679 - The Driver’s Seat
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you're listening to episode 679 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, who's behind the wheel? We'll discuss point of view and storytelling in both film and TV, both on the script and scene level. We'll also talk about the most dangerous person in the room. Plus, we'll answer listener questions on visual effects, syntax, and dealing with clingers.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, we'll explain Eastside versus Westside for non-Angelinos, also known as Why Craig and I Never See the Ocean.

Craig is gone this week, but luckily we welcome back a very special guest. Liz Hanna is a writer, producer, and director whose credits include The Girl from Plainville, The Dropout, Mindhunter, Longshot, and The Post. Welcome back, Liz Hanna. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Hi, we're so excited to see you. We've been trying to schedule you for a bit. You've been super busy, but this was the week I texted and you got right back to me. I'm so happy to catch up with you. Me too. I'm so happy we got it done. I know, we've been trying to do it in 2025, 2020.

Just like 2024, the wheel keeps turning. The wheel does keep turning. We've talked a lot about sort of what's weird and unique about 2025 already. We had Dennis Palumbo on to talk through sort of how you try to get creative work done in this strange... I loved that episode. I loved that episode. Thank you. It was great. I mean, I feel like, sorry to interrupt, but I felt like it really dropped at a time, particularly where I was having like

the same conversation with so many creative friends, which was what that episode was about. So strongly, I hope if you're listening to this, you've already listened to that. But if you haven't, please listen to that. We had some listeners write in with their reaction to that. One of them is Ryan Knighton, who's been on the show a couple different times. Ryan Knighton is a Canadian writer, a blind writer who has traveled a bunch

Drew, read what Ryan had to say. Years ago when I was on assignment for a magazine during the Arab Spring in Cairo, I interviewed a number of filmmakers and writers. All of them had stopped working. All of them were in fact quite depressed, they said. They were exhilarated by that political change, unlike the world around us right now, but their depression stemmed from the fact that they didn't know what work to do. Simply put, they said, how can you make art that refers to a world that no longer exists or is about to disappear? You know, make art about what?

So even in positive political change, a similar anxiety, if not paralysis, emerges. What I thought was so great about Ryan's point is it's not just that we're in this moment that feels so dark and scary. It's just that we cannot even have a prediction about sort of what the next couple of years will bring. And so the people going through the Arab Spring, they could be really hopeful about the change that was ahead of them, but also they just didn't understand how to write about the world that was going to be changing so quickly. Yeah, I think that it's hard to...

think about what you're doing on Thursday when this universe is happening. So it's hard to think about what you could write. I think there's a paralysis. I mean, I feel, I also feel like writers are searching for paralysis at times. So like when we have legitimate ones, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's even doubly hard and surprising.

But I think that for me, I tend to write in political, social formats often or worlds. And for me, there's a paralysis of what should I be saying now? And I think when you're going through something that feels as traumatic, honestly, either positive or negative, there feels a pressure of a response to be valid and positive.

somehow parallel to what's happening and somehow speaking to what's happening. And if you're not doing that, then it feels sort of defeatist of like, well, what am I doing with my time? And then I think also for me as a writer, which I know you spoke about on the episode with Dennis Palumbo, but is I'm a writer, what can I do to change the world, you know, with everything that's going on? But you really can. I mean, I think that we both serve the roles as entertainers and as

We can be mirrors to hold up to the world. We can be reflections on people in power. We can be reflections on where we want the world to go. We can be reflections on how the world is that nobody wants to see. But all of that is, there's a lot of pressure on that to do that well. Yeah.

Because we're a podcast by writers, largely for writers, it's very easy to think about it just from our point of view, which is good because no one else is thinking about our point of view. But it's important to remember that there's also other decision makers out there who are trying to think like, well, what movies should I buy? What movies, TV shows should I greenlight? You're trying to develop this thing that's going to come out in two years, three years. What will even make sense? And one thing I found on sort of recent...

phone calls and pitches and things like that is, if I can talk about things that are universal themes that will make sense, kind of no matter what the world is like, that's really helpful. So like one of the projects that I'm hoping to get going, ultimately comes down to this moment of unexpected international cooperation to deal with a serious problem. And it's like, oh, well, that feels kind of universal. It feels hopeful. It feels like it's a fraught idea to explore at this moment, but also a thing that you...

could see working really well for... It's what we want to sit down in a theater and see. It's like, oh, a bunch of people coming together and actually solving a problem. And so I think as we're thinking about what we as writers are trying to create, we have to be mindful that the people on the other side of that table are also trying to figure out, like, what the heck is going to make sense, you know, as these shows and these movies come out. Yeah, and I think...

I don't think it's one-to-one, but I personally feel like I have to tread a little bit in hope right now. I am finding that to be a constant sort of word that comes up in conversations with executives and conversations with buyers is...

We need to have something hopeful that can be revolutionary, that can be not. But I think something that isn't living in the darkness that we are living in just by waking up and turning on the news, I feel like finding a way out of that is...

both universal, as you're saying, and also something that we can always hold on to and kind of the only thing we can hold on to right now. Yeah, I was listening to the State Culture Gap this morning, and they were talking about an article and trying to differentiate optimism from social hope and the idea of optimism feels a little naive, and it can feel sort of self-defeating. It's like you're ignoring the world around you. But social hope is remembering that

people can come together to actually achieve things when they need to. There's reasons to still have hope even in dark moments. And it's a thing we need to kindle as writers, but also as parents. I mean, I think it's just, it's making sure that you're able to be developmentally appropriately honest with your kids about this moment that we're in, but also understanding

people come together to resolve these issues. Yeah, I have a three-year-old and so living through the past six months has been just very strange and seeing his community of other three-year-olds and how each of them really is sort of

developmentally different in terms of how much they're perceiving of what's happening and how much they're not. My son, fortunately, is very deep into cars right now and cars are fun. So that's great for him. And we've been living in that world. Lightning McQueen, A plus over here. I would love to talk about cars too with somebody, just like really want to break that down. And then other kids are really understanding it, you know, and really sort of

They understand who Donald Trump is. They know who Kamala Harris is. They understood what the election was, at least peripherally in terms of how it affected their universe and the world. And it's really hard, as you said, to sort of balance being a parent and how you appropriately have that conversation with a three-year-old, a five-year-old, an 18-year-old.

