676 - Writing while the World is on Fire
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you're listening to episode 676 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you keep doing creative work when it feels like the world around you is burning to the ground, sometimes literally? To help talk us through that despair, self-doubt, and anxiety, we welcome back a beloved guest from episode 99, Dennis Palumbo, a writer-turned-psychotherapist who deals with these issues every day.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, Dennis and I will talk about how therapists are portrayed on screen with suggestions for getting it right. But first, Drew, we have some follow-up. We do. So we had a few people write in following up on our conversation on AI from back in episode 669. Yep.

Imran writes, Recently, a production company added my original TV pilot onto their slate and paid me to craft its pitch deck. This particular script is a lo-fi sci-fi with a South Asian female lead. I want to stop on lo-fi sci-fi. I just love that as a term. Yeah. Now, obviously with pitch decks, the visual job is finding comps, stills, actors, etc. to show what we're making.

But finding stills of South Asian female leads in Hollywood roles is a very limited pool. And then trying to find them in any sci-fi context is an almost impossible task. And my past experience is that decision makers often have what I lovingly call racial fantasia. So I got to show them, but what do I show them? Well, enter AI.

I was able to concoct stills from a show like mine that doesn't actually exist but feels familiar, allowing me to center a South Asian female lead, like a show from a parallel universe that's already solved its representation problem.

So decks generally just use images ripped from TV and movies, and they're not for public consumption. So I feel like I didn't go against my general philosophy of not replacing a human with a toaster. Could this be considered an instance of AI enabling opportunity rather than the opposite? I feel okay with this particular usage, but what do you think? Yeah, so Imran, you're right at that sweet spot where I'm actually wrestling with the same questions myself because I've had to put that at pitch decks.

And let's talk through what you're usually doing with the pitch deck, which is you're looking for images from existing movies and TV shows that sort of give a sense of the feel and the style of what you're going for. And, you know, if I'm...

putting up things for the female lead that I'm talking about, like, this is Rebecca. I might put up a series of images of split screens of, like, a couple different actresses who could play that part. Like, here's Zoe Saldana, here's Jennifer Lawrence. Like, here are people in that space. That's great. But sometimes you need to show what's actually happening kind of in the moment, in that scene. And...

My go-to source for all this stuff is I pay for a subscription to ShotDeck, which is a really good site that pulls stills from all sorts of images and does a really good job cataloging and tagging them. So you can say like, I need a close-up shot of a man looking down. I need this kind of thing. It's really useful for building that and for building mood boards. But, Imran, exactly the situation you're running into, like sometimes that shot doesn't exist because it's just never been done before. And particularly with issues of representation, yeah, you're not going to find...

enough young Asian female leads in a sci-fi franchise, it's going to probably work for you there. So I get what you're trying to do. I would say, listen, don't pretend that you're not doing it. Don't hide from it. But also I think you need to sort of put some guardrails around yourself. You're using this stuff to be able to

convince other people to embark on your project, but this is not the final product. So the fact that it's internal is a helpful delimiter for me. Always just be asking yourself, am I taking away someone's job by doing this? Because what are the alternatives? Well, you could go out and do a photo shoot with a model who sort of does these things. That's just not realistic. That's not how these things are done. You could go to a sort of Photoshop professional who could

comp together a bunch of other images to find that thing, that's maybe possible. And as you go out further with the project, it may make sense to enlist some of those folks in terms of building this deck so you can go out and if you need to show it to networks and other places beyond that, that might make some sense. But for what you're doing right now, I don't personally have a problem with it. Some people would. That makes sense.

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

Yeah, I would be really curious to hear from our other listeners about what they're finding in their actual working environments. I was on a studio a lot yesterday in a sort of a TV kind of space and I saw just a lot of people with a lot of really big monitors. I was wondering sort of how much they were using AI to do some stuff in there and I don't know what it is.

Listen, sort of like Imran's question is, I guess I'm wondering what kinds of things are they saying? Maybe it's okay for you to use AI to do some of these things. You mentioned that like your Zooms are all recorded. So great. But a lot of times they're using those Zooms to actually generate notes about what happened in the meeting.

