665 - What Can You Even Do?
51:05 Share

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Well, my name is Craig Mason. You're listening to episode 665 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we often talk about characters needing agency, but what does that look like on the page? We'll explore agency on the scene level and in the script overall. Then it's listener questions on sign language, screenwriting while blind, and credits when something is written for television but then goes theatrical.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, Disneyland. Craig, I just went to Disneyland for the first time in many, many years. I want to talk about Disneyland and our experience of theme parks as folks who create entertainment for those giant corporations. My wife loves Disneyland. Yeah, but I'm guessing you don't so much. I'm not against it. I'm not against it either. I like Disney World, but it's so far away and I'm never going to Florida again. So I guess I should probably get back into Disneyland. Yeah.

So Mike and I are not Disney adults, but we went as adults on election day to avoid all the anxiety of election day. How'd that work out? It was actually a very good distraction for the period of time that we were at Disneyland. And then we just did not open up any social media on the phone. Brilliant. And then we got home and eventually we had to sort of break the seal and the bottom fell out of the world. So maybe we'll start with that. Sure.

Remember back in 2016, we actually did a bonus episode of Script Notes the day after the election saying the title of it was Everything Will Be Okay. But I was genuinely freaked out then. And I was also really upset this time, but not as astonished, I guess. Well, first, let's try and find some vague silver lining here, even though a lot of people have very good reason to be concerned. Yeah. This was eight years ago, and we said everything will be okay.

Everything's not okay, but the world didn't end. Did not end. So that's something, that's a data point. Yeah. But things definitely didn't go great. No. This time, it doesn't feel good again. We're going to have to see what happens. The only weird psychological difference for me this time was, A, I already knew what it was like to feel this. Yeah. So it wasn't a new feeling.

And B, this might feel counterintuitive, the first time it seemed like everybody just made a really crazy mistake. Like people were just goofing around and mistakenly elected a guy. This time, no, they fully chose. They fully chose. This is the country we live in. This is the choice they made. And now we live with it. It's not going to be great and good.

Who knows? Yeah. The who knows is a big factor here because it's, as we talked about on our last episode, the uncertainty and the anxiety that comes with uncertainty is big. And so in that episode, we were talking about waiting on a decision for a thing. And this is a situation of uncertainty.

that we have X number of years ahead of us of this stuff and that it's going to be remembering how exhausting 2016 through 2020 was and just getting through that. And yet we know we got through it. And we also know that people throughout history have gotten through things. A thing that I've talked about on the show before is that

There's the great big book of horrible things, which is this book I read every couple of years, which is recounts the hundred greatest losses of life over the course of human history. It sounds so depressing, but what you learn about when you look at those terrible events in history is like, yeah, but we still got here. And so for all the suffering that happened in the moment, humanity did pull through. Yeah. I think it's unlikely that we will vaporize. And the other, I wouldn't call this hope or silver lining as much as notably pragmatic is

Is that now everyone's prepared. So we take care of the people that we love. We look out for people that aren't living in states where the laws are good. And we take action to help the people we need to help as best we can. And we do whatever we can, acknowledging that there are limitations to what we can do.

until such time as this democracy chooses otherwise. That's the best we can do. And yes, 2016 to 2020 was exhausting. There was also this insane pandemic. He didn't cause that pandemic as far as I know. And here's the thing is that there's going to be a bunch of unexpected surprises lobbed our way. And you want to have people in those positions who can best deal with those things. I don't feel like we're going to have a highly staffed, competent government to do those things.

And that is a concern for me. For example, I'm concerned about the safety of the AI systems that are being developed. I don't feel like this is a group of decision makers who are particularly well suited for the task. They don't seem particularly well suited for any task. And I don't know how that will end up. But I'm very focused on a couple of realities. The most important of which is

I must be aware of the things that are within my control. Exactly. So I know I can vote. I know I can donate money. I know I can talk to people. But I also know that there are some things I cannot influence whatsoever. I am not able to influence legislation about AI. No. I'm not. I'm not able to influence this.

this man's relationship with Putin, which I think is incredibly alarming, but not. And so we talked last week about the circle of concern and circle of control and that they don't overlap very much. And yet what I have found very helpful in these days after this election result was to make a list of the things I'm actually worried about. So actually just chart them because sometimes it's just as amorphous blob, but when you actually list them down, you're like, okay, well, this is a long list, but I can see them.

And for each one of them, is there anything I can control or affect about this? In most cases, a lot of cases, no. But in some cases, kind of yes. For example, I'm really alarmed about sort of the damage that can be done to our U.S. healthcare system under this person. But...

The actual steps I can take is I can make sure I got my flu shot, I got my COVID booster, make sure I'm up to date on my other vaccinations. I can get extra copies of the prescription medicines that I actually need so I can have those. My daughter can get Plan B, which lasts for four years. There are some things like that you can do. I'm really concerned about what the economy just blowing up. Sure. You know, an individual can save money. They can also just think about what are the plans you could take if things got bad and

What are the roommate situations? What are the moving home situations? What are the things you could do? Because at least that's something you can think about that's under your control versus these uncontrollable issues.

