How to Use Character Archetypes Without Tropes

Prologue

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 756 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Since the dawn of storytelling-

Craig: Oh my.

John: -there have been archetypes, characters whose essential nature can be distilled down to their function. Then in the 20th century, we got scientific, with personality taxonomies like Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams, and the Big Five. Today on the show, Craig, what aspects of archetypes are actually useful for writers? How do we move beyond shorthand to create complex characters? We’ll look at one tool created by a previous Scriptnotes intern to do just that. We’ll also answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for payment members, I want to talk about screens and projectors, how we’re watching the things that we make.

Craig: I can’t wait for that.

John: I’m excited to do it. First, let’s talk about the box office, Craig, because we have now hit an all-time record for box office.

Craig: We back. We back.

John: Back in February, in Episode 722, we said that “some people are quietly predicting that it’ll be one of the biggest years at the box office.” That prediction was correct. The summer 2026 box office, domestically, set an all-time record with $4.76 billion from May 1st through Labor Day.

Craig: Huge. Mostly the Sheep movie.

John: Mostly Craig’s Sheep movie.

Craig: Mostly Sheep Detectives.

John: Sheep Detectives.

Craig: I’d say it’s like 90% Sheep Detectives.

John: Honestly, without Sheep Detectives–

Craig: It would have been nearly the same number. (laughter)

John: That’s not it. Everything helped. It narrowly beats the 2013 record.

Craig: Okay, then we helped in that.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: We put it over the edge of 2013. This is enormous.

John: It’s great.

Craig: It just proves that what we said was true. It took longer than I think you and I thought it might take. For some people, their faith might have started to wane that perhaps the movie business was always just being held aloft by some sort of spit and string. When COVID hit, it died permanently. No. It’s like they rediscovered the movies, and they rediscovered it was fun to go, and boom, suddenly it was a thing, and in no small part fueled and helped by social media because it became a thing to do again, and it’s back. Plus, there were some fantastic movies this year. Awesome.

John: Which is great. Back in February, we were talking about the things we assumed could be giant blockbusters. We knew that Devil Wears Prada was going to be coming out.

Craig: Odyssey.

John: Odyssey.

Craig: Hail Mary was expected.

John: Hail Mary also sort of primed the pump.

Craig: It sure did.

John: It was a giant movie, and people were like, “Oh, yes, I’m going to go to the movies. I’m a person who goes to the movies.”

Craig: Yes, and I have a good time at the movies, and it’s a wonderful communal experience. Then you had movies coming out of nowhere that just backrooms and obsession that just added rocket fuel to the whole thing.

John: Yes. What I love about it is, yes, we had our Spider-Man, which became the biggest movie of all time.

Craig: Why this Spider-Man? I don’t know why this Spider-Man.

John: It’s very good.

Craig: I think it’s a good movie. I just don’t know why this particular Spider-Man as opposed to the last Spider-Man. It’s the same Spider-Man. Anyway, regardless, great. Thrilled.

John: Thrilled. I’m thrilled we have some big movies coming out through the end of the year. Listen, some of this was we had things that were delayed and knocked off, of course, so some bigger movies got put together, but it’s also just a reminder that there’s going to be obsessions, there’s going to be backrooms, there’s going to be surprises, and releasing things in theaters is a chance to just make a bunch of money. I just like that for our industry.

Craig: It’s fantastic. For the people who are our streamers, who do both, so not television-only streamers, but people who have the options of putting things in theaters, this begins to put even more pressure on somebody like Netflix to stop just pointlessly holding their breath and going, “I don’t want to.” It doesn’t hurt the Amazon Prime video business to have Hail Mary in the theaters for eight weeks.

John: Good Lord.

Craig: It just doesn’t. It helps them, obviously. Filmmakers are going to want to go to places that do that as opposed to somewhere that’s like, “Hmm, here’s a week.”

John: Netflix has announced they are going to start reporting domestic box office on things, which is great.

Craig: Great, but they have to put movies in theaters.

John: Yes. They are already going to be doing Narnia in theaters.

Craig: For how long?

John: Longer than they probably would have before this.

Craig: The deal at Amazon is, no matter what, we’ll give you 45 days in the theaters. Exclusive. That’s the minimum. To me, somebody like Warner Brothers that just makes movies and then they go to whatever HBO, is it back to HBO Max?

John: Yes, HBO Max, it’s called that.

Craig: Is that what it is again? Warner Brothers will leave movies in there for three months if it’s doing well, if it centers and it’s going great. You just keep it out there, and then you put it on the service. That’s the old way. We’re going to return to the old way because it worked, and it worked really well.

John: It did work. It made people a ton of money.

Craig: Yes.

John: People are going to write in saying, “Oh, it’s because of inflation, so the numbers are higher.” Sure. Yes, ticket prices went up. Yes, ticket prices went up, but also admissions went up. The actual number of butts in seats was higher than before.

Craig: Forgetting, oh, we’re going to compare it to 2013. Forget all that. Just compare this year’s admissions to last year’s admissions. It’s probably not going to even be close. You could tell that people were showing up in droves. I don’t care about the specific, this is the “biggest” or whatever. I’m sure 1943 had a bigger summer or whatever. Well, maybe not that year. Let’s go with ’39. Great year.

John: Absolutely. Because people wanted air conditioning.

Craig: Well, people wanted to not die in the war.

John: That’s true. Yes. This was the summer that I finally got AMC A-List. A-List is where you pay a certain monthly fee, and then you can see as many movies as you want. I saw a ton of movies.

Craig: MoviePass? (laughs)

John: Well, MoviePass was what broke the seal on that, but it worked, and God bless it. It got more people sitting in theaters.

Craig: How much money does it cost?

John: AMC A-List, I think it’s $30 a month at this point.

Meredith: $27.99.

John: $27.99. Makes sense.

Craig: $27.99, and you can see as many movies as you want.

John: You can see up to three per week.

Craig: Oh.

John: That’s a lot.

Craig: Okay. As many movies as you want.

John: Basically, yes.

Craig: Basically.

Meredith: It’s city-specific too.

John: Here in Los Angeles too.

Craig: Oh, I see.

John: The other thing which we did this year, AMC A-List has the most confusing interface for what’s called entourage. Basically, once you’ve added your friends into your entourage, when you’re buying tickets, you just go, you click, bloop, bloop, bloop, and those people, you’re getting tickets for them as well. It shows up in their phone-

Craig: For free?

John: -if they are already A-List members.

Craig: Oh, I see. If all of you are A-List members, you can just sort of– AMC is smart. Okay, MoviePass never made sense because they don’t own movie theaters. AMC owns the theaters. They don’t care about you and your ticket price. They want you to buy soda and popcorn. It’s just obvious. The more I think about it, the crazier MoviePass gets. The crazier, I can’t believe– They’re still trying, aren’t they?

John: They’re still trying.

Craig: Oh, sweet summer child.

John: Yes. I went to see a movie with Megana Rao, our delightful producer.

Craig: The greatest. No offense. No offense, but she’s the goat.

John: Yes.

Meredith: No offense taken.

Craig: She’s the goat. You know what you can do to get you somewhere to go. You got to hit that level.

John: To just be able to sort of, I heard her text, like, “Hey, should we go see this?” Great. I got tickets for the three of us. Done. It’s in her phone. It’s how it should be.

Craig: Beautiful.

John: AMC is so frustrating because they show a half an hour of ads beforehand. Now you just learn to–

Craig: Just go a half an hour later.

John: Exactly. Everyone wins.

