547 - The Fires, and Good Energy (Encore)
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Hey, this is John. As you likely know, this was a rough week in Los Angeles. High winds brought on massive wildfires that destroyed homes and displaced tens of thousands of people. And as I record this, it's still ongoing. But I want you to know that Craig and I are both fine, along with Drew and Meghana and your whole Script Notes team. We're all safe and lucky, honestly. Some of the folks you've heard on this podcast have lost their homes, lost everything, and

And in due time, we will talk with them about what happens next and how to help. For now, we're kind of in the getting through it phase. Now, the office where we normally record script notes is currently sheltering three humans, a dog and a cat who's looking at me right now. They're all currently evacuated from Santa Monica. Parts of Los Angeles have no power or no internet or have to boil their water. Other parts are weirdly normal until we get those terrifying alerts on our phones.

In time, we may learn who or what sparked each of these fires, but the reality is the planet is getting hotter and extreme events like this are getting more common. So this week, we are rerunning a conversation we had back in April 2022 with Anna Jane Joyner and Quinn Emmett discussing how to best talk about climate change on screen.

And I've been looking at a lot of screens this last week because I've watched helicopters dousing flames from the air. I've watched families returning to find their houses destroyed. And I'm reminded that so often we smash up things on screen without really showing the consequences, what happens the day after, the week after. We'll have giant monsters fighting each other in a big metropolis, but we never see the families whose lives are crushed underneath.

So whether you're hearing this episode for the first or the second time, I want to encourage you to think about the characters and not the plot so much. Like all of us, these stories are full of individuals making choices. We probably can't stop the fires, but we can help each other. Enjoy and be safe.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is episode 547 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we live on a planet experiencing climate change, yet the stories we tell tend to ignore this uncomfortable fact. We'll look at ways writers can address that with two of the folks behind a new campaign to put some good energy out there.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, we'll talk about how you ask for money, be that for making a movie or for launching a campaign to save the planet. But first, producer Meghana Rao is here and we have some follow-up to get through. Meghana, what stuff has come into the mailbox that we need to address on this podcast?

So Tony wrote in regarding episode 545, the nuclear episode, and he recommended this great film about Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world. And I'll include a link in the show notes. So this had come up as like, oh, someone should make a movie about Stanislav Petrov, who's the guy who's...

the Russian who did not start a nuclear war. And I sort of sat on the thing like, oh, we don't do movies about people who didn't do things. Exactly. Who's just in the way of things. I looked through the trailer of it because it says like, oh, like all these famous people are in this. Like, wow, how did I never hear about this? But it's like, it's a documentary that has like reenactment footage in it. So it's sort of a hybrid in between, but it's not a full on normal feature. Like scripted. Exactly. Yeah. So we'll put that link in the show notes for that.

What else have we got? So in episode 530, Jack Thorne introduced us to the One in Four Coalition, which is an organization that focuses on accommodations for disability in the UK entertainment industry. That's right. And so he was talking to us about how simple things like, you know, bathrooms are accessible for everybody and, you know, making sure that it's, there's a person on set whose responsibility is to really focus on making sure that people

people can do their jobs and that there's nothing holding them back because of accessibility issues. And so they've made some good progress in the UK based on sort of his speeches and other people doing that work on the ground. Absolutely. And then the Inevitable Foundation, which is sort of the American equivalent of that one in four coalition, just released a accommodations report this week. They sort of created a calculator to look at the cost of

what it would actually cost a production to have, you know, X percentage of disabled people on their sets or in their writer's room. So one of their missions is that they want to close the disability gap between real life and film and television because disabled people make up

20% of the population but represent like less than 1% of writers behind the screen. So they mostly focus on mid-level screenwriters. So in this project, they looked at sort of two budgets. So one was for a 24-week writer's room and they looked at the cost if there were 25% disabled writers versus 100% disabled writers. And

And then they looked at a 20-week budget for a 10-episode show and then did the same sort of thing and calculated the cost there. Great. So we'll put a link in the show notes to their report and also to this Hollywood Reporter article, which does a good job sort of walking through it. So this is Richie Siegel and Marissa, who you and I had actually spoken with before because I did a little thing with them for the Network Foundation. What I think is interesting is that they're putting some real numbers on what those costs would be because I think sometimes you're scared to sort of walk into that

those conversations. It's like, oh my God, it's going to be so expensive. But what I like about the report is they're focusing on some of the really small things. Like it could just be like adjustable chairs for different height people. Right. There's a simple thing and some things are more expensive like ASL interpreters for a thing, but also it scales differently with how many people need that thing on your set. And so if you need...

you know, an ASL interpreter for one person, well, that can scale up to more than that one person. And so it helps sort of the whole production when you have that stuff figured out in advance. And like some of the costs really weren't that big. And so I think the percentage cost for like those writer rooms, you know, it was sometimes like...

