680 - Writing Action Set Pieces
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Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There's some swearing in this episode. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You're listening to episode 680 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you write action set pieces that work both on the screen and on the page? We'll talk with a writer who has made that her calling card.

Then it's a new round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take stories from the news or history and squeeze the cinematic juice out of them. To help us do all this, let's welcome back the screenwriter behind Bumblebee, Birds of Prey, and The Flash, Christina Hodson. Hello. Christina Hodson, we're so happy to have you back. I'm very happy to be back. I cannot believe you're on 680. It's so many episodes. So many. Yeah, but as we're doing the Script Notes book now, we're in sort of the last minutes on Script Notes book, it feels like 680 episodes. There's just a lot there. It's

It's been a lot of sifting through stuff. And the culling phase now where it's like, we've had these amazing guests on. It's like, oh, we want to do a little breakout chapter with them. It's like, oh, no, there's no room. There's no room for these people. Ryan Reynolds, gone. He's gone. Ryan, if you're listening to this, sorry. You were terrific. You're wonderful. Twice. They can't use the me, Ryan.

Christina? No. We want to bring you in here right now just to let you know that you're such a valuable part of this community, and yet you don't have your own chapter. Fuck. Well, you can swear if you want to on the show. I forgot to apologize in advance. I will be swearing. All right. We are going to have some swearing. We're going to have some good crafty things. We're going to talk about story. But in our bonus segment for pre-members, I want to talk about the cold email when you have to just email a person you've never met before and

pitch your case and do that because it's a thing I find myself having to do a lot. And some people are terrified of it. I find it delightful. You do it all the time. Who are you sending cold emails to? People. I have questions about sort of what they're doing. So sometimes on a professional level, sometimes for like the apps we're working on. I'm actually kind of shameless. And I have some techniques, which I think other people who are scared to send those emails could probably benefit from. Is it possible that your technique is being John August? Well, that is a part of it. And just

And just as a little amuse-bouche for the real advice here, is that people are so much better emailing on behalf of somebody else than for themselves. So pretend you're somebody else. So pretend you're doing it for somebody else. Yeah, I used to make phone calls and pretend I was an assistant for myself. Yeah. Well, you've got that British accent, though. It still helps. It does it. We have a little bit of follow-up. Highland Pro shipped. We're so grateful to everyone who's been playing with it and installing it.

You, Christina, were actually really helpful in the launch of Highland 2. Do you remember that? I do remember that. Never in the world did I think I could possibly be helpful in anything to do with software. But you were because one of the features in Highland 2, which you helped to sort of work out, was gender analysis. And so we were the first app that had a thing where you could just look at your script and say, what were the male and female ratios in the script in terms of dialogue and stuff? So we put that in there first. All the other apps copied it, which is great. So they could all sort of see what that was like.

Do you find yourself using those tools now? I have not used them in a little while, but I think it definitely made me more mindful of it in general. So I think now I don't start writing a character without thinking a bit more carefully. It really is sometimes in the conception phase where you're thinking of like, wait, if I do it this way, there's going to be so few female characters or they're not going to have any chance to actually talk with each other. Totally. Yeah, because this all came out of the realization that there was like a study that you helped out on in terms of

You're nodding like, maybe I opt out on it? Honestly, I can't remember anything. Oh, it was pre-pandemic. It's all a blur. It was Me Too. And Me Too got wiped out by COVID. Me Too, like hashtag Me Too, not like Me Too, Me Also. Now I feel like my memory of hashtag Me Too got completely wiped out by hashtag COVID. Absolutely. Everything's been memory holed, so...

It's so scary. One of the things I find so helpful sometimes is just I will like Google myself and find like, oh, did I talk about this thing? Because there was like a New York Times article we were both in. When I Google myself now, I find you. Absolutely. There's a lovely shot of the two of us at your house.

pretending to read notes from my notebook. Yes. I find it endlessly amusing. All journalism is 100% accurately portraying what really happened in a moment. One of the things I've noticed, the difference between launching an app versus launching a series or a movie is that

There's some things that are similar. Obviously, you get reviews, you get articles written about you, which is great. You get features. I've got a feature on the App Store for Highland Pro and ratings, star ratings. But with a movie or a feature, you're just sort of done at a certain point. It's just like, oh, it's out there and it's finished and it's this completion versus something like an app. We're constantly putting out updates and there's bug fixes and Drew gets emails and we're all responding to stuff.

And you have a chance to fix things, which is great. This is not frozen in amber, but there's also a responsibility to sort of keep doing it. Also, it hangs over you forever. Yeah, it does hang over you for a while. So anyway, thank you to everyone who has left a review. That is super, super helpful and left us a star rating. If you haven't tried it, Highland yet. It is available on the App Store for Mac, for iPad, and for iPhone. It's a 30-day free trial, so give it a shot.

Next up in follow-up, director's chairs. And so we were talking to this on a recent episode about sort of the scourge of director's chairs. We got some really good feedback and follow-up. Drew, help us out. So Sarah writes, last summer, I was six months pregnant as the onset producer. You think your butt hurts? I was dying. Finally, I gave in and bought my own chair, which was an outdoor rocking chair I bought at a sporting goods store. It's much lower to the ground, so it requires us to stick down the monitors. I had to buy a new chair,

I had to swallow my pride a little as I was now a pregnant lady in a rocking chair on set, but I was so much less miserable. Highly recommended. So, Christina, what's been your experience of directors' chairs and chairs on sets?

Very bad. I'm clumsy and I like to sit cross-legged, so I always do something wrong. I also always put bags where I shouldn't and then hide things in the pocket and make them heavy and then they tip and I'm a disaster. But director's chairs are terrible. They are terrible. There's got to be a better solution. Well, there are better solutions. And so Ryan wrote in and what did she say? I was a producer on The Walking Dead and everyone had back problems after using the traditional director chairs at Video Village for the last 10 years of our show.

Eventually, our prop master found a bamboo director's chair, and this made a huge difference for the execs.

The props team had rolling carts that the chairs would be hung up on and transported to the next set or village move. The train was brutal, and these chairs are a bit heavier, but to save a few people who kept us employed safe from back surgery, the team was happy to help out. She included a link, which we'll put in the show notes. That's great. So it's nice to see that there are solutions out there, and it's just a matter of people stepping up and saying, hey, this is important for me and for everybody else around you to do this better. The common threads we sort of see, which Sarah's first email talked

talked about is that you got to be lower to the ground like part of the problem is that you know if you don't can't put your feet on the ground while you're in the chair you're going to have more problems the other problem is the seat and the seat the little sling seats you would think you'd be comfortable but they're the worst it just pinches you in a really bad way we won't probably fix this problem on this podcast we could burn them all that's a thing we could do i mean just as a suggestion guys yeah just this is why you invite me back great ideas great

Let's continue on with mammograms. This is from 679. We were talking about mammograms. Yeah, so Stephanie B. writes, I'm writing in response to 679 where the terrific Liz Hanna's one cool thing is to get a mammogram. And she pointed out that insurance doesn't always cover mammograms if the patient is under a certain age.

