Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome. My name is John August. My name is Craig Mason. And you're listening to episode 673 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, let's get back to basics. Structure, Craig. What is it? Why do writers keep freaking out about it when it's a fundamental part of storytelling going all the way back to caveman days? I think why do writers keep freaking out about it is a perfectly good place where we should start once we get there. Then how do you enjoy a movie? We'll teach you how not to be so meh about the things you're watching. Be born before 2000.
And plus we'll answer some listener questions because it's been a minute. And in our bonus segment for premium members, let's talk about the wearables, the devices we wear to track what's happening in our bodies. Fantastic. Let's do it. First, some news. We had Oscar nominations this morning as we were recording. We're recording this on Thursday. Yes, yes. And so as always, I'm so happy for the people who got nominated. I am bummed for the people who didn't.
And it's all going to be okay. Everything will be absolutely okay. Even being considered for something like that is extraordinary. I assume everybody going to that was grown up enough to know that sometimes weird stuff happens. Oh, yeah.
So somehow Conclave got nominated for Best Picture and Best Actor, but not Best Director? Yeah, there's a couple of those, yeah. So wasn't quite sure about that one. Wicked also, yeah. Wicked. Best Picture, but not Best Screenplay? Yeah. All right, so not fair to our friend Dana Fox. So there are these strange things that happen, but it's all priced in. And at the end of the day, while it is nice to have a trophy, this is all part of advertising. Mm-hmm.
So for those folks who did get nominations, I think it's really exciting that their movies will get more marketing money so more people can see them, particularly for the little ones. Yeah. But also, congratulations. Now you get to do six more weeks of work promoting this thing. It is a full-time job. Yeah, and you don't get paid for it. No. No.
Drew, tell us about Weekend Read because I think you have all of these scripts in Weekend Read right now. Every single nominated screenplay we've got up in Weekend Read. So we have, should I run down the list? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, please. Yeah. We have A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, Anora, Conclave, Amelia Perez, Nickel Boys, which is a really fun read, September 5, Sing Sing, The Brutalist, and The Substance. So they're all in a, and the nominees are category and you can read them now. That's great.
That's great. So many. So it used to be five things, right? Yeah. But now that we have both adapted and original screenplay. Oh, I see. So it's, it's, there's 10 best. Yeah. I'm in the Academy. I should know this, right? I vote very quickly. I shouldn't say that. I vote, I vote studiously. I do too. But I clearly don't pay attention to how many people are in the category and I'm voting. So there's 10 best pictures, but then everybody else is five.
Is that right? That's correct. Of each other's categories. Got it. Drew has gone through each of these scripts to make sure they actually work properly and we can read. And so I would just say like, rather than doom scrolling on your phone, just like, why don't you like scroll through a script and actually read something and read something good? Anything is better than doom scrolling. Anything. Now, Craig, I know you sort of took a mandate to like consume less news and you're off all the social media. And how is that going for you? Amazingly well. That's good. So I am aware of what is going on in the world.
I get my news through the old-fashioned method, which is to pick a couple of periodicals that I find at least thoughtful and look at their curated reportage of what happened the day before. Not what happened 10 minutes ago. And with some breath so that there can be some kind of thoughtful analysis and context. And that's it. I do not get my news from the fire hose of insanity. Yeah.
And I don't watch anything with anyone talking. That's the key. I do not watch talking heads. I do not look at tweets. I do not look at Insta thoughts. And it is spectacular. During the height of the fires, I was...
reminded of how useful it is to have local news. So it was one of those rare situations where I turned on the TV and actually watched local news as fires were happening. It was useful to see like, oh my gosh, the fires are getting close here. We actually need to start packing up. And I was so grateful to have that as a service, but I do not want that in my veins all the time. I grew up in a household where the TV news was on at least four hours a day, local news and national news. And it's just
It's not helpful. Local news in particular, and this is no slight against them, the work that they do when something like the fires happen is extraordinary and people put their lives at risk and they're flying around in helicopters. But for the most part, they don't have either enough things to report that they think anyone will watch or...
Or they only have lurid things that aren't worth reporting that they know people will watch. So you get a lot of, there was an accident here and there was a shooting and there was a stabbing. What you don't get are, say, this bill was deliberated. So all the sudden frenzy over why were tanks empty? What was going on with the firefighters? Why didn't the pumps work? That's been being discussed for years. And the local news reported on 0% of it. Yeah.
So, you know, it's not a great thing to have on all day unless there's something serious happening. Indeed. Like a car chase. Like a car chase, yes. Yeah. All right, let's do some follow-up because it's been a while since you and I have been here in person to do some follow-up on previous episodes. Drew, take us back to 671. We had a How It's Be a Movie about an IVF mix-up.
Yeah, so several people wrote in that there were already movies out there with sort of a similar premise. So, Almodovar's Parallel Mothers, there's a Danish movie called Maybe Baby, there's an Indian comedy called Good News, and a Mexican sitcom called Daughter from Another Mother.
Looks like they've covered this one, John. They have covered it. Internationally, it's been well covered. Yeah, everyone all across the world enjoys this story. Also, we talked in that same episode about a Unabomber movie, and several people wrote in to say there's a series called Manhunt about Ted Kaczynski starring Paul Bettany and Sam Worthington.
Okay. Sure. Yeah. Great. Done. Done. We'll put links in the show notes for all those. Fantastic. And we also had some follow-up on way back to episode 454, we were talking about erotic fiction. Oh, this was a long time ago. Yeah. Jenny in New York City writes, I was listening to that bonus segment of episode 454 where you and Craig discuss, but disappointingly do not read erotic fiction. Okay.
In it, you bring up Fifty Shades of Grey as the prime example of fan fiction that managed to cross over into popular culture. Craig says that Fifty Shades of Grey seemed like it was heralding the beginning of something and that he's surprised that nothing similar followed it. Well, four plus years later, we're seeing the floodgates open. So there's a through line from fan fiction to TikTok or BookTok to the traditional book publishing industry. A well-known example is The Love Hypothesis, which was originally a Ray and Kylo Ren or Raylo fan fiction crossover.
Published online in 2018 and then scrubbed of all the Star Wars references and traditionally published in 2021. A film adaptation is now in development.