1% to 12%, but it wasn't like a crazy, crazy number. So compared to sort of the things we spend money on in Hollywood, it was not a huge number. Totally. And they break down all of the costs in this really easy to read way that feels so obvious. Like some of the things that they're asking for are like

But it also brings up that I think when you are someone who is lower level on a production or it's your first day at work, you're like, who do I ask for these things? And it can be so uncomfortable to ask for, you know, really small things that might make going to the bathroom easier. That's what I think Jack Thorne was really emphasizing. I think in their report, they were talking about having trained disabled people.

coordinator people, so that you know there's a person you can go to to ask for that thing. So you're not the person who has to go ask the producer for the thing. You can go to the specific person, just the same way we have a COVID testing coordinator and we have intimacy coordinators. Like there's a person whose job it is to really think about that for the production. And so it doesn't fall on the line producer or some other job. Right. So in the report, they survey 35 artists, writers, directors, showrunners, actors, and

And the combined projects that those people have worked on are like 600 productions. But something that I was so struck by is that productions are spending money on accommodations to make things more accessible. But it seems like the people that they're trying to help are being left out of those conversations. Yeah.

So in one example, the production had hired an ASL interpreter, but this person actually didn't... Yeah, they learned ASL on YouTube. They were not actually qualified to be doing the job that they were trying to do. Right, right. And like someone had celiac disease and someone gave them a gluten-filled donut and lied to them about it. And it's like, I just feel like I was so surprised by, and I guess it makes sense that it seems like the discomfort around...

dealing with people who are differently abled is preventing like any sort of communication from happening whereas like

you know, it's very normal for us to now ask, like, do you have any dietary restrictions? And I think it's just like a new way of framing how we approach people and set expectations before going into things. That's actually a good segue to framing expectations about how we are going to be working on sets and telling our stories as we transition to talking about climate. And so maybe we'll introduce our guests here for this week. First, I'm going to introduce Anna Jane Joyner. She has been working for over 15 years in climate communication strategy and campaigning.

Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Glamour, MTV, The Associated Press, New York Times, and more. Most recently, Anna Jane is the founder and director of Good Energy, which just released a playbook for how film and TV can welcome future storylines on climate issues.

Welcome, Anna Jane. Thank you so much for having me. An absolute pleasure to be here. So I saw you first at a presentation that happened this last week where you were rolling out this big playbook, which is a big giant event at the Academy Theater. I want to get into sort of like how this all came to be and sort of where you're at, but like, where are you at at this very moment? Because like just this past week, are you on a high? Are you trying to get your energy back? How are you feeling?

Yeah, kind of a combination. We'd been working on, well, the overall project for about three years, but on the playbook itself for a year. So it was kind of a whirlwind year. And it felt very surreal to see it actually come to life and be out there in the world and have this great reception both at the event at the Academy Museum, but also a lot of press around it and just general excitement. So definitely on a cloud.

So we're going to be putting links so people can read it, but I really want to talk through some of the workable ideas from it on this podcast. To help us out with that, Quinn Emmett is a screenwriter, investor, father of three small humans. He also created Important, Not Important, Science for People Who Give a Shit, which is both a podcast and a newsletter. It covers science news from climate to COVID, heat to hunger, agriculture to AI ethics.

Quinn Emmett, I can't believe you're finally on the show. Welcome. I know. I was wondering how many times my wife would make the cut before I did. And then every time I think about that, I think,

You should just keep having my wife on the show, probably. Quinn's wife is Dana Fox, Dana Fox Emmett, and who is one of my favorite humans on the whole world. So I got to see her married off to you at a great celebration in Virginia many years ago. So long ago, so long ago. Thank you for having me. You are a mentor to me, and I'm delighted to be here and to help Anna Jane any way I can. So the hook for this episode really is that this thing has just come out. So can you tell us what the playbook is, Anna Jane?

Yeah, so it's a playbook for screenwriting in the age of climate change, which is really just kind of an array of both inspiration and information. So it has kind of all the classic things you would think of, information on impacts, the science, solutions, but all of it ties back to story itself and screenwriting in particular.

And then it has a lot of fun sections on characters and, you know, a cheat sheet, a lot on climate psychology, because obviously that's very related to character development. It's really just an array of both great information and kind of tips, but also a lot of just inspiration and ideas that we hope people steal. Now, when Quinn first described it to me, I was expecting it to be like a book or a PDF, like some sort of

physical printed document and while there is a small version of that it's mostly a website and so if you go to goodenergystories.com you'll see like all the stuff that you have built out and it's a very elaborate array it's like I

I think it's designed so you can just fall into it and spend hours inside it looking through stuff. Now, Quinn, you've been writing about sort of climate issues for all these years, whether they're important or not important. How did you get involved with it and sort of what was the hook for you? Time is a flat circle and I don't remember much. So I don't remember how I got roped into this slash inserted myself, but I have been aware and aware.

so impressed by Anna Jane's journey over the past decade and all the contributions she's made to the movement from her personal story to her greater effect in climate communications. And I got into this because I was screenwriting and mostly sci-fi and tech and things like that. So I devised sort of this, um,

fire hose of, hey, what's the latest in science and tech and medicine and things like that? And I realized, you know, a lot of my friends weren't seeing that same news, folks who were interested in it. They were getting their news from Facebook, which turns out not so great for everyone. And, you know, that's just kind of what it's been. It's been this journey of, hey, how do I help people keep up with these things, but do something about it? And

What Anna Jane was working on was such a bizarre intersection of sort of my two jobs, which was it's very difficult to keep up with what's happening with this stuff, to truly try and understand it, to decipher disinformation from what really matters and...

