686 - Problem Solving
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August. My name is Craig Mays. And this is episode 686 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do writers and the characters we create handle the obstacles that they encounter? One's approach to problem solving can reveal a lot about otherwise hidden mental processes. We'll discuss ways to tackle pernicious problems in real life and on the page, and what it says about the problem solver.

But first, we have a lot of follow-up from previous episodes, including a master class on how to do the lunch order if you are a PA. Oh, this is good. Yeah, so we asked our listeners, they sent in, and man, they delivered this time. Fantastic. Yeah, so really good advice here. We also have a ridiculous and completely unworkable proposal about movie tariffs.

That will never actually happen. But we can use that as an excuse to talk about sort of why we want to incentivize domestic production and ways a sane administration might try to do that. Somewhere inside the fog of crazy is a topic worth discussing. Yes. And in our bonus segment for premium members, let's talk about tombs because I am just back from two weeks in Jordan and Egypt where I got to live my Indiana Jones fantasy. Yes. So,

I'm here to answer any questions you have about relics and burying of the dead and travel through exotic locations. And I just played the Indiana Jones video game, so I feel just as qualified. Basically the same thing. Yeah, if not more so. Absolutely. I really went deep down there. My question is, did most of the Indiana Jones game take place with like a bunch of tourists jammed around you in a crowded Egyptian museum? No.

No, I'm surprised the museums in the Indiana Jones game are probably empty. They are, unless it's just you and a strange giant is attacking you. Yeah, no, it's remarkable how empty things are. You do move around the Vatican quite a bit. Oh, sure. And in the 40s, during World War II, and you're ducking various fascist-y things.

Yeah, fun, exciting. Yeah, we're recording this way before the conclave has even started, so we don't even know. People are listening to this in a time where there may be a new pope, but Craig and I have no idea who the pope is. We don't know. Yeah, we don't. And oh my gosh, I don't care. I'm excited for some change. I like things to happen. No knock against the existing pope who died. Be careful what you wish for. Yeah, it's wild. Let's get into some follow-up because, man, we got a bunch of it. So we'll start off with...

Last week on the show, or maybe it was two weeks ago now on the show, Eric Kripke was on. So he's the guy who runs The Boys and lots of other great shows. And we were talking about a listener question on, and Craig, here's what you would call this, an episode that exclusively follows one of the characters, that it's not a normal episode. It's sort of a standalone. Do you have a term that you would use for that? I don't. I don't. And so we were trying to bat around some. Our listeners came up with two good terms that they've used in writers' rooms. Drew, help us out.

Aaron writes, in our writer's room, we call it our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern episode as a nod to the delightful Tom Stoppard play about the side characters in Hamlet.

Which makes sense. So you're elevating people who would be on the sidelines and sort of centering it around them. But the second solution from a different Aaron I thought was even better. All right. I've been in a couple rooms that have called them silo episodes, as in one character is siloed away from the rest of the cast and given their own story and really their own specific world building. It felt like after Girls did the Marnie episode and then the Shoshin Japan episode that it started a conversation, at least in rooms, about this unique episode format and what to call it.

Well, that's interesting. I like Silo. Silo episode. What do you do on the show Silo, however? Yeah. There's an episode of the second season of Silo that is basically a Silo episode that just follows one of the characters. Solopsisode. Mm-hmm. I think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is...

Decent, but it sort of implies you're following a couple of characters on the side. It is, and it's also, to me, it implies a specific tone of what's going to happen. Yes. It's sort of like a behind the scenes, like a normal episode is happening over on this side and we're just not noticing it. Yeah, like I really wanted to do a partner series to Game of Thrones that was just like a couple of soldiers who were posted somewhere out in Westeros.

And things were happening in the background that they would occasionally hear about. You were like, oh God, that's the red wedding. But they didn't really know. And it was mostly like, gathering taxes and my foot hurts. You know, but yeah, the guys wouldn't let me do it. That's weird. That's weird. That's weird. That's weird. All right. So those are some good suggestions from our listeners. Second bit of follow-up is a conversation you and I had. So we were talking about

how to make our phones less addictive and less interesting and sort of different techniques for that. I know you took social media off your phones. And for this trip to Egypt and to Jordan, I was a little concerned like passing through security and stuff like that and making sure like, I just didn't someone take it open in my phone. I don't want there to be anything on my phone. I almost went as far as like just get a burner phone that I could take with me and just like not have all my stuff.

What I ended up doing instead was going through and basically taking everything off my phone and sort of really paring it back to just the essentials. So I got rid of all the... So you just have the stock app and weather? Exactly. And you can take those off too. You can take the stock app off. So now you're just down to tips? Just weather. But then I also...

went through and changed the icon style and stuff like that to make the phone just like less usable. So, Craig, here's my phone now. What in the world am I looking at? So, describe it to our listeners. We'll put a screenshot in it. Sure. Well, to start with, I'm going to put my glasses on to really investigate here. It is a sickly mint green background and it is monochromatic. Yeah.

And then the apps themselves are in gray slash green scale. No color other than green, black, white, gray. And there's 10 apps total. There are multiple screens. So you can swipe. Oh, yeah. But I mean, this phone says, don't look at me. Yeah.

That's what it says. It was good. I actually did not look at it very much on my trip at all. And so in addition to sort of going to the dark mode style and the larger icons, which also gets rid of the names of the icons, it makes the phone harder to use in a way that I actually found really useful. And so based on location, you can sort of figure out where the apps are. But it broke me of a habit of constantly pulling out my phone to check on a thing or to open Instagram. It's going to be kind of...

when the next thing happens that makes this end. Because something is going to happen that makes it end. We know that much. What's going to end? The phone. It's going to end, right? Well, it's going to be that little thing that it's whatever they do on Black Mirror concept, which is the little dot you put on your temple. Something's going to happen and it will end. And then, boy, that'll be a day. Yeah. That'll be an interesting day when it ends. The post-phone era? The post-phone era, yeah. But not yet.