So even after age 40, my health insurance only covers mammograms every other year. So I paid out of pocket for my own mammograms on the off years. But there's a little secret hospitals don't advertise. They will almost always discount an uninsured procedure like mammograms. My hospital in Atlanta gives me an 80% discount for the mammograms if I pay out of pocket. Always ask and call around to check different hospitals because this is one time when it doesn't matter if a hospital is out of network since insurance isn't covering it anyway.

This seems like great advice.

And I was like, I'm not following mammogram advice super closely. I have a daughter who will eventually need mammograms. But I will say that the women in my life who've had breast cancer, it's always been a situation of like, oh...

I should have gotten a mammogram earlier, but because of insurance, because of whatever, I didn't do it. And so if you have any suspicions, you have any reasons to think... Even if it's not an insurance thing, people just put them off. They do. Because it feels like you just did it because a year now goes in like a week. So you still got to go. You still got to go. Same thing with colonoscopies. When you reach the age of getting colonoscopies, you just do it and it helps.

Finally, a bit of follow-up. Vertigo, which is the game that I've been making with Corey Martin. We had a demo out that people loved, and a lot of people were writing in saying, like, hey, I played through the first 50 legs that came for free in the demo, and I keep wanting to play it. Basically, I'm jonesing for more Vertigo, and I'm locked out. So what we've done is we've unlocked the first level for everybody so you can play it as many times as you want.

We added a bunch of new feathers to sort of get your points up higher. And we added keyboard support. So if you're playing on your laptop, it's actually like a really great, fast and different game. So if you want a little word game that has really cute fat birds in it,

Birdigo is on Steam right now. They're really cute little birds. I'm very excited to look it up. Now that I know it's yours, I didn't realize I saw it on the agenda and thought, but now I'm very excited to find out. Birdigo is like Scrabble or Boggle, but with cute little birds. Who doesn't like that? Yeah. You just play yourself and it's tremendously fun.

Let's get to our marquee topic here, Christina Hodson. I want to talk about writing action because you've become an action sort of go-to writer. I see that grimace, but it is true. That is probably top of your calling card is you write big action movies with set pieces in them. And

I love a set piece. I love a set piece that works really well. And so often you read bad set pieces in scripts. And let's just talk about sort of what doesn't work on set pieces in scripts and sort of the bad things we've read. Because I'm sure you've gotten sent stuff. You're just like, oh, no, no, no. It's so bad. There's so many different ways to make them bad. I feel like we should be positive, though, about what makes them good. Bad things are like when it's a whole block of text that you turn the page, no one speaks, and it just makes you go, oh, God. Yeah.

Because it's fine if no one speaks during an action set piece. Like oftentimes people can't speak during an action set piece, but you can still break up the page. The white space on the page is critical. Yeah, this podcast has been about white space on the page since episode one. It's just so crucial to like help the reader get their way down the page because if you give them a wall of text, they're going to skim. I know, it's really sad, isn't it? We can read books, put in screenplays. If you turn the page and you just see like wall of text on two sides, you're like, no, I won't. Nope.

if some bad action sequence is on the page, I just get lost. I have no idea, like, what am I actually supposed to be following? What is the point? What is the purpose? Like, what would I be seeing? Well, sometimes people feel like because they know they want the set piece to be two or three minutes long, they have to cover two or three pages, but they don't actually have anything to save two or three pages. Yeah.

So they just write stuff and then you read it and you get so bored and so lost. The big thing I find really frustrating is when the person clearly has zero sense of the geography of the space. And that's how I think you can tell. And this is where I'll turn it into a positive because I'm so positive today, John.

when you read a writer who has a good handle of the geography of the scene they're writing in, it can be in any genre. When we ran a writer's program, Lucky Chap and my company, and we were looking for writers who wanted to write in the action space. And often they didn't already have an action sample, and that was the whole point of why they wanted to do the program. But you can tell even in a drama...

when someone has a handle on the geography of a scene because they use whether or not someone is in the room, out of the room, coming in, walking in, sitting down, standing up, all of the spatial stuff basically that can add tension and storytelling and character stuff.

is there on the page, whatever the genre. And a really good writer and a really good action writer always has a sense of the geography of the space. Absolutely. So you sense that you are in that space with them. And we talk about we see and we hear as useful things that screenwriters might choose to use. But it's crucial that you as the screenwriter are placing the reader in the seat, in the theater, experiencing this thing around them and so they're simultaneously within the space of the scene and what it's going to feel like on that screen. And

And doing both things at the same time, it's really tough. And I think people tend to give short shrift to action writing because they feel like, oh, well, it's storyboarded and there's a stunt coordinator and the director and all that stuff. All true, but...

but there has to be a plan for it on the page. Yes, there's also, I was going to say this is a really important thing where there's a big difference to me between a production draft, like a shooting draft, and your first draft. Like the draft that's going to go out that you're trying to sell a spec with is written completely differently to the one that they're going to shoot on the final day. Like,

The first pass of The Flash, by the way, first 12 drafts of The Flash, the third act is very, very short because it wasn't intended to go on and on and it was like quite short and simple and contained and whatever. By the time we got to the end, there's 30 extra pages because you've got, like you say, HODs who want to do this and actors who want to do that and different...

set pieces and things that need to be all laid out really cleanly on the page. You can't be sexy and succinct in the production draft because you've got hundreds of people whose jobs are dependent on understanding exactly what it is that the director wants to put on screen. Yeah, so I wanted to both agree with you and also encourage our listeners not to take that too far. So the idea that like a shooting draft is completely different than a script you sell is

For a lot of things, it's not. Or you shouldn't at least discount the work that you're doing in your production, in your own script. I think the first one is way more important because that's the one that sells it. Exactly. That's the one that gets you the job, gets you the next draft, sells you the project. Absolutely. To me, that's a thousand times more important. I hate my production drafts. I sometimes like my first draft. Well, sometimes the production draft, it's,

Because you've had to add all these little scenes to do these different things. Costumes are asking you to like state exactly what weapons everyone's holding and what exactly everyone's wearing and when the jackets come on and often stuff that you don't normally care about. Really inelegant stuff. Really inelegant stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So what we're mostly talking about here, like this is the writing that you're doing to let everyone see like this is the movie. You're selling the movie on the page. And so that means...

you have to really clearly communicate what we're seeing, what we're hearing, what we're feeling. I was about to say, feeling for me is the main thing. Like, you can change so many things about the way the action plays out and the specifics of the space, but the feeling should stay vaguely the same. Like, you should know what you want it to feel like, what the intensity is like, the ebbs and the, you know, lulls. Absolutely. And the vibe. And like, is this a cool, crisp, like everything is like sort of precise or is it just chaos? And like, that's the thing that you're going to be able to communicate on the page.

