Posted by Drew Marquardt

https://johnaugust.com/2025/scriptnotes-episode-712-something-wicked-this-way-comes-transcript

https://johnaugust.com/?p=23595

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids: there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

John: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 712 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome back one of our favorite guests and guest hosts.

Craig: Yes.

John: Dana Fox is a writer and showrunner whose credits include, taking a breath here, What Happens in Vegas, Couples Retreat, Ben and Kate, How to Be Single, Cruella, Home Before Dark, The Lost City, Wicked, and the upcoming Wicked: For Good. She’s also my former assistant and one of my very favorite people. Welcome back, Dana Fox.

Craig: Ta-da.

Dana Fox: John and Craig are my favorite people. I have to say it right away. Get it out of my system.

John: We’re recording this in our office on a very rainy day. Behind you is the couch, which you would often take naps on.

Dana: I assume you were going to have it bronzed, but it’s just the same couch. It’s still here.

John: The same couch. Lambert is now taking a nap on your couch.

Dana: I saw it, and I had a Pavlovian response to it. The second I saw it, I thought I was going to fall asleep on it.

Craig: The gravity just takes you in, and you just want to lie down and not work.

Dana: Hold me towards it and made me disappoint John because I wasn’t awake to answer his phone.

Craig: Look at you now.

Dana: It’s because he let me nap that I think I did so well in the business.

Craig: [laughs] Okay. Well, something has to explain it.

Dana: I just needed to sleep a little bit. I was so tired. I needed to prep.

John: Look at you now with those headphones on. As Craig said, you do look like Princess Leia.

Dana: Thanks, guys.

Craig: Exactly like Obi-Wan, you’re our only hope, Princess Leia, because you’re wearing a Princess Leia–

Dana: She was a real hero of mine, so thank you for that. I really wanted to be her.

John: Carrie Fisher, of course. Incredible.

Dana: Oh my God, she’s incredible, and the most amazing writer.

John: Did you ever meet her?

Dana: No, I never did. I would have lost my mind.

John: I went to a birthday party for a friend that was at her house. She was exactly as cool and weird as you would want her to be.

Dana: A dream.

John: A dream. An absolute dream.

Craig: Nice.

John: Today, with you on the show, I do want to talk about Wicked, obviously. I also want to talk about character suffering, whether the ’90s were really a great movie decade, or whether this is all just our nostalgia. We’ll get into that.

Dana: Amazing. Am I the character who’s suffering or characters that I write?

John: You will be. There’s a listener question about character suffering.

Dana: Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about me. I was like, “I’m now suffering.”

John: Well, we’ll get into suffering because in our bonus segment, I want to talk about the promo circuit because you’re on the promo circuit right now, and Craig’s been through the promo circuit. It’s just exhausting.

Dana: It’s intense. I’m really tired.

John: It’s a mark of success that you have to do the promo circuit, but it’s just it’s a lot.

Dana: Yes, and you became a writer because you enjoy pajamas and glasses and never doing your hair, and then you’re on–

John: Not being looked at, basically.

Dana: Never having a single person look at your face.

Craig: Yes. That’s my favorite thing in the world.

Dana: Craig, that is the best thing in the entire world. Then you’re on the promo circuit and all the wrong things are happening. People are looking directly at your face.

John: Sitting next to you is the Scriptnotes book, the Hardcovers, which just came in. We’re so excited to hold them. Craig, have you gotten yours up in Canada yet?

Craig: I have not received it in Canada yet. I don’t even know if you guys have my address in Canada.

Dana: You guys, it’s so beautiful. I can’t wait to read it. It’s so gorgeous. Just to say, if I may, John and Craig are the people that I call whenever I don’t know how to do anything. I’m always like, “Hey, guys, I’m sorry.” Let’s say I started with a voiceover, and then I have to do a fade-in. “Where does fade in go on the page?” Nobody knows. It all looks weird.”

John: Basically, non-creative questions then.

Dana: No, that’s not true. I call you guys with every question I have. Now I just have the book, so there’s no excuse that I’m not allowed to call you anymore. I have to look at the book.

Craig: It’s true. Dana sometimes calls. She’s like, “But is 1 also a prime number?” It doesn’t even have to be about screenwriting. It’s about anything.

Dana: It doesn’t even have to be about screenwriting. Totally.

John: One of the goals with the Scriptnotes book, as you remember, is that we wanted a book that if you were to throw it across the room, you could hurt a person. I’ll say that the book has some sharp edges to it, which is nice, but it’s actually lighter than I’d expect. Isn’t it lighter in your hand?

Dana: It’s looking wild. It looks like a trompe-l’oeil. Is it a cake? You know that show?

Craig: Absolutely. It looks like it could be cake.

Dana: Is it cake?

John: It could be cake.

Dana: Yes, because you pick it up and it’s like, “Ooh, no problem,” but it looks substantial.

John: If you throw it in your backpack, it’s not weighing you down, but it is a substantial book. Also, it lies flat, which I didn’t know was going to happen, but actually it’s nice.

Craig: Oh.

John: You can actually open up it.

Dana: [gasps] You’re right. I’m doing it. Reader or listener, I’m doing it. This is great.

Craig: You called the podcast listeners readers.

Dana: I don’t know how to do this, you guys. I’m so bad at stuff. I called my phone the internet before to John. I said, I just kept pointing at it and going, “I have to internet it later.” He was like, “What is happening with you?”

Craig: Oh, Dana Fox.

Dana: I love you guys.

John: Thank you to everybody who sent in the pre-order receipts to Drew at askajohnaugust.com, because we love those and they’re a way for us to know how many people are actually buying the book. This past week, Drew, you sent all those folks a bonus chapter. How did that go?

Drew: Really well. People were really nice about it and sent glowing emails back, which felt nice to read.

Dana: I’m going to do a thing. Am I allowed to say this?

John: Please.

Dana: I’m going to do a thing on my ‘internet’, which is my phone, on Instagram. My handle is @inthehenhouse. I’m going to give away 20 copies. I’m going to send them to people.

Craig: What? Really?

Dana: To young people, students. If you’re a student, if you’re trying to be a writer, I want to send you one of these books because these men, Craig and John, are the greatest people of all time, that they’ve spent their time trying to help other writers be better. They believe ‘rising tides raises all boats’, and they’re generous with their time. I love them. I want to send 20 books to whoever needs one.

John: Fantastic.

Craig: I have never felt anything doing this podcast until this moment.

Dana: DM me on my internet.

Craig: I’m having feelings.

Dana: Are you having feelings, Craig?

Craig: I’m having feelings. That was beautiful. Thank you.

Dana: It’s the least I could do. I just think you guys are amazing.

Craig: That’s very sweet, and it’s very generous of you, unless you’re stealing the books. If you’re stealing the books, it’s not generous.

Dana: No. I’m buying the books and giving them away.

Craig: Oh, okay. That is generous.

John: The bonus chapter we sent out is on getting stuff written. It was a chapter that was originally going to be in the book, and the book was just 600 pages, so we had to make some beautiful cuts [unintelligible 00:05:46]. We cleaned it up, we’ve formatted it nicely, and we sent it to all the people who had pre-ordered the book and sent the receipts in.

Dana: It’s amazing.

John: We’re still going to send it out. If you pre-order it now, we will send it to you. Drew will send it to you today. If you want this bonus chapter, it turned out really well.

Dana: Great. I’ll take the bonus chapter. Can I get some bonus chapter later?

Craig: Absolutely.

John: She needs to get some stuff written. One of the questions we get frequently is, are Craig and I going to do the audiobook, or are we going to read the audiobook for the Scriptnotes book? The answer is hell no. We are not doing that. That is a job left to a professional.

Dana: Correct.

John: I’m so excited to introduce the professional who actually did read the Scriptnotes book.

Craig: Woohoo.

John: Graham Rowat is an actor, a narrator whose talents span Broadway stages, television screens, audiobook recordings. You’ve seen him on Broadway in Dear Evan Hansen, Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!, Guys and Dolls, Beauty and the Beast. He’s also a friend and a longtime Scriptnotes listener. Graham Rowat, welcome officially to The Scriptnotes podcast.

Graham Rowat: Thank you for having me.

Dana: Listen to that deep voice, guys.

Craig: You can hear the Broadway right in there.

Dana: Listen to–

Graham: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Craig: It’s so good.

Graham: [chuckles]

Craig: So good.

Dana: Get out of here. Your advice just got better. Everything you guys wrote in the book is better. Just look at that.

John: Come on, the gravitas of that?

Dana: Intense.

Craig: These shows that you’ve been in, just one great show after another. Congratulations. That’s amazing.

Dana: I know. Incredible.

Graham: I thought to myself, I know John gets to Broadway shows. How about the other guests on the pod today? Does anyone get to see Broadway that often?

Dana: Funny story.

Craig: Not as often as I’d like to. I live in Los Angeles, and now I live in Canada.

Graham: For sure.

Craig: I do see shows pretty frequently once they make their way to the Pantages or something like that, or I go to the bowl. I went for Jesus Christ Superstar, and I went for Into the Woods.

Craig: That’s great.

Graham: I love a show.

Dana: That’s great.

Graham: What can I say?

Dana: I love a show.

Graham: I love a show.

John: We mostly love that your voice is our book because when the topic of the audiobook came up and Graham graciously asked, “Hey, do you or Craig want to do it?” It was like, “Oh, it’ll be like four days in a recording studio.” You’re like, “Absolutely not.”

Dana: No.

John: I wanted somebody to do the book who knew the show, knew the voice of the show, had a sense of what this was like. I asked Graham who would do it, and they figured out how to make a deal for Graham to do it. Graham, I’m curious, what is it like to record this? Because the book is not Craig and I back and forth. It’s just, it’s a we voice behind it. What is your process? What is your instinct going into try to read this book?