And how you balance that with yourself. And I think as a writer, I have found myself paralyzed with what's happening in the world, both with the pressure of how I feel I can respond and also just how as a parent I can function and raise him. And the thing that I continue to go back to is hope. And I think it's really important to differentiate that from being naive about, you know, just sort of

oh, it'll all be fine. Hope doesn't come without parameters that are, we'll have to do a lot of work to get to the place that we can be hopeful for. And part of that is working. I mean, when I wrote the post, I'd been writing that movie for a long time and it just so happened to come out

in the era of Donald Trump. And I sold it, you know, right before the election in 2016. And that's the thing I say to writers who are looking for a way to respond is sort of tell the story that's in you. It will always be relevant if it is something that you find relevant to your path and your existence.

Absolutely. So now you're working on the post too, the Bezos era, and it's going to be great. It's going to be fantastic. Just so much better. All those dilemmas of Catherine Graham and all the things, now the problems are solved. Yeah, we fixed it all in 1971. We did it, team. Another bit of follow-up, that same episode with Dennis Palumbo, we answered a listener question about a listener who was comparing themselves to the Pixar Brain Trust and feeling like, well, I'll never be able to do as well as the Pixar Brain Trust. Drew, what did Scott have to say?

Scott said, my framing of this is to think of it this way. I need to write a spec script so good that really talented people would read it and want to work with me on the project. It's still a high bar, but it's not as daunting as saying you have to write something as good as Toy Story all by your lonesome. Hmm. All right. I think that's fair. So we talk about writing a script as like, this is the plan for making the movie, but it's also a document that shows how good of a writer you are and that hopefully people will want to invite you into a room to do things. And

Liz, you started as a feature writer, but you also worked in rooms with other writers. And you start to realize, oh, we are smarter together than any one of us is individually. Yes. I think there's two things to that. One, I completely agree about a script being a document. I don't write novels because I want to write a screenplay that becomes a visual piece. And in that, there are thousands more of collaborators. But you as the screenwriter, your draft...

of the screenplay that goes, be it a spec or be it your working draft that gets a director attached or whatever it is, that's like your sort of metal that you can show and that's your proof of concept of yourself as a writer. So I think it's important while difficult to compartmentalize the steps and the successes that are possible at every stage of a screenplay. So, I mean, I wrote the post as a spec to get

representation and to have a career. I did not write it because I thought it would get made. I've said it many times, but I mean, it's a moral thriller where the two leads are in their 50s. No one kisses. There is not an ounce of sex in it. And truly, the piece of the puzzle is solved within the first six minutes of the movie. And then the rest is just like, do we do it or not? I wanted to watch it

And I wanted to make it. And so that's why I wrote it. And the screenplay changed my life. Then the movie changed my life. But there were very significantly different stages of that that one was involved with the screenplay. The other thing I'll say is that absolutely working in a room

It's always better to have more brains than one, in my opinion. They have to be the right brains. Yeah. They're not always the right brains. So that's the thing about a room that is complex is, sure, I mean, there are showrunners I know who've had dozens of rooms and their rooms are nearly perfect at this point because you're working with

the same brain trust that you have cultivated over the course of your career. That doesn't always happen and it doesn't happen often early. And I think it's trial and error. But when you get that room that sort of fits perfectly for you and for what you're doing, then yeah, it's great.

We'll put a link in the show notes to the episode that you were on with Liz Merriweather talking through your experiences on those rooms. And it became so clear that how you cast those rooms, how you sort of put those rooms together, makes all the difference in the ability to achieve a vision. And so you can still have a kind of singular vision of that showrunner, that creator, but they have help. And so not to be, to the original listener who wrote in with that question, like, oh, I'll never be as good as a Pixar brain trust.

It's like, well, yes, but you get to be part of that Pixar brain trust by showing what you can do and by sort of allowing yourself to be part of that community. So it's also the very understandable sin of confusing your first work with someone's finished thing. And the reason, the way that we, if we went back and looked at early drafts of things based on what they became, you see the transformation that the process itself brought.

brings out. It's also calling it a brain trust, I feel like simplifies it almost. It's more of like a full body that has been completed because you have one person who's a really good right arm. You have one person who's a really good left brain. You have specialties within that quote unquote brain trust that are specific and going to exactly what you just said. Like knowing your strengths and showing those strengths on the page gets you to be

the right arm in that room, rather than thinking that you can accomplish the entire personage that is the writer's room of a Pixar movie, which, by the way, has multiple iterations throughout the life of a Pixar movie. Oh, yeah. This isn't the same four people for 10 years. If people want to go back and listen to the deep dive we did on Frozen, you see, like, they had a plan for the movie and, like,

well into the process as they were watching it on the screen like oh no no no this is not right and then it was coming in and sort of recognizing here's what's working here's what's not working how do we steer towards the part of the movie that it wants to be that's also part of the process and it's a thing we don't see as often in feature films but in TV as we're sort of back in the old days when you were shooting episode by episode you're finding episode by episode now that we do things more as a block

you have to really then take a gestalt look at the whole project to figure out, okay, where are we at? Where are we getting to? That's actually one of the main things we'll talk about today in the episode is really point of view and perspective and storytelling power. That's the thing you discover in the process, whether that process is

a long movie development or episode by episode or breaking the whole thing as a room, that's part of the journey. It's part of the discovery and you have to be open to that as a reality of writing. I'm not sure if you talked about this on that episode because I unfortunately missed it, but there's also an amazing like six-part documentary about Frozen 2, which is on Disney+, which kind of

comes in towards the end of the, they don't have a ton of the like feedback of it, but they do have that like, they don't know what the song is going to be, the main song is going to be. They walk you through all the animation process. It's amazing. I really recommend it, particularly if you think that any one person or any six people do it on their own in a Pixar or Disney animation, you're very mistaken. That's great.