I think most crucially is, yes, you as the writer and storyteller are welcoming us to this world,

But if we don't have characters and the character's experience within those moments, it's pointless. And so I'm thinking back to The Flash and some of the moments you have, which I love The Flash, by the way. I think I've talked about this on the podcast. All the scandal around The Flash and Ezra and everything else. It's a really good movie and Ezra Miller is good in it too. And so as challenging as everything was around that, it was so specific to that character's experience of those moments is what makes it land. I also think just generally people...

Not even just beginning writers. I think a lot of writers sometimes think like put character on hold and just do focus on the action. To me, like you're going to have a dead set piece if you're only thinking about the action. You have to be telling a character story through the action. You can reveal so much about a person in the way that they fight or the way that they run or the way like, are they resourceful? Are they sloppy? Like all of those things and the way people work together, like...

To me, each of those action set pieces should have its own beginning, middle, and end that gives you a little story arc and a character arc. Yeah. I pulled out three examples of some really good action writing and some really different action writing to sort of show the range of what this looks like and feels like. The first is from James Cameron's Aliens, which we've referenced endlessly on this podcast. Why not? Just keep referencing this. It's so, so good. So the sequence we're watching, it's scene 114, but it comes pretty late in the movie.

They are waiting for this ship to take them back up to the station. I'll read this aloud, but we'll put a link in the show notes too.

That's uppercase. Ripley shouts, Ripley shouts,

She grabs Newt and sprints for cover as a tumbling section of the ship's massive engine module slams into the APC and it explodes in twisted wreckage. A drop ship skips again like a stone engulfed in flames and crashes into the station. A tremendous fireball.

So it goes on, it gets to the Hudson's. We're in some real pretty shit here. I want to ask you a question. Yeah. How do you feel about caps in action? Well, let's talk about caps. And so here's what's uppercased in this section. And crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball, that's uppercase. Roars full on, veers wildly. To me, these are things that are sort of catching my eye and they're also...

They tend to underline sounds that are happening here. How are you feeling about the uppercase? Generally sound I do in caps. Yeah. Generally. In action, it gets so tricky because there's so many loud moments. And there's so many like big moments and like crashes. And if you do every like crash and bang and whatever, capital can get too much. I have had one hilarious experience on a studio job with an old school bassist.

terrible producer person who is no longer with us so I can shit all over him he was a mean mean man he once told me that a set piece I'd written he was just like this is this is dead this is nothing this is terrible you gotta rewrite this completely like there should be real punch in it now this was I was not this much of an asshole I only did this because this was like 17 free drafts and it was early on in my career

I just added caps. I didn't change anything else. Oh, I also underlined the scene headings. Mm-hmm.

I resubmitted it and he was like, this is incredible. This is what I'm talking about. This has real pizzazz. I was like, wow, I guess he just needed capital letters. That's what he needed. He needed something to hang. Underlining in capital letters. I just think there's too much sometimes. I find it like when it's overused. This to me is nice. This is really nice. And so these paragraphs are longer than I would normally use myself. This is like six or seven lines, some of these paragraphs.

And yet I read every word of it. I was never tempted to skim because it was catching my attention, holding my attention. Sentence fragments are there. Clips of rock formation. Did you need a subject there? Great. You have parallel structures because basically you have the implied subject is continuing from sentence to sentence. It's just really good writing. Nice short sentences. Yeah, love it.

Let's compare this to Tony Gilroy, who wrote Bourne Identity and many other things, including the new Andor. I'll read this, but you actually do need to kind of see this because what Tony is doing is the end of every sentence, basically. It's a dash, dash. Not even end of sentence after like he's interrupting himself constantly. Absolutely. And so it's basically, it shows just constant movement. You feel like what the tension is. Bourne, the light bulb, he's tossing it across the room, over her head, into that frosted window, and she ducks down as it shatters. And.

Everything starts happening at once. Silenced automatic weapons fire, raking into the apartment and... The frosted window peppered with holes and... Maria on the floor as the window shatters above her and... Castle, he's in the air shaft, hanging from an abseil rope, but off guard, firing blind, strafing the apartment and... Bourne kicking that chair across the room and... Castle reacting, instinct, moving target and...

The chair just strafed to shit and Bourne rolling away and Castle, he's coming in. The last pieces of window frame crashing away as he swings into the apartment and Marie right below him. Shit raining down as he flies and Bourne throwing the knife and Castle turning back too late. The knife catching him in the neck and

It just keeps going. And I think people need to read that because it sounds crazy when you read it. It does sound just absurd. But it's fucking cool on the page. Yeah, absolutely. Because you see exactly what it is. The thing that he does here, which I like very much and which I think is a little bit also a thing that we should talk about, which is breaking the rules. Yeah. Which is he's kind of using...

the names of the characters to create shots which are almost like cut-betweens. Yes, totally. You can't realistically start... And this is easier because you're just in one room, one space with characters. Sometimes you're doing an action set piece where you're moving between characters who are not...

They're not really in the room together. They're in the same, call it like industrial plant, but they're in different spaces. If you had to do a new slug line for every time, it would just be an impossible read. I have had a line producer once who made me insert those later and it was horrific for the read. No, impossible. But when you're doing the first draft, like forget the rules, like find your style and like you can basically...

basically break the rules and do it however you like as long as you're consistent with yourself. It's really annoying when people switch up. So I've seen people who do like in capital letters on John August colon and then do the next line and do whatever. Here he's just doing the name of the character in capitals and it's one smooth sentence. Like whatever you're going to do, make it your style but then stick to it throughout. Otherwise it gets crazy making. If you do have people in different spaces but you're constantly kind of between the two of them, what I'll tend to do is

establish a scene header for one, establish a scene header for the next one, and then say intercut. And then it's really clear that I'm doing uppercase or whatever for the person when I'm back in their shot or in their space, because otherwise you're just, it's all scene headers and it's exhausting for us. Here what I like so much about what Tony's doing is it's almost you're seeing shot by shot. Like each line is basically just a shot and it's just, it's great. Oh, I had one that I thought of last night when I was thinking about this.

One of my favorite ones. I mean, this is so... We're like, just, you know, Tony Gilroy, David Koepp. David Koepp's Jurassic Park script, the one that he's got on his website, is so good. But the sequence that is the best, where they're outside the T-Rex paddock when the power goes down, he does this really well, where he's moving between the two cars, different spaces...

very fluently and it just ups the attention massively because every time you move away from one character you're wondering what's happening to the other one and it's fantastic use of exactly this yeah

Let's wrap this up with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The version I could find for this isn't properly formatted, kind of, so there should be actually a little extra returns and spaces in there. But I liked a lot of what they were doing here. So, exterior lab day. Jacobs, a security guard, and the two officers are huddled behind a squad car. Other employees are hiding and watching from the safety of the parking lot. They suddenly realize that everything has gone silent.