If you extend that too far, you end up a prepper. Yes. So you have to find the balance, which is difficult. But trying to re-engage the neocortex and kick the lizard brain back a little bit is valuable. It does help put things in context and it does give you at least...

A sense that you're not just running around in circles screaming. And that's pretty much about the best you can do. Yeah. The other thing you can remind yourself is that it's okay to feel grief and upset and outrage, but it's also okay to feel joy and happy and like you don't have to live inside a horror movie. It's actually critical. And I was talking about this with my older kid, how living a joyous life is the best revenge. Mm-hmm.

We will have to do things to try and make sure that we can live a joyous life, including choosing where we live. And if it seems to me over the course of time, if I look around and I'm like, oh dear, this is sliding towards something horrible, even here in California, I'll leave. Yeah. I will. I've always felt like you got to keep one eye on reality. Now,

Generally, I've never actually thought about that as an American, really. I've never thought like, oh, would I ever have to leave? And I don't believe I would ever have to leave here because I don't really think that there is an America. I think there are two Americas. I think they're in a cold civil war is how I would call it. It's not a shooting war, but it's a cold civil war. There's a really good article in Wired.com.

I guess I'll make it one of my cool things about California and how California, despite everyone else's screaming and gnashing of teeth, is just dragging everybody towards the future. It's what we do. But the other thing that is within my control and that I've absolutely exercised is even though I had a very diminished footprint on social media, I've turned it off entirely. Because I think at this point, it is fair to say nobody knows what the hell they're talking about.

Everybody is under the delusion that they can influence other people. They can't. They are simply talking to each other and reverberating. And I am totally with you, John, that the most important thing is that we don't let any person steal our joy. Yeah. Even in the midst of other people suffering, we do what we can to help them. Yeah.

Well, you and I are in the business of hopefully making joy or hopefully we're making entertainment. And so it feels so trivial to be doing that in time when things could be... Things aren't awful right now, but they could get awful. And so then how are you going to continue to work? And I do remember in 2016, I was writing the second of the Arlo Finch books, which is the best of the Arlo Finch books. And it actually was a terrific privilege to just be able to disappear into that work at that time. And so I would say, yes, yes.

all of the outside stressors can be a negative impact on your work, but they can also sort of invite you into your work to focus on those and create meaning in them. And, you know, we're in post-production and I gather everyone together and I don't presume what people's politics are and I don't talk to them in any way about, you know, oh, everyone here hates what happened. I don't presume that. But what I did say was I imagine that there are quite a few feelings right now. Yeah.

And we talked through what options were for people. And then I just reminded them that making shows like the one we make, it's one of the last things that Americans seem to enjoy doing together. Yeah. Are watching sporting events, watching certain television shows, going to certain movies. Everybody's happy to just do that together. There's not much left. We don't watch the same news.

We don't live in the same states. We don't believe the same things. We don't listen to the same music. It's all over the place. But then there are these moments where we're all like the way it used to be, where everybody just sort of does things together. And we're something that people can do together. And so it matters. It actually matters. Sure, we're not making vaccines. We know that. We're not curing cancer. But yeah, it's actually significant. Yeah.

well, it feels like a natural segue into our main topic today, which is on agency. So back in episode six, 27, Aline was here and she and I were talking about this term agentic. Um,

which is kind of related to main character energy. So people are describing themselves as wanting to be agentic. I hate that word so much. Yeah. You were gone for that episode. But here's what I do respect about it. It's about taking the reins of your destiny to do things the way you want to do them. So it's being the protagonist in your story. Yeah. And it can relate to sort of that grind and hustle culture, but

Also about taking risks socially and professionally and not being afraid to take space and demand attention, which are generally noble goals. Sometimes we have this instinct to hide back in the corner when we shouldn't do that. It's about taking that step outside of yourself and saying, what should this person who is me do in this situation to achieve those goals? And so let's now turn this back to the actual work that we do, which is our characters and our stories. How do we do that?

How do we think about agency and what does agency really mean for them? And so, Craig, what's your definition of agency? What does agency mean for a character in a story? I always think of it as giving a character qualities that allows them to change the plot.

Basically, they can make choices that change the plot. Absolutely. So they have autonomy. They have the ability to make choices themselves. They're self-driven rather than directed by others. They're not on rails. They really have to actually do a thing. And there are choices to make. There are choices to make, absolutely. And that they're making those choices with intentionality. There's a reason why they're making this choice versus that choice. And sometimes they can make the wrong choices, but they still had the ability to make that choice. And I think that last point is so crucial that there's...

the possibility of effectiveness. It's plausible that the choices could have an impact on their situation and in a meta level change the story. And sometimes when people write stories, they'll have a character make a choice because

they, the writer, need them to make that choice to make stuff work. Yes. And we can feel it every time. And that's where you'll start to hear, we're not sure this character has agency because they just made a choice for no reason. It's not particularly consistent with what we know about them or how they've lived before. They're just kind of doing it and it worked out

well for your plot, that's not ideal. Then we don't really feel the illusion of a real person there because, of course, it is all illusion. Absolutely. I think the Inside Out movies do a great job with the sense of characters who are making choices that are having a direct impact on the story overall. So in both movies, Joy has a goal and in trying to achieve her goal, she's creating the plot of the story and...