Back in episode 652, we were talking with a playwright who was having trouble adapting their work to film. And Tony wrote some feedback on that. Tony says, Craig touches on it in the beginning when he says that plays are inside and movies are outside. But I would take it a step further, relating a similar comparison that was shared with me. That plays are driven by what people say to each other, while movies are driven by what people do.

I like that as a distinction. Plays are mostly talking. They really are. It's about sort of the verbal fights and spars and culture talk we have between those characters. And movies, we see people doing things. I think that originates with the fact that movies are fundamentally a visual medium that sound came later. We tell stories through pictures.

I think that's great. We're going to talk about it, but I think POV in general is an interesting distinction between film and television and plays. And that doesn't mean that you can't have privileged POV in plays, but I think it's really specifically different because of the visual aspect, the visual tools and technical tools that you have in features in television. But I like that. I think that's a great distinction. I like it.

A phrase that Craig and I have discussed often on the podcast is begs the question, which does not mean invites the question. It really is a legal term that means circular reasoning and things like that. I saw a piece by Alex Kirshner this week where he said begets the question, which I think is a clever way to...

use the framework of begs the question, but actually have it make sense. Begets the question, it causes us to think of the question of this next thing. So if you are reaching for begs the question, maybe add an ET in there and make it begets the question. And maybe that's how we'll get through this question.

This annoying thing where begs the question has come to mean something that was not originally meant to mean. Love that. Love it. I love being a trendsetter too. So I'm going to start using that and people will be like, whoa, where'd that come from? Begets the question.

I was talking with a friend at dinner this last week, and he works on government contracts. He doesn't work for the government, but he works on government contracts. And he was told that they are supposed to remove all their pronouns from their email footers because of Musk and Trump and everybody else, which is nuts. And I just want to have a small moment to rail against this because here is like, even if you believe in like that wokeism and all these things have to go away,

Pronouns are so effing useful. It's so nice to see if there's a name, I don't know, or if it's a Chris or a Robin, to know whether it's a he or her or who am I talking to is so useful. And there's sort of this expectation that all names we can automatically understand the gender of. We simply can't. And so I would just encourage people to put that in their email footer just so everyone knows so that if it's a

Particularly if it's a, if a Chinese person is looking at this, they understand like, oh, I'm talking to a man versus a woman. I think it's just ridiculous. And so I say, please keep putting your pronouns there. I think it's useful. Yeah. Also, there are so many things to be concerned about in this world. There are so many legitimate problems. The idea that this government is attacking people

and attacking things that are not hurting people, like putting your pronouns in your emails, which of course is a tangent of attacking trans rights and the queer community.

the queer community. So we're smarter than you. We see what you're doing. Like, it's just so beyond infuriating to me that I don't actually have an articulate thing to say other than how petty and small and bored must you be that these are the things that you're attacking. My case I'm trying to make is that in addition to being helpful for a group of marginalized people, it's just helpful for everybody. Yeah, I agree. It's just so damn useful. And it's like a small innovation that was just...

incredibly helpful and so to take it away because you're worried about the political valence of it is dumb. It's all dumb. It's just my small rant on a topic.

On more happy positive news, this last week we launched Highland Pro. So it's now in the Mac and iOS app stores. It went great. We were a little bit nervous. We did a soft launch in Australia just to make sure that it would actually work properly and that people could subscribe to it. And it's worked really great. So thank you to everybody who wrote in with

comments to Drew. So Drew's been sorted through the mailbox. Thank you to everyone who left a review. That is super, super helpful. Liz, I sent you a copy. I don't know if you had a chance to play with it yet. No, I am in a deep, dark place of not writing right now. But when I do write, I will. This is why your podcast two weeks ago was very helpful. No, I'm currently in a like

Carding and Google Document Face. That's where I'm at. That's great. I love Highland. I'm so excited. Yeah. My favorite, can I shout out my favorite edition or my favorite aspect of this? Because it's insane that we haven't created this. And I'm sorry for not knowing the exact way you do it. I always call it a scratch pile or like I open,

And I have a different final draft document where I put things in there where I don't want to get rid of them, but like I don't want them in this draft. And I always have two documents and it's always annoying because you're like, where is this? And you guys have created just sort of a place that you can put it for every document. It's just the shelf. It's just the shelf where you put it. And I saw this in the program and I was like, this is great. This is so useful. It's just there's a lot of...

common sense things, which is not dismissive, but there are common sense aspects to Highlands that I'm very appreciative of that shouldn't be hard to be in there for writers. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So we're excited to sort of have it out there in the world. I'm excited for people to copy things from it because the other apps will do the things we do, which is great because it sort of makes the world better for other people too. Fantastic. But if you want to try it, it's on the Mac App Store. It's on the iOS App Store. You can just go to quote-unquote apps.com and see more stuff there. You can see a little video of me talking about it. In fact, if you want to see, it will throw people because so many people, when they meet me in person, they're like, oh, wait, I wasn't expecting your voice to come out of that face. Yeah.

So you'll see my face. You'll see me talking there and see how it all fits in person. Let's get to our marquee topic. This is about the driver's seat. And so this is something that occurred to me this last week. I was watching two series that I really enjoy. So Severance and The White Lotus. And I was thinking about which characters in those series were allowed to drive episodes, which characters were allowed to drive scenes by themselves.

We've talked about this on the show before, but mostly from the context of features. And in features, very early on, you sort of establish the rules for the audience, the social contract of like, these are characters who can drive scenes, and these are characters who can be in scenes, but not drive them themselves. And we've talked through issues even in the first three pages where like, we're confused from whose point of view we're telling the story. But Liz, as somebody who has done more episodic work, I feel like those are some fundamental choices that you are making early on in the pilot, but also in those rooms.

And you have the opportunity to bend or break those rules as you go through a season, as you're figuring out episode by episode. So talk to us about like what you think of when you think of the driver's seat or point of view or like even some other terms that you might be using when you're referring to this phenomenon. Yeah, I think point of view, I think protagonist is often like an episode protagonist is something that we use a lot. Yeah.

I am actually breaking a series right now and point of view is incredibly important to the storytelling of it. And there are a number of point of view characters within it. And so my partner and I, after we sold the show and we were like, let's sit down and really think about like what we want to say, how we want to say it.

