700 - The Live Call-In Show
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2025
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To celebrate our 700th episode, John and Craig open the phone lines for a live late-night call-in show (recorded at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday). Through the power of Zoom (and YouTube), listeners ask questions about rewrites in post, avoiding traps as a production designer, changing characters in a rewrite, and advice on leaving the entertainment industry.
We also welcome back familiar faces from Scriptnotes history for a brand-new segment, “People, Places and Things,” where we look at movie stills and ask how we might describe them on the page.
Also for debate, what is the boundary between “spoiler” and “what’s happening in culture”?
In our bonus segment for premium members, we keep the videophone lines open for more listener questions on juggling multiple projects, preparing alt lines for production, and whether studios option projects just to kill them.
You can (and should!) watch the entire episode on our YouTube channel. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. While you’re there, give us a Like and a Follow.
Links:
- Watch episode 700 on YouTube!
- Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonell, and Megana Rao
- Weapons
- The Hunting Wives on Netflix
- Vince Gilligan YouTube video
- Our Back to School collection on Weekend Read
- Play along with People, Places and Things: Woman one, woman two, man one, kid duo, oceanside, house, and city.
- Scriptnotes Episode 399: Notes on Notes
- Spike tape
- Bridge Base Online
- 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
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at [email protected]
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome. My name is John August. My name is Craig Mason. And you're listening to |
| 0:06.3 | episode 700 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. |
| 0:13.0 | Today on the show, we are doing something we haven't done since 2020, a live show with our listeners on |
| 0:18.0 | Zoom and on YouTube. Hello, listeners. Like a lot of things about the |
| 0:21.5 | pandemic, we only half remember what we're doing. But while we're still an audio first podcast, |
| 0:26.4 | we are going to be doing some things in this episode that benefit from being able to share |
| 0:29.3 | screens and look at things. So if you're listening to the audio version at home or your car |
| 0:34.1 | and happen to be close to a screen, consider going back and watching some of this later on on YouTube |
| 0:39.3 | because there's actually images to see. |
| 0:42.5 | We'll also be answering listener questions live on air, |
| 0:44.7 | including a few in the bonus segment for our premium members. |
| 0:47.7 | And to help us celebrate 700 episodes, |
| 0:50.3 | we are joined by some script notes champions over the years. |
| 0:54.6 | Let us welcome to the podcast, Stuart Friedel, our very first producer of the show. |
| 1:00.8 | Stuart. |
| 1:02.0 | Stuart! |
| 1:04.2 | There we go. |
| 1:05.1 | Hi. |
| 1:05.6 | Oh, my God. |
| 1:06.5 | Look at that background, Stuart Friedel. |
| 1:08.1 | Such a good background. |
| 1:09.6 | Classic. |
... |
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