Learn the 7 forms of conflicts and how connecting to your character’s internal antagonist can provide a bedrock to your structure and the key to your personal wisdom If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/ Learn more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com

This week, Jacob Krueger shares some simple steps toward overcoming the common form of writer’s block and explains how creating manageable goals will reshape the way your mind approaches writing, making it easier to develop a writing routine.

In this podcast, Jacob Krueger analyzes the Season 2 pilot episode of Succession and shares how building a series engine from a personal place of truth will help you create the roadmap for a show that can continue to grow for several seasons.

This week, Jacob Krueger discusses Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and one of the most important skills a screenwriter needs: the ability to develop a distinctive take on historical material or a pitch for a work-for-hire project that makes your approach to a story unique from any other writer.

In this podcast, indie producer and filmmaker Ramfis Myrthil joins Jacob Krueger for a conversation on the business of self-producing: how to properly pitch your project, master the art of following up, attract financial backing and create the right team to make your movie a success.

This week, Jacob Krueger discusses Chernobyl as an example of how to write an essential and effective miniseries, what makes the miniseries format so unique, and how to determine whether your project has the epic scope, relevant theme, visual beauty, and character journey needed to become a miniseries.

In his final Game of Thrones podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses the series finale and the lessons it has to offer screenwriters regarding the importance of compression in keeping your audience engaged and on the edge of their seats until the very end.

This week, Jacob Krueger analyzes Episode 5 and discusses how the three levels of structure - plot, emotion, and theme - need to tie together to create a powerful journey for both your characters and your audience.

This week, Jacob Krueger analyzes Episode 4 and focuses on the importance of revision in keeping an audience connected to your characters by creating a structure that comes from a place of truth.

Jacob Krueger discusses The Battle of Winterfell and the poetry and structure behind writing an action sequence built on the interpersonal drama of the characters within it.

This week, Jacob Krueger discusses the events of Episodes 1 and 2 of Season 8 and shares how you can take an audience along on any journey, but first you have to make them care.

Discover how Poor Things by Yórgos Lánthimos' uses a simple theme to navigate profound questions about identity, the past, and the search for one's authentic voice. If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/ Learn more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com

Jacob Krueger compares and contrasts two Game of Thrones pilots: Season 8, Episode 1 and Season 1, Episode 1, to show you the elements of a successful pilot, and how, as a writer, you can benefit from “saving the best for first.”

For eight seasons, Game of Thrones has attracted and retained a devoted audience. Now drawing to a dramatic finale in Season 8, this week we take a look back at Season 1 and how by building a powerful series engine the show has kept viewers flocking back to this fantastical world year after year.

ROMA: Turning Your Life Story Into A Screenplay This week, we’re going to be talking about Roma by Alfonso Cuarón. Roma is an extraordinary film that harkens back to a different era of storytelling. It’s shot in black and white, despite having a substantial budget. It’s entirely in Spanish. And, in a way, the whole film is a love poem for Alfonso Cuarón’s real-life nanny from his childhood growing up in the Roma section of México City. The film harkens back to a different kind of filmmaking. An age where storytelling was slower, where the pace was different, where shots were longer without so many quick cuts, and where stories unfolded in a more symbolic kind of way. And that kind of structure is quite appropriate for Roma, because, in a way, it is a nostalgic look back at Alfonso Cuarón’s own life. We’re going to look at Roma to talk about how to write a screenplay from real life. How do you look inside of yourself and find those true stories that matter to you? How do you find the shape you want to put those stories into in order to communicate, not the literal experience, but the emotional experience to an audience?  How do you use your real experiences to open up that little piece of your life in a screenplay? What’s interesting about writing from real life is in many ways these true-life stories are actually the hardest stories to tell. One of the gifts we have as screenwriters is the gift of metaphor. If you're Alfonso Cuarón and you're writing Gravity or Children of Men, you can look at those experiences from your real life through the veil of metaphor. You can convince yourself “Hey, this isn't really me!” By using the technique of metaphor, using a work of fiction in order, to tell the truth, sometimes we allow ourselves to actually see the truth about ourselves and our lives more clearly. And, in doing so, we can also help our audiences see the truth about themselves and their lives more clearly. By abstracting just one degree, or two degrees, or three degrees, or twenty degrees from what actually happened, we allow our subconscious minds to start to give us the clues we haven't yet processed in our conscious minds. We start to actually see the truth of our experiences, in a way that our conscious minds shields us from in our daily life. If you have ever been to therapy, you know what this is like. You come in for your first session, and you think you're in therapy for one reason, and then you start to spend time and you realize you're actually dealing with something completely different. This is exactly what writing a film is like. We start with some story we think we’re telling, or sometimes we think, “Oh, I’ve got a great commercial hook...” But then over the course of a year, or six months, or three months, or however long it takes you to write it, you start to realize, “Oh my God, I’m actually doing something very different. I’m actually telling a story about my mother. I’m actually telling a story about my brother. I’m actually telling a story about this thing that happened to me that I can’t make sense of.” That veil of fiction, the way we convince ourselves we’re using fiction, the way we convince ourselves this character isn't really me, gives us a level of safety within which to play. That way we don’t have to deal with the entirety of our past until we’ve done the work to get ready for it. When you start to tell a true life story like Roma, things start to change. It’s just a fact of life that you are actually the one person you can’t see clearly. This is a physical fact. When you go around in the world, you're looking at other people all the time, but it’s only when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror that you actually see what you look like. In fact, most of us, myself included, have a vision of ourselves that’s from a different era of time. I still think that I’m 33 years old! We actually have a vision of ourselves, but when we see ourselves, it doesn’t always match up with the person who’s in the mirror right now. Physically, we actually just don’t see ourselves well. But also emotionally we don’t see ourselves well. It’s extremely hard to look at ourselves. If we could, we would all be capable of change instantaneously. We’d all be capable of being exactly the people we want to be all the time. But there are layers of ego, and self-protection, and fear, and confusion, and conflicting messages, and concerns, and thought processes and belief systems we have to navigate through to actually look at ourselves clearly. In order to survive the things that happen, we put walls around our real self that get in the way of us actually seeing ourselves clearly. So to adapt a true-life story into a film, we must find a way around these walls. Using fiction as a tool is one of the ways we, as writers, get to look at ourselves and heal our wounds or express the beautiful parts of ourselves. Fiction allows us to bypass those filters. But when we start to tell the story that’s “the true story,” things get a lot harder, because now we no longer have the veil. Now we have to start to look at ourselves clearly, and that’s the hardest thing to do. So, one of the places you want to start, as Alfonso Cuarón starts in Roma, is by abstracting to some degree, even within the real story, by giving that story some level of fiction. One of the techniques Cuarón uses is simply to change the name of Roma’s main character. His real nanny’s name was Liboria (she’s actually still alive). He changes her name to Cleo. And simply by making that tiny little change, he gives himself just a little bit more abstraction, just a little bit, one degree further from the true-life story. A trick you can use if the main character is you — and you can see it in Roma — Alfonso Cuarón is a character in the film, but he’s actually even more tangential than the main character. He’s actually off to the side, barely a featured character in the piece. In fact, you don’t even know which little boy he is, but he is a character hanging out there. In Eugene O'Neill’s great play about his family, Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was also made into a really beautiful film, he is finally deciding to confront his father’s narcissism and his mother’s addiction, and he dramatizes the story of all the people in his family except for himself. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, he decides that Gene was the child who died. He actually writes himself out of his own life story in order to be able to tell the story more truthfully. We’re all our own protagonists; we all see ourselves as the protagonists of our own stories, but Cuarón takes that character and slides him just a little bit to the sidelines. He looks at that character just a little bit from an angle, instead focusing the camera on the person who he both loved and underappreciated during this period of his life. If you're ever writing a movie where you're the main character, another trick you can use is to give that character some element that’s very different from you. Find some difference between that character and the way you perceive yourself, something that gives you that one degree of abstraction. You might think finding that one thing that’s different might actually hide the truth from you, but actually, the opposite is true. By finding that one thing that’s just a little bit different, that is just a little bit more abstract, what happens is it actually allows your subconscious mind to start to play and feed you that truth. So, in this case, Cuarón changes his main character’s name. That’s one little trick. He writes himself off onto the sidelines but also uses another technique of amplification. What Cuarón is doing in Roma, you might have noticed, is hitting his symbology not with a little ball-peen hammer, but with a giant anvil. He is hammering, hammering, hammering on his symbology. We don’t get to see this a lot in movies anymore, but in Roma, it is unbelievably effective. For example, we have the symbology of that car that can’t quite fit into the driveway. And then we have the expansion of that symbol when the mother purposefully drives it between those two trucks and destroys the car. And then, we have the next step of that when she slams it drunk into the driveway. Then the next step of that when she replaces it with a new, smaller car. And we start to realize, as we play with and amplify that symbol, that the car is a symbol for the father—the husband who abandoned her—and her anger towards him. And the replacement of the big car with the smaller car is the beginning of the movement back into herself, into building the life she wants to build, rather than trying to fit into somebody else’s walls. Who knows if that car even existed, or if that driveway even existed? In Roma, the car is a metaphor, it’s a symbol, in the same way when Cleo tells her boyfriend Fermín her little secret in the movie theatre and we watch the plane crashing on the screen. This is a symbol; a symbol for the way it feels inside of that character. And so what Cuarón is doing is using these symbols and he’s allowing himself to play, not in a realistic world, but in a heightened naturalistic world, in order to get closer to the truth of what this feels like. He is taking the experience of his true life story and he is translating it into art. There is another level though to what’s happening here because the intention behind Roma actually grows out of the kind of perspective we can only develop over time. Growing up in this little section of México City, Alfonso Cuarón was sheltered from what was really happening around him. He was sheltered even from the Corpus Christi Massacre, which we end up seeing towards the end of Roma. He wasn’t aware of the political events. He wasn’t aware of the real life of his nanny.

This podcast was taken from our vault.  If you are interested in studying Television Writing with Steve our next class is Feb 3rd-March 3rd; you can sign up here. From GoodFellas to Breaking Bad with Stephen Molton Jake: Today on the podcast, I have a special guest, Steve Molton. Steve is a mentor here at Jacob Krueger Studio, and he’s also just an extraordinarily amazing human being and writer. He’s a Bloomsbury Press Pulitzer Prize Nominee, he’s a former HBO and Showtime executive, he just did a movie with Frank Pugliese, and he’s a general badass. Today we’re going to be talking about not just how cool Steve is, but also about TV Drama. We’re living in a golden age of television, and Steve comes with vast experience. He teaches our TV Writing Class that’s coming up February 3rd,  as well as our ProTrack Mentorship program.   So, Steve, I’d love for you to start by talking a little bit about how is it different today than it was a few years ago. Where are the opportunities now? Steve: That’s a great question. As you know, we’re in yet another golden age. I guess we could probably describe it as a third golden age, because there was the initial one in the ’50s, and then in the ’70s and ’80s, cable transformed everything. And then, there were suddenly a thousand different platforms, and that has given rise to an immense number of shows at any given moment. It has also given rise to web series, to the short form, which we hadn’t seen before. And that opens up a vista for writers, of a kind that no other form of writing does at this point, partly because the appetite is amazingly large for all these companies. Everybody wants to brand themselves, and the most secure way to brand themselves is to create their own series. There has never been more opportunity for original voices as right now. Jake: Yeah, it’s very exciting. Writing feature-length drama is much different than writing television drama. Steve: There’s the rub!  That’s the fascination. And you and I have had experience in both worlds. I always like to position this process as who is the writer in society at this point? And one of the fascinating things, if we go back to our old Greek or Roman heritage, is that we discover pretty quickly this very intimate relationship between the law in a democratic society and the storytellers. And that all began, as you know, you're sitting there smiling because you know all too well, it began with something that the Greek called the Agon. When the Greeks, 2,500 years ago, they were trying to train people in the system of jurisprudence, they’d bring all these people down to Athens once a year, and they’d talk to them about how you serve in a jury, and what the law was, and why this was a cornerstone of the free society, etc. But then, at night, they’d put on tragedies. And what we now know as, sort of, the origin of sitcoms. Strangely enough, we don’t think of sitcoms as being 2,500 years old, but they were!  They are. In the middle of the dramas and tragedies-- there are about 22 of them left to us for us to look at-- but in the middle of each of these dramas there was something called the Agon, which was really like intermission where the people who had come down to learn about their judicial system would debate the kinds of issues that had been raised in the drama itself. And it was out of the Agon that the idea of the protagonist and the antagonist were born. What we often assume is that the protagonist is inherently the good guy. But the reality, all the way back to the Greeks, as it wasn’t really the good person. It was the moral contestant. It was the person who was sort of caught in between. One of the best evocations of that in older literature is Hamlet.  This guy is a moral mess. He’s back and forth between this choice and that choice, and to be or not to be, and yadda yadda. But if you flash forward to somebody like Henry Hill in GoodFellas-- and Henry is a guy I actually encountered in meetings at Showtime, if you can believe, when he was in the Witness Protection Program-- Henry Hill, despite the fact that the normal world for GoodFellas is a skeevy, funky, deadly world, Henry Hill is ultimately the one that’s just a little bit better than the rest of them. And that’s why Scorsese drives the whole film with Henry’s voice-over because he’s the moral contestant. He isn't quite exactly sure if he is who he thinks he is, and of course, his identity is completely flushed into the open by the end of the movie. So, I always try to encourage my students not to think in terms of these strict boundaries of good and evil, but to realize we’re in a protracted journey with the protagonist. And that, of course, takes us to: what’s the difference between movies and TV? You and I have talked a lot about this. The primary difference between movies and TV for me is that a movie is about a character who changes, and television is about a character who procrastinates. Jake: [Laughs]. Steve: A movie is a journey, a movie is a product, a movie is all built on an outcome, and it’s driven mainly by imagery and the relationship of character to action, because what we’re really dealing with is rates of change-- and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. A series is really about a world, it’s about a habitat. It isn't really about a product or an outcome. It’s about a world in which characters wrestle with these moral quandaries. I always try to help students look upon their world as this kind of moral arena. And we have all kinds of postmodern ideas about the word “moral,” but when you get right down to it, all the way back to the Greeks, and right up to today, we are storytelling creatures. We’re constantly wrestling, We’re constantly looking at stories and thinking about stories, and reading them, and watching them. And the reason is that we’re protagonists in our own moral universe, right? Jake: Everybody is wrestling with trying to do the best they can in some way. Steve: Yeah, exactly, and trying to sort out the options: “Well, what if I did that?”In our own minds, we’re always projecting, “What if I made that choice?” The great thing about films and television is it’s full of people who are making the kinds of choices that we wouldn’t necessarily want to make!  But we get to see the repercussions, right? It’s a safe way to experience our own moral dilemmas and work through them. Jake: You know I’ve thought about this a lot. Steve: Why am I not surprised? [laughs]. Jake: All screenwriting, all TV writing, it’s all political. Steve: Yeah, [laughs]. Jake: And it is socio-political, right? Like the act of doing it is a social and a political act. We’re actually looking inside ourselves, looking at our society, trying to understand some aspect of it. But it’s also political in that, regardless of what you put out there, you're the debate at the water cooler the next day. You're raising the questions that are going to be debated throughout the world. Steve: Exactly! That’s exactly right. When a student comes to me and says, “Well these are the themes and this is exactly where it rolls…” I think, “Well that’s morally very self-secure!” But it isn't going to be a very interesting movie or an interesting series. I want somebody to be talking to me about their own complex problems, with the questions that they can’t quite answer. Jake: We talk about engine all the time when it comes to TV Writing.  In a way, the engine is the unresolvable question. If you have a question and you can resolve it, if you know the answer, if you know the thing that would save the world, then the truth is you don’t have a series. It’s the unresolved questions, the constant search to try to understand the truth. Steve: Absolutely, absolutely! And that’s why the world of the series is such a vastly important thing when you're starting to conceive of a TV Drama. Because what you're really talking about is a world as a moral arena, as a moral universe, and you think about the specific kinds of choices a character can make within that moral arena. I always say that writing a movie or making a movie is really about building a journey. And writing a TV Series is about living in a building--with all these people living in all these different apartments. So the world of the show and the characters within it is really the essence of this. I want to talk about Engine in a few minutes, but that’s precisely it: the array of characters that populate that world. Just look at genres of television, their habitats: it’s hospitals, it is prisons, it’s the legal system, it is families, it is urban tribes or its conspiracies. These are the agreed-upon social entities. And in a way, they are also political entities, right?  The politics of the self. And within that particular world, are a certain set of moral choices that don’t necessarily exist outside that world. But they definitely have things in common with those worlds. One of the most wonderful things that you talk about, and that I think is so germane here, is that particularly if you're thinking about movies being about a character who changes and TV about a character who procrastinates, is that it always brings us back to the holdfast ego and the nascent ego. It’s wild how that keeps happening, again and again. Jake: Can you run through that real quick for anyone who is listening, who doesn’t know what they are? Steve: The holdfast ego is the ego you encounter when you wake up in the morning. You look in the mirror, you're putting on your makeup or you’re shaving, and you look in the mirror and you say, “Okay that’s Steve Molton, and Steve is this and Steve is that and it’s wonderfully predictable how he’s like that, and I know what he wants every morning, and I know where he comes from, and I know he has been a jerk, you know? Flopping at this and that. And I also know he’s fantastic! And he’s on his way somewhere.” But it’s basically the guy that you’re familiar with,

Beautiful Boy - Where Does Screenplay Structure Come From? This week we’re going to be talking about Beautiful Boy by Luke Davis and Felix van Groeningen. This is a particularly interesting film to discuss in light of our last podcast where we talked about Destroyer and the use of flashbacks in a movie, because Beautiful Boy is also built around flashbacks, but tends to earn those flashbacks in another way. So, we’re going to be looking at Beautiful Boy to talk not just about flashbacks but also about structure, How do you make those structural decisions in your film? Where does screenplay structure actually come from?” If you have seen Beautiful Boy or read reviews of Beautiful Boy, you know that the response has ranged wildly from those who think it is the most beautiful film ever made, to others who feel like it only scratches the surface of the addiction issue, who’ve even compared it to a beautifully produced PSA. Whether you were deeply moved by the film or felt like it only scratched the surface for you, there’s no doubt that the way the structure of Beautiful Boy is constructed grows out of its theme. Beautiful Boy comes at the issue of addiction in a much different way than a movie like Half Nelson or Requiem for A Dream. It is actually adapting two different books one non-fiction memoir written by David Sheff called Beautiful Boy, and one written by his son Nic Sheff entitled Tweak. What the film is basically doing is taking these two non-fiction works and squeezing them together. But it is still primarily looking at the issue of addiction through the eyes of the father played by Steve Carell. And in looking at the father, it basically makes the assumption that we see towards the end of the film when David and his wife Karen find themselves at a 12 Step meeting for parents of addicts, where the sign proclaims, “I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I can’t fix it.” The movie comes at the character of David Sheff from that point of view. This isn't a movie about how the pitfalls of parenting lead to addiction, This isn't a movie about how that empty space in Nic that he describes in the film got created in the first place. This is a movie about a guy who is a good parent, who has a son who is a good kid, who are both fighting the same issue and both failing. Whether you agree with the psychology and the sociology of this premise or not, that’s the thematic place that this piece starts from. We aren't looking at bad fathers and bad sons. We aren't looking at ugly people addicted to ugly things. We’re looking at a loving family torn apart by addiction. This doesn’t prevent the movie from getting deep or complicated in some places. For example there’s a wonderfully complicated scene where David Sheff smokes a joint with his son Nic, not knowing that his son is addicted to a whole array of drugs, thinking that he’s creating a special moment at his son’s request. There’s a very complicated moment when David buys cocaine himself and has a one night cocaine binge--he’s trying to feel what his son is feeling-- or maybe just trying to escape. So, coming at these characters in this way isn't limiting the ability to go deep, but it does cut a lot out. This is true whenever you're using theme. Theme is a way of looking at your screenplays structure and saying, “What am I going to show and what am I going to not show?” “What am I going to dive deep into, and what am I going to skim over? Where am I going to get serious and where am I going to focus my attention?” The truth is in a two hour long movie, you can’t do everything, so you have to choose the things that you want to do. You have to choose where to point your camera and where to point your words so that you know what you're looking at and what you don’t want to look at. Some people are going to love the choices you make:  the people who’re wrestling with the same theme. In this case, the parents who see themselves as great parents with great kids who are victims of a horrible disease. And other people aren't going to like your decision, for example, the people who’re interested in the psychology that creates addiction, who’re interested in the big mistakes, or the sociology that creates addiction. In Beautiful Boy, the camera shows us some things but doesn’t show us others from the true story. We’re told that Nic was primarily addicted to crystal meth. In fact, that’s the first thing that his father says in the very first scene of the movie. But most of what we actually see is Nic using heroin. And while Nic certainly did use heroin, the choice to switch the drug he’s using switches the behavior, and switches our feeling about Nic, allowing us to see him through a different window. There was a period where Nic was prostituting himself for drugs. There was a period where he was attempting robbery (although he says that he was never very good at it), There was a moment where (in “Requiem For A Dream” style) he actually almost did lose his arm. But these moments are cut out of the film in order to focus on what’s beautiful about this boy. in order to focus our attention not on the ugliness of what an addict is willing to do, but on what happens to a beautiful person when a terrible addiction takes them. Similarly, in writing his memoir, David Sheff went through a very interesting experience. There was a period where he experienced a brain hemorrhage and actually had to learn to write again. In his words, it was like “his brain was a broken suitcase full of scrambled items that he had to fit together.” But the brain hemorrhage-- that part of his story-- is entirely left out of the film, as is what caused his divorce in the first place or how that affected the children, or what the parental rifts between father and son were outside of this horrible addiction. And whether you agree with it or not that’s an artistic choice, that’s the writer choosing not to lie, but focus the camera-- not on the full complexity of the relationship, but on what’s beautiful about these two people. And that’s mostly what we get to see, we get to see Steve Carell play the dad that we all wish we could have—the father who’s going to be there, who’s going to be understanding, who’s going to be full of love, who’s going to create so many beautiful magical moments for his children in this beautiful, wonderful house with his wife who’s full of art. And though he isn't a perfect person, he’s always a good dad. And similarly we’re going to see Nic, who may be in the thrall of a horrific addiction and may be making some really terrible choices, but who in his moment of lucidity is the boy that we all wish we could have had. You may agree with this decision or you may disagree with this decision, but this is a creative decision built out of theme. That theme trickles all the way down to each little moment of how this film is shot, the beauty and the nostalgia of each shot, and it also trickles all the way up to the title, Beautiful Boy. The whole film is built around this decision, and that’s why the structure of this film is so much different from so many other addiction movies we’ve seen. Which brings us to the flashbacks. While we never do see the brain hemorrhage that occurred to David Sheff during the writing of his book, we do get the feeling of that experience--of a brain that’s like “A broken suitcase full of scrambled items that have to fit together.” One of the big choices made structurally in Beautiful Boy is that we aren't going to watch the film in linear order, nor are we going to watch a traditional flashback structure. Rather, present and past are going to swirl and cycle around each other, good things and bad days, getting on the drugs, getting off the drugs, moments of hope, and moments of despair. And it is built this way for a reason, because this is a story about a father chasing his beautiful boy, and a son chasing that first moment that he took drugs and felt like his life went to Technicolor. Beautiful Boy is a film about two different people chasing this feeling that they once had that they lost. We’re going to watch Steve Carell’s character, David, chase his son. We’re going to watch his wife chase their son. We’re going to watch his ex chase their son. We’re going to watch all three of them become addicted to their son’s addiction, become addicted to the need to help him. They’re going to spend the whole movie chasing this child, until finally; they reach the moment where they stop. And similarly we’re going to watch this child chase that feeling, chase that first high. We’re going to watch him struggle. We’re going to watch that desire come over him again, and again, and again, every time it looks like he’s going to get clean. And we’re basically tracking his journey towards that stopping point as well, even though it is a stopping point we never know if we’re going to reach. How is this built structurally? Like in any father-son relationship-- like in any family relationship-- when we react in a moment we aren't just reacting to that moment, we’re reacting to every moment we’ve experienced around it; we’re reacting to every memory. In Beautiful Boy, when David Sheff is chasing his son, he isn't just chasing the 18-year-old version of his son. He’s chasing the 5-year-old and the 10-year-old, and the 3-year-old version of his son. He’s chasing every beautiful moment that they ever had. And that chase isn't always in alignment with the reality that’s happening now, just as the chase for Nic isn't always in alignment with the reality of what’s happening now. The way that that chase is created in Beautiful Boy is with a series of flashbacks, and these flashbacks are given order and structure through a very simple approach--which is to keep coming back to the same locations.

Learn from Destroyer how to use flashbacks in your script. We'll discuss the common pitfalls that can make flashbacks dangerous, and the questions you can ask yourself when using flashbacks to determine if your flashbacks are likely to make the structure of your script stronger, or to get in the way.

Linus Roache, actor in Mandy, in conversation with Jacob Krueger on the Write Your Screenplay podcast Jake: I’m here with Linus Roache, a Golden Globe nominated actor that you probably recognize from Homeland, Vikings, Law and Order, Batman Begins, Chronicles of Riddick, Priest and a ton of other features and TV shows. Linus was just in Mandy with Nicolas Cage, so we’re going to be talking a little bit about that movie. And Linus is also a writer in his own right, so we’re going to be talking about his projects, what it is like to walk the line between being an actor and a writer, and how those processes are similar and different. Linus, after a whole career in acting, how did you come to writing? Linus: Yeah, well I think I’ve always had an idea or an ambition to write at some point. Even as a child, the idea of being able to write your own movie-- everybody wants to write deep down, I think. And I’ve always had a great appreciation for writers. I have a theatre background. I love playwrights. I did all the classical work of Shakespeare, so I’ve always had a great love of writers and what they do. I’m slightly in awe of them, and I never felt that I’d really be able to write. I could get a script and see what I didn’t like about it and try to change dialogue and things, but I could never really craft anything. But eventually, at a certain point as an actor you do realize that you're just a piece in a big, big puzzle, and you don’t really have that much power, ultimately (unless you're an A list actor who’s controlling everything like Tom Cruise or something like that).  And I’ve just reached that point where I’d like to be more creative. I’d like to bring more of the stories I want to tell to life. And, as you know my wife, Ros, who I co-write with, had a passion project that we wanted to turn into a screenplay. And I knew there’s no way you can just sit down and write a screenplay without some help. So, we looked around, and, you know, there’s all the usual suspects out there. And I think Ros came to see you doing a one-off little seminar and then we did Write Your Screenplay 1, 2 & 3 and then Pro-Track. You know just to say Jake it has been an invaluable two years that we spent doing that with you. Because, for me, for someone who has read-- I don’t know how many thousands of scripts I must have read! And I can immediately tell you what’s a good one and what’s a bad one. But I couldn't tell you how to make a bad one good or why something necessarily is that good. It is like taking the back of a Swiss watch and understanding how it all actually works. And it was the most humbling two years of work I think I’ve ever engaged in. In fact if I had known it was going to be that difficult I might not have done it! But I’m so grateful that we went on the journey and have learned something of the craft; it is a craft you never stop learning. Jake: Like acting. Linus: Just like acting, yeah. Jake: Movies get made when they’ve got great actors in them. And I think one of the thing that’s top of mind for all of our writers is, “What does a great actor look for in a script?" If you want a Linus Roache in your movie-- what do you look for when you're looking at a role? Linus: Well, it might be different things at different times but ultimately you're looking for a journey. You're actually looking for a journey of transformation that’s believable. You want to feel as you read like you're being carried through that journey. In a sense what happens I think when you read a good screenplay is you do see the movie. And for an actor it is almost like what I call "N.A.R.-- No Acting Required," because it is actually being, in a sense, almost done for you on the page. Of course you’ve got to show up and you’ll bring nuance to it, but when something is really well written, your job is to be a conduit and get out of the way and allow the story to guide you. I’ve often ended up in a situation where someone gives me something that’s "kindof good," its heart is in the right place, there’s a lot of good things about it, but the character isn't quite believable. And I’ve ended up joining in and trying to help shape things.  So when  you feel like you believe that journey, you go on that ride, and you know an audience is going to follow you, you're like, “Oh I don’t have to make stuff work! It works and I can deliver it.” Jake: Yes, and you can also deepen it too, right? It gives you the opportunity to play against the line or to find a moment of nuance that wasn’t there before, because you aren't building that primary structure. You're playing within it. Linus: That’s right. I think that word you just used, that’s been the big takeaway for me in terms of what I learned spending time with you learning to write: I learned more about structure. As an actor, I tended to be very subjective. You work on your scene, your moment, you make things real in the subjective point of view of your character, and you aren't really given the opportunity to stand back and look at the whole structural piece and get involved. It isn't your movie, not my duck, not my bottle. You know it isn't your movie and that isn't your job. But there are very few actors that actually think structurally. I’ve met one recently. I worked with one and it was fascinating. We were on a TV series together and he actually just inherently had the ability to see structure and he would take things we were doing in a season and say, “What if we did this? What if we did that? What if we did this?" And it would up the stakes for the journey of the characters. In long form TV right now, that’s a joyous ride to go on. But for most actors I think your role actually, your function, is to think subjectively, and actually sometimes come to the writer and the director and say, “No my character wouldn’t do that. That isn't true.” I was on a little indie-- I came back from Boston yesterday-- and in the end I spoke out and said, “This isn't true, what we’re doing isn't real.” We were getting this actress to do something and it just smelled of bad writing. And the irony was, the writer was there and he had actually written it first time round beautifully. But he couldn’t help himself. He just had to further mess with it. It was already good, and he just felt like he had to be doing something, and he actually destroyed his own scene. Jake: I should probably do a whole podcast on that!  How do you actually know when your script is done so you don't overbake it? It is just a big and challenging question. Linus: It is a really great question. I think a good example, I did Season 7 of Homeland and the writing on that show is superlative. My analogy is it is like getting on a Mercedes E class after driving an old Citroen Deux Chevaux. You know they’ve thought it out in the writers’ room. They’ve worked out what they need, what the wants are, what the points of view are. So when you actually hit it, it isn't restrictive to you as a performer. It actually helps you. You're very clear. So, I would occasionally think, “Maybe we should say ‘Da-da’ instead of ‘Da-da-da’” and they would normally come back with, “No, no there is a…” they had actually thought it through already. Because it is, in a sense, deeply personal-- that it is the story you want to tell, you need to tell. So they knew when that writing was done. Jake: Yes,  I think really that’s a really beautiful way of looking at it. And, in a way, the same when you're playing with a performance, right?  “I’m going to try this, I’m going to try that, I’m going to try this.” Linus: Right. Jake: Like an early draft, and then there’s this moment when you start to realize what it is. And you start to go, “No, I know intuitively it has to happen here.” Linus: And I think with great writing, when you’ve actually got it in place, it isn't rigid. When you come to it each time, it is actually fresh. If you truly find it, as an actor and performer and it is well written, you can do it 100 times. You don’t get bored of it. Because it is always alive, because it is true, it is real. It is accurate to that moment with those characters. Jake:  So many writers get sucked into is this idea that they've got to write the commercial thing or write the hooky thing. Linus: Right. Jake: And that works really well if you already have a career, right? Linus: Yeah. Jake: If you're a famous writer and you just made $100 million from your last movie, it is a lot easier to have a good idea and let that be attractive. But in early phases of a career, you have to distinguish yourself from all that stuff that’s "a great concept" but only okay execution. To get somebody to invest in you, you have to give them that thing that’s already complete. You want them to read your script and think, “Hey, this might be a hard project or this might be a new writer, or there might not be another famous person attached right now, but I see how this can work and this is so much better than anything else I’m reading.” Linus: Right, and I think that comes down to one of the things you spoke a lot about-- really, you know, it is true of any art form-- finding your voice and being willing to commit to your voice. Jake: Of course. Linus: And if you have the courage to pursue that-- I mean, you have to dig deep for that sometimes! Some people just have a voice and others of us have to actually fish around, and fight, and struggle and look, “What are these themes that are coming out of me, I don’t really understand them yet?” Then you have to curve them into something that translates and impacts people. When you tell that story that is deeply personal, that it is the story you want to tell, you need to tell, I think that does have impact. It finds its way through a lot of generic stuff, or a lot of  people trying to write formulaic stuff, or trying to fit into the existing structure of Hollywood. I mean, I think the films that I admire,