How you want to say it is what characters do you want to say it. And that for me is a day one conversation because I can't really start to break story without knowing who is going to be telling that story to an audience and who I'm going to be trusting with that story and who my audience is going to be trusting. And by the way, that might be a trick, right? Because it's all, when you have a point of view character, it's always privileged storytelling because they are not

just a narrator telling you what's happening. They are telling it through the lens of them as also a character revolving in this story. And so I think it's really, for me, fundamental. On Plainville, we had a lot of point of view characters because we had three timelines and we had sort of a central thesis, which I think does begin to adjust how you have these conversations, which was,

what if everyone was involved in this? Really, it was a challenge to ourselves, which is, what if we step back and sort of don't take a black and white perspective on this and say, she's the villain, he's the victim, but let's look at everybody in sort of a three-dimensional way. And once we start doing that and telling that story of how these two people ended up here and their families ended up here, what are kind of the scenes that come out of that story that

that feel organic and then who are the storytellers of those scenes. And so Lynn was always a primary storyteller, Coco's mother, both because of her own trauma and her own journey, but also because there were stories to be told about him that should come from her. Yeah. And shouldn't necessarily have come from him because you are your own main character of your own life. Yeah. And so I think it's really important. I think that...

that that happens organically in any series and should happen organically at the top. Because in my opinion, you don't know what story you're telling until you know who's telling it. And that goes for features or television. I think of Severance in particular, now you're adding another layer to this, which is the privileged storytelling, which is you as the filmmaker are withholding very significant beats from the audience

and you're probably feeding incorrect or misdirections to the audience that you also don't want the audience to be upset about. You don't want an audience to feel betrayed by those misdirections. You don't want the audience to feel betrayed by your storytelling techniques.

but you do want them to be surprised. And so I think the crafting of that is a whole other level that I'm sure begins with what we were just talking about, which is who are my storytellers? But then also, at what point do I start to lie or misdirect? Yeah, so I want to separate those two ideas out a little bit. So there's who has storytelling power and sort of

within the world of the stories or who do we get to drive things and then also really the social contract you're making with the audience about sort of not just who's telling the story but to what degree you as the creator of the show as the show itself is allowed to misdirect and to do a magic trick on the audience. But let's start with the first part because one of the things you said that I thought was so interesting is you talked about storytelling power. You mentioned narration and most series are never going to have narration. You're not going to hear the person's inner thoughts but

But that's actually a useful way of thinking about sort of who can drive a scene. Like, could that person literally have a voiceover? Would it make sense for that character to talk directly to the audience? If it is, then they clearly have storytelling power. They can actually speak directly to the audience. In Big Fish, the movie, both Edward Bloom and Will Bloom can speak directly to the audience. You hear them talking directly to the audience. And that choice I had to make in those first 10 pages to let it know, like, both of these people can talk directly into your ears.

In most series, most movies, you're not going to have that. But the equivalent of that is who is driving a scene by themselves? Who is the person who the scene doesn't start until they enter the room? Those are kind of fundamental choices. As you're thinking about that on a series level, you might say, oh, we need to know what's happening with

jane and bob and this whole thing i'm like but if neither of those characters has been established in a way that like that we can expect to see them in a scene by themselves that's going to feel weird and those are the reasons why you sort of can't cut to are you a show that will cut to the random security guard and his conversation with somebody or not those are big choices you need to make kind of early on you can have fun with it at times i can think about in the um

Mandalorian, they'll catch a conversation between two faceless guards who are having a little conversation, but it's always in service of the bigger storyline. You're not going to keep coming back to them as a runner. Yeah, I think there's also the question of if you have to know what's happening with Steve and Jane, but...

you've never established them as POV characters, then do you really need to know what's happening with them? Because I think that it can become overwhelming sometimes, particularly when you're starting out as a feature writer or as a television writer of, I have to tell everyone's story. Because this is the other thing going back to the difference between plays and feature and television is that in plays, you have a set cast. And you can only have so many people there and you can only tell so many stories within that set cast. With POV,

in particular, it can be endless. You can continue to add cast as the episodes go on and many shows do. But is the story that you're telling with that cast member, that character, important to the story that you're telling overall? Which is why I do think it's really important to come down to theme and come down to as a

creator, as a storyteller, what is it that you want to say and what do you want to have your audience leave with? I think, you know, we always talk about blue sky in the writer's room, which is sort of that first week, that first two weeks, which is so lovely when you get to just sit with the writers and talk about what you want to have happen. And it's big dreams and there's no bad answers and there's no wrong answers. That all comes later. This is

sort of for me, by the end of that week or two weeks, I want to know what the show is that we're making. What are we collectively saying and what are we all on board to collectively say? You know, on the dropout, we had a lot of conversations about her, about Elizabeth Holmes and about the characterization of her within the series. And what did we want to say and how did we want to say it? And there was a lot of perspectives about her in particular at the time. And so a lot of our conversations were kind of

pushing that out and coming with our own bias to the table and then talking about that bias. And similar with Michelle Carter in Plainville was a lot of people having a bias towards her. And that's fine. I don't think everybody should have the same opinion. That's important. Again, when you talk about the brain trust, it's important for not everybody to agree. Well, let's talk about Elizabeth Holmes. So clearly she's the centerpiece of the story. And

she does protagonize over the course of it. We see her grow and change over the course of it. But if you'd locked into her POV exclusively for the entire run of the series, it would have been exhausting. And you really would have had a very hard time understanding what anybody else was doing because she's

mostly for better, for dramatic purposes. She is, I don't know if you want to say a narcissist, but she is, she's really at the center of all this stuff. And she herself does not have a lot of insight into the people around her. And so you needed to be able to establish early on that we'd have scenes that were not

centered upon her and understand what was going on around her. Yeah, I mean, I think she's quite unempathetic and just sort of if you'd never watched The Dropout and you only watched the documentary or listened to the podcast, I think it's very hard to empathize with Elizabeth Holmes. And so part of our goal was...

to infuse some empathy into her character. And I think empathy is the important word here. I don't want anybody to sympathize with her. I think she's quite hard to sympathize with. But empathize in terms of, can you put yourself in her shoes and see it from her perspective for a moment within the series? It doesn't have to be the entirety of the series, but can you sort of take a step back for a moment and not just go, ugh, that monster, and find yourself into it that way? That was really important for us.