There's also three Draco and Hermione or Dramini fan fictions, all slated for major publication in 2025. Okay. Wait, but also scrubbed of any... Yeah. So that's the thing. Fetishize is great, of course. It was fan fiction that was scrubbed. Scrubbed from Twyla. Right. So we were correct, but just ahead of the curve. We were ahead of the curve. And now BookTok caught up with what we predicted four years ago. Yay, erotic fiction. Yeah. Yeah.
Is there anything less sexy than the phrase erotic fiction? Yeah. It's such a boner killer. It's not so good. No. I'm going to be optimistic. I'm going to be positive. Like, well, this is a kind of movie that we didn't have in theaters before. And the same thing with Fifty Shades of Grey. We weren't having sexual thrillers on the big screen and hooray. Not since the 90s. Yeah. And there has been a lot of discussion about
and Gen Z's general lack of interest in seeing sex portrayed on screen. I think we've talked about it before, possibly because if they want to watch sex on screen, they watch people having sex. Yeah. And they don't need it or want it in their traditional narrative. But it is part of our life and it's very much part of how we relate to each other on very deep levels. Yeah.
screws things up. It makes things better. It makes things worse. It creates all the people around us and at least most of them. So, yeah, let's bring it on. Also, it is interesting that
So much of fan fiction turns toward the erotic. All the way back to, so do you know where, you've heard the phrase slash fiction? Of course, yeah. Slash Spock. Exactly. So it began with people writing erotic fiction about Star Trek and specifically like Kirk has sex with Spock or Kirk has sex with McCoy or McCoy has sex with Scotty, whatever it is.
It's not like the stuff that happens now is only because of that. I think it's always been that impulse. It's sort of there's a fandom and they want to write...
sexy versions of the characters. They do. And they also, they're pining for something that they cannot get in the mainstream version. Oh, that's an interesting point. And so I think the reason why you see slash fiction is it's an attempt to take these characters out of their normal molds and use them how they want to use them. And so there's obviously queer writers were behind part of it, but also women, basically. It's a way of sort of taking control of these male characters and using them how they wish they could be.
be seen but also if you love those stories you make a great point you're never gonna get sex in a harry potter film of course you have to wait until they're bold enough right but like their senior year you're still not gonna get sex it's not how it works so there's an unsatisfied desire for a certain kind of version of that relationship so that makes total sense
All right, let's go on to our marquee topic. This is actually prompted by another listener question. This one from Christine. Drew, help us out. She says, in episode 662, which was the 20 questions, Craig responded to a listener saying something like, there's a lot of people who can write glittering dialogue, but so few who can use structure well. And I had my husband and I fist pumping. We agree. I certainly can't do it well. Sometimes it feels like perfect pitch. Either you have it or you don't.
Craig and John, would you talk to us about examples of how you used or struggled with structure in some of your own work? Great. Happy to. But I think first we should talk about structure and sort of like what we even mean by structure because it's one of those terms that I think is used as a cudgel against newer writers. And once you actually think about what it really is, it's, of course, fundamental to every story you've ever heard. It is story. Yeah.
It's a fancy word for saying, this is what happens, this is what happens to, and this is why. That is what stories are. People get excited about the clothing that we put on that stuff because that's what hits their eyeballs and ears first. What do they look like? And what are they saying? The saying in particular gets overemphasized. But how do you tell a good story? Everybody who grows up in any family that's even moderately sized,
Or even if you just see your extended family at Christmas, doesn't matter. Everybody knows that there's somebody that's going to sit around and tell a story that is so boring and bad. But you also know there's somebody who's great at it. And when that one starts telling a story, everybody leans forward because they know how to do it. Yep. How you begin, how you middle, how you end, what's the point, how it all comes around and coheres together, everything.
Poetics by Aristotle. So I was a journalism major. And so in journalism, you're taught to answer like the basic questions, who, what, where, when, why, and then how. And so structure is really generally talking about the when. It's like, when do events happen? What is the order of those events? When do they happen?
When does the audience learn something? Those are all fundamental parts of storytelling. I mean, you have somebody at a family gathering who is just awful at it and boring. It's like you did not plan for how the details and how you're going to lay out the story and the storytelling in a way that was actually interesting and intriguing. You're starting way too early. You're going way too long. Yeah. There's just no clear structure to this story. And
we sort of know we're trapped in this endless middle of things. And when something is well-structured, you feel beginnings and endings. You feel the closure of moments. You feel that there's just, there's a rhythm to it. And you've recognized what the audience needs and where they're at and how to sort of move forward. And so that's what structure is. And what it's not is some sort of cookie cutter template. It's not some sort of like, oh, here are the magic clothespins which you're gonna hang all your things on. It's not a thing you impose upon a story. It is the skeleton that's holding the whole story up.
Yeah, I think when you said recognize, that's where the talent is. Because I don't know how to teach somebody to recognize something. But it might be instructive for people at home to think about Boring Uncle Ron and how Boring Uncle Ron does tell stories. Because at least you can say, I recognize why that story stinks. For instance, he looped back around.
He told me something that should have been told earlier. I can't explain why, except I wish he had mentioned that earlier. It screws up the context. There was no suspense. He told me what was going to happen before it happened. Or he just casually said something that he should have milked and understood that I would have been, I would have found meaningful. There are parts where there are too many details. There are parts where there are no details at all. It sort of doesn't end. He's not sure how to end it.
It doesn't have a point. If it does have a point, it wasn't the point that the beginning was sort of getting at. There's no revelation, no purpose, and it is episodic. And this, and this, and this, and this.
A boring Uncle Ron may be able to teach people more about structure than they think. The other thing that's important to recognize is that structure is all around you. You just may not be seeing it as structure. So every song you've ever heard has structure. Oh, yes. It has verses and choruses and hooks and it has bridges. There's a pattern that fits your brain well. And because there are things like verses and choruses, you can break from them and that surprise us, which is great. But there's still a sense of what those things are. And the equivalents for those are scenes and...
sequences in movies and in TV shows. It's why learning to write the four-act or five-act structure of a classic one-hour TV show is really, really useful. Even if those commercial breaks are taken out, there's still a sense of like, okay, I know where we're at in this show. There's a flow to it. There's a rhythm.