I'm kind of okay with it. Again, are you taking a person's job who normally would be there to do that? For most of these meetings, probably not. In the case of a writer's room, yeah, a writer's assistant was supposed to be there doing that kind of stuff. I think when you have policies that are written down, but then you're actually not enforcing them, I think it's in some ways kind of worse than not ever actually having a policy because it makes a question of whether there are any boundaries around anything. Drew, what's your take?

Well, I know Rita works in editorial. And so there's different facets to that too. Like when we had Mike Schur on the show, he was talking about using his audio engineer, using AI to pull seal noises out of the back of a shot. And that feels like a tool. That feels like a useful thing. And, you know, editors, these editorial programs have little, you know, tools and wizards and things that can clean stuff up. So if AI is being used in that capacity...

I don't have any problem with it. That feels fine to me. I think I said this on an earlier podcast. If the person whose job it is to be doing that thing is using the tool themselves. Yeah.

I have less of an issue with it than if they are someone whose entire job is in that space is using that to replace the person who would normally be doing that work. But an interstitial shot, that feels bad. It does feel bad. And I think we're going to be wrestling with this for a long time. Rita, I would say that it's good to clock how you feel about these situations. And when you feel like something is crossing the line or you wonder if something's crossing the line,

talk with others around you. You may not necessarily be able to go up to your supervisor and say, this is a problem here, but if other people at your level are feeling a similar kind of situation, there may be some logic behind that. Post is one of those areas that's going to be affected earlier because it's people sitting at machines doing things and maybe they're using the next generation of those existing technologies to do stuff and it may be fine, but it may also be disruptive in a really bad way.

I'd be really curious where the line is for a lot of these people in post, for our friends at VFX, the ethical boundaries that they're pushing up against. Because to me, a lot of these just feel like extensions of tools that they might already have. But that's probably not true. Well, I mean, anyone who's actually edited a movie or TV show will tell you that most of the dialogue you're seeing coming out of an actor's mouth is not necessarily what was recorded in that moment. You've slipped lines from other takes and you've moved stuff through. It's all artifice and all manufactured. So if...

you're sweetening or changing the audio to do that or you're doing clever things to people's mouths so that you can slip frames. Oh, yeah. We've long had issues with sort of like how authentic and how real a thing is that we're seeing on screen is. This is amplifying that and I think people are going to have to make choices about what they feel comfortable with and what they don't feel comfortable with.

Well, yeah, please write in with more on this. Yeah, I'm glad you were able to solve all the AI issues. So now let's talk about our brains. So let's welcome our guest. Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in working with creative patients like writers.

His screenwriting credits include the feature film My Favorite Year, for which he was nominated for a WGA award for best screenplay. He was also a writer for Welcome Back, Carter, among other series. In addition to his therapy practice, he writes mystery thrillers, which you can find in bookstores everywhere. Welcome back to the program, Dennis Palumbo. Oh, thank you, John. It's good to be here. You are on episode 99, which was a zillion years ago, but it's one of our most popular episodes. It's one of the ones that we replay most often because it has such timeless advice.

for writers facing imposter syndrome and just really the struggle of, you know, sitting down in the chair each day to write. So thank you for that. Oh, my pleasure. What got me thinking about you in this moment was an article you wrote just a couple weeks ago titled, Am I Just Fiddling While Rome Burns? And can you give us

Give us a little setup behind why you wrote the article and what you were finding. Yeah, the article is actually one of the columns in a column I do for Psychiatric Times called Creative Minds. And it's a therapist looking at dealing with creative patients. The audience is primarily psychiatrists and psychologists because it's a clinical journal. But apparently, somehow it

Got a little more. It's not viral, but it got big for some reason. And I've heard from a lot of people. And what got me writing about it, frankly, was the L.A. fires. Yeah. One of the things that writers deal with all the time, the two aspects are relevance and perspective.

is what I'm doing as a writer relevant in the world today and perspective. And so relevance to me means, you know, gee, does anybody care about what I'm writing about? Does it help anybody? Is there a reason for it to exist? And perspective is like, here I am complaining because I can't get the second act to work and people are dying in Syria. People are dying in Gaza. Yeah.