And then I think something, a word we continue to use, protagonist, which I think is important rather than a hero of the story. Yeah. Because the heroes of that story were not Elizabeth Holmes. The heroes of that story were other true people who worked at Theranos as well as...

who were just the day-to-day people who were completely affected by that. And they are the heroes of their own stories as well as this one as a whole. And so I think it's important to remember when you're trying to sort of break out your point of view characters, they don't have to be the hero of the story. They don't have to be the villain of the story. No. But they are often the protagonist of the story. Yeah. So,

So I want to talk about protagonists as it relates to a recent episode of Severance. And so again, we will not do any spoilers here, but in the second season, there's an episode that is

largely from the point of view of a minor character, a character whose name we knew but had never had storytelling power. And suddenly, it's all centered around her, centered around her and Mark, who is clearly the hero of the story, clearly a point of view character. And what I found interesting as I was watching, I thought it was fantastic. And I wondered as it finished, like, wait, did anything actually happen or were we just filling in backstory? And I was like, oh, no, no, no. Like, she really was the protagonist of the story. She was the one who...

came into this episode with a need, a want, a desire and was trying to do it. And we saw her at every moment trying to create some agency for herself to be able to affect the change that she wanted to affect. So the episode had a very classical beginning, middle and end of a character who was trying to achieve one aim in this episode, which is

good classic TV, and at the same time was intercutting to show you all the history that led up to the moments that we were at. I thought it was an incredibly good episode, but also a really good reminder of the attention and craft required to both move the ball forward as a series while still having stakes and development and

progress within an episode. Yeah, I think I have not watched that episode, so... So hopefully my vagueness is useful. No, it's great, but I do... It's not about... I think I do know who it is, and if I don't, it still brings me to the same point, which is I think that you have those conversations in the writer's room when you begin to talk about that character very early on. Yeah. Which is, I would imagine that in season one or in season two, whenever that character is first mentioned or introduced...

You probably, as a showrunner, have in the back of your head, I really would like to see the perspective of this character of what is happening or of a separate story. But I want to know more about this character because it affects your casting. It affects your conversations of characters.

okay, so if we are going to see a privileged point of view of that character at some point, how is that affecting the characters we're seeing on screen now? I love when television shows do that in good ways, in successful ways, because it can both fill in

the blanks on some things. But more importantly, you can think that a story is sort of contained in a box and you realize that the box is open. And now there are things that you had no idea to be curious about that now you're curious about. So it can change your perception of the series.

So a term we've used a couple times here is privileged storytelling. And I'd love to unpack that because I'm hearing that to mean it is the special relationship of the show to certain characters or how we as an audience also understand that

the show is not telling us everything. Yeah, I think it's that. I think it's two things. So we'll just complicate it even more. But I think it's yes, that. And then I also think that it is a privileged storytelling of a character's inner life that the rest of the characters are not privy to. So I think, for instance, with Mark in Severance, from the pilot, we know as the audience more about him than he does because he obviously is severed. So there's...

And storytelling, privileged storytelling in two ways that I think is in Severance in particular, exceptionally well done and at a very, very high level that would drive me insane. But for instance, on The Dropout, it was privileged for the audience to know that the box didn't work.

because we knew that, she knew that, but not everybody within the series knew that. In Plainville, we knew that Coco and Michelle's relationship was not what Michelle was telling everybody that it was, but they don't know that. And so I think it's important to distinguish as a writer and as a storyteller, what information everybody has, why they have it. And if

if the audience has it as well, how that changes their perception of what is coming next.

And this is what is so complicated about writing, is that we have to be able to both be the architects who know why everything is there and how it all fits together, and we know we have perfect insight to everything, and be able to step outside and say, okay, from the artist's point of view, where are we at? How much do we know? And so in a case like Severance, where we have so much more information than the characters themselves know, and we have to be looking at Adam Scott's characters like, okay, this is this version of Adam Scott who wouldn't know this other thing, and how is this all tracking together?

It's complicated, but I think that's honestly the excitement and the reward of it. It's so difficult to do on a writing point of view, but it can be so satisfying when it works well from an audience's point of view because it's requiring us to use our brands in interesting ways that are actually kind of natural to sort of

how we are built to function. And I think we have this inherent desire to understand other people's motivations because it's a useful survival mechanism for us. And it's engaging all those things in our brains. Yes. And the only thing I would add to that is sort of my own personal opinion, at least as how I come from a writer and as a viewer, which is the actual events that

of any story, but we'll take severance. Like if you gave me a five-page document that told me everything that we're getting to and what's happened, it just won't be that interesting. It just won't. It will never be that interesting. What is interesting is...

how each character unfolds the story in front of them, how each turn happens, how I'm allowed to participate in each turn, and how the information is interpreted both by me and the people on the show and the people that I talk to about the show. So I think it's important, at least for me, to always come character first when we're talking about point of view and come from character first of empathy and character first of respect

And for instance, is the story of Watergate most interestingly told through Nixon's point of view or from the two journalists who fought for a year to break that story? And so when you start even at the very, very beginning, you know, for me, with the Pentagon Papers was is the most interesting version of this story.

to tell the story of how the New York Times got the Pentagon Papers, potentially, is the most interesting version for me, Katherine Graham, and that it's actually about her becoming the publisher of the Post and having her coming-of-age moment. That's more interesting to me, and that's the point of view in which I'm telling that story.

Yeah, this is a reminder that after 679 episodes of this series, it always does kind of come back to the fact that storytelling is not about the what, it's about the how. It's how you tell the story makes all the difference. And point of view, driver's seat, who's in control of telling the story is one of those fundamental how decisions that you need to make early on. And if you made the wrong choice, okay, well, then go back and rethink it from another point of view. The reason why Liz is doing all this work on note cards this week is...

because she's figuring out the how before she starts putting pen to paper. Yes. Also... Yes.