It's a little bit like having a conversation with yourself. One of you is going to tell a story and the other part of you is going to be listening to the story. So part of structure is saying, how does the hearing this for the first time me like that? Did I like that? Did that make me happy? Did it bore me? Does it seem clunky? You need to have a relationship with an audience even when there is none. Because we are performing a service. Nobody...
other than Kafka, theoretically, who tried to burn everything he wrote, is just writing to be not read or filming to not be seen and so forth. So you have to let the audience in. You don't need to let them all in. Your audience can just be you and what you like. But you then need to be responsive to yourself and go, nope, no. Even though I just came up with that, even though that was my idea of what should happen now and why,
The me that's listening, unimpressed. So let's talk through our assumptions about the very fundamental structure of a movie or a pilot, the things that introduce a character for the first time and introduce sort of what it is that they're trying to do. Early in the story, near the very start, we need to have a sense of who the character is, what they want, what the world is like, what the obstacles in the way are.
that are going to be there. Who else is important? Those are fundamental things. And the fundamental choices you're going to be making, even if you don't think about it, you're making those choices by which order you're putting those scenes in and how you're telling the audience about those things. As they're going off and doing some things, like what is the sequence of events that's happening? What are the choices that they're making? Where are they going? What are the obstacles along the way? And when you see somebody criticize the script for being, I think you have some structure issues here, what they're really saying is like,
I got lost. I got lost in sort of where we're at, what I should have been focusing on. The characters might have great dialogue. It might be really enjoyable to watch them do their thing, but I didn't feel any momentum. I didn't feel like there was anything going there and I didn't know what to even look for in terms of
What's going to happen at the end? What am I even expecting to happen down the road? Yeah. Oftentimes, there's a lack of intention. Yeah. And we interpret that as a structure problem. Every time, you're right. When people say there's a structure problem, they're trying to say there's a problem of some other kind. Yeah. Sometimes, it's as if you're watching a conductor who doesn't have a sense of how to alter tempo, create anticipation, where to use silence as opposed to sound.
There's no shape. Yeah, there's no shape. There's no shape. It's just sort of there and it's not picking you up and then throwing you down. It's not putting its hands over your eyes and then revealing something new. So...
These things get shuffled out as structure problems, which for writers can be very frustrating early on because you immediately then go running to some sort of structure book. The structure books are not going to help you. You do need, I think, to think a little bit like how to write a movie. So a lot of structure is about the main character and how they change.
And the story is revolving around that. It's the nucleus and everything's revolving around that. That creates a sense of intention and purpose, which in theory will imbue this story with structure. So going back to Christine's question, would you talk about examples of how you used or struggled with structure in some of your own work? And so looking back at the movies I've written...
By far the most complicated movie structurally was Big Fish. Because in Big Fish, you have two protagonists who have their own agendas. There's two different timelines. They're intersecting with each other. They are each other's antagonist. And there's so much stuff to set up and plates to start spinning. Those first 10 pages have to do just a lot of work to sort of start the engines for things going. But then...
the setup is so important, but then it's deciding, okay, when am I moving back and forth between these different stories? How is my choice to leave this storyline and go to this storyline, progressing both of them? How to make sure we're really moving forward in time and energy as we're going through the movie, even though we're intercutting between these two things. That was a case where I had an instinctive sense of sort of
what the story was I needed to tell, but it literally did have to just like pull out a sheet of paper and sort of work out like, okay, this is how I'm moving back and forth between these things. And then it had to plan scenes that would make transitions between those things feel logical and natural. That is the hard work of structure sometimes. Most movies I write don't kind of need that, but there are situations where you have multiple plot lines happening at the same time, and you are going to have to just do that kind of
planning work to figure out how you're going to do that. TV shows are great examples too. Oftentimes, you know, I guess Last of Us is much more classically, you tend to follow a small group of characters, but you are cutting back and forth between them and deciding when you're going to cut back and forth between them becomes really important. Like, are we with Joel or with Ellie? And it's like, deciding when we're going to move back and forth with those things are important writing decisions well before they become editorial decisions. Now,
No question. Television episodes are, I find generally easier structurally to deal with because they're shorter and there is an understanding and expectation that you will get to have multiple starts and multiple endings. So you simplify a little bit. And by simplifying, you get to be a little crazier with structure. Television shows are structured way weirder than movies are. I mean, you look at the structure of a season, any season, pick any season of Breaking Bad.
No movie is complicated like that. It's not even a complicated show. Yeah, but I mean, and also in series television, you're looking at the structure across multiple episodes too. And so like, where's the audience at? What are we setting up? There's episodic structure, there's season structure, there's series structure. Movies are, I find to be really challenging because...
You get one shot and that's it. And when it's end, there's no multiple endings. There's no, well, that wasn't my favorite episode. It's one episode. That's it. The end. I won't name titles, but I will say that I have worked on things that I'm not credited for that were big pieces of IP. Yeah. And they had a lot of expectations and they also were from different media. It wasn't like I was taking a movie and remaking it. It was another thing. Yeah.
And in those cases, sometimes the freedom of whatever that medium was made it very hard to structure a movie such that the movie was in movie time. Yes. Like it wasn't five hours long and it wasn't 40 minutes long. It was roughly movie time and got you through the movement you needed to get. And all the things you needed and wanted were there and the stuff wasn't. And most importantly...
