722 - Orality, or Writing to be Spoken

Hola. Y infinidos Vellavo John August o Juanagostos y prefere.

0:02

My name is Craig Mason.

0:10

It too Ore mismo estas escutchando a scriptnotes, un podcast sobre guionismo y las cosas que interesan los gionistas. Craig, it is nice to see you again.

0:13

Ay, caramba.

0:25

I just felt like doing it. I do it in French every once in a while. I just haven't done it in Spanish maybe. So I thought I'll just try to do it.

0:27

I'll tell you what, we're going to have to run this by Melissa and do a little accent check on you.

0:33

Yeah, I sound like a North American person speaking Spanish, hopefully like a guy who grew up in Colorado who learned Spanish in grade school.

0:36

That sounds about right.

0:44

That sounds about right. But today on this show, Craig, I am coming in hot with a thesis that I ran by you a little bit at D and D this week.

0:45

You did? Yeah.

0:52

So I believe that screenwriting is distinct from other literary forms largely because of its orality. So of morality without the M on front. As screenwriters, we write things that are largely meant to be spoken. Not just the dialogue, but the action, the screen description, everything. Which raises the question, are we, in fact oral storytellers that just happen to be writing things down? Is every script just a long pitch? I've got a tiny bit of data, and, Craig, I think you're going to be game. So let's have this discussion and figure out whether we are mostly just storytellers who are writing things down rather than other traditional scribes.

0:53

Yeah, I mean, I already know where I'm leaning on this one. Yeah, we'll find out.

1:29

We'll dig into it. We'll also answer listener questions on deliverables and undeniable scripts. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to look at the movies coming out in 2026, because some people are quietly predicting that it will be one of the biggest years ever at the box office. And I think they're probably right. And, Craig, maybe you should start writing movies again.

1:33

Well, I've got one coming out.

1:54

You've got one coming out.

1:56

In fact, I got one coming out that I wrote 10 years ago. So it's like an echo of a memory. But also. Yes, because after doing television now for quite some time and still some time to go, the thought of prepping something once, casting it once, shooting it once, editing it once, posting it once is amazing. Like, I love that idea. And also the length of the Shoot. Because I, you know, I remember like a 40 or 50 day shoot heading into that. Or, you know, I think one of the hangovers was like, 78 days. I was like, oh, my God, that's forever. This is gonna be forever.

1:57

Nah, luxury, luxury.

2:35

78 days. Are you kidding me?

2:37

Craig, here's my pitch. A movie is like a series, but there's just the pilot. How great is that?

2:38

It's basically episode one and two.

2:44

Yeah. Fun and ship.

2:46

It's episode one and the last episode.

2:47

Yeah.

2:50

I actually have been thinking quite a bit about doing when all this is done, maybe. Yeah, a little palate cleanser of a movie would be nice.

2:51

All right, before we get to that, there's actually some news. This is where I say, WGA members, check your email. Because there are member meetings coming up about the next round of contract negotiations. So in the west, we have meetings on February 11, February 18, and February 21. In the east, we have a meeting on February 17. So go to one of those member meetings, because that's where you find out about the contract negotiations coming up. There will also be special, smaller meetings for people like Craig who are out of the country. There'll be zoom meetings after that. But if you can come to one of the meetings in person, it's always better because you can ask your question in front of other people and just get a sense of, oh, there are actually a lot of writers in this union.

2:59

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think everybody in the union currently still has.

3:39

Yeah. I guess we were on strike at some point, so we saw people like.

3:42

You know, sometimes I think about this, like, right after a strike and heading into the next contract negotiations as we are, there are still a bunch of new members who came in after the strike.

3:45

Yeah.

3:56

But everybody in the union now has been in a strike. I would say a good chunk of us have been in two. So it's like an army of grizzled veterans walking back through the forest. And then these. The new kids, the rooks show up.

3:56

Yeah. The press recruits. Hey, Rick.

4:10

Get in line, Rook. This is how it works.

4:12

Yeah. There will be some people who've never been to a member meeting, who've never seen, like, oh, my gosh, this is what it looks like when we're a bunch of us in a hotel ballroom.

4:15

And, you know, sometimes you get an earful of some weird shit.

4:21

You do. Yeah. And so what happens in those things we don't discuss in a broader sense. We don't talk about the specifics, but I will say there was a moment where a comedian stood up and sort of started to give a set. And it's just like, no, no, this is not the place for that. And that person has become much more famous in the time since. And so I just remembered them as this person who was like inappropriately trying to do a set and is now a much bigger celebrity now. So anything could happen. I'm not encouraging you to try your material in these.

4:25

No, you will, because anyone can talk. Inevitably there are. There's a type of person who legitimately has a question and wants to ask it and must ask it publicly because that's the way it works. And that's the type of person that it gets very excited to talk in front of other people. And they might be a little weird and that's fine. But the people on the stage hopefully are very staid and sober and helpful and clear.

4:55

Yeah, that is the goal. All right, let's do some follow up. We have a longer piece here from Ace. This is going Back to episode 719 when we talked about not having time to do your best work.