her misguided assumptions are changing what's happening there. And you see that reflected in the real world too, in terms of like the real world character who's trying to do things that we can understand why she's trying to do them, even though they're the wrong choices she's making. Yeah. And we, as we write, have to basically be all of the emotions of our character. We are joy and we're anger and we're sadness and, and anxiety. We're all those things. We just have to figure out in these moments, which one of those things is going to be driving the character, right?

There are some characters that play as purely logical, very rational. They are almost never the hero. Yeah. Because we are not interested...

and investing our emotions in somebody who is not driven by their emotions. Spock is a great side character. There's always, you know, in the team that's breaking into, you know, the Russian intelligence building, there's always one character who has no emotions and is just incredibly dry and matter of fact, but that's never your hero. Your hero has to get angry. Your hero has to be scared. Your hero has to have worries and your hero has to love something. Yeah.

And those emotions that we need to be able to see, so we need to find ways to externalize these internal states so we can actually see what they're doing, we need to believe that they are informing the choices that they make, that they are actually contributing to the actions that we're seeing them take. That next line of dialogue comes out of what

It's underneath the surface there that we believe exists. Yeah, choices are difficult. If it's an easy choice, it's not a choice. Yeah. So you brought up the idea of like, you know, we mostly hear about agency when we get the note, like it feels like the character lacks agency. And let's translate that. Like what is an executive really saying when they're giving you that note? Usually that everybody else in the story is different.

laying out for that character what needs to be done and that character picks one of the options that they've laid out and

Or the character is sort of stuck. You know, someone says, we've got to go rescue this person. They're here. We've got to do this and this. And you're like, okay, I'm going. And then really what you're left with as a character is how well do I aim a gun? But that's not agency. That's just skill, which is cheap. So you start to feel like there isn't a person there who is in charge of their life. They're just...

Kind of an NPC. Yeah. I can envision two different scenarios where you might hear the agency known. They're different situations. So there's the... It feels like this person is giving these choices and they're just doing this thing, but they're sort of on autopilot. And it's almost like they've been assigned a mission. And you're going to do these things in this order and this is how you're going to do it. That feels like lack of agency. That feels like lack of choice. You also see characters who, because of the situation you've put them in, it's like...

It's a depressed young mother in a small town who sort of can't get out of her thing. It's like, well, she feels like she doesn't have agency. Well, like, I've not created a situation where that person can actually make a choice that can influence their life. And those are different things and require very different solutions. Yeah, we used to hear passive. That was really what we used to hear. And then somebody came up with agency and our business loves a buzzword.

At the end of the day, our business loves a buzzword. You know, the business of it all loves a buzzword or buzzphrase. So agency took over from passive, but it's similar. It is similar. It's similar. And...

There's nothing wrong, to be clear, with a character who you define as somebody who is trapped because they have no agency, and then they are forced by your plot hand to start to make difficult choices, which forces them to experience what it means to have agency. So 40-year-old virgin, there's no agency there. He's just going through life on autopilot, and then he is forced to try and do stuff. Yeah. I think what's comparing this sort of like

here's the mission you've been assigned versus kicking you out of your comfort zone. The work the writer needs to do is so very different. The passive character lacks agency because they have no choice but before them, fundamentally, your story is different. You need to find a reason why you're telling this one-time story of this character who's changed and how

and has to sort of undertake this quest to do a thing versus the, you've been assigned this mission. Okay, well, that's the kind of carpentry job that you and I are sometimes hired to do. It's like, how do I get these beats to happen in a way where our character is actually making the choices to do these things? That's why Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, he gets the self-destructing message, but then he's making his own course. Yes. Yes. And this is our version of magicians forcing cards. Yes.

They give you the impression that you have agency, that you get to pick a card, any card. Yes. That is what we're doing too. You do not get to pick any card. And this character actually doesn't have agency. They don't exist. But our job is to make it seem like they do. Yeah. I think I've said often, talking about character wants and motivations, is the hero is allowed to drive wherever they want to drive. We're building the roads. And so, yes, you can drive anywhere you want.

these are the roads you got. And so we are sort of laying out the roads and it feels natural because we're

well, for the half-way roads, and so we built the roads for them. It's a weird job that we do. It's a very weird job. It's very strange. Talking about sort of the note about characters lack agency, I think sometimes it's a mismatch of character and story. And so you've created a character who doesn't have the tools or expertise for this really interesting plot. And like, you may have just picked the wrong hero for this plot or the wrong plot for this hero. And they just, the gears don't match. And so therefore the engine doesn't work.

doesn't work right. Yeah. So none of my skills, abilities, desires, none of them have anything to do with the story that's happening. The plot that we choose is designed specifically to test a certain human being who has certain limitations, needs, wants, or undiscovered strengths. And if we don't pick that plot for them, then it really doesn't matter if we give them a choice because the choices don't matter. And it

doesn't feel like it's purposeful. Yeah. The other problem I see sometimes is you have characters who kind of feel like they are rats in a maze. And it happens a lot in horror movies where they're just responding to the stimulus that's being put there. And some of the very best, you know, horror movies, Alien is a great example of like a scary movie where the characters do have agency and are making choices and there are conflicts between characters because of the choices that they're making. That is when it feels great. But when it's just...