Everything made sense. Because other things, a lot of other things, can afford to not make sense for a while. Novels can wander off and not make sense for a bunch of it. Kurt Vonnegut novels routinely don't make sense. And then they do in the end and it's beautiful. But for long stretches, you're like, what is happening? Musicals can wander off down weird alleyways, do bizarre songs and then come back and it's fine. And it's fine because you're in a big room with them and they're singing. It's cool and who cares? Yeah.
can do this, but movies, it's harder. It's harder, particularly when you're doing movies like you and I have done. Logic, as it turns out, is sort of also part of structure. Making sure that facts are in evidence, that one thing follows another,
reasonably, and that people aren't contradicting themselves or their story. So you're talking about adaptations and adapting a piece of IP. But my experience is that when I'm adapting a novel, there's so much you love about the novel and you recognize, like, yeah, I can't just tear off the pages and feed them in the projector. Like, they fundamentally have different engines. And so I have to...
have an honest conversation with the author if the author's around. Like, the engine of the movie is going to be different than the engine of your book. And I need... Some things are going to happen in different order and different sequences and some things are just not going to happen because...
it's a movie and the movie has to be about two hours long and there's just expectations and payoffs that are just very different for a movie. And having written three books now, I can say like, it's really nice to be able to sort of like describe the texture of the sheets and all that stuff. And it provides such incredible rich detail and it's immersive, but that's not movie stuff. And you kind of move on past that. When I've been tasked with adapting a piece of IP that's more like a character or a video game or something like that,
one that's not especially narrative, then you do have a lot more freedom just like to actually make a movie. Like if they give you a toy. Yes. Just make sure that the toy is named the toy and that it does the one signature thing that the toy does and the rest is up to you. Yes. And there's a kind of a liberation to that where it's just like, I'm not so stuck and beholden on those things. I don't have all the benefits of the stuff that was in the book, but it's not so stuck on it. Yeah. It's almost like the challenge is taking something that has been properly structured for its medium. Yeah.
And then telling it again in a different medium, it's almost like you've got to break a lot of bones and then knit them back together. Because you get a dolphin and you need to deliver a penguin. Yes. And so a lot of work happens there. And some bones just are left behind and it can be messy. Yes. And it will never really be a penguin. And it certainly won't be a dolphin. It'll be its own thing. It's hard, but...
This is how important structure is, really. It's like we need to be able to tell the story coherently for this medium. Do you have any other examples from your own work of things that were particularly challenging to structure or things that surprised you in finding a structure for telling the story? We talked through Chernobyl and figuring out sort of where the breaks were in that story. Yeah, other than the things that I, there were a few jobs where I thought, this probably shouldn't be a movie. There were some things where I thought this should probably be three movies, not one.
famously, the Weinsteins had the rights to Lord of the Rings. Oh, yeah. And they refused to let Peter Jackson make three movies. They wanted him to make one movie to cover the three books of Lord of the Rings. Just to be clear, I watch the extended version every year of each of those three movies. The extended version of each movie is three and a half hours. Yes. The theatrical, maybe two and a half. The idea, like, we're going to smash all that into one movie is insane. Yeah.
So sometimes you're running into, I have been in those spots, really when you feel like you don't have enough runway to either take off or land, it's terrifying. I will say that when I look back to stuff I've passed on, sometimes it just didn't spark for me, or the character didn't spark, the story didn't spark, but there have also been times where like,
this is not a movie or like I can sense like it's really fundamentally a structural problem that we're not going to get past. Like the audience expectation of wanting to make it to the screen and what I can actually put on the screen is just not going to match up right because there's just not time to do it. Yeah. There are also been situations where I found as I was going through it that the other people involved, be they a director or producer or star, felt that the value was more in some other aspect of it.
So the pure storytelling was just don't worry about that because we're going to do this and it's going to be cool. I think sometimes action movies fall prey to this. We all love Die Hard because it's so perfectly structured. But a lot of action movies, you can feel them going and we have to have this cool thing. So just make a lot of convoluted reasons why it's going to happen because really people are there for the action. And if you miss that thread of story, like so our friend Chris Morgan works on
the Fast and Furious movies, they found a smart way to create a simple structure. Family, that's it. And it doesn't have to be complicated because they're smart. They know like people are coming for the cars, but that's why they think they're coming. The reason they keep coming back is for the characters and the relationships because you could just watch cars doing crazy stuff on YouTube if you want.
So it's also important to have partners who recognize, hey, we're going to tell everybody this is about the cars privately in this room. We do know it's about basic fundamentals that we have to get right. So I completely agree with you in terms of like, you know, family was a central unifying core idea.
I would be nervous about conflating that with structure. Well, it'd have to be an argument, right? Yeah, it's a central argument. That's a central thing we're always getting back to. Like family is worth more than blank. But then as you're looking at sort of like, what are the events of this movie? How are we going to structure them? How is this all going to feel and tie back into it? It's making sure that you are able to
remind the audience and remind the characters that it's all about family, that it's all going to tie back in there, making sure that, you know, of all these set pieces you're building, which is these things are like musicals, but with like, you know, explosions. Exactly. Exactly. So what is the fundamental difference between the structure of one of your favorite Fast and Furious movies and one of your favorite Pitch Perfect movies? Both Universal films, oddly enough.
family, right? So a bunch of people come together. One of them is a loner of a sort. The other ones need them. There are villains that must be overcome. They all find that they are more powerful together and
And they face their fear and they win through performance of some kind, be it driving or singing a cool song. Absolutely. So those writers, as they're looking at sort of how they're going to structure their stories, they're looking at, these are the singing moments, the big action set pieces. These are how we're going to do it. And so looking at the note card layout, which is a way to sort of think about, like, I don't actually lay out cards, but you used to do that. You just don't use cards anymore. I sort of...
Now you do more whiteboard. Yeah. But as you look at the big whiteboard map of sort of where the story is, that's what we're really talking about. Structure is like, what are those things? It's making sure that they're not just individual things, but they're connected in ways that are meaningful and actually provide value. And if you're looking at structure in that way, when you put up a card that says, a big race, or they sing, you have to know
Why? Yeah. Okay, so they race, but the point of this race is he disappoints somebody and feels horrible. Or he chickens out. Or he realizes that he's better than he thought he was. Why do they sing this song? Because this song shows that they're all thinking about themselves only and not about each other. That's why those note cards happen. That's...
And you're asking, why is this happening now? And what is the effect of this happening now on the stuff before and afterwards? How does this change what comes next? And so we say you're asking yourself, but this is one of those cases where having the writer's room, if you're in a TV situation or having a writing partner, we know a lot of partners who like one person is the person who's sort of better at sensing like this overall map of story. And another person is really good at the execution details.
David Zucker, when I first started working on Scary Movie 3, he didn't know me. I was like shoved in there, right? And so it's week one and he has no idea who I am. And he's like, I don't know this guy. And he was like, you're like structure boy. He called me structure boy.
