676 - Writing while the World is on Fire (Encore)

0:02John August:Hey, this is John. And this is Greg. So this episode is an encore. So about a year and a half ago, I sat down with legendary scripted guest, writer turned psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo. Great Dennis Palumbo. So great. Episode 99 was one of our classic episodes about psychotherapy for screenwriters. In this episode, he and I discuss the many feelings of catastrophe that surround us and how hard it is to write when it feels like everything is just disintegrating around. You have those feelings? That's weird. Yeah, specifically this was recorded in the midst of the LA fires. And so it did feel like, why am I trying to write when it looks like everything is just burning to the ground?

0:43John August:I have that feeling so much, so consistently that the LA fires didn't move the needle that much. Like my needle is just in red of catastrophe. I'm working on it. Yeah, but for me, I would say personally, I don't feel the same way I did a year and a half ago when we recorded this. And so I don't know whether it's just my levels habituated or just things kind of get better. Like the fires got better. We don't think about the fires on a daily basis anymore. It's a thing that happened, but... We're adaptive creatures. We are. Even though we don't think of ourselves as resilient. No. We are. Yeah, it's true.

1:14John August:So in this episode, he and I also follow up on AI. We answer listener questions about competing with brain trusts and how to support a friend who's embroiled in controversy. And then in our bonus segment for this episode, we talked about the best and worst examples of psychotherapists portrayed on screen, which is fun. I mean, there are probably quite a few bad ones. Yeah. Basic instinct. Yeah, that was bad. There was a woman who did a thing on TikTok where she dressed herself as a sheep and said, hi, I'm so-and-so, I'm a sheep detective, been a sheep detective for 30 years. Let's take a look at this movie and see how it does.

1:51And she'd like play a clip and be like, okay, so that's not really how that would go. Oh, no, absolutely. Yeah.

1:57John August:You want authenticity. Yeah, it's quite funny. I love that genre. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we've talked before with our friend Ken about sort of portrayals of lawyers on screen. So this is a chance to talk about portrayals. Zoanne Clack and doctors. Doctors, yeah. So enjoy this episode from the vault. This is 676. As a reminder, if you're a premium Script Notes subscriber, you could listen to any back episode anytime you want. John, can I make a vault opening noise? Please.

2:31John August:Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you're listening to episode 676 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you keep doing creative work when it feels like the world around you is burning to the ground? sometimes literally. To help talk us through that despair, self-doubt, and anxiety, we welcome back a beloved guest from episode 99, Dennis Palumbo, a writer-turned-psychotherapist who deals with these issues every day. And in our bonus segment for premium members, Dennis and I will talk about how therapists are portrayed on screen with suggestions for getting it right.

3:03John August:But first, Drew, we have some follow-up. We do. So we had a few people write in following up on our conversation on AI from back in episode 669. Imran writes, Recently, a production company added my original TV pilot onto their slate and paid me to craft its pitch deck. This particular script is a lo-fi sci-fi with a South Asian female lead. I want to stop on lo-fi sci-fi. I just love that as a term. Yeah. Good. Now, obviously, with pitch decks, the visual job is finding comps, stills, actors, etc., to show what we're making. But finding stills of South Asian female leads in Hollywood roles is a very limited pool.

3:39John August:And then trying to find them in any sci-fi context is an almost impossible task. And my past experience is that decision makers often have what I lovingly call ratio fantasia. So I gotta show them, but what do I show them? Well, enter AI. I was able to concoct stills from a show like mine that doesn't actually exist, but feels familiar, allowing me to center a South Asian female lead, like a show from a parallel universe that's already solved its representation problem. So decks generally just use images ripped from TV and movies, and they're not for public consumption. so I feel like I didn't go against my general philosophy of not replacing a human with a toaster.

