165 | Michael Arndt's Act 1 Masterclass (REBROADCAST)

To prepare for his upcoming appearance on our show, TSL is proud to rebroadcast a classic, Michael Ardnt's Act 1 Masterclass.

Little Miss Sunshine's script, written by our guest Michael Arndt, won almost every major industry award, and for good reason. Its warmth, humor, and surefooted commitment to its themes makes it one of the finest scripts written this century. And SO many of those themes show up in Act 1.

Michael has become a bit "obsessed" with act 1's lately, because it's our chance to maximize the "rooting interest" around our hero so that our audience has no choice but to keep watching. FOR MICHAEL'S (AMAZING) WEBSITE: https://www.pandemoniuminc.com/

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Jeff: Hey, everyone. Producer Jeff here with a really exciting episode. We're actually re-airing our 2021 episode with Michael Arndt. It's a really incredible episode pretty much devoted to act ones and how to make the most kind of bulletproof and momentum building act one possible. 

So it's a really valuable episode, and part of the reason we're re-airing it is because Michael is going to be back on the show soon to sort of continue the conversation around what he built in this episode. So we wanted to refresh your memory and just dig into a bonafide TSL classic. Enjoy the show. 

Meg: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today we are thrilled to be talking to one of Hollywood's most well known and most well respected screenwriters, Michael Arndt. 

Lorien: Michael Arndt's first produced screenplay, Little Miss Sunshine, won the Oscar, BAFTA, WGA, and Indie Spirit Award for Best Original Screenplay, and is considered one of the finest scripts written in the 21st century.

Meg: He has written for many major studios and franchises including Pixar, Lionsgate, and Disney, and has one of the most respected and valued story brains working in our business today. So from one story brain to another, I will say I am so excited to be doing this. 

Lorien: Welcome, Michael. 

Meg: Welcome. 

Michael: Well, thank you. You guys kind of ambushed me with that introduction. I wish I had some fair warning that was going to happen. But thank you for having me on the podcast. 

Meg: You're so humble. 

Lorien: And we're really excited to get into talking to you. But before we do that, we want to talk about our week. So what we call adventure in screenwriting. 

Meg: So Lorien, you go first and then Michael we’ll hear from you and I'll come up at the end there. So Lorien, how was your week?

Lorien: My week was amazing. It's still in progress. As I mentioned on the last show, I'm showrunning a show and it's going very quickly. This week was the first week in the writer's room or the writer's Zoom because I'm hilarious. 

And I am so excited about my writers, the team we put together. And I'm actually sort of a little thrown by how much I don't get to be in the writer's room as the showrunner, that I have meetings and things to read and emails to respond to. And it's a lot of work that's not in the room. So luckily I had the foresight. Well, I got amazing advice about this to hire a writer in the room who can run it in my absence.

So he's amazing. And he sort of knows what I'm looking for and can and runs it when I'm not there. So, which is so helpful because then I can pop back in the room and he'll be like, great, we're ready to pitch to you. And they pitch it. And then I'm like, here are my notes. And then I have to bounce back out again.

But it's a lot of fun. I'm tired. I was up very late last night doing things. I woke up this morning at five. Hello. I'm awake. Let's keep going. So, but that's the job and I love it. And I am looking forward to sleeping at some point in the next couple of months. So that will be exciting. But that's my week.

Meg: I wish a good sleep for you at some point. 

Lorien: It is consuming. In a way that I need to find balance about, right? Because I could just keep going. I could never sleep or take care of myself. So, a genius friend of mine said that if you feel like you don't have five minutes, you should take an hour.

And I did that yesterday. I went out in the sun, I called a friend and it just sort of changed the day for me. Cause I was sort of doing that thing where I forgot how to breathe. Right. Everything was like an emergency. Everything was a panic. And then I was like, Oh no I can't die today. I have a lot of work to do.

So that taking care of myself in like basic ways, like, hey, breathe, drink water, eat, sounds so silly, but it's so important. And honestly, I've been here before on other productions, but it's just it's just I haven't been in a while. So it's a good reminder to, you know, take care of myself and not just survival take care of myself, but actually go out in the sun, take a walk, talk to someone who makes me laugh. That kind of survival. So that's my week. 

Meg: Michael, how was your week? 

Michael: My week was actually great. And I feel almost embarrassed saying this because mostly my weeks tend to be just me floundering around in confusion and making tiny little incremental progress on anything that I'm working on. But this week was different.

Like, you know, when you're surfing, most of the time you're just floundering around the surface and like 1 percent of the time you actually catch a wave and you're surfing it. So this week I had a new idea for a script. And it was Sunday night and I have insomnia and I had, I just, I had a bunch of different pieces of a story, of different stories, basically.

And so three different pieces sort of came together and formed a new story and I got all excited about it. And then on Thursday, I was able to, I did a zoom call with my assistant and sort of sketched out what the three act structure would be. So, and this almost never happens to me, but it was, so I feel I'm embarrassed because I feel like I'm almost bragging but it was, it's one of those moments.

It's like surfing, right? 99% of surfing is just frustration and floundering around in the surf, but when you catch that wave, right? And you're just riding down the glass, it's great. It's the greatest thing in the world. And so there, I think there are intrinsic rewards, to writing every once in a while and I was, you guys caught me on a very good week, so.

Meg: I love it. And some of our listeners do have questions about process, so that's going to be interesting to hear about what you're going to do now and how you're going to shape that idea. Just in general what your process is. 

Michael: Right, right.

Meg: My week, super quick, was forgiving myself for not sprinting with our listeners because that was my goal this week and it did not happen because I'm just too tired. I'm going, I have family, it's graduation. Like the family stuff is so heavy right now, and the work, that I decided to be like, okay, I'm not going to be able to work on my passion project till next week.

And that's how I will work on it next week. Cause I'm forgiving myself. And the, in terms of my writing, I'm in rewriting mode in terms of fine tuning. Not even fine tuning. Scene work, doing scene work. And I love big picture, blue sky, you know, barf draft. So this is like, make my brain get in there and work it.

And my husband also happens to be, he was doing a scene in his writing and he mentioned to me, he said, you know, I just, all of a sudden these two lines of dialogue were like this amazing crumb and set up, these things just started to make sense and work that was already there. And I was like, yeah, that's the work I'm doing, which is–

And it's so amazing, right. Cause you can do 30, 000 foot view and get this. And you can do intimate detail work and all of a sudden it like flowers open. Like it's so amazing to watch all of a sudden just because they said that, they had this two line exchange, the crumb of that. It's just, maybe crumb isn’t even the right metaphor, but it just blossoms and suddenly stuff that didn't make sense. 

And so I'm appreciating, even though it's not my favorite part of it, to that, looking for those crumbs and really doing that has really been fun. Michael you're gesturing.

Michael: Yeah, no, I remember Andrew Stanton saying sometimes your hero's change is in his worldview, his epiphany is just changing a single the meaning of a single word. 

So, for example with George Bailey, right? It's like, you know, you go through the whole movie, you think that Mr. Potter is the richest man in town. And then you get to the end, you realize that George Bailey is the richest man in town. And you're just changing the meaning of what riches is. But if you can boil your story down to a little bumper sticker like that, I feel that becomes so helpful because it just helps, it just floods out to the rest of the story. It just becomes your, the organizing principle of your story.

So finding those little nuggets is just crucial because it, anyway, congratulations on finding that because that's a fun moment. 

Meg: Yeah, it was my husband who found it, but I'm looking. I am looking. I mean, it's also in Nemo, right? I mean, that's very Stanton, right? 

Like at the beginning, he says, you know, I can't let him, I can't let anything happen to him. And Dory says it back to him, if nothing's ever happening to him, nothing will ever happen to him. 

Michael: Yeah, totally. 

Meg: Like she re-contextualizes his belief into a completely opposite belief, but using the same words, because now he understands it because he went through the whole movie. Like this is, that is the poles of the character that are so crucial and they don't come easy.

I don't find those words, that bumper sticker can take drafts and drafts and drafts because you even got the wrong main character and you didn't know it or whatever. 

Michael: Totally. 

Meg: It can take so long to get there. All right, so let's get to the interview part. Juicy, juicy. So Michael, let's start by talking about something that I think that you are also interested in diving into recently, which is first acts. Yes? 

Michael: Yes, totally. 

Meg: You know, you know, let's just be really broad about it in a way so that you can come in at it whatever angle you've been thinking, like, what is a great act one in terms of setting up the film or like, what do you, what are those elements that you see that really are writers, both pros and emerging should be thinking about as they're creating act ones?

Michael: I feel like I can't speak to anyone else's writing process or what anyone else should be doing, but I'll talk about my own obsession and what I'm thinking about like now in terms of my own writing and what I want my first act to do and what I want my first act break to do. Like for me, I feel like the thing I've become obsessed with is, I feel like the whole ballgame is just getting your first act break and having the strongest possible first act break.