And I was Structure Boy. And then I was funny. But it was funny. He didn't mean it as an insult. He actually really respected Structure. He was obsessed with note cards. And he was a big believer. I'm talking about him like he's dead. He's perfectly alive. He would appreciate that I'm talking about him like he's dead. He was very rigorous about logic. And actually, he was quite grateful that Structure Boy was there to help. Because I think he had had real problems with that
Like he had been trying and there is a great structure to like, for instance, Naked Gun. It's a fantastic structure, but it was hard for him. It took him a lot of work. So it was useful to have a structure boy. And just thinking back to last week's conversation with Jesse Eisenberg, he was talking about an idea and needing structure in order to actually have the idea make sense. And so he was talking about how originally he had this approach for the movie and he realized like the
The big reveal happened at the end of Act 1. He didn't have an Act 2 or an Act 3 because things just happened too early. And so he needed to change everything around. He needed to change the premise so that he could actually have a structure that made sense for the course of the movie. Well, therein is the difference between good writers and not good writers. Good writers will make a mistake.
And then go, oh, that's a mistake. And bad writers will make a mistake and go, this is awesome. Yeah, the bad writer might just say, oh, but I'll figure it out later. Or no one will care. Or they just give up. Or they give up. But I think the biggest issue is it's that having that other you that can just be the audience with its arms crossed going...
Yeah, that's fine. What's worse than hearing that's fine? You know, I've said that to myself before. I'm like, oh boy, okay, let's not do that.
All right, on the topic of that's fine, let's talk about the meh. And this comes from a newsletter that somebody sent me. It's written by Sasso Chapin. He writes that,
And so he runs through some of his advice for enjoying things. And I thought they applied really well to enjoying a movie because what I do find is I feel like people have, some of it's just as you age up, but there's a cynicism and a sort of like, that I feel happening more. And I just want to remind people of ways to enjoy a movie because sometimes if you're sitting and watching a movie, you're like,
I could just look at my phone. No, there's other things you can look at instead. Yeah, I think sometimes...
People say they didn't like a movie because there is a risk of saying you like something. You can be sneered at. No one will sneer at you for not liking something. If anything, you can be like, you, none of you, you all cretins, you've taken delight in this, you idiot. It's hard to say you like things. People will sit through a movie silently watching the entire thing.
And then when it's over, go, I mean, it was okay. What else gets you to sit there silently fixated upon it for two hours? Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. So while you're staring silently at a thing, kind of wondering whether you like it, some of his advice, first is look at the other part. So he's saying, move your attention beyond the part that you're immediately focused on. And so for...
His example is like listen to the bass line in a song and listen to actually hear what the bass is doing, which can be fascinating. For me, sometimes if I'm like, I'm not fully enjoying that, but then I can look at the sets. I can hear the score. I can just appreciate the world in which the story is in. And that's okay. It's okay to not maybe be enamored by everything in the movie that you're experiencing, but to focus on one thing, one part of it is also okay. Yeah.
And sometimes people think that unless a movie is perfect, it's bad. Yeah. So movies will make a mistake. That mistake is not an objective mistake. What it is is a disruption in your relationship with it. You are on a great date with a movie and then it did something and you went, oh, no, I don't like that thing. Well...
Get over it because like dates, movies will have flaws for you. Other people might enjoy those. You didn't like it. Accept it as part of the process where nothing is perfect and then get back to liking it. Yeah. Don't just go, well, there it is. Well, you know what? The movie had me until this person said this thing and then I was like, oh, this is garbage.
That's stupid. Yeah. That's how stupid people talk. Yeah. Another bit of advice, let the intensity in. And so he's talking about how people don't journal like heavy metal because it sounds like an assault on their ears. Yeah, an awesome assault. For me, sometimes a movie will do something like, and I'll just cringe on its behalf. Sure. And sometimes you just let the movie be the fullest version of itself and sort of try to appreciate for like what the movie is doing, even if not sort of necessarily your taste, just like,
watch it enjoy itself. Yes. And if a movie is doing what it was intended to do, and you can feel like, okay, they wanted to make a large macaroni and cheese. And I just got a huge bowl of macaroni and cheese. I don't love macaroni and cheese. What are you going to yell at the macaroni? They did what they would. And so really absolutely appreciate at least this is for macaroni and cheese. They cared. They delivered it.
what else could we ask for them? 100%. And I feel like comedies in particular get judged so harshly for this. I mean, well, again, if it's not Tootsie, it's no good. That joke didn't work for me. Okay, well, what about the 5,000 other words? You laughed a bunch of times and you're not even in a comedy club where everybody's drunk. Do you understand why? Like the two drink minimum is the reason 70% of comedians have a job. Yeah.
Everyone's a little toasty. Yeah. And it's fun and you're all together and somebody's doing it live and adapting and feeling you out and seeing, okay, you don't like this joke, you're going to, oh, you like that one? I'll give you more of those. Movies are stuck. They're only going to do the one thing. That's it. And you could be alone in the theater and you're like, eh. Yeah. Yeah. Next bit of advice, develop a crush on the creator. Allow yourself to be transiently infatuated with the person who produced the work. You know, who likes that idea? Sexy Craig. So, you're
You're infatuated with me. Yeah, so think about the artist's intention. He doesn't even give me anything. He's so horrified by sexy Craig. So here's what I've learned. It's like, don't acknowledge it. You can't just, you just turn away from it. Like at the end of Nightmare on Elm Street, she turns her back on Freddy Krueger and he disappears. Yeah, that's my hope. Well, you keep hoping. But thinking about intention, like why did this creator do this? What are they trying to achieve? Actually, like,
It can be useful to stop and if you're not enjoying this moment right now, think about the actual person making it or what the intention was behind the thing can sort of get you reengaged in what they're doing. Yes, give people the benefit of the doubt. Now, there are times where you will watch a movie and you will think, oh, this is just poorly done. In those circumstances, sometimes I will think to myself,
okay, giving these people the benefit of the doubt, something went wrong here. Yeah. Rather than me presuming that everybody sat down and said, this is exactly what we want to do, did it, showed it to me, and it was a mess. What if I think to myself, what was this supposed to be? What, who, how, what went wrong? What collided with this?
