Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you're listening to episode 685 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, screenplays and stage plays are superficially similar. They both consist of scenes with characters talking to each other. So why do they feel so different? And why is it often so challenging to move something from one format to another? To help us explore these questions, we are joined by writer, director, showrunner, and playwright, Leslie Hedlund.
best known for creating Russian Doll on Netflix along with the accolade on Disney+. She wrote and directed Bachelorette, adapted for her own play, and she's coming off of a Broadway run of her acclaimed play, Cult of Love, which I got to see in New York and absolutely loved. So I'm so excited, Leslie, to get to talk with you about all these things. Welcome, Leslie Hedlund. Thank you. What an intro. Gosh, it's so nice to be here. I didn't realize you'd seen the play.
I saw the play. So here's how I saw the play. So I was in New York because we were doing a new version of Big Fish and we were there for the rehearsals and the 29-hour reading, basically, of Big Fish. And Andrew Lippa, who is the composer-lyricist of Big Fish, is a
is a Tony voter. And so he said, oh, hey, I need to go see a bunch of stuff. Come with me. I'm like, great. I'll go do anything you want to see. And so we show up and I'm just talking with him and I literally walk in the theater and I have no idea what the play is or who's in it. I didn't even like look at the signage to see who was in the show. And so literally I come into the theater and there is this gorgeous set, like the prettiest set I've ever seen on a stage play. And then I
Absolutely loved what I saw on that beautiful set. Oh, yeah. The set was designed by John Lee Beatty, who is an absolute legend in terms of set design. Yeah, I had a really, I would say, clear vision for what the set would look like, that it would have that Fanny and Alexander touch to it. There was a play by Annie Baker called John that took place in a
bed and breakfast that was also like just stuffed to the brim with like coziness and all of that just directly contrasts the darker content of the place.
and, you know, those plays as well as mine. I want to get into that because we're actually, I want to take a look at the very first page of your play because you actually lay out in the scene description like what it's supposed to look like. And it's so different than how we would do it in a screenplay. And it's so effective on this page, but it's just a different experience. So we'll get into that. But I also want to talk about, obviously you've done film, theater, television,
I want to talk about sort of origin stories because you went from assistant to auteur, which is something that a lot of our listeners are trying to go for. I want to talk about time loops because I love a time loop. You've written a bunch of time loops in Russian Doll. And we have listener questions about music cues and long scripts, which I hope you can help us tackle. Absolutely. Yeah.
And then after we're done with the main show, in our bonus segment, I want to talk about the difference of seeing plays versus seeing movies. Because as screenwriters, it's easy to catch up on movies. We can just watch them anytime we want to watch them. But for plays, it's such a specific deal. If you can't actually go see a play, if I didn't happen to be in New York to see your play, I wouldn't be able to talk to you about how great it was. So I want to talk about the differences between seeing plays versus seeing movies and how you keep up as an artist. Oh, I'd love to talk about that. I love working in all those fields.
but they're all very, very, very different. Yeah. They are. And so having done a bunch of them, there's gatekeepers, there's, you know, shibboleths, there's a whole set of systems you have to learn the ropes of. Yeah. And so there's things you come into it thinking like, oh, I know how to do this thing. And you're always like, ah, that's, it's just, it works so differently. Yeah.
Can we wind it all the way back, though? Because I'd love to get some backstory on you and sort of how you got started, where you came up from, and sort of when you first decided that writing and making things was for you. I am very, very young. Very young. I was one of those kids that just wrote. You just started writing. Yeah. I would read...
Books for, you know, I'd get them from the library, like the Judy Blume, or I ordered a bunch of American Girl doll books, which I absolutely loved. And then I would fill composition books with...
rip-offs of those, just doing exactly the same structure. Well, because that's, you learn by copying, you learn by imitating on the things you see. Exactly. There's no shame in that. Just beat for beat imitations, but with my own characters, you know, like with the themes and personalities that I found more interesting than others.
the simplistic morality of those types of books. Absolutely. Right? I mean, one of the reasons like Judy Blume is so great is that there's this sort of gray area that she writes about. But very soon I found musical theater. I became completely obsessed with Stephen Sondheim. I mean, nobody could tell me anything that wasn't Stephen Sondheim. I was introduced to him from the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the marathon recording of
And my dad watched it with me. It was like on PBS or something. And he was watching it late at night. And he said, Leslie, Leslie, get in here. Get in here. And so I ran into my parents' room and he said, you need to watch this. You need to watch this. And so I started watching it. He didn't know what it was. I think he just started seeing it and was like, this is my girl. And I started watching it. And, you know, Sondheim is in like all...
all black. And there's one part where he like puts his head in his hands. He's like so depressed at what's happening. And I said, who is that? And he said, that's the writer.
So that was suddenly, I was like, that was my basis for what a writer was. So you had the opportunity to see this thing that you loved. Oh, you could actually see the face of the person behind the thing and see the hard work and process it took to make that thing. Absolutely. And rather than scaring you away from it, you're like, oh, I want to go and do that thing. Yes, yeah. I absolutely wanted to dive in. So I jumped into being a drama kid. Then I went to Tisch for college for directing and acting.
acting a little bit, but not writing. I didn't do, I would write screenplays on my own that were terrible. I would give them to my friends. They would say, this is terrible. But I learned so much from directing, just figuring out how to tell a story visually and
rather than textually was exactly what I needed for those four years. Talk to us about the program at Tisch. Was this all directing for the stage? Was it directing for a camera? Like what was the kind of classes and what things were you learning? It's a good question. They're all broken up into different studios, Tisch. And I was in a studio called Playwrights Horizons. It's actually not
that connected to the theater, the Off-Broadway theater. But this particular studio, rather than... And they have like, you know, Strasberg, Adler, the musical theater program. Playwrights was a little jack of all trades. You could study design. You could study directing. You could study acting. You could study, you know, not dance, but Alexander technique and have all these voice classes and everything. So...