5:20

Wanting to Ace it says it's a pain point for so many editors in our business. Most often in network TV and lower budgets. The schedule defaults to the guild minimum days to deliver the editor's cut. The expectation is to keep up with camera and then cut the show in four or five days before the director arrives in the bay. I've not met an editor on the planet that thinks that this is a sustainable timeline. In the old days of film, there was significantly less dailies. But in the digital age, we still use this outdated scheduling model due to our guild deals. We need more time before the director's cut begins. In stories with major action or tonal sequence editing, it takes time to refine the edit and get it to play emotionally. Hard to do when you don't have enough time to watch everything. We can get an assembly together, but most editors have told me that they either shortcut to the deadline or stay late on their own accord. I can't tell you how many times I've been at the office until late at night with another editor trying to get through an avalanche of dailies just to keep up with the unreasonable schedule so that our directors are given the best experience during their days. We don't complain. We help and we work hard. We want our work to be the best work before we show anyone. This applies to everyone in our pipeline. Dits want to make sure that their color and metadata is their best work. Our assistants want to make sure that materials are grouped correctly and organized to the best of their ability. When the schedule is too tight, everyone grinds, mistakes are made sometimes and people don't feel like they're doing their best. In contrast, when we have enough time to do our best work, I've seen directors cuts done a day early. I've seen less notes in the longer term of a post schedule and everyone on the team is a lot happier overall. My hope in mentioning this is that the DGA may discuss this issue more at the upcoming negotiations and and find a more healthy, holistic solution to post production schedules in collaboration with Ayatci. We all want to do our best work and tell these stories in the best way.

5:32

I have many thoughts.

7:23

Yeah, I'm sure you have many thoughts. I would say on a macro level, I get what he's saying because he's saying what we all kind of feel sometimes as artists and people who are working in this business is that if I had more time, I could do this better. And I'm sort of forced to rush to do this and not to invest in my abilities. And that's so frustrating. And it's also the first time I've sort of heard called out. But it makes sense that we do just shoot a lot more now and we print a lot more now. So there's a lot more footage to go through. And that's something that editors and assistant editors and other people are doing at the very start of the process. But Craig, I know you have opinions about the post production workflow and the value of editors.

7:25

I mean, the big thing here, ace, is that you are. Everything you said, with the exception of the last thing you said, is absolutely correct. So let me walk through the problem here is ACE is signaling out network TV and lower budgets. Everybody gets screwed on that schedule. That schedule is not designed to create quality, although there are people who have managed to do it. And those people are magicians. That schedule is designed to hump out episodes repeatedly, quickly, over and over and over and over and over for half a year. That means the writing has no time to be written. The show has no time to be shot. So the writers are cranky, the editors are cranky, the directors are cranky, the people who run the post production are cranky. They're the crankiest because whatever they got, they got to get it through. The editors are cranky. Then the directors become cranky again because they get about 12 minutes to quote, unquote, edit. And then the showrunners are cranky because they get that cut and they go, the hell is this? And now I got two days plus. Then we have five minutes to mix it and it's out the door. The whole thing is a fast food assembly line. And it is bad for creativity. And it is unfair to people who are trying to do good work. So is there anything to be done about that? Not if that's the machinery you join. I mean, it's not like they hide it, you know.

8:02

Yeah. So ACE is specifically saying is most often in network TV and lower budgets. And so in network tv, there is a pattern for sort of how you're supposed to be doing this in the sense of, like, the writing is not that distant from the actual airing of the show. Friends didn't have three weeks to sort of put everything together. Like, those things had to happen quickly. And it's really the struggle of if you're doing something like that, if you're doing reality shows that have a fast schedule, if you're doing Love island or just nearly real time, you're not going to be able to do your best work. So I guess the meta question is, what is the best work you can do given the constraints? And how do you maximize the output given the constraints that you have?

9:28

I don't think you can. To me, time and the availability of time for each part of the process is the thing that separates some television from what we call prestige television. It's not actually the quality. Cause sometimes prestige television is bad and sometimes network television is good.

10:06

Yeah.

10:27

But by and large, it's time. On our show, we take time. There is no minimum editor's assembly cut when they're ready and they're happy. I mean, they gotta get something to a director. But let's talk about the directors for a second. And this is the one thing that I think ACE isn't quite right on. And it's the dga, at least in what we'll call non network television models. It's the showrunner who's really doing the final edit of the show. I spend more time editing through each episode than any of our directors. Because the directors get, I think, a week and then they go. And typically they're going on to work on other shows. They're not really there to. They're not in the mix. They're not there to carry this to the end. So really that's when I dig in. And I take weeks, weeks. Because we really dig in and we do have a lot of footage and we do take our time. And I want to give my editors their best chance. The DGA is not the gatekeeper here. Iatse, certainly, as a representative of the editors, can advocate. You can't really talk to the WGA because the WGA represents writers, not producers. So a writer, producer, like me, they represent me up to the hyphen and then they don't. So really the people to talk to is. I think it would be IATSE directly with the AMPTP to say we want our editors to get more time. If I were running a network show, I would rather give my editors more time than the. Than the directors more time because the editors are looking through every little tiny thing. That's just my two cents.

10:28

Yeah. So let's talk about the showrunner there. Because the showrunner is a writer and producer, and that showrunner has some sway over how things are going to be done and how the money and the time is going to be allocated. And powerful showrunners may be able to choose to shift some time and money in order to put more time towards editorial, but there's a cost to that as well. And there's other things they can't be doing that may be less time in production because they're having to move that thing. So they're always making choices. There's always compromises. And that's the thing you're butting up against is that choosing where to spend your time. It was great having Ava Victor on the show last week because they were talking about they had all the time in the world for prep. And then the reality of making anything is that you have less time in production than you would hope for. And then in the future, I think you, you tend to have a lot more time and a lot more leisure because there's not the pressure of we've got to hit this release date unless you're backing up against Sundance or something. You got a lot of time. And that's one of the reasons why I think it's going to be perfected more, because you just, you have the time.