Craig: We’re of a generation where getting to the movie theater on time was actually stressful because if you show up and you’re not on time, because there was only– There was like they would show two or three trailers and that was it. There were no ads. There was nothing. It was just, “Here’s two or three trailers, and now we start the movie.” It was panic. Now, it’s a little bit like stoppage time in soccer. No one knows how much time is at the end of the game that they’re just sticking on. No one knows how much time is in the beginning of a movie before the movie starts. Is it half an hour? Is it 45 minutes? What is it?

John: AMC started saying 25 to 30 minutes.

Craig: That’s insane. It’s insane. They’re all bad. Have you ever noticed that? I’ve never seen one– I’m like, bad comedian. Have you ever noticed this? I’ve never seen one ad in front of a movie where I went, “Huh, good ad.”

John: It’s mostly trailers of AMC. To their credit, they’re mostly trailers.

Craig: Trailers are fine. I’m talking about the other garbage.

John: No, there’s not a lot of other garbage.

Craig: They sound so cheesy.

John: There’s the Coca-Cola ad, which is now its own parodyable thing.

Craig: Why does Coca-Cola need to advertise? Is there someone that doesn’t know about it?

John: I’ve never heard about Coca-Cola. Tell me about this product.

Craig: Oh, convince me.

John: How do I drink Coca-Cola?

Craig: Convince me to buy that. What? Why? It’s crazy.

John: No. Anyway, we’re excited for the box office to be where it’s at. We’re excited that sometime in the next two years, we’ll have the Cinerama Dome reopening.

Craig: Will we?

John: Yes. That happened while you were in Canada. Sony/Alamo Drafthouse bought it all, and they are going to be reopening that.

Craig: Fantastic. Oh, I can’t wait. What a great venue.

John: They will need to figure out their own good system for how the tickets they’ll do it.

Craig: They will. Hey, great timing for them too, by the way, because movies are back.

John: Movies are back.

Craig: Movies are back. What a wonderful thing.

John: I’m really hoping that if we can make Wolf’s Belly into a feature, I would love for, as a Sony feature at the Dome.

Craig: I assume that’s the plan, is to make a feature out of it. That would be great. Seeing a movie at the Dome.

John: Yes, that’s so good.

Craig: Get a cocktail beforehand.

Archetypes vs. Personality Types

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John: Delightful. Yes. Craig, back in Episode 716, we talked about personality typologies. We went through–

Craig: I remember this. Even I remember this.

John: We talked about Big Five. We talked about Myers-Briggs. You and I were trying to figure out what our four letters were for Myers-Briggs.

Craig: I know what mine are.

John: We talked about Big Five. Big Five, if I remind you, is openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. Those are all frameworks for describing real people, but you try sometimes to apply them to fictional people. It’s like you want them to feel real.

Craig: I never think about this, ever, mostly because I think about characters in extraordinary moments. I think these archetypes would be great for the day-to-day stuff before anything happens. Maybe they’re useful for the first 5 or 10 minutes of a character, but then you see what happens when they’re under stress and pressure, at which point I think a lot of these things begin to break down.

John: I think some of my reaction against, I don’t want to conflate the term archetype too much, because I think of archetypes as being a character’s function within a narrative, function within a story.

Craig: A mentor.

John: A mentor, what are they doing? If a personality type is sort of, why are they that way? An archetype is, what are they doing? What is their actual thing? What are they for in the course of your story? I think what’s crucial for writers to understand is that, yes, characters have functional roles, but you cannot be reduced down to tropes. That’s my concern. It’s like, so often, like mentor, you said mentor. Mentor as an archetype.

Craig: It’s a bad way to start writing a character.

John: Exactly. It’s also partly because no one is just a mentor. No one is just one thing. I think people try to reduce things down to, distill it down to, they’re only that thing. It’s like, but then they’re not interesting because real-life people are not only one thing. You’re a dad, but you’re also a writer and a creator. You’re a mentor to some people. You’re a pain in the ass to other people.

Craig: Many. It’s a bad way to start thinking about a character because character’s utility is, I consider, a meta aspect, meaning what purpose are they serving from a narrative point of view requires you to think about narrative. When I’m thinking about these characters, I’m thinking about them inside of something. They don’t know they’re in a narrative.

John: Exactly.

Craig: I don’t think it’s helpful to think about them in that way.

John: What’s also crucial to understand is that all characters are relational to other characters in the course of the story. You cannot be a mentor if there’s no one for you to be a mentor to. You have to have a student or someone like that, or if you don’t, that could be an interesting character who is a studentless mentor, who has this drive to teach people but no one to teach. Interesting.

Craig: Why this person? Why is this the first person? You think about Karate Kid. Mr. Miyagi doesn’t have a karate dojo. He’s a gardener. He doesn’t teach anyone anything, and he doesn’t want to teach this kid anything. Then he feels a connection to him. He feels something. The why of that is fascinating. People forget. When you think about these movies, and you think, “Okay, I immediately go to Mr. Miyagi because he’s such a classic mentor,” but there’s an amazing scene where he gets drunk and talks about his dead wife and Japanese internment.
This is a complicated guy. Then in the subsequent movies, it gets less and less so because, as sequels proceed, and this is not about the writers, this is about the studios, they misunderstand what the value of these people are, and they think, “Oh, mentor.” That’s the point. Mr. Miyagi doesn’t know he’s a mentor at all, nor should he. Robert Kamen.

Introducing the Character Creator Kit

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John: Last summer, we had an intern. Sam Shapson was our Stark summer intern. Do you remember Sam? I don’t know if you met him in person or if he was only on a Zoom one or two times.

Craig: He was on a Zoom.

John: He was only on a Zoom. He also ended up cutting a lot of the YouTube videos that we started putting out last summer, which were great. One day, he came into the office, and he brought this project he’d been working on, which was a bunch of slips of paper that were cut up with different character archetypes on them. Things like mentor or criminal or things like that. They’re all bound together with rubber band. He was explaining that he works through them as he’s starting to think of a project. He will sort through all these things and think of what of these archetypes actually appeal to him about the characters that he’s thinking about for the project.
He’ll sort through them and lay them out in little piles and move them around. It was his process. I looked at it. It was interesting because what I liked about it was he wasn’t trying to reduce things down to one person. He was saying, like, a character is a constellation of different archetypes. Certainly, things are more dominant than other things, but it wasn’t trying to reduce it down to astrology or to very specific categories or types.

Craig: What was the benefit of doing that?

John: It was for him to think through what functions do people carry in the story? How are we not duplicating functions among different characters? What’s missing also can be really helpful for this as well. I looked at this, and it was really primitive, but there was something interesting about it. It was primitive.

Craig: I hope he’s listening to this. Really, man? Really primitive? It was really primitive.

John: We make Writer Emergency Pack, which is for when you get stuck on ideas and sort of knocking it around. I felt like there was a better version of this to be made. I challenged him to do it.

Craig: This is a very John August thing to do.

John: Absolutely. I see a thing that’s not quite right, and I got to fix it.

Craig: This is really primitive.

John: This is primitive, but there’s something there interesting. As a mentor, I will talk you through it.

Craig: Do what I did. As the perfectionist.

John: Yes. I challenged him to just come up with a better version.

Craig: A better version, and did he?

John: He did. I’m going to show it to you. This is what we’re working on.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: I want him to make this as an extension of Writer Emergency Pack, which is the brainstorming tool we have. We’re in the middle of a story. After months and months, he came back with a better prototype, and now we’re on our second prototype. What I like is this is a thing that generally does not exist on the market. There’s things that are a little bit more astrology or super Jungian in a very abstract way. I wanted something that was really concrete. Let me give you these. Let’s go through these. We’re calling this Character Creator Kit. Describe what you’re seeing on these cards.