It's really hard to write. You're avoiding writing. Writing is hard. Writing is hard. Let's switch to something that's a little less crafty and more sort of the business that we're in. This was a thread by Todd Alcott this last week where he was talking about, he was actually referring to some political events, but I really liked his description of what he saw in Hollywood all the time. And so he's talking about the stranger in the room. And

And so, Drew, if you could read through, it's not the whole thread, but some of that will link to the full thread, but read through what Todd was describing about the stranger in the room.

Screenwriters especially are well aware of the role of the stranger in the room. The stranger in the room is anyone in the meeting who is just there as a friend. Someone who has no creative authority on and no stake in the project being discussed. Anyone in the room who is a last-minute addition. Sometimes it's a 20-something intern. Sometimes it's an executive from a sister office. Sometimes it's someone from marketing. Or sometimes it's an older, more experienced producer who's lending a hand for a day. Sometimes it's someone from a company.

The purpose of The Stranger in the Room is to destroy the project. The Stranger in the Room is the one who, after the writer and producer and director have all agreed on the direction of the story, says, well, how will that play in China? Or, this sounds a lot like, you know, whatever movie. Or, but isn't this movie really about love? And then, suddenly, the balance in the room shifts. Suddenly, a collaboration, a negotiation, as it were, becomes an argument.

Where, just moments earlier, everyone was agreeing on how awesome the project sounded. Now, suddenly, the creatives are on one side and the suits are on the other, and the meeting becomes a power struggle. One the creatives can only lose, because the suits have the money and the creatives only have the art. Oh, this gave me such terrible flashbacks, because I've been in those rooms where like, oh, wait, who's that person? Who's that? And so things are going well, and they ask questions, and they just start pulling threads. And

Creative challenging is fantastic if you're poking at that thing, but then you realize, no, no, no, no, you're here to destroy this. You are here to sink this ship. And at least three or four times in my career, I can really point to like,

oh, this was actually, this was a trap. This was a setup. This was meant to sort of ruin a thing. And so I want to acknowledge this. I'm not sure I have specific solutions for it or guidance for it. I'm breaking into a sweat having this conversation. Yeah. Legitimately. So this has happened to you. Yeah. I've never heard the phrase stranger in the room. So that

Now neither have I. Maybe that's terrifying me because now I'm like putting pieces together through my career. But creative conversation, creative conflicts, creative...

pushing is always good at the appropriate time. I think what this is, is like, so we've already gotten past these 12 hurdles. And now this person is like, let's go back to hurdle one. And let's start talking about that. Or let's go back to hurdle six. And let's talk about that. It's funny for out of nowhere today, maybe because I had read the rundown for the show and was thinking

thinking about this and sort of like, that never happened to me. And then now I'm sweating. I was thinking about this one experience I had making a movie and we were on set and, you know, already sort of trying to figure out who was an indie and we were trying to figure out how to make this movie for no money and all of that. And the director had called me the night before and sort of pitched to me how we could save some days or things like that. And I was like,

And he had pitched to me an idea of losing this one scene. And, you know, sort of the knee-jerk reaction for any writer is like, no, every scene's important. And then I kind of thought about it and I was like, well, maybe we could move the content of this scene to someplace else. And, you know, particularly as a writer on set, your job is the problem solver and your job is to maintain the integrity of the show or the feature while making it producible. Yeah.

So I was like, yeah, I think we can do that. And then the next day I went into a meeting and one of the collaborators on the project was like, oh, no, we absolutely can't do that. And like really pulled it back. And then like we went backwards in time to like going to why this scene existed and all of this. And I sort of was like, if I'm the writer and I can say we can lose this scene, then we should probably move on from this argument. But.

We didn't, and we continued to have it until we still lost that scene. And it was really for me, and I promise there's an end to this, which is I generally find the stranger in the room is they're saying whatever they're saying purely out of ego and purely out of the need for their voice to be heard. And I don't generally believe that it is for the goodness of the project. That doesn't mean that it can't be. But it's if you are the stranger in the room,

and you are saying something like this, you know that it's not positive. You know that it won't end well. And so there's no other reason for that to be said other than I want to be heard and I need you to hear me. So that goes to my advice, which is hear them, let them be heard, acknowledge whatever feelings are being felt by everybody and whatever threads are being pulled on.

And then get off of the call as fast as humanly possible and never talk about it again. Yeah. It's lovely that it could be in a call. I've been, I've had this happen in person twice. Yeah. And so one case was the executive who was like, literally we're like weeks away from shooting. I was like, listen, I think it would be best if we went back to cards and really thought about this. I'm like,

oh, no, no, no, no, we're not going back to cards. This is not a fundamental situation. Or another meeting where it's like, I was on my polish step and this producer was like, okay, well, ask a fundamental POV question. It's like, well, what if it wasn't about this, but it was about this other thing instead? It's like, where do you think we're at? And in both the situations, I extricated myself as well as I could from that situation. Liz, what I think you bring up, which is so important,

is like sometimes I've been the stranger in the room and I've tried to be really mindful of like, listen, I see a fundamental problem here and how do I both understand

to acknowledge the fundamental problem and sort of like help steer people correctly without just blowing the whole thing up. And I think that is a delicate art too. It's like really making clear like within the reality of the space you're in, what is the most work or the best work that could be done to sort of get people to the next place? If I truly feel like you need to stop this, I need to kill this, I will always do that in

In a one-on-one and not in a group situation. Because I think it's the group situation that makes this so, the social dynamics of it that make it so awful. It's like, you're around people who are seeing these things. If it was just a one-on-one conversation, it wouldn't happen. Yeah, my scenario was also in person. And I also just as a human don't tend to react well in person to these scenarios because I'm just sort of like,

why are we having this conversation? Like, we've already done this and there's really big fish to fry that this isn't one of them. I think you bring up a bunch of really good points, one of which is that sometimes there is something true behind it. And though it means more work or like fundamental work that seems to have been accomplished, there might be some truth to the note. To be clear, I think it's important to understand

always look at each note as if there is truth behind it. I do not believe in dismissing notes. I think that you guys have done one of your episodes, which I send to people, which is how to give notes to writers, which is one of the most foundational podcast episodes that anyone working in this business should listen to because so much about this is about presentation, both from writers receiving notes and people giving notes because...

that process can immediately taint whatever the note is very quickly and very easily. Look, we are sensitive, sweet people.