This week we’re going to be talking about BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee, Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott. When I first went out to see BlacKkKlansman, my hope was that I was going to be able to do a podcast about how to write a movie for a political change— to talk about the confluence of race and politics and storytelling and history. But, my experience of BlacKkKlansman led me to an even more important topic: the role of the truth in adapting a true life story, and how running towards (or away from) that truth can impact the overall experience of your screenplay. Like always, in his script for BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee has a lot of very interesting things to say about race and politics, particularly about how the white supremacy movement has taken off the hood and the robe, put on the suit, and made themselves frighteningly presentable to the American public. I think he has a scary message there that’s well told, and I think there are some really transcendent and wonderful moments in this film. But for all the power of its message, and the appeal of its true-life premise, the actual execution of BlacKkKlansman feels shockingly uneven, bouncing between moments of political insight and compelling storytelling that we expect from Spike Lee, and others that feel predictable, anticlimatic, heavyhanded, or downright false. What’s causing this unevenness in BlacKkKlansman is a simple problem that many writers fall into when adapting a true life story into a screenplay. So in this podcast, I’m going to be talking about how-- whether you're writing a political film or a non-political film-- you can avoid falling into some of the traps that get in the way of a really tremendous premise. So let’s talk about BlacKkKlansman. The premise of a black undercover police officer infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan is just about as good of a premise as you can get. And the fact that this actually happened in the 1970’s is even cooler. The problem with BlacKkKlansman isn't in any way its premise. The problem with BlacKkKlansman is that the writers make the most common mistake when adapting a true life story. Rather than running towards the truth, they instead end up running toward the same old Hollywood elements we’ve seen in a million films in this genre. They think this is going to create drama, but instead they end up creating cliché. If you’ve seen BlacKkKlansman, think about the moments that really stood out to you, the moments that really mattered, the moments that seemed too wild to believe but totally compelling… well, the truth is a lot of those moments were true. And if you think about the moments that felt a little cliché, a little “seen it before,” a little familiar… well, you probably won’t be too surprised to find out that a lot of those moments weren’t true. But there’s an even bigger consequence here. By running towards the Hollywood story, rather than running towards the truth, BlacKkKlansman misses out on the full potential of its premise, not only structurally, but also politically. And I’m not saying that BlacKkKlansman doesn’t have a powerful political premise at its center. I’m just saying that there’s an even more powerful way to deliver it. So, let’s start with the biggest most “Hollywood” moment in BlacKkKlansman. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie— Ron Stallworth is a black police officer in the 1970’s. His only dream is to become an undercover police officer. He’s the first black man to become a member of this police department, and of course he’s dealing with a lot of racism, and he’s dealing with the pressure of infiltrating both the Black Power movement and the Ku Klux Klan at the same time. So, there’s a lot of very interesting stuff happening here, and what makes it most interesting is that this stuff is actually true. There really was a guy named Ron Stallworth, he really was a black policeman in the 1970’s, he really did infiltrate the Black Power movement, and he really did infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. So, as soon as you find out that a black police officer is infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, the first thing you're going to think is, “how the hell did he pull that off?” And in fact that’s exactly what draws you into BlacKkKlansman— that’s why you go see it. “Hold on, there’s a true story about a black cop who actually infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan? I want to see that movie. I want to know how he did it.” And as soon as you hear the premise, you start telling yourself a story. Maybe it’s an unlikely story about a guy who is wearing a hood all the time so nobody knows— but you’re trying to figure out how this happened. Unfortunately, this presents a challenge in the movie, because the way it happens, at least at first glance, isn't all that dramatic. What actually happened in the true story was Ron Stallworth sent a postcard to the Ku Klux Klan and they called him back at an unlisted number. And it’s true that he developed a phone relationship with David Duke, and it’s true that the Klan wanted him to join and wanted to meet him… So how is he going to pull this off? In the movie, what happens a “white” cop, Flip, played by Adam Driver, poses as Ron Stallworth and goes and interacts with the Klan for him. So the in-person conversations happen with Flip, and the on-the-phone conversations happen with Ron Stallworth— which raises the question of believability. If he can pass for a Klansman, why doesn’t Flip just have these phone conversations and make it all a lot easier? Many critics (who have not done their research) have pointed out this question as one of the biggest problems in the script. It just doesn’t seem credible. But in fact it’s entirely true. So, the first problem is, the “way things really happened” doesn’t seem credible, even though it is. The second problem is that even if “the way things really happened” did seem credible, on first glance it isn't that exciting. The moment we hear the premise of BlacKkKlansman, we start imagining something really exciting: a black cop having to interact with the Ku Klux Klan. Instead, we’re getting a white cop interacting with the Ku Klux Klan and a black cop on the phone. Which, true or not, feels like a bait and switch based on what we imagined we were going to see when we bought our tickets. When writing a true life story, this is a danger that all writers face: sometimes the truth doesn’t seem inherently dramatic. And this leads to a panicked desire to forget about the truth and start making things up. That’s usually the wrong decision. Now don’t get me wrong. The writers of BlacKkKlansman are not bad writers. A really bad writer would make an even more problematic decision than these writers made. A really bad writer would send the black cop in to meet the Ku Klux Klan, get rid of the white cop entirely, and run towards the drama… But pretty soon that really bad writer would find themselves with a much bigger problem than the inconvenient truth of who actually met with the Ku Klux Klan. They’d soon start to realize, having built everything on fiction, that each following choice they make is going to open a Pandora’s box of new credibility issues— because eventually both the writer and the audience are going to realize the same thing the real Ron Stallworth had to realize: there’s no way this guy could pull this off! That the premise just doesn’t work If you run away from the truth when adapting a true life story, you will find your script is floating completely in a fictional world and not in the real world at all. And you’re going to lose your audience and you’re going to lose your character and you’re going to lose your instincts that guide you through the writing process. What a great writer would do is ask themselves a different question: “How do I make the fact that Ron Stallworth isn't meeting the Klan the coolest thing in the movie? How do I make the fact that what the audience expected isn't what the audience is going to get the coolest thing in the film?” And the way you find that answer is by running towards the truth, rather than away from it. Unfortunately, that’s not what these writers do either. What these writers try to do is to run a middle road-- “Let’s make the white cop Jewish, let’s create a lie detector test, let’s create a lot of suspicion among his new white supremacist “friends” that maybe he isn't really an aspiring Ku Klux Klan member, let’s try to build some danger.” But none of this is true, or at least none of this is confirmed. The identity of the actual white cop is unknown, it is still classified, so no one knows if he’s Jewish or not. But Ron Stallworth has been clear in interviews that no, none of these Ku Klux Klan members were especially smart and none of these Ku Klux Klan members had any suspicion whatsoever that this undercover white cop was anything but a wholehearted Ku Klux Klan member. Rather than running towards what’s really cool and what’s really true about this story, the writers have immediately gone to the easiest solution, the one you’d most expect. “Well since there’s no way a black cop could physically infiltrate the Klan, what if it were a Jewish cop… yeah, that’s a lot easier… and what if there was a member that was onto him… yeah, that would create some drama” Unfortunately, what’s easier for you as a writer is rarely better for the story. I think we can all agree, the premise of a Jewish cop who might get recognized as Jewish is fine… but it’s a lot less exciting than the premise we paid to see-- of a black guy doing the same thing. What we’re served is a lesser version of the same story. More importantly, we’re served it in a way that belies credibility; we don’t actually understand why this is necessary. And this breaks our suspension of disbelief,

Succession Part 2: How To Write Subtext In Your Dialogue In the last podcast we looked at the engine of Succession. We looked at the way each episode was put together, and the way that all these characters come together in each episode to create the season. So today, rather than thinking globally, we’re going to think locally. Rather than looking at the big structure of the piece, we’re going to look at one little teeny-tiny scene from episode 7. And the scene starts, if you want to watch it, around 27:07 and ends at 28:20. So we’re talking about a scene that’s a total of one-minute thirteen seconds. What’s really cool about this scene is that it features all the secondary characters of Succession. These are secondary characters who are not only secondary characters for the audience but are also secondary characters within the social circles of their own family. These are the boyfriends and girlfriends, and wives and fiancées: Marcia, Willa and Tom. Marcia is the wife of Logan Roy, the Brian Cox character in this piece, the King Lear, the Rupert Murdoch, the great patriarch. And Marcia is a highly intelligent, complicated woman, and it’s pretty clear that she loves her husband. But it’s not entirely clear if she can be trusted or not. She seems to have her own agenda, and it isn't clear how much of that agenda is about protecting the husband, and how much of that agenda is about solidifying her own power. Willa is Connor Roy’s…well, let’s just call her a girlfriend. Actually she’s his paid escort with whom he’s madly in love, and who is putting up with his affection and his desperate desire for her to play the role of his wife and move in with him in order to further her career as an actress and playwright. Then you’ve got Tom, discussed in detail in last week’s podcast, who’s the trickster character, the fiancé and soon to be husband of Shiv Roy, the scheming and politically savvy daughter of Logan Roy. And Tom isn't the greatest person in the world. In fact, he’s the worst possible version of new money. He’s a person obsessed with the power and ridiculousness of being rich. He’s a guy who’s small in the family, so he throws around his power in places where he has it. But Tom is also deeply in love with Shiv, and deeply unaware that she might not be a person he can trust. And what’s happened in this episode is that the entire Roy family has convened for therapy. This meeting has been called by Logan, who has basically realized that if he doesn’t do something his share prices are going to fall. He needs to do something to create some kind of positive photo-op that suggests the family is coming back together after a big falling out between himself and Kendall that was way too public. So Logan has called for this reconciliation, and with the exception of Kendall, all the children have come willingly, a bit curious, surprised, and maybe even hopeful that dad actually wants therapy. And of course that isn't what’s really happening. What’s really happening is dad wants a photo op. Even Kendall Roy shows up, and that’s a big deal because Logan just placed an article through his media sources suggesting that Kendall, who in the previous episode failed a vote of no confidence on his dad, was back on drugs. This article has not only cost Kendall his faith in his father, it has also cost him any chance of reconnecting with the one woman he loves, his ex-wife, who now thinks he’s back on drugs even though he isn't. But Kendall Roy decides to show up, even though his plan to reconcile with his family doesn’t actually turn out well. He ends up at a bar instead, where he’s soon drinking and getting high with some locals. Regardless, everyone has descended on Connor Roy’s beautiful mansion in the desert for this big moment of reconciliation that isn't going to happen. And the secondary characters of Succession, Marcia, Willa and Tom, have all been kicked out. Willa is used to this. Everybody plays status games with her. She’s used to getting kicked out of family pictures, kicked out of family meetings. But this time, it isn't just Willa that has been kicked out. This time Marcia and Tom have been kicked out as well, and the family bloodline is being clearly enforced because who’s in that room and who’s out of that room really matters. And so this is why we’re going to look not at what’s happening in the room where the big drama is happening, but at what’s happening outside of the room. We’re going to use this scene from Succession to talk about a concept that’s extremely important to all screenwriters: subtext. Part of what makes Succession such a powerful series, part of what makes the performances so incredible, is the use of subtext by the writers. There’s a tremendous amount of subtext to almost every line in Succession. Which raises the question, what the heck is subtext? What does it actually do? How do you actually create it? For a lot of writers, subtext is just a place of anxiety, wondering, “does my dialogue have enough subtext in it?” without actually having a clear understanding of what subtext is and what subtext does. So let’s define subtext for a moment. Subtext happens when there’s a slight difference between the primary objective and secondary objective of the character. Primary objective is what the character is doing on the surface, and the secondary objective of the character is what the character is doing under the surface. Sometimes this is a conscious disconnect, where the character is consciously talking about one thing in order to imply another. Sometimes this is a subconscious disconnect, where the character truly believes they’re coming for one thing, truly believes they’re acting on one intention, when they’re actually acting on another. We’ve all done this. If you’ve ever broken up with somebody and decided that you have to return to their apartment and get your favorite pair of socks back so that you can finally have closure, you're consciously telling yourself the primary objective: “I’m going to go get closure.” What you aren't telling yourself is the secondary objective: “I’m going to try to get back together with my ex,” or, “I’m going to try to sleep with my ex.” Sometimes the gap between primary and secondary objective is very conscious. Sometimes it’s under the surface and the character isn't even aware of the secondary objective. They’re only aware of the primary. But what happens— when you can feel that secondary objective bubbling up underneath the primary objective, when you can feel that extra layer of pressure pushing up against what the character is doing on the surface— that’s subtext. When you start to think about subtext in this way, you don’t have to think about subtext like a technique. Instead, you can use your intuition to guide your writing of subtext. You can simply connect to the primary and secondary objective of the character. You can connect to, “What are they doing on the surface?” or, “What are they talking about on the surface?” And then you can feel the pressure between that and what’s bubbling up for them underneath the surface. And there are lots of different things that can bubble up. We already talked about objectives. I want to get closure: primary. I want to get back together with my ex: secondary. But there are other kinds of secondary objectives as well. There are emotional needs.  I want to get closure and get my socks back: primary objective. I want to feel love: secondary objective. I want justice: secondary objective. So sometimes it is a disconnect between a tangible goal and a primal core need driving under the surface, and in order to get in touch with that, all you have to do is get in touch with that primal core need in yourself. You want to feel those two things happening at the same time as you write the character, and just to look for the moment where—“Poof!”—that one thing bursts through the surface. The third kind of difference between primary and secondary objective that can create subtext is something called status games. And status games is something I would love to discuss a lot further in a future podcast. It’s also something that I cover in depth in my Write Your Screenplay classes. Status games are about the dynamics between people as they try to raise or lower their own and each other’s status in order to feel better about themselves. Status games happen all the time. They happen with every relationship, with every character. And I’m not going to go into all the different kinds of status game relationships because that’s a multiple hour lecture. But, if you think about your relationships with your friends, sometimes you raise your friend’s status in order to raise your own. And sometimes you raise your status in order to lower somebody else’s status: “Dude, you know that I know fashion, and that shirt…give me a break.”I’ll give you an example of this: “Hey, look man, you know that I know fashion, and, dude, that shirt looks awesome.” And sometimes you lower your status in order to raise somebody’s status: “Dude, I don’t know a damn thing about fashion, but that shirt is freaking awesome.” And sometimes you lower your status in order to lower somebody’s status: “Dude I don’t know anything about fashion, but that shirt… give me a break.” So there are lots of different kinds of subtext. There’s subtext where it is primary objective versus secondary objective, where you have a conscious goal and an unconscious goal, or a conscious goal and a second conscious goal that are in tension with each other. Sometimes it’s the tension between a primary objective— the conscious goal— and the emotional need underneath. And sometimes it’s the pressure between what’s happening on the surface, which in this example is a little bit of a fashion critique,

Succession vs Arrested Development: The Series Engine This week we’re going to be talking about Succession. If you haven't already seen the whole season, don’t worry. We aren't going to give away any major spoilers. What we’re going to be looking at this week is the structure of Succession: the way that this piece is actually put together and the way the season is created so that every single episode can feel completely different but also deliver the same emotional experience to its audience. If you haven't seen Succession, basically here’s the premise: What if Rupert Murdoch were King Lear?   That’s the structure of the piece. It’s looking at a modern day tycoon, a modern day king (in fact his last name is Roy, which means king). And this patriarch, Logan Roy, is sick and needs someone to take over the “throne”—to take over control of his company. Like King Lear, he has some children. Lear has three daughters; Logan Roy has four children. And he needs one of these children, or all of these children, to step up and take over the kingdom of his giant media empire. And of course, the problem is that all of his children are spoiled and also hurt and broken. There’s nobody who’s actually ready to succeed him. In many ways Succession is really a show about trust. It’s a show about what happens when trust—between father and son, father and daughter, husband and wife—gets violated. It’s about the kinds of choices people make in a world where they can’t trust each other—when the trust between corporations and people, between rich and poor, breaks down. It’s about what happens to our families, and what happens to our society. And the painful thing about watching Succession is that, because nobody trusts anybody, no one can feel the love that actually exists. All of these people are the product of a deeply dysfunctional family, run by a deeply dysfunctional patriarch, who of course has demons of his own and his own past that he’s wrestling with. And what they do so beautifully in Succession is to fully dramatize these characters. Everybody in the show is awful. Everybody in this show is selfish, greedy. They’re the awful, entitled 1%—the worst possible version of those people. Everybody has some inner awfulness that they wreak upon the people around them. And at the same time, every single character in Succession is totally human. Every time you think that you're going to finally write somebody off, the show exposes some humanness in them, some little bit of love, some little flicker of what they could have been, some attempt to do the right thing... and suddenly your heart breaks for them again. Sure it’s loosely inspired by Lear and loosely inspired by Rupert Murdoch, and as the show creator Jesse Armstrong has noted, loosely inspired by every succession story through the ages from Shakespeare all the way to the royal succession in England. Even though it’s inspired by all these very serious stories, as a series, the engine of Succession is actually nearly the same as a series that you probably would never equate with it. In fact, Succession, the series, actually has the same basic structure and the same basic engine as Arrested Development! You could even pitch Succession as the black-comic-real-world version of Arrested Development. Like Arrested Development, the engine of Succession is a bunch of maladjusted 1% kids, who are victims of their totally narcissistic father and mother, who are struggling to do their best but don’t have the emotional means to do so even though they have all the money in the world. The main “kid” in Arrested Development is Michael Bluth, and in Succession it’s Kendall Roy. He’s the one kid who, in each episode, is trying his best to save the family business now that the “king” (that is, the dad) is deposed. In Succession, Logan Roy is deposed in episode 1 by a stroke. And in Arrested Development, George Bluth is deposed in episode 1 by being arrested. And what happens in Succession, just as happens in Arrested Development, is that in each episode Kendall has got to find another way of “saving” the family. Now, Kendall in Succession is a lot less likeable than Michael in Arrested Development. Kendall in Succession is a recovering drug addict—which we can all respect him for—but he’s also a narcissistic asshole who’s just not that bright, who blows every meeting, who has all the wrong instincts, and who’s always focused on himself rather than the people around him. But nevertheless, Kendall has been working his whole life to take over this company. He has a vision of what the company should be (even though he may not actually be equipped to accomplish it).  And he’s the only person in the family who’s really taking the company seriously. And in episode 1 of Succession, just like in episode 1 of Arrested Development, Kendall is poised to take over. It’s been the succession planning all along, just like Michael’s succession had been planned in Arrested Development. In the first episode of Succession, Logan decides that his son isn’t ready and instead tries to give over the power to his wife. Just like, in Arrested Development, at the end of episode 1, George gives the company that’s supposed to go to Michael to his wife, Lucille. And just like in Arrested Development, there are reasons for this that Kendall and Michael don’t completely understand—because both companies are involved in some pretty dark dealings of which their naïve inheritor sons aren't entirely aware. But in both situations, the son feels screwed over by the father and trust is broken. So the structure of each episode, the structure of the season—the way Succession works—is that in each episode Kendall comes up with some way of saving the business (sometimes at the expense of his family), and Logan and Marcia, who each have their own goals and their own intentions, will play and manipulate the children against each other until finally Kendall will compromise his own integrity trying to get what he wants. And this is exactly the same structure of Arrested Development.   In Arrested Development, in each episode, George and Lucille will play the children against each other, until finally Michael makes a decision that compromises his own integrity and gets punished horrifically for it. In Arrested Development, all of these machinations are played for comedy. And in Succession we’re laughing too, but also a part of us is crying. Because in Succession all of these experiences are played with great, dramatic integrity. What’s really interesting is that there are parallels for a lot of the other characters between Arrested Development and Succession as well.Succession we’re laughing too, but also a part of us is crying. Because in Succession all of these experiences are played with great, dramatic integrity.   We’ve already talked about the parallel between the Michael Bluth character and the Kendall Roy character, but there’s a “George Michael” character as well. In Arrested Development, the George Michael character is Michael’s naïve son, who’s desperately in love with Maeby, his kind of twisted cousin, and who’s going to follow her around and try to please her doing all kinds of things that compromise his own values in order to get her approval. In the structure of Succession, the George Michael character is Greg. Greg is a young, down-on-his-luck kid, who’s related to the family even though he barely knows anybody. He’s sent by his mother, after losing his job at a theme park that’s owned by Logan Roy, to go see Logan and get a job. And Greg ends up under the tutelage of Tom. Tom is the fiancé of Shiv Roy, who’s probably the smartest of the Roy children. She’s as close as we can get to the equivalent of the Portia de Rossi character, Lindsay, in Arrested Development. And Tom is kind of like a mix between Tobias and their child Maeby in Arrested Development. He’s this goofy, weird guy. (If you remember from Arrested Development Tobias is the "never-nude" and Maeby is the twisted cousin who always wants to push things a little bit, who always wants to corrupt George Michael a little bit). And Tom ends up playing both of those roles in Succession. Tom is both the odd mentor who is teaching Greg how to be rich, and he’s also the twisted guy who’s using and manipulating Greg in order to get his own desires met and advance his own career and feel more important in the world. So, you’ve got Tom, who’s a Tobias/Maeby mashup, and you’ve got Greg, who’s the George Michael character—the wide-eyed innocent.   And just like in the structure of Arrested Development, those two usually form a B story in each episode. While the main story is happening, they’re off on their own doing a related story. So, you’ve got a parallel structure there as well. And then you’ve got Connor Roy, played by Alan Ruck (who you may recognize as Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off). And Connor Roy is a little bit “off.” His closest parallel in Arrested Development is the Buster character. He’s a slightly more real version of the Buster character. Like Buster, he isn't totally tied to reality, and like Buster, all he wants is to please. Buster in Arrested Development wants to please his mother and is totally under the thumb of his mother. And Connor in Succession wants to please his dad and is totally under the thumb of his dad. Connor has tried to reinvent himself as a relaxed hippie who kind of goes with the flow, but the truth is, like Buster, he’s so insecure that he just doesn’t know how to behave in any situation. Connor, like Buster, is in a relationship that a lot of people would frown upon. In Buster’s case he’s dating his mother’s best friend, Lucile 2, and in Connor’s case, he’s dating a prostitute with whom he’s desperately in love—and who doesn’t love him back. And then you’ve got Roman,

Learn from Beef how to apply the improv concepts of Game and Escalation to screenwriting in any genre. If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/ Learn more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com

Hereditary: The Power of the First & Last Image This week we’ll be talking about Hereditary written and directed by Ari Aster. I want to start by talking about the first image of this film. So, if you're worried about spoilers, we will get to some spoilers later, but you can listen to the beginning of this podcast without concern. The first image of Hereditary is the most important image of Hereditary. That's because the first image of any screenplay is the most important image of the film. It’s the most important image of your film creatively. It’s the most important image of your film structurally and it’s the most important image of your film commercially. So, it’s actually the most important image on three different levels. I want to talk about how the first image functions on each of these levels. We’re going to start on the most external and then we’re going to work down to the most connected. Externally, as a commercial device, the first image is the most important image of your film because the first image is the only image that everybody is actually going to read. When your producer or agent or manager flips the script of the first page and takes a look, it’s actually that line that makes them decide, “You know what, I’m going to send this one out for coverage,” or, “Maybe I’ll read this myself.” Similarly, if you think about the math of being a coverage reader, you as a consumer are likely going to pay about $150 for coverage, but they’re actually getting paid $50 a script. And, if you think of what it would take you to write a logline, a commentary, and a summary of a film, you’ll realize that if they were actually carefully reading each film, and carefully writing summaries, log lines and commentaries, that they would be working for about 32 cents an hour. So that’s not possible. You can’t eat from that. Which means that coverage readers need to choose which scripts they’re going to fully read and which scripts they’re going to skim. And that’s true for festival readers and readers who read for production companies. They actually can’t afford to read every single script carefully. And even if the economic reason for skimming didn’t exist, there’s an emotional reason that’s even more powerful, which is that almost everything they read is bad. If you’re a coverage reader and you read a thousand screenplays and one of them is producible, you had a pretty good year. Most of the scripts they’re reading—and I’m not talking about scripts by student writers or beginning writers or amateur writers, I’m talking about scripts by professional writers with agents—most of what they read isn't just bad, it’s actually un-producible. Many of these professional writers are just slamming out ideas, playing within a formula, trying to get something to throw against the wall to see if it sticks, rather than doing the real work of carefully mining their subconscious for the real story they want to tell. The downside of that is that there’s a lot of bad stuff that you’ve got to cut through in order to get your script noticed. The good thing about that is that if you start to learn some of the things we talk about here, and you start to do this real work, your script really will stand out from the pack. And that starts with the very first image. If you’ve got a great first image in your screenplay, it will actually change the whole perspective of the person reading. It will stop them from saying, “Oh... another bad script, okay let’s see if I can get through this,” and it will start them saying, “Oh wow! This is actually kind of cool!” Because the secret of every coverage reader is that even though they dread reading another bad script, they’re desperately hoping to find that diamond in the rough. So that first image is your place commercially to say, “You know what, pay attention. This one is going to be cool.” I actually learned this lesson doing Off-Off Broadway theatre. If you’ve ever been to an Off-Off Broadway theatre piece, you probably went there supporting a friend. You didn’t go thinking, “Hmm, Off-Off Broadway theatre. I bet I’m going to have a great entertaining experience.” You probably went going, “Oh God, Jimmy is in another play. I hope it isn't terrible so I don’t have to confront him afterwards, but I’m going to show up and I’m going to support him.” And so, as a producer of Off-Off Broadway and Off-Broadway Theater, I knew that my audience was going to come in often feeling like they were doing charity. And that isn't where you want someone coming in, just like if you’re working with a coverage reader you don’t want them coming in expecting to slog through another bad script by an amateur writer. So, what I used to do—most Off-Off Broadway black box theatres don’t have a curtain—so what I used to do was invest real money in the set. I had a wonderful set designer, Niluka Hotaling, and we knew that as the audience filed in, their expectation was that they were going to see a bunch of tables and chairs and maybe some black boxes. And instead they would walk in and see a set that looked like it could be on a Broadway show. Even though it cost me—Niluka was amazing and it cost me a few extra thousand dollars to do that that other Off-Off Broadway plays weren’t spending—the effect on the audience was huge. Because as they sat there waiting for the play to start, they realized, “Oh, maybe I’m going to see something entertaining, maybe I’m going to see something actually good.” Their entire expectation changed, and by changing their expectations, I actually could change their experience of the play, just like when you’re really excited to go see a film it changes your experience. So, from a commercial perspective your first image is the most important image, the first line of action is the most important line. But, it’s also the most important image and the most important line from an artistic perspective. Artistically, what the first image of your screenplay does is set the rules of the world for both you and your audience. It sets the tone of the world, it sets the feeling of the script, it creates a window through which your audience can experience the story of your film—through which they can interpret it. And it also creates a window through which you can interpret it. It creates a feeling in you you can return to which can guide you as you write things—as you wonder, “Should I put this in or take things out?” It creates a feeling, a mise-en-scène, an atmosphere that shows you what this movie wants to be. You can think of it like this, if you’ve ever had one of those terrible dreams where you are off to a job interview and you realize, “Oh my God, I’m not wearing pants!” If you’ve ever had that dream, you know why that dream is so terrifying. That dream is so terrifying because you know that once they see you like that, there’s going to be no recovery. You know that that first image, the way you come in, whether you're wearing a beautiful suit or whether you’re wearing a worn out pair of track pants, is going to change the way they experience you and the way they interpret everything. And it’s going to change also the way you feel about yourself in that meeting. So artistically, the first image of your film gives you a window into the world of your movie, and reminds you what your movie is supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to work. It points towards the themes of your movie and the things that really matter. And what’s cool is that, oftentimes, when you first start writing, you aren't fully aware of your themes. But, simply by pushing on that first image until you find something you haven't seen in a movie before—until you find something unexpected, and fresh, and new—you’ll start to learn, just through the action of closing your eyes and looking or pushing on that image, what your movie is really about. So, the first image of your screenplay is incredibly important commercially, and the first image is incredibly important artistically. But the first image is also incredibly important structurally. In fact, everything structurally in your film is going to build from that very first image. In a well-structured film, if you take the first image and the last image of the film and you put them together, it should tell you the journey of the characters, at least metaphorically. You should feel the journey of the character just by looking at that first image and that last image. So, let’s talk for a moment about the first image of Hereditary. The first image of Hereditary could very well have been a cliché one. In fact, we start out and we’re in a scene that’s very familiar if we’re used to horror movies: we’re in a creepy room and a kind of creepy house, and that creepy room is filled with dioramas, and there’s creepy music playing, and we’re kind of drifting with the camera among these dioramas. And, if we watch a lot of horror movies we already recognize this image. We’ve seen this image in other films. In fact, if you listen to my podcast on Annabelle: Creation you know this is essentially the first image of Annabelle: Creation: we’re in a creepy doll show filled with creepy dolls and a creepy doll’s eye. And that isn't the only film that has done this; there are many horror movies that have done this. So the good thing is that this familiar image is dropping us into a genre that we understand. We immediately know, “I get it. I’m in a horror movie. I get it. Dioramas are creepy.” And, what a lot of us might do when we realize, “Oh my God, I’ve written a cliché image,” is freak out. We might think, “Oh my God, cut it, cut it, I’m wrong, I’m wrong, it’s a mistake!” What great writers do, instead of throwing out that image, is look closer and keep looking closer, until they find something that they didn’t expect.

