161 - A Cheap Cut of Meat Soaked in Butter (Encore)
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2025
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John and Craig invite Aline Brosh McKenna back to celebrate the third anniversary of Scriptnotes. It's a jam-packed, glass-and-a-half of wine, listener-favorite episode.
They look at ways to breathe new life into scenes and characters that aren't working, box office journalism and how Hollywood is always dying, scene geography, and the role of emotional intelligence (or EQ) in a writer's career.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we have original outtakes from the episode where we look at what changed in the world in our first three years on air, make predictions for what's to come, re-invent Spanx, and of course talk about D&D.
Links:
- Going to the 2025 Austin Film Festival? Submit to our LIVE Three Page Challenge here!
- The original episode 161 and its transcript
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Instagram and IMDb
- Why do people throw tomatoes? from How Stuff Works
- The Knowledge
- Global Entry
- From 2014: Movies Have Worst Summer Since 1997 by Brooks Barnes
- Mimeographs on Wikipedia and eBay
- Maguire Watch on Everything is Terrible!
- Filthy Scriptnotes episodes The Angeles Crest Fiasco and The Dirty Show
- The Honourable Woman
- This Movie Will Require Dinosaurs by C. W. Neill
- N3TWORK
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Robert Hutchison (send us yours!)
- This episode was originally produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is John. Today's episode is One From the Vault. Episode 161 dates back to September 2014. It's our third anniversary show, and Aline Brosh McKenna is our very, very special guest. It is a glass and a half of wine kind of show. It has a lot of evergreen topics. We talk about changing character tactics to breathe new life into a scene. We talk about |
| 0:22.1 | scene geography. We talk about the emotional IQ of writers. There's some things that feel a little |
| 0:27.1 | bit dated. We talk about the iPhone 6. We talk about the script notes app that doesn't exist anymore. |
| 0:32.2 | But it also includes one of our very first bonus segments for premium members. We look at what changed |
| 0:37.1 | in our world over the first three years on the air. |
| 0:39.7 | We make some predictions, we reinvent Spanx, and of course we talk about D&D, because it's a bonus segment. |
| 0:45.7 | And for those of us here in 2025, reminder to join us at the Austin Film Festival. |
| 0:50.3 | And if you want to be considered for our live three-page challenge, submit your pages to |
| 0:54.1 | John August.com slash three-page. |
| 0:56.6 | In the meantime, enjoy this throwback episode to September 2014. |
| 1:03.9 | Hello and welcome. My name is John August. |
| 1:06.2 | My name is Craig Mason. |
| 1:08.3 | And this is episode 161 of Script Notes, |
| 1:12.2 | a podcast about screenwriting, |
| 1:14.6 | and things that are interesting. |
| 1:16.7 | The screenwriters, Craig, |
| 1:18.5 | this is our third anniversary. |
| 1:19.5 | Whoa. |
| 1:21.1 | Years we've been doing this. |
| 1:22.1 | Oh, my God. |
| 1:23.0 | Wait, who's that? |
| 1:26.3 | Well, we couldn't do a three-year anniversary without the third voice in script notes, |
... |
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