It really was a hodgepodge of information. So you could pick and choose what it was you wanted to focus on. And my main one was directing. And each year, you do something different. So...
The first year, you're just going to everything. They just, everything. I did acting classes. I did design classes. I did directing classes. I was not great at any of them, to be quite honest. I did have like a couple spurts of directing that were good that I felt very proud of, but that was it. And then in second year, you stage managed for...
the juniors and the seniors. When you became a junior, you did two short plays. You did one in the fall, and then you did one in the spring. You did two one acts. So I did The Lesson by Ionesco, and I did Beirut. Then when you're a senior, if you've made it this far, which a lot of people did not, you do a full length. And I did Waiting for Godot because I love that play. It is...
It is exactly who I am. And the story that I want to tell, you know, influenced me beyond like Sondheim. I'd say it was like Sondheim and Godot were just the major things. So I got to do that for my senior thesis project. And I would say that people at Tisch responded to it essentially the same way that people respond to my work now.
which is they're impressed, but they're also kind of confused by what's happening. But I do think that the style of what I do now absolutely was born out of that production, which... Let's talk about that style, because what was it about that? So was it your choices in terms of...
how characters are presenting themselves on stage? Was it how you're handling dialogue? Because I want to, as we get into Cult of Love, I want to talk about your very specific choices in terms of when characters overlap and when they don't. What were some things, if someone said like, oh, if they could time travel back and see that production, it's like, oh, well, that's very Leslie Hedlund. Like, what was it about that? Well, it was definitely very choreographed. It was, one of my teachers said that was the most energetic part
of Godot I've ever seen because I didn't have them just standing there. My sort of aha moment for it was Marx Brothers. I was just like, it's vaudeville. That's what this is. And so therefore, it was very choreographed and it was almost a musical, essentially. So that Sondheim influence was like pushed into it. So we did so many visual gags that were, even Lucky's speech, you know, was this massive, like,
Just all of them hanging onto that leash of his and, like, yanking him around. And my Lucky was an incredible dancer and gymnast, so he could fall on the ground in just a violent, violent way.
And my mentor for the project said, when you do like a post-mortem with all of the teachers and the head of the studio and you get the critique and, you know, some of it was good, some of it was critical, which is normal for what that moment is.
But my mentor for it said, you know, I think you're one of the darkest people I've ever met. But also really stupid things make you laugh. So I do think that's sort of what I ended up doing was very, very messed up characters and...
that then became a big joke. So coming from that, so you're graduating from Tisch. This is...
Early 2000s? When did you come out of Tisch? I graduated in 2003. I immediately started working at Miramax. I actually was working at Miramax while I was in school. I would go to my classes in the morning. I would go to Miramax. I was working in the archive department, which means that I was archiving all of the props and costumes and
and any sort of set pieces for films so that they could be archived for posterity. But also all these things were sent out for Oscar campaigns so that they could be displayed places like the costumes for Chicago or the props and the costumes for Gangs of New York. It was that time period, 2002. And then 2003, I immediately started working as an assistant director
The next thing is that I quit. I had no money. I lived on my friend's couch in a studio apartment. That's where I wrote my spec, Bachelorette. I worked at Amoeba Records. I worked at Rocket Video. I just, I got a job wherever I could. And then, you know, I started writing these plays and this, all of my, but there were a bunch of friends from NYU who had started a theater company called I Am A Theater Company and they're still going strong. And,
And we just started developing these plays. I started this Seven Deadly Plays series because I just wanted to challenge myself to write seven plays. That was really kind of the biggest thing was, can I keep writing and can I keep getting better and stop thinking about one particular project as being like the thing that's going to make me? And I felt that was really helpful. It was really helpful to develop the plays with...
actors to watch them read things and understand like, oh, that's a really bad scene that I wrote because people don't talk. Like I just saw two people do it and it's absolutely uninteresting and there's nothing going on, you know? And I think sometimes when we are in a...
fishbowl of writing drafts or writing first drafts, it's almost like your brain is a dangerous neighborhood and you really shouldn't be hanging out there alone. Like, that's why, you know, people got to start reading it. You got to start, you got to have a reading with some actors. That's just my advice. I'm sure nobody else does that, but that's what I do. No, Mike Briglia, who's been on the show a couple times, always talks about how important those readings are to sort of get people just...
you know, the pizza readings just with friends just to sort of get a sense of like, what does this actually sound like? What does it actually feel like with real people doing a thing? Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. So you create a great situation for yourself where you set yourself a goal of writing these seven plays. You wrote these seven plays and in the process of writing them, you got to stage them, see what they actually felt like on their feet. Yeah. They were all done in like little black box theaters. And like, I forgot to say that when I was an assistant, I was still doing that. Like I was putting my own money into black box theaters
so that I could mount other shows like Adam Rapp and Neil LaBute. And so when I started writing the plays, again, like the composition books, I just started ripping off other plays. You know, like Bachelorette is just a female Hurley Burley. Like, I just was like, oh, I can't believe nobody's thought of that. Like...
Each play had its own genre reference, if that makes sense. Cult of Love is a family drama, which is a staple of plays. There are so many family dramas, but I like to, within that composition book, do my own thing. Yeah.
