Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out - Screenwriting Advice You’ll Actually Use with John August

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

For this very special episode of Working It out, Mike welcomes John August, the screenwriter behind Charlie’s Angels with Drew Barrymore, Tim Burton’s Big Fish, and his breakthrough film Go, which is celebrating its 25 year anniversary. John co-hosts the screenwriting podcast Scriptnotes with Craig Mazin (The Last of Us), which is not only Mike’s favorite screenwriting podcast, but his favorite podcast about the creative process (not counting Working It Out). John shares direct, practical screenwriting advice that you’ll actually use, whether you’re an aspiring screenwriter or you want to pursue creative work of any kind.Please consider donating to Miry's List

Today on the show, we have a very special episode with John August. John is a screenwriter, an acclaimed screenwriter. He wrote Go in 1999. He wrote Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, so many movies. wrote Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, so many movies. Very significantly, he is one of the co-hosts of Script Notes, which is my favorite podcast about writing and creation. It is co-hosted with Craig Mazin, who was on this podcast before.

He created Last of Us on HBO. This is such a fascinating chat today that we have for aspiring screenwriters. I get screenwriting questions from folks all the time. I've made two movies. John has made countless movies, written countless movies. He says some things today that I find completely surprising and interesting and inspiring.

It made me want just to write, write, write. I want to thank everybody who's been coming out to the shows. I was in Troy, New York last week. I was in Rochester, Toronto. At the end of this month, I'm headed back to Florida for those Miami and St. Petersburg makeup shows.

We just announced a third show in Westport, Connecticut on June 4th. We added a second show in San Francisco, September 27th. We added a second show in Charlotte. That's June 26th. There's a fourth and final show in Washington, D.C., June 30th. We added a second show in Red Bank, New Jersey. I'm doing a show in Indianapolis. I'm doing the Fillmore in Detroit, which I love. I'm going to be in Louisville at the Brown Theater, which I also love, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

I'll be in Knoxville, Asheville, and then Charleston. It is a big, big tour. I'm loving doing these shows. Thank you so much for coming out to them. All of that on burbiggs.com. I think you're going to love this episode with John August. I've known him for a bunch of time. I've said this before. If you like screenwriting, if you're interested in screenwriting, the Script Notes podcast, I believe, is as good or better than any screenwriting program, including universities, graduate programs, any kind of book that you would buy. And there's one key difference. Theirs is free. There's like

500 plus episodes of this podcast by two extraordinarily talented screenwriters, and it is free. John has some great stories today. So much wisdom about creative work. Enjoy my chat with the great John August. Your podcast, Script Notes, I should tell the listeners, I believe it is one of the greatest public services for any art form that I've ever witnessed in the sense that it's so thorough and it's almost like you have a vendetta.

You and Craig Mazin have a vendetta against snake oil salesmen of the screenwriting industry. Well, I think there's something very unique and weird about screenwriting. It feels like an approachable way into filmmaking. Because most people can't envision, okay, I'm going to get a crew together and I'm going to go shoot this thing.

That's too much. It's expensive. It's time. I have to talk to other people. But being a screenwriter, I could just do that myself. And I can get this magic program that will format all this stuff and I just have to type the words in.

It just seems easy. And because it seems easy, I think there's this whole industry that's built up around encouraging and soaking money out of people who want to pursue that dream. And there's just bad books written about it and conferences and all this sort of industry around it.

And so we just wanted to be the free alternative to all that stuff with actual real people doing it. It's an astonishing thing. But you're doing the same kind of thing on your podcast here because there's not the same joke industry probably, but there's a whole business of up-and-coming comedy people. Absolutely, there's classes. There's classes and all that stuff.

You're giving it away for free for the cost of listening to some really good ad reads by Mike Rapiglia. Oh my gosh. Here's the thing, there's some truth to all that. All religions have some aspect of truth in there. There's some common and shared experience that your observations are pointing out. The problem is it can become this dogma,

this formula that you have to hit these beats at this exact time, that everything has to relate back to Casablanca. And it's like, that's just not the way actual movies are done. It's not the conversations we have in the rooms as we're talking to executives or talking to directors.

And so we're just trying to push back against all that. And so in the early days of Script Notes, I think we were spending more time going after those books. And the books are what they are. If you're spending 15 bucks on a book, it's not so bad. I think our bigger target is the people who are trying to sell classes or be the gurus for the people who are charging you thousands of dollars to sit in their workshops and learn this lesson.

That's where we really have a problem. People are using psychological manipulation on people. If you don't do exactly what I tell you to, you're never going to make it in the town. Right. What is, I mean, because people must ask you for advice all the time. What is the best and worst screenwriting advice that you've heard? I'm going to give two pieces of advice that I've said,

and I'm not sure they're originally my ideas. But first off, you should write the movie you most wish you could see. Yes. A hundred percent. Like, you know, what movie would you actually pay money to see in the theater opening weekend? Because that, if it's a genre movie, fantastic. That means you should be writing that genre movie. If it's a big commercial Marvel blockbuster, you should be writing that because that's the kind of movie you would actually pay to see. The second one is to, you're always going to have ideas jostling for time in your head and write the one with the best ending because the one with the best ending you will actually finish. You probably have a lot

of great first acts, but you likely only have one or two things you actually know where it goes, where it ends up. That's the one you need to write. The ending is so true. If you have a great ending, you can figure out your movie. I mean, all stories are kind of mysteries to some degree. You figure out where you need to get to and then how you're going to back into it. Of course, you're doing it from both sides, really, and that's why the middles tend to be kind of mushy.