Craig: I’m just going to pick any card. Here we go. Do I have to keep them in order?

John: No. Shovel them, sort them, do whatever you want with them.

Craig: I’m just going to pull one out… Spy.

John: Tell me about Spy.

Craig: Spy. Keeps their secrets. That’s bolded. Guards what others can’t be trusted to know. That’s in the light part of the card. Then in the darker part of the card, it says, exploits their secrets. Knowledge is power, and now they own you. Then there’s a little picture of an owl.

John: Things have very broad categories. We’re trying, again, not to lock you down into one way of approaching this. I think the best approach that we found is to do what Sam was doing with his little slips, which is that if you’re thinking about a project, just shuffle them, sort through them, and say, “Okay, which of these actually feel like they’re relevant to my project,” and just stack them. I’m grabbing Shapeshifter here. Feels for sure. I have a Vampire. As a Vampire, this might be a thing.

Craig: Oh, you might need that.

John: Tortoise. Slow and steady. Never rushes what matters. That’s the light side of this. The shadow side would be slow and stubborn. They’ll get to it when they get to it.

Craig: This feels great for subclasses for Dan.

John: Oh, totally.

Craig: Oh, look. Look, John, we found us.

John: What are these?

Craig: Perfectionists.

John: Perfectionists.

Craig: Gets it just right. Polishes every detail but knows when good is good enough or never good enough. So obsessed with polishing the details they might never be done, or you could have added, or beats themselves up eternally. Not that I would know anything about that.

John: Here’s what I think is interesting about a perfectionist card is let’s say you had–

Craig: See, I’m trying to perfect it.

John: You’re trying to perfect it. Let’s say you had a mercenary. A mercenary for hire with morals walks away when the job crosses the line. The shadow side is a cold, hired gun, no job, too dirty for the right price. You have that. Okay, a mercenary, but something like what you just had in terms of perfectionist. Well, if it’s a perfectionist mercenary–

Craig: Yes, you start to combo them. I see that.

John: Yes, combo them together.

Craig: Let’s make a combo. I’m going to pull this card out and pull another one blindly. Okay, here’s Guide. I’m going to pull one randomly, and it is Leader. Well, Guide, Leader. That’s an easy one. I’m going to– Let’s pull a different one. Too easy. Let’s find something else. Hero, nor.

John: Oh, how about I’m an addict?

Craig: Okay, great. A guide, addict.

John: That’s a fun one. The light version is stays clean, knows how dark the bottom can be. The shadow of that is consumed by craving, chases the high until there’s nothing left.

Craig: My instinct would be to combine the top of one and the bottom of the other because then you get some good stress, right? A guide shows the way, offers the best road for travelers on their journey, consumed by craving, chases the high until there’s nothing left. You’re making a movie, and you are climbing Mount Everest, and you need a character who’s a Sherpa. A lot of people are just like Sherpa Number One, Sherpa Number Two. You’re like, “Well, what if this guy loves his job, loves to show the way, knows how to get there, also is an addict and is fully on pills and at times has no idea where he is or what he’s doing?” That’s an interesting combo.

John: It is a good combo.

Craig: Or starts to get withdrawal while you’re halfway up the mountain. That’s an exciting thing to do in a mountain climbing movie. Haven’t seen that one before.

John: Absolutely. But also, think about it the other way around. What if their sort of principal thing is that they’re an addict, but they’re also a guide? Basically, they’re leading a 12-step program, but they’re struggling themselves. It doesn’t have to be about drugs itself. It could be about some other thing, some kind of adventure or some kind of thing that they are obsessed with.

Craig: We would flip it around. Stays clean, knows how dark the bottom can be, leads astray, steers travelers off their path into danger. Now you’ve got a guy who’s your sponsor. He’s clean, but the way he stays clean is by just sort of manipulating you into failing. That’s how he feels good about himself. That’s a cool character too.

John: That’s a cool character too.

Craig: I like the light-dark combo vibe.

John: What does that remind you of?

Craig: Irony.

John: Okay. Irony.

Craig: It reminds me of irony. Basically, this is what I’m always looking for is just some sort of sense of an ironic conflict in somebody. It makes them interesting because, you’re right. A guy who is an addict, he lives sober, he follows the plan. That’s a person. It’s also boring. There’s no dramatic value to that. Then, in a sick way, light wants you to fail. That’s very human. That’s very human. That’s interesting.

John: What appeals to me about this way of thinking about things is archetypes that fail are straitjackets. They’re short hands. They’re tropes. They’re bad. As you combine things and realistically look at it, most characters are going to be at least two, but sometimes six different things sort of jockeying for control over how they’re approaching things. It’s great. I also I think there’s a part of their personality that they acknowledge that they know, and there’s a part that they’re ashamed of and they hide. The shadow part of that, to me, is often that the part that they’re reluctant to let other people see.

Craig: To me, the combo makes this– In an early version of The Last of Us, Neil and I had been talking about Joel as somebody who had become addicted to painkillers, to meds. There’s like a little bit of a squib of that leftover because he’s dealing drugs in the QZ, and he’s also taking some and drinking to just make himself go to bed. We just play that off as a just temper. It’s his birthday, and he feels very sad. Sarah died. He remembers it. That notion of basically, he was addict guy. This is a cool way of thinking about things. Then you can get excited, get into a triple. Get into a triple combo.

John: Let’s try something new. There’s 110 cards in the deck, so there’s a lot.

Craig: Oh, my God. I’m going Networker.

John: Networker, great.

Craig: I’m going Muse. I’m going (chuckles) Deity.

John: Deity, correct.

Craig: All right, let’s see what we got here. Ignites transformation. Their glowing presence awakens and inspires. Hold on. I’m going to go down. Frightens the masses. Commands supreme devotion from above the laws of men. Instead of a dark lord, you would have a queen. As treacherous as the sea, and well-connected. Friends in every room. Always knows a guy. (laughs) I have to work on that one for a little bit. You’re both inspiring and terrifying. This is a cult leader, basically. It would be described as an interesting cult leader.

John: Yes, I feel it’s a cult leader. Absolutely. In this case, you picked two of these purple cards and one of the blue cards. As you’re sorting through that, let’s say you’re starting from scratch, you’re just sorting through all the cards. If you ended up with a bunch of the same category in your pile, it’s worth asking why. What is it about those kind of things?

Craig: Just out of curiosity, how did you sort Muse into one type and Deity into another?

John: It was tough to find things that feel like broad categories that are not too reductive.

Craig: Is this the category card right here?

John: Yes.

Craig: The red one is love, empathy, connection. I see. Then the blue one is authority, power, and stature. That makes sense.

John: Talk us through what the general categories are.

Craig: We’ve got creativity, craft, wit, wisdom, knowledge, truth, love, empathy, connection, authority, power, stature, courage, honor, force. This is D&D straight up. Passion, drive, intensity, darkness, fringe, menace, innocence, deference, smallness. I really want to sort these into D&D classes. Wisdom, knowledge, truth, that’s a clue.

John: That feels like a wizard.

Craig: I’m going to go Druid on that one.

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: I’m going to go Druid. Creativity, craft, wit, that feels like a wizard. Love, empathy, connection.

John: Bard, a cleric.

Craig: Bard, I like Bard there. Authority, power, stature is a Paladin.

John: Higher, a Paladin, sure.

Craig: Courage, honor, force. Actually, courage, honor, force, I go Paladin. Authority, power, stature is Fighter. Passion, drive, intensity feels like a sorcerer. Darkness, fringe, menace, warlock. Innocence, deference, smallness. It’s not a rogue. I don’t know what that is. Damn it. I almost had them all.

