716 - Personality Typologies

24:20But I wrote the pilot script as a proof of concept because again, anytime I told people I wanted to make a sort of darkly comic and subversive take on the Garfield assassination, they were just like, no, fuck you. So I wrote the script. I was super proud of it. And then just through the different machination, I mean, it took about a year, but it ended up getting in the hands of our mutual friends and the producers of the show, David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Bernie Caulfield, who gratefully fell in love with it and were able to champion it at Netflix and at least get Netflix to agree to let me write a second episode.

24:55It was a development process that lasted, you know, about three, four years ultimately because I had to jump through every conceivable hoop imaginable over there. Like I wrote a 70 page Bible after the second episode. I ended up writing four more episodes, then condensed those back down to two more episodes. We had a director, the director fell out, we got another director, we had to cast the two leads. We were in Budapest scouting for the show, backing into a start date, and we weren't actually greenlit yet. Again, I feel like we just sort of slipped in under the wire on this thing. I was going to congratulate Netflix on their impressions and their risk-taking.

25:37Now, I'm going to pull back a little bit just because it does sound like they really put you through it. But then again, HBO put me through it too. Nobody's just going to casually go, oh, yeah, here, make this thing that's probably just going to run in social studies classrooms. They are going to put you through it, which I understand. And I have to assume, based on Budapest, that budgetarily, you guys, you did not have a lot of wiggle room there, I'm guessing. Yeah, you know, whenever people ask me how the show got made, I hold up like the one Doctor Strange finger from the Avengers. I don't know that there were multiple paths to get this James Garfield show made in 2024 when we shot it.

26:19And I'm extraordinarily grateful to Netflix. I don't know that anyone but Netflix would have made this show at all. And we had a slate of executives who were also extremely passionate and grew extremely passionate about the show. But even that only really gets you so far. No, we had to pass a lot of litmus tests in order to ever see the light of day. Can we talk about Budapest? Because one of the things I was sort of surprised about, but I realized, like, I have not seen that era of American history very much on screen. And Budapest, I suspect, like, had buildings and places that actually looked like that in a good way.

26:54I'm sure there was a lot of visual effects to sort of create the depth behind things. It looks great. And you also have scenes with 500 extras in them, which is just very difficult to do in the US or even in Canada to sort of get that sense of scale. So that's all really helpful. But it's also challenging just being in Budapest for six months or so. Yeah. And it was funny. I got married. And two weeks later, I was in Budapest for five months. Yeah. And now I'm getting divorced. No. No. We're good. She's finally out of here on air now. No, Kara got a line in the show, which she was thrilled about.

27:28She's crowd woman number one. Oh, nice. She came out for one week and she was feeded as a queen. Boo. Boo. well congratulations on the show I'm just so happy that it exists and that it got made I remember Dan and Dave talking about sort of like oh yeah we're doing this crazy Garfield thing and they didn't say like it'll never get made but like it was clear like this is going to be a hard lift to sort of get there and I'm not sure anyone but them could have really mounted it I love that they did that and Mike and I would pass each other in the halls over at Formosa Sound where I was mixing the second season of The Last of Us and he was mixing Death by Lightning and that's where I found out that this was a show about Garfield.

28:08And I was kind of, just to give a little salute to my dearly departed dad, he was an American history teacher and he loved Garfield. He loved Garfield. He thought Garfield was, you know, one of the only good presidents of that era. And also just as a musical fan, I love Stephen Sondheim's Assassins and Charles Guiteau's song is the best song in the show. It's the best. I need to go back and re-listen to it. I've seen Assassins, but I don't know it off the top of my head. Because he's crazy. Yeah. So I don't know that we've actually, Charles Guiteau is the guy that assassinated Garfield, who is a very fascinating character in his own right and is sort of this like perverse fun house mirror image of Garfield in many ways.

28:53These are two guys who operate at opposite ends of the American social spectrum on one end. Again, you have this poster boy for the American dream who falls upward accidentally to a presidency just based on strength of character and merit. And Goteau, who also grew up in abject poverty. Loser. But like worshipped Garfield. As soon as he heard about Garfield, he was like, this guy gets it. Like - I deserve a job from him. Right. I need to do everything in my power to get this man elected because once he's elected, he's going to see that the two of us are kindred spirits and he's going to appoint me to an ambassador ship to Paris.