DEADPOOL 2: Where Tone Meets Genre in Screenwriting This week, we are going to be looking at Deadpool 2 by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and a new addition to the writing team, Ryan Reynolds. If you missed my podcast on the original Deadpool, you might want to check that out as well, because one of the things that is exciting about Deadpool 2 is the way it manages to maintain a consistent tone, even over the course of a very different film. If you’ve studied TV writing in our  TV Drama Classes, TV Comedy Classes or Web Series Classes, you know that every episode of a TV show should feel the same, and also feel different. that it should deliver the same genre experience to the audience, the same tone, the same feeling, the same experience while taking them through a story that also feels very new, and very fresh, and very different. But now, we’re seeing the same phenomenon in big action movie franchises, like Deadpool or Guardians of the Galaxy or The Avengers, where each installment needs deliver on those expectations of the audience. So, setting aside the questions all over the internet about “which is better, Deadpool 1 or Deadpool 2?” -- rather than comparing these films in terms of which is a more successful movie, instead, what I want to do is I want to look at this question, which will be valuable for any writer, whether you’re working in features or TV. How do you maintain that consistent tone? How do you create one screenplay after another that has the same feeling that feels entirely fresh and also entirely consistent?” Learning how to control tone in your screenplay will be valuable for you in many different ways. If you are writing a TV Drama or a TV Comedy, or a Web Series, understanding how tone is handled in a script, how different elements can be brought together to replicate the same feeling for the audience, will be extraordinarily valuable for you, whether working on your own pilot, or replicating the voice of a showrunner as a staff writer on a series. If you are writing for feature films this will help you in a couple of different ways. First, a lot of the writing work out there right now is work-for-hire writing or rewriting, and to be a great work-for-hire writer, or to be a great rewriter or a great polisher of scripts, we need to do more than just create great stories and great characters-- that is just a given of the basics of what we need to be able to do. We also need to be able to write characters that didn’t originate from us, we need to be able to create characters that fit effortlessly into a universe or a world created by other people, We need to be able to emulate the voices of other characters. So learning to control tone will help you in your career if you are interested in rewriting, if you are interested in being able to take notes from a producer and adapt your work, if you are interested in having control over your gift rather than just letting anything that comes out onto the page be what you end up with. And it will also be valuable for you even if you’re just working on your own script. Oftentimes, there is a big gap between what we imagine our screenplay is going to be and what actually comes out on the page. Many years ago, one of my very talented students was working on his first foray into comedy. He pulled me aside at one point and he said, “Jake, what do I do if I do all this work, and it comes out, and it isn't funny?” And I said, “Well Bill, then you will have a really great drama.” And ultimately that is still the answer I believe in. As screenwriters, we really should worry a hell of a lot less about tone. We should really worry a whole lot less about where we are going to end up, and we should really focus on what it is that we are writing, what the script wants to be. At the same time, as writers, we often freak ourselves out, because we will write something that feels like it isn't coming out right. We are writing a wonderful comedy and everything is really funny, and then here is this incredibly dark scene. Or we are writing something that is incredibly dark, and then, suddenly, here is this goofy thing that dropped in. Or, we are writing something that is set in a totally natural world, and then, suddenly, we see some expressionistic, or magical, or fantasy element comes in-- something that feels like it is from a different genre. And oftentimes what we want to do when that happens is just shut it down! “Oh my God what is wrong with me,? Why am I going off on this crazy tangent, or at this crazy angle?” When really what we need to do is bring ourselves back to where we are, and say, “Okay let’s start by noticing what comes up, and then let’s start to adapt it to turn it into what it needs to be.” Jerry Perzigian, who teaches our TV Comedy Classes here has a quote that I really love. Jerry says, “first write it true, and then write it funny.” But if you are studying TV Drama with Stephen Molton he would say the same thing, “first write it true, and then find the drama.” If you are writing an action movie, I would say the same thing, “first write it true, and then find the action and the spectacle to build around it.” As writers, our ultimate job is to tell the truth. But in our final drafts, we need that truth to take a form that fits with all the stuff around it. If we are working on a film like Deadpool 2, where we are working with a character who is supposed to feel, and look, and be, and act a certain way, we need to fulfill the expectations that our audience had set up for them in the first episode, just like we need to fulfill the expectations that we set up for our audience on the first page, or the first act, or the first half of our script. We have to give them what we promised, and then we have to outdo it. If you look at Deadpool 2, it is an exciting film because, just like the original Deadpool, it deals with a lot of stuff that you aren't supposed to deal with in a comedy: suicide, death of a lover, child obesity and anger, child abuse, sexual abuse, murder. And one of the fabulous things about Deadpool and Deadpool 2 is that even though the films are both chock full of violence, Deadpool the character shows a lot of awareness that those bullets hurt, that the actions he is taking aren't necessarily right, that the violence that we see in these films isn't really the society that we want to create for ourselves. So you have this completely immoral character (or mostly immoral) character in a film that actually has a relatively moral message. You have a completely irreverent action comedy that is actually dealing with some very, very, real issues. And although you have a wise-cracking character who never seems to break a sweat, or never seems at loss for a joke, you also have a couple of moments of truly moving character-driven drama between him and his wife. What’s really beautiful about Deadpool 2 that it is able to wrestle with very real, truthful, dark issues without losing that constant comic fun tone that categorizes who Deadpool is and how the series works.   In the original Deadpool this was already hard to do, but in Episode 2 this was actually harder. In the original Deadpool what we have is a creation myth. We have the journey of Wade Wilson to becoming Deadpool, and in that story, we have the story of a guy learning what really matters in life. And even though, as I commented in my first podcast on Deadpool, it doesn’t draw to the traditional moralistic conclusion that you would expect in a superhero movie, Wade Wilson does go on a character-driven journey where he learns that it really isn't all about materialism, it really isn't all about looking good-- that he can actually believe in love. A really beautiful love story grows between Deadpool and Vanessa--his stripper prostitute girlfriend--where these two very flawed people actually find real love together. What that means is that by the beginning of Deadpool 2, we need a completely different kind of journey for the Deadpool character. The first Deadpool is a journey about discovering that love can be real. But, you can’t just go do that again in Deadpool 2, because the character has already gone on that journey! At the same time, if you have studied any TV writing-- and these big-budget action movies do work like TV in that each installment needs to feel the same but also be different-- you know that for the formula of Deadpool, for the engine to work, Deadpool has to go on another morality versus lack of morality kind of journey! It can’t be the same as the first one because he has already learned what love it, it has to be something new. So, Deadpool 2 hones in on a different theme. If the first Deadpool was about appearance versus reality, about a character dealing with the ugliness of his face and learning that he can still be loved for who he is rather than what he looks like, Deadpool 2 is about something different. Deadpool 2 is about family. And Deadpool 2 starts, just like the first Deadpool, with a really beautifully shot, fun, funny action sequence. Deadpool 1 begins with a visually spectacular sequence, but while in Deadpool 1 this was a fun action-fight sequence, in Deadpool 2 it is a suicide sequence. What we watch is a guy who can’t die, doing his best to blow himself up. We meet a Deadpool who is starting the film at a place of total despair. And though he is still wisecracking and fun, we can feel the despair underneath his actions and we can feel the lengths he is going to, to try to end his life. We then flashback to find out why. And what we flashback to is a sequence between Deadpool and Vanessa that is a little bit surprising emotionally and tonally, if you are used to the Vanessa from the previous movie and the Deadpool from the previous movie, because,

The Hero Writes Itself: Interview with Katie Torpey Jake: I am here today with Katie Torpey, our newest teacher. She is teaching our TV Drama Classes, Write Your Screenplay I, Write Your Screenplay II, Write Your Screenplay III, and The Writing Lab. Welcome, nice to have you.  Katie: Thanks for having me, I am very excited. Jake: I would love to start off by talking a little bit about your background as a screenwriter. Katie: Perfect, so the first job I got out of college was at America’s Most Wanted TV Show. I was doing stories for them, and that is when I fell for storytelling in that genre. And then I left for LA, I lived on the East Coast; I went to LA and started working as a PA and stuff like that. But, I started taking some classes at UCLA Extension and I won some awards. I won The Diane Thomas award, I was a finalist in the Chesterfield. That got me going, and then I got into UCLA Film School and got my Masters in Screenwriting. And then from there, I sold a script out of film school, and I went started working with Power Rangers and wrote for them. Then I sold another script that got made called The Perfect Man with Hilary Duff and Heather Locklear and Chris Noth. I wrote and directed a movie that I shot in Ireland, starring Stana Katic who was on Castle, and that was awesome because I got to direct. From there I sold a TV show that got made on Hulu. It was one of Hulu’s first TV shows. It was interesting because we were like, “Online? We’re going to do a TV show online?” And now it is so huge online TV. And I teach obviously, I love teaching. My first teacher as a screenwriter was Valerie West and she was so inspiring. She helped me learn about storytelling, and I swore if I ever got to a place that I could teach and help someone and have them feel that way I would do it. And that is what got me into teaching. Jake: I had a mentor like that too. I had Peter Parnell, who at the time was a playwright, and Peter taught me what it meant to be an artist, which is something that often I think gets left out of screenwriting training. Katie: Absolutely, it tends to get so formulaic that it is like a math equation,  and that isn't what it is supposed to be. Jake: When you’re approaching a script, how do you help a student, or how do you help yourself find that balance between the art and the craft? Katie: Well, I spent so much time learning the craft in many different ways. I throw it out now, because it is really kind of ingrained in me. So I don’t even really think about it. For me when you know the character so well like you really make them rich, they write themselves, it is almost like you’re channeling. Jake: So if you’re a new writer, and maybe you’ve been taught a lot of like formula, you’ve been taught Save The Cat, or The Hero’s Journey, or three act structure, and now you’re looking to kind of get underneath and get to your authentic voice as a writer, like how do you do that? Katie: I would start with journaling. Just start to write, just vomit it out and see what comes out. And then you’ll see like some beautiful stuff. Jake: You have a really cool installment of The Writing Lab that you’re going to do with us called The Hero Writes Itself, and you were talking about how you actually use archetypes in that class to connect through a series of writing exercises, is that right? Katie: Yeah, I have people go into their life and the people who they’ve met in their life, and things they like, they dislike, who they are, moments from their life, to really pull out experiences and stories, and a story they might want to tell. It is just a wild experience because it is all psychological. Because, if you know all the elements of a human being, why they do what they want and the motivation behind everything… for example, if you understand someone has a hard time in relationships because the parents got divorced and the mom cheated on the dad... If you know these kind of details, you will understand why this main character has a hard time at love, and it is almost like a river that starts and it just goes. And the character becomes fabulous, because you’re creating something so original and it is just talking for you, it is like you aren't even writing it anymore. Jake: You’ve worked in so many different worlds, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you approach feature films versus how you approach TV writing, how are they similar and how are they different? Katie: Well, in features there’s an end to the story. So I really think about “where’s this character going?”and “who are supporting characters in the world with them?” and “how do they all connect?”I am like a little more like, “hmm, what’s going on here?” and “how am I going to end it at some point?” And then with a TV show, it is endless, so I think, “what could happen at 100th episode?” “where can these characters go?” “where can the stories go?” It’s almost more freeing to write TV and it’s a lot of fun. Because in TV you can let these characters run and play. Look at Breaking Bad, it is a great example. It was almost like a long movie, six seasons, because he changed and the characters changed, and the stories changed. Jake: You know we have so many students who are working to break into television, and some who’ve successfully done it, which is really exciting. When you were working as a Head Writer, what would you look for in a new writer? Katie: It is all about, “Can they tell a story?  Am I engaged?” And engagement doesn’t mean you open up with a murder or something. Engagement is all about, “Do I want to read the next page, because the character is just insanely brilliant?” Or, there is a story element makes you say, “wow!” and you just want to keep on reading and reading. That is my goal when I am telling a story; I want to be real and authentic with it. You can feel it when it is manufactured, when it is trying to be something it isn't. So, I love being authentic with it. I want you to keep on watching the TV, or not walk out of the movie theatre. Jake: So, one of the things that I always talk about with my students is that there are different phases of writing. You have your Me Draft first , “hey, I am just going to look at what it might be, I am going to let it write itself.” Then you have your Audience Draft where you are like, “Okay now I have to find a way to serve this up in a way that the audience can go on as cool of a journey as I have, so I am going to have some structure.” You have the Producer Draft where you are going to turn up the volume on the hook, so that a producer can realize, “Oh I can sell this!” or an actor can realize, “Oh I want to be in this!” And then you have the Reader Draft where you really clean up formatting. I am curious, when you are working on a TV show, it is such a collaborative environment, and like you were saying, there is like this element of, “I want to just allow the story to tell itself”, and then there is this other element of, “I want the audience to keep turning these pages...” Katie: Absolutely. So, when you are in a writers room, it is a lot of fun because you do the season arc, so you need to know where the journeys are, where the characters are going, what are the story lines. It is a lot of fun to play with that and bounce ideas. We always had a big board and we would just lay it out like, “Where are the stories going?” But they would change sometimes. We needed the structure so we knew where we were going, but sometimes the episode would change, so we would be like, “Oh wait we have got to change this because the character authentically didn’t want to go there.” So, we played that way, and people would balance and it was a lot of fun. Jake: I think that that is such an exciting thing to think about, because a lot of newer writers get really hung up on their outlines. Or there is this idea that when you get to a TV show, you must do an outline and then everyone must play by those rules. What we have really seen with our students who have gone on to TV shows, and having wonderful teachers like you and Jerry teaching how to write for TV, what we have seen is there is an outline but that outline is constantly in flux. And just when you think you know what your story is, someone changes episode 42 and your story changes. How do you develop those skills with an emerging writer so that when they have worked so darn hard to craft that piece, and suddenly the showrunner changes everything, or the network changes everything, or the showrunner and network both want to change something, they have enough plasticity in their writing to adapt? Katie: I think for any writer, you need to be able to be flexible, because it is an art. It is a storytelling art. It isn't finance! And so you have to go with the characters and the story. And you never know why a story is going to change. There could be an actor that gets fired and all of a sudden it is like, “Okay this story is going over here.” Or there is no chemistry between a couple on a TV show and they are like, “Okay we’ve got to break them up”. So, you are always moving and shifting. But it is fun! It is actually fun to move and shift. It is like you are hanging out in the writers room and somebody is like “hey we’ve got a new plan, what are we going to do, let’s figure it out?” Then everyone bounces ideas together, and then we land in the story. Jake: So you actually enjoy rewriting? Katie: I do, I absolutely do. I find usually then it usually gets to the best level at that point. Jake: How do you make rewriting fun for yourself, because I know so many of my students they dread rewriting. “Oh no God please let me be finished!” Katie: Many people get hung up on rewriting and feel like they could rewrite for the rest of their lives.

A QUIET PLACE Part 2: Dialogue, Action & The Theme of Your Screenplay In the first installment of this podcast, we looked at A Quiet Place in relation to writing action and discussed how all of screenplay formatting really exists for one purpose: to isolate visual moments of action. By isolating visual moments of action we can hypnotize the reader into seeing, hearing, and feeling the story in their mind’s eye, rather than simply reading it on the page. We can invite them to tell themselves the story of the movie, rather than having it spoonfed to them. We explored the idea that each image in your screenplay, just like each image in your movie---every line, every comma, every period---is really a cut. An isolated moment that, when bumped up against another isolated moment, draws the reader into your script and allows them to make connections to tell themselves the story of what is really going on. So by now, we understand what the word “Isolate” means. But what about the other three elements of formatting: Visual Moments of Action? And how does all of this relate to theme and character and dialogue and all those other elements of A Quiet Place and screenwriting in general? Well, that’s what we’re going to cover in this podcast. So since we now understand the idea of Isolated in Isolated Visual Moments of Action, now let’s get into the concept of Visual. The next idea is Visual. Visual formatting in your screenplay means that there is something visually exciting about each image. Another way to think of that is that there is nothing normal in your script, and the reason there is nothing normal in your script is because there is nothing normal in the world. Everything in the world is really freaking weird. Your most normal friend is really freaking weird. You are really freaking weird. Your desk doesn’t actually look like a desk. Your desk has something weird about it.  Maybe it’s a scratch, maybe it’s a toothbrush sitting in a pen holder, maybe it’s the way that your papers are stacked up with a little crystal on top of them. Your desk has something weird about it and you have something weird about you, and every moment in life has something weird about it, and if you don’t see it, you are just not looking closely enough. And if you aren't looking closely enough, that means that your reader, or your viewer, has to do the work of seeing, rather than you doing the work of seeing. Visual means that you are going to do the work of seeing each moment. You are going to do the work of finding that little hooky thing, that little special element, that little thing that makes it just slightly cooler than normal. That every single thing you write is going to be something that is worthy of shooting. And here is why that is important: every single thing you write is freaking expensive. A Quiet Place had one of the craziest production schedules ever. It was released about 5 months after they finished production, and think about that. Think about how short that is. Post-production was the biggest part of this movie. You had to cut this whole film together and actually use sound almost like it was a character in the film. This movie was all about post, and its rush to release date was insane. In fact, they even had to reinvent the creature during the post-production process because John Krasinski wasn’t happy with the creature that ILIM had created; they actually went back to the drawing board and reimagined all that visual work. So that timetable is intense. Why were they able to pull it off?   Well, actually Krasinski has talked about this. They were able to pull this off, and they were able to pull it off on such a low budget, because he wrote it (as did Bryan Woods and Scott Beck) to cut together in exactly the way they had written it. Unlike most scripts, which basically throw the ball to the director and go, “Hey dude, you figure it out,” this script was written exactly the way it needed to be shot. If you are an independent filmmaker, this is the most important lesson that you can take. Usually, if you are an independent filmmaker, it means that your line producer isn't experienced enough to really do their job. And that isn't because your line producer isn't good. That’s because your line producer isn't experienced because you can’t afford an experienced line producer. And usually, you are trying to squeeze in more shots in a day than the professionals are squeezing in, which is crazy because they have more budget and more pre-production than you do. And what ends up happening is all of your days are going to run late, and your line producer is going to start making cuts because you don’t have time, and your director, who is likely as inexperienced as you are, is going to start figuring out on the fly “what do I need?” But if you do this work on the page, like John Krasinski did, starting with a great script and then rewriting and rewriting until it’s written exactly the way you imagine your editor will cut it, then you can control your budget and the ultimate success of your film, regardless of how little money you have or how compressed your production or post-production schedule may be. And on A Quiet Place that’s exactly what they did! Although they did a little bit of rearrangement in the editing room, they actually cut it on the page exactly the way they wanted to get it shot and edited---each image written on the page in exactly the way they were going to shoot it. What Krasinski did was he took a great script, the early draft we referenced in the last podcast, and revised it until he had isolated each of those visual moments of action, and that allowed him to know exactly what he needed as a director. But that also allows you flexibility and huge budget savings when something goes wrong. When you don’t get your location, or it starts to rain, or you’re running behind and you don’t have the budget to pay overtime---you can actually make the cut on the page and see how it is going to affect the rhythm and the tone of your script. And your inexperienced line producer isn’t going to be able to predict this. And trust me, if you’re doing a low budget movie, your line producer is almost certainly inexperienced, since you’re not going to have the money to hire an experienced one.   The chances are, your inexperienced line producer has already under-budgeted your production. And if you write non-specific action, like “Jake is recording his podcast” it’s just going to exacerbate the problem. Your inexperienced line producer isn't going to think, “Jake records his podcast, what are the shots I’m going to need to convey that in a captivating way?” He’s going to think, “Jake sitting at a desk, one shot, bang, bang, done!” But if you write those isolated visual moments of action like we discussed last week: “Jake’s hands tip the microphone towards his mouth. His lips move within a bushy grey beard.” Instead, he is going to realize, “Oh, I need to get in a shot of that hand. I have got to get the close shot of that mouth. I have got to get hair and makeup to make sure that beard looks right for that close shot.” When you learn to do this work in your screenplay, you are actually going to be writing better than the professional screenwriters. Most professionals don’t have time to do this, and because of their reputation they don’t have to do it. They can throw it back to the director and go, “Hey, here is the story, get the gist.” They can think of it like it is a blueprint. But, you as a young writer, an emerging writer---or if you are planning to self-direct, if you are working on a low budget, or if you are trying to break through to Hollywood, or if, as they did in A Quiet Place, you are actually doing both---you are thinking you are going to make this yourself, and meanwhile your agent is out there shopping in Hollywood… and everyone says “no.” But, finally, Michael Bay says yes, because he sees it and feels it and experiences it, and he knows it is going to work. If you actually do that kind of writing, you are going to save yourself so much money, or you are going to make yourself so much money, and you are going to give your film so much better of an opportunity to actually get made. And that’s all we want. At the end of the day we want our movies to get made and we want our movies to be great.   And writing in this way protects you. It protects you from producers. It protects you from coverage readers. It protects you from inexperienced line producers. It protects you from inexperienced directors. And let’s say that film was made not by John Krasinski. Let’s say that the director hadn’t been such a brilliant filmmaker who could come to that original script and do his own revision and make it even stronger. When you write this way, if you get stuck with an average producer or an average director, you’ve given them something that they can actually shoot. You haven't given them a blueprint that they have to figure out---that they need special expertise like an architect does to read. You’ve given them something that translates directly to that little movie screen in their mind. So, the first element Isolated, the second element Visual. The third element is called Moments. Moments mean we are going to see the greatest hits. We’re not going to see all the stuff in between. If you were writing a play, you would watch the character enter, walk across the rooftop, say “hi” to the other character and then leave. They would have to actually track all that little detail, and that is why a play is actually very little action, because we go, “Ah, we will figure that out on the stage.” But when you are writing a film, we have the power of the cuts---these isolated visual moments of action---and that means we only need the greatest hits moments, the moments that create the impression,

Please note, this podcast was recorded prior to the recent scandals surrounding Roseanne Barr. We have chosen to leave the podcast on our site because we feel it may have information that is valuable to writers. But the analysis was based upon what the show appeared to be after the airing of the pilot. As recent events have shown, rather than taking advantage of her unique opportunity to use her artistic platform to begin a healing for a torn apart America, as I had hoped when recording this podcast, Roseanne has instead used her platform to further fracture us through hate, reminding us of a darker side of what art can do when used in the wrong way. On my podcast I have always tried to separate the art from the artist. But this episode certainly reflects a mistake on my part in failing to note the difference between the real Roseanne and the character she plays on her show. This week we are going to be talking about two scripts that seem to have nothing in common.  The first is Isle of Dogs by Wes Anderson. And the second is the pilot of the new Roseanne. Wait, what? Well keep listening, because as different as they are in every aspect of their execution, their style, their politics, their genre and their format, Isle of Dogs and Roseanne do have one incredibly important thing in common: They’re both a lesson in the power of movies and TV shows to grapple with real socio-political issues, and make real change in our society. And what’s so fabulous about both of these scripts is that they do so without sacrificing their political beliefs, without dumbing anything down for their audience, and without compromising their artistic integrity or their commercial or critical success. Isle of Dogs is a ridiculous movie about a ridiculous concept. And when I say Isle of Dogs is a ridiculous movie about a ridiculous concept, I’m not referring to the ridiculous concept of a Japan of the near future in which dogs are banished to a mysterious island by a cat loving corrupt leader… or the unlikely story of his adopted child’s flying a stolen airplane to the land of garbage save his beloved pet, Spots. When I say ridiculous story about a ridiculous concept, I am talking about the concept underneath: the real theme of this movie. Because this isn't a movie about dogs. This isn't a movie about the war between cats and dogs. This isn't a movie about a closeted cat lover who wants to banish dogs from his corrupt future Japan. And this is not just a movie the power of the visual image-- though Wes Anderson’s approach to Isolating Visual Moments of Action is at once a master class in how to write action in a screenplay, and a complete violation of every rule you thought you knew. And yes, I can’t help but wax poetic about how Wes Anderson somehow manages to fuse the rules of theatre and film, creating set pieces like a giant stage, and then populating them with oddly poetic images… or how he uses that poetry at once as an homage and a satire of a world that he loves, treating the ridiculous with piety, and the serious with ridiculousness... But that’s not what the movie is about either. Isle of Dogs is a movie about racism and politics. In other words, Isle of Dogs is a movie about America. And it is interesting because Wes Anderson has taken a lot of crap actually for this movie. Some critics feel that Isle of Dogs is guilty of cultural appropriation in its depiction of this future Japan; other critics have argued that having a white exchange student as a savior is degrading to the Japanese characters at the center of the movie, a recreation of the old white savior trope. And maybe these things are true. Maybe these things would be true if this was a movie about Japan. But, really this is an homage to Japanese film making by a filmmaker who loves Japan, and who loves Japanese filmmakers. And more importantly, this is a movie about America. This isn't a Japan that looks like Japan. These aren't dogs that act like dogs. This isn't a political landscape that looks like a real political landscape. This is a satire of the most ridiculous part of our human nature. This is a movie that looks at the ridiculousness of racism, that looks at the ridiculousness of deporting people based on what they are rather than who they are-- in this case, the fact that they are dogs-- which is just as ridiculous as banishing someone from the United States because they happen to have been born in Mexico, or some other country. This is a movie about totalitarian law and corruption. This is a movie about playing the media. This is a movie about the way that actual science gets dismissed in favor of politics. This is a movie about the fact that our leaders tend to be puppets that are manipulated by much darker forces behind them. This is a movie about the idea of equal debate in a world where total falsehoods and totally true statements are given equal weight. This is a movie about a black dog and a white dog who don’t realize that they are brothers because they seemed to have come from such different backgrounds. This is not a movie about a bunch of stupid dogs, and it’s not a movie about Japan—it is a movie about us. What is wonderful about Wes Anderson--and this is such an important thing if you are writing a political movie-- What’s so wonderful about him is that he managed to make a political movie without making us feel political. Without getting up on a soapbox. Without isolating the people on the other side but rather, holding up a ridiculous, magical mirror in which we could examine ourselves and maybe change what we believe. A lot of us are mad about politics right now. A lot of writers are mad about politics. And a lot of writers who don’t agree with my politics (and I am somewhere far, far, far, to the left), are equally angry about politics right now. If you watched the reboot of Roseanne what is incredibly powerful and what made that reboot so darn effective and successful is that, like Isle of Dogs, rather than getting up on a soapbox and preaching to the choir, it trusted its audience to form their own opinion. Which is interesting, because we’re talking about two writers on completely different sides of the political spectrum: One, Roseanne Barr, an unabashed Trump supporter, and the other, Wes Anderson, making an allegory about racism and xenophobia in a magical dog hating Japan. But both writers take the same approach, which is basically to say, “Hey, we trust our audiences to form their own opinions. Rather than getting up on a soapbox and moralizing, what we are going to do is we are going to give our audiences a chance to look at themselves.” Both Isle of Dogs and Roseanne make their political points by transcending politics-- and focusing instead on the heart of all screenwriting-- by focusing on characters, and relationships and the things that really matter to us. If Isle of Dogs is  a poetic masterpiece set against a ridiculous world, Roseanne is a couch, a studio audience, and a bunch of laugh lines, set against a very real world. In Roseanne what happens is we get to look at a family that we love and that loves each other, Roseanne has always been the symbol for white trash dysfunction, a family that is so messed up, but underneath it really loves each other. That’s why Roseanne was welcomed into so many houses and so many homes for such a long time with so much success. Because Roseanne gave us an opportunity to laugh at ourselves, but also to see ourselves clearly, not as the perfect people that we are supposed to be, but as the totally messed up but well intentioned people that we actually are. It allowed us to see our families that way. And our friends that way. And even the people we don’t agree with that way. Who would have thought that a reboot of Roseanne, might be the thing that actually begins the healing of America in the wake of the horrific political crisis we have been through. That a show like Roseanne would be able to take these two extreme points of view and somehow bring them back together. That a show like Roseanne would help us remember -- you know what?-- at the end of all this, at the end the day we still love each other. Roseanne is going, “Okay look, I believe this, and my sister believes this, and we are estranged over the rift between us so badly that we have forgotten the fact that we love each other. And somehow through humor, comedy and love we are going to agree to disagree, and remember that at the end of the day we are sisters, or we are brothers, or we are family.” That we are actually all the same, and that we are actually all going through the same stuff together. Even the people who support the party and the politicians that you don’t believe in... So, as a screenwriter this is why you are here. You are here to change the social fabric of your world. But that doesn’t mean getting up on a soapbox. In fact if you do get up on a soapbox, if you make one of these moralistic movies about the way things are supposed to be, here is the only thing that you can be guaranteed: the only people who will listen to you are the people who already believe what you are saying. You are going to be preaching to the choir and you aren't going to convince anybody. But, create a show like Roseanne and you give people a chance to actually look at themselves, to actually look at how ridiculous, and how beautiful, and how loving, and how messed up we all actually are. You give them a chance to actually come out the other side and remember who we can actually be. So, Roseanne takes one model, “Hey let’s look at this honestly, let’s look at the real intentions and the real misconceptions, and the real extremes on both sides, and let’s show America a model for how those two sides can actually come together, not in perfect harmony but in beautiful dysfunction.”