We had talked an episode in 683 about long takes. And that was before we saw a bunch of things that were about long takes. Like when we recorded the episode is before the Wonder episode of the studio, which I thought was delightful. Right. But this guy Aiden wrote in and he had done a comparison of your Chernobyl scene with the rooftop clearing and a scene from Michael Clayton. So, Drew, talk us through what this post is. We'll put a link into it as well.

So the post is, it's a comparison of those two scenes. They're about the same. The Michael Clayton scene is two minutes and 11 seconds. The rooftop scene in Chernobyl is two minutes and two seconds. But despite the fact that they're about the same amount of time, the subjective lengths, which is, you know, how long it feels like it lasts, is very different because it's the assassination scene in Michael Clayton. And the murder scene happens like frighteningly quickly, whereas the rooftop scene feels agonizing and slow.

So it's just a nice comparison side by side. That's what I'm going for is agonizing and slow. I did get some additional feedback from Jack Thorne who pointed out, and this is something that Seth Rogen pointed out as well. I did an LA Times roundtable with him that I guess will be coming out shortly. And both of them said the same thing, which is that planning for long takes, writing them into the script is a way to do

protect the writing itself, of course, because no one can really mess with it. And it's true. You can't really decide what to do, say, with a script of adolescence other than shoot it. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. Yeah.

Last little follow-up here. In 6.72, we talked about words we don't have in English, like words we kind of wish existed in English, but it doesn't actually happen. And so we had a couple people write in with words that they're looking for that are not in existence anywhere. Talk us through these. First, let's start with Shauna in Vancouver. She writes,

cheated with additional undertones of now I'm angry and disappointed that you broke my trust and wasted my time.

I think it's just unsatisfied, isn't it? I get that she's feeling a specific kind of unsatisfied because it just took so long and there's an aspect of social trust in there too, yeah. Yeah, but I think we have that word actually. I don't think an extreme version of an emotion qualifies for a new word. You just put the word very in front of it and you're there. Yeah, isn't that like a thing they teach you in writing classes is that anytime you use the word very, there really is a better word out there for it.

Almost certainly. And it may not be necessary at all. I mean, there's that whole, I don't like adverbs thing, which, you know, listen, sometimes varies great. Yeah.

It's an intensifier. Yeah. You know that it comes from verily, that it comes from truly? Yes. Yeah, which is just such a strange thing to think. Yeah, verily. Yeah. As an intensifier, it's actually apparently very common in languages to say truly this and that becomes the intensifier. And I actually often will say truly. It's a good one. That's true. Is that kind of what we're doing with literally?

It is. The way that literally started as being true and then just an enforcement. Yeah, but that one's wrong. Yeah, it still feels wrong to us. It's wrong. It's wrong. It's just wrong. More of words that don't exist from Reid. Reid writes, you mentioned the Russian word Tosca as a deep anguish that can never be resolved, but a word in Welsh that I've always enjoyed is the word Hiraeth.

It's about a similar deep longing, but is a more positive spin on the feeling rather than an undefined existential despair. So the rough translation is a profound longing for a home, place, or time that you can no longer return. A homesickness for something that maybe never was, the echo of our soul's past. Nostalgia. Yeah, but it's a feeling of nostalgia for the moment you're actually currently in, maybe? He said past, didn't he? It is past. He said past, or it might not even exist? Yeah.

Just sort of a vibe you wish you could go to. I feel like Ren Faires do this. Oh, I see. So it's sort of like a nostalgia for something that is fictional even. Like a longing to be in your memories of Middle Earth, even though you've never been there. Yeah. Seems like it, yeah. That's the case. Yeah.

Then sign me up. A script I read recently actually did refer to the sense of nostalgia for the moment that you're in right now. I love this thing and I know it's going to escape me and I already kind of missed this. So I have a version of that, which is I know I should be enjoying this moment right now. Later, I will look back at this wistfully and wish that I could be back there. But right now I'm miserable. Yeah. That's a tricky one because sometimes I think back to...

You know, when I was younger, you miss these things. I miss things that I, at the time, I wasn't thinking about at all. And in fact, in many ways, and almost always, my life is better now than it was when I was in my 20s. Except, you know, my back doesn't hurt as much and I'm not that much closer to death. So, like, I wasn't able to enjoy that at the time. And there are things right now I know that I'm not, I'm just, I should be enjoying more. Yeah.

A related concept is sort of second-degree fun, like things that are actually unpleasant in the moment, but then you sort of look back at them with a fondness. It's like, oh, yeah, remember that horrible thing we went through and did together? I was commiserating with Megan Arow, shrimp-nosed Megan Arow, about the Giza pyramid, because she had done that with her family, and we were texting afterwards, like, what?

Wasn't that just the worst? Like, yes, it's the worst. It's like, it is the most unpleasant experience to go inside the Giza pyramid because you are climbing up this ramp. You're stooped down almost on hands and knees, climb up this ramp, packed, starting tight with a bunch of strangers. It is just the most claustrophobic thing. But you get to the emperor's tomb. What do you think is in the emperor's tomb?

Sarcophagus? Nothing. Not even a sarcophagus. Everything's been taken out of it. It's just an empty room with like, there is like a stone box where like the actual real sarcophagus used to be. But like,

it's so unrewarding and yet the experience as a whole kind of is still second degree fun. It's like, oh yeah, I went through that thing. Right. So you have a great story of how awful it was. Yes. Oh, I'm not going there. What we should have done and Mike was pointing out is that like, as we were like lining up to get in, people are squeezing past you to get out at the same time. And like, some of them have this horrified expression and they're sweaty and they're just exhausted. And it's like, what am I doing? Right. Like take a hint. Yeah.

I think it's fair to say as they're coming out, should I get out of this line? Because you know a bunch of them will be like, oh my God, get out. But what would I say? I would be honest with them and say like, it's not cool to actually want to get up in there, but also maybe you want the story. Yeah. I would probably say something like, we should all be home. Yes. Don't go anywhere. Yeah. Ever. Yeah. That's a choice too. Yeah. But that's just me. Yeah. Secondary fun, it's almost a word in itself. Yeah.