29:26But Goteau, unlike Garfield, had failed abjectly at everything that he had ever attempted. He was a failed lawyer, a failed public speaker, a failed newspaper editor. He had spent a couple of years at America's first ever free love commune, the Oneidas. And he was kicked out. He was the one guy who couldn't get laid at the sex commune. He refused to do the manual labor required of him. So the women on the farm would call him Charles Get Out. Charles Guiteau. But once Garfield is elected, it's the first time in Guiteau's life that he's ever put his energy into something and succeeded. in some warped way and derives so much of his own self-value from Garfield.

30:07And there's this weird toxic parasocial obsession quality that feels so modern. It feels incredibly modern. It feels like, you know, there's a pre-social media time, but you recognize, oh, I see. There's that, rather than sort of retweeting him, he's like, I'm gonna shake his hand and therefore like we are best buds and I know him. And yeah, so it's interesting to watch that. Once he's rebuffed by the Garfield administration, and he just sort of descends into madness and becomes convinced that his way to matter and to etch his name in the annals of American history in a positive way is to save the country from James Garshaw.

30:41Well, he's etched his name into the annals in the strangest way. We all know the name Charles Gatteau, just not for the reason he wanted. I'm very glad that you made the show. I hope it's doing well. And I would urge people as they're listening to this, if you have some thing that you're obsessed with in history, I hope that you're pulling out of this what something that, you know, the most important thing that I think Mike said about the genesis of this is how he became passionate. Yeah. And he felt like, ooh, I can't wait to tell people about this. And if you start telling people about these things and they go, oh, oh, you got something.

31:21If you start telling people about these things and they're like, no, no, that's pretty much as boring as I thought it was, then you don't. But follow that, at least that initial thing is very exciting to find something that we haven't seen a million times. I mean, it was, James Garfield was my Roman empire for about seven years. And to anyone that would listen on the street, I would sort of pull them off with the lapels and be like, James Garfield's the most fascinating story you don't know. And yeah, like I had a birthday cake one year that my parents made for me with Garfield's face on it. They were just like, when are you going to stop talking about James Garfield?

31:52But it's incredibly, like, what a privilege to be able to help reintroduce this man to modern audiences. And in the process of my research, I went to Ohio. He's the only president who is not interred or cremated or buried. His coffin and his wife's coffin are on twin pedestals in their crypt in Cleveland. Great. At their memorial. and anyone can go and like spend time with Garfield. Obviously, the coffins are behind Rod Iron Gate, so you can't touch the coffins. But, and I went there in 2019 when I was first starting to do research on this. And for the full hour that I was down there, I was the only visitor, which felt crazy to me.

32:40Like, that sounds about right though. No, to you, it seems crazy. But to everyone else listening, like, no, that makes sense. I'm routinely the only person at Buchanan's grave. That just happens, you know. Buchanan? That's not a good one. No, it's not. It's not bad. It's just fully bad. Oh, that was... And as a bonus, I also get to tell the story of Chester Arthur, who is Garfield's vice president, who later... Nick Offerman. Nick Offerman. Yes, our buddy Nick Offerman, who is just like such a dream. And of all of the characters in the script, I wrote Chester Arthur with Nick Offerman's voice in my head.

33:18Which makes it so easy. I was just saying this the other day. If you can just sit there in your mind and go, well, it seems to me that you're not, and you just start slipping into the cadence. You're like, I know what to write. I know how to do this. Yeah, it does help. He was so great. I'm so glad that he said yes. So Mike, the first time I met you was on Zoom because you came on for HBO's Bad Education. And then post-pandemic, you and I met up for coffee. And we sort of got to talk a little bit. And at that coffee, we were having a conversation about sort of your writing practices, your thing.

33:48how you do stuff. And I think I noticed this in the Bad Education script is that we talk about sort of how much things look on the page and how you want a good looking page. But your pages were all the margins were exactly identical so each line was the exact same length. There was a precision that I worried was like a little bit, was overkill because you're not making the best choices on words if you're actually worrying about the character length. And I said, I asked whether you'd ever consider talking with somebody about sort of your writing practices and things like that. And we had a little conversation about that.

34:16How much are you comfortable sharing sort of what you've done in the meantime? Yeah, I don't know that I was, I didn't know we were talking about this but sure. So we had coffee a few years ago and you guys have done however many episodes of Scribd Notes. Yeah, 714. 16, yeah. 16. And I have a very, very specific way of writing and I think it's a sort of like low-grade OCD where a lot of people don't like orphans or open lines. I think I've taken it to a kind of obsessive level and I just, I think I showed you a sample page from something that I was currently working on. I think probably Death by Lightning.