So let's talk about Bachelorette. So you were able to... This is one of your seven deadly plays. You were able to write it as a play, mount it in a black box sort of theater situation, and then you went and made the screenplay version of it with yourself with the intention of you directing from the very start? Or did you think, like, this is something I'm going to sell? What was your intention going into Bachelorette? I thought it was going to sell. I thought it was going to sell.
I did not in any shape or form assume that I was going to be directing it. I worked really hard on the screenplay. I got an agent based off of it. I started to do the water bottle tour. That's what I call it. I don't know if other people
Oh, that's a term of art. We all say that, yes. Yes, yeah, yeah. So you, you know, this is for people who don't know. It's where your agents send you out to the executives at different production companies or different studios and they've read your spec and they, you know, just get to know you and you guys have like a little...
And over and over again, I got the feedback about the movie that, you know, this is absolutely the way women talk, but no one wants to watch that. So I thought, well, it'll be a good, you know, writing sample and maybe I can get some jobs off of it. But Adam McKay and Will Ferrell and Jessica Elbaum ended up optioning it just as the play was going up in New York.
so it was kind of confluence of this piece that had been this little tiny play that I didn't really think was going to do I mean it was just one of seven so I kind of was like it didn't seem like the one that was going to
But then it went up with second stage in 2010. And then they optioned it at the same time. They sent it to a bunch of directors, which is very par for the course. I can't even remember who we sent it to. We sent it to like every human. Everybody passed.
It was also the time of... Because it was actually written before Bridesmaids, but Bridesmaids got made first. So there was this sort of rush of, can we beat Bridesmaids? We can't. The directors started passing on it because...
They were just too much like, yeah, it was kind of like, well, we already saw that. We already did that. I was at the Gary Sanchez Christmas party with Adam and a bunch of other people. And I was just sitting there with Adam chatting. And he said, yeah, so we haven't found a director for Bachelorette. And I said, yeah, I think we're going to find, you know, we'll find somebody. And he said, why don't you just direct it?
And I said, I think that's a great idea. I think I should. And so I would give the, again, just do everything before you're ready. If you get that opportunity, do not think in your head, I don't know how to do that. Just say yes. Just be like, absolutely. And his reasoning, and we talked about this a little bit, was you know these characters more than anybody in the world, and you can work with actors because that's what you've been doing for the last, you know,
seven, eight years. He said, to me, that's the most important thing. We can set you up to success with all the other stuff. All right. I'd love to transition now. So we talked about sort of, you know, getting Bachelorette set up, but I want to go back to plays and really focus in on sort of playwriting versus screenwriting because they look so similar at a glance, but then actually sort of get into like how they work and sort of what our expectations are as audiences. They're really different. So,
in a play, in a stage play, the audience is actively participating in the imagination with you. That's correct. They're there, their game should go. So if you show them a desk and say, this is an office, this is an office. And you have their full attention in ways that you kind of don't
if you have it with a movie. Like with a movie, you don't know if they're kind of half watching. Here, for those first five, 10 minutes, they are there, they are fully invested into what we're doing, which is great, except that some things are just all harder to do on a stage. Like that sense of where we are, creating a sense of place is more challenging. You don't have closeups. Um,
So you have to make sure that small emotions are going to be able to land if you can't see a person's face. That's correct, yeah. But I'd love to start with, in Cult of Love, Drew, if you could read us this opening scene description of the house that we're starting. So we'll read this first, and then we'll get a summary from Leslie about what actually happens here. But Drew, help us out with what happens on the page, page one of Cult of Love. Sure. Home, the first floor of a farmhouse in Connecticut. 8.30 p.m., Christmas Eve.
The kitchen, dining area, and living room are all immediately visible. A small door to a washroom, an entryway alcove-slash-mud room with a coat closet-slash-rack. An upright piano stands near a staircase to the second floor. A red front door with a Christmas wreath leads to a quaint covered porch area. Snow falls.
The house is decorated for Christmas. This cannot be overstated. The place is literally stuffed to the brim with goodies, evergreens, and cheer. It's an oppressive display of festivities and middle-class wealth that pushes the limits of taste. There isn't a surface, seat, or space that isn't smothered with old books, LPs, plates of sweets, no real food though, glasses of wine, wrapped presents, stockings, and garlands of greenery and tinsel.
There are many musical instruments, a spinet piano, banjo, nylon, and steel string guitar, ukulele, steel drum, washboard, djembe, melodica, harmonicas, handbells, spoons, maracas, and sleigh bells. They are not displayed or specially cared for in any way. They lay among the Christmas decorations and book collections like any other piece of ephemera. When a character picks an instrument up, regardless of size, the audience should always be surprised it was there hiding in plain sight.
notably absent a television, a sound system. Actually, there's no visible technology. No one's holding iPhones, tablets, or computers. They will come out when scripted.
All right, Leslie, five paragraphs here to set up this room that we're in for the duration of the play. And so it's so evocative and so clearly shows you what you're going to do here. But you, as the screenwriter, Leslie Hedlund, would never put that in a script. It's a different thing than what you would do on the page here. So talk us through how you approach the scene description at the start of a play. Well, I think with this play...
It was important to be super prescriptive about what that world was going to look like. Like you said, when you came in and you were like, that's the most beautiful place
Yeah. Set I've ever seen. That was the idea, right? To go through five paragraphs so that it was very clear that this is not open to interpretation. There's no... Absolutely. It's not a metaphor of a family living room. This is actually the space. And your point about like when I walked in the theater, like the curtain's up. So we're seeing this behind a scrim, but we're seeing the whole set. So...