Do you know a tomb that you can go into where something actually is there rewarding to see? All of the tombs in the Indiana Jones video game. All of them. Every one. I need to speak up for the Egyptian Tourism Council. Like, the pyramids are fantastic. Actually going in that one tomb is just such a weird experience. But the other tombs, like...

The hieroglyphics everywhere. There's still color on the walls. It's actually genuinely impressive. So it's not, they're not all... No, most of the tombs are spectacular. It's just like the one that's like in the giant pyramid that you think should be the absolute coolest. No, it's empty because everything was stolen out of there years ago. Everything was stolen. The reason why the King Tut is famous is because the tomb wasn't open until the 20s. That's right. Yeah. Yes.

And that's when the curse happened. That's when the curse happened. Also, I just... Last bit of Egypt trivia here. They have photos of what the actual...

vault looked like in there. It was just a bunch of stuff piled up. It wasn't like it was neatly arranged on shelves and stuff. It was all just a pile in the corner. It's a storage unit. It's a storage unit. It was like, here's some chariot wheels for your sky chariot. Right. Like, what should we, what do we throw in there? Oh, he loved, he loved chariots. Yeah. He loved bread. So we need to make a bunch of like stone things that look like bread. Right. Because he loved bread. Oh,

You know what? So you can get things like that at Pottery Barn. Absolutely. So it's just Pottery Barn crap. What it reminded me most of is my mom would go to Montgomery Ward's or JCPenney's to pick up her catalog orders and they would have the refrigerators because you could buy a refrigerator there. And you'd open the refrigerator and some of them had the plastic food in there. I loved the plastic food. Plastic meat. Loved it so much. There was always a lamb chop. Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We had a lot of lamb back in those days. Yeah, so much lamb. Mm-hmm.

We have one more missing word here. Let's talk about Mitch's proposal here. Something that could be useful to have for describing an important feeling you want to attain in storytelling. I believe it was described by Rachel Kondo at the live Austin episode, but it's a word for something that's both surprising and inevitable. If anybody could get it to take off, it's John and Craig. Yeah. We do talk about that all the time. Yeah. You want surprising and inevitable, but it is sort of that feeling like, oh, of course. I mean, maybe we just portmanteau it to supervitable?

I like Suprevitable. Suprevitable. Let's do it. Great. Done. Done. Suprevitable. Let us talk about another bit of follow-up here, which is on first jobs. And so we'd asked our listeners, so many of you have worked as PA, so many of you have had to do the lunch run for an office or for a writer's room. And man, there's got to be so much shared wisdom out there about how to do it best. And honestly, there was so much shared wisdom. We got Drew, I don't know,

Oh, dozens of emails. Dozens and dozens of people. So rather than read through all of it, we're going to put together a blog post we could link to so that it's on the internet and everyone can always find it. Great. But Drew, talk us through some of the section headers here and what some of the highlights were, things that were surprising even to you. Sure. So we start with just picking the restaurant because that's a whole process. And simple things like making sure to ask about dietary restrictions, looking for restaurants that are good balance of healthy and greasy,

No tacos was a thing that came up because Ali's got great tacos and people probably want them, but they are, according to some people, the single-handedly, the most painstaking lunch order to place. Because everybody gets like four different tacos and then they all get mixed up and no one knows which goes to what. Also, I feel like tacos don't travel well, fundamentally. They don't? Well, soft tacos sort of. Yeah, but everything slides off across the table. And it gets wet. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, no, tacos is a bad idea. Home State seems like it's an exception to that, according to some people. Home State's solid. Yeah, Home State's solid. So how about taking the order? Because that's a thing you clearly messed up if the order doesn't get taken right. So talk to us about that. And we got some good horror stories in here too on that. A great thing is just to make sure that you include a link to the menu or a PDF copy, even if you have to make one yourself because some people...

You can't trust them to find the menu themselves. They'll ask you to get items that don't exist or things that are out of season, you know, sandwiches that they used to have but aren't available anymore, and double-check it when you place it over the phone. Oh, I guess people still have to do phone orders for some stuff. Craig, on Last of Us, when you are doing a phone order, is it printed out and handed in front of you and you're circling, or how are you getting your thing? Yeah.

So in our writing office that we have now, our PA sends us an email with a link. This is where we're getting today's lunch from. Let me know by this time what you would like. And you click on the link, you look around, and you respond back. Okay. So far, so good. Seems to work. That's great. But we don't have a very big workplace. That's actually very small. So how about when you're actually in pre-production or any of that stuff, or if you're going out on a location scout, what's the order there? So typically...

I don't participate. That's like, because it's good to be the king. So I can get whatever I want. But typically the office will...

It's like a choice of three things. There's like an app that people can log into and my camera is called Eatly or something like that. And then everybody puts their thing in and it all gets delivered roughly around the same time. Okay, so it's more like what we do for D&D, which is where, because for D&D, when we're playing each week, we'll send out a link and everyone will just pick their things and at a certain point, it'll cut off and we'll submit the order. It's a group DoorDash thing. So it's sort of like that, except we're going to say you can pick from...

any one of these three today. Okay. And typically it is a somewhat curated menu as well because some of those restaurants are like, hey, we can do this, a lot of this, but we can't do a lot of those things. Yeah.

When we're on scouts and stuff, we usually just pick a restaurant. Yeah, makes sense. This is too long to read through on the show, but we'll include Kelly's Quizmas horror story. Wow. The punchline of this was there was a Quizmas order. It was like a big Quizmas order. And so Quizmas called like, is it really this benefit? Yeah, I know it's a big order. So the total was $400, $409. Okay. But they ended up making 4,000 sandwiches. No, no, no.

Wait, how did they even make 4,000 sandwiches? I don't know. She doesn't even know. Because they called to confirm and they went through the whole order and apparently everything was fine, but they made 4,000 sandwiches. An order of magnitude difference. So they were supposed to make 400 sandwiches. The total was supposed to be $409, so it's not even 400 sandwiches. So it was 40 sandwiches? Probably. Probably. That feels right. And they went, they were just like, well, they might need a few extra. Yeah. Yeah.