From the 10,000 foot perspective, what I do doesn't matter. And that really came home to me during the L.A. fires because I had so many patients who were just saying, look, you know, people are losing their homes. People are dying in Gaza.

what the heck am I doing, you know, writing my fourth mystery novel? What am I doing writing my 28th episode of an NCIS series? You know, when you are an artist in particularly a commercial marketplace, it's really hard sometimes to justify what you're doing in the face of difficult times. I mean, we're also in a quite

erratic and revolutionary political time that's confusing and disheartening to a lot of people. And so this is something I noticed in my patients. So I decided to write a column about some of the people that I've worked with and some of the things they've said about it.

Well, let's start local. Let's start with the fires because you think about Gaza, you think about sort of like turmoil in the world is not new, but having such incredible turmoil in our backyards and in many cases, I've had 10 friends who lost their houses in these fires. It brings it home very directly. It makes you sort of question, what is it that I'm doing here? What is keeping me in Los Angeles? So let's take it from the perspective of the extreme case of a writer whose house burns down in the fires.

If you are the therapist talking with that writer about getting back to work, what are the points of the conversation? What are the things that you're trying to get that writer to see? What's the conversation like? Well, first of all, I think it's important for someone to acknowledge the traumatic experience

of something like that. You know, you end up with two kinds of patients. There are those who are bowled over by an experience like that and become immobilized. And then you have another kind of patient who says, I don't care that my house burned down yesterday. I'm going to get this in on deadline, you know? And to me, they're two sides of the same coin. They're magical thinking. Yeah.

So the first thing I would do with any, I have had actually a patient lose her home in the Palisades and we dealt with it like any trauma, any tragedy. People are going to have PTSD symptoms after a tragedy like that. You know, for those who don't know, post-traumatic stress disorder, the kind of symptoms you have is a hypervigilance about bad things happening again.

a belief that maybe you could have avoided this by not living in the Palisades or by having one of those automated sprinkler systems that watered down your house. Then if your house didn't burn down, but your friend or your relatives did, then you have survivor guilt. These are all functions of PTSD. And these traumas have to be experienced and processed and held by the therapist.

so that the person can move through them. So we're not saying, no, we don't think you should ever write again. In fact, I'll make the argument it's crucial that you do so. But I also think it's crucial that you allow yourself the initial experience and the feelings that you're having about it, and then to challenge the meanings that usually associate themselves with a trauma, primarily meanings that are self-recriminating,

that are self-blaming or that make you feel as though the universe doesn't like me, my house burned down and this guy's house didn't, so God hates me.

you would be surprised where people go in the face of a tragedy. Well, also, we're dealing with writers who, it is by their nature to narrativize, to sort of create stories around these situations and to see themselves as the protagonist in the situation and that they're in some act of a multi-act story, which...

is understandable, but may not actually be helpful for them processing what's happened and to sort of move on with the next stage. You make some examples in your column about great art that came out of really difficult times. We have Picasso with Guernica. I was also thinking about like Virginia Woolf or Kurt Vonnegut or Auden who are writing about the profound grief and anxiety that they're encountering. And some of us will have a chance to channel what we're feeling into art.

Right.

Well, it's hard to balance unless you look underneath it. Okay. I mean, I wrote sitcoms for years. You're a Mahomet caller. You know, and I got to tell you, if you're not angry and aggrieved and filled with pain and bitterness, you're not funny. So the only good thing to come out of it, it's like the old joke, hey, you know, the war was terrible, but a lot of great songs came out of war. The reality is,

You can write comedy coming out of tragedy because sometimes it's the only way you can survive. I mean, a whole race of people, the Jews, that's to me how they've gotten through the last number of centuries. But I know it's very, very difficult. And it's interesting, too, because...