As the audience, we're spending more than five paragraphs just looking at the space before any actors come in, which is also serving us. It's really establishing this is the place where the story is going to happen, which is great. Yeah, I also think that there are cues, essentially, that you should follow. One thing that I felt very strongly about with the play was that it didn't feel too now-like.
that there would be an essence of this could perceivably take place at any time. Yeah. So putting the technology in there would be disruptive to the fantasy because that's really what it is, right? Like it's a fantasy play. It's not Long Day's Journey Into Night. It's not August Usage County. It's...
It's in that genre, but it's not meant to be. It's in that genre. So the audience approaches it with some of the same expectations. And so you have to very quickly establish that it's not those things and you're doing that through music and other things. But we should say, because most of our listeners won't have seen this play. So we've set up this gorgeous set. What's going to happen here? What's the short version of Cult of Love?
you don't have to go through everything, but like, who is the family that we're going to meet here? Like the log line or the synopsis you mean? Yeah. So this is about a family, kind of upper middle class family in Connecticut who all come home to celebrate Christmas. It's parents, four grown children and their partners. They all essentially exploring and voicing and talking
venting all of these pent up
you know, frustrations in history that they have with each other. Yes. Which is pretty normal for a family play. But what I would say is that the thing that makes it set apart is that there is no plot. No one is trying to do anything. No one is trying to, you know, like, there isn't a thing that any one character is trying to achieve. Right.
the action of the play is the disillusionment of both the family or the disintegration, sorry, also disillusionment, but the disintegration of the family as a unit, as a beautiful idea into the reality of how a family, you know, breaks apart eventually and gets completely decimated. The idea behind the play is that you watch that, but instead of watching the story of that,
because there is no plot that you yourself insert the plot of your own family.
And therefore, the catharsis comes, hopefully, at the end of the play because you have been watching your family, not my family or the play's family. So that was the intention of the show. I don't know if I answered your question, but... Oh, absolutely. We're going to see on stage this family go through these dynamics. And that's, as an audience member who went in literally knowing not what play I was going to see, that's what I was pulling out of it. Yeah.
It's interesting you say that there's no plot because I think you're overstating that a bit. People do want things. There are goals. Characters have motivations. There's things they're trying to get to. But there's not a protagonist who comes through to the end and things are really transformed. It's not the last Christmas they're ever going to be at this house. There's no establishment of that. But it's all the little small things, the little small tensions that are ripping at the seams of this very perfect story.
Absolutely. And one of the big inspirations for the play and one of my biggest influences beyond who surpassed Sondheim is John Cassavetes. And Cassavetes once said about Shadows, his first movie, that he was very interested in characters who had problems that were overtaken by other problems.
And that's what I wanted to achieve a lot of my work for sure, but specifically with Cult of Love. So that's really where the overlapping dialogue comes in. It's meant to evoke Cassavetes' indie film where you can't quite...
latch on to one character as the good guy or the bad guy. You're dropped into an ecosystem where you have to decide, am I going to align myself with this character or this character? Yeah. So that's where all of that came from.
And actually, before we even get to the description of the set, there's a description in the script about how dialogue works. Drew, could you read this for us? A note about overlapping dialogue. When dual dialogue is indicated, regardless of parenthetical or stage directions, the dialogue starts simultaneously. After indicated dual dialogue, the cue for the next line is the word scripted as the last spoken. Overlapping dialogue is denotated by slashes.
So incredibly prescriptive here. Greta Gerwig was on the podcast a couple years ago, and she was talking about little women, and she does the same thing with slashes when she wants lines to stack up the right ways. But you're making it really clear. If there's two columns side by side, simultaneously, those are exactly happening at the same time. It's the other overlapping, which in features, we're more likely to just say as a parenthetical overlapping to sort of indicate where things are. But you're saying like, no, this is the word where things are supposed to start overlapping, which...
works really well in your play, but also feels like you got to rehearse to that place. It's not a natural thing for actors to get to. No, it is absolutely not. It's a magic trick, for sure. Initially, you're like, oh, this is super messy. And then it sort of continues and you really get the sense of the musicality of it. And that kind of goes back to Godot, right? Like, it's essentially the way I staged it was a musical. And that's what...
Cult of Love's overlapping dialogue is. It is meant to sort of suck you in as a, quote, realistic way that people speak. But there are certain sections, especially large arguments, that do need to happen later
boom, boom, boom, right at the right time. And it was difficult to explain that to the actors, that you do need to rehearse it in a natural way, right? You do need to say to each other certain lines and you have to find the real genuine objective or super objective or however the actor works. The issue is, is that once you've learned it,
it has to be done in the way that it is written perfectly. So, for example, Zach Quinto, who's playing the character of Mark, there is this argument that happens and he has in the clear a bunch of moms. You know, it's like, ba-ba-ba, mom. Da-da-da-da, mom. Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, mom. And that was sort of difficult to explain to him that it actually should be in the same... Like, it should be in the same...
cadence each mom. But of course, for actors, that's a little unnatural. So I've had to give that note to actors very often that this is not real. Your intentions and your pathos has to be real, but the way you speak is not. If you watch any sitcom, you recognize that like,
There's a reality within the world that's hit come, but it's not the way actual people would really do things. And there has to be, you know, when you're stacked up, when you're clear how you're doing stuff, how you're selling lines, it is specific and it's different on a stage than it would be
on film. If we were to try to literally just film this play as it is, it would probably feel weird. It wouldn't feel quite natural to the format. That's correct. That's correct. I think that you'd have to move it into the Uncut Gems world if you were going to do this, where the sound design becomes...
a fill-in for dialogue that is happening off screen, you know, so that it feels a little unusual and like sort of a wall, you know, a wall of sound of dialogue. Or you would have to figure out some way like Little Women, you know, like you'd have to figure out some way of doing it, but in a way that was parsed out and easier to follow, I think.