How did they do that? That's not... That can't be right. That's the exception. I mean, but like that's... It's the horror story that underlines like why it's so important. So many questions like...

where is this Quiznos? How did they do that? Do they really have the ability to make 4,000 sandwiches on the spot? I don't believe this. It doesn't seem possible. This feels like, this feels urban legend to me. I don't know. Timing is so important. And so we'll have a little session on timing, but basically based on the restaurant, do you need to put it in an hour ahead, two hours ahead, 30 minutes ahead? Like what is it going to be? And, you know, I just know from like the Mendocino farms at the Grove, it's like, good luck. You,

You have to be able to navigate that. I would be so bad at this. I like the suggestion to label everything at the restaurant so that as you're double checking, you actually label whose things and what they're at the restaurant because that's a way of verifying that you actually got everybody's thing and that everybody is the right thing. Suggestions of getting a giant plastic bin from Target to put everything in so it doesn't slosh around inside your car. Smart, smart.

everybody their lunch. So rather than laying it on the table, I actually like put it in there and bring them. Yes, that is a nice thing to do. Yeah, because it also reconnects that you are the person who did this thing. And it keeps people at the table. Yeah.

And then you don't have this weird scrum and somebody's, because again, it's like, it's like dealing with children, like kindergartners. They're going to pick up the wrong thing. They're not going to look at the name. They're just going to see, oh, it's, it's a sandwich that I ordered, except that that one, it was somebody else's that didn't have mayonnaise on it. I cannot tell you how many times I've ended up with the

The mayonnaise sandwich. We know, listeners know that Craig hates mayonnaise. Any white substance that's spread on a sandwich. Disgusting. Yeah. You know, we were talking about today in the room was the nightmare, the British nightmare known as salad cream. Oh, yeah. Disgusting. Yeah. Disgusting. If you look at the Wikipedia page for salad cream, it describes it as something like a thick pale yellow. It's like I'm already out. It's like pus basically. It's disgusting. Yeah.

Sorry, Heinz. And then our last section is sort of on general advice, which is good stuff. And it actually applies to a lot of the functions of being the PA in an office. It's like,

The stuff you're doing doesn't feel rewarding in the moment, but it is so important for the actual successful functioning of the room, the show, the whatever it is. And so recognize that you're not always going to get credit for the work that you're doing, but know that you're actually doing a great job. There was a book I read over this break that was talking about

Like this woman was feeling bad about her job. She was a janitor at a place and they said like, no, no, you're the custodian of the building. Like it's your job to make sure that this building actually works for everybody. And like that reframing was really important. So like in some ways you're like the custodian of like the people who need to eat food. Yeah. And I will say that, and I hope this is true, that the PAs are appreciated when they're doing this well because I have been in circumstances where I've

The person doing it wasn't great at it. And every day was just, I wonder who's going to either not get lunch or get the wrong lunch. Who will it be today? Like every single day. Yeah. So thank you to all the PAs out there who are making sure we're well fed. And by the way, let's face it, we're all in better moods. You know, one o'clock rolls around, the hangriness that sets in, who?

It's rough. It's tough. We all know it. So this was a very good experiment. So our next experiment, I would like to have our listeners talk to us about their best suggestions and tips for pitching on Zoom. Because it's obviously a thing that started during the pandemic, but it's now become the norm. And so I've been talking to a lot of writers recently who say like, I hope to never actually pitch in person again, because it's just, they so much prefer pitching on Zoom and sort of the ability to

kind of keep eye contact with the whole group and to have your notes at the top of the screen. And so I would love to hear people's best practices for doing that. Yeah, you don't have to memorize anything, I suppose, right? It's all there. It's there. I like that. But it's also tough because you don't have the real feedback of a person paying attention or not paying attention, which has pros and cons. And so... Yeah, and then there is, I'm still old school enough to believe being in a room with somebody, there's a little bit of, I don't know,

You feel where they're going one way or the other. You can sense it. You do. And there's been cases where I've really misread a thing where I thought like, oh, that went terribly. And I'm driving off the lot. I get the call like they want to make a deal. Yeah. So it's crazy. So I love to hear people's suggestions, things they've learned, tips and tricks. But also I love the horror stories. And so if you have your equivalent of the 4,000 Quiznos sandwiches,

I'd love to hear that too. I assume it's going to be, I shared my tab of my open browser tab with something, something. Yeah. I'll say a pro of pitching on Zoom, I think for up and coming people is that you can have as many people in the room. And so you can have like a, you can have an assistant listening in and actually gleaning from that stuff, which is if they were in the room themselves, it would be distracting. But if they're just an extra person on the little screen, it's fine. True. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's get to our marquee topic. I want to talk about problem solving because this actually came up because a listener was writing in about a different thing. And she mentioned this technique called rubber ducking, which I'd never heard of before, which is talking through a problem, especially like it comes from my coding, like talking through a coding problem to an inanimate object, like literally a rubber duck and say like, okay, first I'm doing this and then I'm doing this and you're explaining it to a non-animate object to someone.

really think through your logic and sort of verbalize it and sort of express it aloud. It got me thinking about sort of us as writers, but also our characters are often having to solve problems that are put before them. And looking at how people solve problems is a great way of exposing how their brain actually works and how they're forming a mental model of the world around them. So I wanted to talk through some techniques for solving problems, but also a

why it's important to show characters solving problems in stories. Well, ultimately there is a problem. If the character doesn't have a problem, then I don't care about the story, right? So there is a problem and then there are sub-problems and sub-problems. So we know we're invested in them solving things. The first question I like to ask when it comes to this particular topic is, are they any good at it? Because...

It can often be, I don't know, engaging watching somebody that is terrible at solving a particular kind of problem who has to solve that kind of problem. You're asking like, does the character have expertise in this? But if they don't have expertise, are they good at being able to communicate with others and find out and solve a problem even if they don't actually have the information themselves? Can they find the information? Can they find the expert? Can they draw information?

from various sources to get to the answer that they need. And so many of our shows, I'm really thinking of procedurals, but also even the Buffy the Vampire Slayers, different people have different strengths and they have to work together to come up with an answer to the problem that's facing them. And there are two kinds of problem solving that we engage in as storytellers. One kind is a process problem. It's straight up logic or insight. Yeah.