12:09

There is a financial pressure on independent films. And every single week you keep your post production office open. You're paying the editor and you're paying the assistant editor and you're paying the PA and lunches and all that. And you're absolutely right. Like, it's a question of resource allocation. And I am a little crazy about this. I will say, like, I don't fight with HBO ever. There are times where they have to figure out how to deal with me. Like, because I get a little bit. I don't get crazy. I just, I Sort of go, look, I'm, I'm not. This is an immovable object. And the immovable object is, well, how long do you need to edit this? Until it's good. That's how long. How long is the mix going to take? Until it's good. And I'm going to make it better than you think it should be and it's going to take longer than you think it should be. And that means I'm going to be spending more money than you think I should be spending. And I think season one, they were like this guy and they're lovely and I've come to really enjoy their company. And they're great. They back me and they support me. They just had to sort of get accustomed to my thing and, and see that it worked, you know, that there was a benefit to it. I do think that one of the things I am responsible for is protecting my editors and making sure that they get the time they need. Because this workflow from DIT through, remember, then there's a whole workflow on the other side of color, timing, DI and all that stuff that has to happen. And we have to lock the picture in order to mix.

13:15

Yes.

14:47

So editors, and I have my editors at the mix. Editors are the most important part of this thing. Once you say, that is a wrap. Everyone. Great job. Pile up the trucks and drive home Everything now, as far as I'm concerned, is about editors and editing and they need to be protected.

14:48

Next up, we have a follow up from Leslie and she is writing about your comment about Steve Jobs.

15:12

Leslie says, I'm a historian and the executive director of the Steve jobs archive. In episode 719, you talked about knowing whether your work is good enough. And Craig recommended watching Steve Jobs keynote introducing the iPhone in 2007. I thought you might be interested to see the attached email Steve sent to himself about a year before he died. I think it speaks to the question of why he cared so much about his work.

15:19

Craig, do you want to maybe read this? Because this would be good for you.

15:42

Sure. Steve Jobs wrote, I grow little of the food I eat and of the little I do grow. I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to Help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being. Sent from my iPad, which may be the best sign off there possible. Well, this is an interesting meditation on gratitude. Yeah, I wonder why it's interesting, she says. I think it speaks to the question of why he cared so much about his work. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the historian and executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive knows him and his work better than I do. But I'll tell you what I get out of this is humility.

15:46

Yes.

17:02

Especially for somebody who changed the world in a profound way and in a way that continues to ripple ahead. I sense great humility here, which is a remarkable thing.

17:02

Yeah. It's also the recognition that you are a part of a process that started before you and will continue after you. And so the fact that he was in the last year of his life, it also makes sense that he had this realization. Is it an email that he would have written to himself five years earlier? I don't know, but it makes sense for where he's at in his life.

17:15

The thing that really kind of grabs at me is when I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. But he didn't realize that at first.

17:34

Yes, he didn't.

17:43

And that was a fatal error. He felt like maybe he could help himself survive. And he chose, I guess what we call alternative therapies for a very serious cancer. And it's hard to say if he would have lived or not had he, had he engaged in science based, evidence based medicine faster. But regardless, this is a pretty thank you. Thank you, Leslie. That was lovely to receive and I'm very glad that you were listening.

17:44

So this email reminded me of a piece I read this week by Kevin Kelly, who was former editor of Wired, who's now, I think it's in his 80s and still blogs and writes a lot. And this was him talking about as a young man. He backpacked through Asia and hitchhiked everywhere and sort of just relied on other people helping him out. And so he's really talking about receiving kindness. So he writes. I believe the generous gifts of strangers are actually summoned by a deliberate willingness to be helped. You start by surrendering to your human need for help. That we cannot be helped until we embrace our need for help is another law of the universe. My new age friends Call that state being pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped by, you have to join the conspiracy yourself. You have to accept the gifts. Although we don't deserve it and have done nothing to merit it, we've been offered a glorious ride on this planet if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering at the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, how will the miracle happen today?

18:16

That's beautiful. I love the idea of all of us as sort of less narcissistic Blanche Dubois depending on the kindness of strangers. There is an idea about pro social behavior that suggests that because there is a evolutionary benefit for us to be part of a group, we have an instinct therefore, to be helpful to a group so that they will let us into the group. I mean, you could draw all this back to a kind of selfish gene theory, which is fine. It doesn't matter. What matters is that we have it. And it does feel good. It feels good to help people. It just does. I mean, there are people, I think, who don't experience that feeling, but I know you and I do. What is this? Episode seven? What? Well, why are we doing this? We're doing this not because we have been sentenced by a court. Yeah, we like it. It feels good to help people. It really, really does. And I love this idea of pronoia, the presumption that people are actually out to help you. That's great.

19:40

And so as I look at the protests in Minnesota this week, and I look at the marches in sub zero weather and people trying to get in the way of ice doing terrible things. That resonates for me because it's people who don't know who they're actually helping, but they know they're helping. And that's a crucial aspect of being human.

