookie. It’s the OG chocolate chip cookie on the far left there.

Craig: Got it.

John: This is the original chocolate chip cookie. I’m looking at this. It’s a classic chocolate chip cookie. It’s a lot of chocolate in here. It looks like chocolate chunks. It’s not greasy. It’s got an amazing smell. Craig, what’s your first instinct here?

Craig: It’s a little bit intimidating how much of a cookie sommelier you are. It’s flat, and there’s too much chocolate in it. I’m just looking at it. For me, there’s too much chocolate. What I do like is that there’s salt on the top. That makes everything better. It’s a chewy cookie. I can tell by squeezing it. I’m just concerned about the quantity of chocolate in this thing. Shall we?

John: Let’s do it.

Craig: Oh, Megana, do you have any thoughts?

Megana: No. I’m excited by the salt, and it has a nice crunchy layer on top of the chewiness.

Craig: That’s pretty much what I thought.

John: It’s nice and crispy on the outside, and it is chewy on the inside. It’s a solid chocolate chip cookie. I agree with Craig that it’s basically a chocolate delivery mechanism.

Drew: Yeah, it’s chocolate dominant.

Craig: It’s almost like a thin cookie-crust-covered brownie. Now, I recognize that they’ve pulled a trick here. They smashed a bunch of chips down, then put another little bit of cookie dough, then put the cookie. I don’t know if I’m the only one that has that.

John: I wonder if they’re maybe not chips but actually some sort of chunky chunks kind of situation.

Craig: Yeah, like a ganache almost. Confession. People get upset with me when I say this and so many things. I don’t love chocolate. Look at Megana. Megana, literally, I wish I could’ve taken a picture, and we could’ve put it in the show notes. The look of disgust on her, just utter contempt. I’ve never actually seen her look like that.

Megana: You know what it was? It was a moment where I was like, I thought that we were very close.

Craig: You’re shooketh, because it’s like, I don’t even know who you are anymore.

Megana: Exactly. It was a look of betrayal.

Craig: I am sorry. I want to assure you that I am who you know. But this is how we keep things spicy, by just occasionally going, “Oh, by the way, I have a kink.” My kink is not loving chocolate. I don’t hate it. I just don’t love it.

John: Drew, what’s your first read on this cookie?

Drew: A lot of chocolate. My gut is that it would be better if it was warm, but I also feel like we’re doing ourselves a disservice by not having them warm, because all cookies are good when they’re warm.

Craig: That’s fair.

John: Let’s talk about some bake-offs here, because I described-

Craig: By the way, you just assumed Megana loved it.

John: Am I wrong?

Megana: He knows me so well. I did love it. As a vehicle for chocolate, I loved it. The salt did a lot of work for it.

John: Yeah, it did.

Megana: I will say that.

Craig: Always good with cookies. I agree.

John: Bake-offs in general. I described that one TV project as a bake-off, but that’s really the exception where you’re going after these giant, established showrunners. Most bake-offs are really targeting writers who are newer to the industry. Producers are asking you to come in and pitch your take on the piece of IP that they own, or open writing assignment, and they sit back and pick the one that they like best. You’re doing this tremendous amount of work for free for them. It is both really tempting and kind of natural to approach, because it’s good practice for how to find a take on something, but you become free research and development for these projects. Oftentimes, they pick none of the above. It’s like, “Oh, there’s nothing here to make.”

Craig: Sometimes the winner is no one. It’s a function in part of anxiety. It’s also a function in part of just lack of trust. But having been on the other side of not writing bake-offs, but employment bake-offs, basically interviews, so we have to interview a lot of people to come and work on our show. Sometimes I’ll talk to three or four or five different, say, cinematographers. They will bring different levels. Sometimes they just talk, and sometimes they put together mood boards. Everybody has a different thing.

For me at least, I wish I could say that that process led to certainty. It doesn’t. You’re guessing before they show up, and then you’re guessing after they show up, because you realize what you’re getting is not necessarily the work that will be done. They’re not shooting something for you right now, in the case of cinematographers. Also, you’re getting their interview self. You’re just hoping, and you’re going on your gut. It’s a process designed to create certainty where certainty cannot exist and doesn’t exist, which is why bake-offs, a little bit like pretty privilege, I think bake-offs lead to room privilege. People that are good in rooms, fun, easygoing, seem like they’d be a great hang, those people have privilege in bake-offs.

John: In theory, you are developing the idea, and you’re coming in there, and people are responding to your idea. But they’re really responding to your charisma, your ability to sell yourself as the person. They can have confidence that you are the person who can deliver this thing. When we talk about bake-offs, we really should think about actors auditioning are really in a very similar situation too. There is that scourge where actors will go in and audition and come back in and get callbacks, but there are some rules about how many times you can call an actor back without paying them.

Craig: There are also now rules about how many pages they can be. We’ve been dealing with that now as we go through our audition process for certain roles. Coming out of the SAG strike, we now have a limitation on the amount of pages we can send for reads. You can’t just dump 12 pages on them, not that we were. But I think it’s five maybe total, I think, something like that, which is fair.

John: Which is fair.

Craig: By the way, same deal with actor auditions. Actor auditions, at least there’s time where somebody, you just go, “There it is. That’s it. That’s our person. Done.” I saw Bella Ramsey’s audition. I was like, “We’re done. It’s over.” You’re hoping for that. You will never get that certainty from writing bake-offs. It’s not possible.

John: When Bella Ramsey came in to do that thing, you saw, “Oh, that’s it.” She created that moment. It happened. A writer coming in in that bake-off situation, that’s never going to happen.

Craig: No, it’s not possible, given what we do, and it’s not really possible for, I think, any other job except for acting.

Megana: Because such a huge part of it is the revision process. That’s not something that every writer is capable of or that you would be able to know from the first pitch that they have about that project.

John: Craig was able to see Bella doing a version of a scene that would actually be in a thing. But if I’m going in to pitch a thing, I’m pitching a vision, but that’s not the script. They’re going to hire me, and then three months later, I’m going to deliver this script, and who knows?

Craig: You’re not able to show them anything like the final product, nor are you able to show them, like Megana says, how you would participate in the process of developing that. All you can show them is, hey, does this person make my skin crawl? Do they seem defensive? Are they imaginative? Do we ping-pong? Do we converse? Is there a dialogue, or is this a monologue? The bake-off process, to me, that’s the problem with it. There are some incredible writers who, I think if they were coming up now, wouldn’t even get a shot, because they don’t have, what would you call it, charisma privilege.

John: Let’s try our second cookie here. Drew, describe this cookie for us.

Drew: This is an oatmeal raisin cookie.

Craig: Now we’re talking.

Drew: It’s a brown exterior with raisins pretty solidly throughout, it looks like.

John: I would say softer on the outside. It’s definitely soft on the inside. Very cinnamony.

Craig: It smells good.

John: It does seem good. A lot of people just despise cinnamon raisin cookies for not being chocolate chip cookies.

Craig: Yeah, but that’s why I love them. This is the kind of thing I love. Megana’s so upset. She’s like, “There’s no chocolate in it.”

Megana: I keep looking. No, I’m enjoying it. Texturally, it’s good and interesting, because I feel like oatmeal raisin sometimes have too much texture, too much oatmeal. This is nice and gooey.

John: I’m not getting much oat here at all in terms of actual… I’m not a fan of this cookie. It feels a little gummy and under-baked to me.

Drew: It’s a little wet.

Craig: I love it. I’ll tell you why. Because this is my flavor profile. I love, I’m going to say, the fall spice kind of vibe. I love raisins in cookies. Everybody else is like, “What’s wrong with you?” I made a joke about it in the first season of The Last of Us. Still, I love it anyway. I also like how much you can take a molasses, brown-sugar-forward kind of vibe in this, which makes me so much happier. I ate my whole piece.

Megana: It was enjoyable. I just don’t think you should call it a cookie.

John: What would you call this then?

Craig: What would you call it? An abomination?

Megana: It was just like a breakfast item, like a breakfast pastry.

Craig: A flat, disc-like coffee cake?

John: If you take one of those Quaker Oat bars and just soften it, microwave it, it could be-

Craig: That sounds great. I’d eat that. This is really turning into a real Jets versus Sharks situation. I feel like we’re star-crossed lovers.

John: Drew, texture-wise?

Drew: Texture-wise, wet. But I think Craig hit the nail on the head with that molasses, and I like that gingerbread kind of flavor to it.

John: Let’s talk about you’re approached as a writer in a bake-off situation. Generally, your agent, your manager, somebody’s coming to you for the situation. Have you been hit by these yet, Megana?

Megana: Thankfully, I have not. I have not.

John: You’ve had to go in and meet on rooms. You’re just coming off your second room. But you haven’t had to go out and pitch on a job. Back when you were still a producer, there were projects you were going out to meet on, but were you the only person they were going out to?

Megana: I was going out to meet mostly on projects that I was pitching and developing, so luckily, I have not had this.

Craig: You haven’t had the bake-off experience.

Megana: Exactly.

John: Here’s the information you want to know from your reps before you would consider taking off for one of these things. How many writers are in the mix? You ask the question, and they need to tell you the answer. That’s in the contract, because they have to do that. You need to figure out how invested is the studio in this. Is it a priority for the bosses, or do they even know that it exists? How many people need to say yes before you get the job? One of the things I did like about this thing that the agency came to me with is they could talk through the process. They’ve asked the questions. They knew what the process was going to be.

How long has this been assignment been around, because if things have been around, floating for a long time, that’s a really bad sign, that they’ve never been able to crack it. Do they actually have the rights. I’ve heard so many horror stories where, “Oh, we’re trying to do this thing. Oh, we haven’t gotten the rights yet, but don’t worry, we’ll get the rights to this eventually.”

Craig: “If you tell us how to make it something good, then we’ll tell the people.” Then I’m like, “What do I need you for? I’ll go talk to them then.” Now they’re just laundering your work into IP that they would control. It doesn’t make any sense. But there are some people in Hollywood that just are not scrupulous.

John: Funny that way.

Craig: Shocker.

John: Shocker. The last red flag that Andrea has here, which I think is such a good point, is that if you hear something like, “The director has a preferred writer, but we’re exploring our options.”

Craig: You’re dead.

John: Run away.

Craig: Dead. You’re dead.

John: Even if you get the job, you won’t want to have that job, because you’re not the person the director wanted to work with.

Megana: I’ve also heard experiences from friends who have gone on open writing assignment pitches and things. It feels like an open book test, but some people have had after-hour sessions with the teachers or something, where some friends will know exactly what that executive wants, and they just want you to repeat that back to them from a different body. It’s like, okay, so not every writer has this information.

Craig: It’s not a healthy or sane or principled process. It just doesn’t really make sense to me. In the case of a massive project, where a studio has invested a billion dollars and wants to make 10 billion dollars, I understand to an extent. But the process is very formalized. They come to you, and they say, “There’s going to be five steps,” and da da, bah, bah, bah. When you get what we’ll call the standard bake-off, I just feel like that is the first indication that nobody cares and that this is kind of junky, because why are they doing it like this? It means they don’t really know what they want, and they probably don’t have money for bigger writers. It’s all sketch at that point.

John: The alternative would be just go to a writer who has experience making movies and you know can deliver a script for you.

Craig: Exactly. If you’re like, “Okay, I bought this neo-noir book. I now have some IP,” why wouldn’t I call Scott Frank first? Of course I would, unless I can’t afford it. Now that means I don’t have the vote of confidence from the studio, and I’m just begging and looking. Then I need to seat seven people, because I don’t know. Problematic.