And for me, a great first act break is you've achieved maximum rooting interest, right? Which is, totally hook your audience in. They're totally into like what the movie's about. And you've created sort of a thirst in both the hero and in the audience, right? To see that heroes satisfy that thirst, right?

And I also feel like you want to the, in the DNA of that first act, it doesn't always have to work this way, but a lot of times what you're doing is you're setting up a short term plan that your audience is, that your hero is pursuing in the pursuit of a long term goal. So you, the work that your first act has to do has to be both setting up the long term goal that your hero is pursuing and the short, the ladder that they're going to climb, a short term plan that they're going to pursue to achieve that goal. 

Meg: I often think of Wizard of Oz, right? Like when I was teaching at UCLA, I'd be like, but what's the plan? The plan is the yellow brick road. So it tells me the audience, this is the plan. And it really, it is the second act. That's the second act, or at least a little chunk of it.

And I also love the word you're using that I just want to highlight for people. Thirsty. That your audience has to be thirsty for it. Not just watching your character be thirsty for it, but they are thirsty for it. So important. 

Michael: Yeah, you've got to infect your audience with the thirst that your hero has. And I'll just, I'm just going to dive right into the thing that I was thinking about because you, when I was listening to your podcast, you invited me onto your podcast and so I had to go back and listen to all the episodes. And you know, I'll just say thanks a lot because you guys have called, caused me all this insomnia because you know, I listened to your podcast at night and then like my brain starts going a mile a minute and I start thinking of all this stuff. And then I, and it ends up being seven in the morning, I haven't gone to sleep yet.

But the thing that you guys made me think of is maybe you've got this great metaphor about a character starting off being asleep and getting to the end of the story and waking up. And I think that's a great metaphor to use for any character and it's a great thing to always keep in mind as you're, I think, especially when you're getting towards your later drafts, you know, and going like, how is this character changing?

How are they seeing the world in a new or different way? But I also feel as though, I think that your character's dawning consciousness, your character starting off from sleep and coming to wake often or usually has to do with the internal stakes of your story or the philosophical stakes of your story.

And what's important about creating thirst is it's in the external states of your story, right? You're creating, you're introducing your character and you're creating a thirst in your character in the external world. They're going to want something out there in the external world that they're going to go and pursue. So like, for example Olive in Little Miss Sunshine. She wants to win the Little Miss Sunshine contest, right?

And you want to infect your audience with that enthusiasm that your character has and then send them off on the second act journey to get there. And I guess the thing that I was thinking of, this was the new idea that I had after listening to you guys’ podcast and trying to think about this to myself was, there's all these movies in which the thirst of your hero is reflected in the thirst of the world, right?

So there's a deficit in the world that is reflected in the deficit, the personal deficit of your hero. So for example, I was always, I couldn't figure out the beginning of The Bicycle Thief because The Bicycle Thief begins and you don't meet your hero right away. Like, there's a whole sort of sub genre of movies where you don't meet your hero right away, you start in the larger world.

So in The Bicycle Thief, you know, it's just, truck comes in, the guy from the government comes out, he's handing out jobs, right, and there's a big crowd of people all there gathering around to get jobs. And you're just establishing that in this world, there's a general thirst, there's just a dying thirst for jobs, right. 

And the guy, you know, is handing out jobs, he goes, you know, where's Antonio? And Antonio's friend goes, wait a minute, I'm going to go get him. And he runs off. It's a really weird opening, but he finds the hero in town. And he's just sort of bobbling and he goes, Antonio, they got a job for you. Come on. But when you get in, you're just establishing those first two minutes that there is a general thirst in the world, is a deficit in the world, that then your hero is going to participate in so you're here and I feel like a lot of times a great first act is taking a deficit or a thirst in the larger world and combining with the deficit or the thirst in your hero's world. 

And when you get to that moment, sort of, that's when you light the spark and you have this sort of maximum rooting, which is at the end of your first act, if that makes sense.

Meg: I love that.

Jeff: That is incredible, like my mind is being blown in real time. But if you wouldn't mind like articulating in Little Miss Sunshine, we know the thirst that Olive has to win that award, but like when you talk about that thirst within the world, could you explain it in the context of that film?

Michael: Yeah, I think that, I mean, it ties into what I refer to as the philosophical states of the story, which is you start off with Richard giving this whole speech about winners and losers, right? And so you're in my own vocabulary, he's doing the antagonist aria of like what his worldview is. 

But you're creating a general sense, you know, with that first opening shot of Olive watching a beauty pageant, right? And you're seeing all these women lined up, ready to be crowned or not crowned, the winner of the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. You're reflecting what Richard says one scene later, right? Which is the whole world is divided between winners and losers. 

And you're automatically sort of tilting the playing field of your story because everyone, you know, if you ask people, do you want to be a winner or a loser? It's sort of a loaded question. Everybody wants to be a winner. But as I'm going through the first act I'm introducing different characters that are all pursuing their own idea of sort of transcending ordinary life and becoming a winner, right? 

So Uncle Frank wants to be the number one proof scholar in the US. Dwayne wants to become a fighter pilot. So there's just you're just creating a universe in which there's a thirst for everyone wanting to be winners and then the second act of the story is just crushing all those dreams, right? Like having everybody fall short and being disappointed. 

Can I jump in? I want to, I feel like one of a really good example of this is Close Encounters which just I went back and watched just a couple of days ago just thinking about this because there's all these stories that don't begin with your hero. Like you don't meet Luke Skywalker, right, until about 15 minutes into Star Wars. You don't meet Robin Hood until about 10 minutes into Robin Hood. 

And in Close Encounters, it's such a great opening, right? You start off with this huge mystery, right? Which is you find these planes in the desert. You've got Bob Balaban and Francois Truffaut walking around and you're basically telling your audience like crazy weird shit is happening in the real world. Like unexplained shit is happening in the real world. And you spend, I'm telling you I think it's 17 minutes, doing that, creating this thirst, going what is this mystery? What is happening? How did those planes up end up in the desert, right? 

So your audience is getting hooked in and then bingo like 15 minutes in or 17 minutes in, you meet Richard Dreyfuss, an ordinary guy living ordinary life, but he works in, for the electric company. And so one of the effects of the alien visitation is the power grid goes out, so he’s sent out right. 

And you, you've already established that there's, you've established that in the world, Truffaut and Bob Balaban have this enormous thirst for figuring out what the fuck is going on with these UFOs, right? And you've infected the audience with that thirst. What the fuck is going on with these UFOs? 

You meet Richard Dreyfuss, he gets in his truck, he pulls up to the railroad crossing and you have that insane inciting incident, right? Where all those Vilma Zygmunt lights come down and like light him up right. And now you've infected him with the same enthusiasm right. And he chases those lights. You get to the end of the first act the lights sort of go off and they disappear into the distance and I feel like your story has, that first act has done what it needs to do, which is to radicalize your hero, right?

The very next scene, he goes and he waits for his wife. He goes honey, you got to come in. You got to see this, right? And so he's kind of left the ordinary world behind. He left the world that we started off with behind. He's left every sort of ordinary prosaic care of his life. And now he's been radicalized to go. He's got this thirst. He's been infected with the thirst. 

We've already established that there was a thirst in a larger world. And now you've infected the hero and he's like, I will risk everything. I will run through brick walls. to find out what the fuck just happened to me. And so I think that's a great example of you know, maximum reading interest first act. 

Meg: That's amazing. I mean, when I hear that, I think about, I think that there is an old tradition in storytelling, not, I'm not even talking movies now, where you kind of set the world, but you're setting who will help us with this thing, right? There's a dragon. Who will be the hero who will come and help us with our problem?

So you're asking the audience who. And so you're starting to lean forward because you're setting up. There's this problem. It might be narrative. It might be character. It might be philosophical. Like there is this problem in the world, who will come, who will be the hero, right? 

Seems so classic, who will be the hero? And suddenly you meet him and he might be a doofus. He might be an ordinary man, but we know, oh my god, there he is. He doesn't even know it yet. It's so juicy. It's so exciting. 

Michael: I'll tell you, I remember being a kid and sitting in the theater and watching Star Wars and going, who are these robots? Who is Darth Vader? What is Princess Leia? And you get this, you're, all this crazy stuff is going on, right? And when you go Luke, and you get that John Williams, like French horn playing, I remember going, oh, this is the guy, right? And there's this great, you're fulfilling that thirst, your audience is going, oh, this is who like the story is going to be about.

But let me also make a, the example of Tootsie, I think is a really good example, right? Because you know, Dustin Hoffman, he says, I don't want to be, he doesn't want to be rich and famous. He doesn't want to be a star. He just wants to be a character. He just wants to be a working actor. But you start, you know, with that opening montage of him, both going to auditions and also teaching acting.

And there's this crucial line of dialogue in the first five minutes where he's talking to his teaching student, his acting students. And he says, there's no acting work in New York, but you got to go find it, right? There's no, like, it's impossible to get a job acting in New York, but you've got to go get a job, right?