if at all possible, to guess where we're going, but more importantly, to really identify with the folks who are already being affected, whether by choice or not, and the folks that are working, as I like to say, on the front lines of the future to do something about this, whether through mitigation or adaptation, and there's a million different ways. And that's about people.

and stories and characters and struggle. And Anna Jane said, we need to build something so that the folks in Hollywood who have a hard enough time making movies and TV and all that can find ways to build the most important story of our time into the most prolific storytelling mediums of our time. And I feel like what she built is just an incredible version of that. So,

So, Quinn, you're trying to distinguish between news, which is information and facts. It's a kind of storytelling, but it's not the kind of storytelling that involves characters. And so, Anna Jane, like, you know, we all do a segment on this show called How Would This Be a Movie? So...

imagining you as the protagonist who's building this organization, what is your character origin story? Like what gets you into doing this kind of work for 15 years? It's a journey. So I grew up in a conservative evangelical community. My dad is a mega church pastor. So definitely not who you,

most people think of becoming a climate activist and communications guru. But I went to UNC Chapel Hill and I took environmental science because it was supposed to be the easy science class and learned about climate change and just for

For me, the actual entry point was mountain tap removal coal mining, which is this kind of coal mining where they blow the tops off of mountains in Appalachia. And I grew up in Western North Carolina in the mountains and then on the summers and on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. So that hit me in a very visceral, emotional, personal way, just imagining the mountains near me being blown up and those communities being impacted. So that's what really got me into working on coal and environmental activism and climate. And then...

A few years later, when I was the campaign director for a regional nonprofit in North Carolina, I was approached by Years of Living Dangerously, which is a Showtime documentary series on climate.

And they wanted to follow me trying to convince my dad that climate change is real for a year. And we had a celebrity co-host, Ian Somerhalder, and we spent a year trying to convince my dad by introducing him to faith leaders who are climate leaders, but also some of the best climate scientists in the world. And that experience, I kind of, I intellectually understood the climate crisis and how severe it was.

But when I did that, I was like, okay, I really need to read up on all of this and like really immerse myself in the latest climate news. And I was just listening to a TED Talk by David Roberts. He's an amazing journalist. And he just went through it in such a simple way, like the climate crisis and the impacts of

And it just hit me. Like I just had this moment. I remember where I was driving, where I really emotionally understood what we were up against. And from that moment on, knew that there was never anything else I could do. And also working on Years of Living Dangerously introduced me to just the power of cinematic storytelling and the fact that we don't have enough of it. And so that is what really turned me more. I was already passionate about climate stories growing up in

religion is kind of a master class in storytelling so I knew the power of it but that's what really got me into TV and film and thinking about how to portray it on screen. Now thinking back of you as a protagonist we always talk about a protagonist has to sort of leave home and go on a journey and sort of be transformed in this. Was it

That speech that is the transforming moment or was it the first class that's transforming? What are the moments along the way that made you say, oh, this is what I meant to do. This is what scares me. This is the cave I fear to enter that I must enter. What were those moments?

Yeah, so that was definitely a big one. David Roberts, he kind of showed you like if we're at two degrees, this is the world and six degrees and like just in this powerful, simple way. And that's, you know, just showed how terrifying it was, frankly. And like it was a bet that he, that somebody on Twitter had kind of waged at him that he couldn't talk about climate change in 11 minutes or explain it in 11 minutes. And at the end, he just said,

your job, anyone who knows this, is to make the impossible possible. Like that is what we are up against and that's all of our roles. And I really took that to heart. So there was that kind of car moment listening to a TED Talk. And then I would say the other pieces. So about six years ago, I was working in New York for a company

company that was a B Corporation that had a non-profit climate arm and we had a creative agency in-house. So I got to do a bunch of my own documentaries and short films and work with a really amazing creative team. But I decided to move back to the Gulf Coast of Alabama, which is where my mom's family's from. And I had this sort of

A romantic idea of I'm going to move back to this place that's, you know, my family's been for five generations. That's very sacred to me. That's beautiful. It's right on the water. And it's also on the front lines of climate change. Like it's been called my little town of 500 people is a peninsula and it's been called one of the most vulnerable places in the country to climate change.

But when I got down there, I was not anticipating the real trauma and stress of living on the front lines of climate change. Like it's now like six months a year of hurricane season. It's just...

Every couple of weeks, you know, one of these starts forming and you just have to stop everything you're doing and prepare for, and it's traumatic, you know, and it's also like morally complex because you're praying that it doesn't hit you, but that means that it hits somebody else. And yeah, so that being down on the Gulf Coast has certainly brought climate home to me in a very, very personal way. And it has elicited...

I already had a lot of emotions and feelings about it, but it's certainly up to that experience of just really profound grief and anxiety about how this is already impacting us. Let's talk about the emotions because you said grief and anxiety, but also it sounds like this initial TED Talk was fear. I mean, basically, there's a monster there and we have to fight this monster. Yeah.

Yet the storytelling can't only be about fear and grief and anxiety. It has to be, there has to be positive things to talk about there as well and hope and optimism and courage. So as you're trying to develop this playbook for people to be telling stories in this space, how do you find those other emotions? Because I feel like the movies we've seen have always been about just doom. And so how do you key into those other things? Yeah.