A moment later, lab doors fly open. Officer 1 says, here they come. A massive primate's barrel towards them. Officer 2, there's more of them. Jacobs, those are my chimps.

They duck as the apes run by. Some of them get right up and over the car, their crouch behind. Bam, bam, bam, bam, as the chimps hit and leapfrog over the squad car and their heads. The apes stampede across the parking lot, where several use Jacob's black Jaguar to vault over the fence. The last is Buck, whose weight crushes the car. And then they're gone, every last one of them. Quiet now, except for car alarms.

Nice. Nice. Really smart writing here. I loved how much I could hear it and feel it. I loved the way, like, crushing the car. There was an anticipation. It felt just right. Yeah, and you feel the chaos before it goes quiet, which is lovely. Yeah. And it gives you a nice out on the scene. People sometimes, like, just forget about the end. The end's really important. Yeah, and it's really important. Absolutely. And so I always think about action sequences as being like, they're the songs in a musical. And so it's,

Instead of breaking into a song and dance, you're breaking into this action sequence. And those are going to have beginnings and middles and ends. They're going to have, you know, verses and choruses. It's going to feel like a thing. And so often, it's just like action is just happening and then it's over and you don't know. Nothing's really been achieved. You feel nothing. Yeah. Empty action is just... Such a bummer. It's a huge bummer. It's a waste. Yeah, it is. Talk to us about Flash or Bumblebee or Birds of Prey.

writing on the page that was surprisingly difficult, that was a real challenge to convey. You might have had a vision in your mind, but it was actually hard to get those words down.

I mean, they're all difficult, but it's one of the bits I love the most. It's the bit of our job that feels most like playing. It is. Like, I literally will get the toys and play with them. Like, for Transformers, I made them send me bumblebees. Which, by the way, was really hard to get. You'd think that would be really easy working with Hasbro, trying to get a hold of bumblebees. No. No, it was not easy.

But yes, I wanted to do the toys because for me, there were things like the way they transform and using action through the way they're transforming. That is incredibly hard to write because it's nebulous. And it's actually interesting, like with the alien, that's an interesting example because when you're writing about stuff that doesn't exist, you have to pick a lane on like how much you're going to describe stuff because you can't go into crazy detail and describe every new nebulizer and whatever. And you just can't because it gets so boring on the page.

But you also need to create a sense that this is otherworldly and it is different. So it's a really tricky balance. So talk to us about then, on the page, how are you talking about transforming? Are you describing those middle states? Are you describing how a limb, as a limb is shifting from one thing to another? I have two things that inspired me. One is that I wanted the kids in the audience to feel the way I felt when I was a kid and I was playing with transformers, which was sometimes it's really fucking tricky and like you're trying to bend that.

arm back into a bloody door and you can't. And I wanted to do that for Bumblebee. Like he's a broken robot. I wanted to sometimes feel that. So mostly I would kind of go by the way it felt for the characters doing it. And then I

I also went with the way it was for Charlie, Hayley Steinfeld's character. Yeah. Is what did it feel like around her? So often that was more about like scale and sound rather than specifics of names of pieces and things. It was just about like, what would it be like if your sweet little Volkswagen Beetle just stood up and towered over you? Yeah. So yeah.

Playing with sounds, feelings, scale, things like that. Yeah. Scale is a thing that's often missing in action set pieces too. And on a page, you're just not feeling like, okay, well, you have a semi truck and you have a bicycle. Like that's just, it's that. Missing or just like that wildly wrong. Yeah. A number of times I've seen people like dive off a thing 300 feet and you're like, they would be dead. That's not a thing. You can't do that.

People often get scale wrong and like distances away from each other. Like I really recommend to people that they like look online or go out into the world and measure things and feel what it's like because otherwise it just feels silly. And as soon as people start doing that, as soon as you don't feel that you can trust the writer that they know what they're talking about, you kind of check out a little bit because you're like, this is just nonsense.

You mentioned Lucky Chap. And I remember having a lunch with you. You were talking through this program you were working with Lucky Chap to help writers who were not traditionally action writers sort of get some experience there. What were you teaching them? What were the common things you saw that you needed to sort of get people comfortable writing? I mean, honestly, it was more about teaching them how to get into the space rather than doing the actual writing. They were great.

There were a whole mixture of levels. There was one writer who wasn't even in the guild yet. And then there were many who were kind of experienced in TV, but had never been in features. And like I say, when we were reading submissions for those, we were often reading a drama as a sample for someone who wanted to be an action writer. And you could kind of get the sense of what they could, what we were really kind of quote unquote teaching. I shouldn't be allowed to teach anyone anything. But what we were really focusing on was how like we would help them outline the movie. So they came in with sometimes a title, sometimes an idea, sometimes just like a character dynamic.

And then we spent four weeks all day, every day in a room, breaking those movies down, outlining them so that when they were pitching them, they actually had a whole movie rather than just kind of an idea. And then we had wonderful people come in and talk to them about...

One of the things actually is one of the things we should talk about here, which is Chad Stahelski came in and talked to them about writing action and creating action set pieces. Chad Stahelski did the John Wick movies. If you're interested in this topic, go look up any of his stuff online. He talks about this stuff incredibly eloquently because he comes at it from a place of real passion and love. And he talks about, you know, Buster Keaton and humor and storytelling all the way through action. It's not just like pull out your guns and go bang, bang, because that's going to be boring.

We had Ryan Reynolds on the podcast talking about Deadpool and sort of like, you know, really thinking about that as a physical comedy movie and really making sure the set pieces reflected the specificity of sort of who that character was and what they were trying to do and why those set pieces were not reasonable. And they're so playful and fun and funny all the way through. Absolutely. And getting back to what you were doing with Lucky Chap, what's so important about the way you're approaching it is that

It's not like an action sequence is something you drop into another movie. You have to build a movie that can support an action sequence. You have to build the action sequence that actually tells the story. And they have to go hand in hand. Yeah, absolutely. Otherwise, you just end up with a piece that feels wonky and weird. Yeah. Which happens a lot. It does happen a lot. Wait, you said one thing, though, which I think we should talk about. Please. Specificity. Yeah. Because this is a real Goldilocks one, and I'm sure you have found this. Yeah.

Either people are way too specific and they're using all these terms that you don't know for like martial arts that you wish you knew but you don't. Or they're like not specific enough. It's just like uppercut, uppercut.

cut, up a cut. And that's a bummer too. And you don't want to, listen, we all know there are some writers who write, this will be the coolest car chase you've ever seen. But don't do that. Never do that. Just don't do that. I know people have gotten away with it, but don't do it. Well, and when you see that in a script, you feel like they're embarrassed. They're embarrassed by this. They recognize it's going to be hard to do. And so they just don't want to actually do it. Or they're just really cocky.