34:52Yeah. And I was like, have you seen this before? And you looked up, you looked at it for about 30 seconds and then you looked up at me and you were like, are you in therapy? And I was like, I'm not. And you ended up introducing me to my therapist who's also, you know, a frequent guest on this podcast as well. Dennis Palumbo, episode 99. And so, sort of a famous episode for our listeners, which we talk about psychotherapy for screenwriters and sort of like specific things that writers may benefit from therapy. And so it wasn't helpful. And so again, especially if you feel like sharing or don't feel like sharing, I'm just curious because I feel like we have other listeners who probably have similar sort of things that they're working on.

35:31Here's how I feel about writing. And I probably spend about 50 % of the time that I write making sure that the lines fit correctly for me. And sometimes that means sacrificing a really great line, but it also leads me to over-scrutinize every word in a way that I think actually does ultimately improve the writing. Nothing about my writing process is passive, right? And it needs to fit a specific way. The one sheet that I do do, I don't fuck with margins at all, but sometimes I will reduce the space between two words from a 12 to a 10. Wow. Just manually. I spend a lot of time obsessively just making sure that the dialogue looks like blocks and that there's not just one or two words hanging over.

36:23And I didn't always used to be this way. It's actually, it's grown more cute as I've gotten older, which I think is a little bit worrisome. Yeah. But it's also become like a, almost like a good luck talisman. Like I want to present the best looking aesthetic version of a script because I do believe that there is a subconscious quality to reading a script. And if it just looks sloppy on the page, for at least for me as a reader, like it does sometimes affect how I read. I mean, I wonder if, as I listen to you, I think a couple of things. One, that's crazy. Yeah. But two, so what? Because you're good.

37:03I guess whatever helps a good writer write, we are not perfect. We all have our things. And it is, as you mentioned, maybe there is a theoretical better version of a script you write that is less concerned about these things. but you don't write that script because you are concerned about those things. If the script is good and you need to not use the letter Q for some reason, what do I care? We're all crazy. What we do is a kind of insanity and we all have our weird things. It sounds to me like maybe you've made your peace with it and you accept that it's part of your process and it's a good thing for you.

37:44Yeah, it's never felt crippling. And then, you know, once you get into production and there's just the realities of like, you know, you start talking about the actors and then you're like, you know what? It's just, I don't think, I don't think I'm so hobbled by it, but I do think, you know, in those early drafts that it does help my process to over scrutinize and be a little bit obsessive with the words that are in the script. And yeah, I'm probably insane, but when I first spoke to Dennis, my therapist of about three years now, you know, I showed him a sample page and he was just like, do you feel like it helps you?

38:17And like, Like, do you feel like it makes you better at doing this? And I think at least in the short term, it does. In the long term, you know, we'll see. But for right now, it's definitely like, I think it leads to a more thought out product. And one that I do think from an aesthetic perspective, like it is helpful to be presenting something that looks clean. It may not really matter to anyone but you. But that's fine. But it does matter to you. Exactly. And so I want to go back to my initial instinct when I saw your page. I said like, my concern was like, this may be getting in the way of you doing the best work that you know how to do.

39:04And so here you articulate that you feel like this is a helpful way for you to get that best draft that you feel good about that feels like it is your work. then I totally get respect that. And it sounds like Dennis provided a perspective on sort of like, is this helping or is this getting in your way? And that's gotta be the crucial question. It's like, is this helping you do the work that you want to do? Or is it a thing that is stopping you from doing the work or distracting you from doing the work? And it sounds like you believe at this moment it's helpful, but you're also mindful that at some point it could be not helpful.

39:34It has to be. I mean, you know, I've never run a writer's room or really been in a writer's room. like, you know, when you're collaborating with other writers, yeah, you'd have to throw that in the garbage immediately, that notion that your script should look like someone else's, you know, because it won't. I'm not that crazy. And also, there are a lot of people who are listening to this podcast who are looking at their own scripts in their own pages or listening to a three-page challenge. And we're talking about how it looks on the page. And we're talking about Widows and Orphans some, but also just like how lines are broken up and sort of, and how this all feels.