20:48

Yes, the concept that you are going to be one of a thousand people. And of that thousand people, some of you may die, but that may create some small movement on the needle. I mean, the civil rights movement in the United States was very much whereas the Civil War was just a. You were sent and you had to do it. And what they find in war is that people really are just trying to defend their friends. They're not trying to defend their side, but to march across a bridge with the expectation that some of you are gonna get bitten by a dog, some of you are gonna hit by a fire hose, some of you gonna be beaten with batons. That incredible scene in Gandhi where the march on the salt works happens, that is the highest form of pronoia is I'm going to help you by putting myself in a position where I will actively be hurt. It's not just that I'm out to help you. I'm also out to get hurt. My we do these things because of this unity we feel we went on strike. Yes, there are rules, and the rules say you have to strike. Although there's a way out of it. There is a way out of it. You can say I'm financial core, so I still can work on guild cover projects, but I'm not subject to the rules and I can work and I don't have to strike. And when we strike, what? I don't know, like three people do that?

21:07

Maybe basically no one does it.

22:25

Basically no one. Regardless of what you feel about the merits of any particular strike, you have a sense that if you can suffer a little bit for the betterment of your group, it's worth it or suffer a lot. So it keeps us together. I love this concept.

22:27

And so what I see in both Steve Jobs email and in this blog post by Kevin Kelly is recognizing that you are benefiting from others doing that on your behalf. And it's so easy to overlook that we think of ourselves as protagonists who have to go out and do the thing, but it's recognizing that we are also the beneficiaries of other people helping us out. And so again, it's gratitude and it's also just remembering that you're part of this bigger experience and that no one is an individual. We often talk on this podcast how relationships are everything and we think about the people in our lives who we know directly, but it's also our relationships with invisible forces and invisible groups that we can't perceive.

22:45

Yes, the shoulders of the giants upon which we stand.

23:27

A little bit more follow up Brian wrote in about Ava Victor.

23:30

Thank you so much for inviting Ava Victor on. A key reason their interview was excellent for me was the fact that Ava made this film like an auteur. Scriptnotes is largely focused on the craft of screenwriting, which is great, but rarely does Scriptnotes do a deep dive with a true indie auteur who did it all to create a worthy film from scratch. It's fascinating and Inspiring. And this is the core reason why I pay the premium subscription for scriptnotes.

23:34

Oh, that's lovely.

23:58

Yeah. Well, we got your $5. That's all we care about. Yeah.

23:59

I think Brian makes a good point, is that we'll have Ryan Johnson's on and stuff like that, but we don't have a lot of Greta Gerwig. Greta Gerwig. We don't have a lot of auteurs who are just doing their own thing. And that's why it's so nice to have those. Well, now that I think about it, we do have a fair number of autoreurs. Christopher Nolan, we have, like, mega auteurs.

24:03

Yeah. And Chris McQuarrie. The thing is, what I would encourage Brian to consider here is actually not to diminish what a writer director does, because it is exciting, but to remind them that if you sit down and talk to most people that we call on auteur, they're going to very quickly start pointing at the people that help them. So just to stay on theme here, I write and direct episodes of this show. Am I an auteur? Well, I'm going to start talking to you about my editors. I'm definitely going to talk to you about the actors. I'm going to absolutely talk about the cinematographer, first and foremost, the production designer. And then you start going down the line of all the people that worked to do something, the visual effects people, the artistry. You're not really an author. Like, it's not. It's not. I wish I could just kick that word back over to France.

24:17

Yeah.

25:11

I used to say this, and I think maybe people thought, well. Cause he's not a director. Well, I direct, and the whole film by thing still makes me want to vomit. It's ridiculous. It's an insult to literally everyone who worked on the movie. It's such a joke. So I kind of feel that way about auteur, but I get Brian's point. If I just replace the word auteur with writer, director, then this works great.

25:12

Yeah. Filmmaker. Yeah.

25:37

Yes, yes.

25:38

Lastly, a bit of praise that is not specifically towards Craig, but a relative of Craig's.

25:40

This is from Hannah in Lethbridge. Hannah writes, this is not a question, and it's not for John and Craig. It's for all the listeners who heard Craig plug his daughter Jessica's music and thought, mm, yeah, but dads are gonna dad. I'm here to tell you that dads are gonna dad. But nevertheless, Jessica's music is amazing. I came across her in the Wild and I only just put the connection together. Way to go, Craig. And Craig's +1 for producing at least one amazing artistic thing, so Craig doesn't.

25:45

Have to talk anymore about his daughter. But Jessica really is a unique, singular talent, and so it's very nice to see her and to know her from before this was discovered in the world. Listen, independent of her relationship to Craig, she's gonna do some kinds of amazing things, and it's just neat to see it from the ground floor. So she's recording new music now. We'll see. There'll be albums, there'll be things. But, yeah, she's a real talent.

26:14

Yeah. I mean, I really got in on the ground floor.

26:38

Yeah.

26:40

See, Yeah, I was there from that first breath. Well, I'll tell you, Hannah, that's lovely to hear. I'm so glad that you appreciated that. And I will share this with Jessica, because, no surprise, I don't believe she subscribes to the podcast. But what I really like, Hannah, is that you're from Lethbridge, a place where I've spent quite some time. I even spent time in that Lethbridge casino.

26:40

Lethbridge is a. I have no idea what Lethbridge is. Tell me.