Yeah. Anyway, but I do think it's a mix with the specificity. And for me, I kind of look at it as kind of zooming in and out as well, particularly in things like battle sequences. I've had to write a few big scale battle sequences where you've got hundreds of people and then

key characters that you have to follow for me often that is about picking the moments you want to highlight i'm not saying never use specific martial arts terms if it's relevant because for example it's a character who's just learned a thing that they didn't know then if you're writing neo yeah sure it's fucking cool to drop in a term that it doesn't matter that the reader doesn't know exactly what that kick looks like because the fact that they don't know what it looks like helps inform the way the character is experiencing it too

But then also have moments where you zoom out, particularly if it's a big, long battle sequence or something. Go from a tiny detail of swords clashing between two characters you know, and then zoom back out to what it feels like to be in it.

you know, on that battlefield. The other example that I love of this that I read often when I was writing, I wrote a swords and sandals thing at some point. David Benioff, of course, is masterful. David Benioff's Troy script, that film is fun. It's not one that anyone ever talks about. The battle sequences in that are incredible. And then there's a really good one-on-one fight scene where he does another thing of like breaking the rules, quote unquote, where he does, it's the Orlando Bloom plays Paris when Paris fights, um,

Menelaus in that one-on-one in front of everyone he does a very cool thing where he goes into Paris' POV and he switches to second person so it's all you're in there sweating like you can feel your heartbeat oh great it's really fun and it's really evocative alright well we'll find that script and put a link to the show notes I've never read it it's cool it's very cool awesome

let us move on to our next topic, which is how would this be a movie? So for folks who are new to the podcast or new to this segment, every once in a while, we'll put out a call to our listeners and say, hey, tell us stories from history or from the news that you're curious about, like how we might make these into movies. And so the examples that we're talking through today, some were things that I just happened to stumble across and bookmarked. Other stories come from our listeners who sent them in. All right, our first one is A Man of Parts and Learning.

I ran in the London Review of Books, turned by Farah Dapoywala, and it tells the story of Francis Williams and sort of the backstory, but mostly centers around this painting, which was a real question of like, is this painting a portrait in a positive light or a negative light? Is it just super racist? Drew, can you help us out with a summary of what we know about this? Sure.

Sure. So in 1928, this unknown, strangely proportioned painting turns up from the 1700s. It's determined to be this portrait of a black Jamaican intellectual named Francis Williams, and that it was formerly owned by a white writer named Edward Long, who wrote the book History of Jamaica in 1774. Let me stop you there because this point in the article, you actually see what the painting is, which is included here. And so if you look at it, it's like it is...

a man who's dressed in a formal attire, a blue coat, gold trim, white waistcoat, knee length, breeches, and he's impossibly skinny legs. He's got this powdered white wig. His hands are tiny when he's resting on this open book. His face feels out of proportion to everything else. And you're like... Is it very good? Is it very good? And it reminded me a bit of... There was that Spanish...

the restoration of like Ekehomo, which is like with like the Jesus face and they painted it. It's not that bad, but it's not good. Yes, although I will say, so I looked at it and I was like, oh, why are we going to talk about this just not very good painting? By the end of it, I fucking love the painting. Yeah, isn't it great? And so, but you cannot tell...

at the start, like, is this a mockery? Is it a satire? And so continue with what the description here is. Well, so Francis Williams was born enslaved, but he eventually gained his freedom. He was wealthy. He was Cambridge educated. And he was arguably the most famous black man in the world at the time. But Long's book is actually a racist hatchet job. And it's incredibly denigrating and dismissive of Williams and many white scientific racists, which is a term they used a lot in this. At the time, they attacked Williams' achievements in order to argue that slavery was necessary. Yeah.

At first, this portrait's value is dismissed, and then later it's rediscovered, and it's assumed by scholars that it is this caricature meant to mock Francis Williams. But after this author commissions a modern high-resolution scan, it's discovered that the painting is actually a rebuke of the racist assaults and character assassinations that Williams endured. The author researches every detail to discover it was likely commissioned by Francis Williams from this avant-garde American painter named William Williams.

I love this article. Yeah. I'm not going to lie. When I saw it on the internet, I was like, this is going to be dry and it's so long. And I was like, John, why are you making me read this? And I loved it. Yeah, I loved it. Twists and turns and reveals and everyone should go read it. That doesn't make it an easy movie. It doesn't make it an easy movie. And so let's talk about sort of ways into this movie because, okay, there is a biography of Francis Williams, which is certainly possible. He was the most famous

well-known black person in the world at a certain time, grew up enslaved, got out of slavery, but then ended up having slaves of his own. That's problematic. Problematic, yeah. Studied at Cambridge, clearly very, very smart. He was a member of scientific organizations. In the forensics of doing this painting, Daphoiwala actually discovers that, oh, that's Halley's Comet in the background. He actually literally had proven when it

how his comic was coming back. So clearly a brilliant man. So you could do the straight biopic without looking at the painting, but I don't think you would. I think the painting is too interesting. No, I was thinking of like Compton. If you do the academic version where it's about him, there's like the theory of everything, but that's Hawking who everyone knows. There's a beautiful mind, but that's kind of really about something actually very different. I then thought about Belle written by Miss Ansage and Amarisante, which was also actually based on a painting. There was very little known about her story. It was really just a painting and then they created this fictional story.

None of those feel quite right for this one. Yeah. Did you find a way in? I'm not sure I found a way in. I've got two, just to be competitive. All right. So I have zero, you have two. My halfway in is I do think you're probably intercutting between the investigation of the painting and the real person and sort of how stuff reshapes around that.

I'm curious what your... Well, that was one of my two, John. Thank you for saying you had zero. That's one, and I was trying to find, and please, for the love of God, can one of your readers find the movie that is on the tip of my brain that I cannot find? There is a movie. It's not The Hours, but it's not totally similar to The Hours, where it is playing with...

someone in the present investigating something in the past. It's a little bit possession, but I haven't seen possession, so I know it's not possession, the ASPYAT one. But it's doing that intertextual thing where someone is discovering and learning something in a...

old thing and then you're seeing that thing play out at the same time. I do think you could do that. I think the reason that we both want to do that is just that it's so fascinating what this very, very deeply passionate, nerdy person did. Who doesn't love that? Someone going deep diving on this. The details and the twists and turns and how exciting it is when they reveal this tiny little detail that you didn't notice before. But I think it's too nerdy to be a movie. So then the way in that I actually got excited about was

The person that painted it, William Williams, super fucking interesting. The first known paintings of this person, one was a celebrated Native American, one was an outspoken abolitionist, and then the third, according to this, is this guy, is Francis Williams. And if you look at the other paintings, they're all weird in the same way. Oh, and that's why I came to love it. Like, when you see, like, there's details, like the wrinkled stockings. Like, how...