4:15John August:Could this be considered an instance of AI enabling opportunity rather than the opposite? I feel okay with this particular usage, but what do you think? Yeah, so Imran, you're right at that sweet spot where I'm actually wrestling with the same questions myself because I've had to put the dead of pitch decks. And let's talk through what you're usually doing with a pitch deck, which is you're looking for images from existing movies and TV shows that sort of give a sense of the feel and the style of what you're going for. And, you know, if I'm putting up things for the female leader, I'm talking about like, this is Rebecca.

4:45John August:I might put up a series of images of split screens of like a couple different actresses who could play that part. Like here's Zoe Saldana, here's Jennifer Lawrence, like here are people in that space. That's great. But sometimes you need to show what's actually happening kind of in the moment in that scene. And my go-to source for all this stuff that I pay for subscription to Shot Deck, which is a really good site that pulls stills from all sorts of images and does a really good job cataloging and tagging them. So you can say like, I need a closeup shot of a man looking down. I need this kind of thing.

5:15John August:It's really useful for building that and for building mood boards. But, Imran, exactly the situation you're running into, like sometimes that shot doesn't exist because it's just never been done before. And particularly with issues of representation, yeah, you're not going to find enough young Asian female leads in a sci-fi franchise that's going to probably work for you there. So I get what you're trying to do. I would say, listen, don't pretend that you're not doing it. Don't hide from it. But also I think you need to sort of put some guardrails around yourself. You're using this stuff to be able to convince other people to embark on your project.

5:50John August:But this is not the final product. So the fact that it's internal is a helpful delimiter for me. Always just be asking yourself, am I taking away someone's job by doing this? Because what are the alternatives? Well, you could go out and do a photo shoot with a model who sort of does these things. That's just not realistic. That's not how these things are done. You could go to a sort of Photoshop professional who could comp together a bunch of other images to find that thing. That's maybe possible. And as you go out further with the project, it may make sense to enlist some of those folks in terms of building this deck so you can go out and if you need to show it to networks and to other places beyond that, that might make some sense.

6:28John August:But for what you're doing right now, I don't personally have a problem with it. Some people would. That makes sense. Next comes from Rita. Rita says, I work at an animation studio, and while our policies are all strictly against AI use, the message from above is that if it's going to help us work faster, go right ahead. This isn't being communicated in anything written or over Zoom since our meetings are all recorded, but rather has been said to me with a wink wink when I've been physically in the office. I suspect this is the case for a lot of studios. Yeah, I would be really curious to hear from our other listeners about what they're finding in their actual working environments.

7:02John August:I was on a studio a lot yesterday, in a sort of a TV kind of space. And I saw just a lot of people with a lot of really big monitors. I was wondering sort of how much they were using AI to do some stuff in there. And I don't know what it is. Listen, sort of like Imran's question is, I guess I'm wondering what kinds of things are they saying? Maybe it's okay for you to use AI to do some of these things. You mentioned that like your Zooms are all recorded. So great. But a lot of times they're using those Zooms to actually generate notes about what was happened in the meeting. I'm kind of okay with it.

7:33John August:But again, are you taking a person's job who normally would be there to do that? For most of these meetings, probably not. In the case of a writer's room, yeah, a writer's assistant was supposed to be there doing that kind of stuff. I think when you have policies that are written down, but then you're actually not enforcing them, I think it's in some ways kind of worse than not ever actually having a policy because it makes it a question of whether there are any boundaries around anything. Drew, what's your take? Well, I know Rita works in editorial. and so there's different facets to that too.

8:04John August:Like when we had Mike Schur on the show, he was talking about using his audio engineer, using AI to pull seal noises out of the back of a shot and that feels like a tool. That feels like a useful thing and editors, these editorial programs have little tools and wizards and things that can clean stuff up. So if AI is being used in that capacity, I don't have any problem with it. That feels fine to me. I think I said this on an earlier podcast. If the person whose job it is to be doing that thing is using the tool themselves, I have less of an issue with it than if they are someone whose entire job is in that space is using that to replace the person who would normally be doing that work.