27:05

I'm gonna tell you. Lethbridge is a town in Alberta. It is a city. And it's pretty close, I think, to Montana. It's down towards the border there, and it's kind of like a factory town a little bit. Like, there's a big vegetable cannery. Trains go through there to pick stuff up from the US and, well, probably not now anymore. And it's a blue collar city, but it's like you could feel a spirit. You know, it's funny. I'm like a guy that spent time in a lot of weird Canadian cities, and I kind of. I dig it. I liked it. I liked Lethbridge, and I like that Hannah is there in Lethbridge. And I salute you, Hannah and I salute Lethbridge. Had a great time. Casino is small. I'm not gonna lie. It's a small casino, but it was trying.

27:08

All right, let's move on to marketing topic here. So my thesis that I'm trying to defend here is that screenwriting has notably higher orality than other prose writing. And I stumbled across this because there was this thing called Havelock's Orality Tester, which I'll put a link into the show notes, too, so you can paste in some text, and it tells you how oral it is versus how literary it is. And so the idea is that Some text basically kind of is written to be spoken aloud, and some stuff is just written to be read with your eyes. The definition that they have on the little side here is orality. Refers to the characteristics of speech that distinguish it from writing, the patterns, rhythms, and structures that evolved from memory and performance before the advent of literacy. Drawing on the work of scholars like Walter Ong and Eric Havelock, this tool analyzes text for markers of oral tradition. Formulaic expressions, repetition, sound patterns, direct engagement, and the agonistic tone of a spoken debate. So it put in some text into the score. A higher score suggests that the text carries the DNA of the spoken word. So some of the markers. So if you paste some stuff in, you see what it tags things. And so things like a literary marker might be qualifications that signal uncertainty, nuance that would be impossible in live speech. Nested clauses. This is a thing you run into all the time in a novel. You can have many nested clauses, and your eyes can track back and figure out, where am I on the sentence? What am I actually referring to? If you try to say that aloud, you would get lost. A lot of Trump's speech issues are because there's just the clause within the clause, and it sort of never comes back to the original thing. And it's like, wait, you get lost.

27:49

I think there's a problem.

29:34

There's other things happening there, too. I think we know there's a decline that's happening there. Literary stuff will often acknowledge opposing views before it counters them, which is not a thing you tend to do in speech. Embodied action. And so description of physical actions and bodily experience. That's a thing that tends to happen much more often in oral tradition than literary tradition. And we saw a bit of that in, I think, Kevin Kelly's thing, which was, I would say, actually felt kind of spoken, where she's talking about, like, standing on the side of the highway holding a sign. You're putting yourself in the body of that person in that space. Other orality markers using first and second pronouns, asking questions, imperatives, so musts the commands, contractions, discourse markers. Well, so anyway, interjections, short clauses, fewer nominalizations where you're taking a verb and making it into a noun, and it's all just tracked. For me. It's one of those things where it's like, oh, yeah, that describes a thing. I've sort of noticed but never had a word for.

29:35

I think this would be incredibly useful for screenwriting teachers, whom I'm often railing against, to use at the beginning of a class on Screenwriting, because no one who begins has. Very few people who begin have spent time reading screenplays. I certainly have. What I had spent so much time doing was reading literature because I was a student. So I was reading Shakespeare and Faulkner and short stories and essays, all of which really were not oral. They had low orality. They were highly literate. And maybe the closest thing that I was reading at the time that felt like maybe it would fall into orality was Stephen King. His books tend to feel like that. He has these long paragraphs and italics that are really designed to be spoken.

30:42

Yeah.

31:41

And they're beautiful. I always love those. And I think this would be an amazing way to sort of start with people and say, you're going to have to actually weirdly forget all that. Because even though you were taught that was the stuff that's going to help you be a writer, it's not going to help you be this kind of writer.

31:41

Another thing which is striking about screenwriting, which, I don't know, it tracks for reality, but it feels like it would, is that screenwriting is a present tense. So we're not referring back to characters, can refer back to the past, but the actual action of a screenwrite play is in the present tense. Yes, you're right there. So you're describing a moment that you are in. And generally you're in with the person who is hearing you, who's there. And that's why it feels so live and so active. So when I say that a screenplay just feels like a long pitch that's written down. Yes. There's specific grammar we use in screenplays, the ints, the exts, the transitions. But if you notice what we do on the page, what a lot of screenwriters that you and I both do is we'll often, like, end sentences that go into the transition that continues the next thing.

31:57

Always.

32:44

We're always bridging those things, always so that it reads well. But it's really so that it sounds good. Yes. So it sounds good to say aloud.

32:44

Yes. We know when we listen to people telling stories that flow is important.

32:53

Yeah.

32:58

A sense of continuity. What it implies is that the person who's telling you the story knows where it's going. We've all had the experience of listening to somebody tell a joke and watching them realize they screwed up or can't remember. And it comes to a hitchy stop. And you think, this is not going to be that funny anymore because they don't have confidence in it. Which means I don't have confidence in it.

32:58

Yeah.

33:20

So with your screenplay, you want to. This is something Scott Frank said to me a long time ago. He said, you want to feel like the person who wrote this is in complete control of it.

33:21

Yeah.

33:29

And that is different than good and bad. It's just. But it is sort of an essential start that they needed you to read that so that you would read this. And then the next page. Is this on purpose? And never just like, oh, wait, a scene is happening or they're correcting something. The plates are getting wobbly as you spin them. And you lose confidence.