Yeah. I want to take a look at four pages here at the start of Act 2. And so we'll put a link to these in the show notes. So thank you for providing these. Of course, yeah. So we're 60 pages into the script and we've now gotten to Scene 2. So Scene 1 is very long and we're getting to a shorter one, which is... Yeah, the Scene 1 is about 40 minutes. Yeah. And then you start this, yeah. And so we're now into this new space. Time has passed, but we're on the same set and everything is progressing here. Yeah.
I think it's just a good way of looking at sort of what's happening with our dual dialogue, so simultaneous dialogue. And then I think on the second of these pages, we have... This is such a funny section. So talk us through, for folks who are listening while they're driving their car, talk us through what's happening in the start of this scene here. Sure.
Johnny, who is the third out of four of the children, has arrived very, very late. And he's... I was waiting for Godot for a while, but he actually does show up. Yeah, I'm waiting for Godot. Exactly. Like, everyone's kind of waiting for this guy. He shows up in sort of a very eventful way by playing this huge song, this countdown song with everybody and sort of joins everybody together after this, like, fractured...
So he's standing and holding court at the top of scene two. He's telling a story or attempting to tell a story about when he was younger that he went to a chess tournament and that he placed 51st out of 1,000. And how impressive that was and what a, you know, essentially beautiful memory it was for him. But at the same time, he's just doing that sibling thing where he wants to tell a story and...
Sort of no one's listening and, you know, correcting him and jumping in, sort of moving into different spaces. And, you know, the kids start quoting things to each other. They start doing little inside jokes and he gets sidetracked.
by all of that. And I don't think it's in these pages, but there is a point as this moves on where he goes, I'm telling a story about me. Can I tell a story about me? And Evie, his sister, goes, I don't know, can you? It just reminded me so much of those conversations at Christmas where everyone's not sitting there talking about big things. They're sitting there talking about things that are basically...
And not stupid, but they're essentially superficial and it's the subtext. It's like there's just the idea that he's trying to tell this story about how special he is, but everyone is kind of, you know, pushing down how special he is. It works so well on the stage, but I'm trying now to imagine, try to do this scene...
Try to do this scene on film and you run into some real issues. You have a lot of characters to try to service. So basically, who's in the frame? Who's off the frame? Who are we actually looking at? How is the camera...
directing our attention versus the person who's speaking at the moment. As an audience watching it on a stage, we can sort of see the whole thing at once and we can sort of pick an actor to focus on and sort of see what they're doing. But you get a sense of everything. And cameras by their nature are going to limit us down to looking at one thing. And so somebody's going to be on camera and somebody's going to be off camera for their lines. It's just a very different thing. I
I don't know if you're ever planning on adapting Cult of Love into a movie. I am, yeah. And so it'll be terrific. But obviously you're facing these real challenges and looking at sort of how... There's times where we have eight characters on stage. I mean, you have a lot of people in scenes. Yeah, there's 10. I think actually in this scene, there are 10 people on stage. Crazy. Yeah. And so it's just really different challenges. And...
Our expectation of how long we can be in a scene is much longer on the stage than it is in a movie. So these scenes would be, it's possible. You could find a way to sort of just to play this all kind of in real time. But our expectation as audiences is like, oh my God, we got to cut to something else. We got to get out of this space when we're in these things. Yeah.
These are all of the things you're thinking through. You know, dinner table scenes are a nightmare. You know, they just, they do become so static and you have to jump the line like, you know, 34 times or something like that. However, I do think, yes, I do think it's possible. I think that the bear episode did it rather well. And I think that the first episode of, um,
The second season of Fleabag also did it really well. So I guess what I would say is that it really would be about your editor. Like, it would really be about, you know, having a lot of options for him to, or her, to whittle it down into something that was as exciting. But I agree. I think this would either have to be massively choreographed, like these, like, one-take scenes,
things that everybody is doing now, like the studio and adolescence.
You know, you'd either have to do that. We talked about that on the podcast recently, just how thrilling they can be, but also how baked in all your choices are and how, I mean, it's the opposite of what you're describing with the editor having a bunch of choices. You're just basically taking all the choices away. But maybe that's the closest to the experience of being in a theater is that theater is all one continuous take. It's just you're in one continuous moment the whole time. And maybe that's the experience you want to get out of this.
I would just argue I don't know how immersive one-take things are. Yeah. I just think, I don't know. I mean, certainly there are many people who watch Adolescence, for example, which is an excellent show. Yeah. There are many people who watch that and probably don't notice that it's all in one shot. Yeah. But I don't know. I mean, there's just...
I've said this before, but in theater, the audience is wondering what's happening now. And in film or television, they're wondering what's going to happen next. Oh, wow.