So again, like in The Bicycle Thief, you're establishing that there's a deficit in this world, there's a thirst in this world, right? That you, that Dustin Hoffman is desperate, like he wants to get a job, but everyone else is desperate, right? 

And so again, you're going to have this congruence when you get to the end of the first act, that you get a closed door moment, right? Which is the inciting incident. Sidney Pollack, his agent saying, nobody will hire you. Like not only nobody in New York in, in Hollywood wants to work with you either. And like you'll never get a job. 

So you're creating a situation in which your character's number one thing, the only thing that he really cares about life, which is getting acting work, you have the dwarf like sort of slam in his face, you know. And then, of course, he just goes oh, yeah? you know and you cut the next thing he's wearing a dress and a wig.

And I feel like that's a great like maximum rooting interest moment because now you I want to see this guy go out and get a job by pretending, like being such a good actor that he can pretend to be somebody else 

Meg: Yeah, I love that because what I love about the different examples you're giving is that some are literally universe like, like Star Wars is like the universe, Darth Vader, like it's huge. The question of who will help the universe. 

The other one is societal. Italy, no jobs. That's a societal, country problem. 

And now this last one is an actor's problem. In their world, in this acting world, they have a problem, which is it's hard to get a job. Right. But it doesn't matter because as long as you align me to the characters first within that, right, then I'm in.

Michael: Totally. 

Meg: And what you say when they, what they care about. Right. In their world, they care about this. It might be huge. It might be Dark Vader. It might be, I can't, nobody can get acting jobs, but they care about it. So we care about it. 

Lorien: And there's a thing too, I think when we're taught screenwriting. It's, you know, what is the main character's problem and then how are they going to solve it?

But then widening it out with the worldview is so much more powerful, right? And it's what you're talking about, but I think it's going to blow some people's minds. Right, you have to create this connection. 

Michael: Right. Well, I think that Tootsie is actually a really good example of that because you're starting off and you're saying the hero is both asleep in the internal stakes of the story, but he's thirsty in the external stakes of the story.

So that screenplay is doing a lot of work in its first act, and it's a really short first act, it's like 25 minutes. But you're going, you're establishing that the reason he really can't get a job is he's kind of an asshole, right? He's kind of like an egomaniac and he can't take direction from anybody.

So his problem is actually self created, but you're also, I mean, I could go on and on about that first act break in Tootsie, but the work that screenplay, that first act is doing is establishing that your hero has an internal problem, which is sort of tacitly like you're, it's not being announced with big neon sign, right?

It's sort of being tacitly laid out. So it's going to pay off later on, you know. And, but you're also, so he's asleep and he's going to wake up at the end of the story. But you also want to start off with him being super fucking thirsty at the beginning in terms of the external stakes. 

He wants a job. He wants something in the outside world. And it's reflected in the broader world that it's impossible to find a job as an actor in New York. And now he's going to go out and run through brick walls and risk everything to satisfy his outside thirst. And if I can–

Meg: Yeah, go ahead go. 

Michael: If I can editorialize a little bit, I feel as though there's a bias in a lot of story meetings that you get into, which is people end up talking about the internal stakes of the story.

So I feel like almost, not every, but almost every story meeting ends up devolving into talking about character and theme, because that's the easiest stuff to talk about. And a lot of times what you need to talk about is what is our inciting incident? Like, how are we getting our audience on board with our character?

Like, you know, or what is our first break? How can we make our first act break stronger? So, for example, you could have a version of Hamlet, right, where Hamlet meets his father's ghost, you know. And then he dithers around and he doesn't know what to do. And that's the rest of the movie, right? 

And you can, and you, if you were in a Hollywood story meeting, they'd be going, well, we need to dig deeper into Hamlet's relationship with his mother. And what was this college that he went to and all that crap. You don't need any of that. What you need is the device of the players arriving at Elsinore castle, right? 

And therefore Hamlet gets a plan, right? He goes like, I have a long term goal. I want to avenge my father's death. But now the place, the thing we're in, I'll catch the conscience of the king. He has a plan to go forward. So I'm just going off on a mini rant here because I feel as though a lot of times you can get hung up. You, what you think is a character problem is actually a story problem. It's actually a plot problem.

And I've just, I've seen that over and over again in my own work. And so I just, I think that a lot of times I know it's easy to make fun of script nerds talking about inciting incidents and stuff like that. But I feel like those tools are very helpful a lot of times for identifying what's actually working or not working in the story. 

Lorien: So I know quite a few of the movies that you referenced are older and I'm, and you know, like we, we used to be able to take more time with act one and establishing the world and now it doesn't feel like we do.

I'm so curious what your opinion is on like when that shift happened and as screenwriters, how much control do we have over telling the stories in this way in the amount of time we have now in act one. 

Michael: I have strong feelings about this. I'm a big fan of short third acts and long first acts, and I feel like you, you need to fight to have your first act do everything that it needs to do, right?

And I don't care if it's, I think, you know, the first act of Toy Story, really, if you're following Woody's story in Toy Story 3 is like 40, 45 minutes, right? You're getting into, you're getting way deep into the story before Woody finally leaves Sunnyside and heads back to Andy. So I think that, I just feel like if I watch a film and I see it skimming over its first act, I just know it's not going to, the whole film isn't going to work because you need– the DNA of your story needs to be entirely set up in the first act of your story.

You've got to establish the external stakes, internal stakes, and the philosophical stakes. And the Billy Wilder thing, right, is that if you have a problem in your third, it's really in the first act. But I'll up that and say, if you have a problem, your second act, the real problem is in your first act, because the, you need to do all the groundwork to set up everything you need to do in the second act.

Meg: I totally agree. I always talk to people about your story engine and the engine, all the elements of that engine have to be fiery at a hundred percent. And if it's not, you're going to get a problem in act two, you're going to get a problem in act three, you're going to get a problem at the midpoint. 

You're going to get a problem because we don't care about anybody, whatever. You got to go back and that's why I keep talking people about, you have to reiterate, you have to re-outline, go back to all the basics that you're talking about. 

I also was really interested in when you said that he's awake to the external stakes and asleep to the internal stakes, but what's interesting about Tootsie that is so, such great writing, and what we all have to do, is that you have to kick dirt over the fact that he's asleep. 

Michael: Yeah, totally.

Meg: Because the audience has to be asleep too. So that even though we're like, he's a little arrogant, you also relate to the idiotic notes he's getting. So it's not, you do relate to that he is a better actor than this. And you relate to his feeling of like, oh my god, really, this is the note.

And yet his response and how he does it might be a little more arrogant than you would do it, but you do relate to him at really, at granular levels, so that we stay with him. And I think that's when people start to go, I don't like him. I don't know if it's about like, it's about relate. It's about experiencing it the way they experience it so that you're in the movie.

And that's really tricky with an arrogant character to do, but it's still beautifully done. 

Michael: Well I think that you, the thing is you want to, if your character has a flaw, let's say Groundhog Day. You know, Bill is condescending and he doesn't want to be there. But we participate in his condescension, right, because he's very amusing in the way he makes fun of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

So, it's just, I feel like, such a rookie mistake to announce your character's flaws in, in broad strokes, in primary colors, in your first act. You gotta do, as you say, you gotta do everything to kick dirt over it and disguise your hero's flaws. I think that Tootsie does a particularly brilliant thing because the inciting incident, the reason that he can't get, or the thing that sets him off, right, is that they're doing the Iceman Comic on Broadway, and they're hiring an actor to, who's on a soap opera, to do the lead, Hickey, in the Iceman Comic on Broadway.

And Dustin Hoffman is just totally outraged, right, because, you know, I can act circles around that guy, did the part already up in Syracuse. And so the way I think about it is that Dustin Hoffman has gone through the world, with a handshake deal that like the best man for the job is going to get the job. That's just how he sees the world. 

And what you're telling him in your inciting incident is, no, sometimes the best man for the job doesn't get the job. It doesn't matter how good an actor you are, you're not going to get that job, right? And that's the thing that sort of like, but we, like I don't care about actors in New York City and whether they get jobs or not, but I do care about the principle of the best man for the job, getting the job. Right? 

So when he, I feel like the thing that's going to get your audience on board with the character a lot of times is having some little injustice happen to them. Some little thing that you go, Oh, that's not right. You know, you can't have, you shouldn't just hire a soap opera star to do the Iceman Comic on Broadway just because it's famous, right? 

And so what that inciting incident allows you to do, that argument between Sidney Pollack and Dustin Hoffman allows you to do, is Dustin Hoffman doesn't have to wake up at that moment. He doesn't have to address the fact that he's sabotaging himself and that he's the reason that he's not getting work. He can go, the rest, I'm not, the problem isn't with me, the problem is the rest of the world. The rest of the world is unjust, therefore I'm justified in putting on a dresser wig and going out and fooling everybody and getting a job.