40:09And I want to make sure that in the conversations that Craig and I have about the pages that we're looking at, no one is taking it to an unhelpful extreme. No one's going, like, being so obsessed with it that they're not actually focused on, like, what the words themselves actually are, which is, it sounds like it is for you a tool to really help you inspect, like, what are the word choices you're making, not just, like, is it exactly 60 characters long? Yeah, but, you know, I think every word has a cost to it, so So hopefully it leads to a tighter draft, you know, and... It leads to a draft. That's, you know...

40:44It leads to a draft, that's the crucial thing. As long as it leads to a draft. That's your... It's how it comes out. That's how it's organized with you. It's... Our brains are complicated. And I, like, one of the things I've been really working on for myself in this area of, I don't know what you'd call it, you know, human growth and enlightenment, um, is understanding that the process that I follow to make stuff is flawed because I am flawed. Uh, and that's okay. That's standard, right? Standard issue, human being, not a God flawed, but it works. It's just the flaws are part of it. You have to kind of accept it and you can call the flaws at that point, not flaws, just characteristics.

41:27You don't actually get to write anything if it doesn't go through the machinery of, and I also want it to look like this. It's the same thing. You can't separate them. When you get to a place where you're like, I actually don't like this. This is holding me back now. It just feels like a bad habit. Then you become aware and then it is recontextualized and perhaps it is teased apart. But if it never gets teased apart, if you spend the rest of your life turning things to make them fit, if the scripts are good, this is how you do it. So you said bad habits. And I think I often say is that early in my career, I felt like I had a lot of bad habits and I, at some point stopped labeling them as bad.

42:11They're just my habits. They're the way I do things. And that's actually okay. And so like some of my procrastination is just sort of my habit. And it's like, I can't fix it because it's actually just how I work. And that's also okay. But if at a certain point, like it does get in the way of how I work, then I need to really stop and examine them and see if there's a thing I can do to not fall into that pattern again. Yeah, no, I mean, it's actually incredibly helpful to talk about this with you guys. And in no way would I recommend that anyone else do what I'm currently doing. I'm not preaching the gospel here.

42:42It doesn't sound like fun. No, it sounds like you. To me, it's a version of problem solving and puzzling in a way that, you know, it's an added component to the way that I write. And I think that at times it ends up leading to something beautiful. And other times I do have to sacrifice my first blush best line and maybe I find something better. And hopefully, you know, if I'm ever on this podcast again, you know, we can check back in and see if I'm still doing it. But right now it's proved, I would say, mostly helpful and not too bedeviling. It seems like it's been incredibly helpful, actually.

43:20So sometimes people will talk about these issues and they will put them under, you know, kind of, oh, I know I seem a little OCD about this. And we tend to concentrate on the O, which is obsession. And I think it's the C, it's compulsion that is far more frequent among people who do what we do in a large sense because we're compelled to do it in the first place. It is compulsory. and then there are these kinds of compulsions that occur as part of this compulsory behavior of writing. Yeah, I mean, I think all screenwriters are bound by this. We're all compulsive. We're all a little crazy. We're all neurotic.

43:58Like we would have never, we're all in our heads, locked ourselves in rooms and written these things in a vacuum. Like there is a compulsion there and sometimes that comes out sideways, like in my case. But, and we all have different processes and it's helpful to be able to talk about it, especially with two guys like you. You are not alone. And to say that we are all idiosyncratic in our own idiosyncratic ways would be an understatement. This is actually great for people at home who may feel sometimes like they're weird. Yes, writing is a weird thing to do. Imagining that you're 12 different people who are all disagreeing with each other is a weird thing to do coming up with these scenarios all the time.

44:39And what we do is weird. It is neurologically weird. how could you not, as part of the neurological weirdness, have quirks? And to the extent that, you know, you can accept those quirks as long as, you know, as John says, they're not things that you don't, if you don't feel a great need to get rid of it, you know, then you and Mike McCaskey have something in common. And me and John. Next thing I want to talk about is typologies. And this came up because my husband, Mike, I was describing to him, this person I needed to work with. and some frustrations I was feeling about sort of our working relationship.

45:15And Mike said like, oh, well, she's a questioner. I'm like, what does it mean? And it's like, oh, sort of Gretchen Rubin's four tendencies. There's a questioner. And it's like, he brought this up before. He's like, I will show you the chapter on sort of how to deal with a questioner. And so he showed me the chapter in the book. I'm like, oh, wow, that's exactly right. You've precisely diagnosed why I'm having a challenging time with this and sort of what the best strategies are for getting into consensus with this person. So I want to have a general conversation about sort of personality archetypes, the ways we sort of sort people both in the real world and also our fictional characters because I think there's this instinct that you should be able to neatly categorize all these people and their personalities and their types.