But yeah, if you know that ending, you're set. Yeah. When you watch stand-up, because a lot of people listen to the show, they're used to listening to stand-up comedians or seeing stand-up specials, what do you relate to in the writing of stand-up specials as a screenwriter, and what do you see as different?

I'm always fascinated by really good stand-up because the degree to which they're able to maintain a joke after joke after joke after joke. They get the audience's trust and then they're able to tell a story. And along the way of that story, there's other jokes to remind you, this is a comedy show. This is how we're going to keep it going. But when they can call back to it and wrap it up in a theme, that's when I really applaud. Like, oh, it wasn't just about these individual jokes. They were part of a bigger package

that all fit together in a way. That is what I really love. And it's one of the reasons why I enjoy your comedy specials is that they are crafted and honed in a way. And they're perfected in a way that I sort of can't do as a screenwriter because I don't get the chance to audition that material. Right.

I get one shot to tell that joke, whereas you've told that joke, you know, 100 times, 200 times, and crafted it just the way because you know exactly how it lands. You've said this thing on the show that always rings in my head, which is on your podcast about,

I think you call it breaking the back of a script. So sometimes you'll say, when you really have an idea for a screenplay, you need to go away from your life to break the back, what you call the break back of the script. Can you talk about that? Yeah, this is a thing I did early on in my career, and I still do it to some degree.

A script is about 120 pages. It's a big writing commitment, and you're trying to deliver this entire thing. And if you're just doing a little piece at a time, I find it hard to sort of get the momentum. So what I used to do is I would book a hotel room in Vegas or someplace, go barricade myself, handwrite scenes. And so I couldn't go back and

edit them and just write it, generate as much material as I possibly could. So like 60, 70 pages of handwritten. Back in the day, I would fax them to my assistant who would type them up. And so when I came back, this is what I would have. And during those writing retreats, I wasn't drinking. I wasn't watching TV. I would have like one non-interesting book I was allowed to read just so that I was— One non-interesting book? Yeah, some sort of historical nonfiction that's like, yeah, I can read a couple chapters, but it's not going to pull me away from it. And then if I'm writing scene after scene after scene, I really know what it's like. I know what it feels like in that world.

I know who the characters are. I know what their voices are. And if I can come back with like 60 pages, man, I'm going to finish that script. I'm going to really know how to do it. When you're in the hotel room, are you on drugs? I'm not on drugs. I'm not on a thing.

Some caffeine, but that's it. Do you exercise? Oh, yeah. I'll go to the gym. Okay. But it's honestly like, it feels like a vacation from the rest of your life. It's selfish in the way like, you know what? Now I'm only doing this thing. And because I'm only doing this thing, I'm not worrying about my family. I'm not worrying about all the other stuff. I'm just doing this thing. And that feels like a luxury. That's interesting. So, okay, you have the idea for a screenplay. It's going to get really granular. Please, let's do it. You have the idea for the screenplay. You go to the hotel room. You have a notebook, a series of notebooks. Yeah. So, I can be even more specific. I tend to have what I call the

scroll. So, working all the way back, I'm thinking about a scene. I'm writing a scene. And so I sit there and I think about the scene and I loop the scene in my head. And so I'm thinking, okay, what's happening in the scene? Who's in the scene? Where is the scene?

And I'm just, it's almost like character blocking where you're just like, how do people move into and out of the space? What's happening? How's it getting discussed? What kinds of things are they saying? Who's saying what? Where does the scene want to start?

Where does the scene want to end? I'm just looping that in my head before I'm writing a single word. And then once I can sort of see and hear the scene in my head, okay, I got it, I got it. I will scribble it down as quickly as I can on paper. And that paper is folded in quarters for some reason, I don't know why.

And it's just the quickest version of the scene I can possibly write down, just so I don't lose any part of it. And then I'll go through and write the more full version of the scene that actually has all the dialogue and the scene description is the finished version of the scene.