Meg: That's awesome. I'm sorry, I'm taking notes, so.

Lorien: I think a lot of what you're saying is so great. And you know, you're talking about point of view, you're talking, you know, like we, as writers, we hear all these words, sort of over and over again in different ways. And I love the way you're contextualizing all of this, because it's such a different and exciting way to think about it.

So it's a, it can open up new pathways as write, you know, as we're writers like, oh right, it's thirst, it's point of view, you know, it's stakes, it's all those things. So it's so great to hear it just talked about instead of the usual ways we talk about these things. It's like a new word opens up new possibilities.

Michael: Totally. And I think that also, I think that, I mean, I went back recently, looked at one of my old scripts that I've written a long time ago, and I got to the end of the first act, but I didn't have, and the character changed and the character goal, but it just sort of, it petered out from there. And I feel like I'm more and more conscious now. Again like the thing I'm obsessed with, like I know I've been obsessed with endings. I'm sort of over that obsession now like the ending is its own separate ball of wax and you know, it, you have to address it on its own. 

But I feel like, the other thing is I feel like endings are architecture, like there's a way in which like if you've set up everything right in your story, when you're going into your third act, there's an architecture to how everything's gonna play itself off. 

What I love about first acts is that they're sort of the poetry of cinema, the poetry of storytelling. You can do any fucking thing you want in your opening act because your audience is going to give you that sort of free time. And I just think that it's easy for first acts to be entertaining because you're meeting new characters, you're going into new situations. It's easy in the first 30 pages to just be turning pages and go, oh, I like this guy, I like this world blah blah blah.

But the job, the work that your first act needs to do is not making, you know, I like the world, I like this character, blah blah blah. The job that your first act is doing is all this other stuff in terms of setting up stakes, setting up your character being asleep so they're going to wake up. They're going to be thirsty so that they get sated at the end. And also just planning out or just gesturing towards, you know, what the ladder that, for example, Obi Wan and Luke are going to climb as they try to deliver, you know, R2D2 to Alderaan.

Meg: You know, when we had Andrew Stanton on, he said something that I think very much feathers into what you're saying. I'd love to get your view on how to do it. Which is, and I'm sure you've heard him say this, which is, I need to fucking love your main character. I need to fucking love them. As soon as you can get me to fucking love them, I want to fucking love them.

And I, what you said about injustice certainly helps you love a main character, but is there other things that you're doing in act one to make us love that character? I mean, you're so good at it. 

Michael: Well, I mean, for, I can only speak to my own personal taste, but I like character, I like characters who are crazy, right? Like, I feel like the crazier you can make your lead character, within the bounds of reason. You know, the more passionate you can make them, the more the audience is going to like them. 

I remember Chris Rock saying, his method for writing stand up was he goes, I try to think of the craziest fucking thing that I can say to an audience, and have them go, oh, that's still true. So I think in terms of your character, you know, I, you know, Olive is this passionate character, Dwayne is this passionate character. Like, having characters be irrationally passionate about something, I think is a big way to get your audience on board with them. Having is, having some unjust thing happen to them is another thing. And then also selflessness. 

I think, here's the first act I’ve been thinking about recently, which I just think is so great is Amelie, right? Amelie exists in this world of sort of, it's a little bit like Cinderella. It's a little bit world of domestic drudgery, right? There's no magic in it, right? So there's a deficit of magic in the world at large and there's a deficit of magic in Amelie's life. And the exciting incident, which I would have never written in a million years, right, is her finding that little fucking box of children's toys, right?

And every other character that you write is going to go, I don't care about a box or some old box of children's toys. But Amelie goes, no, I'm going to find the kid. I'm going to find the guy whose toys these were. I'm going to give it back to him. And they frame it as a thought experiment, right? Which is you, when you get to the end of the first act, the narrator says, Amelie was going to do a random act of kindness for a stranger, right?

And if it worked, if it made him happy, then she was going to change her whole life, right? But if it didn't work and it didn't make him happy, she was just going to go back to her life of domestic boring drudgery. So we are fucking hooked. 

Like at the end of the first act for Amelie, when you have to do all the shoe to track down, door to door, right. And get that, get the little box of toys to him. But when he opens it up and he starts weeping, right. And then he goes into the bar and it has a little drink and Amelie follows him in. And he goes, amazing thing happened to me. 

Now, Amelie is going to embark on this crazy campaign of like random acts of kindness to like bring magic and whimsy and imagination to other people's lives. And we're totally fucking rooting for her to do that just because she's acting selflessly. She's not acting for herself, you know. She's acting for other people. And what makes it great is that she's asleep to her own fear, like she's asleep to her own fear of contact. So in a weird way, she's a little bit like Michael Gorsi and Tootsie and that she's using her second act to avoid the thing that she's really afraid of, you know.

But that script does a great job of establishing her fear, the thing that she's asleep to, but also establishing her thirst, which is she wants something, you know, she's a waitress in Paris. She wants some adventure or imagination or spark or whimsy in her life. That inciting incident is so crazy. It's such a tiny little thing, you know. But they amp up the emotional stakes of it, amp up the philosophical stakes of it. And when she embarks on this campaign of random, the random acts of kindness, you're fucking rooting for her because she's not doing it for herself. She's Doing it for other people.

Lorien: And you, do you have a similar process when you start a project or does each process or project tell you what it is? 

Michael: I think that usually a story is inspired by a single moment in that story. So I think, let's say Finding Nemo is about Nemo disappearing, right? And now you gotta go find him, right? And for me, Little Miss Sunshine was all inspired by the ending, you know, and going, how do we get to this ending?

I finished this, or I'm working on a script now where it's all about the midpoint handshake, you know. It's just like everything is gonna have the midpoint handshake. I would say Close Encounters to some degree is a little bit about that midpoint, right? Because you got Richard Dreyfuss building that big mountain, you know, of dirt inside his living room and then on TV you see devil's tower on TV and it's such a great midpoint, right?

Because the whole audience is pointing to the TV and pointing at the turn going, go, that's where the mystery is going to be solved. So for me in terms of my own process, a lot, your story is going to tell you what it is, but a lot of times there's a single moment in a story.

I have another script I'm working on that's all about the inciting incident. Like, it's a total, brutal, insane, inciting incident of the story, and everything else flows from there. So, it's, a lot of times, just your initial impulse is gonna be about one single shining moment, and then everything else sort of works itself out from there 

Meg: In terms of midpoints, we did have a question from both Stephanie and Matt about midpoints and or act twos in terms of, if you've done this heavy lifting in act one, I do know that the engine then starts to help you create all of this. 

But is there anything that you've seen in the midpoint area that you can call out in terms of for your process or, you know, we know what, you know, what you can learn in school. It's the, you know, the shift in the stakes that go up and things get much harder on them and blah, blah, blah. 

I mean, I tend to find in my work, and again, I don't know if it's for everybody's work, there is a relationship shift. There's a giant relationship shift in most of my stories in terms of a coming together. Is there anything you're finding in your work in terms of midpoints? 

Michael: I feel like there's, I feel like there's a natural, organic, relationship between your, the strength of your first act break and the strength of your midpoint.

So, for example, Finding Nemo is such a strong first act break. I gotta go track down my son. That's going to be enough juice to power you all the way through the second act. You don't need a big turn in your story because your first act break is so strong. So the midpoint, I can't even think off the top of my head, sort of what the midpoint of Finding Nemo is, just because that first act break is so great.

On Toy Story 3, I had, we were dealing with, kind of a weak first act break, which is, the first act break is Woody leaving his friends leaving Sunnyside and saying, well, screw you all I’m going to go home to Andy. And there's not a real strong rooting interest in that, right. Because we don't want to see Woody leave his friends. We understand he has a sense of obligation towards Andy, wants to be there for him. But it's a pretty weak first act break because there's not a lot of strong rooting interest. 

But when you get to the midpoint of the story And you go, Sunnyside is a prison, I gotta go save my friends, fellas, we need to go home now, right? The story, because the first act break was so weak, the midpoint becomes very strong and powerful because that's where all your juice, all your emotional rooting interest is coming from. 

I think it's the same, if you don't mind me blathering on, it's the same with The Graduate, which is when Ben, gets to the first act break, right? He embarks on the affair with Miss Robinson. We know, we're not really rooting for that, right? We kind of are intrigued, we're curious, we want to see what happens next, but there's no real emotional juice to it. There's no real emotional rooting interest. 

However, when he goes on a date with Elaine Robinson and they totally connect with each other, you're like, oh now I know what to root for now. So it's a super strong midpoint, right? But because the weak point was fairly, the first act was fairly weak, your midpoint is going to be super fucking strong, or you need a very strong midpoint. 

Meg: Yes. Yes. That's funny. I have a project that's exactly what's happening. And intuitively I'm like, yeah, but I, this'll work, but you get, you start to get the notes, right, of this has to be a stronger end of act one. 