45:55Craig, you and I have talked about Myers-Briggs before, but in addition to Myers-Briggs, there's Enneagram, like the big five, you hear about the four behavioral types from DISC and these are the four tendencies from Gretchen Rubin. I remember I read a book in high school when I was buying all the screenwriting books called The Writer's Guide to Character Traits. Sure. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of that one. Is it orange? I'm sorry. I'm frantically. Is it light? No, it was blue. I'm frantically trying to Google it right now, but maybe we can't. Blue books are out. Orange books are out.

46:25Absolutely. But I remember like an early book I read was like sort of like the gods in every man or the goddesses in every woman. And basically it was talking about sort of her personality types that way. And I'd love to have a discussion about sort of to what point is it useful and to what point is it just astrology and it's just like sort of you're just randomly assigning labels to things. Oh gosh. Yeah, I don't... You don't think of your characters in terms of like a bundle of attributes that sort of fit neatly together? I don't think so. Yeah, I tend to adapt. I adapt a lot of true stories and I definitely gravitate to characters that have similar misguided impulses to one another.

47:01but I wouldn't say that I try to be too prescriptive by sort of assorting them into boxes. Greg, have you ever tried to do Myers-Briggs-y on any of your characters? Hell no. How they approach things? No, no. I mean, I remember, you know, everybody kind of goes through a phase where, I don't know, Melissa's family was super into Myers-Briggs but I never thought that it was particularly interesting. There's probably a character type called person who likes character types and that they get value out of this But yeah, I bet there's a large number of our listeners or at least a sizable percentage who really want to neatly be able to categorize things.

47:38And that's part of the process. You can try, but you try. You this is not I I personally don't think this is a good because it's it's post it's post. It's not pre right. So writing is about creating somebody. And when you are introducing characters to an audience or a new relationship in a story to an audience, they need to see the birth of it and they need to see people discovering each other. And as they discover each other, they should be changing each other. We tend to look at people when they're in moments of change. These things are sort of, this is who you are, not changed. And it's kind of simple and they tend to go over the same things.

48:16And really, as far as I could tell, these things exist to sell books. To sell books and to do workshops to understand your co-workers and things like that. You know, like, here's the thing. I'm fascinated by people who aren't like me. and I'm also fascinated by people that are fundamentally not like me. It is interesting. I don't necessarily know if the people I've liked the most as I've gone through my career have been a certain type. My guess is no. I think generally what I seem to be attracted to is intelligence and there are intelligent people in all of these. I mean, you and I are not the same personality type.

48:51Did you know that? I did notice that. Somehow over like the last 15 years, I have noticed that. It's funny. And yet we do have a significant degree of overlap in terms of our desire for logic, our desire for... But also you're smart. I mean, the bottom line is you're smart. That's what I go for. I like smart. And I like smart people who are so wildly different on all these scales. And when I meet somebody that has like my characteristics, who's just sort of dull, I don't need to hang out with them. There's a thing we're developing internally for... So we make Rider Emergency Pack, which is sort of like, you know, as you get stuck in a story, sort of ways to navigate out of a jam.

49:27And the thing we've been working on is a version that is sort of more sort of character archetype-y, but rather than being sort of ex post facto, it's like ways of thinking about, if someone has these two characters together, what kind of character would have that? And so what would a nurturer explorer kind of feel like? What kind of character is that? And sort of useful storytelling, like thinking tool, but it's not meant to be sort of like, oh, you have to have this exact mix of characters in order for it to work properly. To what end do you think D &D character classifications? Oh, yeah. Like, I feel like I am constantly referring to characters as, like, chaotic neutral.

50:04Yeah, the alignment charts, yeah. The alignment charts are fun, but again, post-facto fun. Yeah. In and of themselves, they're pretty blunt tools, and there's also quite a bit of fuzziness, you know, between some of them. Here's where I imagine it could be useful. None of us, you know, traditionally work with a group of other writers, but I could imagine as you're having a conversation about sort of a character or, like, a new character or introducing sort of like how it fits together, rather than trying to apply an exact label to them, look at some of the spectrums that they sort of lay out there.