We have to get away from this madman, and I can go through this door or through that door that doesn't really feel like agency. No, that's running. Yeah. Now, usually, there is a character early on in horror films that has no agency on purpose. Yes.

Who just gets chewed up. Poor woman swimming when the shark gets her. She has no agency. And usually the first person that Jason or a friend gets has no agency. That's what NPCs are for, to demonstrate the formidable nature of the villain. But then our hero...

they're the ones who are like, and you know, in horror movies, this does happen where you're like, okay, clearly plot armor has come into play. And plot armor exists specifically to protect characters who have agency. The reason we call it plot armor is it's not working well enough because the choices that they're making in theory aren't good enough to keep them alive based on the rules of what we know. So you got to watch out for that one or else...

you just stop worrying about your characters. Indeed. Well, let's look at what agency looks like on the page. So in the course of a scene, how do you think about agency within a scene? And sort of talk about it from your protagonist or from other characters in the scene. What does agency look like in a scene for you? Well, I always start with what is the point of this scene? And the point... Your point as... My point as the writer. As the writer, yeah. And the point is surely to...

change this character in some way to express a need or want or to fail. And all of those things require the person to make choices. If they just walk outside and get walloped, it's not interesting. So they make a choice in every scene, no matter what. They must choose something. If they just walk outside and it's like, well, we've got to figure out how to get from here to here and there's sort of...

No choice, even if the choice is, there's only one way to get there, but it's incredibly dangerous. Should we do it or not? We should do it. I need to understand that choice. And I need to know what the ramifications are of it. Yeah, so they're making a choice. They're deciding to make a choice. They're not being forced to make a choice. They're deciding to make a choice. And it's plausible that the choice that they're making is effective, that you can believe that they think that that choice is effective. That the choice is effective, but it is also important to make sure that the choice is not irrevocable,

Because if it is, then it doesn't matter what they think. They can't choose their way out of it. So running away is a great choice to always keep for your characters in whatever form running away would take. So that you know that you can back out of it. You don't have to go through with it. Therefore, when you do, it is either because of courage or folly.

It's a smart idea or it's a bad idea, but the choice remains all the way. Absolutely. And if you're designing your character as well, each different character would make a different choice in that moment, both in what they're going to say and what they're going to do. The choices they're making should reveal more about that character and more about sort of why they are such a unique person in a situation. But it has to be specific to who they are and what they're doing. And you brought up the idea of arguing. Yeah. Yeah.

debating the choice is important. It underscores where each person is coming from. Arguing is a great instrument that we have, like sleight of hand for magicians, to create the illusion of agency because people are arguing for their points of view, which means they have a perspective that is individual and individuated from each other, which is also really important. If everybody agrees and everybody's like,

It can either be A or B and everybody votes B. We got a problem with our story. Yeah, I would agree. Because an argument of disagreement should reveal differences. It should reveal power imbalances. It should reveal hidden things that are not being spoken about. If characters are disagreeing, it should be more than about A or B. It should really be about some other situation that's behind the scenes. Yeah.

Let's talk about agency within a sequence. And by this, I'll mean a collection of scenes that are driving to one specific point. So to me, even if you're given a task, a mission of like what to do, you want characters to have autonomy on how they do it. So if we know that we need to blow up that bridge, great. If that's the goal, fantastic. But let's see our characters making decisions about how to do that. And then we as storytellers frustrate those decisions and force them to rethink their plans along the way. Yes.

And there are also sequences that are defined by characters revealing, and this is sort of like a double negative, revealing that they really don't have agency. Yeah. So characters that are obsessive, that are losing the plot, so to speak, who convinced you they were being rational, and then you realize they're not. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. Yeah. I love Star Trek First Contact. That movie's great. And a lot of it is...

basically lifted from Moby Dick. And Captain Ahab pretends he has agency. He makes you believe he has agency and then he exhibits this quality that we recognize in people, which is, okay, now it's a notable lack of agency. It's not mistaken. It's notable. Like they're trying to hide it. That's also fine. A lot of humans move through life

without any real ability to shift the levers. They just keep doing what they do. Yeah, they keep pulling the slot machine and expecting the reward. And finally, let's zoom all the way back out to a movie, an episode of a series, or the whole series in terms of what agency looks like in the course of those. Because I'm thinking about sometimes I've seen problems where it's like,

well, you've made the wrong choices because you've focused on characters who didn't have agency or you had to make smart choices about who you were focusing on because of lack of agency. I was thinking about the movie 13 Lives, which focuses on the Thai soccer team that's trapped in the caves, the flooded caves. And

it's important to see their perspective, and yet those characters, once they're trapped, they have very little agency. They're trapped. Exactly. So once we're there and we have the means to get them out, then seeing their decision-making process about how they're going to do it makes a lot of sense. But like,

They're basically like Baby Jessica down the well. It's a story about them, but they're not actually the central characters. Yes. And there are situations where we have an expectation that there won't be agency. Yeah. Let's say, for instance, you live in the Soviet Union and someone calls you and says, we need you to do what the government is telling you to do. You're like, guess I'm filing that report. Mm-hmm.