For a lot of artists, they think, well, the way to be relevant when a tragedy happens is to only write about the tragedy. You know, like John Hersey writing Hiroshima.

Or like you said, Picasso painting Guernica. And there's a great story where a former German officer was looking at Guernica on the wall and said to Picasso, how did you do that? And Picasso said, actually, no, you did that. The thing that's really important to remember is you don't have to write directly about something to write about its emotional impact.

Because one of the things that writing does that's so amazing, no matter how small or far off or idiosyncratic an idea is, or even a time zone is, or even a historical era is, if the stakes are real and the people's feelings are real, anyone can relate to it.

And so you can write an episode of a sitcom in the wake of a tragedy because every character in that sitcom wants something, has felt denied something, yearns for something, and has been disappointed about something. And you can craft a story about the smallest thing, like not getting invited to the prom.

But you can work in it all the ideas about yourself. I'm not worthy. I'm not good enough. If I were pretty enough, if God loved me, I'd go get a prom date, you know. All the things that concern us about ourselves can be filtered through something as silly as a sitcom.

Let's talk about writing as a therapeutic practice because one of the things that writers have that is sort of unique among some of the creative arts is that we don't need anyone's permission to do a thing. You know, even painters, like their studios burn down. Writers, we just need a piece of paper and we can write stuff. And I guess there probably is a double-edged sword there because we need so little, there's an expectation we should be able to get back to work quickly. We don't need all this stuff around us. We don't need these permission structures around us. What advice do you have for someone who is sitting down for the first time after writing

a fire tragedy or loss of a loved one or some other profound loss in their life, how do you recommend they start or do they just start and grapple with it as it comes? Well, there's no one size fits all model for how you work with a patient. It would be dependent on

What I know about the patient's childhood, their core issues, their values, the kinds of themes they tend to write about. I mean, just off the top of my head, I would suggest that someone write about how they're feeling right now. Even if what they're feeling right now is I don't want to write my episode of this procedural or I don't want to do this rewrite of this episode.

comedy film I've signed up to do. Write about what you feel and how you don't want to do it and what's preventing you from doing it. And then I would probably look at what's the meaning behind preventing it. In other words, there are people who would feel, what business do I have of writing about the time my sister broke up with her boyfriend when people have lost their homes?

You know, so then I'd say, okay, now we're talking about how relevant you are, how important what you do is. It's crucial to remember, too, that like everyone, writers come from a family of origin that contributes to their mythology of how the world works. You know, I have a very famous director patient whose parents died

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

is how relevant what he does is, how important what he does is. If I don't know that, having worked with him for a long time, if I don't know that about his core issues, I'm not going to know how to talk to him about what

is preventing him from going back to work, which may include the idea that if he were really moved by what was going on in the world or in the Palisades, for example, he wouldn't be able to write. He wouldn't be able to work.

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

Doing the work saves your life. And in my experience, writers save their ass by writing. I don't care if they're going through a divorce or the loss of a family member or their house burning down. For most writers, the way they connect with themselves is to utilize and manifest their skill set.

It's like True North. If their needle isn't pointing to True North, they get wiggy. That's a clinical term, but they get wiggy. So I want to segue from this incredibly local situation of the fires and the loss of what we see sort of in front of us to something I'm feeling a little bit more personally, which is I feel like I'm grappling with this

sense that I'm not sure that the world, as I understand it, is going to exist in two or three or five years. I just feel that there's an acceleration of things. And so you touched on part of this, that sense that the administration is trying to rip apart the government, that we have the rise of very powerful AI without any guardrails around it, and the sense that this kind of cold war we're in with various nations could become hot. So those are all anxieties I have that the stuff that I'm working on right now can

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

A concrete example would be Craig and I have this script notes book, which should be out at the end of the year. And I feel really good about that. We're going to get it done. I'm excited people have it in their hands. But if I were starting that project right now, and it was like 2027 that was coming out, I would feel a little bit different about that because I just don't have a clear vision in my head of what 2027 looks like.

