748 - One Room Movies

19:06John August:Otherwise, we're going to 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 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 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.

19:39The game is you can't catch me because I'm just going to go this way and that, which 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 because that is maybe just a symptom here. There's a feeling going on that's trapping you. Sometimes as writers, we 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 1 ,400 other ways to go. You've just gotten trapped between a false Scylla and Charybdis.

20:19John August: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.

20:52John August:So if it's authentic for them to be jithering, 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 adjusting towards the problem is not going to solve the problem.

21:25Yoda's 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 look at you and bare my weird teeth and go, you it'd 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. You're a student.

21:57You've never used the force to lift a freaking 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.

22:25John August:emailing into askadonals.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 set up 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 planet. There's an entire galaxy. It's a galaxy.

22:58So 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.

23:10John August: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 and tension within scenes. It can help understand the character dynamic shifting between just two people who just see the world different ways. Just, you know, it's a spice and you got to be careful with that spice because otherwise it can just overwhelm things. Yes, agreed. Or sort of underwhelm things. Yeah, just...

23:42John August:I've landed anything. 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 You just go home. You don't care. I love it. All right, let's talk about movies set in one room. This is a Meredith 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.

24:17What about movies set in one location?

24:19John August:It's a bigger location. in 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 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 yeah lock is an interesting case but of course it's actually like all in a car one car right but it's it's it's one location yeah so let's start with those sort of the strict examples and there's some that are other also very close you know snowpiercer is sort of like one long location but you're changing sets a lot along the way train to pass on another train movie that does that clue Of course, it's the house.

25:18John August:We're always in the same. But it's a soundstage movie, and that doesn't feel like quite the same level of construction. Yeah, I would agree with that. But Craig, I want to talk about, like, 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. Well, there was the recent Zemeckis movie that everything took place in one room over here. Yeah, over decades.

25:46So is that a movie set in one room? I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. Specifically, yeah.

25:51John August:I mean, Run, Roll, Roll, Run is, you know, essentially a continuous time, but it's set over a lot of different locations. Over a lot of 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.

26:21John August: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. 12 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.

26:56I think it is 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 and 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.

27:33now 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.

27:55John August:So two movies you and I both love are The Invitation and The Invite. So The Invite, we talked about recently with Willem Carver 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 if like once you've arrived at a place, you're staying at that place. That's also the deal with Matt McFerty 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...

28:29John August: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 movie way back then. So we talked about Get Out is essentially just one house. My movie The Nines is almost entirely in one house. and so that we're constraining ourselves that way.

29:03John August:And some of the advantages that the audiences have to learn about new spaces. The audience can really focus on characters so they're 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. Like, there's the ultimate.

29:40Hell is other people. Three people in the room. No doors. Go. So, yeah. Or 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 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.

30:30Yeah. 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

31:04John August:place where you are constrained in that thing. And stuff does change over the course of it. As you're making a decision about something, 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've 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 it? What would you 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 here and that conversation over here, how do you make those feel like different places on the page so we can see 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.

31:59John August:Because again, I think I thought in our conversation about the invite, they did so well is while staying in one location, letting people split apart and do things. And that's, 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 Lindsay 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.

32:42You can just tape that out. We do, by the way, 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.

32:54John August:And now... We're saying tape it out. Are you taping it out in the actual location or some open space that you have? No, I mean, when we're building a set, we go to the soundstage and we just put tape on the floor to outline the rooms. And if you don't have a soundstage, because let's say you're a student, go outside to where they're not working on a parking lot or a basketball court, tape it out and see. Just see. Walk around. Feel it. And you will realize pretty quickly, uh-oh, this room is too small for the things I want to do, or uh-oh, this room is enormous for the things I want to do. Let's figure out.

33:31It 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.

33:49John August:Wrapping up this topic, I also want to talk about the extreme other example is that there are some movies which, in some ways could be plays and that you make the choice to have them not be plays by going to a bunch of locations and having very short scenes and having these little spontaneous moments. It's worth thinking about what the opposite of this would be. So a recent movie, The Drama, which I just watched and was kind of trying to buy movies, is remarkable to me because it has scenes that are like 20 seconds long where clearly they move the company to a thing to shoot a 20-second scene.

34:22John August:And it's delightful. and makes the movie feel really expensive because you're getting all its production value of being in all these locations all at once. But wow, it's nice to remember how different things can be and the range 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 help. You know, that's one of the nice things about movies set in one room is that they're very, they're very economic.

35:03John August: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 the back. So a movie like 12 Angry Men, I don't know what the shooting schedule was, but I'm going to guess they shot it. I'm just going to 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 sure I was 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.

35:53And for something that takes place in one room where so much of it is 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 peace and tempo are so important. You go look at the breakfast club, the way the pace of it is remarkable. The way they talk back and forth is so fast and interesting. So that's another thing that you get.

36:33If 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 doing it. You can't do it at a table.

36:51John August:You're not at a table. Table reads are, we've talked about on the show many times, they're really helpful for making sure that everyone's actually read the script once, for getting some sense of how things are flowing. Did we cast the wrong person? Those things can be helpful. I'm not even sure you can tell that from it. Yeah. But 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 think they are table reads or 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 camera to figure out a way to get this line to work.

37:35John August:But you can also just do that on the day. Yeah, so just do that. That's the thing. If you're the writer. If you're the writer. If the writer's around and on set, That's an important thing too. Hey. 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 it's jumping to are trained dancers, movement people who it was all timed and they knew exactly how they were doing.