cool and weird as that little detail. I assume that he was just like a bad painter who just didn't see it. He's not. He's actually not. He's not. He's awesome. It's the same way that like, you know, Tim Burton draws really exaggerated people. He draws exaggerated things. And there is something I think potentially really interesting about the relationship between, so the idea is that Francis Williams at the end of his life, he's wealthy. Like they all said he was by then nothing. He's wealthy and successful. He is, he does own some slaves and I'd like to gloss over that. But

he's doing really well and he chooses to commission this. He's the one who chooses what goes in the painting. Yeah. And there is something really powerful about the idea of an older man, an older black man, and this young white artist. And this man is trying to tell the story of his life through the white man's paintbrush because that's the only way he can get his story to actually be listened to because no one will fucking listen. And he's got this idiot, Ed Long, who's written this horrific book that just makes him sound like nothing and has basically erased him from history. And he's kind of

choosing to put himself in history. And there is something potentially really beautiful about that friendship between them that could be, obviously it's not, um, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. That becomes a romantic relationship. Lindsay Duran, I've went to one of her amazing talks at Austin Film Festival and at the end of it, she was talking about King's Speech and how they tested that movie and it didn't test that great. And then all they did was add the title card at the end that talks about the lasting friendship between the king and his, um,

consultant person and that friendship just that title card just saying they were friends until they died just completely transformed the schools and it makes sense and like this is what I was missing from the stories I want a friendship or a relationship story or of it so that to me felt like the most obvious place to put it let's sell it we're selling it we're setting up tomorrow taking it out tomorrow and we'll sell it embarrassed escaped me like

There's no relationship in here and you need to establish those relationships because it cannot be between the person investigating him and Williams himself. You could, but it's such a struggle. And it's Julia and Julia and they're separated by time and place.

I do feel like some equivalent of the journalist of Adab Hoywala feels important because there are so many cool things he discovers along the way. Like, he discovers that, like, oh, that book on the shelf is actually this book, and this book could have only gotten there by... I know, but aren't we just excited about that because we're nerds? Like, in a movie, is that as exciting as we think it would be? Or would it be kind of cool to see it from the perspective of Francis having William Easter egg it in the thing? Mm-hmm. Because...

Like, I'm so with you. I loved reading it. Yeah. But is it a cinematic idea? I don't know that it's cinematically exciting being like, oh, look, this book was published in this year. So it couldn't possibly have been 1726. It must have been 1762. Like, we're excited, but we're losing. Yeah.

We are losers, but this is potentially, I think it's a potentially good story. Yeah. Really difficult to break. I mean, I think just the outlining of this is really tough on how you're moving back and forth between the timelines and how you're telling stuff. But I think it's also really cool. Everyone should read it. Everyone should read it. Second story, when a deadly winter storm trapped a luxury passenger train near the Donner Pass for three days. Yeah.

So the article we're reading is by Robert Clara for Smithsonian Magazine. It's a true-life event that happened. Drew, talk us through what the reality was. So in January 1952, a severe blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada and traps this luxury passenger train in the city of San Francisco near the Donner Pass. The train, en route from Chicago to San Francisco, becomes immobilized by massive snowdrifts, stranding 226 passengers and crew members for three days.

During this period, they endured freezing temperatures, dwindling food supplies, and the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rescue efforts were hampered by the harsh conditions, but eventually all individuals are safely evacuated.

Christina, so we've had many train movies. So we have Snowpiercer, we have Murder on the Oregon Express, which actually features a train that gets stuck in snow as a plot point. This was a real life historical incident. Some people died in the process of rescuing things, but no one on the train itself appears to have died. Is there a movie here in your estimation? Yeah.

I mean, I think it could work as a setting in the way that those movies used it as a setting. I think it could be a really fun setting for anything from a heist to a murder thing to whatever. Is there a version where it's really... I mean, it's not Society of the Snow. They don't eat each other. It's only three days. Like...

Like, they're a little thirsty and a little hungry. I'm not that excited about it. So I would want to either add a big genre element, like a thriller, heisty, murdery thing, potentially a romance. I mean, by coincidence, these are both train movies, but Brief Encounter and Before Sunrise came to mind, where you have like some intense love story that develops in three days. And then at the end of three days, they have to say goodbye to each other forever. Yeah.

Or maybe doing the one detail in the story that made me giggle and maybe think of Triangle of Sadness was that there was some dedicated staff who remained on latrine patrol and they would take like buckets of snow and deal with all the piss and shit. Which you could do some funny satirical class thing maybe. Yeah.

Yeah, Train to Busan hits on some of that stuff too. I agree that this is a setting, but it's not actually a movie. It's not a story because we don't have characters in there yet. We just have a general place. I think them being trapped is part of it, but I think they're...

Going from where they're stuck to whatever tiny town they end up in, it's also kind of fun. There's something about that feels interesting to you and it could lend itself to a comedy, to lend itself to something else because there's like, the whole point of a train is that you get to bypass all these places that you would otherwise get stuck in. Oh, I like that. A bunch of rich people descending on a small mountain. Absolutely. Kind of funny. There have been various versions of it, but for 9-11, when all the planes got grounded, there was a plane that was stuck in a tiny town in Canada and...

There's an article called When the World Came to Town. And it's essentially just like it's a bunch of people stuck in an unfamiliar environment. It's always a good setup for comedy. But I didn't feel like a pressing need to take this one exact moment. So we won't be pitching this one tomorrow as well? No. We'll just stick with parts and learning. Yeah.

Next up, a UK teen's parents send him to Ghana. He took them to court by Lindsay Chudel for the New York Times and Laurie Donahue, a listener, sent this through. So British parents send their teenage son to a boarding school in Ghana, believing he is at risk for being drawn into gang culture in London. The boy, initially unaware of his parents' intentions, thinks that he's visiting a sick relative, but upon discovering true reason for the trip, he contacted the British consulate and initiated legal proceedings against his parents.

alleging abandonment and seeking to return to the UK. However, the judge ruled that the parents acted lawfully within their parental rights to safeguard their son from potential criminal activities. He's still there, guys. Yeah. I read this and then only got to the very end where I was like, oh, this kid is still only four. He went when he was 12. Yeah. He's still there. He's only like 14 or 15 now. Yeah. Still stuck. Still stuck. It's harsh. And got it.