Yeah, I think you're right. Like the tropes that we do see are the apocalypse in Doom or they're like a character who's shaming another character about their plastic straws or SUV or what have you, or their eco-terrace. There's a lot of that too. So we would love to see some more versions of climate stories, which is really the purpose of the playbook is to expand that menu of possibilities. And I do, I have two kind of feelings about it.

Dr. Britt Ray, who's an expert on climate psychology and mental health, has this great line of thinking or quote that like grief and anxiety isn't inherently bad and hope isn't inherently good. You know, like grief and anxiety are pointing you towards something. Like when you feel anxiety, and she's said this, like climate, it's not a pathology to feel anxiety about it. There's a reason we feel anxiety about it. So if you can really...

process that and turn towards doing something that this anxiety is pointing you towards doing, that is a really amazing transformation. And seeing characters go through that and really reckon with their difficult emotions around climate can very much not only help the writer process their own difficult emotions, but the audience as well. So I really love those stories where it's like the emotions show up and it's hard and you see how people work through them and reckon with them.

But I also think the courage, you know, and that's a form of finding courage, right? Like almost a lot of great stories are like that dark night and then you come out of it and then you find courage to go up against the impossible odds and

And I think that that's huge. Dr. Kate Marvel, who's a climate scientist and was one of our advisors and wrote the climate science section. She's also a beautiful essayist and storyteller. She has this great quote that we need courage, not hope to fight climate change. And reframing it that way for me was just so powerful because, you know, there are moments where it's hard to find hope. Like it is like a really big challenge and

Even just what we're already seeing, like with Hurricane Ida, when it hit New Orleans last year, I just cried for like two days, you know, because that's the Gulf Coast is going to change. You know, there's nothing we can do. So for me, it's more about finding courage. Like, how do we face this thing? And which is such a lot of what stories are about, like everything from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to the Jesus story is about going up against really big forces.

But I do think you can find hope. Like there's definitely still hope. We can still avoid the apocalypse outcome for our children. And no matter what direction we're going towards scientifically, we can build a society that can actually take care of each other so that as we're going through these impacts and transformations of our physical world, we can still take care of each other. Now, obviously, the...

actual changes that need to happen. There are some individual changes, but there's more societal changes, political changes. Those are the wheels that need to turn. But you're focusing on sort of what Hollywood's role is in this and sort of what the storytelling can be. So I want to take a moment to think back about what impact has Hollywood actually had

over the years in social issues and to what degree is it just reflecting things or what time is actually moving the needle? And so at our meeting, we were talking through sort of trying to brainstorm like what are examples of situations where Hollywood and film and TV actually did have an impact. One of the things I was thinking about was smoking. Is that like,

people used to smoke on screen and you just don't see smoking on screen. Smoking numbers have gone down and I think that is related. I think there's less smoking. It's not perceived as being cool anymore. And that's an example, a negative example. We see the CSI effect. And so because everyone watches the CSI shows in which there's perfect crime forensics, the expectation for juries is like, oh, there should be perfect crime forensics. It should be fast and easy and there should be DNA tests for everything. It should be easy and fallible. So there's

definitely an impact that Hollywood could have in terms of what Americans think is normal. And so I think you're trying to move the needle in terms of what Americans are thinking about in terms of climate. Absolutely. Yeah. Quinn, help me think through some of these other examples of bigger issues. Designated drivers. That's the thing that I think I see in movies a lot now and in TV shows. It's like it's not okay to be drinking, driving drunk. That's kind of way. Yeah.

Are there examples that you can think of? I mean, you guys have covered, I don't remember, it was sometime in the last 100 episodes, you talked about their portrayal of sort of dark government, right? And those sort of things and realizing like, hey, it might not be okay to keep showing these sort of things with how little we trust institutions these days for better or worse. But, you know, it's also the goal of this isn't to...

put the onus completely on Hollywood. And I think one of the things Anna Jane and I talked about a lot is it was really important in the language and the tone and the vernacular to not say, you're not doing a good enough job. It was important for us to say,

We need you. You're the best in the world at this. If there's anything you can get out of this, if one line prompts you to include one line in your movie or TV, or you have an entire show or an entire movie, entire series you want to bring out of this, that's great too. Because, you know, as Anna Jane was alluding to, 30,000 feet to come on down, right? We have actually made in the past 15 years or so, as we've scaled up

solar and wind and batteries and things like that, we've actually gotten rid of a lot of the worst case scenarios, right? With these sort of eight degrees of warming, seven, six, five, four. And just this week, there's a big article in Nature saying if every government fulfilled just their current pledges, which to be clear, aren't that great, we can keep it under two degrees. Of course, that's a big ask, right? But that's actually enormous. And every tenth of a degree really does matter.