Jake: Hi, I’m Jacob Krueger, and thank you for tuning into a very special episode of The Write Your Screenplay Podcast. This is our 100th episode. I’m so incredibly excited, proud and grateful to all of the listeners that have made this possible for 100 episodes. So, I was thinking, “What am I going to do for my 100th episode?” I wanted to do something special? So, I decided to go back to the source. And for that reason, today I’m going to be interviewing my mom, Audrey Sussman. I’m excited to talk to my mom on this podcast for a couple of reasons. First my mom taught me everything that I know as an artist. I have the only Jewish mother in America who found out that her daughter was going to be a doctor and responded, “Oh, my God, but you could have been an Opera singer!”   So, I’m incredibly lucky to have had a mother who supports my artistic life, and that is something that a lot of people don’t get. in addition to that, my mom taught me everything I know about writing, and not because my mom is a writer, but because my mom is a hypnotherapist. Her work is about the stories that we tell ourselves, not on the conscious level but on the subconscious level, and how those stories take us on journeys of change-- how we can actually change who we are by changing the stories. In this way my mom taught me how to induce a trance in a reader: how to allow a reader to experience a fictional story as if it was real. She taught me how to use image and sound and feeling, and the other modalities that allow writing to feel real and stories to feel real. She showed me how to build structure-- how the human mind puts structure together. And she taught me how to do rewriting-- not how to rewrite a script but by how to rewrite your life! How to change the way you tell yourself the story of your life—not by making it fake, but by finding different layers, and different values to the truth. Another reason I’m very excited to have my mom here is she teaches classes at the studio. She teaches two classes: The Inner Game which is our class about how to take care of the inner challenges to your writing—the subconscious challenges, the fears, the confidence, the procrastination, and also how to connect to your characters on a more profound level. And she teaches our Writing Lab, which is our experimental laboratory where we really push the edges of how writing works.   So, thank you, Audrey, so much. It’s weird to call you Audrey-- but thank you, Mom, for joining us here today. Audrey: I’m really delighted to be here. As I was listening you tell the story of how you learned from me, it is interesting because all I was doing was being a mom who knew how to listen. That just was natural––it was such a natural way of interacting where you are always looking for the good in the person. You are always figuring if a person is feeling a certain way, especially my child, there must be a reason for it. Looking for those stories that you might have been telling yourself-- that was just how I parented and I was always looking for the good. And it sounds like you do the same with your students. I hear you when you teach. Jake: That is probably the most valuable thing that you can learn as a writer. It is so easy to find the bad, and a lot of us, as parents to our inner creative children-- if we ever said to another child what we say to our little inner artist child, someone would be calling child services immediately. And part of being a writer is learning how to be a good parent to that creative child. Because we do need to be a parent to that child; we can’t just neglect that child and leave that child out in the wilderness, or that child will experience a lot of the negative things that happen to artists. We have to be a parent to that child, we have to help guide that child towards the places that they need to go creatively, to learning the skills that they need to learn to succeed. But, a lot of us get way too aggressive with that child, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Audrey: I was thinking of a story. A parent plants some seeds in the ground, and they are supposed to be flowers. And three days go by, and the parent is like, “Well why aren't these flowers yet?” And they dig them up and they’re still seeds! Covers them up, waters them. Next day, waters them. A week goes by and the parent is like, “What is going on here, where are the flowers?” and he starts stamping on the dirt. That’s sometimes what we do to ourselves. “Why don’t I have this done? Why didn’t I write the pages I said I would?” And instead of just watering the seed and saying, “Hey let me just spend five minutes doing something, fifteen minutes, let me look for the good,” we are stamping on it, because we are angry that the flower hasn’t bloomed. It doesn’t work like that. Jake: I think that metaphor that you just gave of digging it up is such a powerful metaphor. Because we do this to our scripts all the time. You start something and it is something you believe in, but it is in an early form. It is still a seed. It isn't a plant yet. Or, you expect it to be a flower, but it turns out it is a beautiful tomato plant. And instead of trusting that the material is going to take the shape that it needs to take, sometimes we end up just digging it up, or reinventing it, or throwing it out, or giving up on it, or trying to shape it into something that it doesn’t want to be. Audrey: You know, it’s funny, when I was a kid I used to write poetry. And I never thought much about it; I never thought it was good or bad, I just wrote. And that is the freedom of a child-- who knew that this was poetry! It is beautiful poetry. Some of it was a little deep and sad, but I look back on it as an adult and I think, “Oh my, if I sat down to write with all that stuff we do to ourselves as adults, I wouldn’t have had that beautiful poetry.” Which makes me think about-- I call them filters through which we see life. You know, if you write something and then you think it is great, and then you look at it the next day and you are like, “Oh this is a piece of trash!” Don’t throw it away. Because three weeks or a year from now you might look at that and you are like, “Oh my God, did I write this?” Even daily our own filters change. Jake: Yeah, it is interesting because that happens with feedback as well. Most scripts that go out aren't really ready to go. Most people rush it. They still have the seed, and they are trying to pretend it is a plant-- it is very easy not to put enough time in as a gardener, or to kind of see the beginning and go, “Let me duct tape and chewing gum some leaves on there and we will just pretend it is full grown.” But, every once in a while you have a script that really is ready to go. You have really done the work and you have created something that is beautiful to you,  that is surprising to you in some way-- that maybe goes even beyond what you expected it to do. And sometimes that happens and you have to recognize that other people have filters too. You are going to get a lot of very negative feedback sometimes. And it is important to recognize what happens as an artist that if you let all that feedback bounce you around, if you react at every bit of advice and every bit of feedback. Don’t get me wrong , I believe in mentorship. I would be nowhere without my mentors. And that is what we try to provide here at the studio, that kind of mentorship so that you have people to bounce ideas off of. But, there is a big difference between bouncing ideas and being told what to do. And there is a big difference between the kind of feedback that opens a door for you, and the kind of feedback that tries to force you to do something that serves somebody else’s filters but not necessarily your own. Audrey: And that is one of the things in The Inner Game that we are doing. If any artist knows the core is safe, the core of who they are is safe, it is so much easier to hear feedback, because it’s not about you. And so in The Inner Game what we are looking at is: how do we change the voice in the back of your head, so that you know you are safe no matter what? And then you can hear what we call criticism or whatever, take in the parts that work and still stay true to your voice and what you believe. Jake: I always think of it like going to the ocean. It is wonderful to get wet, but you can’t take the whole ocean home with you. So when I’m getting feedback, I want to let the waves wash over me.   It is a process. Like all writing, it is a process of trust. You need to trust that the part of you-- the parts that you hold on to, the parts that actually seep into your clothes, or that actually gets you wet when that water washes over you-- those are the parts you need right now. And sometimes that means letting other parts wash back out to sea. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be really valuable things to learn later. But there is a trust process that happens-- that the sea is going to bring those ideas back to you. If you just keep on pursuing your art that those waves will keep coming in. Audrey: Oh my goodness I must have been in my late 20s, I was taking a class, every week I would just argue with the instructor and I was like, “But this doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense.” At week number six she said probably the same thing and I said, “Why didn’t you say that five weeks ago?” And she said, “But I did!” Either she changed the wording slightly or finally I was ready to hear it. Jake: I had a teacher like that too, Joe Blaustein, who was a wonderful painter that I was lucky enough to study with in Los Angeles. And I learned a lot about feedback from Joe because Joe would never tell you what to do. Joe would come around, he would look at your painting and he would be like, “Just take a look at this area right here,

This week we are going to be talking about BoJack Horseman, but we aren't just going to be talking about the series, we are going to be talking about one very particular episode, and doing a really deep breakdown: Season 4, Episode 9 which is entitled Ruthie. A lot of the times when we talk about television, we talk about TV bibles, we talk about the idea that every show needs to have an engine, a structure that is replicable, that can be done again, and again, and again. Selling a series is like selling a franchise, like selling a McDonalds or Starbucks-- you are selling not just the brilliance of your writing, or the brilliance of your idea, you are selling the replicability of it. You are selling the ability to do it again, and again, and again, even if the writing team changes, even if the showrunner changes, even if the directors or in this case the animators change, that you have the same engine again, and again, and again. And so, what is really exciting about this episode is that it shows what starts to happen, once you really understand your engine, once you really understand the formula for your series.You can start to play within it, and then you can also start to play against it. You can start to open up new avenues of what your series can be, especially, once you’ve established what it is for both your audience and for yourself as a writer. What is really interesting about this episode is, we don’t start in the present, we start in the future, we start with Princess Carolyn’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great granddaughter, who is telling a story about her ancestor, Princess Carolyn. Now, if you don’t watch BoJack Horseman, let me catch you up a little bit about how this series works. BoJack Horseman is both the most ridiculous and the saddest series that you will ever watch on television. It is an animated send up of Hollywood, in a world in which some of the people are people and some of the people are part animal. And, the animal-people are basically just people except they have certain animal traits… Pretty wild concept already for a series! And generally in the series, what happens is we watch BoJack Horseman, who is the ultimate narcissistic movie star, and we watch the funniest possible trainwreck we could ever watch as BoJack consistently makes his own universe harder, and harder, and harder. Princess Carolyn is BoJack’s former lover and former agent, and Princess Carolyn is a cat who is dating a mouse, and her mouse is pretty much the perfect man. And all Princess Carolyn has wanted for the whole season is just to get pregnant, and it is just not happening. Usually we would watch Princess Carolyn’s story as a B story in an episode. But in this episode, Princess Carolyn’s story becomes the A story. Now how do you get away with this, you aren't supposed to just be able to reverse the whole structure of your series; you’re not supposed to just change up what you’ve been doing especially in a series as successful as BoJack, why did they get away with this? Well, what is interesting is they don’t just get away with changing the focus; they also get away with changing the structure, because we are actually going to the future. And we are going to start off watching Princess Carolyn’s great, great, great granddaughter tell the story of Princess Carolyn’s awful, awful, awful day. So the A story is going to be Princess Carolyn’s journey, the B story is going to be BoJack’s story, and the C story is going to be this unusual thread that starts in the future, and then flashes back to our present. And what is really cool is this is something that the series has never done before. There have been times where we flashback to the past into BoJack’s story, or even into BoJack’s mother’s story, but, there has never been a point where we have flashed from the future back to the present. So, what is happening is the engine of the series, the rules of the series, are actually getting complicated. We are starting to riff on the basic structure which is that we are going to watch BoJack Horseman destroy his own life, but instead we are going to flip it and we are going to focus on Princess Carolyn and her terrible, terrible day as reported by her great, great, great granddaughter. Why does it work? The real purpose of a bible or of an engine, is to make sure that the audience comes back, and every time they get the same feeling but also something different. So, when an audience comes to watch a TV show, you want BoJack Horseman to feel like BoJack Horseman; you want it to feel like BoJack Horseman in every episode. You don’t want one episode to feel like BoJack Horseman and another to feel like Curb Your Enthusiasm, even though both pieces are about similarly narcissistic Hollywood characters. You want the show to maintain its integrity. So, here are the things that are consistent in the show, is every episode is going to be filled to the brim with pun, and of course this episode is no different: it is pun on top of pun on top of pun. In every episode, we are going to watch a character who is loved by the people around them, make all the wrong choices that end up destroying their own lives. And always, we are going to watch this happening in the funniest way possible; we are going to be surprised when those tears end up hitting us. And what this episode does so brilliantly is that even though it completely changes the structure focusing on Princess Carolyn and reducing BoJack to a B story. Even though it creates a random C story (usually the C story would be Todd and Mr. Peanutbutter and those characters make brief cameos in this episode). Even though all those things are happening differently, the end product does the same thing. And what is really amazing is how the end product does the same thing in a way that still feels funny. Jerry Perzigian, who teaches our TV Comedy Classes here at the studio, is an Emmy Award winner. He was the showrunner on Married with Children, The Golden Girls, The Jeffersons. He was a writer on Frasier. If it was a hit show in the 80’s or 90’s Jerry was on it, or he was running it. He has a really interesting way of teaching: he actually runs his classes just like real writer’s rooms, where basically on your day you pitch your project to the class and everyone collaborates together on structure, and engine, on characters, on jokes. And Jerry has a quote that I really love, which is this: “First you write it true, and then, you make it funny.” And I think this is such a powerful lesson for screenwriters and TV writers which is, the tone is something that you can control. And what is interesting about this episode: this episode is about Princess Carolyn’s terrible, awful, awful day. It is so freaking dark. this episode is about a woman whose only desire is to have a baby, and guess what, she is not going to have it. And, this is about as dark a topic as you can handle. And this is a comedy; you aren't supposed to be doing this. So, how do they keep the tone from getting so dark that we would lose the fun and the laughter that brings us to a series like this? How are we supposed to laugh at Princess Carolyn’s miscarriage? Well, the magic is actually in that structural game they are playing --by flashing into the future -- because the mere existence of this little girl from the future telling the story of her ancestor, lets us know as an audience that it is okay to laugh, that it is okay to have some fun, that as awful and dark as all this stuff gets, it is still going to be okay at the end. In other words that little opening sequence controls the tone of the piece, it allows the audience the permission that the audience needs to enjoy themselves. And this is the brilliance of BoJack Horseman, and we have seen BoJack Horseman play these kinds of games with us before, if you think about BoJack’s experience with his Deer Friend in earlier seasons, BoJack is constantly walking the line between tragedy and comedy, between laughter and pathos. And it is walking it in the most ridiculous way, because the writers of BoJack are geniuses with tone. And here is the important thing to remember about tone, and it goes back to Jerry Perzigian’s quote tone you can control, you can allow anything to have any tone you want as long as there is truth underneath it. Tone is like the plate on which you serve your screenwriting or your TV writing. And simply by changing the plate or changing the arrangement, you can actually completely change the tone of any scene. A wiser man than me once said, “Comedy is just tragedy without empathy.” But what BoJack actually does is somehow manage to create comedy that is both tragedy and empathy that actually lets us feel and also lets us laugh at the same time. So, first what happens is they break their own rules, but, they break their rules for a very specific reason, because they need that permission, because, otherwise, this thing is going to go off the rails into darkness. So, first they write it true and here is the story of Princess Carolyn’s very, very, very, very dark day, and guess what, it is too dark. And this happens to us all the time in our writing, we write something and we aren't controlling the tone, we are going off the rails, we are losing the genre of the piece. We’re not watching The Crown here, we are watching BoJack Horseman. It has to feel like BoJack Horseman. But, rather than just rejecting the idea, well I guess Princess Carolyn can’t have a miscarriage because that is too freaking dark, and too freaking sad, instead what happens is we run towards it. We write the truth and then play around to create the tone that we need in the execution. So, it is always okay to break the rules, it is okay to break the rules in your own writing, it is okay to break the rules in a series, it is okay to break the rules in a feature,

This week we are going to be talking about The Florida Project, by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch. I am so excited to be talking about this film, especially a week after the Oscars, because this is a film that probably should have been competing for Best Picture. Bria Vinaite probably should have been competing for Best Actress, and Sean Baker probably should have been competing for Best Writer and Best Director. If you haven't seen The Florida Project yet, I am going to try to avoid spoilers until we get to the end, and I’ll give you some warning first. What Sean Baker did in this film, like what he did in Tangerine, if you listened to my Tangerine podcast, is really quite inspirational for any writer and quite complex, in its structure and its form. Sean Baker shot Tangerine on about 600 grand. He shot it on an iPhone-- a feature film shot on an iPhone! And he shot this movie in a budget somewhere around 2 million dollars. So these are extremely low budget films. Beautiful, successful, powerful, low budget films. Which is very exciting if you are an emerging screenwriter. As an emerging screenwriter, you can take the success of The Florida Project as a sign that you can do this yourself. You can do this yourself at a very high level, and you don’t need a lot of money. Here is Willem Dafoe, who has obviously done some huge movies, who isn't doing this film for the money-- who is doing this because someone has written a beautiful role that he just needs to play. And seeing the performances that Sean Baker, second time in a row, has gotten out of these extremely inexperienced actors—Bria Vinaite along with little Brooklynn Prince, who gives one of the finest performances you could ever ask for, and she is seven years old-- shows you just how much you can do with very little if you have the right script and the right actors. I also want to talk about the form and the structure of The Florida Project. Because The Florida Project is not put together like most movies we see at the theater. Rather than hurling us into the action, or into the plot of the film, it just kind of drops us into a world. And lets us wander with the characters through that world, watching their lives as if we were living them. Watching The Florida Project is like watching Beasts of the Southern Wild in pastels. You might feel like you’re just drifting through a world, but you’re actually being propelled on an extremely powerful journey, into the experience of some extraordinarily compelling characters whose lives are changing forever, and whose journey will change the way we see ourselves and our world. The Florida Project is an incredibly hopeful film that takes place in a world that should be filled with despair. It takes place in a rundown motel just outside of Disney World, where a bunch of low income families are attempting to raise their children in these tiny little one bedroom motel rooms. The movie is primarily seen through the eyes of children, and it centers around a really complicated and beautiful relationship between six year old Moonee, who is played by Brooklynn Prince, and her mother Halley played by Bria Vinaite. Moonee is not quite old enough to recognize her mother’s problems, her destitution, her desperation, her drug addiction, her violence, her despair. Instead, she sees her mother through the eyes of any child-- through these beautifully idealistic, Disney World, pastel eyes. This child who is having the time of her life, in her own private Disney World with absolutely no supervision, and absolutely no awareness of the danger that is all around her. And what is gorgeous about this film, what makes us feel connected to these characters, is not that these characters are perfectly good. Because the characters in The Florida Project are not perfectly good-- not the kids, and not the parents. They’re not all doing all the right things all the time. Sean Baker is not “saving the cat” here at all. Because what connects us to these characters is not that they’re doing the right thing, but that they’re coming at life with an open heart, from a place of love. And what is really beautiful about all these characters, no matter what their problems, no matter how misfit they are for being parents, all of these families, all of these people, are coming from a place of love. They all love their children. Some of them are terrible with their children, but they all love their children. They all want them to have better lives. And Halley, in particular, is as fun of a mom as you could ever want. Halley is open to anything, completely non-judgmental of any behavior that Moonee chooses to engage in. She loves and accepts her child exactly as she is, and all they do together is have fun. Of course, Halley is also stoned out of her mind all the time, struggling to make ends meet by mooching meals off of her one employed friend, ripping off tourists on fake perfume and worse, and running a lot of other scams that are incredibly unhealthy for both her and the people around her. But Moonee doesn’t really see any of that. We see it, from a distance, in the same way that Willem Dafoe’s character, Bobby, sees it. Bobby is the incredibly harried manager of this crappy motel, who is like the father to all these troubled children who live there and to all the parents who live there as well. We see these fractured family units where there is no one to watch the kid, where it is impossible to watch the kid, have a job, pay your rent. And we follow the kids as they run wild through a summer of fun, in a dilapidated world just a stone’s throw away from Disney World. And even though The Florida Project appears to have no structure, you are absolutely never bored. So how do you build structure that doesn’t feel like structure? Because in 80% of The Florida Project nothing is happening. 80% of the movie we are just watching a bunch of kids play together. And yet, we don’t feel like it is amorphous or structureless. In fact, we feel totally drawn in and compelled. So what are those techniques that these writers are using and that this director is using to pull us in? The first technique Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch use in The Florida Project is the power of visual storytelling. And I am not just talking about the incredibly beautiful shots, and the incredibly beautiful costumes, and the incredibly beautiful mise-en-scène of this piece in the way it is shot. Because that is compelling and powerful, but ultimately, if that is all you have, you end up feeling like you are in an art gallery. It is fine to look around for a little while, but people tend to browse for a few moments and then they tend to lose attention. What actually roots us in these characters also isn’t just the great performances. And, yes, the performances are fabulous. And, yes, these characters, even these kids, are fully alive on the screen. But guess what? That isn't what roots us into these characters either. What actually roots us into the characters in The Florida Project is a screenwriting and directorial concept called vignettes. As I’ve discussed in depth in earlier podcasts, a vignette is a moment of visual action that captures the essence of the character from the very first moment we meet them. What Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch do such a great job of in The Florida Project is using those vignettes to provide an underlying structure for the character’s journey. They root each of these characters in action, allowing us to immediately understand who they are and what they want. And then they attack those desires with obstacles, to force the characters to make new choices. No matter how small the choice may be, there is always a goal and there is always an obstacle that leads to it. As an example of this, we are going to look at the opening sequence of the film, which culminates in a spitting contest. We are watching a bunch of kids and they have a very clear goal, their super-objective is to have a good time and that is what they do for most of the movie.   They do it in a way that we wish we could. I wish my childhood was as much fun as these kids’ childhoods, although I would never trade my childhood for their childhood either. But, these kids are living in a magic kingdom, in a place where there are no rules and there is no responsibility, and there are no consequences. And, in that beautiful magic kingdom, they start the film. And they are practicing spitting from that balcony of a neighboring motel onto one of the resident’s cars. Oftentimes we think as we are writing, “if I am going to start my movie I need something really big,” but the truth is you don’t need something really big, you need something really small. You need something really small that the characters really want to do; in this case the characters really want to spit on that windshield. And it needs to connect to a super-objective, which is they want to have fun. Then you need an obstacle. In this case the obstacle is the neighbor, who comes out and screams at them and tells them to stop. And what happens? The kids don’t stop; in fact, the kids don’t care at all. The kids end up cursing her out and spitting all over her car and all over her and all over her kids. So, in this case we have a bunch of kids, and all they want to do is spit on the car of this resident of the neighboring motel. And they don’t even probably know the resident; they are just enjoying their little spitting game. They have a want and they are rooted in the action and it is visually fun to watch. And we watch them do a verb. Not sit around in a state of fun, but rather doing the verb, the little goal, the little task that is going to pull us through their story today. And what happens is, the obstacle of the chastising neighbor forces the kids to reveal their how: how they are different from any other children.

*Please note this interview was from 2018.   Jake: This week, I am so excited to be doing something we’ve actually never done before on the podcast: we have two different writers, Doug Jung and Emily Dell. Emily tends to come at things from more of the independent film side, and Doug has been involved in some very famous blockbusters and big name TV shows like Star Trek Beyond and Big Love.   And what’s really cool is that both of these writers have transcended a lot of the genre conventions in their writing-- doing everything from really beautiful, personal, character-driven stories, to big budget action movies and sci-fi. I want to start by asking you both-- when you first broke into the industry, what do you think it was that led to your success? And in the face of the commercial and genre demands of so many different kinds of projects, how do you hold onto who you are and continue to grow your voice as an artist? EMILY: I want to say this, I am still finding my way in, I think this is a long term process and in fact maybe  that one of the biggest “aha!” moments for me being early mid-career but not quite mid yet. I feel like my writing has grown and expanded through the help of friends who are also mentors who have given me feedback and Doug has been one of those. And on the content side, always trying to write what I believe in and write what is connected to me, but also to see how that fits into an organic brand that maybe was part of my identity-- never having a difference between who I am and what I write is a clear part of the way that I look at my art. And I think that is what makes people connect both to it and then to me, and then makes it easy for people to be like, “hey here is this Emily girl and she writes grounded emotional genre because that is also what she loves in life.” So that is one thing that I found to be really helpful lately. But also, as I have been in LA for a while more than a couple of years and I have developed friendships and working relationships, I really tried to listen as much as I spoke, learn as much as I can, ask questions from the people whose work I admire and whose work I seek to emulate, and use that to improve. But also if they someday become comfortable even me and want to form an organic working relationship, then that is something I am obviously very open and welcome to. Doug:  I ended up in a very fortuitous way getting some work in television which you know literally like these sort of freelance things for weird shows, and that enabled me to quit my day job. At that time I also had a very lucky stretch where I managed to bank a little bit of money. But I was able to take this time and I wrote a script that ultimately was picked up, then optioned, and then eventually made. And I suddenly had, in a very lucky way, both a foot in the door in the TV world and a foot in the door in the feature world. And I have just sort of managed to stay in that position this whole time, which is great. But as much as I can say it was hard work and I applied myself, there is an element of luck. And for my case it took a long time, but I do believe that luck is a byproduct of other things that you are doing to put yourself in there. Jake: I feel the same way with my career, almost everything that ever happened to me that was good was luck, but I worked so damn hard to get to that lucky moment. And I think one of the places where I was luckiest was that it happened at a time where I had enough craft to actually back it up. Doug: There is this element that I always see with people in these kinds of panel discussions, or this meet-and-greet kind of thing that I have been to-- you know the most often asked question seems to be: How do I get an agent? How do I get somebody to read this thing? Totally valid, totally get it. But, nobody has the same origin story. Nobody has that thing where it was a particular path that you took. And you kind of have no control over that stuff. You write something, you put it out into the world. Someone is going to love it, someone isn't going to love it-- certainly you can have some direction in how it goes, where it goes, all that sort of stuff. So a lot times I get that question in like panels or film festivals or something and I say, “I don’t know…” I mean in the nicest possible way I say, “I am not really quite sure if you must know somebody, more importantly, what are you doing now?” Because, if you are just going to sit there and say, “I wrote this little nugget of gold, a diamond in the rough, someone just needs to recover it…” a lot of times it isn't like, “Hey, this is this great thing and we love it,” they go, “We like the potential this thing shows, what else are you working on?” Emily: Yeah, it comes along with you doing the work, and you having three or four things ready, or you having the one thing ready that when they do ask for it, and they read it, it is really, really good. Doug: That is exactly right. I think the other thing that you know there is this kind of cliché about writers being on a certain level of the totem pole, but another way that I always try to look at it is that we actually are in the most democratic position in Hollywood. We’re not directors, we’re not production designers. We aren't beholden. We start with nothing other than your time, your imagination, a blank page and you are off. So, you don’t need 50 other people to accomplish the creative thing you are trying to do. There aren’t many places out there, or not many positions other than being a screenwriter, where you can do a whole movie just by yourself. And I have found that as I have been lucky enough to have a career, and do these things, that, more and more, time becomes the greatest commodity. And how you spend that time. Because if you are lucky enough and you are good enough, at some point you can kind of say, “Well I can get work, but now how am I going to spend this time in the best way?” And one of the things that I always find really interesting about talking about mentors and mentoring relationships, there is this idea of “beginner’s mind”, this sort of Zen Buddhist idea that there’s nothing but possibilities, there is nothing but opportunities, and you aren't loaded down by experience, or you haven't developed all these bad habits. And you connect very easily to this part of you that is so wide open. You have access to all these parts of you that I think you can kind of lose a little bit as you start to get a little bit further on in your career. You fall into the conventional world and you start taking on those other voices in your head constantly. And a lot of times, it becomes about beating those voices back and getting back to your authentic thing. Jake: One of my really great mentors was a guy name Joe Blaustein, and he actually—he wasn’t a writer he was a painter—and I used to study painting with him in Los Angeles when I lived out there. And Joe used to say, “Don’t paint on canvas, paint on paper. If you paint on canvas, you are going to start thinking you are making art and you will forget what it is to really be an artist.” He said, “You want to paint on paper. Feel like you could throw it away.” And for me that was one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned as an artist, was this idea that rather than like trying to create the one product that is going to get me where I need to go, losing myself in like the joy and the play and the creativity of childhood. “Hey I want to make something, and I’ve got these characters that want to say something or want to do something,” and the practice of navigating back to that, even as you emerge into your professional career, is challenging, especially as you get an agent and you get projects. I am curious, how do you navigate yourself back to that place? Doug:  I have a hard time connecting with a project if I don’t find that thing in it that feels like it is a part of me. So, if a project is presented to me, or if I have an idea, really taking a lot of time to figure out, “What is appealing about this to me, and what is the thing that I want to say, or how do I connect with it?”   So, for example I recently adapted this graphic novel, a vertigo book called Scalped, which is a crime noir by this great writer named Jason Aaron and it is set on a contemporary Indian reservation. I really didn’t want to let it go, because I knew there was something really great in it and it took me a long time. So, I sort of came to this idea that it wasn’t that I had the direct experience, but what I saw in it was this idea that all of the people in the book are searching for some form of the American dream, like they are trying to get to that aspiration. To me that was an immigrant story, and I am Korean-American, my parents were immigrants. So, now I can say, “Well that is what I can always go back to.” I know that whatever the story and the plot becomes, underneath it all, in my mind I knew that what I am doing is a reverse immigrant story. Now I had a connection-- and when we got to the point of shooting the pilot, I could then talk to the Native American actors we had and say to them, “I am not trying to emulate something that I am not; this is my take on it.” And that is what enabled them to trust me. So, that was one example of finding yourself in some material that wasn’t originally yours, but it also maybe had a very on the surface disparate connection to how you had seen it on paper or whatever. Jake: You’ve done a lot of rewriting work, you’ve come onto a lot of projects where they didn’t originate with you.  I was thinking about your work on Star Trek Beyond where you really use that theme of unity versus independence. And I am curious when you are coming on to a project that already exists,

