748 - One Room Movies

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Oh, my name's Craig Mazin. And this is episode 748 of Script Notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Recently, Craig, we talked about road movies, where characters constantly find themselves in new locations. Today on the show, let's discuss the opposite. Movies that take place largely or entirely in one location, sometimes just one room. Okay. And then I also want to talk about dithering, which is one of the most relatable and annoying habits for both characters and real-life people. Can I tell you something? Please. Right before we began recording this, I had a little bit of a mic problem. Yeah. And it took me a while to get connected with you properly. And I said, once I was done, all right, that's enough dithering about for me. And Meredith said, that's funny. And I thought to myself, not really, but okay, thank you. And now, I realize why. I didn't even know. Yeah. Craig, here's a question though, because as you were doing this, because I noticed that too, you were opening the outline. So I was wondering if like subconsciously, you saw the word dithering in the outline without realizing you were saying the word dithering. It is absolutely possible that subliminally, the word dithering was there. I was not conscious of it, but it somehow hit some neurons back there. Yeah. I wonder if it's, similar thing is at play where people were saying like, oh, my phone is listening to me because I was talking about this thing and suddenly this thing showed up. My belief is that your phones are actually not listening to you. Facebook's not listening to you. Instagram's not. But instead what's happening is your decisions and what you're thinking about is influenced by all your friends around you. And all your friends around you are also on Instagram and they're doing things. And so it's just a combination of your social graph, what your friends are looking at and your brain just selectively paying attention to certain things. But that wouldn't explain the dithering phenomenon. No, but I think it's related in the sense that you didn't realize your brain had actually made something. So it's surprising. If it did. If it did. If it did. Because there's also the 100th monkey suggestion here that both you and I arrived at the point in our lives where all the things that we share together led us both independently to the word dithering. This in and of itself is dithering and we'll explore more. But for those of you who don't know, for those of you at home, just understand I've had, I've just experienced a moment. Yeah, it's like deja vu. It's that thing that goes, the world doesn't quite make sense. Yes, glitch in the matrix. So we'll talk about those things. We'll also talk about some listener questions. We'll answer them as best we can. And in our bonus day for premium members, what happens when you outgrow your earlier taste? And do, has the movie changed? Has the series changed? Or have you changed? We'll talk about our experiences with things we used to love and maybe don't love the same way anymore. Yeah. Mm, yeah. But Craig, first, I don't think I've talked to you about this. You've been to Europe. You've been to the UK. Have you ever boiled water there? Have you ever boiled water in a kettle to make tea? I sure have. So what have you noticed about boiling water in Europe? Well, we do it, it's a bit different in Europe because everybody has the electric kettle that they just sit on the thing. Yeah. Other than that, I didn't notice anything different. And so we loved our electric kettle while we were in Paris. So we got a kettle when we got back home. And it's so much slower. I remember talking to Kelly Marcel and other Brits about it, other Europeans about it because, because the kettles in the UK or in Europe, they operate on higher power because their power is just stronger. And so it boils in half the time. Yes. Because their voltage is 220 and we're at 110. Yeah. And so I was wondering a few weeks ago, why has no one made a faster kettle for the US? Because it's really frustrating. And once you're used to water boiling quickly, it just seems agonizingly slow that it boils so slowly. So I thought like, well, there must be some technological solution to this. And it got me thinking, about there are these induction stoves that can boil water quicker because some of them actually have battery power that can sort of add to the thing. So why couldn't you make a battery-assisted electric kettle? And so I'm not an engineer. I'm not going to build this product. I am a person who goes out and like starts businesses, but I'm not going to make an electric kettle. But I wondered why it did not exist. So I went to Reddit, which is the place to find these answers. Sometimes it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but sometimes it's useful. Well, I would say, in the specific forum, Ask Engineers. Oh, that sounds useful. Engineers. Yeah. Engineer nerdery. Yeah. So I asked, why is there not electric kettle? I described what I was looking for. And I just wanted to credit the hundreds of people who responded in this forum for a meaningful, useful, illuminating discussion of the technical issues involved in doing it. The TLDR is that you absolutely could build it. It's just, there's a question of whether there's a market for it. I know it would be willing to pay $300, but these people don't believe that there is a market for it. Well, here's what I would say to you and Kelly. Yeah. First of all, patience is virtue. It's just water. You know, that said, you. We could still be taking horses to work, so. I actually looked it up. It was slightly off. Europe is at 230, and we're at 110. But in your home, almost every home, there is going to be a 220-volt socket for your dryer. Yeah. And possibly your washing machine. But I think for sure, your clothing dryer. And also, in our case, for our induction stove. For your induction stove. So, really, what it comes down to is just get an electrician to put that, put another 220 outlet in. Yeah. And then get yourself a European kettle with an adapter, plug it in, and you're done. Yeah. In theory, yes. And there are several people in that forum who actually had done a similar thing. So, I wasn't the only person who noticed this problem. So, that is an option. Of course, I just want to be able to boil my water more quickly, and I wanted to see if it was possible to have this battery system thing. And it was possible to. I would say the unhelpful level of comments were, patience is a virtue. What are you talking about? I'm boiling my water now. Come on. It's just boiling. Other unhelpful was like, just use the microwave. Why are you drinking coffee or tea that requires boiled water? Well, that's stupid. That's a ridiculous comment. The most widely drunk substances are after water. Well, I think the general category I put this in is like, that responses were like, you don't want what you want. And it's like, that's never helpful to somebody. No, I think if you want it, and actually I'm wrong, it's 240. It's 240, not 220. Yeah. By the way, Meredith is going to get so many people writing in with like corrections too. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm live correcting this way. We don't have to deal with it. So, it's 240. As an electrician. Yeah, it's 240. Installed, you can't do it. I mean, I would advise you to not do it. But that would cost much more than a $300 kettle. Absolutely. But that's what money's for. So, now let me respond. Let me respond back to you. You're absolutely right. Telling me I don't want what I want is not helpful. Yeah. Borderline insulting. So, I apologize. Both you and Kelly. You need your water fast. I get it. Yeah. This is what money does. Yeah. It gets you the things you want. And yes, is it a luxury? It's absolutely a luxury. But it sounds like you would love it. Like you'd be so happy. I'd be so happy. I mean. Similarly, there's people in our D&D group who want the titanium dice. Do the titanium dice work any better? They don't. Tungsten. I got. Tungsten. I apologize again. I got tungsten dice. I don't even use them because they're too good to use. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes, exactly. These are things that sometimes we do. And I comfort myself and I know you are the same way. I like to counterbalance the overt luxuries with either equal or greater than charitable acts, gifts, donations. So, I, kind of, assuage my moral sickness. Yeah. I get what I want. I get that. I'm saying, I will, I will, this feels like a birthday gift that I could give you. Yeah. If it existed, which it doesn't exist. No, it does. It does exist. Oh, you mean, the electrician coming to my house to do that thing? Yes. Yes. Electrician comes to your house, you just need a free circuit. You need, you know, your panel has to have enough, you know, amps to spread out. We get you 240. You stick it right there in the kitchen. You stick that British kettle right in there and bam. Yeah. You get there, you have to get the plug adapter. There's other things too. So it's not as simple as that, but it's possible. If they, if they install, if they're doing this custom, they do it so that it takes the UK. It all could be done for you, for your birthday. All right. Which is in what month? It just happened. It was in August, but yeah. Yes. Yes. Next year. I have one entire year. Happy birthday, John. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All right. Let's follow up with some How Would This Be At Movies. Recently, we talked about, a policeman who was stalking this woman that he met on a set. Yeah. That's a terrible, terrible story. Oh, there's, there's a movie to be made here, but there's more research material here. I'll put a link in the show notes to this article, I think from the Washington Post talking about a bunch of police who were found to have been using flock cameras to stalk people. So flock cameras for Europeans who don't know what we're talking about are these cameras mounted generally on poles that are supposed to be the license plate readers, but they can actually like read a lot more than that. You can also identify faces, police people using those to stalk folks that should not have been doing. Jeez. This seems like a surveillance state problem. I mean, what a mess. What a mess. All these systems that they put in place presume that people are going to, let's take a step back. The entire existence of law enforcement is predicated on the notion that people will not follow the rules. If everybody followed the rules, we wouldn't need police. Yeah, so the existence of the police postulates that humans will violate the rules, but the systems that they give police postulate, police will not violate the rules. Police are humans. They will. Huge problem. It is. And if you look at our existing laws are really based around the idea that certain things would be very difficult to do, that there wouldn't be a surveillance system, a panopticon that could monitor people at all times. And of course we can. And so we're having to apply things like illegal search and seizure to things that are not, the text was never meant to address that. Which courts are actually pretty, well, they may be slow at, I don't know if I would say they're good at, but they exist to do that. And they do. Over time, they had changed laws and things to, to adapt to technology. In this case, this kind of surveillance should simply not be allowed to be accessed willy nilly by anyone. That's crazy. Yeah. You should have to have a court order to be able to do something like that. And you should not be able to just do a sweep of every phone that was in an area. No, it is such an obvious violation of the right to privacy. If we had a good right to privacy embedded in the constitution, it would be easier to defend that. That would be really nice, actually. Yeah, right. It is. The right to privacy is something that Apple talks about a lot, but it's not necessarily there. Unwarranted search, I guess we would have to go put it under search. Yeah. I also wanted to follow up about FIFA because we just had the world cup and the world cup, actually went kind of pretty well. I was, there were no disasters during, during the time it was, it was a Trump wandered on there to, in front of the Spanish team to also embarrassing moments, but there weren't any disastrous moments. No. And I would say like all the North American cities that hosted it seemed to have a good time. People enjoyed it. Success on that little, but it reminded me that we talked about FIFA back in 2015 about the scandal. Oh, a broom behind the scenes there. There was an article that it sold to Warner brothers. You remember this Ben Affleck? Matt Damon has set up an article over at Warner brothers. I called house of deceit. Gavin O'Connor was attached to direct. And so I looked it up today and it's dormant. It doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon. I think it's important to note that like, that's the norm is that things will get set up and they will not happen. That's right. And it's possible that in the wake of this very successful FIFA, and I think probably the most watched world cup in North America, at least perhaps, you know, Warner brothers may sift through their pile and go, yeah, wait a second. Maybe this is now FIFA continues to have issues. Oh yeah. They are a scandal plagued organization. That's what they are. They've talked about privatizing part of it. Everybody lost their minds. It's a situation over there. And the privatizing thing, it was actually Joshua Kushner, not Jared Kushner was the guy heading up that whole operation. Who's Joshua Kushner? Who's that? Joshua Kushner is the equally wealthy brother of Jared Kushner, who is married to a man named Ben Affleck. He's married to Ben Affleck. He's married to a man named Ben Affleck. He's married to a supermodel. You know, this family, this family, this family is also another, you know, how would this be a movie? Let me tell you, we have, we have, uh, an expression. We have a phrase that we use in my community and it goes like this bad for the Jews. That family's bad for the Jews. We don't like it. We don't, that's like, stop it. Stop it. You're not representing us. Well, don't love it. No, don't love it. FIFA tried to represent themselves better. And they made a movie, which was about the origin story of FIFA and this, uh, which I looked up. It came out also in 2015, it looks like, and, uh, it made $936 in its opening weekend. Who's going to watch this? Yeah. Here's the funny thing. Like, you know, so soccer slash football is the most popular sport in the world. And somehow the organization that controls the global, the sort of Olympic version of it in FIFA is hated by like everyone. I think nobody likes it. I don't think it's a good thing. Nobody likes it. It's just this, who's going to go see that? Yeah. There's actors in this. Gerard Depardieu, Sam Neill, and Tim Roth. They're all in this. Yeah. Yeah. It, rest in peace, Sam Neill. Sam Neill was a lovely guy, by the way. Uh, Sam Neill was a lovely guy. As it turns out, Gerard Depardieu, horrible. So $26.8 million worldwide and failed to obtain the actual distribution in many markets. Yeah. It's bad. Yeah. We don't want to see that. Nope. Yeah. All right. All right. Let's move on to new topics. Uh, let's get to our dithering. Dithering. Dithering. You've dithered enough. My inspiration behind this was, was twofold. I was recently reading a script and my frustration with the script really came down to, it was really clear what the hero needed to do. And so the hero classically pushes back against the call