And then I repeat that about 200 times, and that's a movie. 200 scenes. Yeah, 200 scenes. 100, 200 scenes for most movies. Wow. Yeah. And so that seems crazy, but I think that's really the way that most writing works,

is that you have some vague sense of what needs to happen. You sort of see it in your head. You sort of hear it in your head, and then you've got to get it down. And too often, I think the problem people, writers run into is they stare at the blank screen and they just start typing and they don't know where the typing is going. Screenwriting is about scenes. And so just knowing the shape of that scene, you're going to be able to conquer the writing of it. A lot of times on the podcast, you'll talk about like, you have one episode I've listened to countless times again and again called the conflict episode. You basically talk about this premise of if there is no conflict in a scene, it doesn't necessarily

deserve to be a scene. But then there's certain movies like Lost in Translation or like the recent Vim Vendors film, Perfect Days, where it's so kind of like almost like entrancing or like it's soft. And what is that exactly in that universe? So there's, in the case of, I haven't seen Perfect Days, but Lost in Translation, it's that distance between where your life is and where you want it to be and sort of how much you're willing to push towards getting your life, your situation to be what it wants to be. And the conflict is between obviously Scarlett Johansson and her husband, but also Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray and sort of like what they're trying to get out of each other. And are they being honest with each other? How much can they trust each other? There still is conflict, even though it's not people shouting at each other or what is their, how much can they trust each other, there still is conflict, even though it's not

people shouting at each other. I think people have this idea that all conflict has to be loud. And sometimes conflict is really quiet. Celine Song's movie, Past Lives, is not a conflict-y movie in the sense that people are shouting at each other, but it's the conflict of needing to make a choice between two different paths.

And that's conflict. It is driving the story forward. Yeah, that's a perfect movie for me. That's precisely my taste of a movie where, yeah, the conflict is sort of, oh, God. Yeah, yeah. It's sort of, oh, God, what's going to happen? And then everything in this every scene feeds, in some ways, what's going to happen? And then everything in this, every scene feeds, in some ways, what's going to happen. Yeah, 100%.

And that's the range of what conflict can be. Like, incredibly quiet like that, or I just saw Cola Scola's new show, Oh Mary, which is fantastic. Which is just shouting the entire time. Everybody's at each other's throats the entire time. And it's hilariously funny, but it's a completely different vibe

and in both cases well there is conflict there there's a lot of conflict every character's in conflict with every other character the most conflict and I love it and I love it

it's so good I was screaming laughing yeah what are films I mean it sounds like you like past lives what are films that you like that are being made right now

and what do you feel like are films that aren't getting made enough in this industry? Films I really like that are getting made. I like that we're willing to try some different things. Like, Bottoms is just a crazy movie. And I'm just so impressed and excited that it got made. Because it doesn't all work, but man, it's just going for it. It sort of understands where the audience is and is just willing to sort of push ahead.

And I loved that, sort of how that movie came together. But I don't think we're making very many of those. We get A24 movies, but that's sort of the extent of it. Right. Neon's making some movies. It's kind of like those two are the indie studios of today.

Yes. And, you know, they're coming out of a genre background and so now they're trying some comedies, which is exciting, but I want more of that experimentation because we were able to make Go at Sony, which was a big studio to be making a little tiny movie, now would have been an A24 movie. I wish more companies were willing to take those chances. Why do you think, from a business perspective, why was the 90s ripe for that to happen? Why was the 70s ripe for that to happen? Those seem to be the two recent eras where that sort of blew up. Yeah. Some of the factors were there was a lot of interesting money floating around there to do stuff and it wasn't so crazy expensive to release a movie.

So you had the Miramaxes and the Dimensions and sort of the other ways to sort of get movies into theaters. Theaters were profitable. If a movie played for four weeks in theaters, that was great. And there was home video to make up the losses if it didn't do so great theatrically. So you could take more swings because you had home video to make up the losses if it didn't do so great at theatrical. So you could take more swings because you had home video as a backstop.

And now we don't have that because now things are made for a studio, but then it's going to go to streaming and it's not really going to make much more money off of streaming. So that whole model is probably what was so different. So my guess is that the explosion of the 90s was really more about home video than about the theaters,

but the theaters benefited from it. And with the 70s, do you think it was just people like Robert Evans who ran a studio just going, like, I like these movies, and I'm powerful right now? Yeah. We also had legislation that made it clear that it was great to have competition in the theater spaces, that movie theaters couldn't be owned by movie studios, that you couldn't shut movies out of theaters.

And so people realized, oh, I don't need to go through these gatekeepers. Instead, I can put my movie directly in theaters and an audience can find it, an audience who was hungry for something that they weren't getting out of the studios. Right. With like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Charlie's Angels, you're dealing with someone else's original baby. Yep. What is your obligation to the original creators of those things?

Yeah, most of the work I've done has been adaptations of other people's things. And so I always have to be mindful of, someone else made this, but that thing that they made, I'm not going to be able to touch it. It sits on the shelf. It's perfect the way it is. Roald Dahl's book is always going to be there. The original Charles Daniel series is always going to be there.

How do I take the stuff that is great about that, that I love so much about that, and bring that to film, and bring it to the media, and carry across those things that will work on a big screen and not get stuck with the things that are really not movie ideas. And so both cases, I wanted it to be a giant

hug around the original thing and not ever be ashamed of what it was. And so with Charlie's Angels, that was me and Drew Barrymore meeting for the first time. We're sitting on Amy Pascal's couch at Sony Pictures and just talking about what Charlie's Angels would feel like. We weren't thinking about plot. We were just like, what is the vibe?