John: The last one could be like a warlock, where it’s all the weirdness of things.

Craig: Darkness, fringe, menace feels very warlock to me.

John: I understand the instinct to sort of go to D&D categories because we always start thinking in D&D. What’s interesting is that you can imagine a character in a story or character you’re playing in D&D. By combining different aspects of things, because there are warlocks who are sort of the leaders of the party and are charismatic, and there’s also weirdos who don’t talk to anybody, who are hermit-like.

Craig: Which is what we generally do. We rarely play a character that’s just, I’m the most Paladin of Paladins. What’s your character? Honorable. Wants to defend the innocence and believes in her oath.

John: That’s one-dimensional, and that’s the problem. It’s just like they’re doing things, and there’s not actually a thing to play there.

Craig: There’s nothing to play. There’s no playable character.

John: Because there’s no tension between the rest of the group, and there’s no tension within them themselves.

Craig: You want some irony. You want some irony.

John: You want some irony.

Craig: That’s the deal. Or something fun. All right, I like these. These are great.

John: These turned out great.

Craig: Can I buy it?

John: They’re a Kickstarter that starts today.

Craig: Send me a link.

John: I will send you a link. They are $25. We’ll have the first thousand decks shipping by Christmas. If people want to do it, they should click through now and see if they can get that first thousand deck.

Craig: Great.

John: I’m really happy how they turned out.

Craig: They’re well done.

John: Our intern knocked it out of the park. We just have the most amazing interns. Sam Shapson did a great job on these, and we’re really happy with them.

Craig: Nice work. Excellent.

John: Printed in the US, like all of our stuff.

Craig: Printed in the United States of America. Amazing. It won’t be coated in some sort of lead?

John: No. There won’t be any tariffs on them. They won’t be stuck on a boat someplace.

Craig: It won’t be off-gassing something.

John: They’re printed in Florida.

Craig: Oh, God. John, you were so close.

John: I was so close. There’s lovely people in Florida, and they do a great job printing all of our stuff.

Craig: It’s not their fault. What are we going to do with Florida in general?

John: We’re going to love them.

Craig: We’re going to love them.

John: Yes, I like that.

Craig: We just show them love.

John: Yes, show them love, respect.

Craig: Try and behave in a way that we want to be reflected back to us.

John: We’re talking about the rescue animals. They’re rescue dogs.

Craig: They’re a rescue dog that sometimes bites people. We love them, but they’re biters. The entire state’s going to write to us.

John: Yes. I’m looking forward to this. This has actually already been useful for me as I’m mapping out stuff. Obviously, you have a sense of who your main characters are, but when you’re introducing them, the character only appears in one episode, or the minor character, getting them beyond just the function. It’s like, “Oh, they are the henchmen to this guy,” but giving them a specific thing that is their deal can really help.

Craig: I’ll tell you another way that I think this could be helpful. I can imagine myself using it in this way. I probably wouldn’t start with these and go, “I’m going to combo some cards and think of a character.” If I have a character and I’ve thought of that character, it might be interesting to go, “All right, now that I know who this person is and what their deal is, let me see if I can play the game of finding the cards that fit them.” If only because then there might be a couple of other things on those cards that make me think, “Oh, I could also do this, or that’s consistent with this.” That would be an interesting exercise. It’s very cool.

John: We took this to Meg LeFauve’s group. She has a writers’ group. As a demo, we were talking through things. One of the things that Meg said, which I thought was really clever, is she did it for a project. Then she had her writing partner also do a project and see what cards they pulled for different characters.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: It was a good way to discuss how they saw the characters-

Craig: I like that.

John: -which is fun because early on in the process, you may not have the same vision in your head for who these people are.

Craig: Right. You may be seeing it in two different ways. That’s okay, too.

John: This is fun. That’s the discussion.

Craig: That’s the discussion.

Listener Questions on Music and Process

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John: All right. Let’s answer some listener questions. What have you got for us, Meredith?

Meredith: Since we’re talking about process, Trevor writes, “My name is Trevor. I’ve spent the last 25 years scoring music for film and TV here in LA. I recently segued to screenwriting, and I fell in love with it. I wrote and directed and composed my debut project, A Feature Short, which premiered at TIFF last year. I just completed my first full feature screenplay, which is going up to cast. My question, what role does music play for you in your process? In the blue sky dreaming phase, in the actual writing, do you write music into your scripts? Do you create a Spotify playlist to write to? I think of dialogue a lot like music. Wondering how music fits into your creative process?”

John: It’s very important for me. Early on in the process, I will make my Apple Music playlist. These are the songs that feel like they would be in my world. That’s incredibly helpful for getting back in the mood for it, especially if I’ve had to go off and do something else in between. It gets me back into that mind space for it. Other times, I’ll just be listening to music and realize, “Oh my God, that is the thing for this. I get what this is,” and it will inspire other moments. It’s not that there are lyrics or anything. It’s just like, I want to write this scene where that song would go. Does it actually make it into the project? Almost never. It’s a hugely helpful emotional touchstone for what that moment felt like for me.

Craig: I use it a bit differently. I don’t generally create playlists, and I generally don’t play music when I’m writing. Sometimes in a scene, I’ll think, score will go here. Sometimes as a transition, particularly towards the end of an episode, I will say, score rises. I understand this is a different feeling now. I’m going into some sort of, we’re landing the plane and going to credits. Obviously, when there is a need for a specific song, I’m obsessive about it in an almost insane way to try and find the right song. I don’t know. I just think if I’m going to put a song in, I need it to be like, “Why that song? Why there? Why that?” I’m very, very fussy about that.
For The Last of Us, let’s say, if I’m lucky enough to get Baldur’s Gate on the air, those have scores that I pull from, and I use the composer’s. I would absolutely love to use the composer from Baldur’s Gate. Incredible music there. I already have a tapestry I can draw from. For, say, Chernobyl, I didn’t think of any music at all. We just turned it over to Hildur Guðnadóttir and said, “What do we do?” I don’t think Johann or I had any concept of how that should be scored. We just didn’t know. It felt vaguely unscoreable. Then she was like, “Hold my beer. Hold my Icelandic beer. Watch this.” It was wonderful.
That’s also good to just say, “Hey, we actually don’t know,” and to let somebody go to town and play around and invent. What I’ve found is it’s scores like that we will tend to go to when we’re editing as temp score. The where did that come from score, that’s fun to find those things by creating space for the composer.

John: Just this past week, I heard a track and was like, “Oh, well.” I flagged that I might totally do that. I was looking up the composer, and it was Max Richter who you used on The Last of Us.

Craig: We used him on Last of Us, but it was like that particular piece had already been used in Arrival and so many things.

John: It’s amazing.

Craig: We just went, “Ah.” I remember talking about it with Tim Good, the editor, and he was like, “Look, the thing is it works.” I’m like, “It does work.” We played game of like, “But it’s been in things before. Should we do it? Is it cheap? Is it derivative?” In the end, it’s like, “Nah, you know what, the thing is I’m crying.”

John: What’s remarkable about that piece, and all of his music really, but that piece in particular we’re talking about On the Nature of Daylight-

Craig: On the Nature of Daylight.

John: -it builds in a way that you think like, “Oh, it’s going to resolve,” and it never actually gets to resolve. It repeats and repeats and repeats and introduces new ideas, but never fully pays them off. You’re just in this agony of suspension.

Craig: It is romantic and so sad at the same time. It’s like hope and loss at the same time.

John: Remind me where you used it in the show.