to adventure. Sure. Great. Um, but like, it was just so obvious what they were supposed to do and they were dithering. They were dithering through too late in the movie. Did they finally make a decision to do a thing? And then I read this article by Sarah Constantine and she was talking about how dithering is such an unattractive thing in a person that she wouldn't encounter. She was talking about specifically talking with young people in their twenties who it felt like had already really basically made the decision, but they wanted to talk it out. And then you say, when you tell them like, well, it sounds like you made the decision. That sounds great. It's like, no, no, but I'm not sure I, I, and they couldn't offer any articulate reasons why not to do it. They just weren't ready to make the decision. They weren't ready to make the leap and how frustrating that is as the person who has to encounter that in life. And so I felt a kinship with her and the 20 something person and me reading this script with a character. So I want to talk about dithering as both a natural human tendency that we see in real life and we see in scripts and we need to push past it or just recognize that it's not helping us thrive in life. Absolutely. And to the extent that we can identify with it in a character to a point, and then we demand something happens because our attention is not limitless. So there's only so much time we have this like running clock in our heads. Part of what we have to learn as writers is how to align our clock with the audience's clock. So after some point of, and probably characters that don't dither at all feel rather one dimensional and flat. They just make the decision. So in like very broad action movies, someone's like, they took my kid. Here we go, blah, blah, blah. You want a little bit of Hamlet, but you don't want too much Hamlet. Yeah. Yeah. A character over dithering is a reflection of the writer dithering. Uncertainty and the consequences of choices. I think it also comes down to loss aversion is that it's so easy to imagine like, this is what I have right now and anything that would be different could be worse. And so I don't want to risk anything possibly being worse. So for our characters, our job as storytellers is to push them into the thing that actually will probably will be worse for a while until it gets better. Yes. And as we're talking to people in their twenties, we're considering going off and making a life change or breaking up with that person or starting to date that person or take that job or not take that job. You got to do something like honestly making some choice and trying that thing. It's probably better than sitting back and doing what you're doing. Of course, the opposite of this is the people who are constantly blowing up their lives and you wish they would take a little pause and think through what the range of outcomes is where they can only see things being better than they are right now. Yeah. I think about the moments, maybe moments where dithering makes sense. You know, characters that have this, like a part of their characters, they're indecisive and they don't know what to do. Maybe at some point that does become a huge problem for you as a writer, the pressure on you to deliver something with the story when you're faced with a character that doesn't want to do anything or keeps going back and forth. So when you have a character like that, sometimes it's great if you pair them with somebody that is the opposite. So we see that combination all the time, the ditherer and the impulse, the impulsive character that can be really fun. Yeah. Dory and Marlin and Finding Nemo is a ditherer and, and force of, of nature. But the moments inside, you know, those little mini dithers, micro dithers are fun. It's just that you have to know that in a scene, by the time you get to the end of the scene, the dithering has to stop. There must be a decision. In fact, dithering can kind of help you structure a scene. Yeah. So what I'd like that you're hitting on is that dithering as a source of conflict can be fantastic. Conflict between new characters, conflict within a character, conflict within the setting of the scene. It's a game that you're playing. So you have a character who dithers and that's the game that's being played. But if you try to play the game in multiple scenes, back to back or across the things, beating yourself, and we're going to feel like we've already seen this, this act, we, we can't take it. So it has to be an escalation. Something has to change. There has to be a reason why we're watching this beat happen this time. Otherwise we're gonna be frustrated. That was my frustration reading the script. And it's also my frustration with the people who you have dinner with and you have dinner with them a couple of months later, and they're still kicking over the same decision. Oh man. I can't, I can't, I can't, sorry. I can't help you there. It's a rough one. In life, we will meet people. Who are like this, who have a problem that they, they must talk about and you do your best to sort of help them analyze their choices. And no matter which way you go, they're skating the other way every time. So it's almost like that's the game. The game is you can't catch me because I'm just going to go this way and that, which can, can be very frustrating. I mean, in real life, sometimes I just go, let's talk about what the feelings are underneath. Let's forget the circumstances. That is maybe just a symptom here. There's a feeling going on. That's trapping you sometimes as, as writers. can get into this situation with our own stories where we feel like, oh, the story is either I do this or I do this. The problem with this is this and the problem with that is that. And you fail to realize that there is 1400 other ways to go. You've just gotten trapped between a false Scylla and Charybdis. Yeah. You see people who they recognize there's a problem and so they'll tell you about the problem. And what they're not actually trying to do is solve the problem. They're just sort of massaging the problem. They're indicating where the problem is. And like, yeah, that's the problem. You need to actually do a thing to solve that. And in real life, we have sympathy for those people because we understand that it's hard and you're trying to give gentle love. In a script, you can't do that because we actually have narrative control here and we need to make choices about how we're going to guide these characters through their story. So if it's authentic for them to be dithering, fantastic. But then look for, how are we going to get them out of that loop? Because we as an audience don't want to see them stuck in that loop for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an entire movie. That's not what we sign up for. Yeah. No, I mean, forcing those people to make a decision is a kind of torture and that's what we're here to do. Yeah, fair. Yoda says, do or do not do, there is no try. Interestingly, he's not the classic kind of impulsive character. He's the wise character who recognizes that gesturing towards the problem is not going to solve the problem. Yoda is the worst teacher. He's the worst. Let's talk more. First of all, he lies about who he is. Then he's like, okay, fine. I suppose I'll tell you, I don't believe you're going to do well. I think you're going to fail, but I guess I'll take you on. And you're going to be scared. And in fact, I'm going to, I'm going to look at you and bare my weird teeth and go, you will be. So I'm just going to intimidate you into thinking you're a failure. And then every time you fail, I'm just going to sigh and hang my head or hit you with a stick when you don't know how to do it because you've never done it before. I'm just going to sigh and hang my head or hit you with a stick when you don't know