And that in and of itself is interesting. Yeah. To allow something to be bad without saying, and it was intentionally so. It is almost never intentionally so. Yeah. But even if it's something that isn't bad, but it's just sort of mid or meh, it's like... Well, mid or meh is the worst. I'm so frustrated with this mid or meh. No, it's not. Yeah. It's not mid or meh. The only thing that I find mid or meh
is the usage of mid and meh, which is the most mediocre thing you can do. Just repeating a kind of blasé indifference that a thousand other people have repeated in the last five seconds. And what I do find, I try to stop it myself. I see other people doing it as well, as I feel like people are like,
their letterboxd review while they're watching the movie. Oh, the worst. And then so like through this whole exercise, I'm just trying to remind you to like be present for the movie that's actually in front of you. Yes. Don't try to anticipate your reaction afterwards. You bought a ticket. Give yourself to it. Yeah. You're giving it your time. Give it your time. Everybody grew up on a thousand film critics and they all want to be a film critic. By the way, that's a job that I guess everybody feels like they're going to just do for free. It's so strange. It's as if...
People go to a restaurant, have a great meal. They hate on it. They call it mid. They go home and then they make their own version of it. It's just, it's like, don't be a critic. That's a job, which is already questionable. Yeah.
just give in and just watch it honestly. There'll be time enough. Also, how many times have you seen something and then four days later you went, you know what? I actually love that. Yeah. I was wrong. It won't leave me. And now I realize I just needed some time. Well, you don't give yourself time if you immediately go home and start letterbox. Well, and here's the other thing I think is letterbox, you know, you're rating it one to five stars and you're also giving a thing. But like,
Just move beyond like or dislike and just appreciate like something he says in his articles, like begrudging enjoyment or like there's multiple ways to experience a thing. Flavors. Yeah. And there's things like, I don't want to watch that movie again, but I'm glad I watched it. I'll give you an example. Please. I went to go see a movie called, I believe it was called The Island by Michael Bay. Oh, yeah. I remember The Island. Remember Michael Bay's The Island. Scarlett Johansson. Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor. Yeah.
It wasn't a movie that I thought after when I walked out, like, that was awesome. I didn't have that feeling. There were a lot of things I remember thinking, a lot of this doesn't seem to add up. As I was going along, I would keep getting jostled out by logic or convolution. But there is a car chase in it that is so spectacular. Mm-hmm.
And for me, that was worth the price of admission. I marveled at it. I still marvel at it. I don't understand how they did it. It is so incredible to me. When I see things like that in movies that I otherwise maybe am not enjoying, I go, well, there. And you know what? I'm still talking about, do you know how many movies I saw that I was like, it was really good. And then I don't even remember seeing them. No. But I remember the car chase in the island. Yeah.
Last bit of advice here that he gives us is notice how your body enjoys it. And so what are the physical reactions? Again, we're talking about being present for it and sort of actually looking at your own feelings. So when I'm watching something that is genuinely scary, that's part of the reason why I'm watching it. So I actually get that physical sensation. Or when I'm watching something that's so funny that it hurts, that's why you go and just like acknowledge and clock that. Because I think so often you kind of forget afterwards, like,
Oh, yeah. It was actually so funny that my stomach hurt. It was so funny that I laughed. Yeah. That's a physical response. Just laughing of any kind is so hard to make people do. And I love that aspect of it. And I find that the physical response that I notice the most when I'm being dislodged from the experience is a wandering. My mind begins to wander. Yeah.
and I feel myself like returning to my body. Yes. Yeah. Do you know, like it wanders away from the movie back into my skull. But when I'm in it, whether it's a show, I'm gone. Yeah, yeah. You're not physically there. You're inside the world of that. What an amazing trick of the mind. Yeah. All right. So some advice about movies, TV shows. I would
I would say just let yourself be entertained by the things you're choosing to watch and see and listen to. Be brave enough to like things. It's a more mature, it's actually a more mature and more enlightened state of being when it comes to interacting with art. Yeah, agreed.
So let's start with questions. First, we have Elizabeth in Brooklyn. Elizabeth writes, how does a screenwriter for hire best work with a director? I find that more and more I'm coming on to studio and streamer projects where a director is already attached. Every director is different, obviously, and I'm finding that a good many of them are not story people. They don't have a sense of the necessary scaffolding or how to build a character's journey. Structure. They obsess over the weeds without zooming up to see the whole landscape. And the real problem is those who don't know what they don't know.
They want to do script brainstorming sessions with me, which is actually them just excitedly pitching contradictory suggestions or plain old bad ideas. They fight me on beats that the studio loves. Should I be thinking of this relationship where you don't speak the same language? Sometimes they're infuriating, but you need to be patient and respectful so that you can create material that suits them and so that the relationship endures? Or is it okay to set up boundaries so that you can go off and write your draft without being subject to many unhelpful brainstorming sessions?"
When the director doesn't want me to write something, studio has approved. Which master am I supposed to serve? So, Craig, you and I actually know this writer who's writing it. And so, congratulations, Elizabeth. You're at a point now where you're dealing with directors on projects. The way we have a million times. Yeah, and so this is all so familiar. And I just say, like, big giant hug around you. I know how hard this is. And Craig is shaking his head. So familiar.
If you listen to that question and you put it in the context of any other business, when she gets to the point of, so should I just be really patient? I'm like, what? This is like, and this happens all the time because our business has overindulged directors in film for some reason. It's a little bit like a history teacher is paired with a history student to write a report on history.
And the history student is put in charge. That's what it's like. To me, it's like you are any software engineer who has to talk to Elon Musk. Okay, that also works. And you realize the authority is backwards. It is not earned. And I want to be clear about something. There are directors who are brilliant at this. And you know how you know that a director is deserving of the authority they have?