Graham: Well, the first thing I did was I wanted to listen to every one of the episodes that featured the guests that are quoted in the chapters. It’s tricky because I want to find a neutral voice, but I hear you and Craig when I’m reading the book. There are distinct moments, too. There’s a chapter, the Die Hard chapter, where it is the two of you having a discussion.

Craig: Yes, it’s true.

Graham: The neutral voice is pretty much me. That’s always the easiest thing to work from and go back to. Then, when the two of you step out and actually are John and Craig, for example, there’s Craig’s whole chapter where he presents his approach to screenwriting, I tried to stay true to the Craig persona.

Here’s the thing: it’s a matter of very subtle changes because one of the very first things they teach you when you’re learning the old audiobook stuff is that anything too broad, that’s what the audience is going to be listening to, especially accents. They’re going to be sitting there thinking, “I don’t think that’s a very good accent.”

Dana: You decided not to do the Australian accent for Craig?

Graham: I didn’t. I gave him sort of the Maverick Ed McMahon energy.

Craig: Nice. Good.

Dana: Hot. Yes, sexy.

Craig: Not hot, no. McMahon, no.

Dana: Oh, I thought what the Ed McMahon energy was. I always thought it was really sexy.

Graham: No, young Ed McMahon. A real young, dashing Ed McMahon.
[laughter]

John: Graham, a question for you. We’re talking about the chapters that are interspersed with all the subject chapters are interview chapters. Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, for example, we try to do a light edit on them so you can still feel their voice and how they speak. What was it like for you to figure out how to make them sound on that? They read differently on the page, so how was it actually articulating those?

Graham: Thankfully, and listening to the episodes and listening to the interviews allowed me to have an image in my head so that when I got to Greta’s chapter, I could make a very slight adjustment vocally. It’s more about the conversational tone that was a part of their interviews. If I can inject? A little bit of a more casual conversational tone in their chapters, I feel like that makes it more distinct. If I am doing a Greta, I have her in my head because I’d listen to her, so if I make a slight pitch adjustment and I just make it a little more casual, I feel like I’m doing her justice, and I’m making enough of a shift away from the neutral narrator.

Christopher Nolan was the tricky one because he’s the very first one up. I thought if he had been ninth or tenth in your list of guests and I’d reached him, I probably could have gotten away with a very subtle English accent. I think the listener would have been okay with that because they’d be like, “Well, he’s used up all the other textures. We can give him a break.” But because he was the first one up, I had a conversation with the producer when I recorded this; he was Chris [unintelligible 00:11:14] was patched in from Texas. I said, “Should we do it?” and we came down on the side of not doing an accent for Christopher Nolan.

Craig: I think that’s fair. I think it’s a smart idea, given the fact that it starts it off because some people who haven’t heard Christopher Nolan speak might think, “Oh, this entire thing is going to be read in an English accent.” Also, Christopher’s brother Jonah has no English accent.

Graham: It’s so fascinating how different they are.

Craig: I feel like the Nolan family, you’re allowed to do either English or American. You’re fine.

Graham: That’s a relief.

Craig: Yes, you’re good. They won’t be coming after you.

John: Well, Graham, we are so, so, so appreciative that you did the book. Thank you so much for reading it. For folks who want to hear Graham read it, it’s December 2nd, just like the main book is out. It’s available everywhere. It should be on Audible, but every place you can buy audiobooks will have it.

Dana: I have 42 Audible credits I need to spend. I’m going to use one of them on this.

John: This is the perfect thing. It’s also going to be fun for people who’ve listened to the whole show to hear our words and just a different person saying it, which is great.

Dana: Different way.

Craig: Love it.

Dana: That’s so great. I’m so excited. There’s no one I trust more for advice about screenplay writing than you guys. This is amazing that you’ve done this book.

Craig: Thank you, Dana. Whatever content we provided, plus Graham’s magically resonant voice, should be very effective. Everyone should write better after this. We don’t know what else to do, honestly.

John: Graham, thank you. Thank you so much.

Dana: Thank you. Nice to meet you.

Graham: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Graham.

Graham: Take care.

Dana: That’s a chill voice right there, man.

Craig: It’s a good voice.

Dana: My thing is I usually listen to voices like that to go to bed at night. I’m having an ‘all right, all right’ moment from just talking to him. I’m ready to snooze it up on that couch over there.

John: Do you listen to any of those sleepcasts where they just talk about nonsense that just goes on, it just melts away?

Dana: Yes, 100%. I like a little patter. I like a sleep timer, and then boom, I’m out.

John: We have some follow-up to get to. Drew, could you start us off with some follow-up?

Drew Marquardt: Martin writes, “I recently listened to John’s appearance on the Birbiglia podcast, and I was fascinated by his method of writing his screenplays in Las Vegas hotels. I wonder if John is aware that this technique of literary production was invented and/or perfected by one of the most successful writers of all time, Agatha Christie. I saw an image making the rounds last year, clearly a scan of an actual book, but I don’t know what book. The quote is attributed to an author named Christiana Brand, and here is the quote.

‘Agatha Christie once described to me her own particular method of getting down to work. She mulled over a book in her mind until it was ready. She said, ‘Well, we all do that.’ She would then repair to a very bad hotel. In a bad hotel, there was nothing to do but to write and plenty of time to do it in. The beds were so uncomfortable that you had no inclination to retire early or to get up late. The armchair’s so unyielding that you wasted not a minute in idle relaxation. The meals were so bad that there was no temptation to linger over them.
Any guests who would put up with such conditions must, of necessity, be so stupid that you couldn’t possibly make friends and spend precious moments in desultory chat. The book would be done in a matter of weeks, and you could pack up a few dull clothes, which were all you needed to bother to take with you and go off triumphantly home.'”

John: Dana Fox, this thing of me writing in hotel rooms, I think I did that while you were my assistant. Was I ever faxing you pages? Do you remember that?

Dana: 100%. A fax machine was involved at some point. I think, also, you did a thing involving trains at one point.

John: I took the train from LA to Seattle and wrote on the train, and then I faxed stuff back from the train. I’m not surprised that Agatha Christie has written this, except that this last April, I was in Aswan, Egypt, where she wrote Death on the Nile, and I was at the hotel where she wrote Death on the Nile. It was the Old Cataract Hotel. By the way, it is a luxury hotel.

Dana: Yes, she’s full of shit.

John: Maybe at this point, she was actually like-

Dana: The armchair was amazing. The desultory conversations occurred constantly.

John: We were able to tour the room where she wrote it. It’s like a three-room thing with a walk-in closet.

Dana: Fantastic.

John: Then a patio. So she’s kind of flying.

Dana: Yes. [chuckles] It’s kind of amazing.

John: That’s what I’m hearing.

Craig: Thank you for writing in about this. I’m not surprised that Agatha Christie has done this. Let’s move on to follow up on weirdness. Mike has a recommendation for a good, weird movie.

Drew: “You Want Weird? Friendship from Andrew DeYoung. My wife called it the worst movie she’s ever seen. I thought it was brilliant. We’re still married.”

John: I really liked Friendship, by the way. It should have been one of my One Cool Things. It’s a movie with Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. It is just really, really strange in a way that I loved.

Dana: I remember seeing that and thinking, “I’m going to like that,” and then never seeing–

John: You’re going to watch it on the plane when you fly home?

Dana: That’s right. That’s a plane movie.

John: It’s a plane movie.

Dana: I like to cry on planes, too. Can I cry in that or not?

John: No. You will laugh and feel unnerved.

Craig: You can cry.

Dana: I like to cry, if possible.

Craig: At the end, if you feel like a good cry, just force it out. It’s funny.

Dana: Just force it out of you.

Craig: We were on a plane recently and–

Dana: Yes, we were on a plane recently.

Craig: I feel once we stopped talking to each other, we started to cry.

Dana: My daughter, who is 11, bought me a sweatshirt because she knows how much I like to sleep. I feel like this is the only thing I’ve talked about on this podcast is sleeping. She bought me this sweatshirt. It’s called ‘Comfrt’ but it’s missing a letter-

John: Of course, it has to be.

Dana: -because you couldn’t name it that.

Craig: ‘Comfrt’.

Dana: ‘Comfrt’. It’s so soft. Then you put the hoodie over your head, and you pull down an eye mask that’s inside the hoodie that clutches to your face. I was like, “Charlotte, this is crazy. I can’t wear this. It’s hot pink. I’m like an adult woman. This is crazy.” It’s got zippers all over for all sorts of things. It’s extraordinary.

John: Yes, life-change [unintelligible 00:16:50] [crosstalk]

Dana: Literally, there’s never been a better. It was absolutely life-changing. I’m asleep inside of it. I wake up, and I whip up my little eye things. I see Craig Mazin standing in front of me, going, “Dana Fox, what are you doing here on this plane?” We talked for so long on the plane. It was adorable. Everybody around us got involved in us. It was very cute.

Craig: You know what? You looked like a cute little Jawa.

Dana: Thank you.

Craig: Now you’re Princess Leia. Then you were a little Jawa.

Dana: I’m doing the whole series. I’m doing all of Star Wars.

Craig: If you want adorable, find Dana Fox in her slanket on a plane.

Dana: It’s pretty slankety. I tried to sell it to your wife. I was like, “I get kickbacks on every sale.”

Craig: I’m buying her one. I’m buying her a slanket.

Dana: It’s amazing. I was going to get it for you, but I learned about Craig that he doesn’t like sweatshirts that don’t have zippers. Good talk.