What is the sensation you want to get having watched Charlie's Angels? And it was about sort of joy and pride. These girls are incredibly competent when they're on the job, but giant dorks when they're off the job. Because cool people aren't funny. It but giant dorks when they're off the job because cool people aren't funny. It's like dorks are funny. And so how do we make sure that they can stay dorks?

And the first meetings were all about that. And then eventually we got to, okay, and we have to have a plot. We have to have villains. We have to have this whole other thing. But it was really talking about what was the experience of being in the world of Charlie's Angels going to feel like?

It's really funny because it's an interesting point that dorks are funny, but sort of cool people aren't funny. Because I think about that in comedy all the time. Whenever a comedian tips into cool, I'm always a little bit like leaning away. Yeah. And why is that? And then in movies, when is it okay for characters to laugh at the humor that is in the movie?

Or let us as the viewer of the movie laugh? I could spend hours diving into this because one of the things I think was so smart about the show Catastrophe, the Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan show, is that from the start they acknowledge that if I'm telling you a joke, you're going to laugh at the joke. If the joke is funny, the characters are going to acknowledge

that a joke actually happened, which most television comedy doesn't do that. So people plow through as if nothing funny has been said, which is so weird and artificial, and yet we've accepted it as a thing. So I love situations where comedy is actually funny within the world itself. So a situation I ran into, I did the movie

Big Fish, but I also did the Broadway musical Big Fish. And there was one point after Chicago, but before we opened on Broadway, where the producers came to me and said, we need more jokes. The show has to be funnier. We need a lot more jokes. And basically, if you don't add more jokes, we show has to be funnier. We need a lot more jokes. And basically, if you don't add more jokes,

we're going to bring in somebody to add more jokes to Big Fish. I'm sorry to laugh, but it's such a funny example of a terrible note. Yeah. Because it's such a broad note, and that's actually not what things need usually.

Yeah, and to their credit, they had seen the reviews out of Chicago saying the show wasn't as particularly funny and they'd been in the audience with it and so there's some things were getting laughs and some things weren't getting laughs and we were trying different stuff but it wasn't a laugh riot of a show and so I went

to my funny friends and I said Hail Mary, help me. Here's the show. If you have any ideas for any jokes, pitch them. And so maybe one or two got in there. But to my credit, my friends really did step up and found some little places for jokes. But getting back

to do you acknowledge that something is funny in the course of it, I think it was over that process that I added this series of jokes for Edward Bloom who is a storyteller who naturally would tell jokes. And think it was over that process that I added this series of jokes for Edward Bloom, who is a storyteller who naturally would tell jokes. And so it's a question of like, he knows he's telling a joke and everyone around him recognizes he's telling a joke. And the series

of jokes is that the town I grew up in, our town was so small that our zip code was a fraction. Our town was so small, our phone book was the yellow page. Our town was so small, we phone book was the yellow page. Our town was so small, we only had three jokes. Yeah, yeah. Which was the Caproni.

That's funny. It's actually not very funny, but it's appropriately funny within that world. It's cute. And cute felt like the right place for it. you have great advice for screenwriters what's your what is your advice for square one because like i was i was in school and i took tons of tons of nine screenwriting classes as a writing major in college. And then I became a comedian partly because I was like, oh, there's no job for being a screenwriter. I just thought, oh, people will want me. And then I think the realization sometimes as a writer is you go, nobody's actually looking for writers per se.

So that would be my question is someone goes to college in Washington, D.C., they want to be a screenwriter. Yeah. Should they move to Hollywood? Should they move to Los Angeles? I think they should first learn what the screenplay format is. So just basically it's this weird way we write movies that is reflecting what's going to show up on screen. You've got to read a bunch of screenplays. Start with reading a bunch of screenplays

for the movies you really love. Watch the movie, then read the screenplay, or read the screenplay, then watch the movie. Watch them together and really see how it goes from what's on the page to on the screen. Understand that. Read a bunch of bad screenplays, too,

because you'll recognize that there are going to be things that just never work, things that frustrate you. And then, like all things, you start by imitating. You start writing and you start imitating the stuff that you're seeing and you get better, you get some stuff under you. But you don't need to move to Los Angeles

until you have a couple of finished screenplays that you feel really good about and that you can really good about and that you can feel good sharing and showing them around. It's less important now to move to LA than when we started the podcast, just because everything is more virtual now. There's people who've

never come to Los Angeles who have agents and who are staffing on shows because it's all Zoom rooms. But, yeah, I think if you want to write country songs, you should move to Nashville at some point. If you want to write movies, it's New York or LA at some point.

Right. But should you take the job in Los Angeles as a receptionist at an agency or in the mailroom? Is that old trope real still? I think the trope is real just in the sense that those kind of entry-level jobs give you a sense of what the conversation is like and how

it all fits together and how the business kind of works. Yeah, and how everyone shouts at each other all the time. Yes. So you're really good at shouting. Yes. Build your diaphragm, your vocal muscles there. It just gives you a sense of how things really work

because it's crucial to understand that, you know, a screenwriter's job is putting the words on the paper in order to shape a movie. Yeah. But it's also talking to all the other people who have to get involved to make a movie to actually have it manifest. And so that ability to understand what people really want,

to understand the notes behind the notes, to figure out what I should be writing next, that is stuff you tend to pick up in the air in Los Angeles a little more easily than if you're just watching from afar. What are screenplays that you think people should read? I feel like you've recommended Aliens before. Oh, God. Aliens is so seminal. So, Aliens by James Cameron. Every action writer who

grew up, started the business in the 80s or 90s, read Aliens and internalized Aliens because just the way action works on a page is so specific and clear and you feel like you're watching the movie, but it's not overloaded with camera angles and stuff. It's just genius.