Often thin-skinned people in this industry who don't like to be wrong. And that doesn't always make for the best amount of collaboration when it gets to that stage where you are so close to the end. So I think it's important to really look at who the note's coming from, how the note is coming to you, and process that in whatever way that you have to process it to hear the note.

And I also like really go back to something that Christopher McQuarrie said, which is, I'm going to butcher, but it's something I think about a lot, which is there is no bad note.

There is no such thing as a bad note. There is such thing as a poorly given note. Yeah. But there's no such thing as a bad note because if you're getting noted on something, that means that either you aren't doing your job. It just means you're not doing your job as a writer. You're either not doing your job by how you're telling the story. You're either not doing your job of the point of view.

or you're not doing your job selling it. That for me really changed my way of hearing notes and hearing the way in which I should think about them. I also want to say that doesn't mean you're going to take every note, but it means that you need to consider why it's being given to you. Yeah. One of the things about Todd's thread that really resonated for me is that

The person who was coming in to do this job really had no stake in it or didn't have the most immediate stakes. And so I wanted to differentiate that person from a questioner. And questioners could be just incredibly annoying. There'll be people, there'll be directors or producers or actors who will just like want to have a three-hour meeting where they sort of pull everything apart. And like, it's just part of their process and how they figure out stuff.

It's so annoying, and as a writer, it can be torture. But you see, like, okay, there's an end product. There's a reason why we're doing this, and you just have to put up with it and sort of

live in that space with it. And sometimes good things can come out of it. Sometimes it can be frustrating, but you understand they are making a genuine effort to make this fit right into their brain. And that's a valid process. It's the stranger in the room is the person who's just there to sort of be an assassin, whether they know it or not. They're there as an excuse for killing a thing and for destroying a thing. And so I think if you're going into a meeting, that's just some practical advice here,

Try to know who's supposed to be in the meeting. And if someone shows up who's not supposed to be in that meeting, your spider sense should tingle a little bit just to make sure you understand something maybe could happen here. Usually it's going to be a more senior person or some other person like that. If it's another writer...

be especially alarmed because that can be kind of weird. That's happened a couple times where it's like, why are you there, Mr. High Profile Screenwriter? That doesn't feel great to me. Who I know comes on and does rewrites. That's so weird that you're here. That's so weird. It's like, you know, we may be thinking about the same person who's been in that room. And so if that happens, that's reasonable. But sometimes it is actually that junior executive who's like, I've been in a couple of situations like,

why is this person doing this? Why is this person here? First off, it's great if they're there to sort of learn stuff. But when they then ask the questions and sort of pull stuff, in TV pitches, I've had this happen more often, where it's just like, they start to ask you for kind of needless detail. I'm like, okay, great. I'll help you out here. So I agree, but I don't think any stranger in the room is there without a goal. Like, unless you are...

I don't know. Unless you have invited them there. Unless you as the writer have invited a friend or something like that to hear this. But I don't even think an intern... If there's an intern in the room, the intern is trying to prove to their bosses why they should have a promotion. If the writer is there, they're proving to their bosses that they're going to get the rewrite. So I think that there's always... You have to really evaluate the stranger in the room's intention. And most often...

there is something behind it. That doesn't mean it's malicious to you. No. It doesn't mean that it's personal. It also doesn't mean that they're wrong. It just means, again, like going back to how it's being delivered and the surprise factor. And to be frank, when you get to that stage and you have a junior executive that's never been in a meeting start giving notes, you're kind of like,

wait, haven't we gotten past this? It can be alarming. I always try and think about notes in any stage, be it a stranger in the room or an evil person in the room, just to think about the context in which the note is coming to you. Yeah, absolutely. And so if you are that intern in the room, the person who's invited in, try to get a sense where you can even ask ahead of time, like, what do you want me to do in this room? And especially if you're talking to the writer or the creatives, just like,

you have to be respectful and delicate and make sure you're leading with some praise. And if you're asking a question, there's nothing in that question that makes it sound like, has a subtext of like, you idiot, this doesn't make any sense. Because that's where you run into problems.

Let's answer some listener questions. Let's start with It's Not You, It's Me. After a little industry success, I'm now discovering that I have friends, distant relatives, and sudden acquaintances who want to pick my brain or set me up on blind date style meetings with my cousin who just started film school. I've even had friends and relatives share my email address without asking me.

I like to share with people who are starting out, as a few people did for me when I started. However, I'm not sure how to decline when the connection is forced, and I don't want the obligation, or how to distance when someone becomes too persistent, asking for Zoom after Zoom, sending Life Story emails, or asking to send me their screenplays. How do you guys deal with getting cornered by family and friends, and how do you deal with clingers? Okay, so my mom, rest in peace, love her to death, but she would...

try to connect me with anybody and everybody. And she was like over generous about that. I had to sort of step in and say, mom, you need to stop doing that. Like, this is not useful for anybody. But like, I will talk to your Boulder screenwriters group once, but I'm not going to do it every year. I'm not going to do it all the time. I think Craig and I have the convenient excuse of like, we do a podcast every week that's everyone can listen to and that that's the conversation. But yeah,

Before I did that, and for everybody else who doesn't have their own podcast, bless you. Liz, do you have any suggestions for ways to be tactful and helpful, but not deal with the clingers? Yeah, I mean, boundaries are really important. So establishing boundaries

you cannot share your personal information that cannot be shared is really important. I also have a work email and a personal email. So I think having those two, still setting boundaries, but those two are really important because if...

there is someone that you feel that you can be helpful to or feels polite and appropriate that you can reach out to, then you can do that from your work email. And it doesn't feel as, I know that it seems silly, but it does not feel as like disruptive to me when it's going to my work email. It feels like that's the right avenue for it to happen. Yeah. Look, I try and talk to whoever I can and I try and be as helpful with people

my time and energy as I can be because I had a lot of people be helpful with theirs when I was coming up and, you know, you being one of them. And so I feel like I don't have a podcast. So trying to do that is important. Having the ability to say like, look, I totally would love to talk to you. My life is really crazy right now. So I can do it for an hour. Yeah.

in March or I can do a 15 minute call now or I could do, but I just think really boundaries and being honest with yourself that you are a kind person for having any conversation and extolling any kind of experience to people is really going above and beyond.