John: Let’s take a look at our final cookie here. Drew, talk us through this.

Drew: This final cookie is a dark chocolate peppermint chip.

Megana: Are you kidding? You don’t like mint in your…

Craig: I really thought it was going to be white chocolate, which I love, because I don’t like chocolate. I’m basically the anti-cookie person. It’s mint chocolate chip?

Drew: I don’t know. It’s peppermint.

Craig: Peppermint.

John: Those look like peppermint pieces, I think. It’s a smashed-up candy cane.

Craig: A smashed-up candy cane in a cookie. Let’s just say also, this thing is massive.

John: It looks more like a rounded brownie than a cookie.

Craig: It’s a mound.

John: You can smell the mint in it.

Craig: It also just looks so chocolatey to me. That’s foul. This is terrible. It’s toothpaste. I’m eating toothpaste. Megana’s like, “I’ll take yours.”

John: It really is a brownie to me.

Craig: It’s gritty.

John: If it weren’t for the rounded shape, I would say this is a brownie. Megana?

Megana: If I was closing my eyes, I would think that this was a brownie.

John: I’m not a fan of candy cane kind of things, but Drew, what are you thinking?

Drew: I’m not either a big fan of the candy cane. It has a similar amount of chocolate as the first cookie, as the chocolate chip, where it’s everywhere.

John: Everywhere!

Craig: I actually like mint chocolate chip ice cream. It’s when they put mint and chocolate together, like those Andes after-dinner, I’m like, “Gross,” because I don’t like chocolate that much. Now, it just tastes like disgusting toothpaste. I hated it. Apologize to the bakery. Literally, I’m choking.

Megana: Is this a new thing? I don’t remember you not liking chocolate.

Craig: No. Even as a kid, I was always confused why let’s say after baseball practice, the team goes to get ice cream, and everyone’s like, “I want chocolate!” Everyone was in pure agreement, chocolate ice cream. I’m like, “I would like vanilla, please.” I love vanilla. It’s amazing. It’s just never been my thing. It’s not for me, dog.

John: Now we’ve tasted the three cookies. Should we vote first, or should we reveal where these cookies are from?

Craig: Good question.

Drew: Let’s vote first.

John: Let’s vote first. I would say cookie number 1 was my choice of the three cookies.

Megana: I would also say number 1.

John: Yeah, which is a very classic chocolate chip.

Craig: Number 2.

John: Number 2, of course.

Drew: I would also vote number 2.

Megana: Drew!

John: Oh my god, tie.

Craig: Whoa. I did not see-

John: I did not see that-

Craig: Wow.

John: Didn’t see it coming.

Craig: Wow. That is gasps from the audience. Okay, so now-

John: Final two contestants here. I guess it gets kicked up to the boss, the studio head, to decide between these last two contenders.

Craig: Right, and you know they have just a D20 that they’re rolling.

John: But I think you actually can pull this back to what we’re talking about with bake-offs, is that tasty is subjective.

Craig: Sure is.

John: You may have delivered the pitch that wins over that executive, but their boss may not have the same taste, and you’re screwed.

Craig: Also, I remember seeing on a producer’s table, when very young… I was starting out. I was coming in and pitching on something. The system brought me into the meeting room, the office. But he was on the phone. He would be right in. Right there on this desk was a list of names. Obviously, I was one of them. Next to each thing, it said a credit, and then there were dollar signs, like Yelp.

John: So exciting.

Craig: It was like one, two, three, four, because part of it is how much do you like this person, because they’re way more expensive than this one. If cookie number 1 costs half as much as cookie number 2, cookie number 1 will probably get the job.

John: Drew, it’s now time to reveal the cookies that were…

Drew: In third place-

John: In third place.

Drew: The dark chocolate peppermint cookie is from Levain Bakery.

Craig: World famous.

John: Right up the street, yeah, world famous.

Craig: They do have some lovely things there. I can’t hang this on them. They probably have an amazing oatmeal raisin cookie that I would love to try.

John: I would say all the cookies I’ve gotten from Levain have that quality of it feels like a giant ice cream scoop was used, and it never quite all the way baked down. That’s their way of doing cookies.

Craig: They are kind of doorstops.

Drew: Is that too much baking powder? I feel like there’s got to be something that’s [crosstalk 48:36].

John: No, it’s not risen. It’s just dense.

Craig: It’s just quantity. It’s quantity of dough.

Drew: Tied for first, but the oatmeal raisin is from DeLuscious Bakery, which was a Megana recommendation.

Megana: Oh my god, I betrayed the love of my life.

Craig: Megana!

John: Tell us about DeLuscious Bakery. Why was that your choice for a place to pick?

Megana: It was a place that I discovered when somebody sent you a gift three or four years ago. Their cookies are just divine.

Craig: I agree.

Megana: Oh, gosh. I’m betraying my team. They’re delicious. Their chocolate chip cookies are so good. They also have vegan and gluten-free cookies, which I am not, but they’re still delicious.

Craig: Levain also, I know for a fact, has a vegan cookie and possibly a gluten-free as well.

John: Excellent. My top choice, the chocolate chip cookie, is from where?

Drew: It is from The Very Best Cookie In The Whole Wide World bakery, which is LA Times number one cookie in LA.

Craig: I’m going to challenge their name, but okay.

Megana: Wait, that was the name?

Drew: That’s the full name. I feel like a lot of cookie places have names that make me a little-

Megana: I thought you were just vamping.

Drew: No.

John: I thought maybe it’s for search optimization.

Craig: The best cookie.

John: Dentists will have a place called Dentist Near Me. Their actual practice name will be Dentist Near Me.

Craig: A lot of plumbers that are AAAA Plumber. It’s got a The Country’s Best Yogurt vibe for their name. It was, I’m sure, fine. I don’t know how to evaluate a cookie like that. It’s just not my jam.

John: My favorite cookie in Los Angeles is at La Provence bakery over in Beverly Hills in a strip mall. Their vegan gluten-free chocolate chip cookie is incredible. It’s better than any of these cookies here, I believe.

Drew: I love vegan desserts. The best brownie I ever had was a vegan brownie.

John: They can be really good.

Craig: I don’t know where you are in this, Megana, but to me, as somebody that likes to make desserts, cook, bake, etc, I support vegans, I love them, I disagree with what those two people just said. Eggs are essential.

John: They’re really [crosstalk 50:44].

Craig: Often, cream is essential, but eggs and butter. Eggs and butter, that is what a dessert is.

Drew: They do coconut usually in the vegan stuff.

Craig: I can’t stand that.

John: Let’s answer a listener question.

Craig: No, no, no, I need to get support.

Megana: When I have a vegan dessert that I really like, I’ll say it’s a surprise rather than an expectation.

Craig: Girl, boom.

John: Got a fist bump there.

Craig: Owns.

John: Let’s answer a question or two. I see one from Carlos that seems good.

Drew: Carlos writes, “What do you consider a draft? I’m sorry if the question seems a little bit obvious, but I’m new to this sort of thing. I understand that a first draft is what comes out from beginning to end with the story laid out, characters and all. Next, you take out a scene or add up some more story. If it’s just a new paragraph, is that considered a draft or a pass? How many changes are considered to make it a new draft, and what do these many color labels mean in various drafts and revisions?”

John: Craig, this week I was working on the chapter of the Scriptnotes books which was about script revisions and colored revisions and all that stuff, so the idea of a draft comes up here. My instinct is that a draft is any time you have a script that you’re handing to a different person that you’re saying is different. That’s a change that’s going out there. It’s not just you’ve made a change on one page. It’s just like, “This is actually a new thing I want you to read.” That’s a draft.

Craig: I think of draft as a pre-production term. This is my first draft. Okay, here are some notes. Beginning, the end. Here are some notes. Here are some thoughts. Okay, I’m going to go off now and do a rewrite. This is my second draft. I’m going to do a polish. This is a polished draft. It just means these are new versions of the thing from beginning to end. Once you get into production, those now aren’t drafts anymore.

John: They’re revisions now.

Craig: We will sometimes say blue draft. But really, I like to say blue revision. It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, in production, if you change one word on one page, and it’s really important, and it has to go out today-

John: That page goes out.

Craig: … it’s technically a draft. It’s a page. Pink page is out.

Megana: It’s so fun, because I’ve been getting the updates from the Unstable: Season 2, what is it called, the distribution?

Craig: Yes, synchronized?

Megana: Yes, exactly. I’ll be like, “Oh, cool. What did they change here?” It’s like, “We have changed the hat to a visor.”

Craig: There’s definitely a lot of that, and sometimes one small word, like, “They walk outside. It’s raining.” Pink page, “They walk outside. It’s sunny.” That’s a very big change. I should give a little shout-out to Ali Chang, who is my intrepid assistant, but also our script coordinator on Season 2 of The Last of Us. She’s doing an outstanding job.

John: In this chapter, we talk through revisions mostly from the future perspective, where you and I have to be the script coordinator, because we’re the person responsible for making sure the script doesn’t get messed up. But on an actual TV show, there’s a whole person whose job it is to make sure that those revisions go out in a way so that they are sensible for everybody.

Craig: We have a shared folder. I say, “Okay, I believe Episode 203 blue is ready to go.” She proofreads, adds in, if need be, the production days. We do D1, 2, 3, 4, N1, 2, 3, 4, and all that, and make sure the headers and the title page, and then sends it through Scenechronize, which I think it’s owned by Entertainment Partners, that also owns Final Draft. For something that is even remotely associated with Final Draft, it works quite well. It is not Final Draft-esque in its [crosstalk 54:13].

John: Craig, a question for you. In the chapter that I put through, we talk about pages in that sense. I don’t bring up Scenechronize at all, because I want to make sure the book doesn’t feel like it’s too tied into one thing. But I do mention the fact that often it’s now software. On your set, how often are people looking at physically printed pages?

Craig: Our initial feeling for Season 2 is that we would have no printed pages, until the morning when certain people would have sides, director, showrunner, actors. Little bit of a revolt by the heads of departments. We loosened it up and allowed HODs to have printed things, because they just need them to do their work. But beyond that, we really are trying to keep it digital. Security is a thing. Once you have a show that people are really paying attention to, you do have to be careful. I know Game of Thrones went through all sorts of… There used to be this thing where they would print scripts on these red pages, because they couldn’t be xeroxed. No one xeroxes anything anymore. What’s nice about Scenechronize – so it’s synchronize but it’s Scene-chronize – is that it distributes PDFs, but they are only viewable online and watermarked and dated. If you try and take a screen cap, it’s going to have exactly your name and the time and all that stuff, your IP, blah da da blah. It’s actually quite solid for security purposes.

John: On the day, certain people are going to have sides, just because you have to look, like, what is this thing?

Craig: Of course. One of the things, I always ask for my sides to be on full-size pages, because I don’t like the little tiny pages. I don’t understand why they have to be little tiny pages. I can’t see them. There is somebody who, at the end of each day, studiously gathers those things up and runs them through the shredder.

John: Great. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a game that we played yesterday called Clue Conspiracy. It is the game Clue, but built out in taking cues from Avalon and other sort of social deception, teamwork. It’s cooperative, but there’s traitors in your midst.

Craig: Pandemic kind of vibe?

John: Yeah. It’s really a smartly done thing. It took a bit to figure it out, but it does come with a video explainer. Drew, you liked it.

Drew: I had a great time. Avalon’s a good comp. It’s like Clue but White Lotus.

Craig: Nice.