And when you ask the question, okay, why?

what is it going to require for those governments to do that? It's going to require the kitchen sink, right? Just like defeating smoking wasn't just not showing people smoking on TV and movies anymore. It was the warning labels we put onto the packages. It was all the lawsuits. It was all those things. It was banning it in restaurants and all these different places. So the answer and sort of where I work a lot is people saying, okay, this is all great, but

What can I do? And the best answer to that, usually, whether it's COVID or climate or whatever it might be, is, well, what can you do, John? What is the intersection of your interests and your skills? And then I'll give you 70 different ways that are very measurable where you can have an impact. And what Hollywood screenwriters, or if you live in the UK, wherever it might be, Bollywood, whatever it might be, what you do is so impactful and has such reach,

and can have such exponential impact. Any publicity is good publicity. I mean, look at what happened with Don't Look Up, right? That matters so much. So again, the onus isn't you're not doing well enough. It's we need you because you do this one thing so well, while people like Kate Marvel, who's, again, an incredible essayist, but also one of our most impactful atmospheric scientists, right? All of these people are going to make a difference. And the impact that screenwriters make

can have and showrunners and story editors and people who work below the line to build these worlds that writers imagine. Everyone can have such a substantial impact. So if we can provide a tool for people to answer that question of what can I do?

then that's the least we can do. It just will help move the needle so much. And the answer is, we've made a lot of progress and we can make so much more, but we need everybody on board. Let's focus on some of the smaller things, the bigger things in terms of what screenwriters and TV writers can do to show impact of climate change and solutions to climate change on screen. So we'll put a link in the show notes to the specific page we're talking through. This is climate solutions on screen. Anna-Jane, can you talk us through just some of the simple things and we can...

also get into the bigger things. So I look at, so I know Norman Lear is involved in this organization as well. And I think to sort of what he did with the Jeffersons, which was like portraying a successful black family on screen and putting it in everyone's living rooms did have an impact. So there could be this

Big thing about like, you know, a climate-centered series like Scott Burns is doing. Or we also have Gloria Calderon Collette on the show to talk about One Day at a Time and how she did the little small things on the show. Like, you know, if they're on the roof, they're going to show some solar panels. There's bigger things and smaller things. So can you give us a sense like from this playbook of some of these smaller things that we could be looking at for our characters in existing shows or movies? Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. Lynn and Norman Lear have been great champions of seeing more climate on screen. But you're exactly right. Like we talk about it as a spectrum. And so on the kind of smaller things are almost more the set dressing. You know, like if you're showing a roof, show solar panels on it. If you have a kitchen scene, show an electric stove, not a gas stove.

If you have a car scene, have an EV, you know, like what are just like the really, when on set, like don't have single use plastic in your scenes, have a water bottle or, you know, those are just like the really easy things that almost any production could do. Yeah, those are things that you're not even really acknowledging in the course of the scene. It's just like, it's just,

It's just normal to see that there. Yeah, and we know that that works because it's worked with smoking and it's worked with other issues and it normalizes these behaviors and makes them kind of sexy depending on the context. And of course, that's what we want. We want to make these things...

really desirable and sexy. And then I think from there, it's talking about it just in passing. And you're seeing that show up more just in shows where it's an ongoing story that isn't about climate, but the character brings it up in passing conversation. And we know that that is powerful because again, it normalizes talking about it. And there's this really strange dynamic that's happening

In the country where now, according to Yale's most recent research, 75% of American adults are concerned about climate change, everything from cautious to deeply alarmed. And the deeply alarmed is now the biggest American audience of all the audiences they study. But it's a really small percentage of people who ever talk about it in their normal day-to-day lives. So it's creating this...

a sensation of feeling very isolated and also kind of like you're being gaslit by the world, which kind of, you know, kind of how the characters in Don't Look Up felt. Like there is a meteor headed towards us and nobody seems to care. We also consistently, according to research, underestimate how much those around us care about it. So we think that we care more than other people around us, but that's not true necessarily.

So just having it come up in passing conversation for a character that you're already attached to and a story that you're already attached to is really, really powerful. And then I think we see the more in-depth engagements with it. Shows like Years and Years where it's not focused on climate, but it's a consistent theme that impacts people.

the family and the story because it's set in the future. Yeah. So let's go back and take a look at that sort of middle ground thing where it's not just set dressing, but the characters are, it's coming up in conversation because I think the classic example you go back to in terms of like one character makes a comment that changes the whole industry is Merlot. So in the movie Sideways, Paul Giamatti has this tirade against Merlot and it actually has a demonstrable impact on Merlot sales for decades afterwards. It really changed like what grapes are planted in California based on like

the results of that movie and people like not buying Merlot. So if you have characters, do you care about who you believe would be saying this thing but are sort of voicing a concern about this thing or that thing or a preference for this over that, that could have a real impact if it's the

the right show, the right message, the right timing of it. It's being traditional about when you're doing that. Oh, yeah, it's huge. Dr. Catherine Hayhoe is another amazing climate scientist, says that the number one thing that anyone can do about it is talk about it, is really being honest about the fact that this is impacting our lives and our psychology and our mental health and our physical environment. So having your characters do that, I think also is just an honest portrayal of

of the world we're living in now. Like if these characters were out there in the real world, it would be impacting their lives and they would be thinking about it. But also just for the impact on the audience, it really does a lot to normalize, you know, people's own concerns and encourage and thinking about it and saying like, it's okay to be worried. Like these, these characters are,

also worried. Yeah, and choices in transportation feel like a really natural way to do that because the choice of whether to get that bigger car or to get the smaller car or to not get a car and use public transportation, those are things that are moments we can see on screen where characters are making choices and we can think about, oh,

what choice would I make if I were in that situation? And you might make a different choice. And just because you see a bunch of big trucks around you, you might be the person who doesn't get the big truck because of something you saw on screen or a choice that someone else made that was different because of a show you saw or a movie you saw. So going from the ground level back up, there's some fascinating research that says