50:35So to what degree are they introverted or extroverted? To what degree are they rebelling against external expectations or are they sort of intrinsically motivated to do certain things? How agreeable are they? To what degree they want to challenge authority? Those are useful conversations to have, but rather than sort of reduce them to one little label, I think you're probably better off. Yeah, no, I'm not going to go. That's right. Cool. Let's answer some listener questions. What does Julia in Oxfordshire ask us? I'm a novelist who teaches creative writing. I would be interested in your views on what someone with IP like a popular novel should look out for when people start circling.

51:10What's the ideal journey from page to screen and what's the nightmare? So I've had a couple of adventures with like adapting books or you're dealing with a property that's sort of becoming popular. And I've had good experiences and bad experiences with authors in that situation. I won't talk about the bad experiences, but my Arlo Finch books came out at the same time that Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi came out. And it's been interesting watching that development cycle because that came out in 2017, and the first movie version is only coming out next year, 2027. So it's like a 10-year journey.

51:44And looking through the number of times it sort of got set up and then fell apart and then got set up and going again, as the author, I should say, you just cannot know when a thing is actually going to happen, and when it's all going to come together. Mike, you bought this woman's book, optioned this woman's book, and it took years. Yeah, and at no point did it seem like a certainty that it would ever actually make it to the screen, even two years out or a year and a half out. I would say that talking with authors whose books have been optioned or purchased for adaptation, you have to treat it as like, this will probably never happen.

52:21And just sort of make peace with that. and you won't have the kind of control over it that you do over your own book. It's just like, your kid is going off to college and it's just gonna become its own thing. Yeah, I know. I think a lot of authors have really challenging relationships with the eventual product and so many other times. I mean, some of the greatest books of the last 10 years, books that maybe in a different era would have readily been ripe for assassination. Wow. Ripe for assassination. Wow. Stunning. Or I didn't slip there. For adaptation. I recently went on like a big Barbara Kingsolver kick over this past year and reading books like the Poisonwood Bible or Demon Copperhead where you're just like, these are some of the best books of all time.

53:02Like, why hasn't this been made as a... You weren't the first person who ever thought of doing it. It's hard to get things made. Yeah, it's just really, really, really difficult. So I would encourage Julia Nosferchire, if someone's circling your book, you might think like, oh, a director would be fantastic. Directors attach themselves to 19 ,000 things and none of them ever happen. finding like if a Mike Michalski approaches you who is a writer who's obsessive, who can actually sort of do the thing is generally a better choice. I tend to classify myself more as compulsive than obsessive. Well, I'm sorry about that, yes.

53:32Well done, Terry. I don't want to mislabel you or put you on the wrong spot. But yes, if I call you, please say yes. I agree. Let's answer one more question. Oh, here's one from Marco about writing with a bad back. Oh, yeah. Craig, you may have an opinion about that. I remember you mentioning back injections for pain. I'm turning 50, and right when things are finally starting to go well career-wise, my back decided to revolt. I can barely sit for more than 5 to 10 minutes without serious pain. The price of 15-plus years glued to a chair, I guess. I have scoliosis, facet joint arthritis, mild anter...

54:06Anterial ascensis. There we go. Oh, boy. A couple of disc protrusions, probably the usual writer's cocktail. Surgeons say it's not bad enough for surgery, so I'm stuck in this frustrating in-between zone where something could be done, but hard to figure out what. Did you ever find something that actually helped? Do you have specific physio or exercises or a special chair? Any professional tips would be a lifesaver. Pretty sure many of the Script Notes audience might be in the same boat. Craig, you and I were talking about this just like backstage right before the curtain opened at our live show.

54:36And you were about to get another injection. Did that happen? Did it help? I'm due. I had to make the appointment, but I'm going to be having it when I'm back home right after Christmas, right before New Year's. In between Christmas and New Year's, That's back injection season. It's going to be lovely. Well, first of all, Marco, I certainly sympathize with you. Yes, you're in your 50s and yep, this is how it's going. And you already had issues. Scoliosis has been there almost certainly since you were a kid and just gets worse over time. Anterolysis is not fun and any arthritis anywhere in your back.

55:09And disc protrusions, that's really the worst of it because that starts to push on the nerves all around. And that's what the pain is. the pain is nerves. It's not bones. It's not the rest of it. It's the nerves. So yes, physical therapy can help. There are some stretches that I do every morning that seem to help. And I would not suggest you do those because those are for what I have, which is spinal stenosis and in a spot. And I don't know what stretches would be good for you, but I think physical therapy, it could help. Pretty much every single back doctor in the world suggests that you strengthen your core muscles, which I would do if I had them, but I'm pretty sure that my abs have actually dissolved.