John: You’re trying to prevent a murder, but you probably won’t prevent the murder. Then you have to figure out-

Craig: I bet. Avalon, they’re classic.

John: They’re good. We played with four, which was okay, but I think five to seven to nine would probably be the right number there.

Craig: More of a party game.

John: It’s more of a party game, but nicely done.

Craig: Does anyone actually die?

John: Yeah.

Craig: In real life?

John: Oh, no, not in real life, no. That’d be nice if it did. Megana, what have you got for a One Cool Thing?

Megana: I’m going to say on the baking theme, last weekend, my friend brought this spiced persimmon cake from Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person book.

John: Such a great book.

Megana: Such a great book. So delicious.

Craig: Persimmons.

John: I can’t summon the taste of a persimmon. What is persimmon like?

Megana: I don’t totally enjoy them, but the profile that they brought to the cake was just a little fruity, really moist, and it was just perfect.

Craig: It’s a milder citrus flavor, to me at least. I think they’re delicious. But a little goes a long way with persimmon. We don’t generally put oranges in cakes. You put fake orange in cake, probably. But it’s very strong, whereas lemon and lime somehow work better. Persimmon is really interesting. Spice I think is the key. You know I love my spice. I thought for a second you were going to be like, “My One Cool Thing is oatmeal raisin cookie.” That would’ve been awesome.

Megana: I’m also pitching this because I’m hoping that one of the two of you will… Drew, do you bake?

Drew: No.

Megana: You guys are my bakers.

Craig: You want me to make one for you?

Megana: Yes, please.

John: I have her book.

Craig: Send me the recipe. I will do it.

Megana: The hack that my friend did was she used butter instead of oil. I’m still thinking about it.

Craig: I am not a big believer in recipe hacks. I feel like you should always try it once the way the author intended, maybe because I’m a writer. What happens, I’ll look on, for instance, the New York Times, and they have some really nice recipes there, and then there’s all the comments. I like the comments, because people can say what they thought. If everybody agrees really you should probably not leave it in the oven as long as they say, okay. But inevitably, there’s five people like, “It was incredible. I loved it. I just replaced the eggplant with tuna, and instead of cheese, I used graham crackers.” People are like, “Why are you here?”

Megana: Have you seen the Reddit thread that’s people who have made substitutions in recipes and then get really mad that they don’t work?

John: That’s a perfect subreddit.

Craig: That is a dream. I got to go look that up, because I’m like, “Guys, how is it their fault?”

Megana: There’s literally one that’s like, “I substituted mayo for marshmallow fluff, and it did not work well.” It’s like, who asked you to do that?

Craig: Oh my god. Because they are the same color?

John: They’re both white, in a jar.

Craig: I used an old T-shirt instead of butter, and it didn’t work very well, but they’re the same color. If you send me the recipe, what I will do is… By the way, since you’ve had it, I’ll do the OG version, and let’s see what you think. Look, in general, butter is butter, but every now and then-

John: If Claire didn’t use butter, she’s-

Craig: Every now and then, there’s a reason. There really is. Sometimes I’ve even come across recipes where they do use strange substitutes for things. Some people are just like, “Look, if you’re going to do this, you’re using Crisco. Sorry. I know it’s kind of trashy, but that’s what works.” You make a pie crust, use Crisco. It’s bad for you.

Megana: But so is pie.

Craig: Correct.

John: Craig, what have you got?

Craig: Have I talked about steaming yet?

John: No.

Drew: No.

Craig: You guys, I’ve become obsessed with this.

John: Steaming for clothes or steaming for vegetables?

Craig: Steaming for clothes.

John: It’s better.

Craig: It’s so much better. I get frustrated with wrinkly clothes, but I don’t want to have to constantly take it across the street to people to press it. That just seems stupid. Ironing is hard. It takes so long. I’m terrified I’m going to burn something. It’s just so long.

John: Setting up the ironing board and all that stuff.

Craig: Setting up the ironing board. There’s always one corner of a shirt that is topologically un-ironable. Then somebody, and I can’t remember who, said, “Just get a steamer.” I’m like, “What?” I watch this video of this guy doing it. I’m like, “There’s no way it’s going to work that well.” Oh my god.

Megana: It’s magic.

Craig: It’s magic! You just do it. You can watch wrinkles. Some shirts are easier than others, but even the hard ones, it’s okay, because you’re just running this thing up and down it. It just goes, not wrinkled anymore. I do it on pants. I do it on shirts. I do it on sport coats. I love it.

John: We went to Drew’s wedding, so we were staying in Boston. We had our suits. Things get wrinkly. The hotel room didn’t have an iron, but it had a little steamer in a little bag. You plugged it in, put the water in it.

Craig: Off you go.

John: After that point, I immediately bought the same steamer.

Craig: Oh, so you don’t have a standing steamer?

John: Oh, no. It looks just like a hair dryer, but with water in it.

Craig: John, if I may.

John: The standing steamer?

Craig: Step your game up, dude.

John: No more closet space, nothing like that.

Craig: You can shove it in a corner. It’s not that big. The whole thing is the size of a football, and then there’s a pole-

John: A pole.

Craig: … and a hose, and it goes in the corner.

John: I’m so happy with what we have.

Craig: I’m just saying.

Drew: Do you put the water in the bottom?

Craig: Yeah, you do.

Drew: How do you get it in the bottom?

Craig: There’s a little tank. You lift it up. Always use distilled water.

John: This one doesn’t require distilled water. This requires any water you got.

Craig: I’m super suspicious about this janky ass steamer you got.

John: Works delightfully well.

Craig: I’m just saying. I’m in. I’m in. Megana, do you have a steamer?

Megana: I do have a steamer. I wasn’t using distilled water, and so I got the LA water buildup. My clothes have flecks of calcium deposits on them.

Craig: This is what I’m saying. Distilled water, good steamer. I used to have this panic. I came home yesterday from Vancouver for our holiday hiatus, packed all my stuff into this big bag. I’m going to go to a holiday party this evening at someone’s house. I would normally be like, “I’m screwed. I’m going to take this out of the suitcase. It’s going to be wrinkly. I’m just going to look like an idiot.” I have no fear. Know what I’m doing after this? I’m going home and I’m steaming. I so enjoy it. It’s so Zen. Love it.

John: Drew, what do you got for us?

Drew: I get a One Cool Thing?

John: Yeah, you get a One Cool Thing, of course.

Craig: Yeah, you do.

John: It’s a Christmas episode, a very special Christmas episode.

Craig: Is it also steaming?

Drew: I should be. My embarrassing joy this year has been, I got a new-ish car, and you get a few free months of SiriusXM when you get a new car. There is a Kelly Clarkson radio station on SiriusXM that is anarchy. It’s basically like someone hacked into Kelly Clarkson’s iTunes and hit shuffle, and you don’t know what you’re going to get. It’ll go from ’40s country to ’90s RnB. It is crazy, but it’s incredibly joyful and insane. I love it. I’m going to be really sad when my free trial ends.

Craig: Did you just Tinder match with Kelly Clarkson in front of us?

Drew: I might’ve. I think she’s fantastic now.

Craig: That’s incredible.

Drew: I wasn’t a huge fan, and now suddenly, I’m all Kelly Clarkson.

Megana: So sorry. I have some follow-up questions. The Kelly Clarkson bit of it, it’s not just her music?

Drew: It’s her music sometimes, plus whatever Kelly’s influences are or she feels like playing [crosstalk 01:04:14].

John: But how often [crosstalk 01:04:15]?

Drew: Occasionally.

Craig: Just enough to keep you going.

Drew: Just enough to have that Kelly Clarkson… She’s never taking over. I’m learning all about SiriusXM. Lisa Loeb hosts the 90s on 9. Lisa Loeb has guests. She’s not that involved. She’ll just do bumpers. It’s just her feelings and her vibes. It’s super modern stuff. It’s old stuff. You’re like, “Yeah, you know what? I guess that is what influenced Kelly Clarkson.”

Craig: Are you into Broadway at all?

Drew: A little bit. I don’t keep up with Broadway.

John: SiriusXM on Broadway.

Craig: SiriusXM on Broadway with Seth Rudetsky, that’s my jam.

Drew: I’ll check it out.

Craig: It’s the best.

John: Drew, you very naively say as long as you have your subscription, you get it free for a while. Good luck getting rid of your Sirius subscription. They will try to hold onto for whatever.

Craig: You haven’t given them a credit card or anything?

Drew: Not yet, because I looked, and I was like, “What would this take to keep?” It’s 25 bucks a month, which-

Megana: Wow.

Drew: Insane. I’m sure they’ll try and get me offers and stuff. I’ve already got some [crosstalk 01:05:13].

Craig: Yes, they will. As long as they can get your credit card in some way or another, you will be unsubscribed maybe 40 years after your death. Wow, they’re good at what they do.

John: They are good at what they do.

Drew: Don’t subscribe to SiriusXM for this channel, but if you have it, check it out.

Craig: I think Seth is worth it myself.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Woot woot!

Megana: Woo!

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Yeah!

John: Our outro is a Christmas throwback by Matthew. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That is also the place where we can send some questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We were on the Cotton Bureau’s Christmas list [crosstalk 01:06:00].

Drew: We were front page.

John: Yeah, it was nice. We were front page of them.

Craig: You mean the front page of the Bureau?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Damn.

John: You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on gifts. The three of you are my gift, so thank you so much.

Craig: Aw.

Drew: Aw.

Megana: Aw.

[Bonus Segment]

John: The best gifts we ever received at Christmastime. Two things come to mind for me. Maybe I’ve mentioned them on the show before. I remember getting Lester, the ventriloquist dummy.

Craig: Oh my god, terrifying.

John: Terrifying. So great, so wonderful. I had my little Lester doll, which was great, and also a safe, a little child’s safe to store all my valuables in. I had a little safe.

Drew: I don’t know anything about Lester. Was that a mass produced-

Craig: Yes. Sorry, I’m just hung up on John hoarding stuff in his safe, this little kid. What were you putting in there?

John: Exactly. What valuable things did I have? I had a silver dollar. I had that cool rock I found.

Craig: A gold crayon. No one can get at it. I love that.

Megana: Was it a children’s safe, or did your parents give you a safe and call it a children’s safe?

John: It was a children’s safe. Both of these were definitely out of the gift book or the wish book. We used to get these big catalogs from department stores that had a bunch of stuff to buy. Those were the things that [crosstalk 01:07:39].

Craig: My first safe.

John: Yes, my first safe.

Craig: For paranoid children.

John: I became obsessed with safe-cracking and pretending like I had a great idea.

Megana: That’s so cute.

Craig: I love it.

John: Two little dials there.

Craig: That’s so great.

John: Those were gifts I remember loving [crosstalk 01:07:51].

Megana: How old were you when you got this ventriloquist dummy?

John: Second or third grade.

Craig: So creepy. This Lester thing was a nightmare.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to Lester. It’s an African American, looks like a small adult, kind of.

Craig: Yes, like all dummies, it is both a child and man.

Megana: Is this where your thing against ventriloquism came from?

Craig: No. Ventriloquist dummies are horrifying and famously have been featured in horror movies. Yeah, there’s Lester. My issue, look at the mouth. The problem is the mouth.

John: It’s just up and down.

Craig: It’s just terrifying.

Megana: This is what they’re making fun of in Arrested Development.

Craig: Yes, exactly. My issue with ventriloquism as a craft is that it’s just stupid.

Megana: Got it.

Craig: It’s just dumb. You’re just not moving your mouth. Who cares?

John: Megana, gifts you received and loved that were life-changing, or at least in the moment were really significant?