38:14John August: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 going to be a crowd added, those people and how that sequence was done is so terrifically 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 really made me sort of happy for Hollywood that we remember 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.

38:54There 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 test edits. The amount of energy and planning and time that has to go into these things is enormous. And 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. It may not be good, but it's never lazy.

39:26John August:But I can just imagine the meetings behind 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 going to actually just trust that the performers themselves are going to give you the feeling like, oh, this thing is adjutant. 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 previs and they show it to you and you're like, it seems all CG-ish.

39:58And then someone's like, could shoot elements of real people and then put them in. Then you start doing it. 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.

40:30John August:Yeah. Well, crucially, it's having the vision for it. 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. 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.

41:05And 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 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, telling your professionals to go figure out a way, getting a way back and going yes or no. Yeah.

41:36John August: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 or fateful ways, revealing an underlying thematic payoff. Popular examples include Pulp Fiction, Snatch, Amoris Peros, Magnolia, and John's film Go. Context here is Corey's been working on his own project in this vein.

42:15John August: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, hyperlink cinemate. No. I looked it up. it's Roger Ebert and apparently popularized it. I'd never heard it either. Well, because hyperlink is such an old phrase. Yeah. Hyperlink. Yeah. Oh my God. 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.

42:55John August:And eventually you recognize like, oh, they're all in the same space and things. They're interlinking. Nashville does that. 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 splinter 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. The idea that you see a scene and then later you see an entire different story that has 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.

43:32So 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 whiteboard there. make sure it makes sense.

43:58John August:So I think I would say one thing that's different about this kind of storytelling versus what we're usually talking about where a character has a one-time transformational journey is that the audience has maybe a one-time transformational journey because we are experiencing the story from all the different characters' points of view, but hopefully they all feel like they're rowing in the same direction, that there's a consistency of aim, 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 about an idea that basically there needs to be some idea underlying all 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 gonna be frustrated at all moments um we're just we're gonna lose faith in you and we'll wonder why we're giving you all our time and attention.

44:57Yeah. 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.

45:45It'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 someone else's main character is your eighth character and vice versa.

45:59John August: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. I'm thinking back to the Fablemans. And so the boy character in the Fablemans, 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 have first-hand knowledge of, it's all in reflection of his greater story. And so there's... So don't think you need to do some sort of weird hyperlink thing just because you have a bunch of characters.

46:37John August: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. I think we'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.

47:12So 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.

47:47John August: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 an intermediate 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 older movies, it drives me crazy. I watched Citizen Kane again recently, and there's phone calls on Citizen Kane where there was no time for the other person to be giving the lines at all.

48:20Makes me crazy. Yeah. It makes me crazy. And I have scenes where people are on phones on my show, and I will often find myself saying, listen, this is what they're saying too. Because sometimes if you don't hear the other person, I'll just write, you know, listens and then da-da-da. 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, I mean, look, Orson Bells wrote it. I mean, I remember Mankiewicz.

48:54He wrote it. He should know. 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. how is that possible that anybody could be talking on the other side of it it's very bad it's very stylized and bad I hate it too yeah

49:12John August:and part of the stylization it's like it's clearly just information you're trying to get to the audience that 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 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 because 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.

49:45And 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. I kind of 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. We haven't done a part of it. Oh my God. It would be fun too.

50:05John August:I mean, like that movie to me. Oh, no. 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 chuck over to where somebody should do something. But like two characters seen 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.

50:33you 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. It's kind of hard to do. Yeah.

50:45John August:Well, I think the answer will be there's not going to be one consistent way that's always the way to do it. Yeah. That's just, it's got it. All right, let's do our one cool things. 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 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 everyone's like, oh my God, someone is spying on you.

51:26John August:Someone is spying on you. So in most cases, it's really 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, oh, 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 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 what could this weird freaking thing be like if you had never seen a pasta fork before, the pasta scooper, you know, that thing.

52:32John August:Yeah, yeah. You might wonder, is this... It's a back scratcher, clearly. Is this... Do doctors use this? Like, what is this, right? I'm having your babies out. Yeah, like, is this something... Yeah, it feels, like, creepy. And so, anyway, this is a... It's that writ large. Yeah. I read it. That's great. Cook's Illustrator, which we've talked about the Cook's Illustrator magazine often. I 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.

53:07So 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.

53:25John August:If someone put a dime in the collection plate, it would look bad. Dime? You're going to charge them 10 cents. 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.

54:06Now 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.

54:58And 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 a 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.

55:42So 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 our part of our job is to represent that stuff. I'm not one of those people says you can never show smoking on screen. I show smoking on screen. But if you are an actor, 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 Erwan because it's got the acai berry combo with the antioxidants, smoking is so stupid and harmful.

56:35and 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 regress.

56:52John August:Okay, great. I do wonder if the fact that you and I grew up 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 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?

57:32John August:That's it. Or if you're an editor who is making decisions about what photos to put in things, don't do it. Don't do it. It's not cool. 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 younger generation that didn't grow up watching their parents die of lung cancer or, 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 good.

58:08Their 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 going to 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.

58:40Well, it's just all natural tobacco and water. I'm like, shut up. All natural tobacco. Yeah. Okay.

58:47John August:There's an authenticity to it. But unlike a vape, which is all artificial, this is all natural. It's all natural. Yeah. It's all Just, it's so natural and lovely. 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. Scriptnance is produced by Meredith Stedman with help from Lauren Loesberg. 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 johnonox.com. That's also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

59:22John August:You'll find transcripts at johnonox.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter 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 Artists Changing.

59:55John August:Craig and Meredith, thank you for a fun show.