And then the character's expression of agency is underlined as some sort of startling act that then has to be encouraged somehow. Or else you, again, take it away. Or you have a story where you imply to somebody that they have agency and then you behave in a way that undermines them completely because only you deserved agency, not them.

And that's also fun. Those arcs go across all the episodes or the whole movie. And you will find at the end of things, seasons or movies, that you find out who really gets to choose and who doesn't. Looking at TV series, Lost is like... Well, let me talk about what you're looking for overall. The audience...

and we want to see those heroes accomplish a thing. Like, you really can't talk about agency without some sort of goal or larger purpose. So in Lost, it's that you want those characters to get off the island. Severance, a series you and I both like, is a lot about agency, and it's characters deliberately severing their agency. And then trying to get it back. Exactly. And so we want them as an audience to be able to get that back and figure out sort of how to reconnect it. In Big Fish, we want to see the father and the son reconcile, and they both have...

quite a lot of agency in trying to do that, but it's the mismatch of how they're going about trying to do it is the frustration and ultimately, hopefully, the success of their story. Every romance involves people who have a choice,

And we just keep waiting for them to make the choice we want them to make. But if they just made it, there wouldn't be a good story. Yes. So then the question is, why aren't you making the choice we want you to make? You got to give them a really good reason to not make the choice that you want them to make. It has to be compelling. Yeah.

Otherwise, you end up with a situation where you think you've given these characters agency and people who read your script will say, it just seemed like they were not getting together for no good reason. Yes. Other than you needing to keep them apart until page 98.

Now you put your finger on a problem. You need to give them a reason. Yeah, it's tough. Let's wrap up this agency conversation with... I'm trying to think if there's any sort of good general takeaways. It's that agency, it's one of those telescoping things. You see it on the very small scale, you see it on the very large scale. It's not just for our heroes. We've mostly been talking about our protagonists. Oh, yeah, no. Villains must have it. Villains must have it. And like, yes...

If you do a freeze frame and you're looking at that third guard over there... NPC. NPC, we won't care. But supporting characters too, we need to believe that they're there for reasons beyond just the plot and to help out the protagonist. Right. Anybody that you want to foreground needs to feel like they are not dancing on your string. If you can see the strings, it's over.

I think you particularly notice it if a character who has been sort of a supporting character is allowed to drive scenes by themselves, that they actually can be a POV character on things.

it doesn't feel like they have any agency. It doesn't feel like they can make independent decisions. Right. Oh shit, like something's wrong there. Yeah, you don't want to follow what should be a day player or, you know, so you have a scene between, you know, your two, your hero and your villain are facing off at a diner. You don't want to spend time with the waiter in the kitchen for any reason. Yeah. Because,

they don't have agency. They will be making no choices that impact the plot whatsoever. Yeah. I will never write this movie, so I'm inclined to talk about it on the air, but I've always wanted to do a rom-com that was set inside the movie world of The Spy Who Loved Me. Because what I love about The Spy Who Loved Me is they're inside this giant tanker ship

And we see all these other henchmen who are working for... So many henchmen. So many henchmen. And I just want those henchmen to fall in love. I want to see their story and I want basically a Rosencrantz and Guilden's turn in there. And so that's a question of agency. They have no agency when it comes to doing their bosses' deeds. But they have a lot of agency in terms of falling in love. Mike Myers kind of did this joke in Awesome Powers where a henchman is killed and then you just...

leave to go to his family and they get the phone call to figure out what to do with that dad. It's great. And it's funny because the notion that that person's a real human being is hysterical to us because we just know they're not. They're just people dying in the background so that our heroes and villains can finally get to each other. And it is kind of amazing how

We compartmentalize these things. So we watch human beings literally murdered. Yes. And we don't feel their humanity whatsoever. No. None. Yeah, but our guy gets like, you know, a cut on the arm like, oh no. Yeah. Indiana Jones, you're hurt. What will happen? Yeah. Yeah. Like this is important, you know, but meanwhile, it's like there's guys in the background just dying. Yes. You know, I was like,

I mean, that's Kevin Smith's thing in Clerks, you know, that Luke Skywalker's a war criminal. Yeah. Because of all the people on the Death Star that, you know, were just doing their jobs. Yeah, absolutely. They're in maintenance. Literally. Like, they don't even know what the Death Star does. No. They certainly don't know it's called the Death Star. Yeah. Who would take that claim? All right, let's answer some listener questions. We'll start with Seb in London.