Megana: I remember I was obsessed with these baby dolls that would pee.

Craig: Of course.

Megana: You would put the bottle in the mouth, and then they would pee. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that longing since. It was like, “If I have this plastic child, my life will be-”

Craig: Your biological clock ended with that little baby that peed, and you’re like, “I’m satisfied.”

Megana: I was just like, “I got to have it. I want to change its diaper,” or whatever.

Craig: You were teasing your mom at that point. She was like, “Yes! I’m going to have grandchildren.”

Megana: Yes. I was four or five years old.

John: She should not allow you to prepone your childbirth with a doll.

Megana: I got that and then pretty immediately I was like, “This is a mess. I don’t want this.”

Craig: It’s basically just a doll with a hole in it, that just comes out. It’s a tube. I’m pouring water in. Then water comes out.

John: We’re all tubes.

Craig: Correct, so what do we need a doll [crosstalk 01:09:49]?

Megana: I don’t need a plastic one to hold around.

Craig: I remember my sister was super into that too. She was like, “I want the doll that pees.” It was a huge thing. Nobody thought that was weird, by the way. Nobody. Nobody was like-

John: Natural.

Craig: Just all these kids want dolls that pee.

Megana: Literal four-year-olds.

Craig: Yeah, it was totally fine.

Megana: I have that. Then I remember I got this fuzzy diary, a blue fuzzy, it looks like a shag carpet almost.

Craig: Yep, that you could write all your secret thoughts in?

Megana: Yeah. I was just like, I’m a glamorous woman with-

Craig: My fuzzy blue-

Megana: … an interior life and-

Craig: A lock.

Megana: … a key-

John: Of course.

Megana: … for my locked diary.

Craig: An unbreakable lock. You’d need literally something as rare as a paper clip.

John: How often did you use your diary? I feel like one of those things where you maybe wrote in three pages of the diary.

Megana: I found it recently. I remember being like, “I don’t have the key for this. I can’t open it.”

Craig: Jesus. God, Megana.

Megana: My friend just ripped it open.

Craig: Of course.

Megana: I actually wrote in it a lot. All of the entries were about a boy named Taylor in my class and whether or not he was in school that day, because I am so cool.

Craig: I thought you were just a budding truant officer.

Megana: No. It’s like, “Today was a bad day. Taylor was sick.”

Craig: Taylor was sick. What ever happened to Taylor?

Megana: I do not know.

Craig: Prison.

John: It was Taylor Lautner. He [inaudible 01:11:19] career, but now he’s in a weird in-between place, where he’s kind of famous, but he’s not actually being cast in things.

Megana: Exactly.

John: Or casted.

Craig: Go get him, girl.

John: Taylor Lautner married a Taylor, who’s took his last name, so Taylor Lautner is now married to Taylor Lautner.

Megana: He used to date a different Taylor.

Craig: Wait, really?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Is that true?

John: That’s true.

Craig: Really?

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s weird.

John: It happens.

Craig: I guess it does.

Megana: Yeah, that you would marry-

Craig: If you have a name that’s unisex, it doesn’t matter whether you’re gay or straight, you have a chance of running into somebody that is going to have… Then if they take your last name, it’s done. Now you’ve just married yourself. We’d love to invite you to the wedding of Taylor Lautner and Taylor Lautner.

Megana: It’s a homograph.

John: It is a homograph.

Craig: No.

John: It’s actually a true homonym.

Craig: It’s a homonym.

Megana: A true homonym.

Craig: It’s a homonym.

John: It’s both written and-

Craig: Yeah, because it’s not pronounced differently. If one of them was Taylor Lautner [laht-NUR], then we would be in homograph territory, I believe.

John: Exciting. Craig, gifts, what gifts are you thinking back to that were meaningful?

Craig: 1977.

John: Now, your family celebrated Hanukkah, obviously, but did you also do Christmas evenings too?

Craig: No. It’s hard to describe. If you grew up in a Jewish household in New York in the ’70s, it was like a war was going on. The war was between your parents and the obviously best holiday. It was like, “We will not have a Christmas tree. There will be no decorations that are Christmassy. We will actively not do any of it, because then we are destroying our faith and traditions. Therefore, we’re going to pour all of our effort into this fake holiday.” Apologies to those who celebrate Hanukkah. On the list of Jewish holidays, I think there’s 4 million, it’s probably in the 3,900,000s of importance. It just happened to line up with Christmas, and voila. For me and my sister, Hanukkah was really just a time of resentment, because everybody else would just look like they were having the best time. We couldn’t put lights up. We couldn’t put lights up, because that was Christian.

John: Sorry.

Craig: Did you have that in your family?

Megana: No. We fully bought into Christmas as a-

Craig: Well done.

Megana: … purely capitalist holiday.

Craig: As an American holiday. It wasn’t a grievance. Anyway, so yeah, we celebrated fake Christmas, basically.

John: Your memories of best presents, was it a birthday present? Was it also just a Hanukkah present? What was it?

Craig: I don’t know when I got this, but it was definitely a gift. 1977. There was a line of toys. I remember there were three of them called Shogun Warriors. They were large. I’m going to show you a picture in a second. They were very big. This is the part I didn’t expect, because usually action figures, dolls for boys, were small. They were maybe a couple inches, or maybe if it was-

John: A GI Joe is a large, almost like a foot.

Craig: GI Joe, yeah, it was like a foot, or the Bionic Man. This thing was two and a half feet tall. It was really tall.

John: Wow.

Craig: It looked like this.

John: Great.

Craig: What I did not realize until much, much later on was that this thing had a name, because I think the package may have just had Japanese on it. What was cool about him was, he’s this big robot warrior, kind of like-

John: It almost looks like a nutcracker to me, honestly.

Craig: Yeah, looks a little nutcrackery, but also you could tell that they’ve cheated a little bit from Darth Vader on the mask, clearly. This thing in his belt fired out, and his fist had missiles. There was all these little spring-loaded things. I loved this thing. I can remember the smell of the plastic, this toxic wafting fume of, I assume it was plastic. It could’ve been made of body parts. I don’t know. Loved it. Years later, I went to look it up. I was like, “Maybe I’ll buy one of these.” They are selling them. It was made by Mattel. It is currently I think on eBay for $800.

John: Wow.

Megana: Wow.

Craig: At the time, I assume it cost $6. They were eventually banned because of the choking problems.

John: I was going to say anything that shoots off-

Craig: Yeah. You can see these little missiles here. Those are little missiles, perfectly designed to catch in a child’s throat. The name of this Shogun is Mazinga, which is just Mazin and a G-A.

John: Wow. Made for you.

Craig: It was like it was made for me. Mazinga. Shogun Warrior, 1977, Mazinga. If you had one of these things as a kid, please write in and let us know. There were two other ones. I don’t remember their names. I did not have those, but I wanted them.

John: Love it. Drew, how about you? Gifts that are meaningful?

Drew: Christmas ’98, because I would go out with my mom every weekend, and she’d go shopping. At Pier One they had these papasan chairs, which are the circle ones.

Craig: Of course, the classic dorm room chair.

Drew: Yeah, dorm room chair. I was like, “I want one so bad.” Christmas morning, there was a papasan chair. That was the big gift. That was like, “I am an adult now. I’m eight years old. My room is like the house in Friends.”

Craig: You were eight?

Drew: I was eight.

Craig: You wanted a papasan chair?

John: Was it a full-size one?

Drew: It was a full-size one.

John: You could nap in that thing.

Drew: Yeah, I would just curl up basically in that, because I was a weird kid.

Craig: What a weird little boy.

Drew: I was very strange.

Craig: Everyone else is like, “I want Nintendo [inaudible 01:16:48].” You’re like, “I would like this poorly put together rattan chair.”

Drew: Corduroy.

Craig: “With corduroy cushions, please. I will sit in it like the king.”

John: I also remember gifts I didn’t get that I really, really wanted. In the first case, I was too afraid to ever ask for this gift. But whenever I was flipping through the wish book, this is the gift I really wanted. It’s Barbie, but it’s Barbie’s head.

Craig: My sister had one.

John: Makeup Barbie, where you could get that stuff. I desperately wanted that, but even then, I knew, oh, no, that’s-

Craig: That’s probably not going to fly?

John: That’s not going to fly in the household. I couldn’t ask for it. Internalized homophobia wouldn’t let me do that. I also really wanted – and Craig, you will remember this one – Big Trak. Do you remember Big Trak?

Craig: Oh, absolutely, I remember Big Trak. Look how ’70s that is.

John: It is amazingly ’70s. To describe this-

Craig: Incredible.

John: It feels like if you took an Atari and put tractor wheels on it, tank wheels on it. The idea behind this is that you punch in little buttons and set a course for it, and then it’ll go and run. It’ll drive itself around on that course, which was just revolutionary at the time.

Craig: Magic. Absolutely magic. With that membrane style pushing the button.

John: My Atari 400 computer had that.

Craig: The membrane keyboard, yeah.

John: So good.

Craig: My sister and I had loads of board games. We would play everything. My closet was jammed full of those things. We liked Battleship, but I was obsessed with the idea of getting electronic Battleship. Obsessed. The ads made it look so incredible. I asked over and over, and every single time, my dad was like, “Why? It’s just Battleship. You already have Battleship.” I’m like, “You don’t understand. It’s like you’re in the middle of a naval battle. There’s explosions and lights.” Never flew. Never flew. Never got it. Never got it. Still don’t have it. Will never even give it to myself, because you need to have something missing, or else… The day I get electronic battleship, I’m probably just going to keel over and die.

Drew: Now we know.

Craig: Now we know. Now you know how to kill me.

John: Drew, you and I were talking about adults who collect toys, adults who go shopping for toys, because you were working at a company that they would actually just go out and buy toys.

Drew: I worked at a stop motion… I worked at the studio that did Robot Chicken. They would just be toys all the time. They would go out and get stuff. Even the people that I worked with would go. There’s so many collector places around LA. It’s a whole subculture. It’s cool for a bit, but I don’t know. People go really far.

Craig: There’s a weirdness to it. It gets weird to turn something so lovely and innocent into something rather serious and tense.

Drew: The collector aspect too sort of bothers me. My dad, when Star Wars toys came back in ’95, bought all of them, and they are still pristine in our basement in boxes. I got some toys, but he has all of them. That always drove me nuts. I can’t wait for, someday I want to just give those to a kid.

Craig: Until you see what they’re worth, and then you’re like, “Yeah, I won’t give these to-”

Drew: I don’t think they’re worth… I think everyone had that same idea.

Craig: I think everybody did have the same… I don’t understand collecting at all anyway.

John: I’m not a collector. I collect some typewriters, but I don’t know anything about the typewriters. I just collect them because they’re cool. I like them. Megana, any gifts you never got that you are still resentful about?

Megana: Papasan chair is actually on there.

Craig: What is going on?

Megana: I don’t know what it was, what choke hold Pier One Imports had me in, but I would beg my mom to stop by Pier One on our way home from the mall. The first time I failed my driver’s test, my dad took me to Pier One to make me feel better about it.

Craig: Aw.

Megana: But he still didn’t get me the papasan chair.

John: Instead, he bought some wrapping paper and some Chilean wine.

Craig: I know. Exactly. Baubles. Here’s some baubles.

John: Absolutely. Here’s a wind vane.

Craig: I like that when you failed, your dad tried to make you feel better instead of what I had, which was just anger on top of shame. Your dad was cool. That’s nice.

John: Cool dads, that’s the best gift of all.