They are deserving of the authority they have. They earned it. They demonstrated either through their own writing or with somebody like Steven Spielberg, he works with screenwriters all the time and he is so good at it that he brings the best out of them. He respects what they do and then does what he does so brilliantly. But we have a situation where
somebody's been writing for 30 years. Let's give them a couple Oscars while we're at it. Let's say that they're paid $4 million to work on this. And the director is a first-time director. Why would you put that one in charge of that one? So what do you do? I'm a big fan of boundaries, and I'm a big fan of remembering that you do work for the studio. And the studio, which bends over backwards and is all worried about directors, says,
needs to kind of know. Otherwise, you just end up writing bad things to make a conversation go better. And that's not going to help anybody, particularly you. So what I want to draw a distinction between is the conversation and the writing. And I think sometimes, Elizabeth, you just have to like, it's almost going back to this conversation we just had about how to enjoy a thing. It's like,
all this stuff is coming your way from this director and you just have to sort of take it in and feel it and you get much better at sort of like, I hear what you're saying there and it feels like that could match up with this thing we were talking about earlier. You get a sense of how to feel that stuff and how to make it all work. But some of what you're getting paid for and I hope you're getting paid well is just to be, to exist in those rooms and sort of hear that and make people feel heard and then still be able to go off and write a frigging great script that works
they're going to be excited to do. And the other thing, which originally I was really nervous about, but I became clear that they won't remember all the things they pitched at you. Oh, no. And they won't be delighted by anything more than a good script, regardless of what all the conversations were, because they're not writers and they don't know. I'm assuming that this is a non-writing director. Yeah.
And I'm also assuming that this is not a director that has earned his or her stripes through achievement and success. It doesn't sound like that. Or there are directors that you and I know of who are just bananas. Yeah. And everyone knows they're bananas. And that's part of their thing is when they capture footage and work with actors, their bananasness sometimes gets great things. But the script has to be the adult in the room. So you and I have talked about
screenwriter plus. Yeah. So, it's not enough to be talented. It's not enough to have a great work ethic. You also need to be extraordinarily diplomatic. Yeah.
And shrewd. Yeah. Because you are being hired to manage sometimes, to manage that person. Yeah. To deliver a good script that the actor will like and the studio will like without the director blowing up and going crazy. Don't overindulge the director and don't be too afraid of them. Yeah. If that director has so much authority that they can boot you off the movie because you're not writing down their insane stuff...
then you don't belong there. Yeah. Then you're writing a different movie anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Going back to Spielberg, I was lucky to work with him on three different projects. And he is so, so smart and is also not like a natural writer. And so he does have the understanding of what he wants to do in a movie and how to make movies. He knows how to do that and he'll pitch you things. But it is your responsibility to find out how to go from that thing to what actually needs to happen in the movie and the script. And
recognizing that people can be awesome at certain things and not be as good as other things. That's great. That's true. You also can't design costumes. You can't do other things. Neither can we. Right? So we know how to do... I write and I direct and I produce. But you know what I don't do? I don't light. I don't know how to light. If you put a gun to my head, I know what a bounce does and what a flag does. But that's part of how I tell stories. And when I'm working with my cinematographer, I look at something and I'm like, okay,
here's what I think about this and why, or here's what I want to achieve and why.
And then they execute it with a level of technical prowess that will never fully be understandable to me. There's a lot that's going on invisible under the surface that I don't notice. I just see the end product. And I appreciate them for that because I can't do what they do. And that's how a great director will work with a great writer. By understanding they need to go do their thing and I'm going to give them a good target to hit. I acknowledge there's a lot of stuff under the surface that's happening that I'm not aware of.
And the ding-dong directors will casually kick things around like drunken toddlers with no understanding of what they've just unraveled and done.
It's very frustrating. You know what you're hearing is the 25 years of working with directors, some of whom I deeply love. I mean, I love working with Todd Phillips. I love working with Denis Villeneuve. There are so many directors that I really enjoyed working with. And on my show, there are directors I love working with, even though it's a different circumstance. And I'm the authority. But man, ooh, John, you and I both have been in some rooms where we are...
just like hostages to a madman. Yeah. Yeah. That's reality. Yeah. Let's do a simple question. Let's do one from Tad. He's writing about point of view. Tad says, I get confused about how to return from a point of view shot. If I use his POV slug line, do I need to use another slug line when I leave his POV? If I use John as the next slug line, then I'm trapped on John until I get to the next scene heading or else I get into a string of slug lines as I jump from character to character.
I understand what Tad is running into here, and I think...
It's the assumption that when you put in like an intermediate slug line like his POV, they were sort of trapped in there forever and you're not. But I think it sometimes is good to signal to the reader like, okay, we're no longer in POV. And so I've, in my own scripts, I've done like end POV or something like that. It's a separate slug line. It's lengthy. Yeah. Then I think it's reasonable to say we begin this person's POV and then there's multiple paragraphs of what they're saying, what they're saying, and then it says end POV if it's like a section. Yeah.
If it's just one moment, I think the next paragraph, so John's POV, Brenda enters the room. On Brenda. You can do that. Yeah, totally. Walking into the restaurant. It's also important, good to remember, like the intermediary slug line is really useful, sort of breaking up stuff on the page and giving you a sense of how stuff flows. But if you're just like popping into POV for one shot or something, you can put POV like as part of the paragraph. Always. I don't think I ever break it off on its own because it just...
It feels so technical. I want people to just like be in the POV rather than being in now. POV approaching and then you see the POV. I just want them in it.
So you can be informal about that completely. So a case where intermediate slug lines can be really helpful is like, let's say you have a scene that's happening and then you have characters that are breaking off and sort of like they're having their own little side conversation. That's a situation where like it kind of feels like it's a scene within a scene and that's useful for that. And in those situations, it'll probably make sense that you're just sticking with those characters and then you have to sort of get us back over to the other shot. Sometimes I just use capital letters to do the same job. So I might say,
off in one corner all in caps then dash and then spacebar dash spacebar stuff happens and off in one corner will tell me the story yeah totally all right let's do our one cool things all right my one cool thing is a good blog post article by Maggie Appleton called Growing a Human the first 30 weeks which is just
Talking about sort of what she learned during her first pregnancy here. And so she's about to have a baby. I'll quote, I'll read from it. Yeah.
And what I like about the post as it goes on longer is that it's recognizing like, oh yeah, I'm an animal who's doing this thing. And like, it's not kind of even in my control. It's just like, this is just a thing that's happening. I'm just a passenger to it.