If I solve this problem, I will have information needed to do something, but I will not be changed.

The process of solving this problem does not require me to grow or push past a boundary. Then there are the problems where, in fact, the only way to solve it and the only way to unpack it or see the inside is to grow as a person or in the solving of it, it changes you. But we need to engage in both levels of problem solving all the time. The non-character-y problem solvings, those are the ones we just have to be careful about because...

Down that road sometimes is what David Zucker would call merely clever. Clever sounds good. Clever is clever. But no one gives you a ton of credit for it.

Unless it's really clever. Otherwise, it's... Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, he figured it out. Yeah. So you're talking about the kinds of problems that characters are solving that it's not their fundamental flaw. It's not the thing that's going to transform them. And we were talking about Michael Clayton earlier. And Michael Clayton is a problem solver. He comes in there to fix a problem. And so seeing him fix those problems is wonderful.

one of the rewards of that story is saying like, oh, wow, look at the expertise and competence, the social skills, his ability to read the situation, to read the room, crucial and fundamental. Ultimately, it's all in service to a greater arc and journey for him. Yes. But it's great to see that kind of level of expertise. Yes. And that's why that kind of problem solving is fun to write and it's fun to watch. But there are times where we think,

oh, somebody just needs to get a clue about where to go next. Yeah. Well, we have to create a problem for them to solve. The problem can't be too hard to solve. The problem should be a fair problem to solve so that people at home theoretically could have solved it also, but didn't. And then we need to always ask, how would this person do? And how do they react to frustration and

to not being able to see the answer. And that's what I think makes creating the right kind of problem and showing their solution to the problem so rewarding for us as writers is that it lets us illuminate what's actually going on in their head and it forces them to interact with the environment around them, with the people around them to solve the problem. What I thought we might do is talk through, I think I have a list of like 10 kind of like classic problem solving techniques and see

how they might work on a scene, but also what are the words that you're going to hear that really evoke this thing. So rubber ducking is this thing I just described in which you're talking to an inanimate object and it forces clarity because you have to sort of explain something clearly. It slows you down. It externalizes the problem, which is good. And so in real life, a thing that I find myself doing a lot, especially when I'm talking through with my team on some software stuff, is I'll say, okay,

Let me explain back what I think I just heard. And you're probably doing a similar thing too as you're solving problems on your show. It's like someone has dumped a bunch of information and you're trying to synthesize and process it back. And in some ways, you are serving as the rubber duck to them. Like, I heard all this stuff. This is what I got out of it. And you're sort of showing it back to them. Yeah, I will sometimes, I guess this is the Socratic method, right?

I will just start asking questions. So somebody has laid something out and I think, okay, here are the parts that made sense to me. Here are the parts that are confusing. I'm just going to start asking questions about every single thing that is either confusing to me or doesn't feel right or feels incomplete until I know everything. Yeah. Until I don't have any...

snag anymore. And that can seem argumentative, but it's argumentative in the classic Socratic method of basically like it's exploring something together. It's interrogative. Yes. And I think it's interesting to watch people question the questions that we ask and the way people answer things is in and of itself a great opportunity to learn about character, but it's also a great opportunity to get information across without feeling lamely expository. Yeah.

It's questioning. This is an interview. Yeah. I like that. Yeah.

Next technique would be free association. And this is where you don't censor the unworkable ideas. You swing big, like, just tell me everything. So it's when they say, no bad ideas, and it's often used in comedies because, like, some of the ideas are just truly horrible, awful, terrible, bad ideas. But at some points in some stories, you actually need that sort of, like, the crazy solution because in proposing the crazy solution, the other character says, like, no, we can't do that, but we could actually do this thing. And, like,

You find connections just because you're willing to go crazy. It is sort of sad in a way how we tend to punish the big swingers in fiction because they take these big idea swings and people are just shut up. And then one of them goes, everything you just said was insane, but wait. Like they just existed to make you angry enough at their bad idea that your brain finally barfs up the good one.

But in real life, it's necessary because sometimes the answer to the problem is to realize you were trying to solve the wrong problem entirely. Yeah. And that'll come up occasionally in these other sort of approaches. Third one is to refactor or rewrite it from scratch. And so basically, rather than try to fix this thing, we actually just need to replace it completely. And

When a character proposes that, it does tell you about their instincts, which could be the right instinct, which is basically like you're trying to fix an un-fixable thing. We need to scrap it. Or that they are so perfectionist, they're idealists in a way that is not practical. And so I love to hear when people are like, oh, we need to throw the whole thing out. Yeah. I'm a big believer in throwing the whole thing out. Well, it is, it's the Gordian knot solution, right? Just chop it in half. Done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

A decomposition, which is to take a problem and break it into smaller, more addressable chunks, which is so often the right solution that people are trying to just tackle too big of a problem and break it into smaller things. It's like, oh, I know how to solve each of these little individual things. It's just the big thing that seems so daunting. There are so many wonderful examples of this in movies. When people are explaining something that's seemingly impossible to other people, they break it down like this.

Maybe my favorite is in Ocean's Eleven, where Danny Ocean is explaining, not yet, how they're going to do it.

He is explaining what the problems are. And he is going little by little by little, one by one by one. It's this, it's this. Gets worse, gets worse, gets worse. But in doing so, you understand that he's laid the groundwork for the solutions. We now know all the things that we're going to have to solve. Absolutely. The Martian is another great example of this. Like every character in The Martian is basically taking this giant unsolvable problem and bringing it into solvable problems. Right. Yeah.

The minimal viable solution, which is rather than try to get a perfect answer, let's just get an answer that solves the issue okay for now. So we can at least, by getting something that works kind of, that we can see what we need to do next. So that's where you care to say like, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. It's like just something that works. It's probably the kind of thing that

you would want to then replace with a good answer. It feels like a duck, not a rubber duck, but ducking. And evasion and unwillingness to face the problem in and of itself is a fun aspect of how characters approach problems. Yeah.