Craig: Cool dads are the best gift of all. You hear that, my kids?

John: Thanks, everyone.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Megana: Thanks.

Drew: Thanks.

Craig: Merry Christmas!

Links:

• Netflix Viewership Data
• The absolutely legitimate, incredibly useful Indian English word you’re not using by Diksha Madhok
• Homographs
• The Very Best Cookie In The Whole Wide World
• DeLuscious Cookies
• Levain Bakery
• Clue Conspiracy
• Dessert Person by Claire Saffitz
• Upright Steamer
• The Kelly Clarkson Connection
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
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• 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: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 622 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Our guest today is the writer-director of the acclaimed indie films Following and Memento. He’s gone on to make movies including The Prestige, Insomnia, Interstellar, Inception, Tenet, and The Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film is Oppenheimer. Welcome to the podcast, Christopher Nolan.

Christopher Nolan: Thank you very much.

John: We’re so excited to have you here. It’s great to finally meet you, because I’ve known your brother Jonah for a long time. He’s been on the show two or three times, but I’ve never met you.

Christopher: Very nice to meet. He speaks very highly of you.

John: Usually, when Jonah’s on with Lisa, we’re talking television, because they are mostly making television stuff. Today I only want to talk about big screen movie stuff and just stuff that’s on giant screens, stories that tell themselves in two hours or a little bit more than two hours.

Christopher: It’s a while since I hit two hours.

John: Absolutely.

Christopher: But yes.

John: But also, stories that are a onetime journey, where it’s not about coming back for next week.

Christopher: Absolutely. No, a very different shape to things.

John: I want to get into that. I want to get into your history with cinema, how you think about movies, your work as a screenwriter who is going to be directing your own movies. Then we’ll look at some scenes from Oppenheimer and really look at how those scenes work on the page.

Christopher: Great.

John: Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I’d love to ask you a listener question. They wrote in with a general question, but you’re the perfect person to answer it, because they asked about dreams in movies and how dreams in movies function. You’re a person who has some experience with dreams in movies.

Christopher: I do, yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about that and trying to make that work, so yeah, happy to talk about it.

John: Cool. Let’s get into it. You are five days older than me, but have a very different history going into it. When I look through the stories of Christopher Nolan as a young child, he picked up his father’s Super 8 camera and started shooting films. Is that accurate, or is that just a story that people tell? That’s how it really started?

Christopher: No, it’s accurate. I mean, look, at our age that was the thing. The Super 8 camera was the go-to mechanism for recording family images back then if your family was lucky enough to have one. My dad had one he was very pleased with and proud of. He lent it to us as kids, which now as a parent, I don’t know what he was thinking. We did wind up destroying it eventually. In later years, I strapped it to the bottom of a car and broke it. He was very upset with me. But that was some years later. For my whole childhood, I was always filming things and putting images together, trying to cut images together on the old Moviola, Super 8’s wonderful format.

John: We had to do it in film school. We had to use Super 8s. You’re literally just taping little pieces of film to the wall as you’re trying to put stuff together. It’s so barbaric and primitive.

Christopher: It is, but I just unboxed the brand new Kodak Super 8 camera that they’ve been promising for years to make. It’s finally a real thing.

John: It’s great.

Christopher: It keeps coming back. It’s a wonderful format.

John: Now, you had the technology to shoot little films, but did you have a sense of what cinematic storytelling was? Because it’s one thing to have a camera. You’ve seen movies. But when did you have a sense that there was a script before there was a movie? In trying to make those early experiments, were you writing anything, or were you just going out and shooting stuff?

Christopher: No, we were just going out and shooting things. I really was seven years old, eight years old, getting together with friends and doing riffs on Star Wars that had just come out. The interesting part about that as it relates to narrative is that it’s different for different writers, but for me as a filmmaker first and foremost, writing came to me over time as a way of formalizing my instinctive process of putting one image after another to create some kind of sensation of narrative. We’re talking silent Super 8 films. As these things become longer, as you move into 16 mil and you start making things that you need more structure to, need more form to, then you start writing.

That to me is always something I’ve tried to bear in mind about my own process is that when you embrace the screenplay form, as I have over the years, and come to really love it, you always have to remind yourself that the initial impulse, and therefore the thing that people are watching films for, is that string of images telling a visual narrative when we’re talking about cinema. It’s nice to have that recollection, to have that physicality of holding images in my hand, taping them together. It stays with me just as a sort of guiding principle as I’m getting lost in the words.

John: You talk about moving from the Super 8’s images, a series of images, to having to figure out a bigger plan for it. It reminds me of actually the history of film cinemas. The initial things, the original screenplays were just a list of shots, and eventually had to figure out like, “Oh no, it’s a little bit more like a play. We have characters interacting with each other. We actually need to find ways to portray that.”

Christopher: Yeah. It’s very interesting, I think, to try and analyze how screenwriting fits in with editing. As a writer-director, I do a lot of editing on the page. I very much enjoy the technology we have with word processing. It’s technology that’s been around a long time. But I wrote my first screenplay on a manual typewriter, so to me it’s still a bit of an innovation.

I love overwriting and then editing the same way I edit the images and, indeed, the dialogue and stuff when we get in the edit suite. I think the relationship between the two is very interesting, because editing is a key feature of cinema that’s not shared in other media. Eisenstein, he summarized it, “Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C.”

In the case of Oppenheimer, for example, this came into play in a very major way when I went to the Institute of Advanced Study, which is where Oppenheimer is the director. We filmed there eventually. I met the current – or he was then the director of the IAS, Robert Dijkgraaf, very brilliant string theorist, brilliant scientist. I was talking about what I was doing in the film and how I was going to try and show the thought process of a quantum physicist thinking about atoms, thinking about molecules. He said this terrifying thing to me. He said, “Of course, a lot of the scientists at the time in the 1920s were alienated by the fact that you could no longer visualize the atom.” As a filmmaker, you’re going, “Hang on. That’s the job I’m going to have to do.”

I’d written this into the script as indications of types of images and tried to do it in a relatively free form, poetic way, just to suggest to everybody what it might be. But in talking to Dijkgraaf, I started to realize that what we can do with imagery, with editing, is we can take Image A, Image B, make Thought C. If you’re dealing with, for example, the duality of waves and particles when you talk about light, to be able to show waves, show particles, have the audience combine them in their minds. I was dealing with that at script stage, but also thinking ahead technically to where that’s going to be.

I think that one of the things that I try to do in my writing at a certain point – it’s not usually with the first draft – or maybe in one area of the script or something, I’ll try to start thinking like an editor as I’m writing, and how the juxtaposition of images is going to be something more. I don’t know. I would be interested to get your thoughts. It’s intriguing to speculate, does the screenplay form sufficiently communicate the editing process, can it sufficiently communicate the editing process? I try to game the system by – in Oppenheimer I put all the black-and-white scenes into italics, for example – trying to find ways to give the reader the feeling of editing.

John: Greta Gerwig was in your seat a couple years ago talking through Little Women. That was a story that also jumped back and forth between a present timeline and a past timeline. For her script, all the scenes that were in the past were in red. Rather than in italics, they were in red. We talked through that as a process.

For folks who haven’t seen the Oppenheimer screenplay, if you’ve seen the movie, you know that there’s two concurrently running stories. There’s Fission and Fusion. Fission is Oppenheimer’s story more directly. It’s in color. That’s him telling his story. It’s the “I, narrator” part of that. Then there’s the story of Fusion, which is the investigation after the fact. It’s all done in black and white. In the screenplay version of it, all those black-and-white scenes are in black and white. How early on in the process of putting this together did you realize you were going to tell those two stories that way, that those were going to be in black and white, and that on a page you would delineate them differently?

Christopher: Really before I wrote anything, other than notes. My process has tended to be more and more one of spending months thinking about the film, thinking about the script, what it’s going to be, and almost not letting myself write until I feel like really I’m ready to go, like I really need to. Structure to me is part of that.

My first film, a film called Following, which is shot 16 mil, black and white, has a nonlinear structure. I came up with the structure before I wrote the script. That’s what I generally do. It’s three braided timelines. I decided the way I want to write the script, I’m going to write it chronologically, so that everything makes sense, and I know that it all works, base rules, and then I’m going to cut it up. In fact, then I was probably physically cutting up. Actually, I think I had a word processor for my second draft. But for the first draft, where I wrote it chronologically, I was typing it out and then cutting and pasting it to the structure. That didn’t work very well, because what I found is you then had to rewrite endlessly to try and create the flow.

John: Because the experience of the reader, the experience of the viewer is going to be start to finish.

Christopher: Exactly.

John: They’re not jumping that same way that you are.

Christopher: They’re not jumping that same way. What I had uncovered is the reason why applying an editorial structure to a project that didn’t have it baked into the script never works. The studios will go to that sometimes. It’s sort of, “How do we say this thing?” But you always feel it, because it has to be part of the script.

Now, with Following, it was written to the structure. In my mind, I’d figured it out, but I thought that I would cleverly write it chronologically, rearrange it. The amount of rewriting involved in that was such that I’ve never done that since. I’ve always now written, whatever the structure is, I write from page 1 through to page 123 or whatever, or in the case of Oppenheimer, 180.

That way, when you’re doing a film like Memento, for example, which has an inverted chronology… I say nonlinear because – it’s actually very linear – it’s very connected, but it is inverted. If you analyze that screenplay, I wrote it from the first image that the audience would see to the last, so it has a conventional three-act structure underneath, or underpinning the more elaborate temporal construction of it. I think that’s an important reason why the film worked for an audience.

John: When you’re writing a script, be it Following or be it Oppenheimer, who is your intended reader? Who do you visualize reading the script, or do you visualize a person who’s sitting there reading through the script, and that you are whispering in their ear to them the story?

Christopher: I think it depends on what mood I’m in. I think sometimes it’s the person at the studio who’s going to read it, literally, because you’re thinking about you’re selling something that you already know is worthwhile, if you like. But at other times, it’s very much for myself or for a perceived audience.

I always try to view the screenplay first and foremost as a movie that I’m watching. I’m seeing it as a series of images. I’m imagining watching it with an audience. Then I think before I ever show it to anyone, there’s a pass where I’m imagining the studio reading it. What do we actually have on the page? What works?

One of the big differences I’ve found in terms of nonlinear construction – I think right back to Following, every project I’ve done – when I’ve got into the edit suite, I have found the need to combine the first two sections of any nonlinear, segmented timeline. I did it with Following. I did it with Memento, definitely. I did it with Batman Begins, I remember. Oppenheimer, we did that.

What I’ve come to realize over the years is, because when you show someone a screenplay with a nonlinear structure, you have to teach the readers the structure right away. But movie audiences don’t respond to that. If you’re jumping around too much at the beginning of a movie, the audience just lets it wash over them, and they wait for the movie to start. They wait to find their feet. With every project, I’ve simplified the structure at the front-end so that the audience can connect with the characters and can connect with the type of narrative it is, and then you start jumping around.

I’m fascinated by these things. It’s an area where you see the inadequacy of the screenplay formatting. A lot of filmmakers have chafed at this. Stanley Kubrick famously would swap around the margins and have the dialogue run to the outside margins and the stage directions in the middle. Everyone’s struggling against, “Okay, how do I make a film on the page?” I’m fascinated by that. I don’t mind it. I enjoy the screenplay format very much. I could never write a novel. I wouldn’t know how to find an authorial voice in that way. I love the screenplay form, because it’s stripped down, bare bones. You’re writing things as if they were facts, things that happened. For me, it’s a really fun way to write, but there are these endless conundrums. Do you portray the intentionality of the character? Do you portray a character opens a drawer looking for a corkscrew?