The single most influential lever for why someone might get solar panels is whether their neighbor has them. And that's been measured a thousand times. And we know that the biggest levers to pull, no question, are elections and legislation and candidates who might be able to win races that will vote for that sort of legislation that pulls a lever. But we also know that that really doesn't usually happen until it's swelled from the ground up, until social norms rise.

has been changed. So when there's been a paradigm shift, and so if you associate, if TV is like the friends that are in your living room every week, or you're binging them or whatever it might be, or these big impactful movies, if we're able to show those things more and more, whether it's solar panels or a smaller car or it's water issues or whatever it might be, that's going to help build that. And that's going to help build it up to the point where it's really tough for the folks who are in charge, who are able to have the biggest impact to

to ignore. And again, there's a million different roles that people can play. So when you ask, what can I do? It's the same thing. I reread Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird, recently, which I love and have dog-eared a thousand times. And it's just these wonderful character questions about what do they dream about and what are they scared of and all this. And it's the same thing, going just looking at your characters and going like, well, what can they do? How can they get involved in some way, whether it's subtle or not? And the more you see that, the more you go, that's a job I didn't know existed. Yeah.

Yeah, I think the way that we talk about it in the playbook is a climate lens, which is also just another generative creative opportunity, like thinking through, like, how would this be impacting my story world and my characters can open up all these new possibilities around plot and character development. So I think that that's exactly right. It's thinking through, like, what if this character was alive in our world today, what would they be dreaming about and how might they be engaging or thinking about this?

Yeah. And then I think Gloria Cotter and Collette did at the event did such a good job of showing what that looks like in her show where, you know, it's a sitcom. It's not about climate change, but one of the characters is really passionate about social justice issues.

So it was very natural to have that character dress up as Greta Thunberg for Halloween. And there was some great jokes and it was funny and it totally worked for their characters and their story. But then also talk to Scott Z. Burns, who just created an Apple Plus show that will come out

I think next year, that's heavily focused on climate. And he really, he, you know, has his co-showrunner and writer, Dorothy Fortenberry, has this great line that like, if climate isn't in your story, then it's science fiction. And I think that that's going to be, continue to be the case. Like in 10 years, if your characters aren't,

acknowledging climate, it's going to feel so outdated, you know, because that is just going to increasingly impact our real lives and our real world. Yeah. Now when I watch any show that is about like an oncoming pandemic or something, or I see like medical situations where people aren't wearing masks, like put on your mask. It feels really crazy. I love, love, love the show Station Eleven. And, but it was, it was,

started to be filmed before our pandemic. So we see all these medical situations and there's a pandemic coming like, where are your masks? And it does feel like some sort of weird all timeline universe that people are not acknowledging what we all know. Yeah. That was one of my favorite shows recently because it's not obviously it's not a climate show, but it does show like

How do these characters find beauty and joy in the midst of like pretty harrowing circumstances? And I think we need a lot more stories about that around climate. Like, you know, that stuff can't go away as things continue to get more intense. Like we're humans. We need stories. We need art. We need joy and beauty. Yeah.

But also on the flip side, I was like, this is set 15 years in the future. There's a lot of climate change happening and they just don't talk about it. And it would be so easy to just have thrown a little bit in there to acknowledge that their world is very changed. Yeah.

We've been focusing on sort of like the little things we can do or sort of how characters talk about it. But let's zoom back out and there's a page in your playbook called The Cheat Sheet, which is sort of like bigger, broader things to be thinking about. And one of the big frameworks you have for it is like the climate crisis is here now. And so this is like...

I think so often we talk about it as the day after tomorrow. We're always jumping ahead 10 years to think, oh, this is how bad it's going to be and not acknowledging what you're experiencing on the Gulf Coast, which is that it's happening to you every day. There's constant problems and the wolf's not out the door. The wolf's in the house and we have to deal with the wolf that's in front of us. But let's talk through some of the other things in this cheat sheet because there are things you might skip past, but I think are important for us to be looking at.

One of them is the idea of no shame. And because I think so often it's easy to think about like,

oh, they're saying that, but then they're also like flying someplace. So they're hypocrites. And you have a quote there from Bill McKibben that says, everyone's a climate hypocrite. Like the hypocrisy is the price of admission in this battle. That like, you know, you to be doing this, you had to fly here to Los Angeles to do this presentation. And you have an impact as well. That doesn't negate the good that you're doing. Yeah, it's really huge. There's...

I think it's actually an intentional narrative that's been seeded by the fossil fuel industry who very much understands the power of storytelling. They commissioned a movie glorifying oil in like the 1950s, you know, and...