Craig: I need the pull-down. I can’t be trapped.

Dana: You need to get in and out of it that way. Are you the same way?

John: Yes. I really like a zip-up hoodie.

Dana: Are you claustrophobic at all?

John: Not especially. A sweater’s fine. I don’t like a pull-over sweatshirt.

Dana: Interesting. I don’t have many pullover sweatshirts either, unless they have an open neck, in which case I’m fine because I know I can escape.

Craig: That’s what you needed to know about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

John: Let’s just cut right to the heart of the matter. Let’s get right onto the craft and do some follow-up on cuck chairs.

Dana: What’s that?

Craig: Oh, cuck chairs.

John: In episode 710, we were discussing cuck chairs. I’m not even quite sure how we got to the–

Dana: That sounds like a swear word, like 100%.

John: Again, this is why we have a not safe for work warning on this episode. The cuck chair is the chair next to the bed for when the husband has another man sleeping with his wife, so he can watch a cuckolding.

Dana: It’s like an intentional cuckolding.

John: Yes. The cuckold sits in the cuck chair.

Dana: Oh, God.

John: You know the standard corner of the hotel room chair.

Dana: Yes, but the fact that it happens so much in this story that there’s a whole chair for it, as if so many intentional cuckolding situations where people are accepting the cuckolding is happening.

Craig: I got to say, this is a very popular thing.

Dana: Is it really? No, stop it.

Craig: No, no. The cuck chair itself, I don’t know if that’s particularly– This whole cuckolding thing, it’s massive.

Dana: I literally cannot think of anything I would like less than all of this. I have always wanted to be the kind of gal that gets invited into a three-way. I have had so many people invite whoever I’m with into the three-way in front of me without me. They’re like, I would love to take your boyfriend or husband into a three-way with me and mine. I’m like, “I’m standing right here.” I think they can tell I would be very annoying, and I would want to talk the whole time.

Craig: What? No.

Dana: Nothing sexy. I’d be like, “You guys, this seems complicated. I feel like we’re going to all have feelings later that we need to talk about.”

Craig: Actually, it feels to me like the cuck chair might be made for you because it’s not a three-way. You’re not involved.

John: No, so you’re just watching.

Craig: You’re just watching.

Dana: I’m the husband in the chair? Oh, okay.

Craig: Or the wife.

Dana: Well, then, all right. Maybe. Honestly, maybe.

John: You could [unintelligible 00:19:49] have enough.

Craig: You could spend your Audible things.

Dana: Can I put the little eye mask over my face while it’s happening so I don’t have to watch it?

Craig: If you’re not watching, is it really cuckolding?

Dana: I would like to hear it, honestly. Just not see it.

Craig: Oh, that’s fun.

Dana: I feel like that would be sexier.

John: I’m not sure if I mentioned it, as we first discussed in episode 710, but there is a great episode of Decoder Ring, which is specifically about the cuckold chair and cuckolding in general, which goes back to the history of where it came from in Elizabethan times to now, it’s where it all came from. We have some more specific follow-up, including previous guests who’ve done work in this area. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Yes, comedian Sarah Schafer is selling miniature cuck chairs. It’s not inflatable like we talked about, but I still feel like she beat us to the punch.

Dana: I love her. I’ve met her.

John: She makes miniature models, so she makes a miniature hotel cuck chair. We also talked about on episode 710–

Dana: How is this a thing, guys?

John: -that my other company needed to make an inflatable cuck chair. You just put it there when you need it, but when you don’t need it, you can just put it away.

Dana: You have a company that makes sex stuff?

John: No, not at all. I said we would never do that.

Dana: Oh, okay. I thought you said ‘my other company’ has to make it, like my already established sex chair company.

Craig: John has an entire sex toy company that he hasn’t mentioned.

Dana: I thought that’s what you were saying. It didn’t seem like that far of a stretch. I was like, “Oh, he does technology and sex chairs and stuff.”

Craig: It does seem like a stretch, Dana. It’s a stretch.

John: It’s a stretch. We do have Scriptnotes barware.

Dana: Okay, that’d be cool.

John: It turns out, on Amazon, we found two inflatable chairs that feel exactly right for this purpose. We’ll put the links in the show notes there. Craig, do you want to click through and see these? This is one inflatable chair. You see, it looks like a side chair at a hotel, but it has a logo on it.

Dana: You can carry it in the bag.

John: Absolutely.

Dana: Nobody has to know. Did I ever tell you about the time I checked into a hotel, the only time I’ve ever changed my room? Because I don’t think I’m good enough to get into a hotel room and change it, and say like, “This isn’t good enough for me. I need a better room.” I don’t believe I deserve that. One time, I checked into a room and I opened the minibar and there was a half-eaten sandwich and an open box of suppository laxatives.

Craig: No, you’ve got to move.

Dana: I was like, “I got to go.” I was like, “I love you. I can’t. I support whatever happened here. I’m open to it, but I got to go.”

Craig: Did you write the scene, though? That’s a great scene prompt. Half a sandwich, laxatives. What went wrong here?

Dana: I think you guys should make your listeners write it because I couldn’t figure out what had happened. It was like a murder scene.

Craig: Sandwich and laxatives at the same time?

Dana: To me, it was the sandwich that was so confusing. It was a half-sannie. Anyway, why are you eating if you’re sopped up?

Craig: Yes, that’s the one that’s really tripping me up. Well, I got to tell you, John, you found a great product here if you’re a cuckold. The only issue, as I can see, is that the recommended maximum weight capacity is 200 pounds. I got to figure a lot of cucks are going to be two-plus.

John: If you pop the cuck chair, that’s extra humiliating, right?

Dana: That might work for the person who wants to be in the cuck chair.

John: I think the second choice may actually be better because this is the inflatable beanless beanbag chair. Besides the bed, it’s pretty humiliating to be sitting in that. It’s loaded around.

Dana: Honestly, it looks pretty nice to me. I think it looks comfortable, no?

John: It’s also max weight 200.

Craig: Again, there’s a gap in the market.

John: Yes, for plus-size cuckolds.

Dana: Built-in possibility for humiliation seems actually in line with the cuckold chair, so it sort of feels like it works.

Craig: You know what? God bless everyone, by the way. If that’s what you’re into and everybody’s cool with it, who cares? I don’t care.

Dana: That’s how I feel. Do your thing, man. Get your sandwich in your cuck chair, and another thing, and you just eat half the sandwich.

John: 100%

Craig: You just have to recognize. I think it’s fair to acknowledge, we don’t king shame. Some kinks are innately amusing. That doesn’t mean we’re degrading you.

Dana: No, we’re happy for you that you found a thing that you like.

Craig: We’re not even laughing at you. It’s just the concept is funny. It just is. It’s funny.

John: Let’s bring it back to a more wholesome moment here. We have some follow-up here from Carrie.

Drew: Carrie says, “I wanted to thank John and Craig for being such calming voices. My dog absolutely hates riding in the car. She’ll often tremble the moment she gets in. However, I’ve found that if I have Scriptnotes on, she’s much less likely to be upset and instead settles for mild discomfort. The moment I get in the car with her, I turn on Scriptnotes, and if an episode ends while I’m driving, I’ll immediately rewind and keep listening. If I don’t, the moment it ends, she starts to huddle in the back seat. While I’d like to thank them for their invaluable writing advice, I also thank them for their pup whisperer skills.”

Dana: That’s really sweet.

Craig: Do you know, ‘settles for a mild discomfort’ is probably what the person with half a sandwich and the laxatives is thinking.
[laughter]

Dana: In the cuck chair.

Craig: Yes, in the cuck chair.

Dana: That’s actually amazing. Also, how sweet is that?

Craig: How sweet.

John: That’s really nice.

Dana: You guys, you have nice pup voices.

Craig: We have nice pup– Yes.

Dana: I believe this. You guys are really good dudes. Pups love you. Pups know you.

Craig: I’ll tell you, my dogs do not like driving around. Cookie does the same thing. She’s very trembly. Real me is talking, and that doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Maybe it’s John.

Dana: Not even podcast me. It’s just actual me.

Craig: Actual me does nothing.

Dana: Oh.

Craig: Oh.

John: All right. Enough banter before we get started. It’s the key topic here. Dana, congratulations on Wicked.

Dana: Thank you.

Craig: Woo.

John: Wicked 1 and now Wicked 2. This was a long journey.

Dana: Ooph. Yes.

John: Let’s briefly recap what the history of Wicked is. Obviously, there was once upon a time, The Wizard of Oz. It was a book. Then it was a movie. There was a book by Gregory Maguire called Wicked, which sold to Marc Platt, who wanted to do it as a Broadway show first. It is a Broadway show, correct?

Dana: No.

John: Tell me what I got wrong there.

Dana: I believe the idea was to make it into a movie without music.

Craig: Yes.

Dana: They started it as that. I’m pretty sure they maybe even had scripts. Then Marc left. He was running Universal at the time.

Craig: He was, yes.

Dana: He went to be a producer. He said, “The one project I want is Wicked.” He took Wicked. It was Stephen Schwartz that convinced him that Wicked needed music because, inherently, The Wizard of Oz was so musical. It was crazy to do this idea without music.

John: Yes, makes sense.

Dana: Thankfully, Stephen Schwartz convinced him to make it a Broadway musical first. Universal, weirdly, always owned it because they had originally bought it to make it into a movie. They owned part of the rights to the play. Then they made it as a musical first.

John: That’s right. The musical that Stephen Schwartz wrote the music for and Winnie Holzman did the stage play for was a massive hit. I remember seeing a pre– I was on Broadway but pre-opening with Kristin Chenoweth and-

Craig: Idina Menzel.