Jake: This week I am with Sebastian Stan. Many of you have probably seen I, Tonya and Sebastian’s performance in that piece. We are going to have an interesting conversation with Sebastian, looking at I, Tonya from the perspective of an actor and also from the perspective of a writer. And we’re going to be discussing something that is important to a lot of writers, which is understanding how an actor approaches a role, how a script develops beyond the point where you’ve sold it and then into the production side, and how a script evolves. And also understanding what an actor like Sebastian looks for in a script: how you know when that is the role I want to play. So, I wanted to just start off by asking you a little bit about when you first read Steven Roger’s script. What did you connect to about it that made you go, “I’ve got to play Jeff”?   Sebastian: It was kind of a hard one, to be honest, because it was so controversial. He was such a hated character; he was such a hated person in real life. And in that aspect, it was really difficult-- you start wondering whether that is something you could even do or you could even play. There was a lot of judgment there. But, looking at it just as a script, and then as an actor looking at it, it felt like a goldmine. It was always unpredictable. It was tragic at certain times and it was shocking and then it could be funny. And there seemed to be a very strong degree of honesty to it. You’re always looking for how authentic certain voices sound. And later I did find out a lot of the dialogue in the script came from the interviews that he had directly with them-- not to take away from his genius writing-- it just had a very authentic air to it, and I think you look for that. And then as an actor you’re challenged by that because you go, “I don’t know if I could do that… and I can’t stop thinking about it.” And I think, in that case, also them being real life characters had a lot to do with it. The whole thing was so sensationalized that you couldn’t really believe that these people existed or that they were capable of that. And it kind of led on a whole tangent of wanting to search for stuff. Jake: Yeah I think it is interesting because, in a way, all of our stories come from life; even the most fictional stories come from life. And there is an interesting theme in I, Tonya that there is no one truth. Sebastian: Right. Jake: And you know even like the breaking of the fourth wall, like, “Yeah, this didn’t happen like this.” Sebastian: Yeah, and it is interesting the fourth wall because that wasn’t in the script originally. That was the director coming in and suggesting that we break the fourth wall in the scenes. I could have seen Steven Rogers come up with that--but you know, the director just finished his sentence so to speak. So I feel like it is important to find that counterpart in your director. Jake: Yeah I think it is an interesting thing about process for writers in that we see a lot of bad movies come out of Hollywood. And so, a lot of people are under the impression, “Oh I will just give them the idea and then they will figure it out.” But you can see with a movie like I, Tonya when the writer has really done his job, and really built the movie around that theme. what it allows an actor to do with the role to make those kind of creative decisions about how you are going to perform it. Sebastian: I always think it starts with the writing. I think that is the most important and the hardest part. I’ve always thought that actors make better actors with good material, which is why the in plays that you go to at the theatre sometimes end up being such great characters-- like those Tennessee Williams’ plays-- and those writers who sort of fleshed out these characters that you don’t usually get to see so much of nowadays. Steven Rogers-- first of all, two funny things about him as a writer-- One of them is he wrote this part for Allison Janney. Every movie he’s written he has always written a part for her, but he could never hire her, he could never get her. She didn’t even know! Because the director or the studio-- somebody would want somebody else.   And he actually, finally, in writing at the negotiations of this thing told them, “I am not going to do this movie, I’m not giving you the script unless you have her attached to play that part.” And the other thing is, what fascinated me about him was that he wrote this Christmas movie and he apparently just woke up and was like, “Well okay like what is the furthest away I can do anything from a Christmas movie?” Then he saw this 30 for 30:  and he was like, “Oh I, Tonya,” and I am like, “Okay well great, I wish I could wake up tomorrow and go like, ‘well I don’t want to do that theme anymore, I am just going to go onto this theme and produce this.’” Jake: And he is a guy who is famous for rom coms. Sebastian: Yeah I mean, I guess he wanted to change it up and go somewhere else with it. It was a very interesting script in the sense that you had these documentary types to die for, it was very similar to that in the sense that you know they talked to the camera. Jake: So, I want to talk to you a little bit about research. I read some of your interviews about this, and you’ve talked a lot about how you felt, “I am not Jeff Gillooly.” And it was a little hard at the beginning to ask yourself, ‘How am I supposed to see myself in this role?’ And I think it’s interesting for writers because---I know for myself personally-- no matter how much I’m in love with a character, there is a point in the writing where you are like, “This is just the worst character ever.” You kind of fall out of love with them, and you have to find a way to fall back in love with them or to like recognize the piece of you that does live in them, or like the dream that you have that you share with them. And I’m curious about, how do you allow yourself to fall in love with a Jeff Gillooly in order to play him? Sebastian: Well first off let me start with when you approach material, usually you know if it isn't a real person you kind of have free reign---not free reign but you are sort of, you are building a life from what you see on the script. And you by talking to the writer you are kind of going, “Okay this is going to maybe-- it could go here, it could go there.” But here, I didn’t really have that opportunity. It was much more, “This is the guy, so you are going to have to mold more to something.” And in a way, maybe it is difficult because you are stuck in a box. And then in another way it is easier because at least you know where to target, so you are eliminating a lot of time researching stuff that won’t be necessary but you won’t know then unless you do it. And the thing about him was that he is very difficult to read as a person. And then virtually everything that I found on him online was just really sort of negative despicable kind of thoughts people had. There was nothing on him. “What was he like as a child? What was their relationship like when they started, was it always that chaotic? He denied everything, okay why? What does that mean? What is he like now at 50?” So it was kind of a big question mark, except for these videos where I would see him sort of make these terrible faces, uncomfortable, like walking through as he is getting arrested. But again, even when you have a real person, there is a tremendous responsibility for you with that. No matter what kind of person it is, you always have to go back to the script. Because, as an actor, that is your job, that is your map. And what is in the script is what you’ve got to follow. In terms of finding something about him, in a weird way I had to come around and try to blend-- and this was in the script also-- this idea that they were this Sid and Nancy kind of crazy couple. And then Margot and I together basically built on that and tried to piece it in terms of, “okay well was it always like this? Was there a good part of it at some point? Was there a time when they were okay or not? And how did it get to this? Was it because she got more famous? Did he get more scared?” Understanding it like a really unconventional, toxic, terrifying-love story, in a way kind of opened me up to sort of something with him that was a little bit more understandable. Jake: One of the things that I loved about your performance was that for me you really humanized a person that is hard to humanize. Sebastian: Thank you. Jake: And I think this is interesting as a writer as well because you know often times like in your first draft, your character feels like a little bit of a cartoon, or it feels like a little bit like “I got this one aspect of them but I am missing the full life that lives underneath there.” So I always think of an actor as doing a rewrite of my script. But in a good way, in the same way that I would do a rewrite of my script. “Okay what is this really about? What is the one God I’m really worshiping here?” And for me in I, Tonya like it is the God of “there is like no one truth.” Sebastian: Right. As a part of the backbone of what the thing is. Jake: So like at least from my perspective, everything in that script serves it. From the fact that I have a very specific idea of who Tonya Harding, is but it’s not true. But Tonya has a specific idea of who Tonya Harding is and that isn't true either. And Jeff has an idea of who Jeff is and that isn't true. But it also, it is true to him. Or even like Allison Janney’s character. She has a very strong story about how she is a good mom-- Sebastian: In her mind yeah. Jake: And we can see that that isn't true. And then you know the whole movie kind of builds to Tonya basically saying “all the truth is bullshit.” Sebastian: Yes, yeah, you mean like kind of like a button to that thing, so to speak?

Learn screenwriting tips from Sundance films Nocturnes, Every Little Thing, Black Box Diaries, Eno, Thelma, Kidnapping, Inc, and lectures from Jonathan Nolan and Steven Soderbergh. If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/ Learn more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com

If you listened to the previous episode of this podcast, you have probably developed a pretty valuable approach for how to revise your screenplay. And you know that approach focuses on these 5 simple tips for revision: #1 - Never Rewrite Without a Goal #2 - Follow Your North Star #3 - Concentrate on What’s Working #4 - Stay Away From Quick Fixes #5 - Beware Written Notes So this week, we’re going to work on taking your revision process to the next level, with five more helpful tips about revising your script. REVISION TIP #6 – Use Your Theme If you’ve ever been part of an unmoderated writing group, you already know what it’s like to lose control of your revision. Without a strong unifying voice to make order out of the chaos, it’s amazing how much turmoil even a small group of well-intentioned writers can bring to your screenplay, pushing and pulling your revision in so many different directions with their “brilliant ideas” that before long you don’t even know what you’re writing anymore! And as anyone who has ever worked professionally as a screenwriter can tell you, the more you grow in your career, the more challenging it becomes to maintain a point of creative focus for your revisions. Succeeding as a professional writer means learning to navigate the twists and turns in the development process, often balancing the demands of half a dozen different producers, all with their own (often conflicting) agendas for the project, without losing your own creative voice. Which means that, if you want to succeed in this industry and actually see your movies make it to the screen, you need to start building those skills in yourself now. That means not only developing the skills you need to navigate the often contradictory feedback you get from other people (friends, classmates, coverage readers, producers, teachers, agents, managers), but also learning how to steer the course through the shifting winds of your own feelings about your writing and the perilous waves of “brilliant ideas” that tend to crash across the bows of our own creative ships. The real terror of the blank page is that anything is possible; and the real terror of a rewrite is that everything becomes possible all over again. If you’re willing to put in the time and effort and just keep asking “what if?” you can develop Thelma and Louise until it turns into The Wrestler (think about it). But along the way, you’re going to drive yourself absolutely out of your mind. And if you’ve ever worked on a revision, you’ve probably found yourself going down that rabbit hole. So how do you make sense of all the thousands of ideas vying for your attention? How do you bring order to the chaos, wrangle all these crazy notes to the ground, hold your own in a development meeting, and feel confidence in each decision you make in your revision? That process always begins with theme.   There are very few people in the world who are truly good at developing scripts, but those who are all have one thing in common. Before they start trying to come up with a single idea or solve a single problem, they always ask the same question about the script: what’s it about? And that doesn’t mean “what could it be about?” or “what was the conscious plan the writer had for the script when they first sat down to write” or even “what could I make it about?” That means seeking out what already has been built, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the pages that already exist, no matter how problematic they may be. What are the ideas that keep on coming up again and again, page after page? What are the questions that seem to tie together the most visceral and exciting scenes in your movie, or the turning points in your character’s journey? What makes this screenplay matter to you as a writer? What is really being built here? And how can you boil that all down to a single guiding theme so simple that you can remember it at every phase of your rewrite without even thinking about it. No matter how good your draft may be, there’s no doubt that huge changes are going to happen in your revision.  But until you know the one simple thing you’re building, you’ll never know which changes will serve your story, and which will simply distract from it. Any note (and any idea) is only valuable in the context of what you’re building. If you were an architect working on a new cathedral, an idea for a breathtaking stained glass window might be a great place to put your energy. But, if you’re building a bomb shelter, that same stained glass window becomes a total hazard of potentially falling glass! In the last installment of this podcast, we talked about following a North Star for your revision-- a goal to focus on as a writer. Well your theme is like a North Star for your whole script, and every scene and every character you create. No matter how lost you get, it will always guide you in the right direction. And the great thing is, you don’t even have to make it up! Once you learn how to look, you’ll be amazed to discover that your theme already exists in almost every page of your script, often buried under the surface, sometimes disguised or masked by undeveloped craft or hidden behind piles other unrelated themes and ideas. But present nonetheless.  Because the theme is that subconscious, broken and beautiful thing in you that’s driving you to do this crazy act of writing in the first place. That doesn’t mean that every idea that fits your theme is going to work. But it does mean that, by identifying your theme, you can cut through all the clutter and distractions. It means you can know what to say “yes” to, and what to say “no” to at each phase of your revision. It means you can focus your energy on the ideas that best serve the one unifying theme of your story, rather than getting distracted by the many red herrings that don’t. Most importantly, as you grow in your professional career, if you can learn to agree on a theme with your production team before you start revising, it will allow you not only to wrangle your own ideas, but also to focus the energy of all those crazy producers, directors, managers, agents, and movie stars on the ideas that best serve your main intentions for the project. REVISION TIP #7 – When in Doubt Cut It Out Many writers make the mistake of thinking that rewriting is primarily about finding that “something missing” in your scene, adding that perfect line of dialogue or discovering that perfect image to take your script to the next level. And it’s true that these are major parts of rewriting. But oftentimes the best (and easiest) rewrites begin not by adding anything at all, but simply by stripping away the stuff that’s obscuring the real heart of the scene. It’s natural that early drafts tend to be overwritten—after all, it’s in these early drafts that you’re supposed to be exploring the limits of what your scenes and your story can be. But once you’ve discovered the core of what the scene is really about, you’ve got to cut away all those extra layers, so other people can perceive that essence in its most pure and beautiful form. This always begins with theme. Ask yourself “what is this scene really about?” And then see what happens if you cut away anything that doesn’t doesn’t work to serve that primary intention. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised to discover that the more you cut, the stronger your scene becomes. That’s because the best scenes function like a collection of greatest hits, catapulting the audience and the character from one compelling moment to the next. When you cut down your screenplay to its most essential elements, it allows readers to get right to the meat of your scene, without having to sort through all that garnish. From a commercial perspective, it also allows your scene to be read and understood more quickly, which will pay off big time when it’s being skimmed by a time-crunched coverage reader. Making these kinds of cuts is quick, easy, and extraordinarily effective.  But it’s also emotionally challenging for two reasons. The first is that we tend to like what we’ve written, and cutting away good writing, even if it doesn’t serve our story, can be incredibly painful.   The second is that we don’t tend to trust ourselves. We imagine that if we just got right to the heart of the scene, keeping only our very best lines and our very best actions or images, the audience would never understand. Or even worse, we fear that if we cut that 5 page scene down to one brilliant half a page, we’d suddenly have to come up with so much more story to fill those extra pages! But the truth is, if you really want to take your script to the next level, you’re going to need those extra pages! Cutting out the wasted space in your script (getting to the best stuff faster and faster and faster) opens up room for you to take your story and your character’s journey beyond what even you imagined when you first sat down to write. And this is exactly what you really need to do if you want to break in as a writer. While professionals with impressive resumes and extensive relationships may be able to get away with phoning in scripts that play by the rules and simply meet the expectations of the audience, to get a producer to take a chance on you as a writer, you’ve got to deliver even more than they expect. You’ve got to blow them away. So next time, before you start adding to your scene, see what happens if you try to tell the whole story of the scene with the fewest lines possible. Cut it down to the very minimum. And then cut it even further. Cut everything boring, everything lackluster, everything redundant and everything that doesn’t serve your theme, until you’re left with only your most vibrant, vital and visceral writing. See how quickly you can make it happen. Then read it to yourself.  And notice not only how much better the scene becomes,

This is a time of year when many of us are thinking about rewrites, both on our scripts and on our lives. So what better time for a podcast about rewriting? Everyone knows that writing is rewriting. But for many writers, the rewriting process can feel so overwhelming that it’s hard to hold onto that creative spark that made the script worth writing in the first place. So over the next two podcasts, we’re going to be talking about 10 things you can do to help make your rewrite great! (They work pretty well for your life goals as well!) Screenplay Revision Tip #1 – Never Rewrite Without a Goal A character without a goal is like a car without an engine.  You can polish it up all you’d like, but it’s not going to go anywhere. And just like our characters, if we’re going to be successful in our revisions, we’ve got to make sure we’re effective in our goal setting, not only for our characters, but also for ourselves. That means setting a clear, objective goal for each draft of our screenplay, which allows no debate over whether or not it’s been achieved. For example, depending on what phase we’re in of a revision, we might set a goal like one of these: Make sure the main character is driving the action of every scene. Find lines of dialogue that feel a little familiar and either cut them or make them more specific to the character. Chart out the 7 Act Structure of the character’s change. Make sure the action on the page captures each image exactly the way you see it in your head. What’s great about goals like these is that you can know if you’ve achieved them. Instead of wasting your energy panicking about whether your script is good or not, you can watch it evolve in front of your eyes, knowing that each draft is that much better than the one that came before. Rather than feeling like you’re trying to juggle a million deadly chainsaws-- instead of feeling like you’ve got a million different problems that you simply have to fix in your script all at the same time-- you can devote all your focus to the one thing that is most important for the draft you’re working on right now. Rather than basing your feeling of success as a writer on things that are beyond your control, like having a good writing day, selling a script or winning an Academy Award, you’re basing it on a simple area of focus that will not only grow your script, but also vastly improve your craft as a writer, which will serve you on every script you write in the future. So if you’re working on a revision of a screenplay, revision of an act, or even just a revision of a scene, take a moment to clear your mind of all the things you’ve been told you have to do, all your fears about getting to the end, finishing, not finishing, selling your script, or having talent as a writer. Instead, think about what this screenplay is really about for you, and set a clear, objective goal for the one thing that’s most important for you to achieve to take the script to the next level. In early drafts, or early phases of your career, it may be hard to identify what the most important thing to focus on might be, or to separate the many conflicting things you’ve been told to do from the ones that really matter to you. Trust your instincts, and seek out the advice of mentors with enough real professional experience to point you in the right direction. What matters is that you choose one goal to focus on, and frame it in a way that you can know if you’ve achieved it, regardless of the shifting winds of your own (or anybody else’s) subjective opinions. That way you can know you are succeeding in each phase of your revision, whether this is your final draft, or just one of many along the way.   Screenplay Revision Tip #2 – Follow Your North Star Without a clear, recognizable goal that we know we can achieve, it’s easy to find ourselves rewriting from a place of fear: driven by a deep anxiety that our screenplay is just not good enough without the benefit of a tangible vision of what good enough would actually be! On the other extreme, it’s easy to overwhelm ourselves with too many tangible goals; compiling never-ending (and often conflicting) checklists of things to be fixed and improved in our screenplays as we try to heed the advice of every cook in the kitchen. Cooks including coverage readers, producers, friends, family, writers groups, screenwriting books, structural formulas – and even our own constantly shifting thoughts about our writing – without any sense of how these supposed “improvements” actually fit with our real goals for this particular screenplay, or how they’re all supposed to fit together into a unified whole. That’s why it’s so important to focus on one goal at a time. Let that goal become the North Star for your revision. The one ring to rule them all. The only action item on your checklist and the only thing your brain needs to focus on in this phase of the process. This allows you to calm the many anxieties that come with rewriting a script, the feeling that you’re wrestling with something so much bigger than you can keep in your head, where everything is so interconnected that you pull one string and the whole tapestry can fall apart. It reminds you that you’re not trying to build the whole tapestry all at the same time. You’re just trying to follow this one North Star and see where it takes you, until you understand it so fully that you can intuitively recognize how it fits with all the other stars around it. So, if you’re working on your dialogue and you suddenly realize that you’ve got problems with your action, your structure, or your formatting, that’s okay! You’re not trying to fix everything right now. You’re just following this one North Star. The wonderful and ironic thing about focusing on only one North Star at a time is that oftentimes changes in one little area of your screenplay end up leading to vast improvements in other areas of your story. Because every element of a screenplay is so deeply interconnected, a revision focused on the specificity of your main character’s dialogue may inspire all kinds of new insights into who your character is, the nature of their journey, the hook of your movie, or even the way you write the action lines. And if the screenwriting Gods gift you with such inspiration, by all means accept that gift!  Write the scene, rewrite the action, restructure the story, capture that turning point. But remember, these new flashes of inspiration are only the bi-products of your clear, objective goal. The icing on the cake, but not the cake itself. So, if you’re feeling inspired, chase that inspiration. But if you’re starting to feel overwhelmed or distracted by all the possibilities, look back at your North Star, and remember what your goal is for this draft of the revision. You’ll have plenty of time to look at all the other possibilities later and, oftentimes, be pleasantly surprised at how a tiny change to the dialogue in Act 1 has suddenly pulled that turning point you were so worried about at the end of Act 4 into perfect focus. But if you turn out to be not so lucky, at least you can set a new goal, a new North Star to guide you, for the next revision, knowing that the foundation of the previous goal has already been fully explored and established. You now know where that star leads, and can draw upon that knowledge as you follow the next one. Screenplay Revision Tip #3 - Concentrate on What’s Working   One of the most common mistakes screenwriters make when revising a screenplay is to concentrate on what’s not working rather than what is. This not only sucks all the fun out of your rewrite-- it also chips away at the confidence you need in order to get your best writing on the page. It takes very little skill to look at an early draft of a screenplay and tear it apart. Anyone who’s ever seen a movie knows how easy it is to rant and rave about every ridiculous plot twist or corny line of dialogue in the latest Hollywood blockbuster. And when it comes to our own work, we’re even more hyper-aware of our many flaws and shortcomings, both real and imagined. We’ve been trained since birth to think critically, censor our strongest ideas, and beat ourselves up over our writing. Thinking about your script in this way is not only unhelpful, it’s downright lazy! If you really want to push yourself in your revision, stop focusing on what’s not working in your screenplay, and start looking for what is already working, even in your most disastrous pages. Ask yourself what your story is really about (this may have changed since you first sat down to write) and make a list of everything in your script that seems to serve that thematic intention, no matter how problematic or flawed. Write down every moment that you like in your script, every line of dialogue that feels connected or real, every image that grabs your attention, every moment that makes you laugh or cry or care. Set aside your judgment, and think about the opportunities that still exist, even in the most troubling elements of your script. What can be built upon, expanded, explored, pushed further, looked at more closely or amplified in its specificity or intent? Seek out the powerful moments early in your script that might lead you to the structural twists and turns you need later in the story. And think about the big turning points later in your story that may point the way to what needs to be revised or clarified earlier in the script. Identify the compelling lines of dialogue that might help you understand how your character really talks in a rewrite of your dialogue?  And ask yourself how that understanding might help you add more specificity to your less compelling lines. Chart out memorable images and actions that capture who your character really is and what they really want.

COCO (Part 2) - The Power of Vignettes As we discussed in Part 1 of this podcast, sometimes it only takes one moment to find the structure of your script— the moment where everything comes into clarity and you understand where your movie is really going to live. For the writers of Coco, that place was the real meaning of Dia de Muertos. The real theme of the story. It was that theme that drove every creative decision they made, every structural turn in their character’s journey. But that structure didn’t grow from a big idea about Dia de Muertos, even though that big idea helped to guide the writers. The structure of Coco grew out of a single moment, and a single song: Remember Me. In fact, it’s from the execution of the very first performance of that song that the whole structure of Coco, and the whole structure, not only of Miguel’s journey, but also of Ernesto’s and Imelda’s and Abuelita’s and Hector’s and every other character’s is formed. You can think of writing as a process of excavation. It begins by searching for the right place to dig, (which often requires, as we discussed in last week’s podcast, digging in many wrong or seemingly unrelated places). And once we find that right place to dig, the place where the story really lives, it’s about digging as deeply as possible, right in that same place, so we can fully excavate every bit of beauty that lives there.   There’s a great anxiety that often overcomes us as we seek the place where the story really lives— a fear that the script isn’t good enough or the idea isn’t good enough or that our craft isn’t good enough, or our structure isn’t good enough or that we aren’t good enough. And that anxiety causes us to look outside of ourselves for the answers— trying to find the right plot or the right characters or the right trick ending or the right idea for what the heck is supposed to happen! And as a result, rather than finding inspiration, we end up finding cliches. Rather than finding the story that only we could tell, we end up finding the story that everybody else is already telling, rather than finding the characters that already live inside of us, we end up finding the ones we’ve already met in other movies. Because ultimately, the real answers don’t lie outside of our scripts. They don’t lie in formulas or outlines or plans or plots. The real answers reside inside. Inside the scenes you’ve already written. Inside the scenes that resonate most truthfully for you. If you ever feel like you don’t know what needs to happen in your script, the problem is not “out there” it’s “in here.” If you don’t know where to go, it means you don’t know where you are. It means something is not fully executed, fully true, fully resonant, fully excavated in the pages you’ve already written. Because once you’ve got that one element of truth, that one thing that you know is right, it will not only show you everything else you need to do, it will also show you exactly how you need to do it. Which is why it’s so important to be fully present with your characters and yourself as you write each scene of your movie. Not to be serious with it or forceful with it, or heavens forbid to manipulate it toward the plot point you’ve planned for the future. Not to get it right in the first draft, but rather to look at the first draft as research— a place to find that crazy little detail (like the fact that a Xolo dog’s tongue tends to loll out the side of his mouth) that eventually is going to bring your scene totally to life. The goal is not to control the scene, but rather to explore it. To hold it lightly in your hand and simply observe it. To see, feel and hear everything, searching not for the things you planned but the things that surprise you, the things you didn’t expect to happen, or that cause an unexpected, strong emotional reaction in you— a laugh, a tear, or even a feeling of shame or failure. It’s in those moments that your script really lives. Those are the areas you truly need to excavate. Those are the areas from which all the answers will eventually spring, if only you give yourself the time and space to truly look at them, to see hear and feel everything. To explore them. To get curious about them. And most importantly to capture them in the most specific, unique way possible, by seeing, feeling, and hearing everything, and then capturing it exactly the way you see it on the page. This is a technique that Francis Ford Coppola calls a Vignette. And for you as a writer, a Vignette is the most powerful building block of structure. Your first, and most important Vignette is the one you use to introduce each character. Rather than using descriptions (Joe has brown hair, a great smile, and a glimmer in his eye) or costume design (Joe wears a brown jacket, cashmere sweater and ferragamo shoes) or character traits (Joe’s a no nonsense businessman with a heart of gold), a Vignette introduces the character with action. More specifically, a Vignette introduces a character with a specific, visually compelling action that they are doing in a way that only they could do it. An action that reveals character. It could be a specific line of dialogue, that only they can say. A specific action that only they could do. A specific image, that only they could experience. Or even, as in the case of Coco, a specific lyric, that only they could sing. What’s great about Vignettes for readers and audiences and producers and directors and actors is that Vignettes take them out of the position of “thinking about” the character “hmm… what does that cashmere sweater look like on Joe” and into the position of experiencing them. “Joe picks a piece of lint from his cashmere sweater” “Joe sticks his finger through a hole in his cashmere sweater” “Joe shovels spaghetti into his mouth, splattering sauce on his giant belly which peeks out from his cashmere sweater” Notice how each Vignette gave you a completely different Joe-- how much of a story about Joe you started to tell yourself without even thinking about it. Notice how much work the Vignette did for you.   That’s why audiences and actors and coverage readers and directors and producers love Vignettes. Because Vignettes allow them to get your characters in an instant, without any need for creativity. To play your story on the little movie screen in their minds. To director-proof and actor-proof and production-proof your script-- to guarantee you’re going to get the shots you need to tell your story and not end up trying to piece something together in the editing room. But for writers, the Vignettes serves an even more important purpose. Vignettes show you where to dig for your character’s journey. Vignettes are a magical place where the creative power of the subconscious mind, and the process of the conscious mind meet. Because once you have that first Vignette, all you have to do is keep digging in the same place, and you will effortlessly discover not only who your character is, but where your character has to go. You will discover the metaphors and the theme from which your movie will grow. Even if you haven’t done a single bit of planning or outlining or thinking about your script. Even if you have no idea what happens in your plot, Vignettes will show you the way. Let’s take Joe the lint picker for example. If the first time we meet Joe, he’s picking lint off his Cashmere sweater, we can already tell ourselves a certain story about who he is. We can tell he’s a bit fastidious, maybe even a bit obsessive compulsive. Maybe he’s a man of a certain income bracket, who can afford a Cashmere sweater. Or maybe this is the only piece of clothing of any value in his closet. We don’t know yet. We don’t have to know. All we have to do is start digging around that first image, until we discover the truth about Joe. And the way we start digging is to ask ourselves a simple question: If this is true, what else is true? What’s another Vignette we can create, inspired by that first Vignette, that would help us feel the trajectory of Joe’s journey? If it’s true that the first time we see Joe, he’s picking lint off his Cashmere sweater, maybe there’s another scene where Joe carefully mends a hole in that sweater, sewing it by hand. And just in those two images, you told yourself a story about Joe. A story about what that sweater means to Joe. A story about how Joe might change. And if it’s true that there’s a scene in which Joe picks that lint off that sweater, and a scene in which Joe carefully mends that sweater, maybe there’s also a scene where a lover tears that sweater off of Joe. And now you’re starting to see a journey. Arrange those scenes in this order. Joe picks lint off his cashmere sweater Joe carefully mends a hole in that sweater, sewing it by hand. A lover tears the sweater off of Joe. And it’s a story of a pent up man surrendering to passion. Arrange those scenes in another order. Joe picks lint off his cashmere sweater A lover tears the sweater off of Joe Joe carefully mends a hole in that sweater, sewing it by hand. And it’s a story of a man who can’t let himself surrender to passion. A man trying to hold an old life in the face of a new one. Or a man repeating the same pattern again and again. Those three images tell a story. And depending on how you arrange them, you get an entirely different structure. Enough to build a film around.   And we could keep on going. Maybe there’s also a scene where Joe gives that sweater to his lover. Maybe there’s a scene where his lover throws that sweater into the fire. And now we’ve got a tumultuous love story-- all from that one little Vignette. All from that one little sweater. Maybe there’s also a scene where Joe runs butt naked through the office. And you know why-- don’t you?