So it's intentional. BP actually coined the term carbon footprint, and it was very much to put the onus of guilt and shame on the individual instead of the systemic problems, the fossil fuel industry, the governments that are allowing this to happen. So I think that when we do shame each other over, you know, our flying planes,

plastic straws, what have you, like in the deep South, some people need trucks, you know, and EVs, trucks haven't become affordable. And so shame is a very good emotion for shutting you down and for not, it doesn't provide a psychological kind of mindset for moving into a place of agency and action. And that's a very intentional, you know,

thing that was done by the fossil fuel industry. So I encourage people not to play into that. Like it's easy to fall into you, right? But it also tends to set up the character who does care as like the nag, you know, like a lot of like the annoying neighbor bitching at you about your recycling. And that's not, we want to show characters who care who you, who you like or you don't like, but there there's somebody who's fascinating and not just, you know, bitching at you ideally. Yeah.

I think one of the other tropes and expectations we get to is like that character, that nag is a white person who is going after you. And one of the things that I see you doing in this is that you're trying to really center black and indigenous people in this conversation. You have Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr. And one of the lines he said that I thought was so smartly crafted was from the front line to the fence line and really focusing on communities that are impacted by these things and communities

centering them in the solution to it, not just the victim of the problem. Yeah, it's huge. I mean, I think it's very in line with a lot of representation and diversity conversations already happening in Hollywood. But when it comes to climate, you know, historically marginalized communities, largely BIPOC, are the ones who are near the fossil fuel industries that are poisoning air and water. Cancer Alley in Louisiana, largely black communities are

And so, but they're also on the front lines. Like we see, you know, Standing Rock and like all kinds of pipeline fights and fights against different fossil fuel infrastructure led by black and indigenous leaders. And it's really important when we're telling climate stories, those people are leading on the stories that they're in. There's not a white savior who comes in to solve the problem for them. Yes. Yeah. And they're part of the actual storytelling process because they are largely the ones who are experiencing it first and worst. Right.

So let's try to wrap this up with some action steps because this feels very much like a Quinn newsletter thing. Like, here's what you can do. But like, obviously, any of our listeners can go to the Climate Playbook right now. So it's goodenergystories.com and take a look at those things. But what are some steps that you'd like people to take like this week, this month, in terms of like, if you were a, let's say you're a showrunner working on a show, like what are some practical things they could do to start having these conversations in the room? Like, what would you like them to do?

Yeah, certainly reading it, but also sharing it with your writers and making sure that other people have access to it and are aware of it. We're definitely trying to distribute it far and wide. So the more that folks can do that, the better. We're also offering workshops and we're happy to do that.

Happy to come into writers rooms and kind of bring it to life off the page. So happy, happy to do that. Definitely reach out to me if you're interested in that. But yeah, just mostly getting it's like climate change, just talking about it, sharing it.

Great. And how will you know if what you're doing is successful? And so how would you know that whether this good energy playbook has had the impact that you want to have? Because I know you have people involved who like are data folks. And so like, will you have a sense of sort of whether this has worked? Yeah.

Yeah. So we worked with USC's Media Impact Project to study how often climate and like any adjacent conversation is showing up in TV and film. And it's 2.8% between 2016 and 2020 showed up in scripted entertainment. And we are going to continue measuring that to see how it's going up. That was before Don't Look Up. So I'm curious.

how much that impacted audiences. But yeah, just looking, definitely going to study, like how does this change over time? And not only just the frequency, but how are the stories showing up? Like what are the narratives that are showing up? Small sidebar, you don't have to weigh in on this. I fully respect Don't Look Up and I'm so happy Don't Look Up happened, but I do worry that it's...

going to feel like, oh, that's how you make a climate change movie. I don't know that you're going to have the impact you're going to have because I do worry that those people involved in telling that story has just made it feel like, oh, it's a Hollywood movie about this thing. What's really kind of about it is a metaphor. The meteor is a metaphor for something else and I don't know that it's going to connect the dots in the ways that it all could. So I just

Happy that movie exists, but I think we could just do so much more granular work to actually get some stuff happening. On Don't Look Up, I do think that it opened a lot of doors by having a successful movie that was a metaphor. We also, for Climate, explicitly, they were very clear about that. But definitely want to see Climate show up more in non-analogies, in real ways. And one of the movies that I just loved that did that was First Reformed. Yeah.

And I just rewatched it because we do a bunch of case studies in the playbook. But it's just so beautifully written. I just feel like anyone who says that you can't write climate without being preachy or didactic or boring or too technical, that movie just to me completely debunks that because it's just gorgeously written. I mean, there's a lot of faith in climate intersections too, which I always find fascinating. Yeah.

I really love that one. And it's dark, but it ends on this like moment of possibility and kind of like expansiveness. And I really love those stories where it's like helping you to befriend uncertainty, but also letting you imagine something that happens. I always try to take the perspective of, well, we'll take whatever we can get here. And one of the things I tried to emphasize as Anna and her team constructed this incredible tool is that

You know, we always have to remember how difficult it is for anyone of any stage in their career in Hollywood to get anything made. And, you know, I watch my wife, who is the most hardworking, incredible human and about as successful as it gets, struggle to get things made. And so one of our goals was...