And I'm like, I'm not all like, yes, it has to be clear and do everything you're talking about, by the way. So I don't want anybody out there who's an emerging writer to not, to hear this in the wrong way. You have to do everything he's talking about and have a strong end of act one.

But the, that midpoint can also be an incredibly important rooting interest moment of, oh shit moment, right? Like, oh, this just shifted dramatically. 

Michael: And the stakes went up, the emotional stakes went up, the external stakes went up and everything like that. I had a script and I went through 12 drafts, and the character was passive basically for the first half of the movie.

And everybody hated, and I love this lead character, I think he's great, right? But everybody hated him because he was passive. And it was just like, you get to the midpoint, and there's this, what I think is a very strong midpoint turn. And I just kept getting this note that like, I hate your lead character.

And I was like, well, that's the character. He's just passive until the midpoint. 

And so it was, I mean, I think a lot of times story meetings are sort of interventions, like someone has to sit down with you and go, Michael, your story isn't working, you need to change this. And so I wrote a sort of a, just a really tiny inciting incident, you know. 

And all I had to do was just make him act make him care about somebody else. Make him want to do some something for somebody else's benefit, someone close to him. And just become active to make some, and then you're gonna have a you know downward cascade from there are bad things happening to him, but the audience is just gonna like him.

So it's not, it wasn't a, it's not, still not a very strong first act break, but it's just enough to get you hooked into liking him until you get to your midpoint. 

Lorien: I love everything you're saying and especially responding to, you know, write the first act, get to the break. It doesn't matter how long it is, right. And then like, it can be the, in the first act break, it can be the midpoint because a lot of us are told like, here are the rules. These are the rules. And I have a big thing about the rules. 

Like it's about what you're talking about, it seems like, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that the story tells you what it is, right? You have to trust that you're a storyteller and that you're going to be inspired by that crumb and then it's going to go from there. And that, yes, we have to follow the rules, generally speaking, but, you know, you have the story guide you to some extent. 

Michael: Probably. No, every story is a, to me, in my mind, every story is a closed system of logic. It's narrative logic, it's emotional logic, and it's thematic or philosophical logic, right? And you need to have an arc for each of those things. So you need a three act structure externally, internally, and philosophically. And that's just really hard to do. You know, you guys have been great on your podcast and talking about how much rewriting you need to do.

And this is something I, if I can just give a bit of advice, like now I just, I always go into any project going, I'm going to write 20 drafts of this. And I think that I used to torture myself and make a mistake when I started out writing because I'd write three or four or five drafts. And then I'd go, and then I'd go, oh, I'm hung up on third base and I'm just trying to get to home plate.

And you just motherfucking torture yourself by going, I'm going to try and solve every problem in the script so that the next draft is the last draft and I don't have to work anymore, right. And so you do a sixth draft and it doesn't work. You do a seventh draft, it doesn't work. It doesn't, you do an eighth draft and it doesn't work.

But every time it's just all or nothing thing, where you're trying to solve every motherfucking problem in your motherfucking script, and you're constantly being disappointed and it gets very frustrating. And if you just budget, you're like, maybe it's not going to take you 20 drafts, like maybe you'll do it in four, right?

But if you budget in your own head, I'm going to write 20 drafts of the script, then there's a way that you can break it down so that you're addressing each problem individually. You're not having to find all your ideas, the best ideas and the best chronology for those ideas all at the same time. That's an impossible task.

Meg: Which is not even possible because it's a layering process.

Michael: Totally. 

Meg: It's a layer, it's like painters have to do, first they have to sketch and they have to do shape, and then they have to paint, and they have more paint, then they have to do texture. It is a layering process, so it's not even possible what people want to do, which is I just do it all at one time.

Michael: No, it's crazy. 

Meg: It's not possible. 

Michael: That’s insane. It will never work. And the thing, you're just allowing yourself a certain leniency to go, I'm going to do a draft that's going to plug all the logic police holes in the script, and I'm just going to make the story logic airtight. I'm going to do a draft to address the stakes of the story.

Is there any place that I can up the stakes of the story? Now I'm going to do a draft that works on the main relationship to the story and just making sure all the main relationships track completely. Or I'm going to do a draft dealing with the philosophical stakes of the story. But there's a way in which if you're just breaking down screenwriting into its constituent elements and going like, again, a story is a big complicated machine and you can't build it all at once.

So giving yourself the leeway to do 20 drafts means that you go, I'm going to do 40 coats of paint, right? I'm just going to keep like, like layering it on, right. But I'm telling you if there was one bit of advice I wish someone had given me when I started out was like, don't try and make your next draft the last draft always, right?

You're always like, give yourself the leeway to go, it's going to be, not it's going to get on, five drafts and it'll be on second base. Ten drafts and it'll be on third base. And now you've got the really difficult task because Hollywood is filled with scripts that are stuck on third base. You got to get it, you know from third base to home plate.

Meg: All right, how, what in your experience are some of the elements, and again, it's always specific to a project I don't, but how do you, what, when you say third base to home, what does that mean to you? Because I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing 

Michael: Well, I'm, I'll just tell you, which is, I, when I finished working on Star Wars and I came back to New York, I was just like, I can't be a screenwriter anymore. It's too hard. Like, it's just too, it's just too difficult and I just can't do it. You know, I'm going to quit. I'm going to go surfing or something like that, but it's the impossible profession and I just can't do it.

Because I feel like I see over and over again in my own writing that I start off with an idea. I think it's great. I do 8, 10 drafts and I get up onto, hung up on third base, and your story sort of plateaus at the level of your initial conception. And George Saunders has that great line in his new book, right, where he says, you always want to exceed your initial inspiration. You always want to exceed the initial conception of what your story is going to be.

And so there's, I feel like I always do a sharp takeoff. I level out plateauing. And then I've got to change my mind about what the story is really about or what the story really is, because that's, I got to listen to other people and tell me what's working, what's not working, because that's the thing that's going to allow me to sort of ramp up.

But the other thing that just happened the last couple of years was I finally just decided that, I mean, I want to direct, I want to be a director. And what I decided to do was, I was just going to adopt the Pixar process of doing sets of reels for live action. So for the film that I'm hoping to direct, I've made five sets of reels on it. And I feel like doing a set of reels on a live action movie is so helpful. It’s the difference between being a pilot and flying on instruments versus being a pilot and being able to look out the window and see the whole landscape in front of you. 

So I have done a set of reels for this comedy I'm working on. I'm starting a set of reels for this low budget thriller that I’m working on. And I know that not everybody has that resource to be able to do that, but I feel like the key thing though is that if you make a set of reels, you don't have to make a set of reels. 

You can just do a story reading with a room full of people and just get, it's the same kind of process. But it's really listening to other people, being super fucking humble. And in a weird way, every time you're inviting people to read your script and give you feedback, it's like an intervention, right? They're telling you what you're not doing right and you've got to be humble enough to shut up and take it and listen. 

And then, because they're trying to help you, right? They're trying to tell you what's not working, you know. And so I don't know. I mean getting from third base to home plate is the impossible thing we're all trying to do. But to me I feel like working on a set of reels has been a super helpful tool.

Meg: Because so much of that I found in the Pixar process is that they can get to home plate because they're iterating, and there is constant outside people walking in and going, did you look here? Did you look here? Hey, how about this? What about this crazy idea? And you're like wait, that crazy idea. 

Like this conversation is happening, which can be super hard, by the way, in terms of as a writer, because you're just watching everything you just spent a year go, and you go, ahhhh! Fuck! But it is, you can lean into it as, this is a conversation happening. That's how you get to home plate because it's pushing you. And that whole fail fast thing is pushing you out. 

And you can do this without Pixar. You can do this with your friends. You can start iterating, like you said, I mean, it is in the notes, whether you like them or not. I was just doing a little intro for a lab and one of the questions was, how do we make sure when we get in our notes, it remains ours. And I was like, right there, you got to stop because that is not what notes are about. It's not about walking in and holding tight to it. It's about opening up to it and letting it start to iterate and have a conversation.

And then you can always go back to what you have, but you shouldn't. And I also think those crumbs we were talking about can be that, right? Like, cause you've iterated and iterated, all of a sudden this thing rises up and you're like, oh, that thing that rises up might be, oh fuck, I have the wrong main character. It can be huge. 

Like you were talking about, I'm on draft six and I'm going to go and do the stakes. And I'm thinking, yeah and at Pixar, after that, they tell you, you have the wrong main character and you go all the way back to the beginning. Because that's how big or small it can be. It can be in the dreaming, that the dreaming is being dreamt. It's being dreamt so many times over and over that suddenly your blind spot gets a shot to come out and smack you on the head in that crumb. 

Or it's because somebody walked in and had that intervention and smacked you on the head. And the people who can handle the smack on the head, and use it and elevate their writing and elevate their view are the ones who I think, you can do this job and you can stay in and you can hang in.