John: That’s information that’s not necessarily in evidence, but-

Christopher: Unless they pull the corkscrew out-

John: Absolutely.

Christopher: … how is anyone ever going to know that? I started off in my early scripts being very, very rigid. I wouldn’t even use a character name until somebody had called the character by name. That was very useful for me as a screenwriter but also as a director, a writer-director, because it meant that I was always aware of the fact of have I communicated the information about who this character is or haven’t I.

The problem is you have to show the script to a lot of people who aren’t reading your screenplay as a movie. They’re reading it as a screenplay. They’re reading it for information about what character they’re playing or what costumes are going to be in the film or whatever that is. Over the years, it varied project to project, but you try to find a middle ground where you’re giving people the information they need, but you’re not violating what you consider your basic principles as a writer.

With Oppenheimer, I decided to write the script in the first person. In doing that, I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t cheating, because the temptation if you start writing the first-person, start writing the, “I went into the room. I sat down at the desk,” all the rest, I love the effect that had on the writing and the relationship with the reader to the film, but I didn’t want to cheat. And so what I did is I wrote quite a few scenes at the beginning, maybe almost the whole first act in the third-person, conventionally, so that I knew that everything worked technically the way it needed to for a screenplay. Then I put it into first-person without changing anything other than the… That worked beautifully for me. That hooked me right in. I knew I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t describing thoughts that no one would be able to convey, that kind of thing.

John: For listeners who haven’t read through these pages yet, it’s a little shocking at first, when you first come across the “I” on the page. You’re reminded that screenplays are traditionally written in either the third-person or the second-person plural, “we hears,” “we sees,” as if you’re an audience member staring up at the screen. In your screenplay, I still feel like I’m an audience member watching, but the “I” in this is Oppenheimer. In all the places where you would’ve had to type Robert or Oppenheimer, you’re typing “I,” and there’s “mes” and there’s some “wes.” The first time you catch a “we,” you realize, oh, it’s not we as the audience, it’s Oppenheimer and another character, which is exciting and thrilling. But it does anchor us into his point of view through that whole sequence, that he is always the person driving that scene. He’s our POV character in all those moments.

Christopher: It was a big breakthrough for me. I knew the structure I wanted. I knew that I wanted to tell the story subjectively. But I knew that I didn’t want to use voiceover. The thing about voiceover, it’s seductive when you’re looking for a subjective storyteller, because of that first-person. I was actually stuck.

My brother Jonah and I, we were quarantining in a house together. I was writing downstairs. He was writing upstairs. Came up with this idea, and I thought, I’m not going to say anything to him. I’m just going to rewrite what I’ve done and then show him the first act, just say, “Look, just gut check, what do you think?” without drawing any attention to it, because I was very excited by it. It freed me up from feeling the need for voiceover, because I felt that the script was giving me the subjectivity in a different way. He read it and was like, “Yep, don’t know why no one’s done that before, but that works.” What he said to me made me laugh. But for years and years, I’ve written scripts where you have to read the stage directions. I’ve never found any way to get anybody to read the stage directions.

John: Of course.

Christopher: He said to me, “You finally found a way to get people to read the stage directions,” because when you put them in the first-person, people value them as information, so they read all of them. Indeed, with this script, people really did read the stage directions in a way that they never have in my other scripts.

John: Since we’re on medium, would you mind reading, on page 1 of the script, it’s scene 2. Basically, we’ve opened the film with this imagery that you talk about, this poetic imagery, “A vast sphere of fire, the fire of a thousand suns, slowly eats the night-time desert.” There’s two quotes. But then rather than moving into a location, we’re landing on a face. Would you mind reading us that?

Christopher: Yeah, Scene 2. “A face. Gaunt, tense, eyes tightly shut. The face shudders- the sound ceases as my eyes open, staring into camera: Peer into my soul- J. Robert Oppenheimer, aged 50, close-cropped graying hair. The gentle sounds of bureaucracy… Super title: ‘1. Fission.'” That’s the one time where we have Fission, and then we have Fusion.

John: How early on in the process did you decide to start in this moment? Through a lot of this movie, we’re inter-cutting between two hearings or two moments, two events. One is this room, 2022, this Atomic Energy Commission interview. There’s also a Senate hearing. How early in the process did you know that those were going to be keystone, anchoring moments for the story?

Christopher: I had to know that before I started writing the script. I can only start writing when I have the structure in place. I was adapting American Prometheus, wonderful book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, I think. It took 25 years of research and writing for these guys to produce this book. It’s this incredible resource, but it’s 700-and-something pages. It’s a massive tome. My approach was to read it, not take notes, nothing, read it again. I read it a couple of times and then just spent a lot of time thinking about what had struck me about it, about what I was interested in, what I would tell somebody about this story. Based on those notes, I started to feel out what were the things that were going to give me the structure I wanted. I knew I wanted subjectivity. In a way, to do that, I felt like I also needed objectivity crosscut with that. I needed two timelines braided together.

There’s a reference about two-thirds of the way through American Prometheus. There’s a reference to the Senate confirmation hearings that Lewis Strauss, ultimately the antagonist, we’ll reveal to be the antagonist in the story, was subjected to. As a writer, immediately grabbed that and went, oh, there’s a really interesting relationship between what happened to him in five years – I think it was five years later, ’59 and ’53 – what he had done to Oppenheimer and then what was done to him. Very, very similar. As a writer, you’re always looking for those kind of poetic echoes, those kind of rhyming relationships in narrative. I chased that down.

I went to the Senate congressional record of those hearings, went through the testimony and found some incredible things in there, and then started to create in my mind this timeline of, okay, if we keep coming back to this, we keep coming back to the greenroom, him preparing for his testimony, and then eventually we go in and we see the testimony. We see those things based on the transcript, when scientists came and testified against him in this very public way. I got really interested in the parallelism with the security clearance hearings of Oppenheimer, which were done in exactly the opposite way.

What happened to Strauss was very, very public, and it was in a very grand setting, in Washington. What he had put in place, orchestrated for Oppenheimer, was more or less a broom closet. It was the most, deny him all of the limelight, sweep it all under the rug. The contrast of the two things, that, I started to get excited about. There are all kinds of interesting parallels of what happened to him.

For example, I started to realize, while reading the objections in the Oppenheimer transcript, which is also about a thousand pages – and I made it all the way through that one, because it’s so compelling – I found things like Oppenheimer strongly and his lawyers strongly objecting to the fact they had no list of witnesses. Strauss in the congressional testimony is making the same complaint, that they’re not giving him a list of witnesses. Things like that, that as a writer, you’re like, “This is such a gift.”

Then of course, you have the fun of going into these written transcripts that have no indication of tone, of voice. They’re not giving you any information. They’re very dry in terms of the format. In a funny sort of way, not to sound massively pretentious, but you have to interpret them. It felt a bit like what my friend Ken Branagh must do when he does a Shakespeare film, where he’s having to… Yeah, the words are there, but what are you going to do with them?

That was really a fun thing, but it also felt I’ve got a responsibility, actually, because you’re taking Edward Teller’s exact words that he said about whether Oppenheimer should be given the security clearance, and then you’re editing them, presenting them to the actor, presenting them dramatically in the screenplay, saying, what did that mean? I’m pretty sure I knew what it meant, but you don’t actually get to hear them say it, because there are no recordings.

John: You have the book. You have your original research in two different areas, all this stuff. But we skipped over the part of why you were curious about it in the first place. This is a book that existed, that was acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning. But when did it enter into your orbit, and what made you read it the first time and the second time and the third time? When did you decide, “This is a story I want to tell. This is a movie I want to make.”

Christopher: Something of a long story. Oppenheimer first came into my consciousness when I was a teenager growing up in United Kingdom. The threat of nuclear weaponry was very much in the news. It was very much in the zeitgeist at the time. It was something we were all very, very concerned about.

John: We’re the same age. That very much was that experience. That was our anxiety source at all times.

Christopher: You remember the pop culture at the time, things like The Day After and Threads and these movies, When the Wind Blows, Sting’s song Russians, where he refers to Oppenheimer’s deadly toys. I think that’s probably the first time I encountered the name. Over the years, he’s a personage, I didn’t know a lot about him, but things about him would pop into my conscious, probably a lot from my brother, actually, who was very interested in these kind of things. But at some point, I got a hold of the bizarre fact that in the buildup to the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists could not completely eliminate the possibility of a chain reaction that would destroy the world, and yet went ahead and pushed that button.

I included that in my previous film, Tenet, in the screenplay, because I needed a strong and understandable analogy for a very complex science fiction conceit. I think it was one of those moments of the screenplay, it always felt like it would probably come out of the finished film, because it’d be too much, too much dialogue, whatever. But when we would screen it for people, they grabbed a hold of the Oppenheimer name. It was something they knew a little bit about. Even if they’d never heard that story, they knew it was a real thing. So we kept it in the film, and it was important to us in the film.

As a wrap gift, Robert Pattinson, who’s in Tenet, he gave me a book of Oppenheimer’s published speeches from the 1950s, where he’s speaking to the issue of how to control what to do about this new technology they’ve unleashed on the world. It’s terrifying reading this stuff, reading these brilliant minds discussing how to stop the world being destroyed. It brought it all back to me, really.

Then Emma and I – Emma Thomas, my producer and my wife – we spent a weekend with our old friend Chuck Roven, who produced The Dark Knight trilogy with us. He suggested that I read American Prometheus. He knew the rights-holders. It was something he’d been trying to push forward. I read it, and it was that wonderful feeling you get where you’ve been interested in something, you’ve been trying to explore it in different ways, but not quite knowing what to do with it, and then you read this book that’s so definitive.

As a writer, when you’re working, particularly when you write on spec, because I always write on spec – I write the screenplay, and then I try to write a home for it – and so you don’t have a legal department. You’re on your own. It’s like, okay, I need authority. I need an authoritative source that I can contain myself to, just look at that, get my facts from there, and know that I’m playing in the world of credible, call it journalism, credible writing that’s been vetted over the years, so I’m dealing with the truth as best people can understand it. The different points of view are presented fairly, as they are in the book. It’s a very good book. That gave me the confidence to want to start telling the story. It started to show me what the shape of it could be. By dealing with J. Robert Oppenheimer as an individual, as a person, with all his human flaws, with all of his brilliance and all of that, how the entire history of nuclear weapons, the way in which the world had shifted and pivoted on its axis, it gives you a very accessible point of contact with that.

John: Yes. That’s great. Now, looking at your produced credits, this seems to be your first adaptation, or first real-life story, but you’ve gone through this process before. This wasn’t your first time tackling a historic subject to do this, right?

Christopher: For British people, Dunkirk is a very well-known, a very important piece of national history, or even mythology, really. As I approached it and I looked at and I researched it, I realized that to tell the story the way I felt it needed to be told, I couldn’t do that with real-life people. I needed to invent characters to take you through. It’s a slightly strange comparison, but it’s not unlike Titanic, what Cameron’s doing there, where he needs fictional characters to be able to move them through the event in such a way that you get a full understanding of the geography of it or the fact of it.

The thing about Dunkirk is it’s a story of collective endeavor. It’s a story about massive numbers of people and movements of people and how that works. There’s a tricky thing with how you approach that. A lot of filmmakers, a lot of writers have done it in very different ways. I think if you were writing it for television, it would be one approach. I think for a feature, what I felt would work – and it seemed to work well for audiences – was to create fictional characters with no backstories, no conventional character treatment.