John: -Idina Menzel. It was great. You could tell this is going to become a thing. It did become a thing.

Dana: It almost felt redefining, I think, too, in terms of what Broadway was doing at the time. It felt almost part movie, part musical in the sense that it had a big hook.

John: Stephen Schwartz is a Broadway legend.

Dana: A genius. The greatest.

John: You’re talking about Pippin. To have somebody like Stephen Schwartz take something that could be a little bit more in the Disney commercial zone for what Broadway sometimes does, to just do this whole other weird thing that was very original in its own way. The whole thing about Wicked is, it’s not The Wizard of Oz, really at all. It’s such an original show and so weird. It’s a weird show with incredible music.

Dana: Oh, geniuses. A lot of them.

John: Talking story, the stage version makes huge changes from the book. The central concepts come through, but it feels really, really different in story and how stuff is structured. Correct?

Dana: Yes. I never read the book-

John: What?

Dana: -which turned out to be a bit of a mistake because I told my 12-year-old he could read it. Apparently, no way, no.

Craig: No. No.

Dana: Not a great idea. He was like, “Mom, some intense sex stuff happened in this book.” I was like, “Yes, I don’t know what it’s about, but I’ve heard it’s amazing.”

Craig: I don’t know about that.

Dana: The extraordinary Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz got together and took the main idea from it, which they thought was so brilliant, which was like, “What if this story that you knew and you absolutely were positive you knew everything about it, what if the bad guy was not who you thought they were? What if the person that was good was maybe not actually as good as you thought they were? Let’s see what that story looks like.”

John: What if they were best friends?

Dana: What if they were best friends? Interestingly, actually, Winnie told me the other day, which I’d never heard before, originally, Glinda wasn’t actually that big of a part. It was in meeting Kristin Chenoweth and becoming obsessed with Kristin Chenoweth that they decided that it had to be a true two-hander, which I had never heard before. That was pretty interesting.

John: All these things that seem inevitable were not inevitable at the genesis of this.

Dana: Absolutely.

John: It’s that process of discovery. The stage show is a huge hit, tours the world, a bunch of different languages. We all know it and love it, but eventually we’re going to make it into a film. The decision to make it from one film to two films, I’d love for you guys to talk about that process.

Dana: I think Craig maybe was around when it was more choice, actually. He can maybe speak to that. When I got involved, I was brought in by John, too. It was already a fait accompli. It was already like, “We’re making this as two movies. We can’t question it, and we can’t go back. We have to just do it.” Craig, you knew more about that stage and development, right? Where they were deciding to make it two movies?

Craig: No, it was a condition that they wanted me to work on Wicked, and I said, “Okay, but it has to be two movies.”

Dana: See, that’s amazing because you’re a genius. You knew.

Craig: Well, I don’t know about that. I’m very familiar with the show, and I read the script as it existed. What I remember saying to Marc was, “Once she sings Defying Gravity, you have to go home. You can’t stay in the theater.”

Dana: By the way, when you’re at the play, sometimes people made mistakes and we’re like, “Bye, that was the most satisfying thing that ever happened. I’ll see you guys. We’re going to go to dinner now.”

Craig: Right. You can’t. You just can’t. Also, the second act of Wicked, totally, is quite different.

Dana: Correct.

Craig: There’s too much to shove into one movie.

Dana: The songs are so extraordinary because Stephen is such a crazy genius, that you try cutting one song–

Craig: No, you really can’t, and you shouldn’t.

Dana: You were like, “I miss that song. That song’s like a short song. I love it and I miss it.”

Craig: I said, I can outline, I can make two treatments for two different movies, and I can write a script from the beginning to the end of Defying Gravity, and that’s sort of how you, “Aah, boom,” and we’ll see you next time. Marc and the executives at Universal, separately, we’re like, “Not sure Marc will go for that.” Marc’s like, “I’m not sure the studio will go for that.” I basically was like, “Everybody, let’s just do it.” Then they all said yes, and that’s it. That was the last impactful thing I did on Wicked.

Dana: Well, it was very impactful, my friend, seriously, because it’s not an obvious choice. It felt so dangerous at the time.

Craig: It feels so obvious now.

Dana: Well, now it does. Everything feels obvious now, but at the time when we were living in it, it’s like they talk about World War II, and it’s like they didn’t know how it was going to end. Back then, they didn’t know. It might have not worked out. We sort of felt like, “Oh my God, this might not work out,” because, as Craig was saying, it was never the first movie. Whenever people saw the first movie, thank God they loved it; it was wonderful. Everyone kept saying, “Well, it was obviously the right choice to break it into two movies.” I was like, “That’s because you haven’t seen the second movie yet.” I was like, “Hold that thought until–”

John: Let’s talk about this because if the decision wasn’t to make one movie and see how it does, and then make the second movie, the decision was to make two movies at the same time, that was distinct movies that are joined.

Dana: Yes, which means you can’t screw anything up because the first movie has to be a success, because you’ve already shot the second movie.

John: Were they cross-bordered? Were you shooting scenes from two?

Dana: 100% cross-bordered, and this is the brilliance of John and the group that he had around him, all the HODs that were so extraordinary, and the brilliance of Cynthia and Ari, that they would shoot the end of movie one in the morning and shoot Wonderful from movie two in the afternoon. They’re in completely different costumes, totally different hair, different characters. They talk about how they had to use different perfumes depending on which movie they were in because they had to sense things to trigger who they were. They had different playlists for the two movies for themselves to listen to because throughout the day, they had to keep it straight. It wasn’t even just–

Craig: Because it was based on location, basically.

Dana: It was all locations, basically. We had 73 sets, and we were turning over sets constantly. These sets were enormous. Nathan Crowley, who’s our production designer, is a genius. He’s Christopher Nolan’s guy. He’s absolutely extraordinary. I’m obsessed with him. Everybody, go find an interview with Nathan Crowley. He’s the greatest guy ever and totally brilliant. His wife is also extraordinary. Obsessed.

John: You know that you’re making two movies, and we’ll get into this one in the bonus segment where we talk about– The promo circuit is like, last time you had to just talk about the first movie and not acknowledge the second movie.

Dana: This is why they were all sobbing in their interviews, and everyone’s like, “Why are these people crying so hard in their interviews?” It’s like, “Because we just finished For Good. We’re crying about For Good. We’re not crying about Popular. We’re crying about the second movie.”

John: Craig and I have not seen the second movie yet, and I’m excited to see it.

Dana: I’m so excited for you to see it.

John: One of the real challenges, as Craig was alluding to and that you were also mentioning, we remember what happens in Act 1. Act 2 races through a bunch of stuff. If you look at the Wikipedia summary of Act 2, it’s like, “Oh my God,” half a line is given to things, and so you have to make much bigger choices about storytelling.

Dana: That’s exactly right. That was the exciting challenge of it, that the second act of the play is 45 minutes long. This movie is 2 hours and 10 minutes or 14 minutes. We obviously created a lot of new material for the second movie. I always used to describe the feeling of the second act as its own movie. You walked in, you sat down with your popcorn, and you got hit with the two, three-act break, and then you went crazy from there. That’s what the feeling is of the second act, because that was appropriate for the play. Then you’re looking at, “Okay, this is a moviegoing experience. People are used to a one, two, three-act structure.”

John: You’ve got to ramp up.

Dana: You ramp up. You’re a little slow. You’re like, “Where are we now? Who are we? What are we doing?” That was the big fun of trying to figure out movie two is how do we remind people where we are? How do we get them used to how much has changed in the time lapse between the two movies? That was actually a big discussion, was how much time to have passed during the two movies. You’ll see when you see the movie. We landed on something I think is interesting.

Craig: 30 years later?

Dana: Well, no. You know what it was? What I realized with my brilliant friend, Lorene Scafaria, is that the experience of people watching the first movie was so intense for them that it actually impacted how we were all thinking about the second movie as we were working on finishing it, because it raised the bar so much. It was like the expectations got higher and higher every time people were like, “Oh my God, this movie is killing me. I saw it 42 times in theaters.” The press tour of the girls became part of the movie itself. That was their friendship in a weird way because they are friends and they’re so close. Watching them be in love with each other platonically and crying all the time about For Good, which nobody knew, created this intense feeling that we knew we had to have come through the second movie.

Part of the decision of how much time passed was, we were like, “Oh, it should be how much time passed for the audience.”

Craig: Exactly.

Dana: “It should be a year,” because the movies are coming out a year later. Then Winnie came up with some brilliant word for what a year was, which was like 12 clock-ticks of the–

Craig: Clock moons or something, yes. Yes, that’s it.

Dana: She made up some crazy word for this, but we all know it’s a year.

Craig: 12 monthly [unintelligible 00:35:13].

Dana: Yes. The moon passages of the– Yes.

John: Talk about the writing process on this because you’re writing both movies simultaneously, or did you like, “Okay, we’re going to finish the scripts for the first movie and then start the script on the second movie,” or was it all blurred together?

Dana: I was pulled in by John Chu because he’s my favorite person on planet Earth. I told him, “Anytime you want me to do something, I’m going to say yes.”

Craig: Ouch.

Dana: Oh, no, you guys, I meant that I met after you.

Craig: All right, thank you.

Dana: He’s my favorite person on planet Earth who I met after you two.

Craig: Weird, late clarification.

Dana: In the podcast, we could put that before, as if I said it right before.

Craig: Now people skip.

Dana: Matthew, just swoop it out–

[rewind sound]

Dana: I love John and Craig,

[fast-forward sound]

Dana: Working with John, he’s the most extraordinary director, but he’s so collaborative, also, and he makes me want to be a better man. He’s that guy. I’m like, “I love you, John.” I told him, “I’ll do anything with you,” after he and I work together.

