750 - Quinceañera

20:45John August:Yeah. Any media like this is essentially a pitch and you're pitching a positive vision of what this is going to be and why they should go watch this movie with you. All right. Nothing has changed. We've not learned or grown in our wisdom at all. Possibly not. Well, so for some things that just have the right answer and that is just the right answer. If anyone has like a different answer for that, they're wrong. I mean, in a way, what we can say now is that we're right. Because back then, how long ago did we answer that question? 15 years. Oh, so that was from season one, so to speak. Yeah, first episode.

21:21First episode. Okay, great. So 750 episodes ago, 749 episodes ago, 15 years ago, we said something. And we're saying it now, and we've done pretty well over the last 15 years. That means we're right. Now we can actually start to say things like, we're right. Yeah. That's not an opinion anymore. Absolutely.

21:40John August:We're just correct. All right, we have a new question here, which just seems very relevant to this Kinita and Yara moment. Tom writes, I have a question regarding a feature film I'm working on. The story is a romantic drama that follows two people falling in and out of love over a 12-year period. What I'm struggling with is how to show the passing of time in interesting cinematic and visual ways without using title cards. Have you encountered this challenge in projects before? And how do you recommend going about it? Any thoughts, examples, ideas, or provocations would be massively helpful. Thank you for all you do.

22:18John August:All right. So passage of time, like we're going through, obviously, people themselves change. Their faces change, their bodies change, their clothes change. But I think the setting around you, the environment is probably one of the better ways of showing that time has passed here. So I had to do this a lot in Big Fish because we'd visit the town of Spectre three different times. And each time we visited, it looks vastly different. So it is, you know, this isolated town with no real road. And then there's a, it's more of a proper town with an asphalt road going through the middle and everything's fixed up really nicely.

22:52John August:And then finally, we see it in ruins there at the end. If you actually were to visit the town now, which is on an island in a river in Alabama, the ruined version is what's there now because that was the last thing we shot. So that's a case of the physical space has changed each time we've gotten there and that is helpful for showing the passage of time. Other situations, you may in an ongoing shot show things changing around it. And so that's the thing in a project I'm working on right now where in a continuous shot, we see time happening to a place and you see it weathering and falling apart and things happening.

23:26John August:So I would say look at the setting around an area for one way to indicate that time is passing. Craig, what are your instincts? Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I understand sometimes why people just don't want to do subtitles, but you don't have to be afraid of subtitles either. They are basic. They also do the job very, very quickly. If you have to do it repeatedly, this is where you start to kind of almost need subtitles because it's hard to just keep doing tricks repeatedly. You could pick something that grows like a tree that gets planted. And then every time you come back, it's taller. You can, let's say it's two characters.

24:07This is a romance. It's over 12 years. I don't know if they move in together. I don't know what happens. But let's say one of them is always in the same place. One of them lives in a home and that doesn't change. And there's a baby across the street. And then you see that baby's a toddler and then the baby's a teenager. And you can do these things to sort of go, oh, got it. passage of time in an interesting way that doesn't involve, you know, subtitles or needle drops. When you think about Boogie Nights, like they really went for kind of needle drops. They went for music that actually helped move you along through yours.

24:40And it worked really good in part because the seventies and the eighties, that music transition was so jarring and crazy and fit the thematic shift so much. So things that grow are helpful, but you know, Well, some titles aren't the end of the world.

24:58John August:They're not the end of the world. Yeah. To speak as something that Craig fixates on often over the course of 15 years of the podcast, hair, makeup, and wardrobe. Yep. Different eras, different styles. You can show us there and we can get a sense of what that is. So we know what 70s clothes will look like, 80s clothes look like, 90s clothes. That will help cue things in. If you need to anchor to a specific year or moment, if it's not going to feel icky, you can do like, you know, So I had a romantic comedy where we were scrolling back through someone's Instagram grid and you sort of needed to feel like, okay, how long have they been together?