I mean, I worked with a producer who literally was like, too nuanced, where's your real estate? What you're, so this is, what's the real estate that you're using? In my head I'm thinking what? I love nuance. I am famous for nuance. This is what I do. 

And then I'm like, oh my God, I keep this, he's right. This is too nuanced. What is this word real estate that he's saying? What does that mean? Like, I have to have this whole thing with myself about, well, I am really giving a lot of real estate to that character. Why am I doing that? Because they're not even in the fucking movie. And so why do I care about them? Can I do that in a different way? And then suddenly it's even better. 

So I'm sorry, I'm getting excited about what you're saying because this is the work. This is the work, what you're talking about. 

Michael: Well, I think that you said a key thing, which is, I feel like your first draft is for yourself, right? You're the king, you're the god of this universe. You do whatever you fucking want. Your job with your first draft is to follow the fun, to entertain yourself, to make you as happy as possible, right? So when you finish that first draft, you've done all the selfish work of loving your character, loving your world, loving the story that you're telling, right?

Maybe third, second, third, fourth, fifth draft, that, that's all you're going to do, right? At a certain point, you've got to pivot, right? Because you're not making your fucking film for yourself, right? You're going to show it to other people. 

And I do feel like when you think about movies that you saw years ago, right? You remember like a handful of scenes and you remember how it made you feel right? So to me, the question is, as you embark on telling a story, I mean, for me at least, and again, everyone has their own process, everyone has their own goals. My goal is not to articulate an idea, my idea, my goal is to create a feeling that the audience has when they walk out of the theater, because that's the thing they're going to remember.

And so, if your goal is not articulating your own little idea that you want the world to share, right? But your goal is to create a feeling in the audience, right? Then you've got to sit there and listen to your audience telling you what they feel. You know, when you get to the end of your story or all the way through the story.

So I feel like, you know, my goal with Little Miss Sunshine was I wanted to drive, I wanted to have a happy ending, but I didn't want to have just any ordinary happy ending. I wanted the happiest fucking ending of all time. Like I was like, I'm going to start a riot of happiness in the theater. Like, you know, I'm going to drive the audience insane with happiness.

And so like everything then, is like heading towards that single goal so that, you know, now I'm sure if you ask someone who saw Little Miss Sunshine 15 years ago, you know, what do you remember about that movie? They remember like two, three, three moments in the film, but they remember how it made you, made them feel.

And I think that to me, at least that's what we should be aiming for as writers is like, how does the audience feel when they walk out of the theater and everything to me at least, every story decision you make has to be in the service of that final feeling, that last shot that you're going to have. And if that's your goal, then you have to listen to your audience. 

Lorien: What do you count as a draft? 

Michael: I count if I get feedback on it, basically. So I'll do, I mean, I guess I got a mini feedback loop, which is, I have an assistant who unfortunately has to read all my stuff and then I have my twin brother who's a professor of literature and philosophy and he will read my stuff too.

So a lot of times if I'm just working on a single scene, I'll do like three or four different versions of a scene consecutively and go, how about this? How about that? How about this? And I don't count that as a draft just because I'm getting feedback on a single scene, but if I'm going to go out, to outside that circle and I'm going to ask somebody else to read the script and give me feedback. 

Or, you know, just if you can find, yeah, just go outside the circle and get feedback on it. You're going to get feedback and that's to me like I'm going to get a new color in Final Draft, I'm going to start working on it. So, the mini feedback loop and then the mega feedback loop 

Meg: In terms of your idea of create a feeling, which I love, cause that's absolutely what I try to do too is let's just talk real quick about world building and that, like, you know, we worked at Pixar. There's world building happening, right.

And every movie is going to have some world building because you're building the world of your character and what their world is, how they see it. Do you see that world building as a metaphor for that feeling or extracting it or both? Or how do you, because the world building can get really, you know, logical, like logic police kind of stuff happening, right? How do you keep that tune, that tone to the feeling? 

Michael: To me, the most important thing about world building is that it's basically, it's serving your ending. Like it's teeing up your ending and setting up your ending. So, you know what, this is just an insight that I had just very recently. But I mean, just two days ago, basically, which is, I was thinking about all these stories that start without your lead character. 

All these stories that start with your antagonist like a lot of superhero movies are antagonist driven. A lot of action films are antagonist driven, you know. Lex Luthor has a plan and now Superman's got to stop Lex Luthor, right?

But I was, I mean this is why it's helpful to just go back and look at examples that work, which is, I was, I sort of, one of my ideas is sort of a Robin Hood movie, and I was like okay, how did Robin Hood introduce Robin Hood, because I know it starts with King John and Sheriff Nottingham. 

And so I went back and I looked at it, and, What's super important at the beginning of the 1938 Robin Hood, you know, with Earl Flynn is it starts out with Richard the Lionheart being the king right and then he gets captured. I mean, this is all done in a scroll. He gets captured and so the rightful heir to the throne, the rightful ruler is captured, and he's appointed somebody else to rule England. And then King John comes in and usurps the power, right? 

And you've got, you're moving in the story universe from legitimate power to illegitimate power, from legitimate rule to illegitimate rule. And therefore that allows, morally, that allows Robin Hood to come in and go, I'm going to do everything I can to fight you and bring you down. 

It's the same, and when I think about it, I was like, oh my god, the same thing in Star Wars, right? Because in Star Wars, in that first act, you see the, go from, you see the whole galaxy go from a republic to an empire, right? Like at the end of the first act, Peter Cushing comes and goes, the remnants of the old republic have been swept away, right? 

And so the world building that you're doing there is just saying that you're going from legitimate power, duly elected representatives, to illegitimate power. And now sort of Luke Skywalker has the moral permission, like, like Robin Hood, to rebel against the status quo, to rebel against the power structure there.

Sorry, that's just a little rant that I went on, but that was just– 

Meg: No I love it. That's exactly what I asked, because it totally makes sense that they, and I think this is what you often talk about, philosophical stakes, and I could be getting that wrong. Tell me. That world experience is a mirror in a way 

Michael: Totally. 

Meg: You know, Luke's problem is he's not legitimate. He, where his parents, right? Like he has, is living that problem too, right? He wants to be bigger. And then you find out in later movies, he's right, right. That there's, that he is actually an embodiment of that external world. 

Michael: I'm going to go to another one of my standbys, which is The Graduate. The Graduate does such a great job of world building because you're introducing Ben Braddock is kind of a, frankly, kind of a dull, passive guy, like in the first act of the story.

So how do you make your audience like him? How do you get them on board with him and brooding with him? What you're doing is you're surrounding him with these superficial conformance. You're surrounding him with these shrieking sort of gargoyles of grownups, right? And he says I just want my future to be different, right. 

So in a way so then you have this, you're, the world building you're doing is saying you're tilting the playing field a little bit and going like everybody else in this world is shallow, superficial conformist, right. And Ben Braddock, he may be a whole, a lot of different things, but he doesn't want to be a conformist, right. So you're just creating that thirst, right. Which is, he doesn't want to be like his parents. He doesn't want to go work for plastics. He wants something different.

Lorien: Sorry, I was taking notes. 

Meg: Sorry, I'm taking notes and I'm talking and I'm muted. Sorry I want to, I know, you know, we're coming up on our time But I wanted, Jeff, you to ask your question about ensemble because i'm actually super curious about it too. 

Jeff: Part of this question is somewhat selfish, Michael, because I'm directing a super, super micro budget feature this summer, but I did the thing that you're not supposed to do, and I guess you did it too, so I'm glad I'm asking you, and the first thing I'm writing that's getting made is an ensemble film.

So I wanted to kind of ask you, and I know this is a big question, but like, concisely, I'd love to hear you speak about, like, first of all, do you view Little Miss Sunshine as an ensemble film? Or do you feel like there is really a protagonist in that film that's driving everything? And when you think about ensemble films, what are some of the hallmarks of what make those movies really work and succeed? And what are some of the hallmarks that you see make those films fail? 

Michael: I think that, I mean, to answer your first question, yes, it's a group protagonist. And I think that I have the story that, like, I thought of all of Little Miss Sunshine and I thought that the end of the, to me I had pretty much the whole idea worked out in my head, but I was hesitating writing it.

I was like, I thought the end was the music comes on and Olive starts dancing, right? And I was like, that's going to be a great fucking ending. Everyone's going to love it. Like the music comes on and Olive blows everybody away. 

And then I procrastinated, like, and I didn't write the script and I didn't write the script for like six months. And I'm like, why am I procrastinating? Like not writing a script. And I, this is why I'm a big believer in procrastination, because it's telling you something. You're hesitating for a reason. 

And I finally just, you know, you force yourself to sit down and go, okay, she starts dancing. Then what happens? Well, then a guy comes out and he's going to try to stop her. Well, then what happens? Well, then the dad's going to jump up on stage. Well, then what happens? Well, then Uncle Frank's going to jump on stage and Dwayne's going to jump up on stage. And I was like, oh, that's the real ending. The real ending is a whole family coming together and jumping up on stage. 