John: I want to back up because you worked with him first because he was a director on your TV series.

Dana: Yes, that’s right. He had shot Crazy Rich Asians, but it hadn’t come out yet, and I needed someone to direct the first two episodes of Home Before Dark, which is my Apple TV series. I met with him and he showed me the trailer for Crazy Rich Asians, which had not come out yet. From the trailer, I was like, “You’re a genius. This is going to hit. This is so universal. This is incredible. I love you. I want you to do this.” I was trying to hire him off of a trailer. I was like, “I don’t need to see anything else. I’m obsessed with him.”

He did the most extraordinary job on the TV show. He brought in Alice Brooks, who is the DP of Wicked, to do my show. He brought in Myron Kerstein, the most brilliant editor you’ll ever meet on planet Earth, to do my show. I got to work with all his people. It was extraordinary.

John: I want to stop you for a second because it’s just such a good reminder of the relationships you form and the trust you form and being able to see what a person is like as a collaborator. You were hiring him, but then he’s actually hiring you because he can see, “Dana gets it. We have a shared vision. I know that she can deliver this thing.”

Dana: Correct. Also, I think John’s very loyal. Once he gets his people around that he knows understands the way he likes to work, he wants to keep them close. I feel so lucky to be in his orbit, honestly, because he’s just extraordinary. I said to him, “I’ll do anything for you. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing whenever I’m doing it, and I’ll say yes.” He called me after I finished Lost City. He called me and said, “I have another one for you.” He had done In the Heights, while I did Lost City and other stuff. He said, “Okay, I have another one for you.” He said, “Do you want to know what it is?” I said, “No.” The answer is yes.

He was like, “I’m going to tell you anyway.” I was like, “No, no, no, let’s do a bit where I’d make part of the deal without even knowing what it is.” I thought that would be funny. He was like, “No, I’m going to tell you, you’re an idiot.” I was like, “Okay.” He said, “It’s Wicked.” I was like, “Oh my God, everybody loves– What is it?” He’s like, “Wicked.” I’m like, “Mm-hmm. I also am one of the people that loves Wicked so much,” because I hadn’t seen it. I’m literally the only American human who had not seen Wicked.

Craig: That’s crazy.

John: What did you say when he said Wicked, you’re like, “Wicked what”?

Dana: Well, I knew of it. I knew it was popular and famous and stuff, but I’m not super dialed in. I discovered Beyoncé two years ago.

Craig: I love it.

Dana: I was like, “You guys, we need to talk. This woman’s incredible.”

John: Oh my God, this is amazing.

Dana: This is always me too late on really important things. I started watching Lost in the last season and was like, “You guys, the Hatch.” Everyone was like, “We’re so over the Hatch, we don’t want to talk about the Hatch.”

John: I like, in a weird way, that you weren’t a Wicked–

Dana: I was not a mega fan. I didn’t know anything about it.

John: Sometimes it’s better to not be burdened by–

Dana: Winnie and Stephen now talk about how helpful it was to have me there, being irreverent and not being so precious, because I just didn’t know. It was the middle of the pandemic, so I couldn’t go to Broadway to see it. I googled everything I could find. I watched the entire play in shaky clips from France, Germany, whatever, blah, blah, put it all together. I was like, “I get it.” I read the play and I played Stephen’s gorgeous music. Whenever the song would come up as I was reading it, I would play the music, and I was like, “Gosh, this is so good. This is so good, the music.” I loved it.

I was, of course, impressed, and also, I had loved My So-Called Life so much. I loved Winnie’s work from that. He said, “We’re going to work all of us together. Me, John, Winnie, Stephen, and you. We’re going to get into Zooms, and we’re going to break both movies together,” which I’d never done before with a director. I was so excited to be able to do it because it felt like every day we weren’t just breaking the story or writing the script, we were making the movie because it was what he wanted to be doing, too. He was telling us about his vision as we were all talking it through. We spent 153 hours on Zoom before we ever started writing. I know it’s a lot. Craig looks so tired from the 153.

Craig: Horrifying, just so much–

Dana: I just looked over at him and he was like, “Girl, eugh.”

John: By the way, the bullet you dodged. All right, yes.

[laughter]

Craig: No, I did not dodge a bullet.

Dana: The bullet hit you squarely.

Craig: Yes, the bullet hit me pretty hard.

John: [laughs] You had all these Zooms before you started.

Dana: Before we even started writing, but that was the ideation period, where we broke them into two movies. We carded them digitally because we were all on Zoom, so we couldn’t see each other. We had digital cards that we had made, and then I started outlining from off those cards. I outlined both movies. Then John basically was like, “Okay, we’re going to split up Movie 1 between you and Winnie, and you guys are going to write it together.” We wrote Movie 1 together as quickly as we could to get it full because we had stages booked.

They were trying to make us feel that pressure. We wrote the first movie, and then I immediately pivoted. While Winnie did notes from John and Mark. I immediately pivoted and started writing the second movie. I wrote the second movie. Then from that point forward, Winnie and I were collaborating, but we were each in a different movie. When I was in Movie 2, she was in Movie 1 and vice versa, but we were still working with each other. It was like I would send her a scene from Movie 2 and be like, “This is hot trash garbage. How would Glinda say this thing, because I’d want her to blah, blah, blah?”

There was a lot of collaboration, but we were in two separate movies. That was how we got the work done. It was super collaborative with John and with Stephen. Then, being a fly on the wall to watch Stephen Schwartz do the two new songs for the Movie 2.

John: It was pretty great.

Dana: It was like childhood Dana lost her mind. It was amazing.

Craig: I have to say that this is a really good example of you’re a good writer. I think I’m a good writer. Some people should be writing certain movies, and some people should not. The thing is, I love Wicked. I love the show, but I was not the right person for that project. You were the right person for that project. That project needed somebody that not only was a writer but also, how would I put it, a clearinghouse, a diplomat, and an ambassador. For all of these people, and also somebody that really enjoys the collaboration of writing with another writer. I’m such a monk.

Dana: Yes, you’re so private. You just want to be in your little room and do your thing.

Craig: This is just a great example. I underscore this all the time, but just in case anybody’s confused, the credits for this movie are spot on accurate. I was happy to support those. I didn’t fight you. [laughs] They’re correct.

Dana: Yes. Winnie had done a lot of work before any of us came on. That’s why she has that solo credit. Only writers will understand that credit, which is Winnie’s solo because she had been working on trying to make this into a movie for 15 years before any of us were involved in the process. That’s why she has that credit. Then AND, which means she worked also with the team of me and her. It’s a weird-looking sandwich of a credit, but it does represent what happened. It was really an amazing experience.

It was very difficult because of all those personalities and all the different things, we all cared so much. Honestly, it was really hard, I think, because we cared so much. We wanted it to be so good. We all felt this profound sense of responsibility to the fans. Then after Movie 1, it was like ratcheted up to a million. The post-process of Movie 2, I would just sit around crying because I wanted to be worthy of people’s expectations of the second movie because it was so important to them.

Then also, the world has gotten even harder. I think people desperately need a time to sit in a theater quietly with their friends and their loved ones and their family and be able to express their emotions about what’s going on in the world or whatever, in a safe place to do that. I know the movie gives you that.

John: As they witnessed the rise of fascism, you see it reflected back in the movie, yes. There’s a potential to triumph over it.

Dana: Of course, we didn’t write it that way because it was five years ago that we started writing it. We didn’t know this was going to be what happened. I just think, unfortunately, the movie is so timely because this is timeless. There are always people looking for power, and they’re going to do it at the expense of the most vulnerable people.

Craig: Steven and Winnie, all the way back when they were first conceiving of the show, and this is something that Mark told me, that there was underneath it a pretty clear allegory for Nazi Germany, for fascism, for people getting disappeared, taken away.

Dana: They were writing it in the shadow of 9/11 and the persecution of the Muslim population in America. That was partly why World War II is so fresh on the mind. If we all remember, right after 9/11, it started to get really off.

Craig: Yes. Wicked, it’s really interesting how it has so many flavors and layers. On the top, it is pink and green, and it’s two best friends.

Dana: It’s floopy, yes, 100%.

Craig: It’s funny and weird. Then underneath it, there’s something bad, something bad coming.

Dana: I think that’s what people are going to love about the second movie, is that it still has all the pink and green and floopy, but it is really about something. It really has a lot of there-there. There’s a lot of there-there for both the consequences within the friendship. The political stuff, of course, is there, and it hits harder now because of what’s happening. The friendship is so beautiful. You feel like you’ve been on this crazy emotional journey. That was another real challenge of writing the screenplay of the second movie was, in the play, there’s all these reprises.

That you’re hearing that you just heard the A side of the reprise 20 minutes ago in the play, but in the movie, you’re hearing the reprise a year later. How do you get the audience to feel the feeling of that reprise the same way they would have if they had heard the A side of it 20 minutes ago? We were constantly thinking about how do we remind them of the things that happened in the first film so that that’s fresh in their minds. A lot of it had to do with planned flashbacks, but also unplanned flashbacks that came out in editing that I think were really strategic and really smart.

Craig: Dana?

Dana: My love.

Craig: What do you think my favorite song from Movie 2 is going to be? I know what it is. I’m just saying, what do you think of this?

Dana: I’m just going to say, I don’t know what I’m allowed to say or not say, but I think that No Good Deed–

Craig: You got the answer. That’s it.

Dana: That’s it. That’s the Craig one. Your brain will exit the back of your head and then come back into it at the end. It’s like the crazy– I lost my mind.