I don't know why that movie, Aliens, sticks with me so much. And I think maybe it goes to the screenplay. What do you think he was doing? And I remember to this day, and I think a lot of people remember that movie to this day. What do you think about that movie as sticking with people? Why do movies stick with people

and some people, some of them are ephemeral? In Aliens, you can pause the movie at any moment and you know exactly what every character wants and what they're trying to do. So you know what their goals are overall,

but you also know what they need to do in the next three seconds. And so it has both the incredibly tight stakes for right now, but also for the movie. And you see a giant arc for Sigourney Weaver's character because Ripley goes, she does not ever want to go back to that planet, to, okay, she's reluctant to go back to that planet,

to, okay, I'm going to go save this kid. She's going to go back and face the beast. She has to go through this giant trial and you're completely with her because you know she's responding the way she should at every moment she's not just being a character in a movie she really is doing what she needs to be doing right there's funny stuff in the background too like the whole crew those characters are specific. They're funny. You got Hicks. You got Hudson. You got Vasquez.

They all have their moments, and they know they're in the right movie. Right. And it just all works. Yeah. Yeah. But you say the thing about the endings of movies, and I totally agree. If you don't have the ending, you don't have a movie. What do you do when you have the ending of a movie and you probably have the beginning because because usually a movie comes out of and my shows come

out of this idea of like oh i know what i want to talk about that's the first act of your movie yeah and i know where it's gonna land if you're lucky you know where it's gonna land that's the end like the middle that murky middle the murky middle it's like what land. That's the end. Like the middle. That murky middle. The murky middle. It's like, what are you doing? You just don't have it. Yeah. Have you had movies where you've reconfigured the middle a bunch because it's just not quite working? Like what has to happen in the middle of a movie or play?

Well, I mean, the thing you recognize is that it's not just one story. It's a bunch of little stories. And there have to be, youups and then come-downs throughout the thing. It's clear what the smaller movie is within this movie and the next movie and how you're always moving forward. The director

who did Big Fish on Broadway, Susan Stroman, one of the things she liked to say is she never wanted to see the same set twice because she felt like if she came back to the same set, then things hadn't moved forward. The story hasn't moved forward. What do you mean see the same set twice. And because she felt like if she came back to the same set, then things hadn't moved forward. We haven't sort of, the story hasn't moved forward. What do you mean by the same set? The same set.

She literally did not want to see that same set ever come back on stage. So if we left that set, we're never seeing that set again. It's dead to her. It's gone. If it's the living room, for example, you're not going to go back to the living room.

And I think the screenwriting equivalent to that is burning the house down. And in what ways are you making sure that you can never go back to that safe place you started the story in or an earlier place so be constantly like destroying the world behind the characters so that they cannot choose to go back they can never retreat back to a safer place that they're always forging forward oh my gosh yeah a great example of that for me is children of men oh yeah children yeah. Children of Men is a movie, I think, where you go, how could they possibly get out of this situation?

And then they do because they're in another place entirely that you kind of didn't know existed. And then that place gets killed, so to speak. And then you're in another new place. And the movie is essentially another new place. And you're willing to go with it as long as you trust the characters who you're there with and you believe that they believe that this situation is real and the stakes are real

and that this is the thing that needs to happen. The challenge is you shouldn't feel the heavy hand of the writer forcing them to take that action or moving forward. You have the characters make choices that inevitably ruin the things behind them and make it impossible for them to go back. That's a tricky balance, though, because also there's the same thing,

which is you want to be working with characters and locations that you're familiar with so that you, by the second act or third act of the movie, you care about all of these characters and situations. So it's like, how can you burn it down? Yeah, but you care about characters. You don't care about places. And so if you are destroying the normal situation,

which is the equivalent of location but you still care about those people it's okay and as long as the relationships between those characters are established they can be strained and sometimes they can be broken and repaired but it's making sure that you really feel like there's stakes and consequences

for each of the little steps inside of this bigger movie that's how you keep from getting those sort of murky middles where you feel like you can just rearrange the scenes in any order and it wouldn't really matter. Yeah, I've heard that as a concept. My friend Adam Leon is a film director and he always says this thing, if you can pull out a scene and it's the same movie, it's not supposed to be in the movie. No, 100%. I mean, everything that could be cut kind of should be cut. Right.