how to do it. You're a student. You've never used the force to lift a fricking X-wing out of the swamp. You're like, here, let me teach you by doing it myself and imparting absolutely nothing to you about how I did it. That's it. That's it. I'll just do it myself and give you no information. And then when you're like, I can't believe it, you go, that's why you're a failure because you don't know how to do it. Worst teacher, worst teacher ever. And he dies. Yeah. Email it into askajohns.com. Let's say that you were George Lucas or, you know, the architect behind Star Wars and you knew ultimately how Yoda was going to be used in the other films and the prequels to get you to that point. I can imagine how those scenes in Empire Strikes Back could have been used in a way that actually did pay off things that were said in the earlier things, but instead were. There wasn't a plan there. We know that. There was no plan. I mean, he was kissing his sister in the first movie. Come on. There's no plan. We all know that. We know there's no plan. There's an entire galaxy. It's a galaxy. So every galaxy has what? 14 million planets? And that guy's dad? Come on. There's no plan. Nobody's going to be upset about this. Not a bit. No. So wrapping up dithering, recognizing that it's a relatable human instinct and emotion. And so if you're showing it and portraying it, we get it. You just can't stay on that emotion because it's really annoying to be there too long. It's great as a source of conflict. Tension within scenes. It can help understand the character dynamic. It's something between just two people who just see the world different ways. It's a spice and you got to be careful with that spice because otherwise it can just overwhelm things. Or sort of underwhelm things. Yeah. It's like this is an exciting thing where you've lit a fuse that's going to lead to a bomb and then the fuse is just like 14 miles long and you just go home. You don't care. Yep. I love it. All right. Let's talk about, movies set in one room. This is a Meredith's suggestion because we had recently talked about road trip movies and Meredith, you were suggesting we talk about movies that are mostly set in one location. Give us a sense of some of these movies that are on your head. Yeah. So it was actually a very interesting subject to look into because it brings up a lot of other things. Like what about movies set in one location? It's a bigger location, a house. Does that count? Is it one room? What if there's an opening scene or an ending scene somewhere else? What if they do a full movie? What if they do a flashback? Does that count? So we'll get into it, but I'll start reading from the one room mostly section. 12 Angry Men, Rope, My Dinner with Andre, The Breakfast Club, Panic Room, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Buried, The Man from Earth, Cube, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, The Exterminating Angel, All is Lost, and Lock, and 127 Hours. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Lock is an interesting case because, of course, it's actually all in a car. One car. That's kind of a road trip movie, too, but it's one location. Yeah. Yeah. We'll start with those that are sort of the strict examples, and there's some that are other, also very close. Snowpiercer is sort of one long location, but you're changing sets a lot along the way. Train to Busan, another train movie that does that. Clue, of course, is the house. We're always in sync, but it's a soundstage movie, and that doesn't feel like quite the same level of construction. Right. Yeah. I would agree with that. I want to talk about. Yeah. One of the things about a single location movie is like, is it also in a single time? Is it almost a continuous time? Because that's a reason why you're staying in one location, obviously, is that it's very constrained in time. Yes. And so some of these are that case, and some of those are not that case, but. Well, there was the recent Zemeckis movie that everything took place in one room over here. Yeah. Yeah, over decades. So is that a movie set in one room? I guess so. Yeah? Yeah. Specifically, yeah. I mean, Run, Roll, or Run is essentially a continuous time, but it's set over a lot of different locations. Over a lot of locations. Places, yeah. Let's constrain our conversation to constrained physically. Physical spaces. In a place. Physical space. And there's a lot of horror in this category, which makes sense. Sometimes you're trapped in a location and can't get out of it. But also, we have a tradition of making inexpensive horror films. And one of the reasons why single location movies tend to be cheaper is that you're not moving around to a bunch of different cases. You don't need the trucks, you don't need the infrastructure to move things from one place to another. We do see comedies that are set in a single location. We will see dramas that are set in a single location. But horror tends to be the one that we're encountering most often. There's good tension. There's some good movies that are thrillers. Yeah. Breakfast Club is a great example, I think, of a one location comedy. Yeah. And it's just a smart idea. It's a wonderful film. Twelve Angry Men is the one I always think of as like the movie that is a play. And a play movie is an interesting thing. And I do enjoy it. You know, I do. I think it's an interesting thing. And it's one maybe because, you know, I'm always a writer first in my mind, regardless of what job I do. I do think that one of the wonderful things about movies set in one room is that it removes a lot of the kind of what I call directorial nonsense. There's like so many discussions about like, well, this room was this color. Now we need a new color. And this room is, and I get involved in those too. I mean, they're real. It's about real things. But to say, this is the room. This is the table. These are the walls. These are the clothes you're wearing. We did all that. Now we just do the story. We do the characters. We do the relationships. That's pure storytelling. It's fun. You know, I think it's fun. And it's a great exercise, I think, for a writer to say, we're going to take away all your tricks and tools and stuff. There's nowhere to go. You want to cut to something, you got to figure it out. You're in one space. So two movies you and I both love are The Invitation and The Invite. So The Invite we talked about recently with Will McCarver and Rashida Jones, which is all essentially in one apartment building. One apartment. We have like a few cutaways to another thing. Those don't count. It's in an apartment. I think it counts. It's like once you've arrived at a place, you're staying at that place. That's also the deal with Matt Maffredi and Phil Hayes, The Invitation, which is, again, one location and nearly real time once we're in there. It feels like it's not, a play being filmed, but it has that sense of. It could be. It could be. That's the thing. If you were to adapt either of those films into a play, you wouldn't have to sweat too much to do it. It's not too hard to figure out how to do that. Similarly with Breakfast Club, it would not be difficult to do. Yeah. Way back in episode 304, we talked about, we had an episode called Location is Where It's At, where we talked very much about location. We mentioned one location movies way back then. So we talked about. We talked about Get Out is essentially just one house. Right. My movie, The Nines, is almost entirely in one house. And so that we're constraining ourselves that way. And some of the advantages that the audience doesn't have to learn about new spaces. The audience can really focus on characters that are not distracted by everything else that's changed around them. But one of the things it does is because locations aren't changing, characters and the relationships, I