The script was a very, very experimental document. It was very short. It was a 90-page script. The characters were really just their actions. That’s what these characters were. Some people you would show that to would get it. Some actors you show it to would be confused by that. Others would get it. But I felt that was the way to take you through that very large event and have an understanding of the geography of it, the politics of it, the thing of it. It was very minimalist dialogue. It was, as I say, no backstories for characters, things like that. It was very stripped down.

Coming to Oppenheimer, it’s a similarly important story. Dunkirk is sacred ground for British people. I think the Manhattan Project, the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, these things are unbelievably important to the world as a whole, and particularly to America and Japan. You’re then looking at, okay, how do you take on something that’s so much bigger than what a movie can be, in a way, and taking the real-life person, taking the opposite approach to Dunkirk and saying, okay, this is actually his experience, and we’re going to lock into his point of view on everything.

Then the other thread, the more objective thread comes in, in order to give you the necessary exposition about what happens to him later in life, about the politics, about how his actions then interact with the establishment, and introduces this character of Lewis Strauss that I became very, very obsessed with – and Robert Downey Jr ultimately played him in the film – and their relationship. I looked at it from almost the Salieri-Mozart view from Amadeus, which is a wonderful, wonderful play and then film, about rivalry and the weirdly trivial personal interactions that can drive a very destructive rivalry.

John: How early in the process did you have a sense of thematically… You knew that you were talking about Oppenheimer. You had a sense that Strauss would be the other central character. But was it during the writing process that you found those thematic things that tied together? You talked about rhymes that happen. Compartmentalization as a theme, the way that you try to hold different parts of your life separate, the question of who wants to justify their whole life, which is asked twice in the course of the story, when did you know that those were going to be some of the central questions and how things would thread together? You say you hold off writing as long as you can, then you sit down to do it. But how much discovery is actually happening while you’re typing?

Christopher: Enormous amounts. All the things you mentioned were discoveries of actually writing. What I try to come up with is the parameters. The structure’s very important, but the parameters, what the film’s going to be, what the three-act structure’s going to be. But you have to leave room to play. I love to overwrite, as I was saying earlier.

John: When you say overwrite, are you writing scenes that just go on too long or scenes that you don’t need at all?

Christopher: I tend to not write scenes that I don’t need at all. It’s more within the scene, particularly with the dialogue, I’ll tend to overwrite. It’s almost like stream of consciousness, monologues kind of thing, that you can then winnow away, find what’s in there that’s the thing you’re trying to express.

I think with thematic connections and ideas, I’ll write notes on those, but some of those ultimately prove too self-conscious. You don’t want to get caught doing it. I’ll write a lot of those, write a lot of notes. I don’t use the outline. I don’t use the notes. I’ll write the script. If I get stuck, I’ll then go back through pages and pages of notes, to see did I miss something, was this something. Sometimes you pick things up, and you put them back in. With those kind of elements, the elements you’re talking about are the things that sit outside the narrative in a way. They comment on the narrative. They’re the meta things. They’re very tricky.

John: They’re tricky unless characters are introducing them in ways that are germane to the scenes that they’re in. Compartmentalization is-

Christopher: Exactly.

John: … incredibly important within the context.

Christopher: It naturally starts to become a reflection or an irony that the person must oppose to compartmentalization, as Oppenheimer, and ultimately that’s what makes… It almost defines him by the end of the film. But I wasn’t too self-conscious about that. When I say tricky, I don’t mean… It’s exactly as you say. It has to be germane to the story, or it has to be absolutely necessary so you do it anyway.

There’s a line in Dunkirk that always causes me a certain amount of, I don’t know, guilt or whatever, because I have a soldier late on talk about survival and define survival. I think the line is he says, “Survival is shit. Fear and greed squeeze through the bowels of men.” That’s the thing. I always knew that that’s not a valid line to have a soldier say in the middle of a situation. It’s a very retrospective sentiment. We all have these things. The joy of being a writer-director is you do get the ultimate say onto whether or not it stays. That’s one where it’s like, it’s wrong, but I’m glad it’s in the movie, and I kept it. Luckily, nobody ever demanded I take it out.

I read, years ago, an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson where he talked about things that you write into a script, and you’re like, “Oh, I’ll fix that later.” Quite often, they become things. Quite often, it’s the things that don’t work or the mistakes or the things that don’t quite fit the pattern that you wind up actually valuing, that give the thing its idiosyncrasy. For my process, as I write, I’ve done a lot of thinking, I’ve done a lot of notes about those kind of elements, and then I want to forget them and try and write from the point of view of character and story and what’s really going on in the narrative, what feels necessary.

John: Let’s talk about what’s actually on the page, because your writing style is relatively spare. You talk about you don’t want to intrude and reveal inner character thoughts when the audience wouldn’t necessarily be able to see those. You’re not describing sets much. We’re in these places often, but you’re not giving a lot of set decoration. You’re not talking a lot about wardrobe or props, unless they are used within the moment. Has that always been your style? Has your screenwriting style changed over the last 20, 30 years?

Christopher: I think for me, it’s been a continual journey to try and strip it down. I enjoy that style of writing anyway, but frankly, as scripts have gotten longer and the films have gotten longer and I’m trying to stuff more and more into the sausage, you really do try to strip it down. I try to write scripts that really will be a page a minute, which if you tend to over-describe things or describe things in too literary a way, the scripts are going to get very long. Then is anyone going to trust that you’re actually… I like to be able to look at the bones of it and know when I’m describing that stained glass window that’s behind you right now, that doesn’t take any screen time. I try to write in a way that reflects screen time, that reflects the kinetic energy. Then you strip down to just the necessary beats. Has it changed for me over the years? I think I got better at it. But different films require different approaches as well.

The funny thing is when you’re in it, when you’re writing – I’m sure this is the same for you – these things seem so important and unquestionable. I remember being at a party when I was writing Dunkirk. I was talking to a fellow writer, who writes TV. I said, “I’m doing this thing, and I’ve decided I want to write it with no dialogue,” whatever, and this, that, and the other, and said a few things. Then he said, “Why?” Of course, I had no answer. It was so clear to me that that would be a good thing to do, that that would be inherently somehow positive to strip away dialogue and just go with action for this cinematic thing.

You become very, very convinced – and I think you need to become very convinced – that you’re doing it the only way that it’s possible, the only way that would ever make a good film. Of course, it’s not true, and there are a million different ways to approach things. You try and get the right approach for the film you’re going to make.

John: You talk about kinetic on the page. You definitely sense the editor on the page. You have a tremendous number of pre-laps and post-laps that make it really feel like this is the experience of watching the movie, that the dialogue is going to anticipate the cut, that we’re going to continue on a little bit after the cut. Things are going to braid themselves together well. Someone who didn’t know might just assume, oh, it’s the editor who moved that stuff around, but it’s very deliberate and clear on the page. You get out of scenes with energy leaning forward that tumbles you into the next scene. That’s why the movie can be the length and the size that it is, and it still feels fast and still feels like it’s moving really quickly.

Christopher: There’s something that’s always been very important to me. Dunkirk actually was the extreme of that, because I came up with a structure based on a musical concept of the Shepard Tone, which is this audio illusion of continually rising pitches. I’ve always been interested. I’ve used it in scores for a lot of my films, actually, and for sound effects. The sound of the bat pod in The Dark Knight is a Shepard progression. I figured out that I could apply it to screenwriting, that in that instance of Dunkirk where I’m looking for this incredibly tense experience, I could braid the storylines together in such a way that one of them is always hitting a moment of crisis. There’s no relief in the film whatsoever, which is why the film had to be short, because there’s no time to catch your breath, which is the point of it. It was very important that that work on the page.

When I talked about the script for Dunkirk, I remember I literally said to Emma at some point, “What if we did it without a script? What if we just [indiscernible 39:33]?” She quite sensibly was like, “No, you need to go write the script.” What I was aiming at is looking for a way that the script could become transparent in a way, that it could be the guide for the kinetics of the cinematic action and just show you. I knew what I needed to film in terms of the physics of what was going on and which ships were sinking and what was going on with the mole or whatever. I was trying to look at it as a real-life event and staging it and shooting it. The screenplay was all about the points and moments of energy.

In a way, it’s not that I ever could’ve made the film without the script. I don’t think you can make any good film without a script. But the script was a map for how to edit the footage together, more than any other script I’ve ever written. That was really the whole point of it. It was a map for Lee Smith, my editor on that film, to sit down and go, “Okay, this is how this all works,” and to tell us how to shoot it in a way that would accommodate that.

With Oppenheimer, it’s a more conventional approach, more traditional approach, but always, that same element is important to me, of trying to incorporate editing into the craft of writing, not because you’re trying to jump ahead, because you know where you want [indiscernible 40:47] because that’s what a screenplay needs to do, because you’re writing it for a medium that enjoys this great privilege of Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C. One filmmaker I showed Oppenheimer to early on said a really wonderful thing to me. You talked about how the film is all montage. What this filmmaker liked about that was that’s what movies do. That’s what’s unique to the medium.

John: That’s why you didn’t make a play. You could’ve made a play.

Christopher: Exactly.

John: Your sense of those two storylines happening, you could’ve done it as a play, but it’s not a movie. It’s very different structure, very different idea.

Christopher: Exactly. That leads you to this, I don’t know what you want to call it, guiding principle, whatever, impulse, that says that the document of the screenplay has to embrace editing. For me, that has to be part of my writing process, or I’m not using the screenplay for what it can do fully. It’s like tying a hand behind your back. When I talk about overwriting, I’m really talking about within a scene and then all the script as a whole and then trying to winnow it down and just really use editing in a very surgical way, to strip things down, but be able to explore a lot of different ideas at the same time.

John: What is your writing process? When do you like to write? How much are you trying to get done in the course of a day? When you actually sat down to write Oppenheimer, what was your workflow like?

Christopher: I think, like a lot of writers, I like to write about five minutes before I actually start writing, and then I like to write about 10 minutes after I’m finished. I think writing’s very hard and very lonely. Like all writers, I try to find my way to trick myself into it, into whatever. I’ve learned a few things over the years.

When I went to university, I went to a lecture by Julian Barnes, a novelist, and he said a thing that stuck with me and I’ve used myself, which is, at the end of an evening or a day’s work, he’ll try to finish halfway through something, because then when he comes back the next day, he knows where he’s going, and he can get started. That’s something I’ve definitely tried to do. I try to be reasonably disciplined and then write office hours for most of it, and then not do all-nighters or crazy hours until you absolutely have to, until you’re on the case of something.

The thing that I’ve learned, that every writer needs to learn, the thing that I know absolutely, is that feeling you have that you can write something, when you know, “Okay, I’ve got it now,” you have to write exactly then and get it on the page, because that feeling will disappear like a fart in the wind. It’ll be gone. You’ll come back to the desk, and you’ll be like, “What was it?” You can write notes. That’s not going to help. You just have to sit down and write it.

With Oppenheimer, I knew what the end of the film was going to be. That was important to me. It’s always important to know where you’re going with the end, with any movie. But I woke up in the middle of the night with the whole last three or four scenes figured out. I got up in my underpants, went down, crossed the garden into my office, sat and just wrote it. I think I didn’t get my computer. I think I wrote it on a legal pad. But I wrote it as foreseen, and it never changed.

I’ve learned that over the years. It’s a really important thing for everybody to know, because the feeling is so convincing that you’ll always be able to write it. It’s like being drunk, then sobering up, or vice versa. You’re a different person the next day, and you don’t have it anymore, and then you’ve got to think your way back into it.