 COCO (Part 1): The Script & The Research By Jacob Krueger This week, we’re going to be discussing Coco, the new Pixar movie by Adrian Molina & Matthew Aldrich. If you haven’t seen this beautiful film yet, then you should run to the theatre immediately, because not only is it perhaps the most visually stunning Pixar film yet, but also one of the most structurally interesting for us to learn from as screenwriters and as filmmakers. Often, when you see a film that’s as perfect as Coco, you imagine that these writers must know something that you don’t. That maybe they worked backwards from their perfect ending, or started with the perfect idea. But the truth is, Molina and Aldrich’s approach to this film was a journey in itself-- a journey they took with director Lee Unkrich of 7 years into research of Mexican culture, and the traditions of Dia De Muertos, into wrong ways and missteps. In other words, it was a process of rewriting. In fact, the first draft of the story was about an American kid with a Mexican mother, traveling to Mexico for Dia de Muertos and learning to let go of someone he loved and lost. As an early draft, the idea made perfect sense. They wanted to teach an American audience about Dia de Muertos, so what better technique to do so than to bring us in through the eyes of the main character who didn’t know his own culture. Because it was built around Dia de Muertos, they knew it had to wrestle with the theme of death, so what better idea than to tell a story about letting go of someone you’ve lost. They wrote the whole script, and even got as far as developing art for the project, before they finally realized they were telling a story that, as Unkich put it, “thematically was antithetical to what Dia de Muertos is all about. We were telling a story about letting go. And Dia de Muertos is about never letting go. It’s about this obligation to remember our loved ones and pass their stories along.” Writing is a search for the truth. A mining of our subconscious to find the real characters that live there, the real themes we’re wrestling with, the real structure that can take us where we need to go, the real meaning that makes our movies matter. In this way, it’s a process by which we find out who we are-- just like the main character of Coco, Miguel, finds out who he is and what he believes in, by exploring his art and his voice as a musician. And sometimes that means realizing, just like Miguel does, that we are staring at half a picture, that our assumptions about our story or our character or our plot don’t match the truth, that we’re not telling the story we think that we’re telling. Sometimes we find the truth through researching the world of our screenplay-- and sometimes that means digging in lots of places to find where the truth lies. It might seem obvious by the final draft that the theme of the movie and the structure of the character’s journey needed to tie together with the meaning of Dia De Muertos. But sometimes it takes writing that early draft, or even several drafts that go totally in the wrong direction, before you uncover the source of the feeling that “something is off” and start to discover what the story really needs to be. It may seem obvious by the final draft that an adorable animal character could generate some laughs for the audience. But who could have imagined that the fabulous dog in Coco, Dante, would spring from research about the Aztec traditions from which Dia de Muertos grew? The Aztecs believed that a Xoloitzcuintli hairless dog was necessary to bring a spirit from the land of the living to the land of the dead. And this research led the writers into even more esoteric research about that breed of dog, and the discovery that Xolo dogs teeth tend to fall out, causing their tongues to loll out the side. And who could have predicted that it was from that research, barely even connected to the idea of Dia de Muertos, from which a laugh out loud visual gag in almost every scene would be born?   A non-writer might assume that researching dog breeds for a Day of the Dead movie was a waste of time-- or even worse, a willful act of procrastination. A non-writer might assume that writing a whole draft, or many drafts, of a structure that you may not even end up using would be a total failure. But an artist follows the instinct, not even knowing where it’s going to take them. An artist allows themselves the freedom to follow the feeling that “this feels right” until the real truth starts to emerge. That doesn’t mean that we should confuse historical research with the writing process. That doesn’t mean that we should try to squeeze in every detail of our research into the script. And that certainly doesn’t mean that we should confuse what we want our audience to learn with the real product we are delivering-- the structure of our character’s journey. But it does mean that we can use our research to find that point of entry. To find that one true thing, that helps us understand the character, or the world, or the entire structure of the film. From our research we’ll start to find our theme, our characters, the look of our film, the world, our style, our rhythm, our tone.   Many writers think that research is something you have to do before you can start writing-- something you have to get perfect, so that you can know everything and find your perfect plan, and not waste any time. But research is actually something you do as you write. In fact, the writing itself is research. Every word you write is research. A quest, guided partly by intellect, and partly by instinct, for the seeds out of which your real story will grow. It’s a quest by which you’ll connect to that real voice in yourself, and transform your movie from something that “makes sense” to something that moves-- that takes both you and your characters and your audience on a life changing emotional journey. At the beginning often that means digging in many places, and playing and practicing and exploring and sketching. And as you do so, some words you write will start to resonate with you. A single line of dialogue on the page. An image you can’t get out of your head. A moment that you don’t quite understand. A structural beat that makes you laugh or cry. And other moments that should resonate, that intellectually make a ton of sense-- ideas that seemed great in your head, or in an outline or in a pitch-- will often surprise you by falling flat on the page. Plot points that should make you cry will instead ring hollow or false. Until one day, something clicks. Sometimes it’s a moment, or a line, or a movement of your story, or something you learn in your research. Sometimes it’s something as minor as a single moment. And sometimes it’s as profound as a whole structure for your character’s journey. And sometimes it’s as simple as a song. Like the Remember Me song in Coco. Which ends up being not only the song we’re all going to leave singing, but also the thematic link between Dia de Muertos and the journey of the character. The structure from which everything else will arise.   But what it really is, is your theme. The song inside you that’s been trying to get out. That little bit of truth trying to find its way onto the page. And suddenly you’re not digging in many places any more. You’re digging in one place. And you’re digging as deeply as you can, because you’ve found that vein of gold, and you want to get as much of it out of the ground and onto the page as you possibly can. That’s the place that we’re all searching for as writers. And sometimes our desire to find that place cuts us off from the process by which we can actually arrive there. Sometimes we imagine we can get to there more quickly by thinking really hard or planning really hard or making sure we know everything before we start. Sometimes we imagine we can get there more quickly by rushing through those early scenes, trying to get the “bones” on the page, rather than doing the real work-- the real research-- of writing. Sometimes we imagine we can get there more quickly by getting “serious” about our scripts, rather than playing around and exploring. Or following some pre-programmed formula that some other writer made, or some coverage reader jotted down in their “notes” about your script. But the truth is, none of these techniques will get you there faster. Rather they will cut you off from the real opportunity of arriving. Keep you digging on the surface, chasing the fool’s gold, when there’s acres and acres of real gold under your feet, gold that you, and only you, have the capacity to access. To do that, like Miguel, you have to cross over into a land where you don’t normally go. To do that, like Miguel, you have to remember what is really important to you. To do that, like Miguel, you have to look the truth in the face, and take it back with you to the other side. That means taking the time to do the research into your own truth, seeing, feeling and hearing every word you write. Applying both art and craft to every page as if it was the only page that mattered. That means refusing to rush to the end, and instead keeping focused on where you are right now, so you can connect to each moment and each character and those little details in which the real theme lies. That means allowing yourself to take wrong turns, so you can find the true path of your intuition. That means surrounding yourself with great artists who push you past your own blind spots, just like Lee Unkrich pushed his writers. That don’t allow you to accept half truths when there’s still a whole truth underneath. That don’t allow you to stop digging until the full power of your voice is excavated. And the only way to do that is to commit fully to keep on digging with everything you’ve got,

Stranger Things 2 Part 2: The Structure of Two Seasons By Jacob Krueger In last week’s Stranger Things 2 Podcast, we talked about the way a TV pilot starts up the engine of a series, and the challenges, especially in a TV Drama series like Stranger Things where everything changes at the end of the first season, of getting that engine started again in Season 2. Because the main structural elements that drive the engine of the show have mostly been resolved by the end of Season 1, the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2 ends up functioning like a new pilot, trying to get the engine started again to launch us into the second season. But while the pilot of Stranger Things, Season 1 dropped us right into the heart of the action, and rocketed the characters into the story from the very first page, the first episode of Season 2 gets that engine started in a far less effective way. And that’s because the pilot of Stranger Things, Season 1 is built around a rock solid Primary Structure-- the way the things the characters want and the choices that they make and the obstacles they must navigate, shape characters’ journeys and push them out of their normal world from the very first page. While the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2 is focused mainly on the Secondary Structure-- the way the audience experiences the episode. As a result, Stranger Things, Season 1 launches us into the engine of the series from the very first page, just as you must if you want to sell a pilot for your own series, or use your pilot to get staffed on an existing show. Whereas the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2, for its many good qualities, starts us off with more of a whimper than a bang.   It’s a problem that the Duffer Brothers manage to correct in a big way by Season 2, Episode 2, when they finally get that engine started. But it’s one which you, as an emerging writer, are unlikely to survive at this point of your career. Because until you’ve got a hit series on the air that everyone loves, the chances are that if your first episode doesn’t launch us into your series with the force of a rocket, no one’s ever going to read Episode 2. For that matter, if your first few pages don’t launch us into your series with the force of a rocket, no one is going to even finish the pilot. So what’s the structural difference between the Stranger Things, Season 1 pilot and the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2? At every moment of Stranger Things, Season 1 the characters are facing obstacles and making choices that change their lives forever. And at most moments of the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2, they quite simply are not. In the pilot of Season 1, the characters are living their lives for themselves. And in the first episode of Season 2, they are establishing their lives for the audience. So let’s break it down together. The pilot of Stranger Things, Season 1 starts with a bad ass chase sequence. We start by panning down from the stars, and find ourselves at the lab, a location that is going to end up mattering a lot for us. We’ve got the flashing lights, we’ve got the scientist running in the wrong direction, we’ve got that horrifying scene where the scientist finally makes his way to the elevator, only to be be snatched up and out of sight just as the doors close. And even though we’re dropped from there into the quiet, mundane world of the kids playing Dungeons & Dragons, even in that scene, The Duffer Brothers are not simply “establishing” that the kids play Dungeons & Dragons. Already the characters are facing huge obstacles and making huge choices that affect their lives and their relationships forever. And for that reason, in Stranger Things, Season 1, we can feel the story start right away. We meet Mike, the Dungeon Master, who wants all his friends to work as a team in the game, and introduces the obstacle of the Demogorgon to test them. We meet Dustin, the cautious one of the group, who wants to cast a spell of protection. We meet Lucas, the impulsive one, who wants to cast a fireball. And we meet Will, who’s afraid to make a choice, but who ultimately risks his own life to protect his friends. The scene isn’t about a Dungeons & Dragons game. It’s about a bunch of kids making big choices that affect each other, in relation to something they care about deeply. And because these are great writers, they keep raising the stakes, by making sure nothing turns out the way the characters are hoping, so they have to keep making big choices that change their lives forever. Instead of rolling a high roll that would allow him to defeat the Demorgorgon, Will rolls a measly seven... and Mike, the Dungeon Master, doesn’t see it. Wanting their friend to survive the adventure, the other boys tell Will it doesn’t count if Mike doesn’t see it. But at the end of the scene, Will makes a different choice. Will admits to Mike it was a seven, “The Demogorgon, it got me,” he says.   And no sooner has Will left the Dungeons & Dragons game than the real Demogorgon indeed does get him-- in a terrifying sequence that we can only see in glimpses of Will’s horror. We aren't even at the credits yet! And we not only locked into these huge choices and changes and never-before experience for the characters, we are also locked in to the hook, the engine of the piece—the engine of a creature that you can barely see; and the disappearance of a young boy that is going to drive the entire season. It’s not that the Duffer Brothers aren’t setting things up. In fact if you’ve listened to my two part Podcast on Stranger Things, Season 1, you know that this first Dungeon’s & Dragons sequence actually thematically sets up every aspect of these character’s journeys. But it’s not the Secondary Structure that’s driving the story. It’s the Primary Structure. It’s Will’s choice to tell the truth, and the terrible consequences he suffers for that choice. I want to contrast that with the opening of the first episode of Season 2, to show you how, even though they’re using many of the same elements that worked so well in Season 1, even though they’re trying to replicate the engine, the Duffer Brothers are missing the Primary Structure that started that engine so brilliantly. In Season 2, once again, we start with the stars, and this time we pull down to a city, an unexpected Secondary Structure surprise for the audience. And this is fun. It is nice to find ourselves in a new place, and wondering how this new piece of the puzzle is going to fit. The Duffer Brothers have a real challenge as they start this episode, which is the creature is particularly scary when it is in the shadows through the beginning of Season 1. But, once it is out of the shadows, the creature becomes a lot less scary; it becomes a lot more typical, a lot more like something we’ve seen before in other “Monster in the House” movies. So, it is important in Season 2 to re-open the door to the danger and the mystery. And while the season could certainly have started equally brilliantly with what ends up being the first image of Episode 2, it’s nevertheless a smart and reasonable move to open to a place that we aren't expecting, and a character that we aren't expecting; the character of Eight, Kali, who is in her own chase sequence-- mimicking the structure of the first episode. But despite the cool chase sequence and Kali’s display of a magical power that reminds us of Eleven’s powers in Season 1-- what is missing is the impact on the main characters, and what’s missing is the horror for the characters that we actually care about.   As the audience, we know that there is another “Eleven” on the loose, and that she may not be playing for the right team. But unlike in Season 1, the story of Kali isn’t going to weave through the first episode of Season 2. Instead, it is going to be left to drop there, hopefully to make us wonder what is coming next. But it’s not going to affect the characters at all. This cool sequence really has only existed at this point for the audience. It hasn’t existed yet for the characters. Whereas in the Season 1 pilot, we very quickly catch up to that lab again, to Eleven again, and the journey of Eleven and the baddies from the lab very quickly get woven into the lives of our story, the lives of our main characters. And so, this is what we really want if our pilot’s Primary Structure is to come into focus: Every element that possibly can needs to affect not just the general world of the story, but the specific world of our main characters. Our characters have to make choices around those elements, and suffer consequences by them. Otherwise the story isn’t really started. It’s just setting up stuff for later. From there, the Duffer Brothers once again attempt to replicate the engine of Season One by catching us up to the boys again-- this time not in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, but an arcade game of Dig Dug. And just like in the pilot, there’s an obstacle that must be navigated in relationship to something the boys care about: Dustin’s high score has just been beaten by someone named Madmax. But the difference is-- unlike in Season 1, where the boys can make structural decisions that matter to their relationships, based on the challenge of the Demogorgon, in this scene, there’s nothing they can do-- not until Madmax actually appears several scenes later. Once again, the Duffer Brothers are setting up the Secondary Structure for the future, rather than launching the Primary Structure of the now. And that’s why the stakes feel super low. And even when Will finds himself magically transported back to The Upside Down from the middle of the arcade, the stakes still never feel like they used to feel. Last season,

Stranger Things 2 Podcast: Part 1: Primary & Secondary Structure By Jacob Krueger This week we are going to be looking at Stranger Things, Season 2. And don’t worry if you haven’t seen the whole season, because for this podcast to be valuable, all you need to watch is the first episode. And I’ll save the big spoilers for the end and give you a little warning before we get there. We’re going to be looking at that first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2 in an interesting way-- by comparing it structurally to that unforgettable pilot episode of Season 1, which launched the whole franchise. As I discussed in my two part podcast about Stranger Things, Season 1 the pilot episode of any series does more than just introduce great characters or tell a great story. It creates an engine powerful enough to launch every character in the series into a huge journey-- and a replicable structure for the series powerful enough to last many seasons. But Stranger Things 1 has a particularly challenging structure to replicate in Stranger Things 2. That’s because the whole structure of the first season is built around a simple problem that’s completely resolved by the time we get to the second season! In Stranger Things 1, a little boy named Will is missing, and his merry band of friends friends need to come together in a real-world Dungeons & Dragons quest to find him. Wrapped around this very simple structure are a bunch of wonderfully horrifying elements-- a creature that can only be seen in the shadows, a magical world called The Upside Down that’s only gradually revealing itself, a bunch of creepy-creepy operatives that are ready to kill to protect a secret that even they don’t understand, a mother communicating with her lost son through Christmas lights, and of course, Eleven, a little girl with magical powers who everyone seems to be hunting. But by the time we get to Episode 1 of Season 2, Will is back (at least mostly) in the real world, so there’s no missing boy to build a structure around. By the time we get to Season 2, the terrifying Demogorgon, which once was scary like the shark in Jaws, not for what we could see, but for what we couldn’t-- has not only been flushed from the shadows, but vanquished from them (at least mostly). So we need a new fin in the water to build the terror around.   By the time we get to Season 2, the world of The Upside Down, which we only barely understood, has now been entered and explored. So we need a new mystery in The Upside Down to build the world around. By the time we get to Season 2, the mother, Joyce, can communicate with Will while driving carpool, so we need a new spiritual component that no one else understands to build the relationship around. And by the time we get to Season 2, (at least as far as we know), Eleven is gone. So we need a new magical little girl to build the threat around. In fact, by the time we get to Season 2, the only major structural element we still have going for us from the engine of Season 1 is the creepy operatives. But even they are a whole lot less interesting, now that we have some sense of who they are and what they do… Which means the first episode of Season 2 has to do a lot more than replicate the engine of Season 1. It actually has to re-launch it. In this way, the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2 becomes a whole new pilot for the series. Which is a big challenge for the writers. But is fortunate for us. Because it gives us the chance to compare a great pilot episode to a good one. It gives us a chance to compare the kind of pilot that can launch us into a new series to one that only works if we’re already in love with that series. And that’s a valuable lesson for any TV writer-- or any film writer for that matter. Because the difference between the Stranger Things, Season 1 pilot and the first episode of Season 2 is the same difference between the original pilot script that’s likely to sell your series, and the one that’s certain to get lost in the shuffle. And that difference is not any of the technical things we usually worry about. It’s not bad dialogue or lousy characters or weak ideas or meandering plotlines. Because the Stranger Things, Season 2 opener doesn’t suffer from any of those issues. It’s a beautifully written episode and quite enjoyable, and I think we can all rest assured, when it comes to the plot of Season 2, the Duffer Brothers have plenty up their sleeves. But the episode does suffer from a huge problem, that so many of my students wrestle with in their own TV writing. And that you are likely wrestling with in yours.   And that problem is setting stuff up for later. When you could be getting it started right now. As screenwriters, and TV Writers, we all have a tendency to save the best for last. We come up with a great idea, and we hold it tightly in our pocket, saving it for later, setting it up, so we can pay it off. But the best pilots, and the best scripts, don’t save the best for last. They save the best for first. That’s the difference between a pilot that’s going to sell your new series. And one that’s going to sit on the shelf. And that’s the difference between the pilot episode of Stranger Things, Season 1, and the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2. The truth is, if you are like me, you probably enjoyed the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2 very much. After all, you are getting reacquainted with some characters you love.  You’ve got some fabulous genre elements that can connect to, more 80’s throwback nostalgia than you can shake a stick at, and a kind of door to reentry into a world that you really enjoyed the first time around. But at the same time, you can’t help but feel like everything’s a little slower, a little more static, a little less high stakes than what you remembered from Season 1. The volume seems turned to an 11 on the 80’s nostalgia, but about a 3 for the actual story. We can feel the Duffer Brothers pulling on the cord as hard as they can, trying to get the engine started on that old trusty lawn mower, but not quite getting it to actually turn over. In fact, if you’ve seen Season 2, Episode 2, when suddenly that trusty engine finally starts to run again, you probably felt, like I did, that with a few tweaks, the whole season could have just started there-- and launched us into everything in a far more dramatic way. If you’re the Duffer Brothers, and it takes a few pulls on the old cord to get the engine started, you’re probably going to get away with it. Because we already trust that old lawnmower you’ve created. We’ve known it and loved it, and we know the great work it’s going to do. That it always starts up eventually. But if you’re a normal human being who walks the earth, who wants to sell a new series pilot, get hired for a staff writing gig, get signed by an agent or manager, you’ve gotta get your series engine started from the very first page. Just like the Duffer Brothers did in the pilot of Stranger Things, Season 1. And as anyone who has ever sold a TV pilot knows, sometimes that means writing not only the pilot, but the 2nd Episode, the 20th Episode, and even the Show Bible-- so that we can truly know what we’re building, before we return the the pilot and make sure it’s doing everything we need it to do. Not only launching the characters from page 1 into a story that will change their lives forever, but also creating a blueprint for every episode to come.   A lot of people think that the purpose of your pilot, (or for you feature writers, the first act of your screenplay), is to set things up for the audience, to lay in the foundations of all the stuff that is going to pay off later and establish the world. But the truth is, you don’t have any time to set up at all. You can’t waste pages establishing the world or establishing the character. You’ve got to jump right into the heart of the action.  Otherwise your reader is never going to make it to that great stuff you’re paying off later, because they’ll have already set down the script, or changed the channel on the TV, or switched to a new show on Netflix. At the same time, if you’ve seen the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 2, you might be wondering what’s keeping it from feeling like we’re jumping right into the heart of the action. What’s actually making it feel different from the experience we had watching the pilot of Stranger Things, Season 1? What’s getting in the way of getting the engine started? After all, isn’t it all building to a huge reveal at the end-- where we discover something we might never have imagined? It’s important to understand that jumping right into the heart of the action isn’t something you do to get the story started for the audience. It is something you do to get the story started for the characters. Every screenplay, and every teleplay, has two different levels of structure. The first, I call Primary Structure, the story of the character’s journey, as experienced by the characters. The huge choices the characters make at each moment in relation to the things they want and the obstacles in their path. The choices that open the door to change and ultimately that change their lives forever. Secondary Structure is the way you serve that Primary Structure to the audience-- the way the audience experiences the story of the movie at each moment-- the story they are telling themselves... now, and now, and now… The Secondary Structure is the delivery mechanism for the Primary Structure within it. The bun around the delicious meat of your character’s journey. If your Primary Structure is working, you can serve it up to your audience in pretty much any way you want to enhance their experience of the show. You can slice and dice it, flash it back, flash it forward, hide it away, chop it up, or toss it like a salad.

MINDHUNTER: Writing For David Fincher Interview With Staff Writer & JK Studio Student Pamela Cederquist Live from ITVFEST By Jacob Krueger Jake:  Hello everybody thanks for joining us. This is an exciting event for me for a couple of different reasons. As a lot of you know, we are up here at  ITVfest in Vermont, hosting a retreat for our students, so we are doing a live version of my podcast. This is a special episode, because I am so incredibly proud of the woman sitting to my left. Pamela Cederquist is a student of mine, she is taking pretty much every class at the studio, she is part of our ProTrack Mentorship Program. And, she just finished her first stint in a real writer’s room on one of the most exciting shows of the year, Mindhunter, the new David Fincher series for Netflix. So first, I just think she deserves a round of applause. These are the kind of success stories that you want to see and that you want to remember. Because, so many people wonder, “Is this really possible?” Pamela doesn’t live in Los Angeles; she lives in Upstate New York. Pamela isn't 22 years old. Pamela is a writer who worked her ass off and made it. And, so, I want to talk to you about what the process was for you. How did you become a part of Mindhunter? Pamela:  Hi everybody. First of all, it is a pleasure to be here thank you for listening. I got the job by word of mouth, by knowing somebody and having worked with that person, and also having had a feature script that I had developed and that took 400 years to finish. I was able to show that script to one of David’s producers, and they read it, and I got notes back from that producer. They liked that writing well enough that, when David was looking for another writer, they were able to say to David, “Hey check this out.” I got a phone call and they said, “Hi, say yes to this phone call and would like you in Pittsburgh on Friday.” And I was like, “Okay, I don’t know what I am saying yes to, but I can be in Pittsburgh on Friday.” Then they said, “Good, you are writing for David Fincher,” and I went, “Okay, yes.” Jake:  I think one of the things that is exciting about this is that often writers get hung up on the question of selling it-- Is it this script? Do I have the right idea? Is the idea marketable? The title of Pamela’s spec script is Pyro, and I think Pyro is a good movie for David Fincher and it is a really extraordinary script. When you sent that script out, the real hope of course was that they were going to buy it, they were going to option it, you were going to make a lot of money, it was going to get made. And this is an example of a script that didn’t get bought, where you get a bunch of notes back, “Do this, change that,” and you don’t even know that months later you are going to get a phone call. Can you talk to me a little bit about the process of developing that script? Pamela:  It started with an idea about an artist whose medium is fire. I actually saw a video on YouTube that was a light piece, where somebody had a dragon that was flowing across a wall, a building. And, I went from there to fire, which I think is an amazing thing, and started writing this script. And I had kindof come up with characters and kindof come up with the story, and I knew what the beginning was, and, I sort of knew what the end was. And I got completely lost in the middle of it, which is you know, where writers end up in hell. And, at that point, I went to a writers’ conference in LA, my first one, and I was thinking “Okay I will go to a writers’ conference because I have never been, so I will go to writers’ conference and see what it is.” And walked into a room, and Jake was doing a pitching session, and it was one of those moments where when you meet somebody and you are like, “Oh, right person for me.” And, that just, that happens to all of us, and sometimes it happens often, sometimes it happens rarely, but in my world, what I have learned is when that happens, you grab hold and you stay there. It took me two years to finally be able to get in a position in my life where I could play with Jake. And, in working with you on Pyro, what we found, and what I have learned from you that was invaluable in working with Fincher, and what I learned on Pyro was theme; was taking theme and using it as your guide, like that was my roadmap. I knew what I was writing suddenly, and we threw out characters, we created new characters, we threw out entire sequences, we added more sequences, and now all of a sudden I have car chases and foot chases and roof running and blowing shit up, all that other stuff. And it works, it isn't gratuitous, it works and it is the right thing. Jake:  So, talk to me a little bit about your process as a writer, because you have a very intuitive process. And you know, I think a lot of writers get hung up on the idea of where they are going. And, one of the cool things that I saw as your writing developed was that we had all these chunks, and all these different chunks, and you would sort of discover them like, “I don’t actually know where all these chunks go,” or, “I am not exactly sure who this character is.” We had characters who switched gender, right? Talk a little bit about that process and how you discovered that stuff. Pamela:  Okay, so one of the things I have found is that the way I work is I have to think a lot. And, Jake at one point finally said to me, “Look, don’t go so deep, please, don’t go so deep, just write on the surface,” because otherwise I am like, “Wow maybe this person is like going to turn their hair orange, it is going to be great.” So, it needs to be integral to me. And the biggest discipline I think I had to learn was getting out of my own way, was, stop trying to write, that for me was the most important thing. I have done some acting, and it is the same thing in my experience as acting where if I walk onto a stage or in front of a camera and I try to act, it is going to suck. And, if I just arrive on stage and let it flow, and trust whatever it is that is talking through me, it works and it works well. And, I have had that same experience with writing, and that is what I brought to the table with Fincher as well.   Jake:  So, I think this story is awesome. Sometimes we manifest things that we don’t even realize we are manifesting. So, we got to the end of this two year process, to tell you that Pamela rewrote that script like 400 times, probably doesn’t even describe what that was. And then, she got all these notes from the producer and she rewrote the script again, which has been another good six months. It is an incredibly long process and it is one of the things that a lot of writers don’t understand. They are wondering, “Do I have what it takes to make it? Or, is this idea good enough? Or, is this script good enough?” And I think one of the reasons that Pamela succeeded is because of her tremendous work ethic. And, I can tell you in my experience working with writers that I will take a writer who has got the work ethic over the writer who it flows easily for any day. I will take the writer who maybe struggles a little bit more. Some people just start typing words and it flows out like magic and gold. But sometimes, those people don’t actually have the experience with struggle to say, “Okay I want to do this again. It didn’t work; I am going to do it again.” And so Pamela-- I was almost done the first draft with Pamela-- and Pamela says, “You know Jake, I have decided as my next project, I want to learn to write something on a deadline because this thing took me two years, and I grew so much as a writer, and I feel like I got enough and I need to learn to write fast.” And, the next thing I knew, she was writing on insane deadlines on Mindhunter. She just manifested it and got out. What was it for you, what was the difference when you are writing alone, or writing a feature versus coming into an existing show and having to write those characters? Pamela:  Listening. I mean, I got lucky. I got to work with David Fincher, and my experience in working with David Fincher is that he is willing to give anything to the creative process. He was available 24/7, his schedule was insane and I never took him up on it, but in my conversations with him, he was like, “Call any time, if you have any question, call.” And he was willing to play with, “what if?” “Yes, here is my outline, yes here is what I have been told, but I would like to play with this a little bit, I am not sure with the character, I think we could do more with the character, I think the character---what do you think?” “Yeah, yeah go ahead, write it, write it long, if you give me 200 pages for 60 pages, I am fine with that, let me see it, and let me participate in playing with it.” So, I got the best-- I mean you can’t get better. I got lucky, I got to work with somebody who was interested in participating-- or maybe I didn’t get lucky, maybe that is true about a lot of people, we just don’t get a chance to help them get there. But, it was about being of service to somebody else’s story. That is what I was there for. I was there to support him in telling the story he wanted. Which meant not only doing what he asked for, but listening and trying to find those pieces that he was maybe implying or wasn’t quite 100% clear about yet. And giving him the stuff to look at so that he could go, “Yes, no, no this doesn’t work, yes this works.” And that-- accepting that the no’s were going to be part of the process of finding what was yes, and not taking it personally. Because it is his project. Jake:  How do you step into a character that you didn’t create? Pamela:  Oh yeah, yeah. Finding what is true for me. So, Mindhunter, came out today,