25:31John August:And you see like, oh, these are the photos where they're wearing masks, where like this is the pandemic. So you get some sense of like, okay, that's how far back this was. That may be a useful thing for you to think about too. I think the answer though is ultimately it's going to be specific to your movie. And if the choice for your movie makes sense to put on the subtitles or the little chyrons that show what year it is, great. If it doesn't, then find some cinematic way that feels appropriate to your storytelling. Yeah, it should have some connection. Think about it now. Boogie Nights, I think Paul Thomas Anderson used both titles and wardrobe, hair, makeup, music to move us through the years, as I recall.

26:11John August:Ultimately, you may find if you're hopping back and forth between these periods, you'll set different color schemes for the two things too. so that we can just instinctively know that we're in this time period or we're in this time period based on essentially the lookup tables and just how the film looks. They're just a different style for the different things. Some movies will go so far as to have different aspect ratios for the different times. Right. Whatever works for your specific story, do that. Let's try one more question. Charles writes, why does it take so bloody long to make a TV show or movie?

26:45I know every young punk probably thinks they can parachute in and cut some dead weight from the process and speed things up. But I get the feeling in this case, a lot of it might be necessarily slow. Where does the time go?

26:59John August:Oh, Craig, why can't you make your show any faster? Why do you make us wait for things? It's really a crime. I could. The simplest answer is that as television has evolved and certain shows, marquee kind of shows are big productions. every episode is movie-esque. So we shoot on a movie schedule. What we're reacting to is the difference between the television we grew up with and the television that is occurring now. Television we grew up with was network television. It was 22 episodes a year. Those episodes routinely would shoot three or four days. That's it. And they could because their scale was rather limited.

27:40Yeah. And when you watch, you know, a show like Ryan's show or my show or any sort of big production. We're working on a movie schedule because we are trying to deliver something that has a movie size to it, even if it's just one hour as opposed to two, but we're doing a lot of one hour. So The Last of Us will add up to, you know, four-ish movies over the course of a season, like we're this season. And that means it takes a lot of time because it takes time to prep a movie, it takes time to shoot a movie, and it takes time to post-production. Visual effects are the other big driver. Visual effects, if your show has a lot of them, are labor-intensive and time-intensive.

28:19So that's really what it comes down to is people are like, well, why does it take so long to make an Avengers movie? Everybody gets it. It takes time. Well, if it takes two years to make a two-hour Avengers movie, the fact that it takes two years to make a nine - or ten-hour season of television should not, it shouldn't be to the detriment of how we view television. is if anything, we're moving faster than one would imagine. But that's the answer.

28:48John August:So we recently had two of the creators of Hacks come on the show talking about making hacks. And one of the things I love about Hacks is like, there was a new season every year. And like, unlike shows that take all this time off, I asked them sort of, well, how are you doing this? And they're like, we just work constantly. We just basically finish the season, then we're starting a new season immediately. And so it's more like how we used to make traditional shows, except that rather than making 22 episodes per season, they're making 8 to 10 episodes per season. They're making it a movie quality.

29:18John August:It's a little bit shorter, but they're just continuously working. And they never took a vacation. They never had a break. They were just on the cycle, keep going. And they were delighted to be doing it. But it was just the grind of doing that. And these bigger shows, Craig, you're often doing kind of one thing at a time. Obviously, you're doing some writing at the start. You're going into production. You're doing editing while you're writing, but then you're finishing editing and visual effects at the end and then you're kind of done and then you have to start the next season. How much time do you think goes between kind of done and start the next season?

29:51I'm curious. How much time do you think happens? Two or three weeks. Two weeks. That's what I get, two weeks. The reason that hacks can be yearly is because their show is much easier to shoot. Because they're half an hour, right?