We said before, like relationships are important. Lots of relationships here and lots of really interesting relationships. You can definitely see sort of the multiple perspectives on sort of what this is. So this is a family that wants to protect their kid and they believe that their kid is safer in Ghana than he would be in London. That's really interesting. And that perspective is really interesting. We can see it from the kid's point of view. It's like, oh my God, how could you ship me away to Ghana when I have this life here in London? And you would think that the...

life would be better and easier for him in London. And yet... The judge said no. The judge said no. And also knife culture. Oh my God, I know. The judge said it was like a sobering and depressing moment. And I was like, yeah, as a British person reading this, this just makes me real sad. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, it's... And the picture of the knives in the London... All the sea knives, yeah. Yeah, I mean, London, London, not so good. If you're willing to trick your 12-year-old and send them away to a country where they basically know no one, because I think he actually doesn't... They're from there, but he really doesn't seem to know anyone from there. Just sending your kid...

anywhere where they don't know anyone and in that situation like you've got to really be worried about where things are at in London so yes I feel bad for London the only way I would want to see this as a movie is if it starts with this set up it's super depressing but then it becomes magical and wonderful and like he finds incredible friends and the school is amazing and like he ends up really happy the version where he sues his parents is sad but the version where they send him and then he discovers you know great things and connects with family and whatever that could be great

Well, there's a version of this where he wins the lawsuit and is able to sort of get back. So it's a question like, do you need any... Get back to the knives on the streets of London. Or that like basically his parents' vision for what his life was like is actually not accurate or he's able to overcome it. And like those tensions are really interesting. I don't think you need these actual people at all. I think the situation is what you care about and you could pick a different kid, a different family. It doesn't have to be gone. It could be whatever. That idea of

This immigrant family who's come to a place with one vision and then they see the dangers in this vision and they want to send their kid back to the place they came from. It's really understandable and relatable and we can see...

both the family's point of view and for the kid's point of view, why it's such a cliche. Maybe that's the way in is that there's something nice about if the kid can learn to see in his parents' home country what they see in their home country and they can learn to see in their new home country what their son does. Maybe there's something redemptive and nice there.

Well, also I think about like sort of the non-immigrant families. You're always worried for your kids and you're always, you want to protect them. And what that means and what you're able to do really depends on where you come from. And so a family of greater economic means can send them to the private school. They can shelter them. And for this family, this is what they thought their best option was. But from the kid's point of view, of course they're going to say no. That's not what they want. Is it a movie? I'm going to say no.

Yeah, I think it's maybe a movie. I feel like it's like a Sundance-y movie. Oh. Yeah. It's a smaller movie, but I think it could... I don't know. I think the good version of this gets some...

Academy Award attention. But do you end it happy or sad? I don't know. Or you could end it in the way that like a Palme d'Or winning a movie at Cannes is neither happy nor sad, just sort of in a place. I could imagine this being a movie that actually comes from the country that they're being sent back to. So essentially, if it was a Ghanaian movie and this is basically the same side, but you really follow the story as it happens back in Ghana, that's also really interesting.

Finally, zombie colleges. These universities are living another life online and no one can say why. The article we're looking at is by Chris Quantana from USA Today. So Drew, talk us through sort of what this article is describing. So the author starts looking into these zombie colleges. There's one called Stratford. It ends up being these colleges that used to be real, but have since shuttered and they're online, but...

They're kind of connected to nothing. So to be clear, Drew, there are no zombies attending the colleges. Yeah, I was a little disappointed too when I ended up past the headline. I mean, we don't know. So here's the reality. So there are these colleges that shut down because they were no longer economically viable. And then somebody somewhere is like, oh, I can pull them up online and get people to...

Give me application fees. Give me application fees and basically cash the application fees. And in some cases, they will actually like, someone from that college will call you about sort of like, what major do you want to study? A person naively could think like, oh, this is a real place. And I guess because these colleges were real as of a couple of years ago, Googling them makes, you might think that they're still real.

A viable college. It's not nearly as much fun as a college for zombies, though. No, I know. On my little notes that I jotted down last night, for the first one, as you could tell, I got excited and wrote a whole page of scribbles. Then there's like less for the train. Then there's like three lines for the UK team. For the zombie one, you will see it's literally just the bullet point and nothing. An empty bullet point. There's something cool about that. The term zombie college is better than the actual story. Than the actual story.

Because it's just a scam. And so a journalist investigating a scam can be interesting and maybe can lead someplace

At the end of this article, I didn't have a bigger perspective on sort of, it's just scamming people, going to scam. But people who go to college and want to eat each other's brains. Come on. Kind of who doesn't want to watch that? Yeah, that's good. So yes, on Zombie College, no on this specific article. Let's do a recap of how this would be a movie. I think we're both excited for A Man of Parts and Learning, a Francis Williams movie. Difficult, but potentially great. Some really good roles in there. The Trapped Luxury Train.

It's a setting, but it's also a setting we've kind of seen, so you'd have to do something interesting new with it. I don't think you need to have that specific incident as the basis. The Donnie and Teen, I think it's a small movie. You're less convinced. I'm less convinced. Yeah. I think you could, but I think anything could be a small little indie. Is it going to be a good small indie? Because I think you should start out writing a small little indie being like, this could really work and move people and...

I see why people leave the Eccles Theatre clapping. Yes. And honestly, I bet there's a filmmaker out there who won't have the identical life, but will have a similar life. I think you could find somebody who can make this movie. It's like, oh yeah, that's kind of my story. Yeah. Or honestly, the opposite is probably very common too. I have a couple of friends who've,

They grew up in a struggling country and like the parents like shipped them off to the US or to the UK. And it's like, they never saw their parents again, but their parents did everything they could to sort of put them out there in the world. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, let's answer a question or two. We have Albin in Finland. I was wondering how you create side characters specifically. Are there any guiding practices to help you figure out what side characters should be present in a story and what role they should play, or does it come up naturally? I found that it's difficult to write a first draft when I don't exactly know what roles all the characters should play in the narrative, and I think getting a better grasp of this would help immensely.

All right, so side characters, these are supporting folks who are not your protagonist, they're not your antagonist, or sort of a key leverage. They're characters who are in multiple scenes, but maybe it sounds like Alvin doesn't know quite who they are yet or sort of what function they're playing. Christina, as you are mapping out a story and you were actually just working on a project with a writing partner too, what are the conversations you're having about those characters?

Not central characters. It's really tricky because they take up space. They do. But you don't want them to be so generic that they're just interchangeable. I'm the funny best friend. They're always such a bummer to read. But you also do want to utilize sometimes the shorthands. Like, if you choose to have an assistant who is unusually, like...

Do you know what I mean? If you do something unusual with one of those characters, it can be really distracting in the reader and people go, well, something more is going to happen to that character, right? There's got to be a reason why you made your assistant like 65 years old. So it's just like a tricky one because it's a bit of Goldilocks because like in theory, you want every side character to be like all the side characters in true romance where they're the most amazingly specific, wonderful, life-enhancing humans ever.

But also you don't want to be tediously kind of shiny things all around the story. I found that in planning out a story...

those side characters who might appear in like three scenes over the course of the movie, I won't really know who they are as I start writing. And then as I get into scenes and I recognize what I need in scenes, then they'll become more specific and I'll realize like, okay, that's this person who keeps coming back through. Or I realize like, this kind of character shows up in three different scenes. It should be the same character. I sometimes think of it in terms of what our main character, what it says about them in the relationship with the main character. So often I'll use it as like a parallel to another relationship. Yeah.

and it'll be a subtle thing that hopefully no one will ever even pay attention to, but you might just feel it there as an echo. Yeah. You can feel sometimes in scripts and in movies where a character is just there to set the ball so that the hero can spike it, and that can be really annoying, and yet it's also kind of functional. And so is that a character there who can evoke dialogue or actions from our hero that move the story forward, that's a good use for the character. And so...