Mother!: Intellect vs. Intution as Screenwriting Tools By Jacob Krueger Before we get started with this week’s podcast, I want to take a moment to remind you that you still have a few days left to register for our Annual TV Writing Retreat, October 11-15 in Manchester Vermont. This is our biggest event of the year. We bring our entire faculty-- including Jerry Perzigian, former showrunner of Married With Children, The Golden Girls and The Jeffersons, our Pulitzer prize nominated TV Drama teacher Steve Molton, me, and of course the rest of our award-winning teachers--and we all head up to ITVfest, the second largest TV festival in the world. You get world-class TV writing workshops all morning, a VIP Content Creator pass that gets you into all the screenings, parties and events in the afternoon and evening, and a special one-on-one pitch consultation with one of our incredible teachers, so you can develop your show, get out there and pitch your heart out to everyone you meet. Plus, we team with the festival to get you hours of exclusive access to the producers, managers, and agents in attendance at our exclusive Secret Producer Pitch Party! It’s the best event of the year for TV writers, so I hope you can join us. You can find out more at our website: writeyourscreenplay.com/vermont. Hope to see you there!   This week we are going to be talking about Darren Aronofsky’s new film, mother! mother! is probably one of the most frustrating movies of the year. It is frustrating because of its ambition. It is a movie that shoots so big, and attempts to do so much-- filmically, thematically, visually, structurally, societally, politically, psychologically-- that you desperately want to love it. It’s a movie with a first half that’s nearly perfect (at least for those of us open to magical realism in films)-- an ending that should move you to tears… But it suffers from a sequence about ⅔ of the way through that makes you want to scream. And not for the right reasons. It’s a movie that, despite its profound message, is having a hard time connecting with the emotions of its audience-- that often elicits unwanted groans and laughs at what should be it’s most haunting and disturbing moments-- rather than the emotional and political response it’s shooting for.   I would like to suggest that what’s brilliant and what’s problematic in mother! both come from the same source, and can actually be boiled down to three really simple concepts. So, I would like to walk you through mother! today. I would like to walk you through what is brilliant about the film, and I would like to walk you through where the film stumbles. That way, if you are ever working on a screenplay whether it is an experimental movie that is breaking the mold like mother! or something much more traditional-- if these really common problems were to happen to you, then you can anticipate them and be aware of them and address them in an early draft, rather than try to explain them in interviews after the film is out. Now, I want to say that none of the issues I am going to raise with mother! have anything to do with the surrealism of the film. There are a lot of people who don’t like mother! because of what it is trying to do; there are a lot of people who don’t like mother! because it isn't living in the world of naturalism. They don’t like mother! because it isn't telling a traditional story. And if that is you, then it is important to understand that this is a taste issue, rather than an execution issue. And pretty much any film that gets made--if your film is good enough to deserve to get made--the truth is you are going to piss some people off. There are going to be some people who hate your film. And there are some people who hate mother! And then there are some people who love mother! despite its pretty obvious flaws. So what I want to do first is to separate the taste issue out. Separate the genre issue out. And I am going to encourage you to do that with your own scripts as well. When you get feedback that is about taste, that is about genre-- when you get feedback that isn't in keeping with the intention of your script-- you have to recognize that that feedback isn't really for you-- that isn't your audience that you are speaking to. mother! is a $30 million dollar movie with huge star power in it, so this isn't a $200 million dollar epic that has to appeal to everybody. Rather, mother! is a movie that has to deliver for its very specific audience-- the people who connect to the world in the way that Darren Aronofsky sees it. In some ways, it succeeds in that tremendously. And in other ways it falls short.  And the same is true with your writing. In order to find that producer, that director, that executive-- in order to get a star like Jennifer Lawrence (at first, Aronofsky actually thought was a mistake to even go down and meet with her because he thought there was no way she was going to get attached to this tiny little movie)-- in order to attract those kinds of stars, you have to write the movie that only you could write. And sometimes that means that you are going to alienate some people. In order to write the movie that is going to get somebody passionate about your work, get a producer passionate enough to back a new writer, get your dentist friend passionate enough to write a check to you for ten grand for your independent film, you are going to have to write a movie that pisses some people off. And the fact that it pisses some people off means that there is enough to it that the person who is moved by it is going to be deeply moved, passionately moved. They aren't going to say, “Oh this is a perfectly decent, good movie,” they are going to say, “Yes, this is a movie that I need to see on the screen.” At the same time, you’ve got to make it work. And the truth is Darren Aronofsky comes very close to making it work in mother! But he doesn’t totally make it work. And he doesn’t totally make it work for reasons that were actually very avoidable. So, first I want to walk you through the concept of what Aronofsky is trying to build. And then I want to talk you through my experience of what he’s actually built. If you haven't seen the film yet I am going to warn you that there is no way to do this for real-- there is no way to do this in a helpful way-- without spoilers. So, if you haven't seen the movie and you don’t want anything spoiled for you, you may want to watch the movie and then come back to this podcast. Here’s what mother! is really about. Darren Aronofsky is a huge environmentalist. That is a really big deal for him. And he feels a lot of rage about Climate Change; he feels a lot of rage about the way that people don’t care for the earth. He feels a lot of rage that we are basically destroying our own planet through our narcissism and our self-involvement. And he is very aware of the myriad causes and hypocrisies that make this possible-- the bizarre scenario by which deeply spiritual and religious people whose beliefs are based in the idea of caring for the earth and for one another, have somehow become allied with a political party of climate change deniers that seem bent on their own destruction.   The rare confluence of our media and our art and our religion-- our desires and our egos-- separating us from our home, and destroying the very home and the very peace that we want to live in. And that is a really emotional place to start a film. So this is a lesson you can start with for yourself, even if you aren't doing experimental films-- start your movie with something that matters to you. If you start your movie with something that matters to you, you are going to end up writing something that also matters to your audience. So, here is the conception of the film according to Darren Aronofsky. Darren Aronofsky gets pissed off about Climate Change, so he decides to write a movie about it. He comes up with this idea that the Jennifer Lawrence character is going to be Gaia. She is going to be Mother Earth. And the Javier Bardem character is going to be God. And he’s going to do a relationship piece about God and Mother Earth trying to live with each other. All Mother Earth wants to do is rebuild and renew God’s broken home, and help him to be the creator he was meant to be. Except that God’s got this really self destructive streak in him. He’s a blocked artist. And when he finally does create, instead of building a beautiful life with Mother Earth, he keeps on populating the earth with assholes, inviting them into the beautiful home Mother Earth has worked so hard to build and rebuild, because of his desperate need to be worshipped and adored. So this is an intellectual conception, but you can see that already it is growing out of something that is real for Aronofsky, his rage about the earth. And the central question that Aronofsky is asking is this: What does it feel like to be Mother Nature? What does it feel like to be powerless?  To defend yourself against human greed and narcissism and self-involvement and violence against you? To give and give and give to people (and to a God) who only seem to take. He was inspired by the mythology of Gaia, he was inspired by the Bible, he was also inspired by a book called The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, which was about a tree that gives and gives and gives and gives and gives to a little boy. And if you’ve seen the film you can see how Jennifer Lawrence is The Giving Tree. So that’s the conception. Mother Earth and God are living together in this beautiful octagonal house. He became obsessed with the octagonal house not only because it looks really beautiful when you shoot it, but also because the number eight is a number that in the Bible is associated with resurrection. So, here is Mother Earth, the symbol of life and renewal,

War for the Planet of The Apes: Interview with Writer Mark Bomback By Jacob Krueger JAKE: Today I’m really excited to be hosting my friend Mark Bomback as a special guest on this podcast. As you probably know if you are a listener, Mark is the writer behind the latest two installments of the Planet of the Apes trilogy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes. As well as a host of other hugely successful blockbusters including Insurgent, Total Recall, The Wolverine and Live Free or Die Hard. First, I just want to say thank you for joining us. MARK: Thank you Jacob. JAKE: The first thing I am curious about is a lot of our writers work in collaboration with other writers, or are thinking about doing those kinds of collaborations. And you’ve had a couple of different kinds of collaborations on the Planet of the Apes Franchise with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and then with Matt Reeves the director on War. I am curious about what those processes were like for you.  What is the difference between working with a partner, coming in to help out with a project like you did on Dawn or working on a script alone? MARK:  Well, you know the thing is, other than Planet of the Apes, I have actually never co-authored anything. And truthfully the only film of the two that I co-authored was the last one, War, which Matt and I truly wrote together from beginning to end. So, how I came onto the Planet of the Apes actually when Rise was heading into production, Rick and Amanda, who were the creators of Rise of Planet of the Apes were getting a little bit---I don’t even know how best to put it-- a little “written out.” It was a really, really intense pre-production, they were doing a lot of cutting edge things. There were just a lot of moving parts, and Rick and Amanda were also producers on the film. So they, along with the other producers, decided it would be great to get an extra set of eyes on this. And so I came on and did some pre-production, inter-production rewriting, and got to work with Rick and Amanda as producers. So, I would sort of vet what I was doing with them, but we didn’t actually write together. And, in fact, I don’t even get credit on Rise because the work was really surgical and had more to do with sort of finessing things. When Dawn came around, Matt Reeves wound up replacing Rupert Wyatt, who was the initial director of Dawn, and when Matt came in, he really had a lot of work to do. So, the studio asked if I would come on and help Matt sort of realize his vision. So, although Rick and Amanda had written a script for Rupert Wyatt that was the starting point of Dawn, when I came in again it was really me working as a writer alone-- actually that isn’t entirely true in that Matt and I were sort of collaborating-- but, Matt was really the director and I was the one doing the writing-- although as we sort of got deeper into production itself, because we had such a crazy timeframe on that movie, Matt and I really were almost functioning like co-writers as well. So, when it came time to work on War, we both agreed “let’s just actually, now that we have the luxury of time a little bit, let’s write it together from beginning, from the very, very start.” And so, it is really the only time I have ever truthfully co-written. And I wound up loving it. And since the screenplay work on War, I am back to writing by myself. And while I do enjoy having the freedom-- certainly in terms of my schedule and having a little more say as to where things are going, and not having to vet everything through my partner-- I really do miss having a partner. Matt and I became super close friends as well as colleagues while working on it. And, I, to this day will vet things with Matt on other things I am working on, and vice versa.   I really came to appreciate what it meant to have a writing partner. You know, it doesn’t make the process go any faster. If anything, it actually, at least in my case, makes it take longer. But what you wind up doing-- again I can only speak for myself and Matt-- is I think you generate fewer drafts, because you wind up talking through everything, sometimes ad nauseum, but to the point where you’ve vetted a lot of things within the scenes before moving on. Whereas, when I work alone, I tend to want to get to the last page and then see what I’ve got and go back and go through again and again and again. So, it is a very different way of working. And it was also less lonely. Most of my days are spent alone in my office. Certainly today is a good example. I have been in my office since about nine in the morning, just writing. And while I love doing that-- that is certainly why I chose being a screenwriter as a vocation-- it is lonely. And there is something great about having someone to shoot the breeze with while you are working.   Also, I felt like Matt really helped me sort of dig deep and find the best ideas that were in my head, and vice versa. It was really fun to sort of dig into Matt’s head and say, “is this the best version of this or can we do any better?” JAKE:  I actually started out writing on a team as well. I worked with a writer named John Wierick on several projects. And it was interesting for me how different that was from writing alone. John and I were an interesting team because we had very different things that we were into. I loved to, like, blow out that first draft, and John loved to go back in and work through those pages tweaking things, making everything perfect. So we had a kind of interesting balance that we kind of developed over the years as a process of writing together. I am curious, like, what was your approach when working with Matt? MARK:  Everyone has their own version of how they work, but Matt and I, every morning-- or morning Matt’s time, noon my time-- our Skype would be up and we had a program called Screen Hero, which allows you to share a computer. So we would use my Final Draft program, but Matt could literally type onto my computer across the country. Matt lives in LA, I live in New York. And so, we would truly write the script together. In fact, we had a funny way of working. Everyone has their own crazy ways of working, but in this case, if I had a line of dialogue that I really wanted to sell Matt on, but I know I don’t act very well, rather than pitch him the line I would say, “what about this?” And then I would type the dialogue into the dialogue section. And then Matt would read it and he would say, ‘okay, yeah I get it but what about this?” And then he would change the word in it and remit it back. So that is how we did it, but it was really on a word-by-word basis that we wrote the script together. Which in a weird way, I think, you could only do in cyberspace. If we sat in the same room, we would still need to hook up into one computer and have two keyboards, because you can’t sit and type on one keyboard. So, we had two keyboards going at the same time in Final Draft, and would just write together. And if we got on a tear in terms of even something like stage directions, some person would just start writing the stage directions, and then the other person says, “Stop, stop I have an idea…” and then circle right back into the stage directions and add something or subtract something. So that is how we worked. We literally never had a moment of a script page generated without both of us staring at the screen at the same time. JAKE:  And how did that affect the nature of the product that you ended up with or the theme of the product that you ended up with compared to most of the scripts that you’ve done where you’ve really had the freedom to sit in the room alone and dream out whatever came to you? MARK:  It is hard to say. I mean I do think it is one of the best, if not the best, scripts I have ever worked on. So, I am guessing part of that is simply a function of two people collaborating. Oftentimes when I work on a script, at some point the director is with me in there again-- not necessarily writing but collaborating. And any script I’ve written that has turned out well has always been the result of, at some point, a really useful month or two spent with the director in pre-production or even ahead of pre-production, getting the script to really fire on all cylinders. Most of that has to do with digging deep in terms of the themes of the story and how the characters’ journeys service those themes-- things that are less plotty and more thematically oriented. And I think because Matt and I work in such a unique way, in that we wind up constantly watching films while we work, we would sort of watch YouTube clips of certain movies we were referencing while we were Skyping. So we could say, “Oh in the end of A Man Escaped there is this big silent break out sequence that I think would be a useful thing to look at for the end of War when the apes escaped the camp.” And we would have the script page open on one side of the screen and the video clip from YouTube open on the other side of the screen! It isn't the kind of thing you are going to do as much if you are working by yourself, because you are more inclined to just think, “Let me just get through this, my kids are inside screaming, dinner's almost ready…” like you are going to find better excuses to just move faster. When two people are working together, you tend to slow down and do deeper thinking. It doesn’t mean that at the end of the day the script is going to be any deeper or better or whatever, I just think you get there a little bit in a different rhythm, instead of just a couple of drafts that are just getting the story out before you see where else you can mine. JAKE:  We see a lot of blockbuster movies that are mostly focused on the pyrotechnics.

Annabelle: Creation &  The First 10 Pages of Your Script By Jacob Krueger This week we’re going to be discussing Annabelle: Creation, directed by David F. Sandberg and written by Gary Dauberman. Normally, since this is a screenwriting podcast, I don’t talk a lot about directors. But this is a case of a good director taking a struggling script, and turning into something far better than what exists on the page. I’m not saying Annabelle: Creation is a fully successful film. The truth is it’s a pretty cheesy horror movie, full of holes, gaps in logic, violations of its own rules, crappy dialogue… But it’s also a movie whose director understands the demands of its genre, and capitalizes on that understanding to turn a script that could have been a total flop into a finished product that not only squeaked to a 68% approval ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, but also has generated over $280 million at the box office for a reported budget of $15 million. Not a bad return on investment for the producers.   Now the truth is, Annabelle: Creation is a prequel to an extremely strong horror franchise, The Conjuring, with a dedicated fan base and a loyal following among critics and moviegoers alike. And the connection to that franchise, and the very strong script, The Conjuring, that launched it, certainly has a lot to do with its success. So if you’re a new writer, please don’t take Annabelle: Creation’s success in spite of its problems as a suggestion that all you have to do is hit your marks with your genre elements to succeed as a writer. For you to get noticed and get your script made and have that kind of success in this challenging business, the truth is you have to write better than the professionals. Because you neither have the connections in the industry, the track record on your resume, nor the fan base out there in your audience for producers to see the dollar signs unless your script knocks it out of the park. Nevertheless, studying Annabelle: Creation is not a bad return on investment for you as a writer. Because while you will certainly be frustrated by the way Annabelle: Creation fails to live up to what should be a very strong premise, you can also learn a ton about rewriting from the film. That starts with understanding the tools David F. Sandberg used to transform a weak script into a genre success. It means understanding the power of genre, and how to use it to your advantage, regardless of whether you’re writing a horror movie, action movie, romantic comedy, web series, or even a little indie drama. And it also means understanding how the writer, Gary Dauberman, fell into the most common trap in screenwriting and lost track of his own premise. So that you’ll know what to do if the same problem starts to happen to you. And it all comes back to one simple premise.   Screenwriting Rule #1: You’ve got to nail the  first 10 pages of your script! The first 10 pages in your script are the most important 10 pages in your script. And the first page of your script is the most important page of your script. Not your brilliant trick ending. Not that fabulous turn halfway through the movie. Not that moment that makes you laugh or cry or hurl on page 72. The first page. The first 10 pages. And why are these first pages the most important pages? For 3 very important reasons. #1 - The first 10 pages of your script are the only pages everyone is going to read! By the time your producer, coverage reader, A-list actor, director, manager, agent… hell even your great great great uncle who you’re begging to invest… reads the first page of your script, they are already making a decision about whether this script is actually worth reading. You either grab them, or you don’t. And by the time they get to page 10, if they even get that far, they’ve already made a decision about whether this script is actually for them-- if they’re going to read it, or skim it, or if they’re simply going to pass. That means that if you don’t hook them from the very first page, they’re never going to get to your fabulous trick ending, your tear jerking climax, your horror inducing end of act one. So that’s the commercial reason for nailing the first 10 pages. And you can see that, whatever the flaws that show up later in the script, the first 10 pages of Annabelle: Creation certainly don’t suffer from them.   What we’re watching from that very first image is really cool!  You start out on this creepy doll’s eye, this creepy eye, that’s being assembled into this creepy doll in this creepy workshop, and you are just seeing the eye-- you are just following the eye everywhere. And the creepy doll into whom the eye is placed belongs to this father who makes these creepy dolls. And he has a daughter that he loves and a wife that he loves. And they have a cool little complicated family in a creepy little house. And, slight spoiler ahead…. You are 10 minutes into the movie and that little girl gets hit by a car. And at that moment, you are already fully drawn in. You are already pitching yourself a movie. And it’s a horror movie, but it’s a particularly classy version of that movie that you’re pitching yourself-- the story of parents whose desire to hold on to their lost child turns something beautiful into horror. And you see, that should be frickin awesome. And whether you’re a horror movie genre fan or not, there’s something real in there you can grab onto, something beautiful and terrifying from the very first page, that captures not only what is important and beautiful and scary about this movie, but also how the story is going to work, both structurally and thematically. It’s a story about creation and horror. About the creation of a doll and creation of a child and creation of a family. And what happens when the creations that we love start to fall apart and twist us into darkness. It’s the story of Annabelle: Creation. And they’ve fulfilled the promise of their title, and captured the physical and emotional attention of their reader-- and we’re only 10 minutes in! So that’s the commercial reason. If you want your script to sell, your first 10 pages have got to grab us like the first 10 pages of Annabelle: Creation. They’ve got to be the ten best pages in your script. But there is also an artistic reason.   #2 - The first 10 pages of your script create the window through which your audience experiences everything that follows. Audiences come to movies for genre experiences. Which is really just a fancy way of saying that they come to a movie because they want to be given a very specific feeling. If they’re coming to a romantic comedy, they want to feel like love is possible. If they’re coming to an indie drama, they want to experience catharsis through the twists and turns of your main character’s emotional journey. If they’re coming to a broad comedy, they want to laugh their asses off. If they’re coming to an action movie, they want to get their adrenaline pumping. If they’re coming to an experimental art film, they want to feel their minds bended. And if they’re coming to a high class horror movie, like Annabelle: Creation, they want to be terrified. Not just at the jump scare level, but at the emotional and psychological level. In other words, they’re coming to movies for the same reason you’re coming. In fact, many filmmakers and screenwriters become famous and successful for their ability to create a certain genre experience in their writing-- think about Nora Ephron or Charlie Kaufman or Martin Scorsese, or Aaron Sorkin, or Christopher Nolan, or my guest on next week’s podcast, Mark Bomback (the writer of the Planet of the Apes franchise).   If you give your audience the feeling they are coming for in your first ten pages, you can get away with a lot. Because even if the stuff that comes later doesn’t fit perfectly with the genre, or even puts pressure on the genre (like the comic character of Bad Ape does in War For Planet of the Apes, or the comic grave diggers do in Hamlet) the audience will still see everything that follows through that original genre lens. They will interpret what they see through the window of the genre. They will enjoy things that they otherwise would never enjoy. And they will know they are going to get back to the stuff they came for. That the movie is for them. If you actually look at the structure of Annabelle: Creation, until all hell breaks loose and the requisite blood starts flowing, not a hell of a lot happens from a horror genre perspective. It’s really mostly just creaking doors and a creepy looking doll that keeps showing up and a really damn good director and score. And it doesn’t even make any sense why this doll keeps showing up or even how this doll works or like what the hell does the doll really do? I still don’t even fricking know-- But because of the way the doll is introduced in those first 10 minutes-- because of the image of that eye, and the feeling of being watched, and the love that is built between father and daughter, the knowledge that death is coming, that in this horror movie, even a little girl can die a sudden and horrible death-- that experience inflicts everything that we’re watching with a feeling of horror. David F. Sandberg uses the window of that first 10 pages to such great effect in his direction, mirroring the elements that he’s created early in such creepy and terrifying ways, that he doesn’t even need a jump scare or much blood at all to create the feeling of horror. All he needs is that fricking doll.   And even though you’re thinking to yourself “I shouldn’t be scared” and even you are kind of annoyed with yourself that you are, because you know this is cheesy. You have to admit. It’s scary. And it’s not scary because of what’s happening.

Jacob Krueger and Christian Lybrook discuss some of the most exciting independent movies premiering at Sundance and what screenwriters can learn from them. If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/ Learn more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com

How To Write A Web Series By Jacob Krueger   Jake: This week we are on with Karin Partin, and we are going to be talking about Web Series, which is something I haven't talked about yet on the podcast. Karin teaches our Web Series Writing Classes here at Jacob Krueger Studio and has a lot to say about Web Series writing and producing. We’re going to be looking at Web Series from a creative point of view, and also talking about how you can use a Web Series and very little money to actually launch your career and get noticed-- how a Web Series can become not only a calling card, but actually something that brings you money or something that builds your career. So, Karin thank you so much for joining us. Karin: Yeah, Hi! Thank you for having me. This is exciting to be sitting in on the podcast. I know so many of my students are just huge fans of the podcast and listening to the podcast, so it’s very exciting to be on the podcast. Jake: When you think about Web Series writing, why do a Web Series? Why start with a Web Series? Karin: You want to make a Web Series to break into the industry. If you write a script, you can pitch that script to managers and agents for six months or a year. And then, you get that one yes or five yeses and all five of those managers and producers and agents are putting that script on their desk, and may take six more months to read that script. Once they love your script, let’s say of course you have the perfect script ever, it is the best script ever anyone has ever written and they love it, then it is going to take those people championing for you to get it made. And it can take a very long time and the chances of its momentum falling off is high. That is why it takes a thousand no’s and one yes to break into this industry. So if you make your own Web Series, you can send it to anyone you’ve ever met in the industry, and all of a sudden your chances just skyrocket of someone actually seeing your writing because it got made. You can just send it out and say “hey, here is my five minutes”. And the chances are much higher that they are going to see your work. And you can do it! You can make it affordable. You can make your Web Series affordable. That is the whole point: getting your work out there. it is a very short form content that lets you highlight your skills. So, if you can pull off character development and an A to B of storytelling so your character goes from point A to point B, they change in a very, very short amount of time. So, if you can change your characters in five minutes or less, people are going to be impressed. So it is a way to impress managers and agents and producers that you can do short form of storytelling, and that translates to long form storytelling very easy. If you can pull off a Web Series they will believe that you can write anything, because it is the most difficult thing to do: to tell a well-crafted, beautiful, impeccable story in five minutes or less. Jake: So, you feel it is a way of demonstrating a higher level of craft or a level of compression? Karin: Yes, making a Web Series that costs very little money with minimal characters in very few locations is constraint. And so, you want to be able to let these constraints work for you as a writer. And with all those constraints on your back as a writer, and you still pull off great storytelling, people are going to be excited about your writing. It used to be it cost you $50,000 to make a television pilot. Now, you can get a camera, you can shoot it with your iPhone and spend $500 or $50 if you have actor friends and you know somebody willing to cook for you for the day or the weekend. Then you can make your own Web Series. Jake: The other really beautiful thing about being a Web Series writer is that you are your own producer. So you don’t have the limitations of someone telling you, “hey I don’t really like this character,” or “I don’t like the way this character is going.” You can push the envelope and you can write whatever you want. As everyone knows, when you are a writer, you have 50 people that give you notes. You have your producers, and you have the other producers and you have financial people and the actors come in and they give you notes. If you are the Web Series writer, you are going to be able to just make it yourself. So you have a better chance that your vision is going to get down and out to the world exactly as you thought. Jake: One of the other things that I think is exciting about Web Series Writing is that the way media is consumed is changing. Web Series is so darn clickable, you can send them an email and have it clicked in a link and they can decide if they like it or not. Would you say that is a benefit? And how are executives and agents and managers responding to Web Series now? Karin: Oh they are excited about it; everyone I talk to says, “please send me your work, please send me the actual work you’ve made.” It is really, getting much, much harder to get noticed as an unproduced writer because there are so many people making things already. So, how do we break in as people who are unknown? Well, you make your own work and you send it out and you show who you are, you show that your voice is special by making it. Clickable content. I mean, would you rather read a 30 page script to a 90 page script or would you rather watch just a five minute film? If you can send someone your story and it takes them five minutes to watch and you blow them away, you are going to get a phone call. Jake: Do you think that there is a prime length that Web Series writers should be targeting? Is it three minutes, is it five minutes, is it ten minutes, is it half an hour? Where should they be focusing? Karin: I would go shorter the better. The shorter it is the more likely someone is going to watch it. If you send a 60 minute digital pilot, if you can get them to watch it, amazing, great. But if you can send them a five minute one, they are going to click on it. And if you hook them in the first minute with characters, they are going to watch the other five minutes, which then you can continue and make episodes 2-8 or 2-12 and they are going to watch the additional episodes. I don’t know if it really matters whether it is five minutes or twelve minutes. Web Series are all over the place. But it is really about how fast can you tell a story and still keep character development? That is the real key in the craft of writing: can you tell a short story and keep character development? So, if you think of something like True Detective, you know how much time they have to develop those characters. Can you do that in a short amount of time? That is what people are looking for. So, if you look at one of the very first Web Series, The Guild and it is one episode now you can watch it-- Netflix took the entire first season and made it the first episode. So, if you want to know how it was originally broken down you want to watch the episodes on YouTube, because those are actually broken down as the original five minute episodes. And in The Guild, the very first episode is all about character; it is a vignette of who these people are. You’ve got the main character who is talking to her therapist on the phone about how she doesn’t play too much of this video game that she is addicted to. And while she is talking to her therapist, she is on the phone playing the game, also crossing out on a posted note how many hours she has played that week and just it is getting higher and higher and higher in how many hours she played. So her dominant trait is represented by the action of talking to her therapist about how she is going to quit playing while playing. And the other people are also very quick vignettes, you’ve got one who is the dad, you’ve got one who is a teenage boy and he is totally in love with women and he is talking about boobs. You’ve got a mom who plays so much she is ignoring her children, and then you’ve got another character who is missing and he has never not been online in this long. You have a group of people who are kind of like a family who are always on this game and you have one who is missing and they are worried about him. So, it is an online group of people who’ve never met and at the end of the episode the guy who is missing shows up at her house-- the main character’s house-- to tell her he loves her and so it goes from a group of people who’ve never met to real life. And that is your A to B in a very short amount of time, while doing character. And that is the goal for any kind of storytelling, whether it is Web Series or TV or features or you know everything, podcast, everything storytelling. So, if you can pull that off, you are gold. People will notice that you can write. That is the point of writing: can you show them you can write in something that is short enough that you can get them to watch? Jake: So what if you are an emerging writer, and you’ve never done any production before? For a lot of writers that is scary-- the thought of, “Oh my god I am going to have to do this myself!” So, how do you start? If one of my students says, “Okay today I want to write a Web Series. I’ve been writing feature films, or I’ve been writing TV Series, maybe I’ve been in one of The Writer’s Room Classes at the studio, I’ve learned how to work in a writer’s room.” When you think about, “Now I am going to make something that I can create myself,” how is that different, or how is that attainable? How do you boil that down for someone who has no production experience into something that they feel like they can do right now? Karin: To create a Web Series that is attainable and that is affordable, you need minimal actors and one or two locations.