think, have extra incentive to change. We're looking for those things to happen because. We're not going to new places. So new places have to happen within the characters and their relationship. Exactly. And we should all pull out our copies of No Exit by Monsieur Sartre and say, there it is. There's the ultimate. Hell is other people. Three people in a room. No doors. Go. Yeah. For us as writers, especially, I think this is a very helpful thing for new writers. And I know, I think a lot of. Students in film school listen to this podcast. I think a lot of the teachers listen to this podcast. This is a good thing. good exercise i think everybody gets excited about taking their iphones and doing cool shots out there no cool shots yeah no exteriors no visual ua tell a great story in one room with characters and just as you just said it the pyrotechnics are entirely about relationships as a budding director if you are if that's what you're into learn about the power of eye lines yeah just just learn that learn how important it is to make sure that you get that one weird shot over the shoulder to that thing that is useless for anything other than this one moment in which case it's incredibly important this is a great way to boil down craft into its simplest and then you're forced forced to confront the hardest part of what we do which is creating authentic human beings having authentic interactions yeah if you think through real life we often have roughly two hour experiences that are in one place where you are constrained in that that thing and stuff does change over the course of it as you're making a decision about something i mean obviously 12 angry men is reaching a jury decision but there's other times where we've had to do this in the wg negotiation rooms there have been two hour stretches that were cinematic in the sense of like there was a whole journey a whole arc that happens and so figuring out how would you shoot that what would be the interesting things what would you edit out of that and what we should keep in there how do you find locations within the location this is the thing we've talked about oftentimes is that when you have a scene at a party and you have this conversation over over here and that conversation over here how do you make those feel like different places on the page so we can see that that who's involved in that conversation and who's participating in it and who isn't so that we can get a sense on the page of what's going to feel like as it's shot and how those sequences are going to feel distinct and different from this because again i think i thought in our conversation about the invite uh they did so well is while staying in one location letting people split apart and do things and that's a you're going to have to find ways to get people together and pull them apart so they can have one-on-one conversations yeah it will require you to ask the question that lindsey duran loves to ask where are they standing which is important another reason to really think about the value of this exercise is that you are forced to deal with the reality of the physical space if you do this correctly you can go outside to a parking lot and tape out like 12 angry men you can just tape that out we do but i do this all the time for our show i'm like before we build a set i'm like let's tape it out on the floor let's actually see how far away because sometimes it's too big sometimes too little tape it out and now we're saying tape it out sorry you're taping it out in the actual location or some or some open space no i mean if it's when we're building a set we go to the sound stage and we just put tape on the floor to outline the rooms and if you don't have a sound stage because let's say you're a student go outside to you know where they're not working on a parking lot or a basketball court tape it out and see just see walk around yeah feel it yeah and you will realize pretty quickly oh this room is too small for the things i want to do or oh this room is too enormous for the things i want to do let's figure out it matters and it's the kind of thing that as writers we often don't get to experience because as ted elliott once said a lot of writers in hollywood only get to do half the job they get to do the writing part but they don't get to see the production part they don't go through the production part where you learn the rest of it yeah wrapping up this topic i also want to talk about the extreme other example is there are some movies which um in some ways could be plays and that you make the choice to like have them not be plays by going to a bunch of locations and having very short scenes and having this little spontaneous moments it's worth thinking about what is what the opposite of this would be so a recent movie uh the drama which i just watched i was kind of trapped by movies um is remarkable to me because it has scenes that are like 20 seconds long where clearly like they move the company to a thing to shoot a 20 second scene and it's delightful it makes the movie feel really expensive because you're just you're getting all this production value of being in all these locations all at once but wow um that's it's it's nice to remember how different things can be and the range of of choices you have in terms of how to tell a story and whether this conversation is an eight page scene in one location or 16 tiny conversations in a bunch of different locations it really affects how it lands for us as an audience yeah budget helps budget helps it does you know that's one of the the nice things about movies sit in one room is that they're very they're very economic both in terms of the money you're spending to get to these places and set up and light and dress all these places but also how many pages you can shoot in a day and how many days you're holding on to exactly so a movie like 12 angry men i don't know what the shooting schedule was but i'm gonna guess they shot it i'm just gonna go crazy here and guess if they shot it in 12 days let's look it up less than three weeks 19 to 21 days it was you know a little off there but yeah preceded by two weeks of intense rehearsals so here's the other thing yeah i just went through this for a lot of what we do we don't rehearse because there's not really a point or it's not possible but then there are sequences where i'm like we have to rehearse this or else we're gonna burn a bunch of time on the day figuring out a bunch of things that we don't we shouldn't we should have figured out already and for something that takes place in one room where so much of it is going to be about the movie it's going to be about figuring out how to monitor tone and create action through interaction rehearsal will help tremendously because you can start to see oh we probably shouldn't just start lobbing our big bombs right here on page 12 let's go we need somewhere to go with this and we need to figure out how to stop and where the rhythms are and how pace and tempo are so important you go look at the music video and you'll see that the rhythm is remarkable the way they talk back and forth is so fast and interesting so that's another thing that you get if you make something in one space you can rehearse it before you shoot it and when you don't you usually can't not in an effective way you can rehearse it in a fake space like a table reading but i don't like table reads because they're not the thing nobody's really do you can't do it at a table you're not at a table table reads are what we talked about on the show many times they're really helpful for making sure actually read the script once we're getting some sense of of how things are flowing do we cast the wrong person those things can be helpful but it's not tell that from it yeah but it's not it's not the moment where you can feel where like oh does this scene work on its