Craig: It’s such a good song. Look, I love For Good. I love it. It’s sweet. It’s adorable. It’s a nice wrap-it-up. No Good Deed is awesome. Having seen Cynthia in Jesus Christ Superstar and watching her turn it to 11.

Dana: You told me about how beautiful that was.

Craig: Yes. I can’t wait to see what she does with that.

Dana: I would reference the song you talked about, but there’s a 100% chance I mispronounce it.

Craig: Gethsemane.

Dana: Gethsemane.

[imitating song tune]

Dana: No Good Deed’s going to kill you. Buckle your fucking seat belt for good, though, because it’s–

Craig: Fuckle your bucking seat belt.

Dana: Buckle your fucking seat belt for that one because that’s a goodbye, everybody. I don’t know why. I hope this makes you, too, also feel really emotional when you’re watching it. Part of my emotional experience with the movie is that there is a feeling, a little bit, that Hollywood is dying.

John: It’s a big Hollywood movie.

Dana: This is a big, beautiful Hollywood movie from the old days. You can’t believe this movie got made.

John: They felt the giant sets.

Dana: I have chills. These giant sets that were real, and everything was real. If it’s out of focus, it’s because a person was doing it. There’s no AI. It feels so much like the movies that got us all to be in this business in the first place.

Craig: It’s going to be massive.

Dana: Oh, I hope so. It’s just so beautiful.

Craig: Hollywood is not dying. It’s just that it’s been the months after summer, the months between summer and Thanksgiving. The New York Times once again wrote an article about how Hollywood is dying. They’re like, “Yes, it’s always dying in September and October.” [laughter] That’s what it does.

John: You forget the article you just wrote about what a big summer it was for blockbusters.

Craig: Right.

Dana: Right. That’s a good point.

Craig: Thanksgiving and Christmas comes and kaboom. It’s going to be huge.

Dana: I hope that Wicked puts the paddles back onto the business too, and clear, and it’s like, [onomatopoeia] but the problem is they never seem to learn the lessons from the movies. They’ll go like, “But that’s just Wicked, so it doesn’t count.” You can’t learn anything from it because it’s Wicked.

John: Another musical.

Dana: Nothing’s ever been like this. You’ll be like, “Okay.”

Craig: Nobody knows, but you know what? You guys did a spectacular job, and I can’t wait to see the second movie. John really is a remarkably talented director.

Dana: I do need you to FaceTime me when both of you, after you see it, because I had a hard time talking about it. I was just wandering around the after-party just like a zombie, and crying in front of famous people was basically what it was. It was just so weird. I was just like, I couldn’t stop crying. It was wild.

John: It was the experience of the movie, but also the trauma of making it a movie.

Dana: I had some health issues during it that were really difficult. The narrative I had in my head was that Wicked was what killed me. Wicked is why I got sick. Then I realized while I was watching the movie that, “Oh, no.”

Craig: Oh, no. Here we go.

Dana: I just realized that Wicked actually saved me. It gave me stuff to do while I was feeling so sick. Every day gave me a reason to get up in the morning and try and care and feel something again. It is what ultimately made me feel better. It’s what got me better from the sickness. It’s not what killed me.

Craig: That’s fantastic.

Dana: That was part of why I was weeping around the stupid after-party, like an animal.

Craig: When you were working on it, before it was in production, you and your husband were in Calgary for some reason.

Dana: Oh, boy. That was a– Yes.

Craig: I was there, and the two of us were just–

Dana: That was my breaking point. That’s where I was like, “I might have to quit because I think I’m going to die.” I was like, “I have to.” You were working on The Last of Us.

Craig: On the first season of The Last of Us, which was chaos.

Dana: You were like, “This is crazy.” Yes, and I was like, “Our health might be in danger.” [chuckles]

Craig: Yes, we were standing in a park going, “We’re dying, right? We’re dying.” [crosstalk]

Dana: Yes, and you were so nice to me. I was like, “I think I’m dying.” You’re like, “It’s okay, because I’m also dying, so we could die together.” Then I encountered a bear, and there was a moment where I was like, “Maybe it should eat me.”

John: Wow, it would be a way to go.

Dana: I was like, “This would be a killer story, first of all.”

Craig: How would I identify with that?

Dana: Then I would get out of doing the rest of this work, which is so intense.

Craig: That is what like writing is so hard that a lot of times–

Dana: That you want a bear to eat you.

Craig: I have told my assistant a number of times, listen, at some point today, don’t approach from the front, but from behind, hit me with a hammer as hard as you can on my head, and just end this, so I don’t have to do this.

Dana: I’m so glad you and John say those kinds of things because– John less so because John is just like–

Craig: John’s healthy.

Dana: He’s just too healthy. I can’t talk to you, John. I’ll talk directly to Craig. I’m so glad to hear you say this, Craig, because you’re so brilliant and so talented. I always think of myself as just a really hard worker. That’s why my work is good. Not because I have any innate talent. I’m just like, I just work harder than everybody else.

John: No. That’s an eldest daughter thing.

Dana: I’m the youngest daughter.

John: You’re the only daughter, right?

Dana: I’m the only daughter, yes. I guess you’re right. I’m still the eldest daughter.

John: The eldest daughter.

[laughter]

Dana: Hearing you say that, Craig, I think that helps me, and also all your listeners who are trying to be writers, that you also feel that way is amazing. [crosstalk] I want to die every day. I’m like, “I cannot believe how hard this still feels to me.”

Craig: Yet, every time I have a chance to stop, and I could stop, I do not stop. I never stop.

Dana: Oh, I could stop tomorrow, and I don’t stop. I’m crazy.

John: No. You’ve set up nine more shows and movies. While you’ve been sitting here.

Dana: While I’ve been sitting here, I set up 42 new things. It’s like I have a problem. I literally have a Post-it note on my desk that says, “Say no.” Then I just said yes to all the things.

John: All the things. All right. Let’s answer some listener questions here.

Dana: Yes, please.

John: James in Vancouver wants to ask about torture.

Dana: We just talked all about torture. [crosstalk] We don’t need to talk about torture. James, that was your answer to your question.

John: You guys always talk about needing to make your characters suffer in order to see them go through the maximum amount of growth possible. However, how much suffering is too much? At what point does it veer into emotional torture porn as opposed to genuine trials and tribulations?

Craig: That’s a good question.

John: I think it’s a very good question. Torture your hero is fantastic. If there’s a moment where it’s like, “I don’t want to watch this anymore,” or it feels gratuitous, I’m going to stop. You have to make sure that you are giving your character some victories, some hope along the way. If it’s just despair, if it’s 1984, people are going to stop. Then you’ve failed as a storyteller, I think.

Dana: I also feel like you ask yourself, what do you want to go through? I have to close my eyes when torture is happening, actual torture is happening in things. I feel almost the same way about emotional torture, which is like, I want to stop just shy of that because I just think that’s gratuitous and weird, and I don’t need to see it. Also, we’re in a world and a time where everything feels like torture. I tend to go with what I feel and what I think the rest of the world is feeling because I’m also feeling it. Craig, what were you going to say?

Craig: I definitely like to echo the feelings that we have, but give people a way to go through these things somewhat safely. Torturing your characters has to be purposeful. Remember, you’re not just torturing them, you are choosing what to do to them. Therefore, you have a plan, and the plan is such that the torture must be matched to their ability to withstand it and then surpass it. The real question, James, isn’t how much should I torture them? The real question is, what would make this person’s victory feel really earned and satisfying?

Dana: That’s great.

Craig: That’s all.

Dana: That’s great. Also, for each individual character, the definition of torture is totally different. For my husband, the definition of torture is me chewing food that he can hear. Literally, that could be an entire scene where he’s tortured. He says it makes him want to actually murder me in cold blood.

John: Misthonia.

Dana: Misthonia. Yes, he has that thing. You can calibrate it based on who the person is because torture is something different for each person, but that’s so smart.

Craig: You calibrate it depending on the person, and you also calibrate it depending on the tone. In comedies, torture could be as “torturous” as, “The girl that dumped me is with the guy that beat me up yesterday, and I have to sit here and watch them dance.” That’s torture. It’s not Zero Dark Thirty torture. [laughs]

Dana: Yes, nobody’s strapped to a chair in that story.

Craig: Right, but sometimes you do strap someone to a chair, and that’s–

Dana: To a cuck chair. Bringing it back.

Craig: If they’re only 200 pounds.

Dana: We’re going to make it a runner. [crosstalk] Don’t worry about it.

John: To recap, when you’re thinking about torturing your characters, you’re thinking about what is it that you want. What is it that makes you feel uncomfortable or comfortable? What do you as the writer want? You’re thinking about the audience. Where is the audience in this? Also, crucially, you’re thinking about the character. What is it about this character and their journey that this torture is allowing them to grow and progress and do the things you’re going to do?

Dana: I particularly like what Craig says because that almost reframes it for me in a way that I understand that question even more, which is what will make their victory feel more earned, which is such a smarter way of saying what specific torture is right for this person and what level. If you think about it, in Wicked Movie 1, we realized, like, since it was ending at Defying Gravity, she can’t be defeating the wizard. That was what her I Want song was about, but she can’t defeat the wizard because she can’t do that until the second movie.

What she had to defeat was the part of herself that didn’t believe that she could do it. That led to all these discoveries of she was going to see herself as a child and all these different things. It led to different forms of torture for her in Movie 1 than are the ones that she experiences in Movie 2. It was all about making those victories feel earned and/or the bittersweet ending feel as sad as possible.

Craig: That’s a good question, though. You know what? Vancouver representing.

Dana: I love Vancouver.