Yeah, I completely agree with you on boundaries. And also just establishing those boundaries at the start in a really friendly way. Saying like, this is the time I don't have the ability, the time to read anything. The truth is we're all crazy all the time. We never really have time to do things. You can also say...

I'm sorry, but no, I can't. And that's also fair too. People have busy lives. Listen, I have Drew, and so Drew is sort of the first filtering mechanism for people who are going to try to sort of come at me. But even independent of that, I think you just have to have your own system for...

saying no and not feeling awful about it or sort of ignoring things and not feeling awful about it. It's just, that's the reality. And people ignore emails all the time and it's not a crime. Yeah, I would say like also go with your gut. Like I honestly have, knock on wood, had like 99% wonderful experiences with people that have reached out or asked for advice

a Zoom or a coffee or whatever, I don't read scripts unless it's from somebody I know. I think that is a step too far for me. And I always just go legally. It's a step too far. And that's if you're looking for a way to sort of say, no, I can't read that, but I'll talk to you. Then that's the way I always go is like, I can't read your script legally. It's too complex for me to do that. But I'm happy to talk to you about what issues you're having storytelling wise and see if I can help.

The other thing I think is useful for me to say, which is absolutely 100% true, is that when it comes to like, how do I break into the industry? How do I do this? How do I do that stuff? It's like,

I can talk to you about scene work. I can talk to you about how movies work. I cannot talk to you about what it's like to be a 20-something-year-old starting in 2025 in this town. That's just not my experience. And so you're much better off dealing with people who are just there and have just moved through that space than I will be. And one of the reasons why we try to keep bringing on guests who are newer in the industry is to make sure that we're still hitting...

the realities of what it's like to be in those moments right now because like Craig, our experience is like 30 years past that and it's not the experience of starting in 2025. Let's go to Dean who's writing about the visual effects industry.

Regarding the sudden shutdown of The Mill and MPC and Hollywood VFX in general, how is it that these giant companies working on some of the biggest and most profitable movies and shows in the world keep going bankrupt? Their work is world-class and it keeps happening. What is it about VFX that is clearly unsustainable? And clearly this email came in before Technicolor also shut down. It's horrible. And so, listen, I don't understand VFX economics, but...

clearly a different situation has to be figured out because we're able to do incredible visual effects and we're spending a ton of money on visual effects and it's still not enough for these companies to be profitable and sustainable. So something big has to shift here. Um,

Liz, do you have any insight? Do you know anything about this space? No, I don't. I do know that Plainville had a significant amount of VFX on a show that should, I mean, everything has VFX. So it's horrific what's happening. And again, I don't know the economics of it, but it doesn't make sense to me. So there has to be a change. Great.

All right, let's do our one cool thing. So thank you to everybody who's been playing Vertigo. So we're still up on Steam. The demo is still there, which is great. But a game I've been playing a lot over this last month, and I think I've broken my addiction, so maybe I need to pass it along. It's like the ring where I need to get other people to play this game, which was fun. It's called Dragon Sweeper. And it's like Minesweeper that we all played, where you're looking for the little mines, except there are various monsters hidden around. So it's by Daniel Ben-Mergi. It is just a free game that you play in your browser.

It takes maybe half an hour to do once you sort of mastered it. But it's a really clever mechanic and gets your brain to think in really interesting ways. So it's just like if you need a distraction, if you just need your brain to stop ruminating on the things it's ruminating on, I point people towards Dragon Sweeper, which is a benevolent time suck that I've found over the last couple of weeks. Love that.

Liz, what do you have for us? I have like a one and a half. One cool thing. I love them. Please. So both my mother and my best friend were diagnosed with breast cancer last year. Both are okay and recovering and in remission. Great. But my big thing is mammograms. One cool thing. Love a mammogram. Mammograms are not covered by insurance until you're 40 years old. And my best friend was...

38 when she was diagnosed and more and more women are being diagnosed with breast cancer in their 30s or younger. So if you have any...

breast cancer, really any cancer in your family, you should be going to get tested. If it's not covered by insurance, you can find ways to do it. And there are really great ways to do it. So that my boobs, my very, my two cool things. And then the plus to that also is that in this experience, I've learned a lot about how women's health is

just shockingly underfunded and under-researched. And one of the aspects of that is menopause and perimenopause, which has been something that's been talked about a lot. Many of my family members have had to, either because of cancer or because of age, anything like that, gone through it earlier. Naomi Watts just wrote a book, which is called Dare I Say It, which is about menopause and how she went into...

menopause in her 30s and it was shocking and then she discovered that many other women went through it as well and that menopause is not that thing that just happens when you're 50 years old, that it's actually something that progresses through your life. So my addition to this is also to read Naomi Watts' book, which I think is really enlightening and makes something that feels very, very scary and isolating, not that. And also women should be talking about their health just as much as men do. So that's it.

These are great things. So in terms of cancer screening, like Craig and I have talked about colonoscopies on the show several times. It's like, I think it's underappreciated the degree to which like there are certain cancers, certain like terrible things that just with like not horrible tests you could just actually deal with and they're not, things that are like

grave threats that are not threats if you actually just get the test and get it early enough to see what's there. And so mammograms are 100% in that category. My best friend actually, and she's talked about this publicly, so I feel comfortable saying it, she had a rash on her chest. She was under the age of 40. And the only reason that

They found the cancer was because of this rash and her doctor said that she should just go get a mammogram and get checked. If they had waited until it was stage one and they had waited until she was 40, God knows what that would have been and what would have happened. So it is crazy that it's on us to be like, hmm, that rash on our chest, maybe that's cancer. But there are preventative ways to find these early that are not necessarily constantly talked about or open. Yeah, great.

Thank you.

Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on East Side versus West Side. Liz, Hannah, no matter what side, I want to be on your side because you are a fantastic return guest. Thank you so much for being on the show this week. Thanks for having me. It was great. ♪♪♪