So I see you nodding. So these are not new ideas to you. But how does one start to process that as a writer, as someone who's trying to work on things that are going to take a while to do? Well, again, you know, there's not one way to look at this. I mean, my overall view is that

Art speaks to something when we are in existential angst that science and reason and even the ability to prognosticate the future doesn't. I mean, that's the thing that's so magical about art is that it transcends what rational or cognitive thought has to say about the situation we're in.

I mean, yes, the world seems incredibly unstable right now and quite dangerous. I mean, this is a terrible period to me, it feels like.

The industry seems like it's gone sideways. AI scares the living hell out of me. I mean, it's the only, the only thing good about being old is I missed AI as a writer, you know? Yeah. I mean, I began writing before there were word processors and computers. I wrote the first draft of my favorite year on a Royal Portable typewriter. Which,

Which I still have, by the way, and I had oiled up and detailed and everything. So I figure when the big, massive electromagnetic pulse happens, and we all go back to the Stone Age, I'll be the only guy that can type. That's my theory. But anyway, to deal with your question in somewhat more serious terms, I'm hearing this from a lot of patients. I don't know what the world's going to be like in two years or five years. I don't know what...

my life is going to be like, what the industry is going to be like, what America is going to be like, how it's going to feel. I mean, it's very frightening for a lot of my patients who found themselves in the Midwest over the holidays and seeing nothing but Trump signs and MAGA hats and feeling literally like they were in a different world. They literally felt like, boy, do I not belong here? And

That feeling is encroaching on a lot of people with sensitivity right now. And so it's very, very tempting to become overly pessimistic. Yeah. To go, everything's going to hell in a handbasket. So what I do doesn't matter.

And I would flip it on its head. I would say, because you feel everything's going to hell in a handbasket, it's never been more important to do what you do. In my article, in my column that you referred to, I talk about two films that speak to that. One is Sullivan's Travels, the Preston Sturges film.

about a director, filmmaker, comedy filmmaker who thinks that what he's doing is irrelevant given the troubles people are going through. And he learns throughout the film that his work provides solace and relatability to people.

And even at a further end in Woody Allen's Stardust, when he's speaking to some aliens who have come down from outer space and he says, what can I do to make things better? And they say, write funnier jokes. And so even though that's a joke in and of itself, I think the intent's very serious under there. The role of art is to transcend and help us cope with stuff that reason and science and logic don't.

cannot contain. It cannot contend with. I defy anyone to look around the world right now and go, well, through reason, I can contend with what's happening and feel reasonably certain about what the next five years is going to be like. No.

you can't even trust the ground underneath your feet. It does feel like everything is just shifting very, very quickly. But your point, which Craig often will get back to as I sort of spin into my, not quite apocalyptic nihilism, but like sort of approaching it, is like, well, our job is to entertain. Our job is to, our function, and this is obviously each individual writer is going to have their own sense of what our purpose is, but our job is to provide that storytelling, to provide that sense of

the moment that we're in, but also carrying people outside of that moment that we're in. That's really what our function is. I agree with that. But see, where I would differ slightly is I don't think of entertainment as outside of relevance. Yeah. I,

I think there's value in any kind of creative entertainment that you do because it's an expression of what's in your mind and heart. And an expression of what's in your mind and heart, no matter how silly or outrageous it is, is relevant to others. You don't have to have been Rocky Balboa to know what Rocky wanted in that boxing match. He wanted to be taken seriously.

to felt like he wasn't a bum. We all understand that. You didn't have to have been raised in poverty to understand what Frank McCourt was writing about in Angela's Ashes. We all know what it's like to feel like we're trying to reach beyond what people think is capable for us. Look at Neil Simon. Everybody says, wow, I really love his plays that were so serious toward the end of his writing career and how, you know, relatable they were.