8:45John August:But an interstitial shot, that feels bad. It does feel bad. And I think we're going to be wrestling with this for a long time. Rita, I would say that it's good to clock how you feel about these situations. and when you feel like something is crossing a line or you wonder if something's crossing a line, talk with others around you. You may not necessarily be able to go to your supervisor and say like, this is a problem here, but if other people at your level are feeling a similar kind of situation, there may be some logic behind that. Post is one of those areas that's going to be affected earlier because it's people sitting at machines doing things and maybe they're using the next generation of those existing technologies to do stuff and it may be fine, but it may also be disruptive in a really bad way.

9:30John August:I'd be really curious where the line is for a lot of these people in post, for our friends at VFX, the ethical boundaries that they're pushing up against. Because to me, a lot of these just feel like extensions of tools that they might already have, but that's probably not true. Well, I mean, anyone who's actually edited a movie or TV show will tell you that like most of the dialogue you're seeing coming out of an actor's mouth is not necessarily what was recorded in that moment. You've slipped lines from other takes and you've moved stuff through. It's all artifice and all manufactured. So if you're sweetening or changing the audio to do that, or you're doing clever things to people's mouths so that you can slip frames, we've long had issues with sort of like how authentic and how real a thing is that we're seeing on screen is.

10:12John August:This is amplifying that. And I think people are going to have to make choices about what they feel comfortable with and what they don't feel comfortable with. Well, yeah, please write in with more on this. Yeah, I'm glad you were able to solve all the AI issues. So now let's talk about our brains. So let's welcome our guest. Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in working with creative patients like writers. His screenwriting credits include the feature film, My Favorite Year, for which he was nominated for a WGA Award for Best Screenplay. He was also a writer for Welcome Back Carter, among other series.

10:41John August:In addition to his therapy practice, he writes mystery thrillers, which you can find in bookstores everywhere. Welcome back to the program, Dennis Palumbo. Oh, thank you, John. It's good to be here. You were on episode 99, which was a zillion years ago, but it's one of our most popular episodes. It's one of the ones that we replay most often because it has such timeless advice for writers facing imposter syndrome and just really the struggle of, you know, sitting down in the chair each day to write. So thank you for that. Oh, my pleasure. What got me thinking about you in this moment was an article you wrote just a couple of weeks ago titled, Am I Just Fiddling While Rome Burns?

11:16John August:And can you give us a little setup behind why you wrote the article and what you were finding? Yeah, the article was actually one of the columns in a column I do for Psychiatric Times called Creative Minds. And it's a therapist looking at dealing with creative patients. The audience is primarily psychiatrists and psychologists because it's a clinical journal. But apparently somehow it got a little more. It's not viral, but it got big for some reason. And I've heard from a lot of people. And what got me writing about it, frankly, was the L.A. Fires. Yeah. One of the things that writers deal with all the time, the two aspects are relevance and perspective.

12:02Is what I'm doing as a writer relevant in the world today and perspective? And so relevance to me means, you know, gee, does anybody care about what I'm writing about? Does it help anybody? Is there a reason for it to exist? and perspective is like, here I am complaining because I can't get the second act to work and people are dying in Syria. People are dying in Gaza. From the 10 ,000 foot perspective, what I do doesn't matter. And that really came home to me during the LA fires because I had so many patients who were just saying, look, you know, people are losing their homes. People are dying in Gaza.

12:45What the heck am I doing, you know, writing my fourth mystery novel? What am I doing writing my 28th episode of an NCIS series? You know, when you are an artist in particularly a commercial marketplace, it's really hard sometimes to justify what you're doing in the face of difficult times. I mean, we're also in a quite erratic and revolutionary political time that's confusing and disheartening to a lot of people. And so this is something I noticed in my patience. So I decided to write a column about some of the people that I've worked with and some of the things they've said about it.

