709 - Live at the Austin Film Festival 2025
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2025
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John and Craig return to Texas for their 11th show at the Austin Film Festival. They welcome writer Pamela Ribon (Nimona, My Year of Dicks) and showrunner Anthony Sparks (Queen Sugar, Bel-Air) to look at what makes character relationships compelling, and how to build a writing career later in life.
We also answer lister questions on getting un-stuck in a script, how podcasting has made us better writers, the limits of exposition, using AI for sizzle reels, and where we get the cajones selling a screenwriting book after slagging-off screenwriting books for fourteen years.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we invite two Scriptnotes super-fans up to the stage to compete for the ultimate prize: an early, signed copy of the Scriptnotes book.
Links:
- Pamela Ribon and Anthony Sparks
- Austin Film Festival
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Our Moneyball episode
- Enter the Relationship Matrix by Chris Csont
- Bring It On toothbrush scene
- STOMP
- Writer Emergency Pack
- 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 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 | The |
| 0:07.0 | The President, Are you guys being paid for this? |
| 0:33.0 | I'm going to say. |
| 0:34.9 | You know, bringing in the warm-up act to sort of like, |
| 0:37.0 | could shit get the mood? That was really good. It was worth all the hundreds of dollars. Yeah, that, wow. That was great. Thank you for that. Sure. Yay. Thank you, guys. So, I would say it's especially impressive that you're here. Not only we scheduled against a Ryan Johnson premiere. |
| 0:55.4 | Also, did you hear this? |
| 0:58.2 | The Major League Baseball scheduled a World Series game. |
| 0:59.8 | I'm telling you this now. |
| 1:02.0 | They scheduled a World Series game against us. |
| 1:03.8 | Apparently it's happening at this moment. |
| 1:04.5 | Yes. |
| 1:08.9 | And I have been told in no uncertain terms that I cannot check the score |
| 1:11.4 | during this. However, I can tell you |
| 1:14.5 | right now it is tied up to two. |
| 1:17.0 | What is exciting? |
| 1:19.1 | Now? |
| 1:19.8 | In the top of the sixth in Toronto. |
| 1:22.6 | What I will tell you is that people think like, oh, John doesn't |
| 1:24.7 | like baseball, but the truth is, I like movies |
| 1:26.7 | about baseball. I like the episode of Moneyball. We recorded a deep dive on Moneyball with Taffy |
| 1:32.0 | Bertester Ackner. So if you're hungering for Craig and I talking about baseball, go back and |
| 1:38.0 | listen to that episode, be a premium subscriber. I thought you were going to say, we'll just do it |
... |
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