Seb writes,

Do not preface every line. No, that would be exhausting. Yeah, no, you can do a little indication early and I think for, I'm pretty sure for that script, I just put that stuff in italics. Yeah, so I have it in one of my scripts for a main character who's deaf and...

So the first time it was introduced, Garrett, who's deaf, signs Delahill, parentheses, will always subtitle this. So you know that it's there. And I bold-faced those lines just because it was a little easier to spot because there's other languages that were sometimes in italics. To me, it's important that I always...

what that character is signing, even if other characters are translating the scene because there can be a difference in discrepancy there. So I don't just have the character who's talking and doing the interpreting. I want to make sure that it's actually clear that this person specifically had lines. I mean, so Sam would have dialogue. Yeah, Sam has dialogue. It's just in italics. Yeah. And we would understand he would be signing that. And by the way, that is how Keevan understood what to perform. Yeah. It was a little...

easier, I think, for us because so many of those scenes were really just between two brothers. And so it was quite clear how that conversation would go. But I think for the purposes of a page, even if you have 12 characters, three are deaf and nine are not, just indicate how you're doing it. Stick to some sort of consistent method, whether it's bolding or italicizing.

My personal opinion is don't put too much garnish on the dialogue because you start to almost put something between you and that character. You don't want to feel any difference there.

And then step back and let the script be the script. Yeah. At a certain point, I remember listening to a podcast when they were talking about Coda and sort of how they did all the sign language in Coda. There's a stage called glossing. And so glossing is actually, it's specifically how are you going to sign that line? Because it's not a one-to-one transition at all. But that's like when we had Justin Marks on and Rachel Kondo talking about the Japanese in Coda. You want the people who can really figure out exactly the best way for that character to express that idea. And that's exactly how we did it. So we had...

It's not enough even to have a translator because as Justin Rachel said, translators just translate. Then you need somebody to understand the craft. So we had somebody whose job is to really understand from a literary point of view, what was the context of this line? What's the intention? What does it mean? Now let me figure out how that should be signed in a way that matches the intent here.

And then the translator is really there just to facilitate communication between the filmmakers and the actors. Absolutely. And so if this thing that Seb is writing, if this gets produced, you would be working with the director, the actors, and some other person in there to help make sure that what is being signed accurately reflects what the intention is there. Yep. Let's move on to Oren's question. Oren writes, my name is Oren and I'm a blind script writer living in Ireland.

As a new writer who requires a screen reader to navigate programs on my computer, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find a script writing program or application that is accessible with industry standard screen readers. In case you don't know, a screen reader is a text-to-voice software application used by blind or vision impaired people, which will read aloud any information including text, button controls, menu ribbons, form controls, edit boxes, etc.

I've tested most script writing software, including FadeIn, ArcStudio, Celtics, and Final Draft. Ironically, I would say Final Draft is the most accessible so far. And by accessible, I mean about 2% of the application is usable for the screen reader. That is definitely stretching the meaning of the word accessible. Yeah.

I understand that you created your own screenwriting software called Highland John. However, as I work on Windows and your product seems to be only available for Mac, I can't try it out. I would even consider purchasing a cheap Mac just to run your software if I knew it was accessible with Mac's built-in software VoiceOver.

Would you consider talking briefly about this accessibility issue on your podcast as it might help kickstart a conversation with developers and persuade them to look more seriously at this problem? A lot of these screenwriting software applications claim to be the industry standard, but I fail to see how they can claim that right if they're not making products that are inclusive for all.

So Ryan Knighton, who's been on the show a couple times, is a blind screenwriter and a friend of mine. And he has been using, he had been using Final Draft on his Toshiba laptop for many, many years and then it stopped working with Final Draft. And so he was in sort of a panic situation. So he came to us and

Hyland, fortunately, works really well for him. So he first tried it on his iPhone to make sure the voiceover worked. He had to sort of learn how voiceover worked with it. He now does it on his Mac. And he wrote us this really lovely message about sort of, you know, he's

It spent its first year on a room writing entirely in Highland. And it works because... One of the nice things about Highland is because it's only an Apple ecosystem, it just actually works with all the Apple stuff. Right. And so it can actually tie into all this stuff. Because Apple's already got a framework for how to be accessible for people who are blind. Yeah. So it's not like we created a special version for blind writers. We just did it properly and have proper labels on all the controls so he can hear what's there. And so...

He will text me occasionally saying, like, how do I do this one thing? Like, how do I see what page number this is on? We'll figure that out. Well, I think Ken Tessman, who makes Fade In, listens to the show. I'm pretty sure that the way he wrote it is native for Mac. It's not. Oh, it's not. That's how it gets it on the PC. It goes through Adobe Air. That's the challenge. And the web-based ones, in theory, should be relatively accessible because there are... They're agnostic.

It's agnostic. So what's challenging is inside the browser window that these things are working, it's like, can the reader actually figure out everything that's inside their...