Yeah, so I think your point is that it's impossible to drop in that immediacy and the ecosystem and all of that stuff. And I would agree, you know, that adapting Bachelorette meant that it had to have a plot because Bachelorette is kind of plotless. It's like, again, you're right, like the characters care about things and they're pushing towards something and they all have arcs and they all have actions that have consequences, right?
but Bachelorette, the film, had to be about fixing her wedding dress, the prize wedding dress. That had to be the thing that kicked them out of the room and into New York City. Otherwise, the audience would, I think, pretty quickly sort of tune out in a way. Yeah, they're about, I think audiences in a film or a TV episode come in with an expectation that
early on, you're going to establish what the goal is. Like, what is the contractor signing with me that we will pay this thing off by the end? That's correct. Yeah. And it's just different. It's just a different relationship you have with the audience. And they really have clear expectations. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. One of the promises you made with the audience early on in Russian Doll was that you would pay off the answer to what was actually happening with these time loops. Because Russian Doll, the concept is she keeps repeating the same moments and no matter what happens,
if it falls through at the end. I was doing a little research and I found your explanation of sort of the time loops at the end and sort of, I was wondering if you could sort of synopsize down what it was you were trying to make sure the audience got out of the metaphor you're using with the orange about sort of like what the time loops were and what was really going on. Wait, what did I say? What did you see? What did you see? Who knows, right? Near the end of Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne's character picks up a rotten orange at the market and sort of explains the
These time loops are sort of evidence that there actually is a solution to this because it's rotten on the outside, but the reality is still on the inside. Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, no, I remember. I just wasn't sure what I said about it like, you know, six years ago or whatever. It's like, I'm sure I said something very smart then, you know, like, well, Russian Doll, I think, I just think it's really helpful if anyone is kind of looking to dissect that first season differently
I would just say, like, the way we started was with the character. We did not start with, here's how we're going to circle the drain. So it...
It had to be somebody who was struggling with her own mortality, but in a way where she's not talking about it, if that makes sense. I just wanted to write a show about a woman that was going through an existential problem rather than a tactile problem. Like, who do I marry? What job do I take? Oh, I'm being chased by this guy. Yeah.
I've got to solve the case, you know? It just felt like what female protagonists are truly, truly just based in I'm having an existential crisis about my own mortality and whether or not the choices that I have made up until this moment are...
adding up to anything worthwhile. So I think what then happened was, if I'm remembering correctly, it was how do you externalize that? And that really, for me, came from the seven deadly plays, right? Like, how do you externalize and physicalize envy? You know, that's a thing that happens in your mind. How do you put it into an active...
So the sort of circling of the drain for Nadia, which, you know, if you haven't watched the show, it is Groundhog Day. But in addition to being Groundhog Day, each loop gives you an evidence of things, like you said, disappearing. So it's not just I'm going through the same day. It's I'm dying continually. And each time I die...
something is taken away from me, something, you know, some aspect of it. And we did kind of plan out, if I'm remembering correctly, it was like, you know, animals go at this time, fruits, vegetables, and flowers go at this time. You know, other people start disappearing here. So that was, it was like almost, it was the shell, really, of the real story.
you know, kind of made the, it was like a medicine, right? Like that you're trying to get somebody to take. If you put it in a gel cap, you know, it's easier to take down, you know? Like, so I think that the premise of that was essentially a gel cap for... Yeah. What you're describing in terms of like needing to physicalize the problem, the crisis is a thing kind of always wrestling with as...
screenwriters, stage writers, is that there's this feeling you have about the world or how reality is functioning and you need to find some concrete way to put a handle on it so you can actually move it around and talk about it in front of things. And so,
In the case of the Russian doll scene, she's picking up an orange and she's describing sort of what this actually really means. Right. And without that, then you're just having a conversation about an abstract philosophical thing. There's no doorknob to open the door. It's just like you're pushing against it and there's no way to get it to open up. And there's no way to have...
a conversation or to see anything change about the issue you're grappling with. Yeah. And I think that, like, listen, I don't mean to devalue that container within the story, but the way we talked about it in the writer's room...
Of course, there was the temptation, right, to be like, oh, the reason this is happening is X. You know, the reason that this happens is, I don't know, there's some sort of... Yeah, she ran over a magical cat or something. Yes, yeah, yeah. There's some sort of thing. You know, I think Severance and Lost are a really good example of this. Like, Puzzle Box shows, they ask the question, like, what's really going on? And who is pulling the strings? And...
you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I just didn't find that super interesting. I thought that the time travel movies that I found really interesting were, of course, Groundhog Day, which is totally based on morality. It has nothing to do with, like, it's absolutely the universe just teaching him a lesson. And, you know, Back to the Future, which, of course, it has...
and the time machine and gotta get back and all of that. But truthfully, the reason he's there is to get his parents together and to learn the lessons that he learns. It really isn't like...
why is he disappearing? Let's go find out. You know, like, we get it. He's disappearing because he's being erased from existence because his parents aren't going to get together. We don't need to know why this happened then and this thing. It's like very quickly in Back to the Future 2, like the alternate 1985. They just explain it really quickly. I mean, I am obsessed with Back to the Future. It's a perfect movie as far as I'm concerned. I think Robert Zemeckis was just cooking so...
so hard in that movie. He explains time travel in 90 seconds. Wow.
In this day and age, that would be three scenes of explaining time travel. It's all one shot. It's just Doc coming into this thing. Or actually, it's overs for that. But there are other times where he's just, you know, he... Oh, my God. Sorry. I'm going to go on a tangent about Zemeckis and how he blocks actors and then how his camera moves work. But I'm not going to do that. I just think that those types of time travel are just more interesting to me.