Literally anything you can get out of this, great. We'll take it. Because that 3% number can only go up. So if you skim one page and you grab one thing, that's something else. And that starts to change that social norm. So we'll take whatever we can get. And don't look up felt the same way, whether it's something more fantastical like Beast of the Southern Wild about the Gulf Coast or it's first reformed or whatever it might be. The movie about the big forest fire last year. Angela Vigilante? Yes. Yes. The point is,

If you think there's a limited number of stories to tell, you are just incredibly off base because the folks that are already being affected by this have such a wide, beautiful variety of lived experiences who have stories to tell who are already contributing because their answer to what can I do is what's what I have to do. You know, I have to make sure that my frontline community is getting the money or is electrifying buildings or whatever it might be. So we'll take any of these stories because all of them make a difference.

They do. And the other thing I should stress is that you don't necessarily have to announce your intentions. And so you don't have to say like, oh, we're going to put a climate change story into this episode. No, just do those little small things. The network, they're not even necessarily going to notice that you did it. But you're making choices for your story that are the right choices, but also help tell the message. Yeah, this will date me. It doesn't need to say a very special episode. Like we don't need that. Just make it part of the world and people will identify with it.

I really love it when it shows up very authentically. I think that's really powerful. And I do think people love the drama of my story, like the climate activist goes up against climate denier megachurch pastor father, but all of us have fascinating stories. All of us are experiencing this in unique ways and there are literally billions of climate stories because every single person in this world is affected and every person to come will be affected. Right.

It's come time for our one cool things where we share something with our audience. I'll start off, I'm going to start with Redactal, which is, I

I knew daily games were in the tradition of Wordle because now there has to be like a daily everything, a place you go to. Redactal is really tough. And so what that does is it takes an article on Wikipedia, one of like the top 10,000 articles. So that's something super obscure. But then it redacts almost all the words. And so you have to, then you plug in words to sort of uncover what it is. You have to figure out like, what is this actual article about? It's really hard, but really challenging. So if you're a, a puzzly kind of person, uh,

You're just trying to figure out what this could possibly be. So I spent about a half an hour yesterday trying to figure out what an inclined plane article was, also known as a ramp. But it's rewarding. You do feel that sense of accomplishment when you actually have uncovered the thing. So redactile will be my one cool thing for this week. And Quinn, why don't you go next? What do you have for yours?

You know, I'm going to cheat. My one cool thing is my wife. But besides just being an incredible human on her own, you know, I...

was privileged enough to choose to do this work. And she has been supportive in 10,000 different ways, including there's really no way to get into this work without having some dark moments, even if you're as privileged as I am. And I don't deal with, well, I deal with air pollution a lot less now that I left California, but I don't want for clean water and food and things like that. But the scope of it and what's here and what's coming can be very difficult. And she has found me

under a blanket on the couch some nights going, oh boy. She's the most incredible human alive. On the other hand, if you want to laugh with everything that's going on, her new movie is fantastic. It's a blast. It's a throwback. It's a delight. That would be The Lost City. That's helpful. Sorry, it's been so long. Lost City, Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum. He takes off his pants. I don't know what else to tell you. Yeah.

Good stuff. Anna Jane, do you have a wonderful thing to share with us? I'm going to go with Russian Doll Season 2. Oh, I'm excited to watch it. So you're enjoying it? I loved it. I binged it. It was my treat after launch. We launched on Tuesday. I was binging on Wednesday. The universe gave me Russian Doll Season 2 as a gift.

But I absolutely... The first season was really profoundly moving. Yeah, I watched it twice. Yeah, I think I watched it four times. Because I think as... Well, just personally, I was going through stuff that it really helped with. But on kind of a global scale, working on climate can feel like you're in this crazy death loop and like you're going a little crazy, especially the first 10 years. Now everybody else is waking up too, which is great. But this season kind of goes back into her story and she...

is working through trauma from her family and history. And I have a lot to do on that as well. And I hear rumors that if they get a next season, they might jump into the future. So if you want to talk about climate, reach out to me. But yeah, that show has just been profoundly life-changing for me. Fantastic.

Great. Well, that is our show for this week. Scriptons is produced by Megan Arrau. It's edited by Matthew Shelley. Our outro this week is by Jade Karda. If you would like to ask her, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is at SailMason. I'm at John August. Anna Jane, are you on Twitter? Are you a Twitter person? I am. I'm Anna Jane Joyner. Fantastic. And we can also follow, is it at Good Energy? It's Good Energy Story. Good Energy Story.

You can follow their Twitter account as well. Quinn Emmett, you are on Twitter? I don't remember now. I am, yeah. Yes, when I'm not dealing with my children. Yeah, it's at Quinn Emmett.

Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnockers.com. That's also where you'll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. While you're signing up for newsletters, you should also sign up for Quinn's newsletter and podcast, Quinn Plug Away. You can find that newsletter at newsletter.importantnotimportant.com and you can find the podcast there as well. It's weekly, it's free, and I don't know, a lot of folks find some value in it.

And of course, goodenergystories.com is the place where you can get the playbook and I'll find all that information there. If you would like a t-shirt, we have t-shirts. They are great. They're available at Cotton Bureau. We have hoodies like the one I'm wearing. They're very comfortable. Are you wearing a Script Notes t-shirt at this moment? No, I should have. That was a real mistake because I have like a closet full of them. Yes, we all have our closets full. 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 asking people for money.

Anna, Jane, and Quinn, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks, John. Oh, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you.