It's analogization, basically saying this thing is kind of like this other thing. And it's recognizing that this specific situation may never have occurred, but it's kind of like other things that have occurred. And so it's a case for generalists. It's a case for people who've done other things. And a specialist may not see a thing that a generalist can recognize because they can pull from history or other fields. Harold Ramis, describing the situation with the ectoplasma container, says,

In terms of a giant Twinkie, this is my favorite example. Yeah. Tell them about the Twinkie. It's a big Twinkie. But it's essential. I mean, I didn't really get into analogization. I said, well, I kind of did in Chernobyl in the sense of like, I sort of described a nuclear reactor kind of like a car. Like,

Gas pedal, brake pedal. You do have to figure out how to make it relatable to somebody that doesn't know the specifics and doesn't need to. Absolutely. I mean, metaphors are how we communicate knowledge. And so it's finding what the right metaphor is for this thing. And so that can be a useful metaphor for what the problem is, but also a metaphor for what the solution would look like. Very related. It's just finding earlier solutions. And I get frustrated by people who assume like, this is the first time this has ever happened. And

And so I always say like, no, this must have happened a thousand times. Someone else has solved this before. We just need to look for the right way to find the answer that they came up with because it's probably the right answer. Or in their attempts to solve this. Yes. We see what we should not be doing or we deepen the mystery. Well, why didn't that work? It should have worked. That's a very good point. If there's not a solution that's out there, there must be a reason why there's not a solution out there. Right. It helps define your particular problem as a character better.

as difficult. Stepping away or letting something incubate, which is basically rather than try to solve the problem right now, we are going to take a break, let our brains rest, we're going to take a shower, which we often mention on this podcast, and we're going to come back at it when we are rested or when the situation has changed. That the problem may be that there's actually not a solution in front of us because of where we are right now at this moment, but there may be an answer to this down the road. Yeah, and

And this is an opportunity for epiphany, which can be a little silly sometimes, you know, but a good epiphany. Love it. I mean, worth its weight in gold. And typically an epiphany comes when someone's given up. So R.I.P. Val Kilmer, real genius, a movie that all nerds and fans of comedy and people of the 80s love.

He's trying to solve a problem with a laser. And because the laser is sabotaged, it explodes and he's out of luck and he's not going to graduate. He's not going to get the job. And he's in absolute despair. And he gives up. Yeah. And in that moment of giving up, he looks at this, he beats up a refrigerator, some ice falls out. He looks at the ice and he goes...

Oh, my God. I got it. And he solves the problem. Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's the recognition that the obstacle is you and the obstacle is your own pride, your own stubbornness. And it's only by taking a step back, you would say like, oh, oh, this was the solution there. And only by creating some space is a solution possible. Yeah. Yeah.

Another technique is what's called test-driven development or contradictory development, which basically first you establish what the thing should do, what it needs to do, and then you can test whether you succeeded. And then you can think about how to implement it. So rather than first trying to find a solution, find like, well, how do you know what the real solution looks like so we're not passing it by? And just so people are clear, this is not just applicable to

obviously defined problems. You can apply what you just said to romance. I look at those two people. That's what I want. Now, problem. How do I get to that? Yeah. Well, it really comes down to, we often talk about what is the thesis and challenging that thesis. Basically, like, how will I know that this thesis has been sustained or disproven?

you got to define those terms first. And so often we're looking for a solution without actually looking for how we'll know a solution is satisfactory. Last one is kind of related to rubber ducking. It's the Feynman technique. It's named after Richard Feynman. Basically, you try to write an explanation in a way that a child could understand it. And this is a thing we do all the time in movies is basically

basically simplify it to another character and you're finding metaphors, you're finding ways to explain a thing so that you can actually get the non-experts to understand what it is that they need to be looking at. Which requires you to really understand whatever it is. Yes. And really be able to break down the problem. And ideally, a character can break a problem down and describe it in this matter very quickly. There are times in movies where somebody comes along

You'll see this in movies that involve military confrontations where somebody gets in there and there's chaos all around. They're like, what do we got? Fast. Because no one has time to go on and on. If you have somebody in the middle of chaos taking their time,

That's all, that's just comedic. It is. So the thing I hope to never hear again is explain it like I'm five. Because it's just so cliche. It's redundant and everybody should be explaining everything like we're five. But that instinct is correct. It's like finding the way to have a character explain something in a very clear way to a person who's not an expert in it is incredibly valuable. And yes, you can over...

do it at times, but you look at shows like Succession that we love so much. They're able to take really complicated things and sometimes they're talking up at the very high level so we don't actually understand. But also fundamentally, they bring it down when it's important. The Big Short does it so well. The Big Short was designed to teach us something important that was complicated. But when you have shows like Succession, people like Jesse Armstrong are really good at understanding when they should not

Talk to you like you're five because they want you to be impressed with these people who all know stuff you don't. But when they need you to understand it for you to connect to the drama, somebody is going to explain it to somebody like they're five. Well, there's times where they're talking high level technical jargon equivalent of like science speak. It's gobbledygook to us, but we believe that they understand what it is. What's crucial is that when there's a problem to be solved,

They're able to then put it in terms where you can actually understand what the stakes are and what the solution feels like, even if we don't understand exactly how it all fits together. So I don't know why getting this person to call that person is going to make a difference. All I know is I have 20 minutes to get that person to call this person. And the first person is in space. And the second person is in a submarine. What do I do? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So you've made it really clear. So all these techniques we're talking through are ways you can think about solving problems in real life, and that's why they feel real and meaningful. But here, because of the script notes, we're really talking about sort of how you have your characters address problems and create scenes where they're solving those problems in ways that are interesting and engaging and sort of hold the audience's attention. And let us...

into our character's thought process, which is so hard to do sometimes. Yeah, let us experience the frustration. Let us experience false celebration. Sometimes our characters have figured it out. No, they haven't. And that's a terrible feeling. We've all felt that in life where we thought we solved it and then we're like, oh, no, we did not.