I think come blow your horn and the odd couple is relatable because it's about intimacy. Yeah. It's about human connection. And if anything is important, when times feel crazy, it's anything that supports human connection. Well, I wanted to sort of emphasize that because I think a natural tendency towards when you see things all going wrong

crazy is to pull back it's just to retreat and I think we also because we went through the pandemic together which is also a shared PTSD which was a function of retreating and sort of pulling back that there's a default posture of that which is just okay I'm just going to get my little bubble and sort of protect myself and protect myself around you and that's not generally the right instinct the instinct is to reach out and to find connection with others and making art sharing art being part of a writer's group getting a chance to actually show what you're doing and pull that

feeling back in is probably what gets you through it. It also creates meaning in a world that feels increasingly meaningless or where meaning is harder to find. The psychiatrist Rolla May wrote a book called The Courage to Create.

And it's the same as Viktor Frankl's man's search for meaning. I mean, the goal for a human being, I think, is to be authentic. And then out of that authenticity, where do they find meaning? There are people who find meaning in animal rescue or in working for Greenpeace. But there are also people who find meaning in writing a 700-page book about their family history.

All of it is okay because art pushes against existential angst. And when external of, I mean, imagine going through the pandemic, going through the fires, going through Gaza, going through the Holocaust, going through the Black Plague, going through the Dark Ages.

humanity has managed to get through all of these things by somehow finding a mode of expression for what's in his or her mind and heart. That's the courage to create.

And I'm, you know, just like anyone else, my instinct is to never read a headline anymore. I don't want to hear I can't listen to him actually speak and I can't look at him. So it's kind of tough to know what's going on at the White House if those are your rules. But, you know, I'll skim a headline just in case there's an alien invasion or something. But.

I'm going on kind of a news diet. And another part of me thinks, well, you know, what are you doing? You copping out? You know, shouldn't you be involved? So there's a real dichotomy there. And I think for a writer, unlike other people, by writing about a narrative that's going on in our head, we are involved because that narrative is infused with the context we're in.

I could argue that reality is only subjectivity in a context. I would say, John, your reality is your subjectivity in the context of what's going on in the world right now. So whether you write a joke or whether you write a horror movie, if it's coming out of where your subjectivity is in the context of the world we're in now, it's legitimate and authentic.

And given how much bullshit there is in the world and how little authenticity we find, whether online or in politics, every authentic expression of your inner world

is a candle against the darkness. It really is. Well, and we speak of authenticity in a time where the question of whether a work of something that looks like a work of art or a piece of writing was written by a human being or an AI is also relevant. So the fact that you did this thing yourself,

lets you know that you did this thing yourself and you have the skills to put this thing down and you had an original idea and you created an expression of that original idea and you can share it, you can actually have it resonate with other human minds that are out there. Absolutely. It's a gift. Yeah, I think, you know, my feeling is why give the world

more impact on you than it needs to have. I mean, if you don't create because you're battered by what's going on in the world, you've allowed the world to take away your skill set, which is the thing that is so important to your self-concept. It really is. Great. We have two questions from our listeners. I think we're perfectly suited to your skill set. So Drew, do you want to start us off with Shiloh's? Shiloh writes...

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

That's a great question. I've never heard that question asked like that before. But I hear little bits in there that I think do speak to things we talked about back in episode 99 and also in this conversation, that sense of like, it's almost kind of an imposter syndrome. I couldn't hope to compete with that. Also, the idea of competition is something we could pull on, a thread we could pull on as well. Listen, Pixar has a bunch of really smart people who look through all their stuff and critique it and make it work.

But kind of so do all other filmmakers you've ever encountered. They have selected groups of people who they trust

to help them figure out how to do a certain thing. The good news is, Shiloh, you don't have to make a Pixar movie. Don't make a Pixar movie. Make your own movie, and it doesn't have to be done in a Pixar-y way. But this is me as an amateur speaking. Dennis, dig in. How do you help Shiloh process that? First of all, I haven't heard it quite put like that. Funnily enough, of course, I've had a number of writers who've worked for Pixar, and it's like, you know, the baton death march. So it's not...