30:04John August:Yeah, they're longer than half an hour off. Okay. Yes, but they're more like a half an hour. They feel like a half an hour, yeah. So our show's twice as long. And also... You also have Fliving, you have zombies. Yeah, they're a comedy about real human beings. Yeah. And it's way easier to shoot. So when we have days that are like that, we shoot at the same speed I would imagine they shoot, which is we could do four or five pages of dialogue if it's two people talking, no problem. But then we have scenes where a horde of creatures attacks, you know, defended enclave. Yeah. That's the problem. And so as opposed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which also had big fight scenes and all these kind of things, but the standards of what it was trying to achieve cinematically were lower for good reason.

30:49Yes. I mean, their schedule compressed everything. So they understood there were certain things they were able to achieve with the money they had and the time they had. And really money is just time. Time is the resource. Like how much time does it take to shoot something up to a standard. So you can absolutely, like Veep is an incredible, legendary show. I don't know how long it would take them to shoot an episode of Veep, but when you're talking about working with your theater troupe pretty much on standing sets. Yeah. We're in the Situation Room, we're in the Oval Office, we're in our apartment, we're outside in this one spot.

31:25Even that, you've just eliminated an enormous amount of prep. The amount of prep time it takes to find new locations, build new sets, cast new actors, It's enormous. So again, that's the kind of thing that ultimately creates these huge delays. When I look at what some of these big shows do, I mean, the one that really, Fallout, they actually were quite fast. Yeah. And I think partly, I want to talk to them about this because I think some of it may have to do with some of their methods of shooting. But even then, I mean, it still takes, I don't know what the time was between Fallout season one and season two.

32:02I just don't want to look it up right now.

32:03John August:I think it's faster than a lot of these shows. I also, my hunch is that they were shooting multiple units. It's logistically a nightmare, but actually can get things done more quickly. Which we also do. So Fallout Season 2 was December 16th, 2025. Fallout Season 1 was April 2024. So it was like a year and three quarters, something like that. So it was not... Wasn't that fast? No, it was not that fast. It's not possible to do these things that fast. It just isn't. And I know it's frustrating for people. I think it's frustrating for everybody. But on the other hand, it kind of is what it is. Like, there's just no way to get there.

32:45Believe me, if we could do it faster, we would do it faster. I've been thinking a lot about Baldur's Gate and how to get back to the way Game of Thrones functioned. Because that, to me, was like a great balance. They figured out at least for the first, you know, they started. You could see how then, as they got to the end and things got bigger, they began moving towards the model that we have now. But let's call it the first five seasons of Game of Thrones. They were able to turn that around on a yearly basis, which is mind-blowing. And I want to sort of get back to that somehow, if I can. If I can.

33:19Yeah.

33:20John August:And I think we've probably talked about all 15 years of the show is that I don't remember when House of Cards came out where all the episodes dropped at once. But Game of Thrones, yes, it was only every year, but it took 10 weeks, 12 weeks to watch that first season. And so it had a bigger footprint because it was more time. It was less time off the air and it just stuck around a little bit longer. And, you know, we, for our show, the last visual effects have to be dropped in roughly, I think, five weeks before air date. So that means if we have nine episodes, while the first four episodes are airing, we're still finishing the show.

33:56It's scary.

33:58John August:Let's talk about our own show for a second in terms of like why things can turn around more quickly or can't turn around more quickly. And some of the stuff you're describing for The Last of Us also applies to script notes because our standards have also just gotten higher. If you went back and listened to that first thing we were recording, like it was John kind of editing this. The audio didn't sound so great. People were more forgiving of it back in its time. I remember Aline commenting like, oh, your audio sounds so much better than a lot of other podcasts. Because we did care. We got better as it went along.

34:25John August:but it wasn't great. The standards weren't so high. It was much more Buffy the Vampire Slayer than The Last of Us in those moments. But now that we're shooting video, there is more prep time. There's more post time. We need Meredith and Lauren to help get the things running right, partly because you and I are just so much busier than we used to be. We still do have our roots and let's sort of stretch our analogy. When we started, we were like the network television version of a podcast was pretty simple. It was a fast turnaround, low footprint, and all that. As time goes on, not only do we want it to sound better or work better, but other podcasts, the podcast world around us has become more and more like everybody's a CBS news bureau.