55:51I don't think I have abdominal muscles. I basically don't have a butt muscle or an abdominal muscle. And those are the muscles that they want you to strengthen, your glutes and your abs. So that is something that they will always recommend. I do use an Aeron myself and it works very nicely for me. My body conforms to it and it feels good. The special chair you should use is the one that It makes you feel the least pain. But back surgery is kind of a nightmare. Yeah, if you can avoid that, I would avoid it. So PT for sure, strengthen the ab, core and butt, and find a chair that is okay. And if you need to sit up in bed and write in bed, you write in bed.

56:35What can you do? A friend of mine with back issues swears by peripheral nerve stimulator implants. And so basically once a year, they implant a little thing that basically keeps stimulating those nerves until your nerves just go like, oh, well, this must be normal. There's actually not a problem. But it's a hassle to do and you can't get your back wet for a while and things like that. So there are other alternatives. I would just encourage, and Craig, I want your opinion on this too, for Marco, this person says it's not bad enough for surgery. That shouldn't be the last person you go to. That shouldn't be the last word on things.

57:10There may be other solutions out there. and don't assume that you have to live in pain. Well, as we get older, we will all be living in pain. Pain's coming. You hear that, Murkowski? It's coming. Oh, no. But there are levels, of course, and there are remediations. The other thing that they sometimes will mess around with is radiofrequency ablation, where they use radio waves to kind of fry the nerve tips. Didn't work for me, but some people have gotten relief from that. But I don't know where you live, Marco, but in Los Angeles, Cedars-Sinai has a pain center. So that's where I go. And it is a building full of doctors that are there to deal with pain.

57:48And the good news is that they have never suggested to me that the answer is opioids. So don't worry about that. They're not gonna turn you into a junkie, but they really do concentrate on how to alleviate pain and to get to the root of it. And it's been good for me. I get basically two of these shots a year and they work pretty well. So, yeah. Let's do our One Cool Things. Craig, your One Cool Thing looks like is related to opioids. It is. Opioids on my mind. So, I'm here in Vancouver. The guys here on the podcast who see me on my Zoom thing can see lovely gray slate, rainy Vancouver behind me.

58:25That is standard. Vancouver is a fantastic city. It has a brutal opioid problem. Anybody who lives or works here in Vancouver knows that there are about, I don't know, six, seven straight blocks of East Hastings that are populated almost exclusively by people who are using drugs and primarily fentanyl and also now some sort of tranquilizer thing, like another veterinary tranquilizer. It's bad. So the fentanyl epidemic is at this point just become the problem everywhere. And there is an effort now to create a vaccine. So you guys have probably heard of Narcan, which is naloxone, the thing you spray up.

59:12Oh, you're at a party, you see somebody go and they thought they were injecting heroin. It was fentanyl. They're dying. You spray this in their nose. It blocks all of the opioid receptors in the body and can help keep them from their central nervous system plummeting to zero. So the issue, of course, is that that has to be administered after the fact. but what they're working on now is, they call it a vaccine. It's really more of a prophylactic. And the idea is they give you, they inject you with something that binds to the fentanyl molecule, but along with it has a larger chunk of protein that keeps it from crossing through the blood brain barrier.

59:54So basically it can't go anywhere. So it can't hurt you. It just runs around your bloodstream doing nothing. and that's for, this would be for people who are like, hey, look, I do use this drug, but I don't want fentanyl. I just want heroin. I don't want fentanyl. It sort of protects you against the thing that might kill you. There are issues that this could create. I can imagine. For instance, then people are like, I want fentanyl. I got the fentanyl vaccine, but I really want to get high off of fentanyl. I think I'll just take twice as much as they normally did to overwhelm this. That is a potential danger because one thing we do know about people with substance abuse issues is that they're incredibly persistent and clever.

1:00:39The other issue, of course, is if you ever did need some sort of surgical intervention or something, if your blood-brain barrier is blocked from one or more methods of anesthesia, you may have a serious problem. But it does feel like, given how bad it is out there, something like this might be a good mitigation solution. So it's a very interesting thought because we do, here's what we absolutely know. Telling people to not use opioids does not work. That is useless. We know that for a fact. So let's see, maybe the fentanyl, quote unquote, vaccine will gain some traction. Great. Mike, do you have one cool thing to share?