So it's not about Olive starting dancing. It's about the family coming together. And when I figured that out, I sat down and wrote the script really quickly. But I think that it's a tricky thing, but I do feel like you're starting off Little Miss Sunshine with everybody isolated in their own little private obsession and then the, really the end of the movie is just the family coming together on stage.

In terms of, like, making the ensemble work, it's a little bit like a love story. I feel like you, like, a good love story is, you're showing how these two people are different from everybody else in the world, right? There's something that binds them together. They have an understanding, they have a vocabulary, they have a way that they relate to the world so that you know individually on their own, they feel like a weirdo and they're just an island in a sea of whatever right? 

And when they meet this other person, they meet their match, they meet the thing that sort of, you finally, you've met someone who understands. You've met someone who shares a common outlook and a common vocabulary and that's when you meet your match and you sort of fall in love. 

In terms of an ensemble thing, it does, I'll just go to Animal House, for example, right? They're all a bunch of slobs, right? They're all a bunch of, you know, reprobates basically, but they're bound together like by their reprobate, you know, quality. Or you just go Robin Hood and his Merry Men, right? They're all bound together by they're going to take down the status quo. They're going to rob the rich and steal the poor. 

So I feel like you just want to find out what is that special quality? What is that thing that they share that's different from everybody else around them? And that makes them, makes you like them and makes them special. 

Can I, you know, I want to mention one more thing about world building, which is, I was thinking about The Big Lebowski, and like The Big Lebowski is an insane movie because they introduced the dude, right, as like the laziest man in LA County. And you go, okay, how are you going to make this guy heroic? Like, how are you going to make the audience like this guy and root for this fucking guy? 

And it's a little bit like The Graduate, right, which is you surround him, with a bunch of like status obsessed, super uptight men, right. Who are all trying to be up about achievement. And when he goes and meets the Big Lebowski, you get this great antagonist aria where he's talking about all like, achievement and status and stuff like that. 

And therefore, because you're surrounding the dude, but like Walter's obsessed with the next round Robin tournament in bowling. Jesus is obsessed with like, winning the bowling also. The Big Lebowski is obsessed with his, well, Time Magazine cover or something like that. The dude's laid backness makes him heroic, right? Like he's the one guy, he's the ocean of calm and zen, right, in a universe of striving, uptight super competitive men.

And so again, in terms of world building, what you're trying to do is to set your hero apart from everyone else around them, hopefully in an attractive way. And that's going to make them, your audience root for them, even if they're the laziest man in L.A. County. 

Meg: Just watched that again the other night. That's so funny that you brought it up. 

Michael: It’s so great, isn't it? 

Meg: You also immediately stick his head in a toilet. 

Michael: Well, you–

Meg: Almost drowned him. 

Michael: You give him three good jokes, which is, oh, I'm sure it's down there somewhere, let me take another look. 

Meg: Right. 

Michael: Obviously, you're not a golfer. And, you know, at least I'm housebroken, you know, so.

Meg: And then you fucking love him. Cause that's his response to getting his head drowned in a toilet. 

Michael: Right. It's actually, now that I think about it, it's his, any other person would respond to that as an insult to his status, right? As an insult to his dignity. And the fact that the dude is so laid back that he's going to make a joke about getting his head stuck in the toilet, makes him heroic in that broader universe.

Meg: Exactly. So good.

Jeff: It makes it enviable. Like in that moment, you want to be him. You're like, I wish I had that level of composure if I were to get, what do they call that? A fleshy? What's the word for that? Swirly. 

Michael: Swirly, right. 

Meg: And you make, and you put, and I think it's also important that you put someone next to him who's crazier.

Michael: Yeah, totally. 

Meg: Who's truly crazy and draws a gun about a score on bowling. Like literally draws a gun and puts it in a guy's face. You're like, okay, to be laid back even with that fucking guy and you still keep him as your friend. Like it does start, you relate to him and yeah, it's just. 

Michael: It's such a great Mutt and Jeff dynamic. You just go, the most laid back person like in the world and the most uptight person in the world and you put them together and you know, comedy is going to happen. 

Meg: So great. Okay. So we normally at the end, ask our guests three questions. I'm going to add an extra one today because Brian, one of our listeners, asked a fun question that I want to add today.

So we're going to start with Brian's, which is, I tend to snack a lot while I'm writing. What's your go to snack or beverage while writing? This goes for everyone on the podcast. So what's your go to snack while you're writing? Unless you're not a snacker. I'm a snacker, so I can answer this. 

Michael: I'm not a snacker. I can't be a snacker. So I'll get a glass of water. 

Meg: Seriously? Oh, I’m so envious of that. Okay. But what do you do if you're stuck? I go and snack and have a cookie, which I should not because of the size of my ass. But what do you do if you don't get a cookie? Do you exercise? You're going to tell me you exercise, right?

Michael: I do exercise, but I also just like just walking outside sometimes, like, and going and sitting on a bench. And I also feel like getting out of Final Draft, like getting a piece of paper. Like, a lot of times if I'm blue sky and stuff, or I'm just writing dialogue, like, I don't want to write my motherfucking dialogue in Final Draft because a scene is going to be too complicated.

And I want to start writing out what, you know, you're going, okay, I have to just figure out what every character is going to say in this scene, but I don't know the best thing for them to say, and I don't know the proper order. So you just write everything they're going to say, right? And then you go and you circle, okay, I want this sentence in, I want this sentence, I want this sentence in, right?

But you still don't know the proper order, and then you're just going to sit down and go, okay, this is going to be A, this is going to be B, this is going to be C, and you add it all together. There's no real way that you can do that in Final Draft, but if you sit down with a, I just feel like making lists of ideas, the thing that you're trying to do in screenwriting, right, is find a ton of ideas, choose the best one, and put them in the proper order, right? 

That's an impossible thing. You can't just choose the best idea and put it in the proper order from right off the bat, right? So break down writing into its constituent elements. If you're stuck, I think a lot of times you're just trying to do all three things at once, you know, and that's why you're stuck. 

And you just go, you know, just, I remember when we were writing the incinerator scene in, in Toy Story 3, and for six months we were like, okay, they fall into the pit of fire and then they get out somehow, right? And for six months, we just evaded the question of like how they get out of the fucking incinerator. 

And then finally, I would like, I shut the door. I was like, nobody's leaving this fucking room until we figure out how the fuck they get out of the incinerator. And like, nobody has any ideas. And let's just make a list. Like, what is there? What's in the dump? Like, what can we use? Right. And it's two minutes later, you go, well, there's a claw like bingo, like, that's it. 

But I feel like if you sit around and try and find the right idea, or put your ideas in the proper order, you're just, you're asking yourself to lift a rock that can't be lifted, right? And so if I get stuck, get away from Final Draft, go somewhere else, sit in a park, sit in a diner, take out a piece of paper, write down why you wanted to make this film. 

But also go, if you're trying to solve a problem in the scene, just go, what are the options in this scene? Like, what can I use? It's, and I'll just say, I feel like the lessons I've gotten over and over again in screenwriting is that your answer is already there in the script, you just can't see it. 

You know, a lot of times, it's like in Toy Story 3 with the incinerator. Like, we had done a research trip, we went to a garbage dump, we saw a big fucking claw, we made a note of it, it was in our brains already, right? And all we needed to do was just look hard enough, and you go, that's the answer.

Meg: Yeah, because the dream, it's in, it is in the dream. Dream is a big metaphor. It's all over the place. And I find it when emerging writers start throwing more shit in to fix things, you're like, okay, you're off because it's already, you're already, it's already in there. Stop. Stop. 

Michael: You're overcrowding it. Exactly. Exactly. You just need to drill down. Like the prize that you're looking for is in there somewhere. You know, you just haven't found it yet. 

Meg: As my father used to say, it's a pile of horse shit, there's a pony in there somewhere. All right, so our three questions, who wants to go first? Which one of us?

Lorien: I'll go first. 

Meg: Okay. 

Lorien: Michael, what is your favorite thing about writing? 

Michael: It's, you know what? It's really just getting that first idea, right? There's an exhilaration to going, I feel like, why do we write is because we're not seeing the movie that we want to see up on the screen, right? 

And I think that I've gotten to a point where I can diagnose myself when I have a good idea coming because I get super depressed, right? I'm just like everything sucks. Every movie sucks. I suck. Like everything sucks and then and but what your brain is doing is making you focus on the thing that's going to be the escape hatch to that kind of depression, right? And when you get your idea you go, oh my god, it's gonna be the greatest fucking thing in the world, right?

And just those moments right of having, getting ideas or coming together, it's just exhilarating. I remember, and Meg you've had this experience and Lorien too, like sitting in those brain trust meetings at Pixar. It's just more fun, you know, than humans should be allowed to have because you're just in a room with super fucking smart people and the ideas are just coming out so quickly.