And it crosses every genre. So it's in comedies, it's in mysteries, it's in dramas, everything is going to have problem solving. Every horror slasher movie is like, how are we going to get through this? How are we getting out of this woods? Yes. Yeah. And so that's what makes it so universal and so relatable. And so it's making sure you're setting up those problems in ways that can force our characters into really good problem solving. Yeah.

Cool. Speaking of problem solving. Segway man. Segway man. So we're recording this on Tuesday. So who knows what the status of the world is at this point? Yeah. What world? This president has proposed a 100% tariff. I like that. This president. That's a great way to do it. A 100% tariff on movies produced outside of the United States. And so as we were recording, Jon Voight came out with this other thing, which is explaining more about it.

Craig, can you briefly for people who are not aware, what is a tariff and why does it actually not make any sense here at all? A tariff is a tax that is levied on imports. Imported goods. So when some product crosses our border, it goes through customs. At that point, the government can levy a tax upon it.

So the people who are selling it, sell it to us. But when we buy it, that purchase price, there is a tax. We, on our side of the border. The consumer of it. The consumer pays the tax on that material. That is the cost of getting stuff from another country. Yeah. So if there is a tax on, for instance, steel from China, China does not pay more.

They don't pay that tax at all. But the people who import it do. And the idea, of course, is to say, see, we've made it too expensive to import this. Now you have to use the steel here. And of course, what happens is that the price goes up dramatically because they can. Because the supply goes down and the demand is the same. But importantly...

tariffs are on products. Yes. Things that were put on a ship and they crossed it and went through customs. Yes. And so a DVD that was manufactured overseas and brought in, you could apply a tariff. Yes, you can. But what you can't do is put a tariff on labor that has occurred entirely in another country. So look, we can talk about how horrible runaway production has been for California in particular. Yeah.

And right now, finally, Sacramento seems to be taking this seriously. Seems to be. But I just want people to understand, when somebody goes to make a movie in the United Kingdom, they fly there. And then everybody who works there is paid there. All the things that they use to build sets, to dress people are there. Yeah. And the thing that comes back is a card with digital information? Yeah.

What is there to tax exactly? Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why specifically when power was delegated to the president to enact tariffs and things like that, movies were excluded as were books, like things that are just intellectual property. They just don't work that way.

All that said, let's talk about... I can't believe Jon Voight doesn't know this. Let's talk about the instinct to make movies and television shows in the United States. Yes. Which is not a bad instinct. No. No, we love that. And to incentivize production within the United States through incentives, through taxes or other incentives. And...

to make sure that we have a sustainable industry so that we continue to make things in the United States. Well, this is a good topic for a show about problem solving. Let's start with what is going on. So what has happened? Places outside of California, in the United States, notably New Mexico, Georgia, Louisiana,

We provide tax incentives. And the way those generally work is that they say, hey, everybody that works here and all the money that you spend here on things, the sales tax and the income tax so that people earn from labor, we're going to provide back to your production. The thing is, you're powering the economy just by being here and by putting income in people's pockets. We want you to come here. So we're not going to tax you on that stuff. We're going to give that back to you.

And those schemes, they're literally called schemes, function in various ways. Typically, there is a percentage that they give you back and there is often a cap. Yes. So the state or whatever the municipality says, once we've covered this much money in this stuff, we stop, we're done because we just don't want to give everybody everything. And what ensued was

And what has ensued is sort of a race to the bottom. And this is the problem. Listen, people get very angry about globalization. Well, that occurred. But I understand the anger at the underlying problem, which is,

capitalism will draw everything down to the cheapest number, which means drawing labor down to the lowest amount of expenditure and enriching corporations as much as possible. And this is why California has resisted this sort of thing for a while. And it's why a lot of people fundamentally are uncomfortable with this. Because what we're saying is the only way to help working people, especially the working crews in California, is

is to just give a ton of money to rich corporations. Yeah. So let's talk about like when incentives work properly, it's sort of how they're structured because if I can find a link to it, there was a representative from the DGA who explained on Kim Manor's podcast in a really good way, sort of like what the new California incentives are supposed to be. The

The incentives are paying people back for their labor costs. Basically say like you employed these people in the state of California. That's a good thing. And so therefore we are going to refund money to you based on that. That's really what it comes down to. One of the challenges we face is that California labor costs are higher than they are other places. And so sometimes that's why you move to cheaper places to shoot.

including overseas, which is really what this focus is of this, which is like becomes hard to do. So when you're shooting a movie that is set in Philadelphia, but you're shooting in Croatia because it's just cheaper to shoot in Croatia, that's a harder problem to solve. It is. That said, there are costs inherent to shooting far away. A ton of people have to be shipped out there, including most of your key cast. Yeah, your department heads. Your department heads.

And there's also just typically a duplication of efforts. So you're going to want to find what's called a services company. So if you're shooting something in Croatia, you have a production company, you have your script, you have your production, and then you need to hire a Croatian production company that puts you in touch with the Croatian folks that you're going to need to work on your film.

your movie or your show, people don't want to do this. Nobody wants to go, unless you're making a movie about Croatia, nobody wants to go far, far away from the setting of the movie. It is disruptive and it has really hurt so many people who make their living off of these production trades here in Los Angeles. Listen, it's dollar to dollar at some point,

Who knows? Cost of currency, everything else. It's impossible to figure this stuff out, except on the largest level, what we know is the argument's not even close for the companies. So for my show, it was like, this is the difference. You either can make it or you can't. Yeah. And so with Canada, it's both the dollar exchange is part of it, but also the incentives. Yeah.

Yes. So the exchange rate is definitely an issue and that fluctuates, but the incentives are absolutely a part of it. And what happens is you start to get even interprovincial competition to see, okay, well, Alberta knows that they don't necessarily have as wide and deep a pool of crew as BC does.

They increase their incentives to bring stuff in. In comes the last of us. More people are trained. More people are hired. Better for Alberta. But we need to do something about this. And the one thing I think we just can't afford to do anymore is...

clutch our pearls about the fact that this is putting money in corporate pockets because they're doing it anyway. No matter what we do, they are either keeping the money in their pocket and not giving it to us or they're getting money to replace the money they give to us.