I felt that the orange moment that you're talking about really just, again, metaphorically meant that even as you don't change, the world keeps going. So, you know, you can either let go or be dragged kind of thing. So she was just going to keep dying until she...
acknowledged, you know, the more, again, more moral psychological issues, which is, you know, the little girl at the end of episode seven, you know, represents an inner child and a love that needs to be given to herself that never was by the world around her. So as the world closes in and, and
in this very intense way of threatens her mortality. At the same time, she is confronted with the fact that the rest of the world or that timeline wasn't
will continue to go without her. Did that answer your question? It did. And beyond it. Yeah. Oh, okay, good, good. I wanted to get back to something you said about the writer's room. It's not that you weren't curious about what's going on, but like you didn't want to establish that as being the central question because if it's a show about like what's actually really happening, then that's what the audience is going to be expecting an answer for and they may not be
paying as close attention to the things you actually want them to focus on, which is her growth and what she's actually looking for and what she's actually needing to achieve. And so I think by not foregrounding that question, you also let the audience, you know,
follow you to the places where you actually really want to take them. Yeah, I think... That's a good insight. Yeah, I think like a really good way of describing it and sort of coming down to the central question of the first season was we don't want the audience to be asking what's going on. We want the audience asking how is she going to get out? Exactly. Like that's the interesting question. And I think that...
You know, as much as I enjoy watching Lost and Severance, which I do, by the way, the sort of going into this space of there's really a cult, you know, that's pulling the strings or running this thing. And there is really a, you know, Alice and Janie had two kids. You know, like, it just feels like answering the question or attempting to answer the question of what's really going on was just not the intention of...
that story of Nadia. We have two questions from listeners to answer, which I think you are uniquely well-suited to answer. So Drew, can you help us out with Liz's question? Sure. Liz writes, I'm a professional classical musician working on a pilot set in the classical music world. Ooh, fancy. Ha ha ha.
I have several action sequences that I've choreographed specifically to a given piece of music. For instance, this punch has to land right on beat three of measure 14. Should I be including these details in the script itself, or would they be notes for a director and or editor later down the line?
I think you're a perfect person for this because not only do you care about Zachary Quinto saying, mom, the same way at the right cadence, but we haven't really talked about it. Cult of Love is not a musical, but it's like the most music I've ever heard in a play. It's a very musical family that plays instruments and sings live the whole time. So what's your instinct for Liz here with her music cues? I think you have to put them in the script. Yeah, you just have to. The director and the editor...
will make their own decisions, not in a bad way, but once the script is turned over to the process of production, mentioning the song in the action line versus...
this is where it lands in the first movement or whatever, I think that you have to do it. Now, the caveat of that is do your best to streamline it. If the action is happening on a particular sequence, like, you know, you're referencing, I don't know if you're referencing a track, you know, you can say like, it's Beethoven's whatever by such and such and this album, and then your action lines should be really sick. Yeah.
Yeah. Because I do think people will be intimidated by that. That's the caveat is that I do think that, you know, executives or producers may read that and go, oh gosh, this is so prescriptive. But, you know, there will be somebody that reads it and thinks, God, I believe in this vision. This is cool. And I think you'd rather that than somebody, yeah,
yeah, taking it over. I agree. So I haven't read Todd Field's script for Tar, but I have to believe that he's specifically mentioning exactly what piece that she's conducting because it's essential to that story. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I haven't read it either, but he must have done that. I wonder if like the Bernstein movie too did that.
I suspect it did. I think Liz could also try, and this is the thing I ended up doing for the Big Fish musical script because we had to send it around to some people who wouldn't know the actual tracks that were previously recorded, is you can now, in Highland and other apps probably too, include links that actually link out. So the PDF will link to a track you have on Dropbox or someplace else or Spotify. And
I wouldn't do that for everything, but for something where you actually need people to hear the real music that goes with it, it's an option there. Because specifically for the piece of classical music, you can like put the full name of the thing in there. The odds that someone's going to find that are very, very low. And so if you need to hear a specific thing, I put a link in there.
Oh, a link is a great idea. Yeah, a link would be really good to like listen while that's happening. The only other thing I would say is like maybe think outside the box about how to write it. Meaning like if you write music and can read music, the reader will not, you know. But if you wrote it like a musical where instead of dialogue, the action lines are underneath each thing, at least...
well, one, it would look pretty. And two, I think people might be really intrigued by that. It might also be a terrible suggestion. But I think, you know, if this is really important to you, try to think outside the box in terms of how to present it. Absolutely. Just the way like stage musicals, they have both the script and they have the score that has the stage directions and dialogue in it too. So providing a supplemental piece of material there, it could just be surprising for people in ways that's interesting. Yeah.
All right, a question here from Richard. What's the longest draft you'd send to a friend for notes? Is there a sliding scale of pain, or rather page count, that you'd be willing to inflict on a best friend? What about a friend or a writer's group? Of course, I know never to send a professional contact like a rep or producer a bloated 140-page draft.
Leslie, what's your instinct? Do you send long stuff to people to read? I mean, when do you like to show people stuff and how early in the process will you show it? Yeah, you're right, love. It's like 90 to 100. I do think that...
for a first draft anywhere between 100 and 150 is okay because you can say in a caveat it's too long but there's a lot of stuff in there that i think i'm curious about what you think i should cut like i know it's too long but i don't know where to make these changes you know 120 if you consider one page as a minute that's two hours that's a decent script i
I write pretty short scripts. Yeah, and I keep an eye on the page count for sure. But then you asked something else, John, about the, was it about the first drafts or the? Yeah, how early in the process do you like to share what you're writing with people? And who are the trusted people you love to read early stuff? I would say like very close to the first draft.