But there is accessibility stuff for the web that should work. And so it's a question of could Arc Studio or the other ones or Celtics, could they do better? Probably. Probably. They should. Well, let's put this out there in the world and see if it's something that these folks can do. I mean, he's absolutely right. He could get, I guess, a quote-unquote cheap. Yeah.

Get a cheap Mac or iPad now because we work on that. And that's the other thing. Yeah, there may be something that is cost effective. It is a bummer to have to buy an entire computer just because the one piece of software that takes advantage of this stuff

only works on that platform. My guess is that Oren probably is using an iPhone because from every blind person I've spoken with, like they tend to go towards the Apple ecosystem when they can. Because it works. Well, so then he could theoretically be working on iOS with Highland. Yeah.

Okay, well, that's possible. We should try. So we'll send him a code to the beta and see if it helps him out. Sweet. Cool. Last question here is from Dan. I've been fascinated by Disney's decision to turn the Moana TV series into a feature-length movie. Do you know how writing credits would get determined in this situation?

Assuming there was some kind of writer's room for the TV series, how do they decide who gets the screenplay writing credit and how does this impact royalties? Oh, boy. I mean, what a spaghetti pile of trouble. So let's talk about this from a couple different levels. Like, writing credit is one thing. Let's just talk about sort of why you make the decision to originally do it as a series and then make it as a movie. Okay.

I think it's because this started in the pandemic and they're like, we need to make series for Disney+. We'll do Moana. And then it probably turned out like kind of, it was going to be really good and really expensive. And everyone was like, we can make so much more money theatrically. If we make fewer episodes, like one big episode and put it in theaters, because the animation is expensive. So in terms of credit, I will tell you that there's other stuff behind the scenes, which is,

You're going to start seeing some teleplay-by credits on theatrical movies, and it will drive me crazy. Craig is already shaking his head. Jesus. And it's because these things were contracted under TV contracts. Right. And this is where I feel for our credits department, because they are tasked with codifying a system

that is routinely rocked by the insane things that happen in the industry. And the employers have no concern whatsoever about it. Their whole thing is, we hired you under a WGA deal. That was our responsibility. You guys handle credits. See ya. Just let us know what to put on the screen. Yep. And then it's up to the WGA to hash through this

That is a very, very difficult question. If you have, let's say, eight episodes, and then you turn to another writer and you're like, take all eight episodes. We're hiring you to make a movie out of these. Pull stuff from all of them or none of them or whatever. Oh, yeah. Make a movie. They're all participating writers. Yes. But they weren't under the feature thing. So how do you consider the contributions? It's...

It's a mess, and my heart goes out to the arbiters and the pre-arbiters who will have to deal with this. But that is what we do at the Writers Guild. We handle our own credits.

It's the best of the worst systems possible. Yeah, 100%. So the answer is a lot of internal discussion and figuring out sort of what is the best way to apply the rules as written to situations that are new. And I'll say, I would rather that. I would rather deal with this rat's nest than be like, say, another union in our town that's just like, one person, pick a name. That's who did it.

no, it isn't. That's not right. But that's how they do it. Hint, it's not SAG. Nope. And it's not IA. Those IA credits, like, which gaffer gets credit for this? Yes.

Many gaffers. Many gaffers. Multiple gaffers. All right, it's time for one cool thing. I have two one cool things as sort of I want. First is a Netflix documentary by RJ Cutler on Martha Stewart called Martha. Some backstory here. Back when Dana Fox was my assistant, she and I would watch the original Martha Stewart show, the one hour highly produced version almost every day. And it was so good and so specifically Martha's taste. You could tell she loved doing it and that she had

absolute control over every little thing. Then after, well, she went to prison for lying to the feds. What a world we live in. Then did a season of The Apprentice and then did this talk show version, which you could tell she hated. And I spoke to people who were guests on her show and she hated doing it. Really? Yes. And

And in the documentary, she's also clear she hates it. Anyway, this documentary is really delightful if you enjoy Martha Stewart. If you don't like Martha Stewart, you might still find it fascinating. You might still actually like it. Because she is such a fascinating character because she's very blunt and she has self-awareness but not necessarily insight. And so you see... So weird. That she's talking about these things like, well...

you don't understand that that's not how a person, how any other person would respond to this situation. Well, she's special. She is special. She's special. And she had a very distant father who loved her very much, but loved her on very certain conditions. That tracks. Yeah, it definitely tracks. Yeah. So I really recommend seeing this if you're at all interested in

And Martha Stewart knows sort of what she's done. My other sort of... It's a good thing. It's one cool thing is the replacement ear pads we got for our headphones. And so we use the very classic headphones that everybody uses, which is the Sony MDR-7506s, which are these...

Great headphones. Yep. The covers are like this sort of pleather thing that just like flakes away and just leaves, it just leaves death detritus everywhere. It feels like the kind of thing where like later when we're dead, they'll pull us out of the ground to measure how much of the pleather was like absorbed into our bones. Yes. Like why did they both die on the same day under circumstances that are not really... They got pleathered. It was the pleather. It was just inhaling pleather flakes. Yeah.