feet because it's not on its feet i i think they are table reads are traps i can largely agree with you but i will say that there are times also where if an actor is having a really hard time saying a line like it just doesn't land in their mouth then it's a natural place for them to come up to you and say like hey i'm having a real hard time with this can we figure out a way to get this line but you can also just do that on the day yeah so just do that that's the thing if you're the writer yeah if you're the writer if the writer is around and on set that's an important thing too hey uh speaking about rehearsal on my instagram reels recently i've been seeing a bunch of reels about spider-man brand new day and the choreography rehearsals they did for one sequence in which an entity is hopping from person to person it's really well done in the movie and you can see in the behind the scenes like oh that's why it works so well is that all the people is jumping to are trained dancers moving people who it was all timed and they knew exactly how they were doing and as the crowd's running past them it all works so well and so in a movie that's going to have a bunch of cg because it's going to have a bunch of cg and there's a crowd added those people and how that sequence was done is so true seriously done it's such a great testament for having an idea having it clearly expressed bringing very smart people to plan it and rehearse it and shoot it it just it really made me sort of happy for hollywood that we remembered how to do this thing and for people watching it i don't know anything about that production but yet i do i know this much that sequence required 500 meetings there were 500 meetings and so many stops and starts and so many plans and so many pre-visits and so many test shoots and so many tests that the amount of energy and planning and time that has to go into these things is enormous and and i i kind of love that it's unseen by people i think that's wonderful but it is also of course why i get crazy when anybody accuses a movie of being lazy yeah maybe not it may not be good but it's never lazy but i can understand i'm not going to say that it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good but it's not going to be good meetings behind that those sequences because they're thinking like okay well we'll need to have a visual effect to enhance what that looks like and then it's just like no we're gonna actually just trust that the performers themselves are going to give you the feeling like oh this thing is edged into this and like their physicality is going to reveal it come on so smart sometimes these things and again i have no idea how this evolves sometimes what happens is people just assume like okay this will be cg and then the vfx department does a little pre-vis and they CG-ish and then someone's like could shoot elements of real people and then put them in. And then you start doing that. And then you're like, wait, why don't we just do this? And someone's like, well, that's going to be hard. But the point is, sometimes, and it may have been that they just from the very jump are like, we are doing this with real people. But the paths are rarely straight to, oh, I think I know how we should do this. That is how we did it. We did it. The end. Sometimes it works that way. Hooray. A lot of times, strange, strange paths to get to where you eventually go. Yeah. Well, crucially is that it's having the vision for like, this is what I want it to feel like. And then trusting the people who you're bringing in to get you to the place where it gets to what you feel like rather than coming in with a preset decision about like, this is how we're going to do it. Oh, yes. Yeah. And so it's the flexibility. And it's both being firm and flexible. Yes. Sometimes my job is just to be the person who says no, if it's not good enough or correct, no matter how much work has been put into it, which is hard. Sometimes I just have to say, I know everybody would be thrilled if I said yes. And everybody will be panicked if I say no. However, no, it's not there yet. We're not, it's not, we haven't figured it out. And, and then through that comes the correct solution. Hopefully, not that, you know, nobody has, there are times where you go, well, we almost got what I wanted, you know, but part of it is just putting a goal out. But telling your professionals to go figure out a way, getting a way back and going yes or no. Yeah. Let's answer a listener question. Okay. We have Corey wrote in about what he calls hyperlinked cinema. Corey writes, while listening to last week's road trip podcast, I wondered if John and Craig had ever dedicated an episode to hyperlinked cinema. A quick Google search says no, but then again, when is the internet ever wrong? Hyperlinked cinema is when multiple characters with independent stories eventually meet in unexpected situations. Or fateful ways revealing an underlying thematic payoff. Popular examples include Pulp Fiction, Snatch, Amores Perros, Magnolia, and John's film, Go. Context here is Corey has been working on his own project in this vein. And he says, as I start my next draft, I'd love to hear the guys wax poetic on hyperlink do's and don'ts. Craig, I never heard of this term hyperlinked cinema. No. I looked it up. It's, it's Roger Ebert and apparently popular. I recognized it. I'd never heard it either. Well, cause hyperlink is such an old phrase. Yeah. Hyperlink. Yeah. Oh my God. And, and then Roger Ebert has not been updating his references. So we don't know where he's at right now. Yeah, alas. Altman-esque is sort of what I'm thinking about with this. Robert Altman is famous for movies where a bunch of different people are doing stuff and anyone could sort of take over the driving of story at any point. And eventually you recognize like, oh, they're all in the same space and things. They're interlinking. Bill does that. Um, and go does that to some degree, but I would say that go, you understand that these characters are connected very early on in the story and then they splintered into three parts and they come back together, but it's not quite, I think what Corey's going for here. No, I think it's a little different. Um, the idea that in a, you see a scene and then later you see an entire different story. There's nothing to do, or you don't think has anything to do with that. And then the bits of the other scene move by. In the background and have a different impact on the other scene. So it is, I guess you can call hyperlink cinema. I mean, it's an interesting storytelling device. I personally have never used it. I do. I mean, I love Pulp Fiction. I love snatch. I do. I love all these movies and they're fun to watch, but I don't know if I have any great advice other than to say, you know, you probably better sketch that out carefully on your, on your whiteboard there. Make sure it makes sense. So I think, I would say one thing that's different about this kind of storytelling versus what we were usually talking about where a character has a one-time transformational journey is that the audience has a, maybe a one-time transformational journey because we are experiencing the story from all these different characters points of view, but hopefully they all feel like they're rolling in the same direction, that there's a consistency of aim that we're, that everyone's swimming in the same water. And in doing that, you're going to want to have hopefully a mosaic of people's different intentions. You're going to want to have people's different intentions about an idea that there's basically there needs to be some idea underlying all of this and the characters are embodying different aspects of that and getting to different places. Our normal conversations about like, what do characters want still absolutely holds true for the scene level, for