13:29John August:Well, let's start local. Let's start with the fires, because you think about Gaza, you think about sort of like turmoil in the world is not new. but having such incredible turmoil in our backyards and in many cases, I've had 10 friends who lost their houses in these fires. It brings it home very directly. It makes you sort of question, what is it that I'm doing here? What is keeping me in Los Angeles? So let's take it from the perspective of the extreme case of a writer whose house burns down in the fires. If you are the therapist talking with that writer about getting back to work, what are the points of the conversation?

14:03John August:What are the things that you're trying to get that writer to see? What's the conversation like? Well, first of all, I think it's important for someone to acknowledge the traumatic impact of something like that. You know, you end up with two kinds of patients. There are those who are bowled over by an experience like that and become immobilized. And then you have another kind of patient who says, I don't care that my house burned down yesterday. day, I'm going to get this in on deadline, you know? And to me, they're two sides of the same coin. They're magical thinking. So the first thing I would do with any, I have had actually a patient lose her home in the Palisades and we dealt with it like any trauma, any tragedy, people are going to have PTSD symptoms after a tragedy like that.

14:57You know, for those who don't no post-traumatic stress disorder. The kind of symptoms you have is a hypervigilance about bad things happening again, a belief that maybe you could have avoided this by not living in the Palisades or by having one of those automated sprinkler systems that watered down your house. Then if your house didn't burn down, but your friend or your relatives did, then you have survivor guilt. These are all functions of PTSD. And these traumas have to be experienced and processed and held by the therapist so that the person can move through them. So we're not saying, no, we don't think you should ever write again.

15:41In fact, I'll make the argument it's crucial that you do so. But I also think it's crucial that you allow yourself the initial experience and the feelings that you're having about it. And then to challenge the meanings that usually associate themselves with a trauma, primarily meanings that are self-recriminating, that are self-blaming, or that make you feel as though the universe doesn't like me, my house burned down and this guy's house didn't, so God hates me. You would be surprised where people go in the face of a tragedy.

16:20John August:Also, we're dealing with writers who, it is by their nature to narrativize, to sort of create stories around these situations and to see themselves as the protagonist in the situation and that they're in some act of a multi-act story, which is understandable but may not actually be helpful for them processing what's happened and to sort of move on with the next stage. You make some examples in your column about great art that came out of really difficult times. With Picasso and Guernica, I was also thinking about like Virginia Woolf or Kurt Vonnegut or Auden who are writing about the profound grief and anxiety that they're encountering.

16:59John August:And some of us will have a chance to channel what we're feeling into art. But some of us are going to have to write that next episode of that comedy series and go back and do that. And that feels like that's a real tension. And you were probably uniquely faced with these things because like it's not, some people who lost their houses are going back to investment banking. And it's like, okay, that's a thing. But the folks of us who have to go back and write comedy or write things, that feels like that tension is gonna be hard to balance. Well, it's hard to balance unless you look underneath it.

17:32John August:Okay. I mean, I wrote sitcoms for years. Welcome back, Connor. You know, and I gotta tell you, if you're not angry and aggrieved and filled with pain and bitterness, is you're not funny. So the only good thing to come out of a, it's like the old joke, hey, you know, the war was terrible, but a lot of great songs came out of war. The reality is you can write comedy coming out of tragedy because sometimes it's the only way you can survive. I mean, a whole race of people, the Jews, that's to me how they've gotten through the last number of centuries. but I know it's very, very difficult. And it's interesting too, because for a lot of artists, they think, well, the way to be relevant when a tragedy happens is to only write about the tragedy.

18:22You know, like John Hershey writing Hiroshima or like you said, Picasso painting Guernica. And there's a great story where a former German officer was looking at Guernica on the wall and said to Picasso, how did you do that? And Picasso said, actually, no, you did that. The thing that's really important to remember is you don't have to write directly about something to write about its emotional impact. because one of the things that writing does that's so amazing, no matter how small or far off or idiosyncratic an idea is, or even a time zone is, or even a historical era is, if the stakes are real and the people's feelings are real, anyone can relate to it.