John: One other quick question here from Zach. Was the 1990s a great decade for action movies, or am I just experiencing whatever generation thinks that the decade they grew up in has the best media? Some of the films that he’s listing here are The Fugitive, Bad Boys, Mission Impossible, Independence Day, Speed, Armageddon, Twister, Men in Black, and many others.

Dana: They’re all perfect.

Craig: Amusingly, none of those movies are even in the top 50 of the best movies of the 1990s. The answer is yes. The 1990s were incredible.

Dana: It’s insane. Yes.

Craig: I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and I’m here to tell you the ’90s were the best 10 years of movies that I’ve experienced in my life. When I look back at what they did there, it’s astonishing.

John: The danger is that we are all roughly the same age cohort and that we were in our young 20s there. You always think about that period of your life as being like, “Oh, that was fantastic.” The way we would test that is we should get younger people to watch movies of the different decades and have them–

Dana: Shouldn’t that be a follow-up question? [crosstalk] Can you ask your audience, to younger people, “Watch those movies and see if they’re bangers like we think they are”?

Craig: I have been showing great hits of the ’90s to my assistants and the office PAs and basically all the kids that are–

Dana: What do they think?

Craig: It’s been just one home run after another.

John: That’s great.

Dana: That’s great. Will you share that list, though? Share that list. Put that list out for me. Give me your top 10 because I want to watch them.

Craig: This list right here, all these movies are fun, but it’s like he’s not even listening. Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Silence of the Lambs. [crosstalk] I can just go on. Fargo. There’s so many incredible movies.

John: He was specifically talking about action in his days. Yes, there are incredible movies. 1999 was a banner year. You look at the movies that came out that year, it was absurd. Yes, you’re right.

Craig: You know what? Fair, Zach. You were talking about action movies. I’ll give you a pass on that. All those were great action movies. The Fugitive is like–

Dana: The Fugitive is a perfect movie. Have I ever talked to you about the movie? Okay, I want to tell. Super quick, though. We may have learned this because we went to the Stark program, so we may have learned this the same. I always learned structure was character, and it was all about how the character’s going through a specific journey. We learned there’s the character’s need and there’s the character’s want. The movie is all about where they start off the movie, where they want something, and they’re making a journey towards needing something.

Wherever they are along the way, those key plot points are always about whether they’re getting what they need or whether they’re getting what they want, that kind of thing. The other thing that I learned was that the protagonist is the character who changes, not the lead of the movie. It’s the character who changes, and the antagonist is the character who causes that person to change. The protagonist of The Fugitive is Tommy Lee Jones, of course. The antagonist is Richard Kimble because Harrison Ford, of course, is the lead of the movie.

Craig: He doesn’t change.

Dana: He doesn’t change at all. He’s like, “I didn’t kill my wife,” in the beginning of the movie. In the middle of the movie, he’s like, “I swear to fucking God, I didn’t kill my wife.” At the end of the movie, he’s like, “I fucking told you I didn’t kill my wife.” Tommy Lee Jones, the whole structure is key to Tommy Lee Jones’s arc in understanding that Richard Kimble is telling the truth.

Craig: Yes. This is all correct.

Dana: That helps me with structure more than anything else.

Craig: Nice.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My one cool thing is sitting between me and Dana. It’s a thing called the Owl, and it’s this little camera device. It looks like a speaker. It looks like a tall speaker, but it has a camera at the top that is a panoramic camera. We’re on a Zoom like we are right now with Craig, and Drew, and Graham. It is showing individual slices, individual shots of me and Dana, so that we actually look well framed in it. It is just a piece of magic. It’s the Owl.

If you’re doing any sort of situation where you have some people in a place and other people are on Zoom, it is a game-changer. When we’ve done other things like this, Scriptnotes, you have to move the laptop back far enough so that everyone can see each other, or there’s a camera up on the wall.

Dana: I’ve done so many things like this, I’ve never seen it work as well as it’s working right now. We’re all seeing each other’s faces. Everybody’s in the frame. It’s amazing.

Craig: It’s really effective.

John: What’s so smart about it is it has the panoramic view, and it shows you at the top, but it’s smart enough to individually slice out when someone is speaking to give them framed as a single.

Dana: I urge every studio to get one of these because all of those Zoom calls I have with you guys, where 27 of you are in one frame, I can’t do it anymore.

John: I was on a Netflix call, and literally, it was like a satellite shot of two executives at a table.

Dana: Yes, satellite, literally, like a Google Earth shot of the Netflix building.

John: It’s hard for me to read it in attention. I’m like, “All right. Do they get it?”

Dana: I was like, “Do they like it? Do they want it?” I can’t tell.

Craig: I’m going to get one of these for the production office. I’m going to get one tomorrow.

Dana: Oh, for the production office. It would kill for that. For production meetings?

Craig: Yes.

Dana: Everybody. Great.

John: Craig, for D&D, when we’re a hybrid, like while you’re up in Canada, game changer.

Craig: Yes. [laughs] John and I–

Dana: Did you just slip in that Craig is doing D&D?

Craig: No, we play D&D together.

John: Play D&D every week.

Dana: Oh, I thought you guys were making a movie together. It’s cute. You guys are cute.

Craig: We are. We’re adorable. We talk about torture. John and I were playing in a game on Thursday evening, where we were subjected to a three-hour pointless combat, where we ended up captured and shoved into a mine.

Dana: Oh, my God. Are you with other people in this story? Who else is in there?

John: Oh, my God. Who’s who? It’s me, and Craig, and Chris Morgan. We’ll talk about it. We’ll tell you after. We’ll sidebar.

Dana: Yes, sidebar. Chris Morgan made it in, though. We all know he was there.

John: Dana Fox, do you have a one cool thing to share with us?

Dana: I would love my one cool thing to be my husband’s podcast, which is called The Most Important Question. It’s mostly about climate change, and science, and all sorts of interesting stuff. Because it’s not a thing, I am going to say my one cool thing is heating pads. Because what it allows you to do is lower the temperature in your bedroom to 55. If you can’t see your breath, you’re not doing it right. Then you get the heating pad so that you don’t die. It allows you to keep the room as cold as you need to keep it. Amazing sleep.

John: Love it.

Dana: Please enjoy.

Craig: That’s good.

John: I also am a big fan of the heated seats in your car.

Dana: Stunning.

John: It can be the middle of summer, but you just want a little–

Dana: Summer? A little back warmer?

John: Yes.

Dana: Heat up that lumbar?

John: Absolutely. Loosen up your back.

Dana: Not getting back pain? Loosen it up?

John: Fantastic.

Dana: Love it. Great story.

John: The new car also has seat coolers, and so it blows air through the seat. Game changer, so you don’t have the sweaty back when you go into a meeting.

Dana: Not to steal another one cool thing, because I totally want to hear one. We also got the ID. Buzz. Let me tell you, this is the electric VW buzz that looks like the hippie thing.

John: You have 19 children.

Dana: We have 19 children. We put them in this hippie bus. We drive around, and it brings so much joy.

John: It’s a beautiful car.

Dana: It’s a beautiful car. We got the peel. People are like, “All right, all right.” Everybody becomes Matthew McConaughey when you drive by. You get peace signs. You get smoking weed signs. We’re in Virginia. We’re in southern places where nobody does shit like that. Everybody is so happy around this car. It’s the cutest thing. My husband got me a little bumper sticker on it. Surprised me one day. It says, “We can’t all come and go by bubble,” on the back of the car. It’s really precious. He’s a great guy.

John: Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: Yes, please. My one cool thing this week is a set of puzzles, a nice puzzle suite from Eric Berlin, who’s a pretty prolific puzzle constructor. He’s a big participant on one of the big teams in the MIT puzzle hunt that happens every year. This one is actually a great one if you’re thinking about getting into this sort of thing. It’s not far off, difficulty-level-wise, from the one that David Kwong and I ran back in the day at the Magic Castle. This one is called Have Fun Storming the Castle. We’ll include a link for you.

Dana: I went to the David Kwong at the Magic Castle one with you guys. That was great.

John: It was with him.

Craig: Difficulty-wise, it’s right about there. You should be able to get through it. Maybe you might need a hint or two, but probably not.

Dana: I’ve never felt dumber than when I was– I was like, “I’m so smart.” I came in, I’m like, “I’m so smart. I went to Stanford, I’m so smart.” I’ve never felt dumber than that night.

Craig: It’s because you use different skills. This one’s got eight puzzles and then one meta puzzle.

Dana: How do I engage in it? Is it online, or is it on my internet phone?

Craig: Yes, you can pick up your internet, get your internet out of your pocket,-

Dana: Okay. That’s my internet and whatever.

Craig: -turn your internet on. [laughs] Then switch your internet on.

John: Unlock your internet on your face.

Dana: Unlock your internet with my face. Copy that. I know how to do that.

Craig: Exactly. Then follow the link, and it will cost you a whole eight American dollars.

Dana: This is great. That’s a great one cool thing.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by [crosstalk]

Dana: Wait, hold on. Don’t do a thing. I love you guys. You’re amazing people, and I really love you, and I miss you, and you’re great, and thanks for being such great people.

Craig: Dana, you are just a permanent ray of sunshine. I can’t explain how happy I was to see Dana in her slanket on that plane. I was so happy.

Dana: Comfort. One of the vowels is gone. I don’t know which one. I can’t help you get the sweatshirt because I don’t know which vowel disappeared.

Craig: Like 70% of people that I know, if I had seen them on a plane in their slanket, I would pretend to have not seen them.

Dana: You would pretend that you had not seen them. 100%. No, I know. I get that about you.

Craig: I’m on a plane. I don’t want to do all that.

Dana: I felt so touched. I was like, Craig usually ignores people on planes. This is special.