1:01:26Yeah. You know, in adapting this true story from the annals of American history and then trying to make a show that appeals to more than just the 2 % of people that would pick up a book about James Garfield, but also to like the other 98 % of people who are quite certain at the outset that they do not care about James Garfield and, you know, making a show with a little bit more of like a modern engine behind it. Like, there are a handful of other shows and films that have done it well, a small handful, one of which is a show called The Good Lord Bird from 2020. I don't know. It's so good. It's based on this incredible James McBride book, and it's about John Brown, the abolitionist, and his reign on Harbors Ferry in 1859 that, in many ways, preceded to the Civil War.

1:02:15it's adapted by Ethan Hawke who plays John Brown and Mark Rochard and it's so funny and weird and incredible and it's one of the best adaptations that I've seen in a really, really long time and I think very much is of a piece with Death by Lightning, hopefully and is just a show that I thought was really, really remarkable and that I wish more people still talked about because it's great. The Good Lord Bird? Yes, it was on Showtime in 2020, which was probably one of the reasons. It's probably Paramount Plus, I would suspect. Oh, that's a great question. I don't know. I hope it's available somewhere.

1:02:54Good Lord Bird. Let's do a little quick live Google. Yeah. Good Lord Bird. It looks like it's on Prime, but I don't know. It's really, really great. Great. Like, would recommend it to anybody that likes my show and would want to do another, you know, historical deep dive. and, you know, it's very different from what you would expect it to be. Like, it is rollicking and funny and strange. Looks like it's on Apple TV and that's about that. Oh, no, I see Prime Video. Yep. So I think you got Amazon or Apple TV. Good choices. Both of which will be purchased by Netflix Warner Brothers within days. But Ethan Hawke is so, so good on the show.

1:03:34And David Diggs is there. He plays Frederick Douglass. That's great. And again, that was peak TV. and so much was being made. It was so hard to just find an audience for anything, especially if it wasn't on HBO or Netflix, but even Netflix stuff disappeared. My one cool thing is a show that was made for Canada, made for Crave TV, is now available in the US on HBO Max, called Heated Rivalry. Gay people know what I'm talking about because every gay person is obsessed with the show. Every gay person? Well, every gay person in Los Angeles or New York City. Basically, everyone on my Instagram. Everyone on your Instagram.

1:04:10No, it's Matt Hedges, probably. What I admire so much about the show, so it's based on a book by Rachel Reed and it's created and produced and directed by Jacob Tierney, who I want to get on the show at some point. The show is about professional hockey. And so it's these two hockey players and their romance between them. What is remarkable about it is like, remember, Craig, we had Rachel Bloom on the show talking about sex on screen. And sort of like, you know, why we're not seeing good sex on screen. And like the show just does it and delivers it in a really good way. And so there are sex scenes that are actually narratively important, really well shot, and story happens during sex scenes, but you just don't see it.

1:04:48It's not just like a little bonus you put on there. It's like, no, it's like the sex is the point and the story purposes are happening during it. So just incredibly well made. Don't watch it with your family. Don't watch it with your kids. Don't watch it on a plane. Don't watch it on a plane. It's unapologetically smutty in a great way. So I just really respect sort of like that they were able to make this show and put it out there in the world. So he did Rivalry. Where is it? So it's HBO Max in the US and it's just really, really well done. Yeah, so Crave is the HBO output channel up here in Canada.

1:05:21So typically it's HBO shipping things to Crave, but I like that Crave is shipping something back. Yeah. So it's shot in Toronto, but set in many places around the world. and clearly I made smart choices in pulling in sort of kind of the horniness of Challengers, the tennis show, but it's actually sort of making that subtext text and really nicely done. All right. Great. That is our show for this week. Script and Institutes by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Schlelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Foster. If you have an outro, send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

1:05:59You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You'll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You'll also find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. Please keep sending through those posts about the Script Notes book. Those are delightful. We'll continue to repost those. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. They're perfect for the holiday season. You'll find them at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

1:06:27Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. you make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You also get the first emails about live shows and other stuff that's coming up. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptouts.net. You get all those back episodes and bonus segments. You get Mike's episode from 2020. You get the Rachel Bloom sex episode. All those things. And bonus segments like the one we're about to record on coaching trees as sort of like the growth of one show leads to showrunners of other shows. We'll talk about that after the music. Mike McHouse Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

1:07:01Thank you guys so much for having me. It was a blast. Thanks, Mike.