Craig: There’s a montage where Bill and Frank are having their last day together. They’re doing all the things that Frank asked to do. They’re looking through their town, they’re getting married, they’re feeling the last sunset, cooking dinner. It’s everything that goes through that last day. It ruined me watching. That’s not something like I wrote down and said, “And now, we are ruined.” They found a piece of music. They put it together that way. I just said to Tim, this is just like, “I’m ugly crying.” And if I’m ugly crying, what am I supposed to do? Go, “Yeah, but it was also in another movie.” Ehhhh. You know? I try to not do that. I will say like on needle drop kind of stuff. That’s a piece. That’s an orchestral piece. For a song song, I will always go, “Okay, was this already used in a movie in some sort of iconic way that makes me feel like I’m just doing it, like I’m not putting in I Feel Good by James Brown that ain’t happening.”

John: Or the Peter Gabriel track that’s always in trailers.

Craig: In your eyes, the light– I can’t sing anymore. I will pay money. Or, Red Rain.

John: Returning to the question, I will build these playlists, but I will not play them while I’m actually writing. I’m silent while I’m writing.

Craig: Me too. Silent all these years. Silent all these years. Can’t. No more, or we pay for it. I want to start paying for music. I’m going to start singing full songs. I don’t care.

John: It’s good stuff.

Craig: Screw it.

John: Let’s answer another listener question.

Meredith: Sure. Sarah writes, “As a longtime listener, first-time emailer, I’m fully bought into the script as key to how the film turns out, but had a question about great movie moments that were never in the scripts. Months after watching Project Hail Mary, I’m looking forward to being able to stream so I can rewatch that thematically perfect karaoke scene of Sandra Hüller singing Sign of the Times. Apparently, the song choice was not in the script, and Sandra picked it fairly last minute. Question, what have been the best moments of unscripted alchemy on your projects? Something you didn’t have on the page, but when you added or suggested you couldn’t imagine the project without.”

John: I recently rewatched Go because there’s a new transfer of Go, a 4K transfer that Arrow did. It’s a Blu-ray. It’s fantastic. Everyone should check it out. It’s a sequence in the car as the four guys are driving to Vegas. It’s scripted, but there was a lot of other unscripted stuff that came up on top of it. I just love it. It’s really Breckin Meyer driving that scene in a great way. That’s an example of a situation like that.

I think it’s probably actually similar to what happened with Sandra Hüller in Project Hail Mary, where they knew this thing was going to happen. Phil and Chris had designed that there was going to be a karaoke moment, but they didn’t know exactly what the song was going to be. She came in and knocked it out of the park.

Craig: Yes. That’s an example of a moment where the people who wrote the script and the people who were directing the movie all understood exactly what they would want once they heard it. In this case, this is why it worked. It’s the same people. It’s Phil and Chris.

John: Drew Goddard was adapting that book.

Craig: Exactly. Drew Goddard. They all understood together this would be the right thing to do. It’s not like I say, “You have to do what’s on the page.” Generally speaking, that’s what we do. Kaitlyn Deaver did make fun of me the other day, and it was absolutely reasonable. I was like, “I’m directing this scene.” Like this moment, “Why don’t we like– I think this is a moment where we can ad-lib. Instead of this, you say this, and you say this.” She goes, “So we’re going to ad-lib, and we say what you just told us to say.” I’m like, “Oh, no, I said improv.” That’s because it’s an improv. Oh, my God. I’m like, let’s improv. Then I realized, “Oh, I’m improv-ing.” They’re not improv-ing. I’m improv-ing. I stopped improv-ing.

John: When it’s not an improv, they start really improv-ing.

Craig: When I improv, that’s not them improv-ing. We’ve now called it Craig Mason improv. The idea of Craig Mason improv is he says a bunch of things you should say, and then you say them. That’s on me. I wear that because that’s sort of how it goes. When I was working in comedy, it would happen all the time. Todd Phillips is very, when we would write, it was down to every period, word choice, very, very, very specific. When you have Zach Galifianakis, let’s just start there, things are going to happen. When they happen, Todd is brilliant at recognizing that they’re about to happen and then just going, “Now we’re just doing this for a bit. We’re not worrying about it. Let’s just see what happens here.”
Some amazing things would come out of that stuff. There are two things in Chernobyl, and they’re both in the same episode. They’re in the last episode. Jared Harris is beginning his testimony at the trial. There’s a microphone, and he was just too far from it. Johann whispered because somebody put it in the wrong spot. He pointed to an extra, basically, guy playing. He’s like, “Go in there and just put it closer.” The guy went in and just snuck in there, moved it closer. It was literally not supposed to–

John: That felt great.

Craig: We were like, that felt so real. We were like, “Oh, we’re keeping that. That’s awesome.” The other one, quite beautifully, was in the moment where Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård are having their final real conversation about how it turns out that you were the most important one in all of this. Stellan’s character is contemplating the fact that he’s going to die. This little bug just landed on his leg. He just picked up the little bug and just used that. He was supposed to be looking out, I think, a script, looking out the beautiful land. Well, as it turned out, where that specific spot was, there was no beautiful land.
It’s like a large building and a bunch of garbage. Lo and behold, this bug occurred. Now, if you had planned the bug, it would have been bug wranglers. You open yourself out. Admittedly, I’m not the best. I’m a little bit of a control freak, I guess.

John: It’s fair.

Craig: I’ll let actors say anything they want. I don’t care. If it’s better than what I wrote, I’m always for it. Craig Mason improv. It’s ridiculous.

John: Let’s try one last question.

Meredith: All right. This comes from Kelsey from Richmond, Virginia. “I’m a screenwriter and filmmaker on the East Coast. I have previously lived in Los Angeles to chase the proverbial dream, but fled back to the East Coast during the pandemic. Since then, I’ve been writing, working, and getting involved with the film scene in Richmond. The main reason I’m writing, last fall, I took one of my short film scripts, got a crew together, and made it. I’ve had some small successes at regional and mid-tier festivals, and I’m wondering how to best use this to my advantage toward my writing and filmmaking career.

One of my upcoming festivals, for instance, is in Los Angeles in late September, and I’ll be attending in person. Attendees at these festivals tend to be the filmmakers, which is so great, but I don’t find myself meeting people who can actually help me move on up or find representation. Is the way to do that, just a whole bunch of cold emails or calls? Is a short film by a no-name writer-director going to impress anyone? Thank you for what you do.”

John: We will attempt to answer this question, but I would actually love our listeners to write in who have experience with this, like people who did a short film and actually were able to go to a festival and make that all happen. I have a couple of friends who are touring around with films right now and going to festivals, and they’re winning their awards. There’s been some success where finding people to make that next film, but other times it’s tough. Our listeners will be better at answering this question than we are.
I do think if there’s people who are at all on your radar or you’re at all on their radar in Los Angeles, this will be the time to reach out to them. Hopefully, try to get them to come to the festival or send them to the link so they can see the film and try to just have a coffee with them. It’s probably the best next step.

Craig: Yes, you’re right. I think our listeners brought up a better sense of this. By and large, these things are traps. Sounds like she’s suspicious that this is a trap in a nice way. She’s saying, “I’m going to go out there and then spend money, and then I’ll be there. The only people I’ll be talking to are the people that are trying to get the same attention or thing that I have.” What’s the point of that? Great observation. The movie will do most of the talking. If it is captivating and impressive and someone sees it and thinks to themselves, “Ooh, I can exploit this human being for money,” which is how this works, then they will call.

That generally works better than a kind of whatever sweaty networking we are all taught to do, which doesn’t really work. The movie itself will do the talking. You come out to Los Angeles, it’s a festival that she’s attending, who’s going to win it? That’ll probably be the person that has the 2% chance of being noticed by somebody. That’s how this works. I’m just going off of my basic understanding of the venality of our business. There may be better specifics from people who’ve gone through this.