And also that sense of so many people will tell you there's one natural right way to do a thing. And she brings up the example of like that organic banana you're picking. Like bananas exist only because we made them. Of course. The banana in the wild is not a thing at all. No. And so just to recognize that you're living in this messy place of like, yes, it's fully human and natural, but it's also a cultural system that we're in. And just...
You got to float in that. No genetically modified organisms in this. It's all genetically modified. It's called mixing the strains. What are they talking about? No genetically modified stuff in this tangelo. Okay. So what's fascinating about what Maggie says is because...
Her body is designed to do an extraordinarily complicated thing. She is now in the mix of that, discovering how much that is part of who she is and how weirdly not in conscious control we are of it. Over on the other side of the aisle, simpler, dumber people, like say a lot of men, will be like horny, angry, violent, hungry.
where we've always been in touch with that. We just called it horny because of the different way it works. And our culture, boys will be boys, like indulges this notion of they're not really in control of all these things.
We are. But there are aspects of it that are underpinned by subconscious things that way beneath this level. And it is interesting how a complicated person doing a very complicated process can suddenly discover this. We have a new baby in our life and it's been so great to be able to sort of have a baby around and to be babysitting and just to have this small human. And it was just...
just watching my daughter like hold a baby and feed a baby and she's like, oh my God, it all kicked in. Oh no. She really felt all this. Oh my God. Yeah. Are you going to be a grandpa? No, not anytime soon. But that sense of like, oh yeah, it's like a primal physical thing that happens. Yes. That's why we keep making more people. Yeah. It is primal and people will laugh about it, but it's real. Absolutely. And it's not for everybody. There are plenty of women that
pick up a baby and go, get this baby away from me. Perfectly fine. But the biological clock syndrome and all that stuff, it's just science. It's just hormones. This is me talking on my ass. But I do wonder if some of the population decline and sort of people's, young people's decision, like I don't want to have kids or I don't know, it's like maybe because they haven't been around baby, they just don't have kicked in because they never sort of got
got to do that because there are fewer babies there are going to be fewer babies that may be true being around babies makes you like babies although being around babies casually makes you like babies that's why grandparents are always like give me maybe a grandparent so that I can show up for an hour and just not and be like yeah the best oh it's crying now bye yeah I'm sort of getting like the grandparent sort of ability to hang out with the kids you and I have parented our own babies yes
But, you know. Still, I'd recommend it. Yes, because the ride of a lifetime. The ride of a lifetime. There ain't nothing like it. Nope. You want to talk about like when you watch horror movies to feel scared? I'm kidding. Yes, absolutely. Now you're scared. Now you know what fear is. Yeah. Well, my one cool thing this week is the 2024 Rules of D&D in a different aspect, I finally got to play. Fantastic. So I'm in another campaign where I play.
It's the first campaign I played where it was D&D 2024 rules from the start. It works great. That's great. It works great. What are some surprises, the things you didn't anticipate? Because we talked through some of the changes. Sure. Character creation is a little bit tricky if you are well-versed in the old method because the old method honestly was a bit simpler than
and a bit stupider when it came to your abilities because it was all tied to, are you a dwarf? Are you a gnome? Are you a human? You get plus two strength, you get plus one wisdom, that's it, boop, the end. And now...
It's not tied to that at all. It's tied to backgrounds. And so each background gives you a chance to do at one point to three different things or two to one, one to another. But the three different things are different for each background. And it's never, they're very clever. It's never the three that would work together in the most min-max way. So it's a little complicated in the beginning to do some math. Mm-hmm.
But once you get through that, and of course it's very customizable, the flow of the play has been greatly improved, and every single class gets some fun choices to make. For instance, I'm not a rogue, but another character is, and rogues are notoriously boring to play. Because even for arcane tricksters, mostly they hide, jump out, shoot or stab, go back into the shadows. And...
If they get sneak attack, you roll a bunch of dice. Whoop-dee-doo. Well, one of the things they've done is, for at least this version of the rogue, you can trade some of those. If you get sneak attack, you can pull some of those dice out
and use them to do other things. Great. And so you're always facing those interesting choices as you're playing. A lot of options, so many options, but they don't seem cumbersome. Great. It's really, it's just smooth. Yeah. And it's fun. I have not run into one thing yet where I was like, even the things that sort of nerf stuff a little bit, like Divine Smite's a little nerfed now, but who cares? It's better, honestly. It makes more sense. Yeah.
It's just... Let's put it this way. Having done it, I wouldn't want to not do it. Yeah, so we're finishing up a campaign right now, which is using old rules, but the next campaign we're already planning to use 2024. I will encourage everybody to dive in, and it's not...
honestly, you don't have to read the whole damn book. You just learn your one thing. D&D Beyond is particularly good at teaching you by helping you build your character. Roll 20 doesn't teach you a damn thing when you build your character. It's a mess. So you would recommend people, even if they're going to play in Roll 20, build your character out in D&D Beyond and then just transfer it over. Yes, because D&D Beyond...
is laid out so much better and every step of the way you can click on things and it will tell you this is what this means, this is what this means, this is what this means and you can go back easily and rejigger it easily. It's so much simpler. One of my previous one cool things was this book on sort of role-playing game history and basically starting with D&D like going up all the way through you know sort of where we're at now but like all these games I'd never heard of and so I've loved just like buying some of these games that I'm sure we're never going to play but is it watching the evolution of the systems and how things fit together and sort of what
this game took from this game and this... It's interesting to see a whole form evolve. And it really has. It's just... Hats off to those guys. They did a great job. One of the games I was reading about was Fiasco, if you remember. Oh, yeah, sure. The Kelly Marcel drunk episode. That's right. Fiasco. Poor John. I don't even remember what happened. I just remember that we did terrible things to you. Yeah, absolutely. It was a Coen Brothers movie. It was a Coen Brothers movie and you were like Brad Pitt in it. Yeah. Yeah.
That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cilelli. Outro this week is by Guy Fee. If you've got an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find them all at Cotton Bureau. Oh, drinkware. You can find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. And thank you to all our premium subscribers. Yes, thank you. You make it possible for us to do this every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on gadgets that tell us what our bodies are doing. Yes, wearables. Wearables. Craig, thanks for a fun episode. Thank you, John. Thanks, Drew.