The Big Sick: How To Adapt a True Life Story By Jacob Krueger This week we are going to be talking about The Big Sick by Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani. I am excited to talk about The Big Sick not just because it was a successful film, but also because it allows me to talk about a topic that I have wanted to discuss for some time: How to adapt a story from your life. There is a wonderful scene in The Big Sick, one of the scenes that actually doesn’t get talked a lot. Kumail (for those of you who haven't seen the film) is a Pakistani-American Uber driver who has fallen in love with a white American girl. And in one of the really lovely scenes in their romance, he invites her to this terrible play that he has created about Pakistan. It is meant to be a one man show but it comes out more like an extremely detailed and dry history of Pakistan. The scene has a lot of wonderful little jokes for the audience. But the joke for the character is that Emily shows up for her boyfriend’s show and it is the worst thing ever, and everybody knows it is the worst thing ever, and now she has to pretend that it is good. If you are an artist and you have artist friends, you know what that experience is like. You know that there is often a desire, when that happens, to protect the person whose work we have gone to see: to tell them things are good that aren’t good, to protect their ego rather than their art. Emily, in the film, does actually a much more loving thing, actually a much more brave thing. She doesn’t trash the play, but she does tells Kumail the truth. She says, “I learned a lot about Pakistan, but I didn’t learn a lot about you.” And this sets up a beautiful structure in the The Big Sick, which is really a story about Kumail learning what it is to tell the truth.   In fact, in a way, it is a story about all these characters learning to tell the truth. Emily’s father, Terry, played by Ray Romano also has to learn how to tell the truth, how to not be a coward. What makes Emily’s mother, Beth, played by Holly Hunter, so wonderful is that she always tells the truth-- even if it means that she is going to attack a racist heckler in the middle of a performance. So all these characters are eventually going to go on a journey about telling the truth. And the biggest journey about telling the truth is Kumail’s journey. Kumail is a character who is afraid to tell the truth. Kumail is a person who is trying to please everybody in his life. And because he needs so badly to please, he isn't saying what is real. He has convinced his parents that he is going to accept an arranged marriage with a Pakistani woman, even though he isn't taking any of his potential dates seriously. He has convinced Emily that they are in a relationship, even though he doesn’t believe he is ever going to marry her because he is afraid of being disowned by his parents. And as an artist he isn't yet able to tell the truth with his writing. Ultimately, he is going to go on a journey in relation to his one man show, in which he learns to tell the truth about himself. And in that way earns his happy ending; he earns his happy ending by telling the truth. When we are adapting a true life story, our job, like Kumail’s job, is to tell the truth. And oftentimes we have a lot of different urges pulling against us. What is interesting is that Kumail and Emily’s story is based on a true story-- is based on their true story-- the true story of how they fell in love, how she fell into a coma and how, during the time that she was in that coma, he realized that he wanted to marry her no matter what his parents thought. So this is a movie based on a really beautiful true story. And like most true stories, at first glance we might think that it isn't enough to be a movie-- which is how a lot of us feel when we first write a true story. I remember the first class that I was hired to teach-- before I created the Studio. The dean of the school (which will go unnamed), who is a very lovely man, during our orientation sat me down and said, “Okay, look Jake, you do whatever you want. We don’t really have a curriculum. The only thing is: don’t let them tell true life stories, because you know it is just going to suck.” And I remember asking him, “What makes you think it is going to suck?” And he said, “Well there won’t be enough for a movie there.” And a few weeks later he came into my class and he saw the work that was happening, and he said, “How did you teach these people to do that?” And I said, “I didn’t teach them to do that, I allowed them to do that. I allowed them to tell the truth, I allowed them to tell the stories of their lives.”   Because the truth is that every movie you write, whether it is fiction or non-fiction, whether it really happened in the real world or whether it only happened at the world of your mind, every movie you write is an adaptation of a true story. It is an adaptation of your true story. There is a common piece of wisdom that you are supposed to “write what you know.” And I think this is actually a very confusing piece of wisdom, even though it is quite wise. The reason that it is a confusing piece of wisdom is that, oftentimes, we feel like “writing what you know” is very limiting. We start to get nervous: “What if I didn’t live a really interesting life? What if I grew up in the suburbs with a nice family? What if my story isn't valid enough?” “And what if I want to write a fantasy or a Sci-Fi or a horror movie? What if I want to write a movie that isn't based on real life things? How am I supposed to write what I know if I want to write in one of these genres?” “Or a Western! I have never lived in a Western, how am I supposed to tell that story?” But the truth is that every story is an adaptation of a true life story; it is an adaptation of your true life story. If we look at a movie like The Lord of the Rings, which was based in a book by J.R.R. Tolkien (which is actually even stronger than the movies)-- I think we can all agree that J.R. R. Tolkien never saw a hobbit, never fought a dragon, never saw an ogre, never confronted The Dark Lord Sauron or had to throw a ring into a magical burning river. I think we can all agree that the world of Middle-earth wasn’t a world that he knew. But the world of Middle-earth and the war between good and evil in Middle-earth isn't really what The Lord of the Rings is about. The Lord of the Rings is about a guy who is addicted to a ring. You lose this in the movie, but it is very clear in the book. Frodo, as he gets closer to destroying the ring, wants to put the ring on his finger. There is an incredible draw to put the ring on his finger. He wants to put the ring on his finger even though he knows it draws the Dark Lord closer, even though he knows the ring makes him invisible.   And ultimately it takes an even bigger addict-- Gollum, has to bite the ring off of Frodo’s finger for him to let go of it. And then, it is really interesting when you read the series of three books, and you get to the middle of the third book and they have destroyed the ring and you are like, what is going to happen in the rest of this book? Isn't it over? But it isn't over, because it isn't a book about destroying the ring of Power; it is a book about letting go of an addiction and then having to go home to the real world. And what ends up happening when Frodo goes home is he has to confront the fact that his neighbors suck, that people will hurt you, that mundane life is hard to take. In fact, Bilbo can’t take it. Bilbo ends up leaving Middle-earth, because the other thing that is happening is that all of the magical creatures are leaving Middle-earth. And this is woven into the movie, but it is kind of lost and confusing we don’t really understand why. But in the book, the magical creatures are leaving Middle-earth because the age of magic is ending and the age of man is beginning. Because the age of addiction is ending, the age of escape is ending, and the age of being a real human being with real human problems is beginning. So this gets lost a little bit in the movie because they change the ring. They change the ring because they have a technical problem: they have a problem that the ring makes you invisible, and invisible is really hard to shoot without it looking cheesy. And so rather than turning Frodo into Casper The Friendly Ghost, they decide, “all right, well he can’t want to put the ring on because if he wants to put the ring on, then we are going to have to shoot him invisible, because there is no way to see him want to put the ring on if he doesn’t do it, not in a movie.” So what ends up happening is, instead of having him want to put the ring on, they make the ring heavy. And Frodo is whining to Samwise-- you probably remember this scene, “It so heavy...” But you aren’t crying with them, you don’t really feel it, because that isn't really what the movie is about. And by reversing it, they end up actually losing the theme-- that theme of addiction that tied the novel together. I don’t know that much about J.R. R. Tolkien’s life, but I would guess that either he had an addiction or there was someone profound in his life who struggled with an addiction. (Some have argued that he was writing about human-kind’s addiction to the commercial-industrial process). But whatever the experience, you can see that The Lord of the Rings is actually an adaptation of that experience. Not what actually happened literally, but what happened emotionally—what it felt like. Our job as screenwriters is actually quite simple; we use fiction in order to tell the truth. Sometimes using fiction in order to tell the truth means creating a metaphor like “the ring,” creating a fantasy world like Middle-earth that can represent the internal world, the internal experience,

[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"]   From Little Miss Sunshine to Dead Poets Society: Writing a script with more than one main character. by Jacob Krueger   This week, we’re going to be talking about a whole bunch of movies, but they all have one thing in common. They all have more than one main character.   There’s a lot of debate about the question of whether new screenwriters should write scripts with only one main character, or whether it’s okay for them to write scripts with multiple main characters.   There are even some famous gurus who say that “multiplot” structures are just plain bad and that nobody should ever write them.   It’s a good thing nobody ever gave Robert Altman that advice, (or at least if they did that he never took it) or we would have missed out on a whole chapter of film history!   We’d also have missed out on a lot of other hugely successful movies, The Squid & The Whale, Little Miss Sunshine, Crash, The Shawshank Redemption, The Usual Suspects, The Godfather, Dead Poets Society, American Beauty, True Detective and the entire library of Quentin Tarantino.   And at the same time, there are genuine risks when we break point-of-view and start telling a story from the point-of-view of multiple main characters.   So what do you need to know about writing a script with more than one main character?   In general, if you stay with your main character, very little bad can happen to you.   If you stay with one character, very little bad can happen to you because you just have to focus on creating the journey of that character. Which is a far more intuitive process for most writers-- it feels more like our lives.   In my life, for example, I don’t know what my wonderful TV Writing teacher, Merridith, does when she goes home. I only know what she does here in front of me at the Studio. Unless I literally follow Merridith home, that part of her life will always be hidden from my view.   In my life, my experience of my relationship with Merridith happens only through my eyes. Only in what I get to see.   And so, when we follow only one character, what happens is it allows us to feel like we are watching the movie through their eyes. And this is natural for us structurally, in that we’re used to experiencing the story of our own lives in this way.   The other thing is that we end up with 95-105 pages that we get to dedicate only to one really specific journey. And that just allows us to dig deeper in one place, rather than digging shallowly in many places.   When we start following multiple main characters, our point-of-view starts to shift.   In narrative, they call it “omniscient point-of-view,” when suddenly we are sitting in the place of G-d, rather than sitting in the place of any single human being.   And this is not the way we’re used to experiencing our lives.   That doesn’t mean it can’t be a compelling experience. It can, especially if it connects to the theme of what you’re trying to write.   But if it’s happening for superficial reasons, rather than organic ones, there’s a good chance you’re going to run into trouble.   So, the real question is not if you should pull your audience, and yourself, out of the point-of-view of the main character, it’s why you are choosing to do so.   In less successful screenplays, we often get pulled out of the main storyline to follow another character so that the audience can learn a little bit of exposition.   In these cases, it’s often a manipulative technique by a writer who has not yet developed the craft to weave that exposition into the structure of her story.   If you’ve watched crappy action movies, you’ve seen this all the time. You’re following the main character, and then you suddenly pop out and follow the bad guy. And the bad guy isn’t doing anything interesting, he’s just sitting there twirling his mustache, laying out his plan for the audience.   The writer’s goal when this happens is usually just to create a little more tension for the audience. But this approach usually does the opposite of creating more tension, because rather than allowing us to experience the twists and turns as the character experiences them, instead it lays all the writer’s cards on the table, and it reminds you that you are in a movie and not experiencing things like you do in your real world life.   In fact, this kind of sloppy exposition was famously skewered by Mel Brook’s in SpaceBalls. Rick Moranis has just made his dramatic entrance as Dark Helmet (“how can anybody breathe in this thing”) and then he and Captain Asshole lay out their whole plan to steal oxygen from planet Spaceball. And finally, Rick Moranis turns directly to the camera and asks the audience “Did you get all that?”   So if you are bumping around different points of view just to serve your audience, you are probably in danger.   At the same time some of the greatest movies of all time follow multiple points of view.   The Usual Suspects follows multiple points of view, not only in its 3 layers of storytelling, but also within each layer.   The Godfather is built primarily around Michael Corleone, but it also follows multiple points of view of Vito, Sonny, Fredo… even Luca Brazi!   Little Miss Sunshine is primarily built around Dad’s point-of-view, but also follows the multiple points of view of Olive, Grandpa, Mom, and Uncle Frank.   True Detective follows multiple points of view as it cuts between the Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey characters.   Dead Poets Society follows multiple points of view, following each of the boys, the Robin Williams character, and the group as a whole.   So there is a long history of great movies and TV Series that follow multiple points-of-view.   Generally, when great movies follow multiple points-of-view, they are doing it for a couple of reasons.   Sometimes you are more interested in exploring a world than exploring a character. You want to drop into that world and you want to see that world from multiple characters’ points of view.   Sometimes you want to understand a conflict from multiple people’s point-of-view.   This is something I got obsessed with for years. I wanted to write two main characters on opposite sides of the same war.   For an example from a recent movie, in Dunkirk (you can listen to my Dunkirk podcast here) we change point-of-view a lot. Because Christopher Nolan is telling a story of a world— the world of Dunkirk-- and he is telling a story about how different kinds of people relate to the same problem.   Sometimes you change point-of-view to explore a theme.   This is what Dead Poets Society does. Dead Poets Society bounces around with different characters, and each character is going through a journey in relation to the idea of “sucking the marrow out of life” versus “choking on the bone.”   And while some characters are sucking the marrow out of life, other characters are choking on the bone. And while some characters are choking on the bone, other characters are sucking the marrow out of life.   And the whole movie is just constructed as an exploration of different characters wrestling with that same problem. And in that case it is telling the story of The Dead Poets Society, not just of one dude.   Little Miss Sunshine is a movie in which every character is going to go on a journey in relation to winning. They are all losers, and they are all going to try to win, and they are all going to win but first they have to lose, they have to recognize that they are losers.   For an example of a movie in which changing point-of-view doesn’t work, let’s go back to the subject of last week’s podcast: Atomic Blonde.   As we discussed last week, Atomic Blonde is essentially a mash-up of… every movie we’ve ever seen.   It’s Quentin Tarantino meets The Usual Suspects, meets True Detective--Charlize Theron’s character is supposed to be doing the Keyser Söze thing-- she is telling a story and there are all these other stories that are happening that may or may not be true, but you don’t really even understand what those stories are.   And then you have these weird shifts in point-of-view where suddenly the secondary character just starts talking to you as the audience.   And, at first, it seems kind of cool. “Oh what cool style--they are breaking the fourth wall and that is really cool.”   But then when you try to get to the big payoff it doesn’t pay off. Because you’re wondering, “Well what did she make up and what did she actually see?” It can’t all be a fabrication, because this guy was literally just talking to you. It wasn’t all from the main character’s point of view, even though she’s the one narrating the story.   So, one of the problems that you have when you start changing point-of-view is that you have to decide-- if the story is being recounted by somebody else-- how true do you want to be to their point-of-view?   Do you want to show things that they haven't actually seen? Or are you willing to show things the way that they told themselves the story of it?   For example, in Forrest Gump we are 99% with Forrest, but for 1% of the movie we are following Jenny alone. And we are following Jenny alone because of the tug in Forrest’s heart around Jenny.   So what does all this mean?     When in doubt, tell the story of one character. If a piece of you tugs you towards another character, then write that character.   But don’t write that character to explain something to the audience. Write that character because, as you were writing your main character, something tugged at you and made you feel like you needed to go on a journey with this other character.  

[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] ATOMIC BLONDE Script Analysis: Guns are No Fun by Jacob Krueger This week we are going to be talking about Atomic Blonde by Kurt Johnstad. I would like to start this script analysis by talking about the way that I saw Atomic Blonde, because this was actually my first experience with 4DX. I went to a 9:15 screening and I am wondering, “Why am I spending $28 on this screening?” But it was the only screening that I could make. I show up, and I have no idea what to expect, and it’s not until I sit down that I realize the seats are on a platform that moves.   There are fans and lightning effects, and when it rains in the movie, it sprays water on you. There are little air bursts that hit you every time a gun goes off, and the seat will shake you or kick you in the back when a fight scene is happening. And basically, this is the worst and most distracting way that I have ever seen a film.       Rather than sucking you into the film, it actually shakes you out of the film. It reminds you that you are seeing a movie-- that you aren’t experiencing something real. And I am not telling you this to complain about 4DX, even though I think 4DX is a total nightmare… I am telling you this because oftentimes, as screenwriters, we make the mistake of inadvertently doing 4DX in our own screenplays. Rather than simply telling the story that we want to tell, simply pulling our audiences into our story in an organic way, we get so obsessed with all the bells and whistles that we end up distracting our audience from what makes our screenplay powerful. We get so obsessed with all the things that that are supposed to make it a “commercial” experience that instead of pulling our audience into the movie, instead of augmenting their experience, all those bells and whistles end up distracting from their experience, taking them out of the movie, shaking them out of the reality of the film.   If you’ve taken my screenwriting classes you have heard me talk at length about the idea of screenplay formatting as a way of hypnotizing the reader.   Ultimately what we are trying to do is to use formatting to capture the visual eye of the reader-- whether they are creative or not-- to allow our movies to play in the little movie screen of their mind. And bad screenplay formatting happens when we fail to do that-- when we either require the reader to supply their own creativity to make our screenplay cool or when we start shaking them with improper rhythm or with overly technical scene headings or with things that they can’t see or with dense action or with images that aren’t specific, that don’t play out exactly the way that we see them in the movie screen in our mind. Sometimes our action, the way we put it on the screen, the way we write our dialogue can be like those annoying jets of water and those annoying sprays of air and the shaking of the seats: they can shake us out of this world that we want to experience.     So we have spoken at length about the idea of how sometimes our formatting can become our 4DX, can become that thing that is supposed to augment but instead shakes us out of the experience of the movie. What we haven't talked about as much is the way that sometimes our ambition -- our impulse to complicate what could be a beautiful and simple experience-- can shake our audience out of what should be a really great story. And for me this is very much the experience of Atomic Blonde.   Atomic Blonde wants to be a Quentin Tarantino movie. And there is no doubt that to the extent Atomic Blonde succeeds, it succeeds because of its extraordinary fight sequences.   Whatever the flaws of the film-- and there are many-- those fight sequences are really impressive on a number of different levels. The first is that this writer is deeply aware that guns are no fun. Often what happens in action movies is the bad guys can’t shoot and the good guys can. Often what happens in action movies is that the good guys are total badass characters and the best fighters and have the best skills and are total superheros and the bad guys are a bunch of idiots who can’t really do anything well.     Atomic Blonde succeeds in the same way that Iron Man succeeds. Atomic Blonde and Iron Man both succeed because they realize that guns are no fun just like Iron Man suits are no fun. If Iron Man is going to work, you’ve got to get him out of the suit. And if Atomic Blonde is going to work, you’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of both the good guys and the bad guys. Because the guns are just too darn easy to use-- too darn easy to kill with-- if they’re used properly. Exciting action sequences don’t come from having the all-powerful weapon-- but from having the challenging weapon; having the knife, having the high heel, having the hand to hand combat, having the object that isn't meant to be fought with.   So if you want to write a great action sequence, just like Atomic Blonde, you’ve got to make the most of every location and every object inside that location.   Look at the location of your scene and ask yourself; what are all the objects that are available to you? What are all the objects that have never before been used in a fight sequence? And how can you use those objects in the wrong way? How can you surprise the expectations of the characters? How can you force the character to show who they are, to show their own ingenuity, to show their own badass-ness? You almost need to think of each of these challenging locations like a video game set--where each location comes with its own unique challenges, own unique pitfalls, many, many exciting ways to die-- and where everything is either an aid or an obstacle to the character getting what they want. Where every object gets used in the wrong way in order to create the most exciting action sequences possible.     So, despite its many flaws, there is a lot that we can learn from Atomic Blonde when it comes to writing action, when it comes to the specificity of our action, and when it comes to this very important concept: Don’t let your action be about good guys kicking bad guy ass, get the guns out of their hands, get them out of the all-powerful suits. Don’t make your action about good guys who can shoot and bad guys who can’t, make it about good guys and bad guys who are both really good at their jobs, who are equally matched and who are both fighting with everything they’ve got. Make it about using the wrong weapons in the wrong way, not the right weapons in the right one.   The other thing that Atomic Blonde does really well in its action sequences is that Atomic Blonde allows the fighting to hurt.   We realize this is going to happen from the first time that we see Charlize Theron’s character, Lorraine Broughton. The first time we meet her, she is literally covered from head to toe in black and blue marks. We have a beautiful image of Charlize Theron naked, bruise covered, in her bathtub. And like all the images in Atomic Blonde, this image is gorgeous; the direction by David Leitch from a visual perspective is absolutely gorgeous. (The direction from a character perspective I have some concerns about. But the direction from making every shot beautiful-- just the way you want to make every shot beautiful in your script-- is quite impressive).     So we have this first image of Charlize Theron naked in a bathtub. She is literally black and blue from head to toe. She looks like she has just been in the fight of a lifetime. And this is not the way we usually get to see our action heroes. We don’t usually get to see the aftermath. And that’s how this first image establishes a rule for how these fight sequences are going to work. It establishes a rule that the punches are going to hurt, the battles are going to hurt. This isn't going to be The A Team; this isn't going to be a battle or a fight sequence without consequence. We are going to allow the punches to land. One of the best fight sequences in Atomic Blonde happens between Charlize Theron and baddy bad looking bad guy German Stasi agent that she squares off with. There is a point during the fight where both of them are so tired from beating each other that they can barely stand-- when they are basically stumbling towards each other, trying desperately to find the will to walk much less to actually fight. And this is something we haven't seen a lot of in action movies, those fight sequences that actually hurt. Those fight sequences with consequence. So, on this level, Atomic Blonde is unusually successful.     And yet, the experience of watching Atomic Blonde is emotionally kind of soulless. The experience of watching Atomic Blonde leaves you feeling really flat.   And you can feel this isn't what the writer is trying to do. What it feels like the writer and what it feels like the director is trying to do and (if you’ve seen the trailer which is spectacular) what the trailer is trying to do, is to try to create that kind of Quentin Tarantino action movie feeling-- that kind of tongue in cheek super badass turn up the volume almost expressionistic take on action where it is a total joyride and a total romp watching the extreme violence. But that isn't the experience that we have watching this film. We don’t have the Quentin Tarantino fun. In fact, at least from my perspective, this movie wasn’t much fun at all. And part of that is because, despite the wonderful staging and the beautiful imagery of these action sequences, Atomic Blonde is taking itself very, very seriously. The film is taking itself so seriously-- it is so overly beautiful, and it is so overly complicated-- that it is hard to just enjoy the romp.  

[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] DUNKIRK PODCAST Dunkirk vs. Saving Private Ryan: What is Your Screenplay About? by Jacob Krueger This week we are going to be looking at Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan. On top of being an extraordinary cinematic experience, Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters, because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting or about filmmaking in general, or certainly about the war movie genre. When we think about big budget war movies, we generally think about movies like Saving Private Ryan, movies about great heroism and winning the battle against incredible odds. And yet this is a war movie that (for the most part) isn't about winning but about losing. This is a war movie about a retreat, about a surrender, but also about the kinds of miracles that happen when people care about each other. This isn’t a typical Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey about one great man, one great woman who saves the world. This is a movie about a lot of little individuals. Some of them are behaving bravely, and some of them are behaving cowardly. Some for their own survival, and some for the survival of others.   Dunkirk is a movie that flies in the face of every traditional notion of star-power and how it’s supposed to be used in a big budget feature. This is a movie with an American budget with no American actors and no American characters. In fact, it features an actor in a starring role that we have never seen in a major motion picture before-- who spends most of the movie, from the very first scene, simply running away! He’s not “Saving the Cat” or behaving in any of the courageous ways we’ve been taught our main characters are supposed to behave. Not trying to help other people, but trying to save his own life in whatever manner is possible. He’s a guy who will pretend to be a Red Cross worker in order to try to sneak onto the boat that is evacuating the wounded. And yet we are able to connect with this character, we are able to care about him; we are able to feel for him. This is a movie that stars Tom Hardy and sticks him-- for most of the film-- in the cockpit of a plane and behind a mask that obscures so much of his face that we can’t even tell it is him! That takes its biggest name star and hides him from the audience that cloaks him in anonymity. And though in some ways this is an inside joke-- a nod to the recurring trend of directors covering half the face of one of the best actors in the business in roles ranging from Bane to The Road Warrior-- it’s also a thematic decision -- one that captures the anonymity of real heroism. That evokes the memory of the thousands of forgotten heroes of World War II and countless other wars. Dunkirk is also a movie that ignores most of the standard rules of the war movie genre. This is a big budget war movie with firefights shot almost entirely from the point of view of the pilots. It’s a war movie in which planes don’t explode in spectacular fashion but rather disappear silently into the ocean. A movie in which fighter pilots are more concerned with running out of fuel than with bad-ass lines of dialogue. A movie in which we watch not from the perspective of an audience being entertained by the fireworks, but from the perspective of exactly what it feels like to be a fighter pilot in the middle of battle. It’s an action movie in which the “good guys” don’t always win, and in which the bad guys can actually shoot. Where there are no supervillains, but no super heroes either. Where the Nazi pilots are as anonymous, and as good at their jobs, as the British ones. It’s a movie which assembled the largest naval unit in film history, not for a spectacular battle sequence, but for a simple journey against the waves of the English Channel. A movie in which Battleships don’t participate in spectacular action sequences, but sit helplessly loaded with frightened men, only to be sunk by a single bomb from the air or torpedo from the sea. It’s a movie in which even the good guy British soldiers are tainted by nationalistic racism and selfishness, turning French allies away from British boats, and even sacrificing the lives of their own foot soldiers to protect their air force and battleships.   Dunkirk is a movie which completely rejects the idea of exposition, or the need to explain anything to the audience. Not only does the film lack a single memorable quip or funny line-- it barely has any dialogue at all! It doesn’t tell the audience any more than the individual soldiers on the beach know, moment by moment, just as they’re learning it, and sometimes even a step or two behind. And yet, it manages to create a compelling and convincing portrait of characters that all feel very different from each other. It manages to tell a story about Tom Hardy’s fighter pilot character-- a guy who makes a life changing decision--  and to capture the feeling and the emotional import of that decision with barely a word—simply with a blown fuel gauge, a couple of chalk calculations on his fighter jet console-- and a big decision at the end of the film. It’s a journey that is not structured around big speeches and feel good American values and huge heroic choices that lead to happy endings, but rather with a series of understated little choices that play out almost in real time, and add up to one big sacrifice that plays out nearly as quietly as the ones the tiny choices that preceded it. Dunkirk is a movie in which good characters not only die for something but sometimes die for nothing. It’s a movie filled with ethical confusion, and also profound empathy. A movie in which you may just have to understand that the half drowned soldier you save on your boat may be so damaged from the war that he may never be the same again. Where you may just have to understand that he may hurt someone that you love, not out of hatred, but out of terror. A movie in which the bravest choice may not be to fight but to accept the ugly truth of war. A movie not about justice, but about acceptance. And at the same time, a movie about holding onto the values that tie us together, and the risk we all face when, in the face of our fears for our own survival, we forget to hold onto those values. Christopher Nolan’s approach to Dunkirk’s battle sequences is a total inversion of Steven Spielberg’s unforgettably gory battle at the beaches of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan. Dunkirk presents an equally horrifying beach battle with virtually no blood at all. Rather than capturing the horror of war through gory violence and chaos, Nolan captures the same madness through the bloodless lens of orderly bureaucracy-- lining his soldiers up in orderly bureaucratic rows on the beach-- silently ducking them en masse as they are bombed, slaughtered and attacked.  A horror of war in which most people simply get in line-- and which even the moments of individuality and self preservation which occur within that orderly slaughter are no more likely to lead to salvation than simply following the rules. This is a movie where characters make real decisions that aren’t Hollywood at all, real decisions under pressure drawn from research about the real events-- such as the character who at one point just gets up from the beach and walks into the water as if he could somehow swim the English Channel. This is a movie about plans for escape that don’t work out. Where risky acts of inspiration, like sneaking into a beached boat and waiting for the tide to rise, only lead to another way to die. So what is this screenplay built around that lets it break all of these rules and still succeed? On the simplest level, it’s because audiences don’t come to movies for the things that so many screenwriting teachers, so many producers, and so many writers spend so much time obsessing over. They don’t come for exposition. They don’t come for plot. They don’t come for nice “likeable” characters and memorable dialogue. They don’t come for formulaic structure or wrapping up everything with a bow. Audiences come to movies to go on a journey. To experience something that moves them emotionally, and transports them into a different kind of world. And to create that kind of experience for your audience, you only need two things. The first is a strong sense of your own intention in making the film-- the question you’re genuinely wrestling with, and the emotional journey you want to create for yourself by writing it. And the second is a character who wants something as badly as you do-- who wants something so badly they’re willing to do almost anything to get it. Who’s going to pursue that intention even in face of the biggest obstacles and most challenging consequences. Nolan is a big fan of Hitchcock, and one of the things that Hitchcock demonstrates so clearly in his films-- something forgotten by so many Hollywood filmmakers-- is that you don’t have to explain very much for an audience to feel suspense or to feel connection for a character. Simply rooting a character in their action, in their attempts to get the things they want-- simply rooting the character in their physical world and letting them try to do things that are really hard-- creates a feeling of connection and suspense for the audience, even if we don’t know exactly what is happening and even if we don’t agree with what the characters are doing. And what is really cool is that Christopher Nolan, by working in this way, drops you into the feeling of the war. Not just through the kinds of actions that the characters are taking, but also by the way that he shoots them. By creating a feeling of confusion that just washes over you. He drops you into the experience of the war,