the sequence level. Like what are they trying to do in this moment? What are they going after? And if we don't understand that, we're going to be frustrated at all moments. Um, we're just, we're going to lose faith in you and wonder why we're giving you all our time and attention. Yeah. And I suppose, I, the only other thing I can think to add for Corey is that the feeling I get from these movies is a kind of strange existential angst that everybody, part of the, the way that these stories interlink is to suggest none of it matters, that it is all part of this, um, kind of the absurdity of life. It's, it's, it's, it's a bit absurdist and to kind of underscore that vein of weird, the weirdness of it all, that, um, we're all living our individual stories. We're all intersecting. None of us are aware of each other. That is a kind of alienation and an existentialism. And it feels like there wants to be a threat of that. It's hard to imagine all these stories wrapping up and feeling complete because the whole point is you're not aware of the other stories and, and someone else's main characters is your eighth character and vice versa. I would also say that people listening to this, don't mistake this kind of Altman territory for what is really a more conventional structure where like a bunch of different characters can have storytelling power, but essentially it's really about one character's journey. Right. I'm thinking back to the Favelmans. And so the, the, the boy character in the Favelmans, he is the protagonist, he is the one who's growing through it. He's the stand in for Spielberg. And while the movie lets us see things that he doesn't first have firsthand knowledge of. It's all in reflection of his experience. It's all in reflection of his greater story. Yeah. And so there's, there's, so don't, don't think you need to do some sort of like weird hyperlink thing just because you have a bunch of characters. You can have a bunch of characters in a story that is essentially still about one person's journey. Yeah. Completely. Yeah. Let's do one more question about phone call scenes. This question is from the listener survey. I would love for John and Craig to get into writing phone call scenes because I always struggle with how best to represent this type of scene on the page. Okay. I've done this before. I mean, this comes up over and over. It's hard. I get it. It's hard and it's easy. I mean, let's just simplify, right? Like the whole point of a screenplay is to help everybody see the story, shoot the story, act the story and edit the story. So the problem with phone calls is that if you have interior Craig's house and interior John's house, and the two of us are talking and the camera theoretically is on us when we talk, you will have 400, you know, scene headers and you don't want that. So. Generally, if the scene starts, let's say in my house and I call John, then I will say John picks up and then I'll just say, you know, int Craig's house and John's house intercut day. And then I'll just do the scene like as if we were in the same space together because we will understand we're not. A fundamental choice you're going to make is, are we showing both sides of the conversation? Oh yeah. A lot of times it makes more sense just to stay on one side of the conversation and that works great. If you are going to do that, I will tend to have the two slug lines. And I'll just say as a intermediary slug line, intercut, just understand that we're in both spaces at the same time, cutting it's necessary between the two. I would say a pet peeve of mine, which I think is just what I'm used to in movies now that if I look back at the older movies, it drives me crazy. I watched Citizen Kane again recently, and there's phone calls in Citizen Kane where like there was no time for the other person to be giving the lines at all. Makes me crazy. Yeah. It makes me crazy. And I, I have scenes where people. People are on phones on my show and I will often find myself saying, listen, this is what they're saying too. Cause sometimes I, if there's, if you don't hear the other person, I'll just write, you know, listens and then dah, dah, dah, and I'm like, okay, but here's what is happening in the listens. So, and which is normal because it's hard for an actor to know necessarily what listens means, right? Like what is on the other side? It's up to us to tell them. But when people do know what's, I mean, look, Orson Welles wrote it. I mean, I remember Mankowitz, he wrote it. He should know. Yeah. So you call someone and you're like, listen, I need to know how many people are working there. What? That many? No, impossible. Well, I don't know that. But like who, how is that possible that anybody could be talking on the other side of it is very bad. It's very stylized and bad. I hate it too. Yeah. Well, and then part of the stylization is like, it's clearly just information you're trying to get to the audience that it's, it's not actually important to the characters who are in it. I'll give you a good example of how that was done intentionally is in Barton Fink when Ben Geisler, who's played by Tony Shalhoub, he's a producer, he's, he's been given Barton Fink. Barton Fink has to write a wrestling picture, Wallace Beery wrestling picture. He doesn't know how to do it. And he hasn't started. And Ben Geisler knows he's in trouble. He calls the projection room and his job is to get them to show him a bunch of wrestling pictures as he calls them. And he talks so fast, but they do have like a little, and he cuts that person off. So it actually works. It's like, it's done really smartly. Yeah. I love that because they were so aware of it. God, I love that movie so much. Have we done that movie? Have we done it? We've done it. We haven't done it. We've done it. I mean, like, that movie to me. Yeah. The last bit of advice I'd have is always ask yourself, is the phone call the right choice for this? And would it make more sense for people to be having this conversation in person? Yeah. And yes, sometimes it's not realistic to think, like, someone would actually truck over to where someone has to do something. But, like, two characters sitting together is generally better than a character on a phone. Yeah. The question that continues to be asked over and over is, how do we do texting? Which is actually very difficult. I mean, it's not difficult. Again, it's simple. You just put the text on screen. You just see people typing. You see the text, and it's fine. But also, it's annoying because texts don't work like that in real life. They don't float in space. Yeah. It's kind of hard to do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the answer would be there's not going to be one consistent way that's always the way to do it. Yeah. That's just, it's not. Yeah. All right. Let's do our one cool thing. My one cool thing is another subreddit, which is, what is it, Reddit, which started showing up in my feed. And I just love it. So, what is it? What is it? People will post a photograph of a thing. It's like that they will have found generally some object. And they're like, what is this thing? And so, it could be, I found this in my girlfriend's car. What is this thing? Or I found this thing plugged into my router. And it's like, everyone's like, oh my God, someone is like, someone's spying on you. Someone is spying on you. Right. So, in most cases, it's totally benign. But Reddit is full of very good sleuths who can figure stuff out. And they'll find like the image that actually shows what the thing is. It's like, ah, reassuring. So, it's like, what I like about it, it's like a mystery that's almost always easily, quickly solved. My dearly departed mother-in-law used to do a thing at Christmas where when we'd all get together, there was a mystery item. And it was something that she inevitably had