33:30

Yeah. And so none of this should be taken as a slam against literary styles. Oh, God. Because I think all of the sophistication that you see in that is so important that there's things you can do in a book or in a scientific article that is very clearly good for that medium and that it's just, thank God we have it, and thank God we have the innovation and the centuries of literacy to be able to do that kind of stuff. It's just different than the oral tradition, which I'm arguing screenwriting probably really stems from. And if you think back about the origin of screenwriting, it started as just like a list, and then it became kind of just like some descriptions of sort of how it's going to come together and feel. Even playwriting, obviously the dialogue is an oral tradition, and Shakespeare was an oral tradition before it was written down. That's why there's multiple folios and controversies over where stuff came from. But the scene description was so minimal. It doesn't have the same. Some of the DNA that screenwriting does, which is basically creating visuals all the time.

33:51

I think this is such a nice distinction to make because it also helps people who may, in a snobby way, think that screenwriting isn't real writing, understand that it's just a different kind of writing. It is trying to achieve a different feeling, but it is writing nonetheless. So you have the Richard Brodies of the world who insist that screenwriting is not art, whereas I guess, apparently writing refuses. But I think you may fall into that trap if you are overeducated to the point where you have become blind to the existence of another kind of writing entirely. And I don't quite imagine how that can even happen, but apparently it does. And there's a cultural value to this, because I think some cultures have simply relied more on orality than others. Western culture has tended to be very much about the literary tradition, with wonderful exceptions. In drama, they're still doing Death of a Salesman that clearly, clearly is art high on the orality scale. And of course, we're still performing Shakespeare and ruminating and iterating on Shakespeare in so many different ways. But Western civilization tends to get very fussy about the literary stuff and orality. I think, as you go around the world, you may find that it's higher or more prized in those cultures than it might be in some ivory towers here in the West.

34:53

Yeah, we'll see. So, listen, I've not read Havelock or Ong or any of the original material here, but if you want to experiment with this yourself, I'll put a link in the show notes to this orality tester. And it's fun to just like, grab some text from your stuff, but also just grab a few paragraphs off of a scientific paper or off a literary paper or a newspaper and sort of see what it is, because it'll give you a score. But more interestingly, it'll break down why it's giving that score, and it'll highlight the sentences and sort of what it's noticing in there that has aspects of these certain discourse markers or epistemic hedges and sort of what it's seeing in there that's giving you this. This instinct.

36:21

One final question as I look at it. Is this gonna, like, scrape stuff as we put it through? Because it is AI or.

37:02

Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, if you're pulling stuff that's already on the Internet, I just don't know that it's actually a thing to worry about.

37:08

Yeah, it's already out there.

37:15

That's all the stuff I put in there. Stuff that's already on the Internet. So it's fine. And again, I don't think that any writer should change how they write to get a higher score in this. I don't want. I don't want anyone's work to be like, well, you have to hit this number on this. Like, that would be a giant mistake. I think what you and I are both arguing for is that I think an important part of learning about screenwriting should be to understand.

37:15

Yes.

37:38

How it tends to feel on the page and why it tends to feel so spoken on the page.

37:38

Yes. I mean, just conceptually, this is a great place to start. So you understand where you're heading as opposed to where you think you might be heading.

37:43

Exactly.

37:50

Great.

37:51

Cool. Let's answer some Lister questions. Okay. I see one here from Lori.

37:52

An increasingly common piece of screenwriting advice is to just write a script that's undeniable. But what does that even mean. Does just write an undeniable script mean the way to sell a script is to write a script that sells? Is telling someone to write something undeniable actually useful advice? And if so, what does it really mean other than write something good and marketable?

37:56

So, to me, this reminds me of. And I cannot think of the source of this, but when someone says, like, oh, yeah, next time we gotta try harder, and it's like, yeah, it's not like you didn't try as hard as you could last time. It's like, there was no shortage of effort. It's just like, it just didn't happen. It just didn't work. And so undeniable feels like one of those. It's like something you say about something that after it succeeded, well, it was undeniable. Well, plenty of people denied it.

38:21

Yeah. Of course, nothing is undeniable. There are people who have written a script, the movie gets made, they win an Oscar for that script, and other people are like, I hate that. I hate that script. I hate all of it. And I would deny it. So the problem, Laurie, is everybody is desperate to try and say something. There is nothing to say. And we're saying that as guys who've been doing this for a while. But when you really get down to this question, and I think what's underneath this question is, but how do I write something that people are going to love and make and buy and give me a job and all that, the answer is that you're going to write something that they will want to buy and make and they will be impressed by. And there is no way to advise you how to do that? None. We try to give you general advice about how to write things in ways that we wish we would have had to maybe get there a little quicker, but. And write something good. For whom? You only need to write something that one person says is undeniable. Right. You can send it to 80 people, 79 of them deny it. This is not an undeniable script. But if one person buys it, job done, you did it. So the truth is, no, it doesn't really mean much. It's a mouth filler to answer when people are asking you for some sort of give me a step one through seven method of writing a script that people will buy. It just doesn't exist.

38:47

So Laurie, in the longer email, notes that Lawrence Kasdan wrote the Bodyguard in 1975, and his script was rejected 67 times. Well, there you go.

40:13

Et voila.

40:22

Became a giant, giant hit. He's undeniably a great writer. But did he write the undeniable script?

40:23

No, he is not an undeniably great writer because they denied him.