And yes, there are times where that funny scene needs to stay in the movie because it is a comedy and there's reasons why you do open up for a scene that are sort of purely comedy. Right. But in general, yeah, everything that's in there

absolutely has to be in there or else it's going to, it could and should be cut. What do you think is the interrelationship between television and film right now? In the sense that like,

for me, my experience of film and, you know, so a movie like Past Lives, the buy-in for me is, okay, this is going to be two hours

at the movie theater. Yeah. And I'm going to meet characters and I'm going to spend time with them, I'm going to go on a journey with them, and then we're going to land somewhere together. And then they'll be done with those characters. Yeah, they're done with those characters.

And television is kind of this open-ended commitment to spend time with characters. But less open than it used to be. I mean, it used to be, you don't know how many, is it going to be seven seasons, is it going to be nine seasons? And your relationship with characters who are going through endless time is different than, you know, an eight episode, you know, Severance or something. Like, you know, Severance is a long movie kind of, but it doesn't have to be a series. Right.

And that's exciting that we're sort of in between these two things. So we can do cinematic TV shows and sometimes TV shows that have pull-in from some of the best sort of TV themes. Don't you think like, you know, you were very involved with the strike, the writer's strike. And thankfully you and Craig did a lot of extra podcast episodes

explaining things that I actually truly didn't explain that I'm a member of the Writers Guild. The thing that always stuck in my craw was the AI component of it. And it punted to a degree. It'll be revisited whether or not AI can write screenplays on behalf of the studios. Is that punted for a couple of years or indefinitely? So the only one little small part got punted.

So we should talk through what the issues were and what got resolved. So going into the strike, we wanted to make clear that AI was not a writer. That anything that came out of one of these systems... By the way, that's the craziest sentence to even say. That we're even having this conversation right now that AI is not a writer.

It's not a writer. But we were negotiating the contract at a time like ChatGPT had just come out and we realized, holy shit, we only get a chance every three years to negotiate this contract. We really need to make sure we put some guardrails on here because three years from now, who knows what the

fuck's going to be happening. So we said, AI is not a writer and the material generated by AI is not literary material for purposes of our contract. And literary material is scripts, screenplays, the things that we write that we get paid to write. So it's that stuff that comes

out of one of these systems. It's not that. It also can't be source material. They can't say, oh, here's a book that was generated by this thing. Now you're adapting it for a lower fee and the original credit gets all messed up. We need to protect our members for their

livelihoods, for their credits, for just basic compensation. For example, just so people understand what we mean, you could put Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into AI and say, can you put Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into AI and say, can you write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory part two, part three, part four, part five? And it would come up with something.

It would come up with something, and it might not be great. The worry is that it kind of doesn't have to be great, because then they come to me and say, hey, John, here's the first draft of this. Just polish this up a little bit. And that's bullshit. And we needed to make sure that was little bit. And that's bullshit.

And we needed to make sure that was, we could say that's bullshit, but we actually have to say that in contract language that is clear and definable. And so we went into this negotiation thinking, okay, this should not be a hard thing to win because it's clear that AI is not a writer. We just needed to have some clear definitions here. And the studio said, no, absolutely not.

And so for that reason and a bunch of other reasons, we went on strike. Second longest strike in our history. And at the end of it, we won protections that said, AI is not a writer. Stuff it generates is not literary material. Plus extra protections for

if they give you any material that's generated by one of these systems, they have to disclose it first. It's your choice whether you use the system or not. These were all crucial things. And we got those things. We got all those things. But for three years. Because every three years we have to renegotiate the contract.

Here's the sticking point that we couldn't get past. Right now we're talking about work going forward. So the stuff that I'm doing today and the stuff that's coming out forward. But what about all the other screenplays we've written? What about my screenplay for Go that Sony owns? Can they train a model based on my screenplay

to do something else? We said, no. And they said, maybe. Because that's a huge issue right now, is that a lot of these AI companies are running out of things to feed the machine. Yep. And so as we left it, and this was probably the best we were going to do, we disagreed.

We don't agree, and this is a lope and live issue. We reserve the right to sue each other's brains out over it if it becomes a problem. Because right now it's not happening, but it could start happening. It could be the issue of sort of who, we know the studios own the copyright on these things, but do they own the right to create derivative works off of this stuff? It's murky.

Doesn't it feel like someone could put Go and Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Nines into a computer and say, I'd like a movie written in this style, but I want it to be about a little girl living in Idaho. And I call that the Nora Ephron problem,

because Nora Ephron, a brilliant screenwriter, and so what happens if you put all of her screenplays into the system and make a new Nora Ephron movie for me, write a new Nora Ephron script? And what do you do about that? And we don't have a great answer for that right now. We feel like it should be prohibited, and yet under U.S. copyright law,

under sort of international law, it's just not really clear. And so beyond the strike, I testify to the Office of Copyright on behalf of the WGA, arguing that material that this stuff is generating should not be copyrightable, which helps us out. We talked to the FTC about how this is really a restraint of trade and an unfair competition problem. Because if me as John August has to compete against an AI version of John August, that's crazy. And we've got to stop that. And it's already happening right now for authors on Amazon.