One Cool Thing

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John: All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, I see you have a follow-up One Cool Thing.

Craig: Yes. John, in our prior episode, we talked a little bit about the absurdity of the lengthy ovations that occur at film festivals, Cannes most specifically.

John: I think it was actually in the bonus segment that we really–

Craig: In the bonus segment. If you don’t pay the $5 a month, you have no idea.

John: Craig’s rant about-

Craig: Unreal.

John: -the length of applause at film festivals.

Craig: Unreal. There’s this thing that happens where somebody runs a movie at Cannes and no matter what, no matter what, there is a standing ovation at the end of the movie that sometimes will get to an insane length. Pan’s Labyrinth, infamously, received a 22-minute-long standing ovation. 22 minutes.

John: Yes.

Craig: People stood there incessantly applauding, which feels like it would become almost an existential crisis-

John: Absolutely.

Craig: -as if we had all gone insane. There’s an article here in IndieWire that talks a little bit about how this all came about. Well, first of all, we understand that it became a competition. It starts like everything. A movie that is beloved gets a standing ovation. Then somebody else is like, “We want a standing ovation, too. Let’s make it last even longer.” Then it becomes a thing to report on. This doesn’t go back very long. If you had been going in the–

John: ’80s and ’90s.

Craig: Oh, yes. It’s not happening. Then it starts to catch on as a marketing thing. If you want to read a little bit about this, it also talks a little bit about how it’s a bit rigged and how it became stupid to the point where I feel like it should just stop.

John: Yes. I’ve also noticed that Sundance doesn’t have that tradition. Sundance, you get standing ovations; it’s nice, but then you actually just get done, and you’re finished.

Craig: Also, a standing ovation is something special.

John: It is.

Craig: You’ve made a musical on Broadway, and you’ve understood now that all Broadway musicals, when they finish, must have a standing ovation.

John: Definitely.

Craig: This is stupid.

John: It is stupid.

Craig: It is stupid.

John: Yet you actually know that it actually goes in the show notes for how quickly–

Craig: It’s stupid. In fact, applause itself theoretically is optional. Way back when, in vaudeville days, you weren’t guaranteed applause. They might throw shit at you. Throw-

John: Cabbages. They came with–

Craig: -cabbages. Always came with cabbages, which, back then, when there wasn’t as much refrigeration, food was spoiling. What do you do with all the spoiled food?

John: You’d throw it at actors.

Craig: Bring it to the theater and throw it at bad actors, which is amazing. Here’s my suggestion for Cannes. If a movie does get a standing ovation, really earns it, at the exact one-minute point, you begin blowing air horns (mimics air horn) until people stop, and then get out of the theater.

John: I worry that it’s only going to encourage them because they’ll hear that, and it’s like, it was just more noise.

Craig: (mimics air horn) There’s 20 minutes of air horns.

John: Maybe just start flashing the lights, like in class when kids misbehave.

Craig: Or release some sort of gas.

John: Sure. Absolutely.

(laughter)

Craig: That’s it.

John: Or snipers.

Craig: Nothing deadly.

John: It’s never–

Craig: Just a nice, calming– like a nitrous. Like, “Ah.”

John: Ah.

Craig: Everyone’s too high to clap anymore, and they just stumble out a little bit confused. That would be nice. Snipers feels a little strong.

John: I don’t know.

Craig: A little strong. I realize, like, “Oh, just release gas into a room,” in Europe is a loaded comment. Let’s not go there. Like a nice, pleasant gas. Just do something to stop this. It seems sick. It actually seems sick and decadent.

John: If we could stop everyone and everyone just say congratulations together, that would feel nice. That would feel lovely.

Craig: Or hey, how about this? We showed up, sat here, and watched what you did without interruption, which is the most indulgent thing anyone can ask anyone. “I made something. Sit here silently and watch it for two hours. Don’t do anything. Don’t talk. You just watch it. That’s enough.”

John: I went to Robyn’s show. Robyn, the singer, very talented singer, was playing at the Kia Forum. In her big song, Dancing on My Own, when it gets to the chorus, she steps away and stops singing, and the lights come on, and everyone just sings the chorus together.

Craig: Everyone can sing it.

John: If everyone in the audience, out of 10, would just sing their congratulations or something for one moment, the moment would happen, it would pass, and then everyone could get about their business.

Craig: Get about your business. I also hate encores at shows. I hate that the whole thing is so-

John: The false.

Craig: -stupid. You’re going to make me just keep applauding for you. The lights haven’t come up. We know what’s going on.

John: Absolutely, and you have not sung the biggest song we know.

Craig: You haven’t sung the biggest song. Exactly. What’s going on here? Why are we doing this? But.

John: But.

Craig: That’s fine, because at least you get more. Then Rush comes out, and they play Tom Sawyer. You get more. The movie’s over. It’s over. There’s no more movie.

John: Yeah. I think they should show an extra scene.

Craig: They should show an extra scene! They said– this is where the irony kicks in. Apparently, before Megalopolis began, the infamous Francis Ford Coppola flop, there was a standing ovation… before it began.

John: Yeah. Everyone’s excited to see a new Francis Ford Coppola.

Craig: No. You sit down-

John: Sit in your seat–

Craig: -shut up. Watch show. Applaud at end for a hearty 20 seconds, then get up and go. It’s enough.

John: Enough, we say.

Craig: Now, this is why you will not see me at any of these places, because I don’t understand their culture whatsoever.

John: My One Cool Thing is LA World. It’s a new podcast from LA Material. It’s hosted by Hayes Davenport, Antonio Cereijido, and Julia Turner.

Craig: Oh, the great Julia Turner.

John: The great Julia Turner. I would steer people towards an episode from a couple of weeks ago, which was The One Street That Explains LA. Craig, what street do you think explains LA?

Craig: I’m going to go with Dwayne Street, the one that goes really up and really down in Silver Lake.

John: I could see that. Sunset Boulevard would be another good choice because it goes–

Craig: Classic.

John: Sure. Wilshire Boulevard. Wilshire Boulevard, we’re right here off Wilshire where–

Craig: Right. Miracle Mile.

John: In that episode, they talk about MacArthur Park, which is a notorious site of a bunch of stuff,

Craig: Sure is.

John: -the D-Line, which runs along Wilshire, and the E. Clem Wilson Building–

Craig: Excuse me.

John: The E. Clem Wilson Building.

Craig: What is the-

John: You never knew it was named that-

Craig: -E. Clem Wilson Building?

John: -but you’ve seen it your entire life. That is at Wilshire and La Brea. It’s that Art Deco building at Wilshire and La Brea that looks like it has a hat on it. It has four billboards at the top of it.

Craig: Oh, yes. This one.

John: I used to call it the Samsung Building because it used to have a Samsung billboard around the top of it.

Craig: Right, the big square-headed building. Now what is it now?

John: It’s in renovation.

Craig: Of course.

John: They’re going to try to turn it into mixed-use residential, which is good because we need some more residential. It’s a beautiful building. I just never knew the history of that.

Craig: Classic LA Art Deco-y, LA noir thing. This was built, I assume, in the ‘40s or ‘30s?

John: Probably the early ‘30s.

Craig: Let’s find out. It was Art Deco, Art Moderne, and it was built in 1929.

John: Oh, ’29. Yes, it’s–

Craig: It’s very LA.

John: Apparently, Deco is actually a very short time period.

Craig: I guess it was.

John: Everything was built in a very limited time. It’s a great, gorgeous building. I had a history of it.

Craig: How do you feel about residing in a building in an earthquake zone in 1929? I assume it’s been retrofitted. A little scary.