40:28

So here's what I'll say. I think that's the after the fact argument. Like, oh, well, that script was undeniable and it wasn't the case. What is genuinely helpful about a script is a script that feels like only you could have written it. And so when someone reads the script, it's like, wow, that's a really effing great script. And I don't think anyone else would have written that script. That feels like specifically your script. And that is an achievable goal. I think that's something. Write something that's really, really good, that is unique to your interest and skillset and experience is going to help you out more than trying to hit, quote, unquote, undeniable.

40:31

Yeah, I mean, there is a certain solace, I suppose, to be taken in the fact that the greatest living screenwriter, Lawrence Kasdan, you know, got rejected 67 times with a script that went on to be a massive hit. It's hard. We do sort of give the phrase break in a little too much stick because as we point out, you never stop breaking in. But there is a moment where credibility is achieved. It is fragile. It can be smashed within seconds into pieces. But for a moment, because of something that occurs, you get a little bit of credibility. And your job is to leverage that credibility and build upon it to get more credibility until there is a point where you are so credible that people would rather believe you than themselves. Like, so at some point, if you sit Larry Kasdan down and you're like, hey, we were thinking about doing a Star wars movie. What do you think about this? And he's like, man, I really think that's a way to go. Then you're gonna go Larry Kazan, because he has so much credibility. But when you begin, you have zero. You get a little shred. Get a little shred and you build on it. But it's not easy to get that first shred. And John, you're absolutely right. Really, the only way, other than be a very talented writer and write something that's very interesting people, is to write something that is somehow specific to you. You don't even have to know how it's specific to you. If you just write honestly, it'll be there. It'll be there.

41:08

Nick has a question about deliverables.

42:39

Assume you're in development, unpaid, on a feature script, and doing notes for your producer or agent. Manager, assume you're generally okay with their notes and assume you've made a good faith effort to address them. What do you actually deliver? Obviously, you send the revised draft of the script incorporating their notes. Do you also send a version with the edits starred redline something else? How much transparency do we as writers really want in this situation? On one hand, highlighting the edits demonstrates that you made them. On the other hand, do we want to show how the sausage is made? Is it acceptable to simply deliver the final revised draft that incorporates their notes and an explainer doc or transmittal email pointing the reader generally to the notes that you've incorporated?

42:42

This is a good sort of general question. It's like, do you send the star changes or do you just send the new draft? And I tend to email first saying like, hey, do you want star changes or do you want the full draft? And if they say they want star changes, give them the star changes. If they want just the clean draft, that's great. I'll tend to make both. I might send different ones to different producers. If there's multiple producers, it's not a giant hassle to do star changes. In most cases, if I'm doing a big rewrite, I won't even turn on star changes because I know that so much is going to change. It's not helpful for someone if every page is mostly stars. It's useless.

43:24

Yeah, I mean, assuming that you have. I don't like the fact that you're unpaid, by the way.

43:58

Maybe this is like, you know, he sent his manager a script like, let's go out with this thing, and the manager's like, not ready yet. If it's a spec that the manager's been selling out. Yeah, yeah.

44:03

The sausage is not being made on the page with the asterisk. The sausage is being made in the sausage inside your skull, my friend. That's where the sausage is made. No one's getting in there, so don't worry about that. The mystery is still the mystery. It's not like handing them a script with asterisks is going to have them go, oh, this is how they do it. Let's just get rid of this guy. We can do it ourselves. They can't. Typically in a situation like this. I will send both. I'll just send, here's a clean copy. And if you're interested, here's a copy with asterisks. Up to you. It doesn't matter to me. Yeah, I don't care.

44:13

That's fair.

44:45

Yeah, the sausage is safe.

44:45

In my head, the sausage is safe.

44:47

The sausage is safe. Do we still title these episodes? Because if we do.

44:50

The sausage is safe.

44:54

The sausage is safe.

44:55

We do title these episodes.

44:57

Excellent.

44:58

So that may be the one.

44:58

Yeah.

44:59

Let us go to our one. Cool things.

45:00

Yay.

45:02

I had an article, but I also have a game to recommend. So I'm gonna do both because I can do both. The first is an article that I think our friend Ken White may have first linked to. It's called Quantum Computing for Lawyers. Substack post by JP Amison. And we hear about quantum computing, especially post quantum cryptography a lot. And this sort of demystifies that explains what's going on and why our timelines may be a little too fast for it. We may be overthinking this a bit at the moment. So essentially, quantum computers work differently than conventional computers. They're doing a bunch of things at once in ways that are hard to understand for our little brains. But because they can in theory break our normal cryptography much more quickly, they can essentially just the mathematics works out that they can just do things which break normal cryptography, which hurts for encryption and bitcoiny kind of stuff. We have to sort of think about new ways to do that. Mathematically, there are ways to do that makes it much harder for it. This article just does a really good job demystifying some of it and also saying, you know what, we may not actually get quantum computers in any reasonable timeline, so don't assume that it's going to happen. So a good demystifying article. The second thing I want to recommend is a game we played once in the office and once last night called Swoop. Craig, have you heard of Swoop? Swoop. Swoop. Swoop. Swoop. Swoop may be the next heated rivalry, Craig, because it is a sensation crossing the country. It is a card game and it looks like Uno or sort of like a typical card game. You can play it with normal decks of cards, but it's helpful to get the real deck. It's a Midwestern game that shares aspects with scum and. And other sort of like summer camp games.

45:02

Yes.