I also like to use music a lot. What I’ve found is if I use music repetitively in my writing process, that’s another way, it’s another shortcut to getting back into the mindset that you were in a couple days ago, an emotional mindset.

John: At the start of a project, I’ll generally make myself a playlist of like, this is the music that reminds me of what this movie is.

Christopher: Exactly.

John: Then I can play that and like, “Oh, okay.” So if I have to come back to something six months later, “Oh, that’s right, that’s the John who was writing that,” and I can remember what that-

Christopher: Yeah. It’s a huge emotional connection, emotional cue. I find I’m unable to make a playlist in advance. I have to feel it out as I go try different bits of music, try to see what connects me to my excitement about the project. It’s a great shortcut for putting yourself back in a particular emotional state, because I think writing’s a very emotional process. People always view it as an intellectual process, but I actually think the actual writing is emotional. It speaks to that, when I was saying that those elements are tricky, those elements that are about or reflect on the narrative or create connections. Those are the intellectual things. They’re the things we like to discuss. But they have to be emotional. If they’re emotional in the story, then they work.

For me, I think a lot of my note-taking process and a lot of my thinking about what I’m going to do when I write, that is intellectual. I do a lot of diagrams. Big fan of Venn diagrams for different narratives or whatever. When I go to write, then I have to be in an emotional state, and I have to write from an emotional perspective.

John: Absolutely. You said those last scenes you wrote, they didn’t change at all, but looking through the script, I do see blue revisions, pink revisions, yellow revisions, so some stuff changed along the way. I asked because I’m working on the Scriptnotes book right now, which is due January 5th. Oh, god. The chapter I just went through was on script revision. Can you talk about what changed from the first draft to later drafts? Were they things you didn’t need, new stuff you decided to add? What was the process of changing stuff?

Christopher: When you’re into the color pages and you’re looking at those production revisions, that’s a complicated issue, because I’m a writer-director, so I will literally sometimes… I remember sitting on LaSalle Street in Chicago filming The Dark Knight. We flipped the [indiscernible 46:48]. I sat down on my laptop, and I wrote a scene and handed it to Gary Oldman or whatever. You’re often creating production revisions under different circumstances than they would normally track if you were in a writers’ room, for example, or if you weren’t on set. Quite often, the changes are weird little… We can’t shoot it in the barn; we’ve got to shoot it in the bar or whatever. You just change that. Then there are fundamental things.

For me, I think what changed in Oppenheimer, there weren’t enormous changes, but things evolved. This is why I very much enjoy directing my own material, being a writer-director, because things like the raindrops as an image, that wasn’t in the draft originally. That came. It’s not on page 1 of the script, because I didn’t want to put it in after the fact and pretend that it was being written that way. It was something that was indicated later in the script. Then as I came to think about it in logistic terms, it’s like, “Okay, that can play as a coda. It could play at the front. There’s things we can do with that.” It has more prominent placement in the finished film. With Jen Lame, my editor, her input, we’re saying, “Let’s try this right up front and really lead with it.”

But over the course of making the film, we started to make the correspondence between this image of the ripples and raindrops and then what he might see when he looks at a map, the circles of fire. I was getting Andrew Jackson, my visual effects supervisor, to make these things up on the spot, say, “Let’s take that raindrop footage, let’s re-project it somewhere, and let’s play around with it.” You’re developing these thematic visual ideas.

I try to use the script as an evolving document, and I try to keep it up to date, because for my own thinking, you can have a clever idea or an idea you think is good, based on what you’re shooting or what’s going on on set. But if it doesn’t work in the screenplay format, it’s probably not as good as you think, actually. I do try to keep the script up to date. I’m not trying to be mysterious with the crew and with my collaborators about how I’m going to use images. I’m trying to keep everybody up to date.

John: That’s great. It’s come time in our podcast where we do One Cool Things, where we recommend things to our listeners that they might want to check out. You have a book recommendation, apparently.

Christopher: I do. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. It was recommended to me by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It’s a fabulous book that deals with a lot of the things that Oppenheimer deals with. It deals with these brilliant minds and all sorts of extraordinary things in history. Very readable. I highly recommend it.

John: Excellent. Great. We’ll put that in the notes. My One Cool Thing is called Infinite Mac. It’s this emulator that just runs in your browser. You go to the site, and suddenly it’s like you’re in a time machine. You can fire up any old Macintosh. It just gave me such a rush of nostalgia for like, “Oh, I remember what that was like.” Suddenly, you’re on the desktop of a very old Mac SE running system 5.2 or whatever. You forget how stuff used to work. You forget just how floppy disks used to work and all the apps that were so important to me in the time, that are now all gone.

Christopher: I don’t. I’m still using them.

John: It’ll be all new stuff for you.

Christopher: It’d be brand new.

John: Time travel for me.

Christopher: Yes, it’s time looping back on itself. I remember very clearly. I’ve always used ScriptThing, which then became Movie Magic. I remember when it went to Windows, and it slowed down tremendously. I was like, “Can you run it on DOS?” You could run it on DOS. It has a DOS emulator within Windows.

John: Wild.

Christopher: I am the ultimate Luddite. I still go back to my Royal manual typewriter and do the odd scene on that just to reconnect with it.

John: That’s fantastic. Then I’ll send you another One Cool Thing. Someone sent through, the app that we make called Highland, it’s a guy who types on a manual typewriter, but then you basically take a photo of the page, and it scans it in, and it makes it an editable document. It’s if you want to write on a real typewriter, and then it scans it in, so therefore then it can be an editable document [crosstalk 51:12].

Christopher: That, I need.

John: Just for you, we’ll send you that link.

Christopher: Please do. That sounds fantastic.

John: That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies that are great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on dreams. Christopher Nolan, an absolute pleasure to get to talk to you about screenwriting.

Christopher: I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.

John: Cool.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Jamie in San Francisco, he wrote in to ask, “I wonder if you could talk a bit about the use of dreams in screenplays. John describes dreams as the brain doing laundry or taking out the trash. Craig attributes no meaning or significance to his own dreams. But in movies, it seems the opposite is almost always the case. More often than not, they show us the past or the future or some deeper meaning to the present. Are they a crutch? Are they overused? Are they tropey? Talk to us about dreams.” You made a whole movie where dreams play a giant role. What is your actual belief about dreams for human beings, but also dreams in movies?

Christopher: Dreams in movies, it’s very complicated. It took me many, many years to crack Inception, because dreams in movies don’t work, basically. They feel like a cheap… They tend to shortchange the audience. The audience has a very sophisticated mechanism for constructing the reality of a film, that when you then invalidate something, your brain discounts it from the narrative enormously. It’s something that I think studios very often don’t understand about scale and how you achieve scale in a movie. You can have crazy, exotic, wild imagery that might look good in the trailer, whatever, but if it’s subverted in the narrative by being, for example, a dream, it gets written off.

It took me a long time to crack it. I thought a lot about why are dreams problematic in movies. I think it’s because movies are already dreams. I think the way we process films is very similar to the way we process dreams. They are collective dreams in a way. When you write dreams, it’s a hat on a hat. It becomes self-canceling if not handled in the right way.

I think with Inception, I think the way I managed that was to keep dreams extremely grounded and make a big point of the fact that you don’t know you’re in a dream when you’re dreaming it, those kind of things, and constantly remind and involve the audience in the mechanics of the technology that’s using the dreams. The film rarely allows itself to become too metaphysical, too poetic, in the way that dreams often are in films. I think they’re very tricky.

As far as in real life, what are they, that’s hard to answer really. I think they’re our way of processing our lives in a different way, looking at them from a different angle. I think they’re a very healthy and necessary process. I also think, as I say, that films have a wonderful relationship with dreaming and with dreams, and they are our way of connecting. We remember films very much the way we remember dreams.

I had a very interesting experience many years ago. I watched David Lynch’s Lost Highway. I had a peculiar experience. I think I was watching it on VHS at home. I did not connect with the film. I found it impenetrable. I found it boring. I almost didn’t finish watching it, because I was watching it on VHS. Put it to one side, whatever. I’d watched it on my own. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it, wasn’t particularly interested to talk about it. Then about two weeks later, I found myself remembering Lost Highway as if I were remembering one of my own dreams. I realized that however he’d done it, Lynch had found a way… I’m trying to remember which way around it. It is like a tesseract, is a projection of a hypercube, three dimensions.

John: Absolutely.

Christopher: He found a way of un-peeling the way a dream works in our brain, feeding it to us as a narrative, so that it lives in your brain as a dream. I think it’s one of the strongest examples of that connection between the way we process sights and sounds and motion pictures and the way we feel about our own memories and dreams and those confusions.

John: You talking about Memento leads me to another answer to Jamie’s question, is that I think so often dreams don’t work in movies because there are no stakes. There’s no consequence.

Christopher: Exactly.

John: Just characters within that. What you do with Inception so well is that there are huge consequences. The whole thing is about the consequences and the plan for why this dream is happening. We as an audience know why this dream is important, why it matters, and what is at stake for the characters. Nightmare on Elm Street, we know that those dream sequences actually matter, because the character is going to die in a dream.

Christopher: Exactly, or The Matrix. The Matrix, it’s dreaming. It’s induced by the machines, but that simple thing of your mind makes it real and the blood coming out somebody’s nose, and you know, okay, yeah, there are stakes. Very similar to William Gibson novels like Neuromancer, where you have that concept of how you can be hurt. Is it Black Ice? I can’t remember. The internet becoming a thing that can actually hurt you, cyberspace becoming a thing that can actually hurt you. Then yeah, the stakes are there.

But the truth is, I think with dreams in particular, even introducing stakes, there’s still a real danger with the imagery of them, with the fanciful nature of the imagery, and what it buys you and what it doesn’t buy you, how it integrates into the film. You want everything you put in the film to be owned by the narrative. You want it to feel solid and valid as something you’ve paid your $15 for, bought your popcorn. Otherwise, you feel cheated.

In a weird way, it’s a little off topic, but when I showed Ken Branagh the script for Oppenheimer, he did ask me, as a fellow filmmaker – this is why it’s great to work with other filmmakers, even if they’re just acting in a film – but he said to me, “You’re never cutting away to World War II or to the War Room.”

I thought about it. It’s like, okay, I’ve seen a lot of films do that. Particularly in a CG era, those images, they tend to sit as if they’re not in the film. They actually make the film feel smaller. They’re always in there as an attempt to make the film feel bigger, but they actually shrink the world of the film, because they don’t feel valid. They don’t feel earned. As I say, in a CG era, the texture of them will be completely different to the main unit photography. I think the treatment of dreams in films, the other thing it’s like is voiceover. It can be amazing. It can be incredibly useful.

John: It has to be fundamental to the structure of the story.

Christopher: Exactly.

John: It has to be part of the social contract at the very start of the film.

Christopher: Exactly.

John: Clueless doesn’t work without the voiceover, but if you try to put that in after the fact, disaster.

Christopher: Yes, and giving voiceover a bad name, because most often when you see it, somebody slapped it on at the end to try to make it work. But done right, planned, put into the script, that’s when it works.

John: Jamie did not know he was going to get you answering his question about dreams. I think Jamie’s probably very excited that you weighed in here. Christopher Nolan, thank you again.

Christopher: Thank you.

Links:

• Oppenheimer – The First Three Pages
• Christopher Nolan on IMDb.
• American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
• The Open Mind by J. Robert Oppenheimer
• The Shepard Tone
• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
• Infinite Mac
• 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 Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (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.