John: They’re doing the retrofitting now. In the retrofitting that they have to do for seismic stuff, they’re also hopefully going to be bringing it through to residential because it’d be nice to be, like I said, tower or there’s no other towers right around there.

Craig: That’s true. It’s cool. E. Clem Wilson building.

John: E. Clem Wilson. The history of Wilshire is actually really fascinating because it was desire to connect our downtown with-

Craig: With West LA.

John: -with West LA. Which were just two completely different cities, and eventually everything filled in.

Craig: Also, the idea of the Miracle Mile-

John: Exactly.

Craig: -when the Miracle was like we brought buildings back to it and businesses. It’s actually not that great. It’s not miraculous when you drive down.

John: It’s not. No. It’s not.

Craig: No, not at all. It is a beautiful corridor. The great May Building, which is nowhere in the May Building. The museums along, which are great.

John: The museums are incredible.

Craig: Now, the line that does get you through to Beverly Hills and gets you past there and beyond is very cool that that works now. I’ll tell you what, when I drive here, I drive on Wilshire; I love it.

John: It’s good.

Craig: It’s beautiful.

John: It’s a good street. Everyone, listen to LA World.

Craig: Nice

John: It is the podcast from these things. Each week, they’re talking through stuff that’s very LA-focused. I don’t know if any other podcast does it.

Craig: You can’t get more LA-focused than the E. Clem Wilson building. At first, I was like, what’s an E. Clem? It was like there was a regular-

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: -Clem, and now there’s a battery-powered Clem. It’s the E. Clem.

John: The E is for Elihu or something. What is the guy from Yale that has that weird name?

Craig: He is Elihu.

John: It’s Elihu Clem.

Craig: Yes. Elihu Clem Wilson.

John: Those are names that– we don’t have any Elihus anymore.

Craig: No one says Elihu anymore. Elihu is an Americanization of Eliahu, which is the Hebrew prophet-

John: Elijah, right?

Craig: -we call Elijah or Elihu, but it’s Eliahu. As a kid, I knew Eliahu or Elijah as the prophet who visits you invisibly during the Passover Seder. You must leave a separate glass of wine and a plate for Eliahu, which, as a child, struck me as the worst version of Santa Claus there was.

John: A ghost. Yeah.

Craig: It’s an invisible person that visits you on a holiday, takes something, leaves nothing.

John: Nothing.

Craig: And if you don’t leave something there, theoretically, you’re cursed or something. Not great.

John: We don’t really have Elihus anymore. It’s also weird that Madonna, the pop star Madonna, her first name is actually Madonna.

Craig: It is.

John: No one else is named Madonna. Did you grow up with anybody named Madonna?

Craig: It is a very ambitious name to give someone.

John: Yes.

Craig: However, in Latino culture, calling somebody Jesus is totally normal. Anglo people never name their child Jesus. You name your child Jesus, you’re on drugs, and that kid’s probably going to prison.

John: As well.

Craig: There’s something wrong. Yes, but Jesus makes total sense.

John: That is our show for this week.

Craig: All right.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Meredith Stedman with help from Lauren Loesberg, edited by Matthew Chilelli, and our outro by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. Scriptnotes merch is at Cotton Bureau.

Craig: Yes.

John: If you’d like to see us, not just listen to us, follow us on YouTube and Instagram. If you’d like to read us, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Most of all, thank you to our premium subscribers. You can become one at scriptnotes.net.

Craig: It’s so cheap.

John: So cheap.

Craig: It’s $5 a month.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s still $5 a month.

John: It’s still $5 a month.

Craig: $5 a month.

John: $5 a month. If you pay for it every year, it’s $8 a month if you’re just doing month-to-month.

Craig: Oh, it is?

John: Yes. Who would do that?

Craig: Oh, it’s $8 a month if you’re month-to-month. Why would you go month-to-month?

John: No.

Craig: It doesn’t even make sense.

John: It doesn’t make any sense.

Craig: You know you like the show, right? You’re listening.

John: No surprises.

Craig: How many more episodes do we need to do for you to figure out you like this show? Another 759?

John: Only the premium subscribers are going to hear what we’re about to record about projectors and screens and how we actually watch the things we make.

Craig: I mean-

John: -Craig.

Craig: John.

John: Thanks for a good podcast.

(music)

(extended applause… then AIR HORNS)

Bonus Segment

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John: Craig, you and I make film and TV.

Craig: Yes.

John: People watch film and TV on screens. We’ve talked, I think, in the past; your house has a nice theater.

Craig: I’ve upgraded.

John: I’ve upgraded to a nice space.

Craig: It’s gotten better.

John: Even better than what I saw.

Craig: Even better.

John: That’s right. Yes. You can see things, and they look great and spectacular, and it’s a dedicated room for it.

Craig: Yes.

John: Where are you watching most of your stuff? Because when you’re up in Canada, you’re watching–

Craig: When I’m up in Canada, then I’m watching it usually on my iPad, which is a very good screen when it’s 5 inches from your eyes.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Nothing wrong with that. You’re certainly getting a very– and also, most importantly, it does not default to motion smoothing or any of that crap, which is brilliant. In fact, I’m not even sure there’s an option for that on the iPad, which is wonderful. At home, when I want to watch something, then I go into my special room. I’ve got a laser projector. This is not something that most people are going to have. It’s too expensive. It is. It’s a laser projector. I upgraded my screen. Projection screens, now that we’re into 4K to 8K zone, you need tiny, tiny, tiny holes so you can see everything, and good audio, which is really important.

John: Awesome. Great.

Craig: More important to me even than the screen.

John: The room upstairs where we used to record Scriptnotes now doesn’t have any designated purpose. I’ve got myself a laser projector for there, an inexpensive laser projector upstairs. I’m using it for my PS5 so I can play my games there on the wall.

Craig: Oh, on the wall. That’s great. That’s right.

John: Honestly, really nice.

Craig: If you got a good color, like a light-colored wall, yes.

John: Oh, yes. It’s the white that you see.

Craig: Perfect.

John: It’s working really well.

Craig: That’s great.

John: I think there’s this expectation that projectors are an expensive choice for things. In many cases, they actually are surprisingly affordable.

Craig: Yes. As technology moves along, what ends up happening is things that would have cost a gazillion dollars 20 years ago are now simple commodities that might cost you $300, let’s say.

John: Yes, which is nice.

Craig: If you’re like us, you’re old, your memories of projection will be bad. Do you remember back in the ’80s, the horrible thing that was like the big projection TV with that weird cabinet that came up with the-

John: Oh, absolutely. It was-

Craig: -red, blue, and green lights?

John: -weird projection, yes.

Craig: Horrible. Everything looked like crap, and everybody who bought that thing needed to convince you that they had got– because they knew somewhere in their hearts they had blown it. It was a bad way because there was not enough luminance coming out of those things to make an image that was sharp and bright. It was just big. That’s all it was. It wasn’t a projection like a film projection, which is showing one bright white light through colored film. It was recreating stuff through the three light colors, the primary color-

John: (crosstalk)

Craig: -of creating colors. It just wasn’t very good.

John: It wasn’t very good.

Craig: No.

John: We were coming from a scarcity mindset, like, to get a big screen, that was the–

Craig: That was the only way to get it.

John: Now, just the fact that flat-panel TVs, which used to be like, “Oh, that was a huge splurge,” are just commodity items now.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: It’s wild.

Craig: Absolutely. They are large, and they get the job done. They get the job done. God bless that industry. They’re the correct shape because you and I grew up with almost square screens.

John: Square as you get.