I will do a reading with actors, like pretty close. Like I would make sure like stuff that was really wonky. I'd be like, but what's fun about that is that because all of my friends are actors, I don't want to have anything embarrassing there. So anything that I feel like that would be stupid, you know, like I'll take that out and it kind of forces me to be a little bit better at my job. But that's, I try to get a reading as soon as humanly possible. They
They also have good feedback. Like, I have to say, like, the actors will have really good feedback. I mean, if they're trusted people, they won't be like, well, I just don't get it. You know, like, they'll say, I really loved this part. I didn't really understand this scene. Like, is it supposed to be this or that? And so...
you know, getting the direction from them. And then, yes, once I do that, of course, I will send it to either a, yeah, a trusted friend or I have a manager that I really love, Michael Sugar, and so I will send him stuff.
as soon as I can. So, yeah. A question for you. Is it ever awkward that you're having friends who are actors read through stuff, but they may not be the people you actually want to be in the project itself? Does that ever become an issue? No, that's a good question. Tell me about that. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, when I was working with Iyama, um,
and we did readings, it was sort of unspoken that the people I was having read, because it was an actor-based company, it was unspoken or explicit that the people reading those lines would be the actors that would eventually do the show, for sure. When I do more casual readings, especially if screenplays, just to be super blunt, we will try to get the most famous person that we can. Yeah.
Who's right for the part? But, you know, like the financing will be based on the profile of the number one and number two on the call sheet. So I think, you know, a lot of actors that I know who are brilliant theater actors, like understand that that's how the world works. It becomes more difficult when actors have done the production of the play and then the play gets, you know, moved to a different medium. That's that's different.
All right, it's time for our one cool thing. So my one cool thing this week is Arthur Aaron's 36 questions. I think I've heard about these before, but I saw an article in New York Times about it. And then I went through and actually found the original study. So Aaron was a psychotherapist, I think, who was really focused on like how people connect and sort of what are the ways to get people to draw closer connections. And so we did
put together strangers and have them talk through this list of 36 questions that escalate as they sort of go along. And you do reveal a lot about yourself in the course of them. So some of the sample questions are, number seven, do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? Number eight, name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. The partner being the person you're talking with.
Number 30 is, when did you last cry in front of another person or by yourself? Number 33, if you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone and why haven't you told them yet? So there's 36 of these and there's actually in the study that we'll link to, there's also a whole bunch more questions there. They're good icebreakers for human beings, but they're also really great questions for characters to be
I think if you have characters who you're trying to get inside this character and you are just doing some free writing, having your characters answer some of these questions would be a great way to get some insight into what's happening inside their head. These people who don't fully exist in your brains yet. So Arthur Aaron's 36 questions.
My God, that's so, should we answer them right now? You did Russian Doll. So do you have a secret hunch about how you will die, Leslie Hedlund? I've always thought, you know, cancer, you know, just, you know, it's how most of us go. And my dad is Alzheimer's. He died and he was very young. He was 64. So it's something that I would never want to have happen to me. So I hope not that.
The last time I cried in front of somebody was last night. So that's an easy answer. Last time I cried in front of somebody was, it wasn't full on crying, but it was Misty. A couple of weeks ago on Survivor, there was like a sort of heartbreaking moment and said that that may be Misty. Drew is smiling. He knows what it was, I think. Oh my God. Yeah. So a young woman with autism who sort of, who had a meltdown and then
a guy on another tribe sort of knew what was going on and sort of got permission to sort of intervene and sort of talk her down. And then she told everybody sort of what her situation was. And it was really well done. It was very heartwarming. Oh my God. Yeah.
Unless you have something to share for us as a one cool thing. Yeah, in classic fashion, I'd love to do two things. That's absolutely fine and good. Yeah, just breaking the rules already. I just read Making Movies by Sidney Lumet. I just had never read it. I've never read it. Oh, it's wonderful. It's short. You know, you can finish it in a day probably or like a couple of days if you're busy. It's a real handbook. Like it really tells you like,
This is the script stage. This is pre-production. You hear all my experiences with The Verdict and Orient Express. Like, here's how I behave on set. This is how I do takes. This is who this person is, and this is who this person is. Like, it's just so... Like, I wish I'd read it before I made my first movie. So I think that it's like a real... It's not...
I guess instructions, but like very like handbook, I think is better. And then I, again, I'm just now reading Alexander McKendrick's on filmmaking, which is much more of a textbook. It's kind of harder to get through, but it's really, really cool and asks many, many questions about specifically how to create a narrative that is in the medium of film and
That, you know, like I was saying, like plays, you're wondering what's happening now, films, you're wondering what's happening next. So his whole, he defines drama as anticipation mixed with uncertainty. So he's always kind of pushing. He has a great way to do outlines in there, you know, but it is more like reading a textbook. You have to like get through a chapter and then put it down, but...
Yeah. So my very first film class ever was at Stanford and we had like film making textbooks. And I just remember being so technical in a very sort of like, here's how the film moves through the gate. And also here's how we tell a story at the same time. Yeah. There's a very specific era of those things. Just like, yeah, you were learning a whole new craft and it was all sort of new. And I think we're now in a place where we,
treat those as such separate disciplines and we don't really think about the technical requirements of movie making at the same time we're thinking of the storytelling goals of filmmaking. No, I agree. I agree.
That is our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Ciolelli. Our outro this week is by Alicia Jo Rabins. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is 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. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email that you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and 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 keeping up on plays versus keeping up on movies. Leslie Hedlund,
Such a delight talking with you. This was absolutely a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on Script Notes. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for asking me, John. I'm really honored, which is kind of a goofy old word, but it really was lovely to be here and I feel like I'm in really awesome company. So thank you. Thank you. Come back anytime.
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