Authors will find books written by AI kind of using their names and using their characters. It's nuts. I mean, I have no response for that because it's inconceivable. Yeah, but we're living in inconceivable times. And so that was the real frustration of the strike is how do you try to put up rules around this crazy situation? Yeah, John August, the screenwriter, is competing against a simulation

of John August, the screenwriter. Mike Birbiglia, you know, they feed all your material into a system. They use these really good video likeness things to create a fake Mike Berbiglia, and they create a new Mike Berbiglia special. That's you. Because honestly, as well-made as your specials are,

it's you on a stage, Mike. I mean, it would not be that hard to create it. You're absolutely right. Yeah. You're not wrong. They could take an existing special and just reanimate your lips to say the new jokes. I mean, that's astonishing.

Yeah. The fire that got you into screenwriting, what was it, and does it still exist, or is it different? The fire that got me into it, I was always a writer, so I was always writing things. I was writing short stories. I got a journalism degree.

I was doing advertising for a while. I loved magazine writing. But once I realized that there was such a thing as screenwriting, once I realized that movies were actually written, I'm like, oh, that's what I want to do. And that sounds so naive. I love that. But the first screenplay I read was Steven Soderbergh's script for

Sex, Lies, and Videotape. And the only reason I got to read it was because he printed, he published this book, which was his journal of making the movie, but also the full screenplay. And so I put in the VHS, watched it, and I flipped pages like, oh my god, everything they're saying

is there on the page, and there's also this other stuff that talks about the things they're doing. It's like, there's a plan for this. And knowing that this thing existed, I'm like, oh, that's what I have to do. this is a slow round please did your life go the way you expected it to go so far yeah i mean that sounds that sounds that sounds weird but largely um the things i think about when i remember myself at an early age um I would wake up early on a Saturday morning and actually this was probably a Sunday morning

because on a Saturday morning, I'd wake up early to watch cartoons. Cartoons, sure. But on Sundays, there weren't cartoons. So what the hell are you going to do? Right. And so I would sit on the floor of my room and I'd have all my little toys

and I'd line them up and they were sort of playing battles and wars across this river. And they had like ongoing storylines and dramas between them. And sometimes people would switch sides. And I would play that for two or three hours until my family woke up and could actually have breakfast. And so I think I always assumed

I was going to be doing some version of that for the rest of it. And that's really kind of what I'm doing. Yeah, that's what you're doing. I just imagine stories and I just type them down. Right, with an extraordinary amount of discipline. Yeah, but I wasn't one of those kids who imagined like,

I'm going to be a Steven Spielberg. I'm going to shoot movies. I wasn't filming little things with my super great camera. I was not that guy, but I was always telling stories. I was always playing. Playing and sculpting and telling stories.

It's interesting. One of the things you and Craig will talk about on the show sometimes, I think is completely true, is this idea of you really only have to write about three hours a day to be a writer. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. There's this idea that you're going to clock in at nine

and clock out at five, and that you're going to be typing that entire time. That's just not possible. The human brain just doesn't work that way. I will try to write for an hour at a time and get up and walk away and do something else and then come back. If you're writing three hours a day,

you're getting a lot done. During the time you're not physically at the keyboard, you're thinking through stuff. You're solving problems. Hopefully, by the time you're sitting down at the keyboard, you're thinking through stuff. You're solving problems. Hopefully, by the time you're sitting down at the keyboard, you're really ready to write and get that stuff knocked out. But no, it's not just sitting there at the desk for eight hours a day. What are ideal writing conditions for you?

In my 20s, I used to write at night a lot. I could write from 8 until 2 in the morning. You'd be in a flow and you'd just keep going. And then once you have a family, it's just not feasible. You're being too selfish if you're doing that because you're not being around for them. And so now I try to get some stuff done in the morning and then maybe one hour in the afternoon

that's really writing time. The best discipline I ever had was when I was doing these three books. I did a three-book series called Arlo Finch. I'm really happy with the books, but man, writing books is hard because you need to hit 1,000, 2,000 words a day or else you're just never going to get those books finished.

I had to be so disciplined about that every day that I was blocking out that time that this is my writing time. I don't care if we're on vacation. I need to be downstairs in the lobby with my headphones in writing because otherwise it's just not going to get done. Wow. 1,000 to 2,000 words a day, right.

Yeah, and you think, oh, that must be a lot. But if you actually look at it on your screen, it's just like four inches on your screen. It doesn't actually seem like that much. Right, because a book is somewhere in the universe of 50 to 150 thousand words. Yeah. The sheer amount of words. Yeah.

I was going to say, what are your hobbies, but I know you run, because you just ran a half marathon. I just ran a half marathon here in Brooklyn, which was really fun. That's great. And that was an accidental hobby. We were living in Paris for a year, and we didn't have a gym and my husband started running. I was like, Oh, he can run. Maybe I can run. And I just started running

and you know, couch to 5k, 5k to 10k. And suddenly you can run a half marathon. Is there anything from training for a half marathon that you carry over into your writing? I think the sense that like, oh, you actually do have to sort of put in the miles is important to remember because sometimes there's a, because you can sort of sprint a bit while you're writing and sort of like, okay,

I can knock out like 30 pages in a week if I have to. Yeah. You can be a little less disciplined about stuff. In running, you can't do that. If you do just try to like run too far, you're going to hurt yourself too far, too fast. If you try to try to run too far, you're going to hurt yourself. If you're too far, too fast. If you try to push yourself to a place where you're not going to be able to do it.