35:11And now every podcast seems to have that one dark room with the rectangle table. So we can be kind of sort of this an old throwbacky relic. but also we have to keep up a little bit with the trends around us. So that makes sense. Yeah.

35:30John August:All right. It's time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing fits in very nicely with this nostalgia. This is a playlist created by Danny Carney. Drew Marquardt, our former producer, sent this through on the Slack and I think it's just delightful. He says, My friend Danny made a playlist of songs you'd hear buying cold medicine with your mom at Walgreens between 1988 and 1992. and it's so accurate, you feel like you ate nine Cadbury eggs waiting for the prescription to fill. Wow. And I think it's dead on. And so, you're looking at the list of songs here, Craig, and yeah, it's just, it's so uncanny because it's not only songs that came out during this time.

36:09John August:No. It's the songs that we'll be playing because the present moment is really just the recent past. Yes. And in a place like Walgreens, it's always looking backwards. to some extent. You know, they're not playing current hits really. So, like, Take It on the Run by REO Speedwagon is just perfect for that because that's like, that really is back eight years earlier than this or nine, you know, and that's about right. I can absolutely hear Against All Odds by Phil Collins. Of course. I can hear it playing on the speakers overhead. Oh, yeah. Baker Street by Jerry Rafferty. Dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt.

36:49Yep, that's, by the way, awesome song. awesome song. Oh my God, look at some of these. Yeah, for sure. Caribbean Queen. Caribbean Queen.

37:00John August:So, during our G &D games every week, Craig and other people will constantly refer back to music that they love or will play songs that they love. And weirdly, I've not heard of 90 % of them. It's so funny how people have specific memories of songs and things and like, there's things I miss out on. But this list, I definitely recognize. And we all know this list too but you know i think like there's so you know we play with tom morello so there's always going to be like some deep cuts on the rock end and a couple weeks ago we went down a pretty serious rush hole and we were we were it was like we were playing 21 12 which by the way is the worst way to introduce somebody to rush i have no idea you know listen to tom sawyer that's a great way to start but yeah we can get pretty crunchy on that stuff phil haye is also very he he goes he loves a deep cut and rock.

37:49Craig, what do you have for us? So this was an article that I read. It was a review in a magazine called Literary Review. And it's a review of a book called First Blossom in the Orchard, Earliest Stories, Stories, Novellas, Humoresques, 1880 to 1882 by Anton Chekhov. Oh, yeah. So it's a gathering up of early Chekhov Before he starts getting, as this reviewer, I believe this is John Stokes is reviewing here, before Anton Chekhov starts writing the things that he's famous for. So this is before Cherry Orchard and his sort of heavy relationship dramas. He's writing stuff, and this is what I just thought this was.

38:33I'm not even sure that this is a cool thing as much as a curious thing. he's trying to contextualize Chekhov's early work in a way that's meaningful and sort of revisionist because what his early work looks like is sort of a bunch of crap. It's like what they're kind of implying. So it says, this is often attributed to the pen name Antosha Cechante, which I guess is what he was going by then. The pieces are extremely varied in kinds. Satirical squibs, tenuously romantic novellas, dramatic skits and sketches, spoofs based on newspaper features. With hindsight, it would be easy to label this as apprentice work, but that would be to miss its significance at the time.

39:20And I was reading this going, wait, that's sort of what I did. And then it occurred to me like, okay, yes, I think what happens sometimes with literary theorists or critics is that they are looking for this grand design to things. But without knowing, I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say, He needed the work. He needed the work. This is what people were hiring to do. This is who would publish him. This was part also of what he liked. And as he grew up, he sort of changed his interest in things. But it is fascinating how even for somebody who's like kind of understood universally to be a literary genius, people who critique are like, but how do we make sense of the parts of this that were just funny?