picked up at one of her beloved church, fair, swap, meet, whatever the hell's yard sales. And it was always some gadget. And none of, it was like, what is this? So, some sort of kitchen utensil. It was often a kitchen utensil or some sort of tool. And then it would be like, oh, it's, this was a thing that held an onion sideways for a drill back in the old drilling onion days. It was like something so weird. Oh, yeah. But you would, it was fun to just kind of postulate and imagine and hypothesize. What could this weird fricking thing be? Like, if you had never seen a pasta fork before, the pasta scooper, you know, that thing. Yeah, yeah. You might wonder, is this. It's a back scratcher, clearly. Is this. Do doctors use this? Like, what is this, right? Yeah, how do you get babies out? Yeah, like, is this something? Yeah, it feels like creepy. And so, anyway, this is a, it's that writ large in Reddit. Yeah. That's great. Cooks Illustrated, which we've talked about the Cooks Illustrated magazine often. Love that, yeah. But they would also have a little feature about that too where they'd find something at a gadget fair. And figure out what it was for. She loved giving us stuff that she got from those church fairs and she would, not intentionally, she just would fail to remember to remove price tags. So you would get like a book and on the back, there was like a little piece of tape and it said, 10 cents. Yeah. And I'm like, go with free at that point. Like, you're not funding your church one dime at a time in the year, you know, 1998. Why don't you just. Yeah. If somebody put a dime in the collection plate, it would look bad. Dime? Yeah, you know, charging 10 cents, like it takes so much time to get the 10 cents, deal with the 10 cents. What if somebody only has 9 cents? My one cool thing this week is not smoking. And I want to talk a little bit about not smoking because I read an article about the return of smoking. So statistically speaking, smoking isn't making some big comeback. However, in Hollywood, suddenly smoking seems to be in vogue again and we're seeing a lot of pictures of celebrities and actors who 10 years ago, their publicists wouldn't have let them be caught dead with a cigarette in their hands. Now are in GQ smoking a cigarette. They're on the red carpet with a cigarette. They're taking selfies with a cigarette, you know. And these are celebrities that people really do, you know, especially younger people are looking at and seeing on Instagram, a lot of Instagram photos. And it's like the point of the article was it's one of these sort of nostalgic bad behavior things you can do and it's cooler than vaping or the freaking Zin pouch or whatever. And I'm here to say it does look cooler. Like I would never lie to people. Like people say like smoking doesn't make you look cool. It does. However, it makes you look cool like in a photograph or something like that or in a film, which is why a lot of times actors will do it or actors look cool doing anything because they're actors and they're handsome or pretty. But it's killing you. And the death you will suffer is not cool at all. It is not pretty. I watched it firsthand with my dad. It is unpleasant and ugly and sad. And it is going to happen. So like everybody knows and there's something about thinking about the notion of cigarettes and climate and how it's like we know what we're doing is bad and we know it's going to kill us, but it's not going to kill us today. And humans have such a hard problem wrapping their heads around the it's not going to kill me today thing, which is why as a kid, I smoked for seven years because it just couldn't wrap my head around it until I did. So for anyone who listens to this, who is in our business, who has an opportunity to be in front of characters smoke, there are characters who smoke and there are periods and places and times where people smoke and part of our job is to represent that stuff. I'm not one of those people who says you can never show smoking on screen. I show smoking on screen. But if you are an actor or somebody in Hollywood, you yourself, please, A, don't smoke. B, if you do, don't be photographed doing it. Don't make a virtue of it. Don't Instagram yourself doing it. It's going to kill people, literally, in a business where people are obsessed with the $900 smoothie from Erewhon because it's got the acai berry combo with the aniseed, with the antioxidants. Smoking is so stupid and harmful. And kids look up to you guys, to actors and to professionals in the business who are out there. So I'm just saying, hey, not smoking. Yeah. Let us make that cool again, please. Let us not, let us not regress. Agreed. I do wonder if the fact that you and I grew up in a place in a time where our parents smoked is part of the reason why I was so opposed to it. I associate it as a dumb thing my parents did so I would never do it myself. And I do wonder if this younger generation just wasn't around people smoking a lot so therefore they don't have all the negative connotations that we have about it. I remember like smoking sections in restaurants and smoking on planes barely, but yes. And it was absurd. The world with smoking is just crazy. It's a world on fire. And so, I think individually if people who are going to be photographed would just like not be photographed would that just, right? That's it. Or if you're an editor who is making decisions about what photos to put on things, let's don't use those photos. Don't do it. Don't do it. It's not, it's not cool. It's not, it's not, it's not edgy. It's not. It's stupid. It's just dumb. It's like, you know what would be edgy and cool? What if you took this gun and put it in your mouth and pose like that? Everybody would freak out because it's dangerous. Don't do that. And you're absolutely right. I think there's a, a younger generation that didn't grow up watching their parents die of lung cancer or esophageal cancer. Like I saw my grandfather die or my dad die. And so they, they don't, they don't know. But they're gonna, their kids will find out. And here's the other thing about cigarettes. Because there's not a lot of smoking culture maybe around them, they don't realize, oh yeah, you know, the whole thing about like, oh, I'm gonna have a cigarette on a Saturday night. That works for like, I don't know, I don't know how many, what percentage of people. And then like the larger percentage of people they get addicted and smoke every day. That's how it works. And oh my God, the stupidity of like, in the article, the lady was saying, and then we start like, some of the cigarettes are like, they get into this natural discussion. Well, it's just all natural tobacco and water. And like, shut up. All natural tobacco. Yeah. Okay. There's an authenticity to it. Along like a vape, which is all artificial. This is all natural. It's all natural. Yeah, it's all natural. This cyanide is just, it's so, it's so natural and lovely. Let us, let us drink of it. It's like hemlock is natural. Don't do it. Hemlock is natural too. Yeah. That's awkward. It's a bad idea. All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Meredith Stedman. With help from Lauren Loseberg. It is edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnox.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find transcripts at johnox.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter call. It's called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books. Script Notes merch is available at Cotton Bureau. If you would like to see us, not just listen to us, follow us on YouTube and Instagram. If you would like to read us, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Most of all, thank you to our premium subscribers. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on our tastes changing. Craig and Meredith, Thank you for a fun show. Thank you.