So recognizing that you've got to put in the miles, that does carry through. That's interesting. One of the things I find often when people ask me about starting up in comedy is they'll ask me, how do you get started? And I'll say the thing.

And it's essentially what you're describing, which is you have to do the miles. And their face sinks. And you realize that they wanted you to say the hack. And then there's just no hack. With screenwriting, is there a hack that people don't know about that's a little hack? I mean, this is going to sound terrible,

but write the best version of the scene every time. I think sometimes... Say that again because I want to fully understand it. So write the best version of the scene and I don't put in... I never stop with sort of like the oh it's a no with a mediocre i don't i never do the vomit draft i always do the um this i really believe is a very good scene and let's go shoot this let's go shoot this let's go film it um and i always deliver a script that i think could be shot the way it is here's here's

the hack hack hack um which- Triple hack. Which drives everyone else crazy, is I write out a sequence. And so I'll write whatever scene appeals to me to write on the day, wherever it is in the script. And because we're not going to shoot the movie in sequence, we're going to shoot the scenes as they come. If I feel like writing this scene right now,

I'm going to write this scene right now. Because it's an interesting thing. You know, I've heard that advice before, now, I'm going to write this scene right now. Because it's interesting. You know, I've heard that advice before, and I think it's a great piece of advice. I've used it recently. I think it was Sorkin who said it in an interview once, where he's just like, just write the scenes that you want to see

and just figure it out. Yeah. You know, just write the stuff that you like, that you enjoy. So many newer screenwriters get obsessed with like, oh, I have to have this structure, I have to do this, and all that, about all the shoulds and the have-tos. Yeah.

And it's like, no, the experience of an audience is they're in there every moment with the scene, so make sure it's delightful in that moment, that it really is worth it in that moment. And I think people forget that. The final thing we do is working it out for a cause. Is there an organization that you like to contribute to? And we will contribute and then link to them in the show notes. Yeah, this is an organization that my friend Rachel Bloom turned me on to, which is just really smart. It's called Miri's List. M-I-R-Y, Miri's List.

And what they do is they work with newly settled refugee families to the U.S. to get them the stuff they need just to be set up and working and successful. So sometimes it's as basic as here's their Amazon wish list because they've just settled in Toledo, Ohio

and they need these things because they have three kids. It's just this woman, Miri, who encountered these families who were settled and didn't have the stuff they needed. She was gathering cribs and things for them. In a lot of cases, these are families who are here now because they were Afghan translators, and then as Afghanistan fell, they were working with the U.S.,

and they got their refugee status here, but they don't have anything. They have no support system. So Mary's List helps out with them. That's a beautiful one. And yeah, that's fantastic. We will contribute to them. We will link to them in the show notes.

And John, thanks for coming on. It's long overdue. I've learned so much from you, from your writing, from your podcast. I appreciate your friendship and thanks for coming on. It's long overdue. I've learned so much from you, from your writing, from your podcast. I appreciate your friendship and thanks for coming on the show. Mike, an absolute pleasure. That's going to do it for another episode

of Working It Out. You can follow John August on Instagram at John August, like the month. He went skydiving recently. You can follow John August on Instagram at John August like the month he went skydiving recently. You can see that video on his Instagram. It has nothing to do with screenwriting but it's a fun video.

Subscribe to his podcast Script Notes. Check out Burbiggs.com. Sign up for the mailing list. You can watch the full video of this one on our YouTube channel. The Mike Burbiglia

YouTube channel is a great channel to subscribe to on YouTube. We're very proud of it. Graham Willoughby did the cinematography for the podcast. It looks very nice. If you've never seen it before, it looks gorgeous. He's actually the same cinematographer who filmed Good One, which is on Peacock that Seth Meyers produced and Jesse Fox created. Our producers of Working It Out are myself, along with Peter Salamone and Joseph Birbiglia,

as well as Mabel Lewis, associate producer Gary Simons, sound mix by Shubh Saran, supervising engineer Kate Belinsky. Special thanks to Jack Antonoff and Bleachers for their music. Their album is so good. They're playing Madison Square Garden this fall. Special thanks to my wife, the poet J-Hope Stein. Her audio book is available now on all the audio book platforms. Special thanks as always to our daughter, Una, who built the original

radio Fortman of Pillows. Thanks most of all to you who are listening. If you enjoy the show, rate us and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people find the show. Tell your friends. Why not tell your enemies? Let's say you're a screenwriter and you get a really absurd note on a script from a studio executive and you want to voice your frustration, but you don't want to burn bridges, right? So instead of saying, hey, this note's ridiculous, you're ridiculous, you have no talent,

your job shouldn't exist, maybe you should say, hey, you know, you should listen to this podcast. It's creatives talking to other creatives in a way that's productive and not destructive. Maybe that'll help understand the creative process a little better and bring them some good laughs.