One way or the other, it's happening. I would rather that we replace the money in their pocket and have them give it to us here in Los Angeles. And by us, I mean all of our grips, all of our electric, all of our catering, all of our teamsters and our seamstresses. And every single person that works on construction is an enormous part of this. And it will power our economy. It's important to do. So...

No, we're not going to get there by tariffs. We're going to get there the other way, it seems. So I want to end this on a happy note, which is a movie that I'm helping out on. It's a very low budget, but based on a low budget, it was going to probably need to shoot in Mexico, even though it's set in Southern California. And...

went through a whole bunch of stuff and then was able to get the California tax credit. And so it was now going to be shooting in California, which is incredible. And it's the right thing for the movie. It's the right thing for the state. It shows off an underappreciated part of our state. I'm incredibly excited for it. Yes. It was a slog to get there, but it happened. Well, and it's lucky because it's a lottery right now. It is. And so you literally win or lose randomly. Yeah.

And it's also in tiers based on what size productions you are. Well, and so that's the other catch here. Yeah. Because the way the new schemes that are being proposed are structured, it really does aim more towards lower budget or middle budget things. And I think there's a great argument to be made that large budget things employ more people. But it's one of those things of like, well, do we want to give five different people...

X units or we would like to give one person 10 X units. And it's, I don't know. It's really tough. Yeah. The other reason why we can't say tariffs even a different thing, if we're going to slap a fee on things that were shot overseas, they're going to slap a fee on anything that we try to show overseas too. And like nobody wants a trade war over this. It is literally other than

I'll even take it back because we don't really export technology. We import it because we build it all overseas. Our film and television industry is a giant exporter of culture. It is the only exportation that we have beyond some limited crops, I think, and in some limited cases, some fuels. I can't think of an industry that is just so...

Yeah. So we don't need sledgehammers to fix this. We just need will. And the unions need to buy in. It seems like they are. So, you know, they have to agree. Unfortunately, they have to agree to somehow make the corporate paymasters happy. Talk about not letting the perfect get in the way of the good. Yeah.

All right, it's time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a person, her name is Hannah Ritchie. She has a great blog called Sustainability by the Numbers. She also has a podcast called Solving for Climate. She is a data scientist and writer who mostly talks about climate, climate change, sustainability, all those things. She's a person, as a data scientist, she actually crunches the numbers to figure out what is useful and what is not useful. And so she can talk about like

solar panel productivity and sort of where the changes are there and really the choices you can make individually, but also the choices systematically that governments make about sort of doing things right. She's Scottish, Craig, you will love her accent. Oh, I mean, Scottish. She's like a really smart Scottish person. It's just like, it's just... I love the Scots. I love them so much. So specifically this last week, she wrote about

ChatGPT and there's this meme going around of like, you know, how much energy like a ChatGPT query goes up and it is so incredibly negligible. And it's like, people say like, oh, it's 10 times as much as a Google search is.

Well, Google searches nothing. It's a grain of sand. Aren't statistics fun? Statistics are fun. So I'll point people to this blog post, but really I've learned so much reading her, but also listening to her podcast, talking about things like they're putting sales on freighters now. And so, which is so cool. They retrofit it because like you save that much.

If the wind blows, you turn your engine off. You save some money. And so the expert they had on to talk about it was talking about how right now they'll optimize for speed a little bit because sometimes it's like, well, we'll burn less fuel and go slower or slowly and it's worthwhile. But with the wind blowing, we don't need to hurry.

Use the wind. Absolutely. So. Imagine that. Yeah. So it's some stuff that feels like science fiction, but it's actually people, actual scientists are doing it. Hannah Ritchie, Sustainability by the Numbers is her blog, but the podcast is called Solving for Climate. I love that. Yeah.

Well, I've got a delightful one cool thing, and it really is. It's so cool. So our good friends at Rusty Lake. Oh, yes. Another game. Another... Yes. So a surprise. A problem solving game. Yes. So our friends at Rusty Lake out there in the Netherlands who make all the wonderful Rusty Lake games, it is their 10th anniversary. Mm-hmm.

And to celebrate, they released a surprise game called the Mr. Rabbit Magic Show. And so those of you who play these incredibly surreal games know that there's Mr. Crow and Mr. Owl and Mr. Rabbit, and they're all very sinister, Mr. Deer.

And true to form, they just knock it out of the park. It's just like, hey, Mr. Rabbit's magic show. There's going to be 20 little puzzles and each one is, it's just really, they're really easy. And you're like blowing through them and then shit gets weird. And of course they supply a whole other game inside the game with...

You know, incredible challenges to do. And so like getting and completing the whole thing, it felt like a full complete meal and extremely Rusty Lake. Very intertextual. They've built quite a culture over there. And it seems like such a nice place. Like I want to work there. Absolutely. It seems like they have fun. Yeah. You know, they seem really cool. So congratulations to Rusty Lake. You guys...

You guys in Fireproof Games, who make The Room games, are my favorite iOS game makers. Fantastic. I forgot to mention this before it actually happened, but I will say thank you to everybody who stopped by our booth at PAX East. So the big game convention this last weekend in Boston, we were there with Vertigo, which is our game on Steam right now. I'm going to say great because it actually hasn't happened as we're recording this. Oh. Yeah, so I'm assuming it went fantastic, but I want to thank everybody who visited our booth and...

and sign up and download our demo for Vertigo up there. Oh, I love that. Yeah, it's so much fun. Yeah, we made little banners and things. Nice work. That is our show for this week. Script News is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you want an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaudis.com. There's also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

Actually, we didn't answer any questions today. No, we didn't. We did some follow-up, though. We must have an incredible backlog of questions. You know, Drew talked to us about the question backlog we have. We do. We have some great ones that I've got in store.

Yeah, we had like four on the workflow today, which we didn't get to because I'm always keeping an eye on time. Sure. You know I love an all-question episode. Yeah, we'll get there. That's so much fun. All right. You'll find transcripts at johnox.com along with a weekly newsletter we have called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about on the episode today. In the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Welcome home, John. Thank you.