It's not a great experience. Yeah, let's make sure that Shiloh hears this because I too know folks who've worked up there and some had good experiences, but some also felt like, oh my God, I spent four months and we worked on like two paragraphs and it doesn't feel like it's my thing at all. Well, but see, I used to work in sitcoms. My first years in show business were sitcoms and we had writer's rooms with, you know, it's not like it is today. We had 10 or 11 funders.

funny people in a room so that by the time the script came out and you were about to shoot it on Tuesday, I didn't know who wrote what joke. Yeah. And one thing I knew for sure is the script wouldn't have been as funny if it had just been me because that gang writing of a comedy really helps make it funnier. Now, if that's your only goal, that's fine.

But one of the reasons Neil Simon left your show of shows and began writing plays is because he lost his own voice in the writer's room, which is the reason I started writing prose, because I began to think I'm not a writer. I'm a funny talker, you know. So, yeah, you can group write something and over five years distill it down into something as good as Inside Out. I agree. Or Finding Nemo. I agree.

But each of those people involved brought their own sensibilities in it. And the brain trust up there kind of put it through the sieve and took the best from column A and the best from column B.

That's not how individual writers work. And so it's not your job to compete with anyone. And see, even if you, God, I think I'm so, I always remember one of my patients who won an Oscar for best screenplay. He brought his Oscar in and I said, congratulations. He said, thanks, but I'm no Billy Wilder.

And what I didn't tell him is that in an interview where people were praising Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder said, thanks, but I'm no Ernst Lubitsch. You see-

It's like Hemingway said, boys, Shakespeare got there first and better. So relax and start writing. And so these kinds of questions, I think, speak to issues of meaning where you're competing to prove that it is worth it for you to pursue your goals. Unless in your mind, you see it as equal value.

to the material that has inspired you, you're not entitled to do it. I see this in my practice all the time, this lack of entitlement and the feeling that, well, the thing that got me to be a filmmaker was Citizen Kane or the thing that got me to be a TV writer was The Sopranos, but I can't do something like that. Well, those jobs have been taken. Yeah.

No one's trying to do, you know, Citizen Kane 2. They were trying to do new things that are relevant to 2025. That's exactly right. You know, that's why you should never follow trends, you know, because by the time you think you're following one, it's no longer a trend. More importantly, some idiosyncratic approach was the beginning of that trend. Definitely. Second question here from Ethel. Ethel writes...

I was recently approached by a major publication that wanted to interview me about my experience working with someone embroiled in a controversy. And my reps have advised me not to touch it with a 10-foot pole. They say nothing good can come of it, and it's a lose-lose to speak up, even if it's only about my own personal good experiences with someone I deeply care about.

It's just business, they say, but is that an excuse not to speak up for a friend? All right, so grappling with the ethical concerns of like, I want to speak up for my friend. Would it be helpful to speak up for my friend? I don't want to get embroiled in that controversy. I've been there. I understand this. And I actually very much understand the rep's point of view of like, no good will come from this. Dennis, I see you nodding here. What's your instinct? I've been in this position too, because, you know, in my 17 years of show business, I've

knew a lot of people. I worked with a lot of very famous people. And I've been approached by people who are writing unauthorized biographies or writing profiles and stuff. My position is always that I will not comment. It's because I never know how it's going to be taken out of context or whatever, how it will be used by the writer or the editor.

And we don't know if it's a hatchet job or not. I mean, the thing is, we just don't know. And I think you do your friend a disservice even if you say, I think he's the most wonderful guy I've ever worked with. And then the writer puts under the, well, that's the only guy I found that felt that way. Everyone else said he was a son of a bitch. So you actually don't help your friend by saying, well, my personal experience was he was great.

You'll find someone who thought they had a great experience of Harvey Weinstein. Yeah. You'll find someone who thought they had a warm encounter with Bill Cosby. In fact, I know someone who did. Yeah. But see, if you say, yeah, well, I don't know. I thought Bill seemed like a great guy. You look like a moron because you're not aware of the totality of the context. Yeah.

Because we don't control the context outside of our own subjectivity, I know I sound like a therapist, but I can't help it. Because we don't control the context outside of our own subjectivity and our own intent, it's usually not a good idea, I think.

