Every Podcast Conversation at Your Fingertips

John and Craig welcome back screenwriter Mike Makowsky (Death by Lightning, Bad Education) to ask, how do you dramatize a historical event that no one's heard of? They look at the dramatic engine behind the Garfield assassination, the long journey Death by Lightning had to getting made, and the importance of finding great stories in obscure history.

We investigate the peculiar habits and compulsions of our own writing practices, and see how personality typologies can help figure out what makes our characters tick. We also follow up on a certain orange book, breaking into Hollywood in your 30's, and offer our thoughts on the impending sale of Warner Bros.

In our bonus segment for premium members, which TV shows had the best "coaching trees"? We marvel at the writers' rooms that launched the most successful writers today.

Links:

Death by Lightning on Netflix
Mike Makowsky on IMDb and Instagram
Episode 448 (The last time Mike was on the podcast)
Which TV Show Has the Best Coaching Tree? Alan Sepinwall for The Ringer
Size matters: a single representation underlies our perceptions of heaviness in the size-weight illusion
New evidence for the sensorimotor mismatch theory of weight perception and the size-weight illusion
Friedman Personnel Agency
Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
The Ballad of Guiteau from Assassins
The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
Writer's Guide to Character Traits by Linda Edelstein
A Fentanyl Vaccine Is About to Get Its First Major Test by Emily Mullin for WIRED
Heated Rivalry on HBO Max
The Good Lord Bird
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John August on Bluesky and Instagram
Outro by Luke Foster (send us yours!)
Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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You can download the episode here.

(9:00) Scriptnotes: A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters (Unabridged)

0:00.0	Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There's some swearing in this episode.
0:08.8	Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
0:13.4	My name is Craig Mason.
0:15.0	And you're listening to episode 716 of Script Notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
0:20.9	Today on the show,
0:21.7	how do you dramatize
0:22.8	the untold aspects of an historical moment as a limited series? No, Craig, we're not talking about Chernobyl again. Darn it. This time, it is the assassination of U.S. President James Garfield and the chaotic, dysfunctional political system surrounding it. We'll also discuss personality typologies, those systems for categorizing what makes people and fictional characters tick.
0:42.4	Plus, listener questions.
0:44.0	Tell us to all that.
0:44.9	We welcome back Mike McCowski, who joined us last time on episode 448 in 2020.
0:49.7	Thank you for having me.
0:51.2	Welcome back, Mike.
0:52.2	Good to be here.
0:53.1	Yeah.
0:53.8	Blast from the past. Yeah. Yeah, it was a COVID Zoom. It was back in the COVID days, yeah. Back in those days. Your screenwriter whose credits include HBO's Bad Education, which is what we talked about. Which we loved. Which we loved. And Death by Lightning is your new series, the Garfield assassination series. It's now out on Netflix. And it's just terrific. Congratulations on it. Thank you so much. Yeah. So I want to talk about the production of it, the just intention of writing about this obscure president and what happened there. Oh, how dare you, by the way? Obscure. Obscure. And also just the notion of limited series because they're increasingly hard to make. And so we'll talk about that. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about coaching trees. And this is an article that we found this last week, which was about which TV shows, writers rooms generated the most other creators of TV shows. So there's like a... Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So it's a branching sort of... Like Sid Caesar, our show of shows was sort of like the ultimate.
1:45.9	That's sort of the iconic one, but there's like many other ones along the way.
1:48.9	And maybe just talk about sort of what the culture is in those shows that allows for so many writers to grow out of them. but first, if anything's going to grow or change,
1:57.3	it's going to be in a new ecosystem
1:58.6	because as we're recording this,
2:00.3	which is sort of two weeks ago for our listeners,
2:03.0	Netflix is apparently buying Warner Brothers. change, it's going to be in a new ecosystem because as we're recording this, which is sort of two
2:01.1	weeks ago for our listeners, Netflix is apparently buying Warner Brothers. Craig, how do you feel about that?
	...

716 - Personality Typologies

Scriptnotes Podcast

John August

Summary

Transcript