46:49

Essentially you are trying to empty your hand and your board and be the first so you don't get stuck with points. But it has a really nice mechanic. It is super simple to pick up. I will also put a link in the show notes to this video made by the people who make the decks, which is so Midwestern and kind of cheesy, but actually explains the game really well.

46:49

I mean, their website, I'm looking at their website, it's like it is. The Midwest is pouring off of this. It's serving Midwest. I like it.

47:09

We played it with seven people last night. It's probably good with three, but you can just play with as many people as you have. It's a really fun game. And what I like about a card game is that when it's your turn, you'd be paying attention, but you don't have to pay that much attention when it's not your turn. And it moves pretty quickly so you can keep other conversations up in the air. Which is, I think, a game night where you have to focus too much on the card game. It's not fun.

47:18

No. Well, that's all right.

47:42

Swoop. Swoop, Swoop. And you're gonna say swoop a lot, which is just a fun word. Swoop.

47:43

Nice.

47:49

Craig, you've got an article, you've got science for us.

47:49

I've got science. So it looks like we've got, we're gonna double dip on science here. So this is a report of a study in Stanford Medicine, their medical magazine, where they report on things. And there is a team at Stanford which is probably reporting on this, that has figured out how to perhaps reverse the degenerative disease that I guess will cover under arthritis or osteoarthritis. So as people get older, they begin to lose cartilage between the joints. It becomes very painful, there becomes swelling, and this just causes a real loss of quality of life. And of course, it's incredibly expensive for societies to help people like this. And what they have found, because they were sort of chasing stem cells and platelet rich injections, they found this other thing. There's a thing they call the gerozyme, which is a protein that is basically driving the loss of tissue function and blocking the function of this protein, Gerozymer 15PGDH. It basically allows stuff to build back. So in theory, if this pays off and it works in human trials and so on, there may be injections that will. I don't have any cartilage in my big toe on my left foot. It's gone. It's gone because of an injury. So basically over time you injure things. There's an inflammation process. Cartilage just dies. It's painful. I could get it back. And as you get older, John, you're going to start, you're going to start feeling it. If you don't feel it already, you're going to start. And there are people who unfortunately, genetically are predisposed to getting this much earlier. And it's rheumatoid arthritis. And there's a lot of ways where this can be very disabling and painful. And they can regenerate adult tissue, in theory, just by turning something off as opposed to putting something in. That's exciting. So quietly they just sort of said, hey, we may have fixed a massive problem, but we'll find out.

47:51

Yeah, we'll see how it happens in human trials.

50:01

Early days. Early days.

50:02

I think this is only good news, but it does remind me of a thing I liked so much in the movie. I am Legend. If you remember the movie, I am legendary. Emma Thompson is on this news program and they say, like, oh. So in a word, what have you done? It's like, I think we've cured cancer. And it cuts to like the zombies that come through the whole thing. So it would just. I don't think this is going to be the thing. Like, oh, we regenerated cartilage and now we have zombies running throughout the universe.

50:04

Yeah, zombies, probably.

50:30

No, no, probably not zombies.

50:30

But I say probably.

50:32

Yeah. And instead we all just become like shark people who are made entirely of cartilage.

50:34

I would love that. Honestly.

50:39

I mean, honestly, like, if I could like squeeze under do because I had cartilage, if everything was just like my nose, it'd be great.

50:40

You punch me and I'm like, ow. But also, nothing's broken.

50:46

Yeah, it's fine.

50:51

Just bent me a little bit.

50:52

No worries. I bent, but I'm breaking. I'm like a bow. I'm like a little branch.

50:54

Yeah, yeah, lovely.

50:57

I learned the Spanish word for branch this. This week I'm doing anki, which is the flashcards for Spanish and for other languages. And so I do that every day. And rama is the word for a branch or a limb. I just like R A M A. It's such a great word. Rama.

50:59

So rendezvous with rendezvous for branch. Yeah, Rendezvous with Rama With Rama.

51:13

With a branch. With a branch.

51:20

Rendezvous with branch. I like that.

51:21

Yeah. And when the bow breaks, the cradle will fall. It all feels. It fits together.

51:22

It works.

51:27

It works. That's our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Drew Marquardt. Thanks, Drew. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Could be our outro this week is by Jennifer Lucy Cook. A first time outro. I love when you have a first time contributor. It's also an especially good one. It's just different and I just love that. So I love when somebody comes in and just kills it. So thank you to Jennifer Lucy Cook. Thank you. To everyone else who's submitting outros, please keep them coming in. I just love hearing new things after 700 episodes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to AskJohnAugus.com that is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find transcripts@johnaugus.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. This Cryptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. People are still sending in their Instagrams of like, you know, their books and I love that. We wrote a book. We wrote a book. Remember that?

51:27

Forgot about that.

52:17

There's a book. There's a book out there in the world.

52:18

How's that going?

52:20

It's going good. It's still selling some copies which is nice.

52:21

It's nice. Nice. See people want it. It's great. Fully useful advice. Yeah.

52:24

You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram ripnotes podcast. We have T shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those 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. Thank you again to our premium subscribers. You keep the lights on and make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a Premium Subscriber@scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on the 2026 movies and just how many of them there are. We're not like a box office podcast at all. No, but it's just really notable this year. So I'm excited to talk with Craig and Drew about that. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.

52:28

Thank you, John.

53:15

Thanks.

53:15

Gu. Da da da da da da da da da da so don't be rare.

53:16