Craig: Then Jack McBrayer just chimed in, and we had the best time.

Dana: We had the best time. I really do love you guys, and you’ve been amazing friends and mentors to me forever, and I appreciate you. Truly, I’m so grateful for you guys. It’s hitting me because I’m here in town for Wicked, and that took five years of my life. There are certain people in your life who just don’t leave and don’t stop being amazing, and it’s you guys.

Craig: I will say, Dana, I don’t know if I’ve been changed for the better, but I know that I’ve been changed for good.

Dana: I’m going to get you something. I’m going to get you a present. I’m going to get you some merch. Don’t worry about it.

Craig: I want merch. I want pink, and I want green.

Dana: I’m going to get you a mirror that has lights on it.

Craig: By the way, that’s how you know that no one’s ever sent me a mug.

[laughter]

Dana: I’m going to do it. I’m going to send you the mug. I’m going to send you the Owala water bottle. Everybody loves these water bottles. They did a Wicked collection. I got 72 of them for Christmas presents.

Craig: Good, because Melissa doesn’t have enough water bottles in her house.

John: No, it’s a huge shortage, yes.

Craig: We have a room that’s called Water Bottle Room.

Dana: By the way, I have 757,000 water bottles, and I somehow don’t have enough water bottles. There’s never the cap. It’s never the right thing.

Craig: This water bottle thing– Anyway.

Dana: They’ve got us by the balls. By the way, if anybody wants to have fun, look up Hugh Grant talking about water bottles. It’s a delight. I have a whole side career where I just watch Hugh Grant do interviews. It’s so fun.

Craig: Second one cool thing. I like that.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. To view an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.

You’ll also find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware, but no cuck chairs. [laughter] You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the promo circuit.

Dana Fox, thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Dana: Thank you for having me. I love you guys.

Craig: Thank you, Dana.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Dana Fox, the reason we get to see you in person in Los Angeles is because you are here doing a promo for Wicked For Good. I just want to talk about the promo circuit because on so many levels, it’s a celebration. Congratulations, you made a movie. It’s out there in the world. You made a series of a new season of television, it’s out there in the world. Then, like, oh my God, you have to just schlep around and promote it. You have to do all the things.

Dana: It looks really fun when people see it, and everybody’s dressed up, and you’ve got all the hair and makeup, and everyone’s like, “You’re great, everything’s great.” It’s so hard. It’s like a job. It’s a real job, and it takes you away from the job you get paid for, which is typing on your computer.

John: You don’t get paid to [unintelligible 01:08:43].

Dana: For months, I didn’t work because I was promoting the first movie, and thank God, we had a lot of people who wanted to talk to us, which was amazing. I felt so lucky, and so I really wanted to take advantage of it. Then it was March, and I realized I hadn’t written a single word for the year. I was like, “Oh my God, I have to pack my entire year worth of work into the next couple of months because the next promo tour is about to start.” That was very intense.

It is a lot of work, and I hate to say that because you imagine normal people with their normal jobs sitting there rolling their eyes at me, being like, “Oh, getting makeup on is really hard.” It’s like I became a writer because I’m terrible at that stuff. I’m so bad at blow-drying my hair. What even is that? It takes hours. I don’t understand it. Then I see the girls, Cynthia and Ari, and I’m like, they look like they’re going to the Met Gala every time they step out. I’m like, that is a lot of work.

John: Hours to get to that place. I remember back when I was in Startup Program, you were just a couple years behind me. There was a writer-director who was talking about, like, “Oh, yes, I do that, but I’m going to have to do the awards season starting for this movie.” Oh, that’s presumptuous. They think that movie’s made up for the awards. He wasn’t wrong. He was just like, he’d been through it before. He knew that, “Okay, those are three months I’m not going to get back.”

Dana: I’m very superstitious, so if something goes well, I have to wear the same clothes. It’s gross. It’s like, I’m that lady. I can’t talk about anything in the future. I’m like, I’m done. The premiere’s on Monday in New York, and I’m going to do that and do a couple more interviews. I’m assuming I’m done because I can’t–

John: You’re not done.

Dana: Ooh, but I can’t say it out loud.

John: Let’s talk about the gendered expectations of this, though, too, because for you need to have a great-looking outfit. Hair and makeup, but also great outfits for things, where Craig and I don’t– We’re just sticking to our suit.

Craig: I got to tell you that [crosstalk]

Dana: No, I was going to say, have you seen Craig lately? Look at his glasses. He looks so cool.

Craig: They send over a stylist who’s a lovely man, and they send over a makeup lady. Now, for me, makeup is, “Can we please make your head not so shiny?”

Dana: That takes a life time.

Craig: That’s really what makeup is. “Can we do something about the eye bags?” It takes about 20 minutes, maybe 30, but–

Dana: I’m in there for two hours and 30 minutes.

Craig: That’s the gendered part, right? That is a big one.

Dana: Can we make her look like she doesn’t have three kids?

Craig: They send over a rack of clothes, and I’ve got to try things on and make decisions. I’m not good at that.

Dana: I think that’s nice that they do that. They’ve done that for me, and I felt so appreciated. I appreciate Universal so much for treating the writer that way in features because, Craig, you’re the writer in a television show, which means you’re like the king of the castle. I’m a writer in a feature movie, which means they’re like, “Who? What’s that girl doing here?”

Craig: They don’t have to do it, and it’s nice that they are doing it.

Dana: They don’t have to. It’s very nice that they’re doing it.

Craig: It’s also a sign of how much they respect and appreciate you. For me, it was interesting hearing you say you had to take all this time off. For me, that stuff happens while we’re in post. It starts happening, I would say, two brutal months, maybe three, and I’m working all day. Then you just have to go and–

Dana: For me, when I have an interview and I have to get glammed, that’s my day. He killed my whole day. Does it do that for you?

Craig: Most of the stuff that I end up doing are interviews. There’s the junket days and all that stuff. The phone interviews or Zoom interviews, I don’t need to do anything. When somebody’s coming for a magazine and they’re doing photographs or you’re going to an event, then, yes. I got to work on a Saturday now because I did this thing on a Thursday.

Dana: Part of the reason that I accepted the whole idea of the stylist and all that stuff was because Franklin Leonard from the Black List pulled me aside and was like, “Writers are always wearing black, they’re hiding, they’re in the background, especially women, and they look like publicists for someone else. Don’t do that.” He’s like, “Wear color, be out front, make yourself look good because that is part of raising the profile of writers in Hollywood.” That’s part of people understanding that we actually work on the movies. We do stuff.

Craig: I have this thing that I think I’ve successfully articulated to the stylist I work with, which is because part of his job is to try and get me to be a little bit more adventuresome in what I wear because I’m not. Where I draw the line is I’m like, okay, but when I’m up there, like we’re doing a FYC event and it’s me and the actors, it’s about the actors. More importantly, I cannot try to even seem like I think I’m as cool as them.

Dana: I’m trying to compare myself to Pedro.

Craig: Exactly.

Dana: 100%.

Craig: I’m Dad. I need to always be Dad. As long as you can keep me Dad, and let the actors have their beautiful aura of coolness.

Dana: As long as it’s clear that I am Ariana Grande or Cynthia Erivo’s nanny, then we’re fine. [laughter] I’m not up there to try to be like them. I do stare at them lovingly during all of the Q&As [crosstalk] and just tear up because they’re just so beautiful and lovely.

Craig: You’re so important to the movie, and John is so important to the movie and the editors and everybody. These events are entirely about the actors. I reiterate this, too. I’m trying to explain this. Because sometimes, especially when we do–

Dana: They do a lot of events where the actors are not there. These are more the craft ones, like the BAFTA.

Craig: Those are fun.

Dana: It’s about craft, and then they really do listen to what–

John: What’s so interesting about those roundtable-y things is that you are having genuine conversations, but you’re done up because you’re taking photos at the same time, and so you’re looking at stuff. I find if I get makeup for something, I feel it the rest of the day, my eyes get itchy, and I hate having it on. I have to scrub it all down.

Craig: What is that? Dana, why do our eyes get itchy?

Dana: It’s the powder in it. Do your eyes get itchy?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. From the–

Dana: You guys are allergic to something. You got to tell your makeup artists that they need to do sensitive skin stuff.

John: I think it’s just the powder that they use to keep my shiny head from–

Craig: I think it’s anti-bald powder. Because like John and I, our heads are bounce cards, basically. Whatever they use for that clearly makes your eyes itchy. Honestly, no man can complain about makeup. It’s just like–

Dana: Thank you for saying that, because I, as a woman, feel that I could have been president of the United States if I had not had to blow-dry my hair throughout my entire life, because that is how much time I would have gotten back. I could be the president right now.

Craig: Really, you should have been.

Dana: I mean, please.

John: Dana Fox for president. Once again, we’ve–

Dana: Solved it all.

John: We solved the problem.

Dana: We solved everything.

John: Dana, we love you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Craig: Thank you, Dana.

Dana: I love you both so much.

John: Bye.

Dana: Thank you. Bye.

Links:

• Dana Fox on Instagram and IMDb
• Wicked: For Good
• Graham Rowat
• Friendship
• Comfrt travel hoodie
• Sara Schaefer’s miniature cuck chairs
• Pittman Inflatable Camping Chair
• Inflatable Beanless Bean Bag Chair
• What the Cuck?! | Decoder Ring
• Wicked the book and the stage show
• The Fugitive (1993)
• Owl Labs’ Meeting Owl 3
• Eric Berlin – Puzzle Snacks
• The Most Important Question podcast
• Heating Pads
• VW ID Buzz
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The post Scriptnotes, Episode 712: Something Wicked This Way Comes, Transcript first appeared on John August.

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