What will we do when the podcast population is decimated by pleather flakes? We'll all be happy. So our new replacement pads for these headphones, because the headphones are going to last forever, but the new pads have like a mesh coating, which is not going to happen. Very lovely. Yeah.

We have two other small, tiny, one cool things, which are two new babies born into the John August ecosystem. So Stuart Friedel, our former Scripps producer, welcomed his second child. So very excited for a new baby on that front. Weirdly, his second child was born, and then it said...

Two weeks earlier. So... There's a Stewart special right there. Yes, his child was born at two weeks of age. Yeah. Bizarrely. It's crazy that. Incredible. And Chad Creasy, who is also one of my former assistants, who's been on the show, also welcomed a new baby. I love babies. I do too. And their world will be good. Yeah. They will never know some things. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. They just won't know. They won't know. They won't know. Lucky. Yeah.

Well, I mentioned earlier an article in Wired about California and setting the pace. And we'll dig that link up. But there's another Wired article that I'm kind of obsessed with right now. And the title of it is the kind of title that generally I'm like, huh. The quantum geometry that exists outside of space and time. Now, usually I go, uh, because I'm like, either this is going to be some

oversimplification, bad science article like most of them are, or this will be impenetrable. There's very little middle ground. But this article actually appeared in Quantum Magazine and it has been, I guess, repurposed for Wired. And it's outstanding. It does a great job of explaining what a big deal it is for how the mathematicians and physicists work

who think about the underpinnings of reality have started to reimagine it. And it turns out that what was going on was we were sort of stuck in a model. The model was all about what happens when collisions occur. And the only way to figure it out was just like sort of grind out like here's, oh my God, it takes forever. It was Feynman came up with the method, but it was the best we had.

And then through this combination of scientists, they've figured out like, oh, no, this is like a vastly simpler way to start to model how this works. They referenced it. They're like, it's literally you could teach it to a fifth grader, which kind of makes sense. That when you really get down to it, what's underneath reality tends to weirdly be simple like...

How weird is it that energy is mass times the speed of light squared? There's three letters in that equation. So what we keep finding when you really dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, is actually kind of simple, which is, of course, because we're in a simulation. Obviously. No. Of course we are. I mean, we're figuring it out right now. There's no problem. It's fine. Don't let that upset you. I mean...

I mean, of course it's a simulation, but we're figuring out how it works and we're getting better at it, which I think is amazing. Yeah. It reminds me of like, you know, you'll see these formulas for like weird things that don't seem like they have anything to do with like normal geometry. And pi is in there or e is in there. Pi is a perfect example. Why does that keep showing up? Why would that be how circles work? Then when you look at it, you're like, well, this totally makes sense. So...

They find that they can layer paths on polyhedrons. Mm-hmm.

in very simple ways to explain so much of what's going on. Now, I'm simplifying this because we don't have the time for me to read this whole thing. But I would say if you are even a B plus science student, if you're B and lower, I'll probably skip this one. But if you're a B plus science student... You keep pointing at me when you say B or lower. I mean, I don't know how you were in school with this. I don't know. See, I nailed it. B or lower. He went to drama school. So...

Well, this isn't for you. You take physics for poets. Maybe have your wife explain it to you. Yes. Have your wife explain this to you. But even if you have like moderate scientific interest and capacity, this article really is kind of mind blowing and a great little, almost like exciting, like many science stories are an exciting hunt with a

Awesome conclusion. I love that. Yeah. Very nice. That is our show for this week. Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Cilelli. Okay. Outro of this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaux.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaux.com. That's also where you'll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. They're all great. You'll find them at Cotton Bureau.com.

You can sign up to become a premium member at ScriptNotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. A reminder that we have a live show on December 6th. I thought we were sold out, but apparently we still have some VIP tickets left, so if you want to come to that. VIP tickets? Yeah, VIP tickets. What do they get? Cool first rose things. What else? You get a drink ticket, so free drink. And you get to stick around for an after party where you get to meet John and Greg and me.

Oh. And maybe some other guests. You know, I like that you slipped in you. Yeah. I'm important. You're like, this is what's going to move those VIP tickets, folks. And I agree with you. Yeah. I think a lot of these people have already seen us. Yeah. But you're, you know, I mean, Meghana is basically a celebrity. Yeah, Meghana's back. We'll bring her too. Oh, yeah. Let's bring Meghana. Yeah.

Everybody. I mean, people love Megan. When you graduate to Megan-a-status, you too will be... It'll be a different... It'll be a thing. Yeah. And some great guests we got lined up. Yeah, we always do. And who will we be benefiting this time for this? This is Hollywood Heart. So Hollywood Heart is a fantastic charity that helps kids who otherwise couldn't go to summer camp go to a special summer camp. We're doing what we can do... Mm-hmm. Yes. ...to spread some joy and make things better. That's all we can do. That's all we can do.

Craig, thank you so much. Thank you, John.