You don't want to think of them as strictly functional, but ultimately to you they are just the same way that your scenes are functional even though they are sort of hopefully engaging themselves. I would say if you're doing a pretty detailed outline, look back at the end of it and just make sure you clock which are the three scenes and then maybe it'll occur to you as you're looking at it from a distance. Oh, I could do this, this, this, and then it would suddenly happen. They would have their own mini little art because people like to be closed out. They do, yeah. No dingly danglies. Yeah.

Let's try one more here from Daryl. How can I establish a writing routine whilst trying to seemingly balance so much? I'm a student and I'm somewhat struggling to balance writing with school and exercise, healthy eating, living, and whatever else. Am I trying to do too much or do I just lack discipline? Oh, Daryl, it's all your fault. Oh, Daryl, please get a good answer from John August and then give it to me because I don't know yet. I still haven't figured it out. First, I want to ask about whilst. Do you use whilst?

Whilst, if I'm trying to sound very British and posh. Yeah. But do you... I mean, you probably grew up using it, but are you using it in daily life in America? Out loud with my mouth? Yeah. No. No. Whilst. Whilst. No, I don't think I've ever said it out loud. Listen, Daryl, you have to give yourself some grace. Like, yes, you're trying to do a lot and...

If you are having a hard time fitting writing into your life and you want to do more writing, you need to recognize, okay, well, what are the times that I'm doing other stuff that I'm willing to not do that other stuff and write? And that could just mean giving something else up. It could mean making different choices about other hobbies and other stuff. But you're going to have to make a choice to choose.

do some writing. I've actually got recycled John August advice here. I'm excited to hear it. Because you changed my life a little bit with this, but it only lasted briefly because I'm an idiot and I can't stick to anything. But you, I can't even remember if it was on the podcast or just in life, you told me about sprints. Oh yeah, let's talk about sprints. And just doing little short periods, setting yourself a goal. And it can be really short, but giving yourself, even if it's like 40 minutes, set a timer, just do it. And don't, because sometimes trying to

clear out an afternoon for writing or a morning or a day is just impossible. And we won't get more done in an afternoon. No, you won't. And if it's just like, if you have a job and you have the whatever, and you know you come in the door and it's the 40 minutes between walking in the door and making your dinner, and you just have 40 minutes, you will not get distracted. You will not look at your emails because you're like, I only have 40 minutes. And you have the timer running right next to you. And then you just go, you just give yourself a chunk.

Yeah. Just yesterday, I was doing that for edits on the screencast book. I set the timer for an hour and I just did an hour's worth of work. And when the timer beeped, I went a little bit over that. But like,

If I had not set the timer, I don't think I would have actually, I wouldn't have opened the file. I want you to know I'm such an evangelist for your advice. I give it to everyone and I never do it myself. And I don't know why because the period that I did it, I was the most productive I've ever been. I'm just, I'm terrible. Yeah, so Daryl, timers could help. Adjusting where you're prioritizing that writing time can help too. Because it can feel selfish to just take the time and to shut everybody else out to do stuff. But that's what writing helps me, yes. We're all selfish. Selfish, be a little selfish.

It's time for our one cool things. I have two comedy related one cool things. I went and saw Mike Birbiglia's new show, The Good Life, this last week. It's so funny. He's just so smart and so funny. He's been on the show multiple times. It's just observations on life and the way he's able to weave in personal stuff and family stuff in ways that's generous to the folks he's including, but also helps people.

talk about sort of larger themes. It's just, it's so great to see somebody who can just do that so effortlessly. So see his show. I think there are more dates on, we'll put a link to his website in the show notes, but you should also listen to his podcast called Working It Out, which is like script notes, but for like standup comics and just talking through their, their process and how they come to what's funny and they workshop some jokes in the course of it. Second comedy thing is, uh,

The print version of The Onion is just so good and people need to subscribe to it because it's just so great. This last week, just like everything, every story on the front page made me giggle. Trump administration offers free at-home loyalty tests. Baby saves a fare. U.S. military bans men with girls' names from combat. It's all just so, so smart. And to get it delivered... It looks so lovely in your hand. And it feels so good. So I strongly encourage you. We'll put a link in the show notes to The Onion site, but it comes once a month.

And it's just delightful. Christina, what do you have for us? My one cool thing is a person and his company. And it's Patrick Murphy who runs a company called the Research Department. I don't know it. It's researchdepth.com. And Drew will hopefully find a link and include it.

He is amazing. So I've known him for a number of years. He was a co-producer on Babylon, worked on a number of movies for a long time, worked with Baz Luhrmann for a long time, has always done research for movies just kind of as part of his job. But then a few years ago, just went out on his own, made it his job, set up this company. It's just him right now. Although I think people should beg to be working with him because he's just incredible. So I hired him last fall to research a story. I knew what I wanted to do.

I knew the character stories, I knew the character dynamics, I knew everything that I wanted on a personal level, but I didn't know when or where the story was set. I knew it was period, I knew I needed to deal with some colonial stuff, and I didn't know what country or what time period because I didn't know how I would then lay it into the history. It's not about the history, but it's very important that I have the setting. Yeah.

Working with him was the most incredible experience because he's not just a research nerd. He's incredibly creative. And the things that he would do, so his instincts on story and just kind of listening to it and hearing it were amazing. But the thing that he would do that was coolest was actually taking it all the way back to side characters. I would have things like, I've got this side character. It's a maid. We landed on Malaysia in 1914, which is not a place or a time that I knew much about.

And then I had this side character who was a maid. I needed her to be of a certain ethnicity, certain age. And I was like, this is what I think I want to do in the story. Does it sound plausible? And he would like go off and then find journal entries of people who were basically like that same age race in the same time period. And I would get like actual flavor of what those people's lives were like like that.

That kind of thing is so extraordinary. I don't even know how he physically does it, but then he like scans all the pages in the books that you have all of the resources, but then he puts it into a credibly digestible format. So he's amazing. And he works on, he's worked on a few TV shows and features as well. So for any executives or creatives or whatever listening, he is amazing. That's fantastic. Researchdepartment.com. Love it. D-E-P-T. Dept.com.

That is our show for this week. Scriptress is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Cialelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Catrola, who's a first-timer. If you have an outro, please send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting.

Thank you.

like the one we're about to record on, The Art of the Cold Email. Christina Hudson, so great to catch up with you. So great to see you and speak with you for the first time today. Come back anytime and sooner, please. Anytime. I would love to. It's a delight.