19:15And so you can write an episode of a sitcom in the wake of a tragedy because every character in that sitcom wants something, has felt denied something, yearns for something, and has been disappointed about something. And you can craft a story about the smallest thing, like not getting invited to the prom, but you can work in it all the ideas about yourself. I'm not worthy. I'm not good enough. If I were pretty enough, if God loved me, I'd go get a prom date, you know. All the things that concern us about ourselves can be filtered through something as silly as a sitcom.

20:00John August:Let's talk about writing as a therapeutic practice because one of the things that writers have that is sort of unique among some of the creative artists is that we don't need anyone's permission to do a thing. You know, even painters, like their studio is burned down. Writers, we just need a piece of paper and we can write stuff. And I guess there's probably a double-edged sword there because because we need so little, well, there's an expectation we should be able to get back to work quickly. We don't need all this stuff around us. We don't need these permission structures around us. What advice do you have for someone who is sitting down for the first time after a fire tragedy or loss of a loved one or some other profound loss in their life?

20:35John August:How do you recommend they start or do they just start and grapple with it as it comes? Well, there's no one size fits all model from how you work with a patient. It would be dependent on what I know about the patient's childhood, their core issues, their values, the kinds of themes they tend to write about. I mean, just off the top of my head, I would suggest that someone write about how they're feeling right now. Even if what they're feeling right now is I don't want to write my episode of this procedural or I don't want to write, do this rewrite of this comedy film I've signed up to do. write about what you feel and how you don't want to do it and what's preventing you from doing it.

21:20And then I would probably look at what's the meaning behind preventing it. In other words, there are people who would feel what business do I have of writing about the time my sister, you know, broke up with her boyfriend when people have lost their homes, you know? So then I'd say, okay, now we're talking about how relevant you are, how important what you do is. It's crucial to remember, too, that like everyone, writers come from a family of origin that contributes to their mythology of how the world works. You know, I have a very famous director patient whose parents don't have much regard for what he does.

22:10Now, he has a sibling who's a union organizer and another sibling who's a social worker. And the parents who are good, you know, dyed-in-the-wool liberals think that those two siblings do something that's important. And one of the things my patient struggles with and, in fact, feels as though his success mocks him is how relevant what he does is, how important what he does is. If I don't know that, having worked with him for a long time, if I don't know that about his core issues, I'm not going to know how to talk to him about what is preventing him from going back to work, which may include the idea that if he were really moved by what was going on in the world or in the Palisades, for example, he wouldn't be able to write.

23:03He wouldn't be able to work. One of the things that's very important is what's our self-concept? What meaning do we give to the fact that we can't work? Or what meaning do we give to the fact that, contrary to what everyone seems to believe conventionally, we're quite able to work? Does that mean we're heartless or have no empathy? But for some people, what it means is you're escaping into the work. Doing the work saves your life. And in my experience, writers save their ass by writing. I don't care if they're going through a divorce or the loss of a family member or their house burning down. For most writers, the way they connect with themselves is to utilize and manifest their skill set.

23:55It's like True North. If their needle isn't pointing to true north, they get wiggy. That's a clinical term, but they get wiggy.

24:04John August:So I want to segue from this incredibly local situation of the fires and the loss of what we see sort of in front of us to something I'm feeling a little bit more personally, which is I feel like I'm grappling with this sense that I'm not sure that the world, as I understand it, is going to exist in two or three or five years. I just feel that there's an acceleration of things. And so you touched on part of this, that sense that the administration is trying to rip apart the government, that we have the rise of very powerful AI without any guardrails around it, and the sense that this kind of cold war we're in with various nations could become hot.

24:38John August:So those are all anxieties I have that the stuff that I'm working on right now may not be relevant, and relevant is sort of a loaded word, but it may just not make sense to do. I find myself, in some cases, racing to do certain things, like travel to certain places, and the belief that it's going to be harder to do so after, but also holding off on some projects that might take a little bit longer because I feel like, wait, is that even going to be meaningful when it comes out? A concrete example would be Craig and I have this script notes book, which should be out at the end of the year. And I feel really good about that.