40:07Like, that's also part of it. Yeah. That's part of it. It doesn't have to be viewed necessarily as some sort of like, but why? Anyway, I don't mean to imply that this is fully dismissive of that, but it is interesting to watch non-writers wrestle with the notion of writers changing because they don't understand. Yeah. So anyway, it's fascinating. Worth taking a look and see what people might think. Like, Craig, the first things you wrote,

40:37John August:like how many of those are still around? How many of those things can you find? Because one of the things we've been doing as we've been like trying to clean up johnaugust.com, the blog, is like I'm finding all these old blog posts I did. And it's like, oh, that's actually a really good post. And that reads like my voice, but I don't remember writing it, which is great and exciting. And at the same time, if I were a critic going through this stuff, I might ascribe intention to things that I really didn't have. because I was just writing and it's what I was writing at that day. Likewise, like the first things I was hired to write, like how to read fried worms for Imagine, I think it probably reads fine, but is it like a good reflection of who I am as a writer and what my goals were?

41:18John August:No, it was a job I could get. So it's that balance. How about for you? How much of your early work do you still see? Or could you find? I have all of it. Going back to the very first things and I can't open those documents. We had talked a little bit about how there's some sort of universal way to maybe open some of these things because they're ancient from ancient applications. But yeah, I've got it all. I've got it all. Some of these things, I don't even recognize having done. Like I've forgotten about them. And once I look at them, then I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. But man. So the first things I wrote, like in high school, we're on our old Atari, our old Atari 800.

42:01John August:and I don't have the disks for those anymore. I don't have the files for those. So there's a bunch of like, my high school writing is just lost forever. Oh, that's gone. Yeah, I don't know. And I would love to see some of that. I have some of the stuff I wrote for the newspapers there, but that's not really my writing in a meaningful way. So it's not until college that I have some stuff that is kind of recognizable as my writing. But it's early and it's imitative and I'm like trying to write in the voice of Spy Magazine. I was trying to find out how I write things. Yeah, it's funny. Also, I'm not very big on nostalgia.

42:35I'm such a look forward kind of person. So I never actually looked through this. And as I look through this, you know, crazy list of stuff over the years, I don't want to go back and read any of it.

42:47John August:Yeah, that's also very good. Yeah, yeah. There's a script as we were moving stuff onto the server that I read. And it's like, the writing is good. Like the words on a page are good. The storytelling is messy. but I recognize like oh I completely pilfered for this for this other project like I could see like oh I took that idea and reused it and this other thing and appropriate that's not plagiarism that's your own stuff yeah self-fievery self-fievery alright that is our show for this week it is produced by Meredith Stedman and edited by Matthew Cilelli with lots of help from Lauren Loesberg our outro this week is by Matthew Cilelli our editor if you have an outro you can send us a link to ask at johnagons.com that is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

43:31John August:You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books. Craig, 15 years ago, we did not know there would be a Script Notes book. No. No. We barely knew that this was going to be called Script Notes. Or that we would be doing it after four months. Yeah. That's wild. You can find Clips, another helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear.

44:00John August:You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to things we talked about today. In the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers. That's a thing we didn't have 15 years ago. Sure didn't. We had a few hundreds and a few thousand people listening to us. But now we have some folks paying us money each month. And that is why we have producers and coordinators and editors. God bless that. God bless them. And how many people do listen to us a month here at our 15th anniversary? Meredith, do you have a sense? You're getting tens of thousands per episode per week and so per month it would be higher.

44:34Yeah. Well, yeah. All right. Well, then I guess we'll keep going.

44:38John August:We're still bigger than Bon Jovi, Craig, which I know was your benchmark back in the day. We are the Bon Jovi of Bon Jovi. I never wanted to, I would never say bigger. All right. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptones.net where you get all those back episodes, back to episode one if you'd like and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on our predictions for 15 years from now in 2041. Craig, Meredith, Lauren, thank you so much for a fun show. Thank you.