Craig: It was 4:3 ratio, and it was wrong. We have this bizarre thing where we would see movies, and they would have to do pan and scan. Have you guys seen pan and scan? Have you ever experienced this? I don’t think so.

John: It’s when image is wider than what would actually fit on your screen,

Craig: Like for room of view.

John: -and so they’ll zoom in and move around it.

Craig: Yes. You have a square, and you have a movie, and there are two people talking to each other, and both of those people are on the far left and far right of the rectangle. Now, you’re watching this square. What do you do? Because you won’t see them both. What they would do is they would pan the image over, blow it up usually, so they could pan it over, and somebody would say something, and then it would pan over to the other person, which is, of course, not what you want, but that’s what you would get.

Craig: It’s like playing pong, but with actors.

John: There’s the reverse thing, where they took some shows that were made for television back then, like Gilligan’s Island, and they started to run the image on a widescreen and just lop off the left and right, but there was stuff on the left and right that is still there that you weren’t supposed to see. Suddenly, there are grips and ladders and flags and stuff where you’re like, “Oh.”

John: Yes, they overscan areas.

Craig: Yes, I’m not supposed to be seeing that stuff at all. Well, that’s solved.

John: It’s solved.

Craig: It’s amazing.

John: Yes, which is good.

Craig: We live in a glorious age that–

John: A lot of people are going to have issues with that statement. (laughs) When it comes to our ability to find screens in which to play–

Craig: Yes, it is. We are living in the best of all times based on projection screen display.

John: While there are still frustrations in terms of, like, “Oh, this format doesn’t fit into this thing,” or “This cable doesn’t get to this place,” we’re better than I think we’ve been in any time in our lifetime.

Craig: Oh, I mean, cable-wise. Just the existence of an HDMI cable. Because back in the day, you hook up a flat-screen TV, you’ve got your component video cables.

John: Yes, component.

Craig: There’s three cables for that. Then there’s an audio cable. There was options for optical audio. There were so many different cables, and it had to run into a thing and blah, blah, blah. Now, you have one glorious cable that carries it all. Congrats to you, the HDMI people.

John: While I theoretically could watch Netflix or other things through my PS5 up there, realistically, I mostly did this for Grand Theft Auto.

Craig: Of course. All of us, except for the two of you possibly. When I say all of us, I mean precisely 50% of us in this room are just living for Grand Theft Auto, at this point. I put my feet one in front of the other every day to get closer to Grand Theft Auto. I wake up in the morning, and I think, “Well, Grand Theft Auto is almost here.”

John: As I close my eyes at night, I think, “Oh–“

Craig: Grand Theft Auto.

Craig: Mike doesn’t play.

John: He doesn’t play at all.

Craig: No. I know.

John: I allow myself one-hour increments to play a thing. I set a little one hour on my watch, and then-

Craig: Oh, no, no. Oh, John-

John: -I walk away.

Craig: -no, no, no, no, no.

John: No.

Craig: No.

John: It has to be all the time.

Craig: John.

John: How much will productivity drop across industries when that game ships?

Craig: I had to say, for me, none, because that’s all I do in my spare time. I work, and then I play a video game, or I do puzzles. Yes, there’s going to be a lot of people calling sick that day. No question. Across retail and stuff like that, there’s going to be a real impact. I don’t think people understand what’s about to happen with that game.

John: It’s the Super Bowl of popular culture.

Craig: Oh, God, it looks so good.

John: It looks great.

Craig: It looks heartbreakingly good. It’s also a nice change for– because I’ve been playing so much Baldur’s Gate, which is so much about the level of hidden stuff and potential differences in things. The replayability is insane. GTA is always replayable, but there isn’t a lot of super-duper hidden-secret-y stuff where you’re like, “Oh, if I combine this ring with this cloak and this weapon, look what happens.” It’s not like that. It’s just more the size of it-

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: -and the ability to run around and be crazy and explore the world. I can’t wait.

John: It’s that part, too.

Craig: Yes. Big screen on that. I actually will not be playing that on my big, big screen because it’s too big. For that one, I just use a regular TV. I got a couch right up there. Boom. It is not in its own room with the door closed. I told Melissa, “Hey, you’re going to see a lot more of me because I’m going to be right there-“

John: Absolutely.

Craig: “-right at the top of the stairs.”

John: Are you a headphones person or are– with PlayStation 5, I’m headphones into the controller so that I’m getting good stereo out of it?

Craig: I might this time, just so that I don’t bother her because the sound is soaked. I might go to that mode this time. It’s just a little uncomfortable for me after a long time with headphones on. I can’t wait, though. Yes, you know what? So many options. Folks, another chance for us to tell you: turn motion-smoothing off. Turn it off. Turn it all off. We’re begging you, turn it off.

John: As we discussed at the top of this episode, box office is up, and it’s huge because the best place to see a movie is at the theater.

Craig: Yes. I don’t care what you have at home. It is nothing.

John: You could, in theory, have a screen as big as a movie theater. You don’t have an audience to watch it with, and an audience to watch it with changes things.

Craig: You don’t have a screen that big. I have a big screen in a home theater environment. It is not as big as the big, big screen in a movie theater.

John: It would be the worst screen in any.

Craig: Correct. It would be a disappointment in any movie theater if you walked in there, you’re like, “Why did I get into this room?”

John: Do you remember Beverly Center used to have movie theaters? There was one theater which had a pillar in the middle of it, and-

Craig: It was brutal.

John: -it was a TV screen.

Craig: It was the saddest thing when you got in there, and you were like, “What happened? Why did this happen to me?”

John: I think it was a Bowling for Columbine in that, yes.

Craig: Yes. It was the kind of thing that you would see in that where they’re like, “Okay, well, if you want to watch this, we don’t think. We’re going to shove them in that room.” I don’t care how good your sound system is. It is nothing compared to those rooms. The amount of speakers in those rooms, the way that they’re tuned up, nah, you don’t have that stuff. The theater is always the best.

John: Well, I’ll also say that there’s a documentary I’m working on that we’ve done two screenings at Vidiots, and they’re a smaller theater; they’re a little side theater. It’s not an amazing rumor, I think, but it’s a chance to see your movie with an audience, and that’s the difference.

Craig: That’s lovely. Oh, listen, watching– We used to take our kids to movies in the park, (unintelligible 01:03:35) on a Sunday night in the summer, rather, and–

John: Not the ideal viewing conditions.

Craig: No, no. It was hot, and it was a big screen, a bad projector, and everybody had a great time because you were together. 100%, but if you’re watching stuff at home, you have options now. Yes, the theater for movies is always the best.

John: Next summer, if you’re in Los Angeles, we do need to go; listeners should come with us to see the movies at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Craig: I’ve never done it. I would absolutely do that. The other one I love doing is the Bowl. You go to the Hollywood Bowl-

John: Oh, my gosh.

Craig: -and they have the orchestra. Oh, John, you know what? In Vancouver, as a present for my birthday, my visual effects supervisor got me a ticket, and we went to go see the orchestral– the full Fellowship of the Ring. Not the extended edition, but the entire movie, accompanied, all the score done-

John: Oh, that’s great.

Craig: -on stage by an orchestra with a choir. Oh my God. (hums melody) Guys, so good. (hums melody) How much do you think I can go before they charge me? (hums melody)

John: I think for orchestral, it’s going to be harder for them to figure it out.

Craig: Anyway, awesome.

John: It really was an impression of that.

Craig: I’m doing an impression. It’s fair use. I think if you just yell fair use, then it’s fair use.

John: It is.

Craig: That’s the rule, yes.

John: That’s the rule.

Craig: Fair use.

John: All right. Craig, thanks.

Craig: Thanks, John.