Unless you're willing to go do it off the record or anonymously. And I have a number of patients who've said a lot of outrageous things and just were just called, you know, an unidentified source. My experience is it gets back to who they are sooner or later.

So going back to Ethel, I don't know whether Ethel is still in touch with this person who is famous, who's embroiled in a controversy. If Ethel wants to be there for that person, for that friend, be there directly for that person, for that friend. And that's reaching out to them and say like, listen, I'm here for you. What you're going through feels like it really sucks. Let me be helpful to that person. But I don't think you're going to be able, you're not going to help them by publicly speaking out on something because...

what Dennis said is exactly right. Outside of the context of you just don't know how it's going to play. Yeah, you're much better off to personally just say, let's go have a cup of coffee and cry on my shoulder. I think these guys are pricks, but you'll get through this and stay with them as a friend. Yeah. There are situations where you are...

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

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I do think sometimes with a little bit of due diligence and thought, you can prepare for certain questions in case they come up. I mean, one of the things that was so disheartening for me in Kamala Harris's campaign

campaign was when I think she was on The View and somebody said, you know, is there any difference between you and Joe Biden? And she can't think of anything. And I thought her whole team never thought to prepare her for that question. I could have prepared her for that question. So anyway, so I think if you're going to comment to any reporter or journalist or TV reporter,

About a certain subject that's embroiled in controversy, at least do some due diligence as the kind of questions you're going to ask and how you're prepared to answer them. But I wouldn't do it. I just wouldn't do it. No.

All right, it's come time for our one cool things. Dennis Palumbo, do you have a one cool thing that you could share with our listeners? Yeah, I want to share a book that I read and I absolutely love. It's by Sarah Bakewell, and it's called At the Existentialist Cafe. Now, I don't know if your listeners are interested in existentialism, but the subtitle is Freedom Being an Apricot Cocktails.

And it's the private lives of Sartre and Simone de Beauvier and Camus. And it's delightful and funny.

And talks about where existentialism came from and the lives of the people who sort of pushed it without kind of living it. And so it's a wonderful, warm, funny, but very intelligent overview of that post-war time in Paris where all these existentialists came from.

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

And when you read it, one of the things you're struck by is, oh my God, some of the material and themes and viewpoints of these authors from the late 40s and 50s.

has filtered into not only our literature, but our film and television, our comedy particularly, our satire particularly. I could make an argument that most of our best stand-up comics nowadays, male and female, are existentialists. And I could make that argument, but I wouldn't take your listeners' time to do it, but I could make that argument. So I recommend At the Existentialist Cafe by Snara Bakewell. I shall purchase it today.

My one cool thing is River Runner Global, which is a website that I found this week. And the idea behind it is it's showing you a map of the world, sort of detailed map of the world. And you can zoom in and zoom in to incredibly close things. I was able to find my house that I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. And once you zoom to whatever level you want to get to, you can place a single raindrop and

And then we'll take wherever that raindrop falls and we'll figure out based on geological data where that raindrop is going to go. And so it's going to show you from like what's going from this into this creek into this river into this and how it's making its way to whatever ocean it ends up at. It is a fun way to waste some time and also just sort of zen out and figure out like, okay,

where does this all go? So it not only shows you the path, but it literally shows you the point of view of this raindrop entering all the different rivers as it's going its way to the coast. It's just a good reminder of like, there's a giant physical world out there that's going to exist no matter what. I always find that in times of uncertainty,

The recognition that the natural world will continue on without us is somehow reassuring, that it's just, it's beyond all the craziness of the day. So this is a version of that that's just on your screen and a sense of like, oh, that's right, the world is huge. Well, yeah, it reminds me of the thing the Buddhists say, you know, a tree has more to teach us than a Zen master. Mm-hmm.

You have taught us a tremendous amount today, Dennis Palomo. Thank you so much for coming back on. I can't believe it's been all these years. No. We get to repeat your episodes, so we get to more often, which is nice. This was a really great conversation, so thank you so much. Oh, John, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me back. And that is our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Schloley. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

You'll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber or attached to this episode. And thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week.

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