I, my joke is that you're in the presence of like this super intelligent story god because like the organic intelligence in that room is smarter than any one person in the room. And you just feel like you're there with this story oracle. It's like, you know, everyone's voice is chipping in and half an idea becomes a full idea, but it's just so much fun.

So to me, that's, you know, the best part is the doing when it's going well, right? It's the surfing when you catch the wave. That's the fun part. The flocking around in the surf and getting caught inside and getting buried by the whitewater is no fun, but you've got to do that to get to the point where you're, you know, gliding down the wave, a nice glassy wave.

Lorien: Which is fun about the TV rooms, right, is that it's that sort of in a mini way, you know, That it's all this energy and sort of unearthing things and shouting out ideas and it's so fun and just feels like we're all so smart, you know. But it's, but we're more than we're the collection, right? We're a collective, which is so exciting. So it's exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. 

Michael: And it's fun. What's great in a room is that when you get the right idea, everyone knows it, right? Like you just feel it. I remember when on Toy Story 3 the idea of Spanish Buzz came up and the whole room just sort of erupted with like everyone, all the animators could see exactly where this was going.

And so you go like, oh, that's it, like Spanish Buzz, but those are great moments. Like there, there was nothing before and now there's something right. And there's sort of this miracle of the creative process, you know? And so that's the thing that's really, you know, you took something where there was nothing, a blank page and you created something.

And then the other thing is just communicating something. I remember when I was writing Little Miss Sunshine, I was like, if I could, Communicate this feeling in any other way, I would do it in some other way. But I can't because the only way that I can communicate these feelings and this idea is to write motherfucking Little Miss Sunshine. 

And to get that out and then to have people respond to it, that's very gratifying also. But to me, that's sort of secondary just to the thrill of, you know, going, oh, all the music's gonna come on and Olive’s gonna start dancing, it's gonna be great. 

Meg: All right, the second question. Jeff, do you want to ask the second question? 

Jeff: Sure, I mean, you may have kind of answered it with the floundering around in the waves between waves when you're surfing, but what pisses you off about writing.

Michael: Let me go on a, I'm gonna go on a mini rant about page count because I feel like the obsession with page, I feel like half my life as a screenwriter is fighting page count. And I think that it's an extremely imprecise measure of the length of a movie. And I feel like it's gone beyond being stupid, it's actually pernicious and destructive. 

So, for example, Little Miss Sunshine, 118 page screenplay, ended up being a 103 minute movie. Like, if I had a bad producer, they'd be like, okay, you got 118 page screenplay, we want to get it down to 103 minutes, you need to cut 15 pages out of that screenplay. Which is just a naive reading of, like, the relationship between script time and screen time, right?

An even more extreme example is, Toy Story 3 is a 130 page screenplay and it's a 93 minute movie, right? So thank god I had a bunch of producers and we were making a set of reels where no one's going to come and go, 130 pages you can't do this right because. So the thing i'm answering your question the thing that drives me berserk with rage is getting told that the pages equal minutes, you know, when I think it's very imprecise and especially if you have a dialogue heavy script, like let’s go Friday, for example, you're going to end up with 180 page screenplay for like 100 minute movie.

And then the other thing, the bigger sort of thing, the thing that's frustrating about screenwriting is that you feel like you've performed a miracle. There was nothing there and now there's something right and you finish your first draft and the bottle is half full and you go, look there was nothing and now there's something. Everyone goes, yeah, but you're still missing half. So then you fill a bottle of 90 percent and you go, look, I filled up 90% and everyone goes, yeah, but you're still missing that 10%.

And then you fill it up 99.9%. It's like almost fucking full. There was nothing. And now there's something. And you show it to people and all they're going to say is, yeah, but you're still missing that little one tenth of 1%. And so you just have to accept that. That's the way, that's the way it is. That's the way people’s brains work, but no one's gonna pat you on the back and go, oh my god, it's a miracle, there's nothing before now there's something. They're just gonna sit there and point out like what's not working in your story.

Jeff: So true. And what you want to say, and I've just been getting notes lately and I learned from Meg and Lorien that every writer, the first thing they think is fuck you when you get notes.

Michael: Yeah. Totally. 

Jeff: Which was the greatest gift I got. But like, you just want to say like, well then you fucking write it. You know, it's like you write the script. It's so hard. It is so hard. And they come to you and they say, it's like, well, then you write 120 pages of perfectly crafted dialogue and story. It's your turn. Go. That's what I want to say. But instead I say, thank you.

Meg: All right. Our last question is what scene that you wrote, would you love to be remembered for? 

Michael: I think it's just the scene on the pier with, between Dwayne and Frank in Little Miss Sunshine because it's so personal to me. Like, I remember being in high school and thinking, I wish I could just go to sleep until I was 18, you know, and just skip all this crap high school and everything. And, I mean, that was really, just came out of direct personal experience. A

nd then the answer that Frank gives, right, which is the best years of your life are sometimes the wasted years, right, and the years that you suffer are the years that make you into who you are. I feel like that's, you know, it took, it takes a while to figure that kind of thing out.

So, and I think that Steve does such a great job with it. Paul does such a great job with it. The way John and Val staged it is really lovely, very simple. And so I think that, you know, and then it ends up with Paul Dano saying fuck beauty contest, which is what that whole movie is about. So, it would be that.

Jeff: That's the right answer, by the way. 

Meg: So good. 

Jeff: I was so hoping you would say that. I wrote, I did my best. I wrote Michael a somewhat unprofessional email before, and I was like, before we get on air, I just have to get it out now. Little Miss Sunshine is the best movie ever. It's the reason I'm a writer. And that scene makes me laugh and cry at the same time, which is the best way to feel stuff. And thank you for writing it. So. 

Michael: Well, thank you. Thank you. 

Meg: It's not surprising that it's the most personal to you. That’s where the lava was and where you were being brave. That's what we talk about all the time. 

Michael, thank you so much for being here. I, we might have to have you back sometime because–

Michael: I love it.

Meg: It was too fun and too good. And I just, I'm sure we have more questions. But what a gift you are. Thank you so much. 

Lorien: Thank you. 

Michael: Can I, am I allowed to mention my website? 

Meg: Yes, please do, please. 

Michael: So I just have a website which is pan, www.pandemoniuminc.com where I put a couple of videos about screenwriting and–

Meg: We will also put that on our Facebook page, so everybody can link in.

Jeff: And in the description of this episode too, if you just click down there. 

Michael: People have told me that it’s helpful. So there's one video that's me going on and on about how to write a good ending. There's me going on and on about writing Toy Story 3, and then there's a couple of smaller videos about screenwriting.

Lorien: Sounds great.

Meg: And there's so many good things about writing Toy Story 3, but my personal favorite is the cartoon of you strangling Anderson. 

Lorien: Oh my god, that was gold. That was gold. 

Meg: Yeah no it's so smart. 

Michael: It's a good example of like having sort of a wild idea that you think you're just going to throw away and go like, and go no, like that's the thing that people are going to respond to is like a little cartoon of me strangling Andrew, right?

And so what seems to be a throwaway thing, right, or it seems to be, it's not the most professional thing, but you go, that's the most human thing. That's the thing people respond to. So that's the stuff that you got to keep in your writing. 

Lorien: Well, thank you so much for your time and all your amazing brain exploding thoughts and for sharing with us.

Michael: You know what, let me say, I feel like just you guys, thank you guys for doing just your podcast, right? Because it there's you guys A. focus on your frustrations in daily life. But also you really do talk about craft, you know. And it's just a thing that I feel like gets devalued or people just don't even talk about enough and it got me thinking, it got me all inspired and excited and going back and and looking at, you know, like looking at Close Encounters again, going back and looking at Robin Hood again.

And I'll say, I'm like in such a good mood these days because looking at Amelie again, looking at these films, I was like, we lived in an age of miracle and wonders. Like, I'm so glad I'm part of this profession or this tribe that’s telling these stories and like we have this abundance of miracles around us in the forms of stories that, I would never think of Tootsie. I would never think of Amelie. Like I would never think of Close Encounters, but those things are so perfectly made and so beautifully done.

And it just makes you go like it just, it's a privilege just to be like in the ballpark, you know, with those other movies and trying to do the same thing so I feel like it's easy to get frustrated with your own writing, with everyone else's writing and just like, you know, curse the darkness instead of lighting a candle.

But there are tons of candles out there already. And you just have to like go look at them. So, listen, I'm the king of depression, I'm the king of everything sucks and I hate everybody. But I feel like you guys, just in talking about craft, that sort of lit a spark under me and forced me to go back and look at the shining diamonds of this craft and got all inspired again. So thank you for that. 

Meg: Awesome.

Lorien: Thanks everyone for tuning in. And if you haven't yet, please join our Facebook group. We're there answering questions and interacting. 

Meg: And drop us a review on Apple Podcasts. It's how we can keep doing this. 

Lorien: And remember, you are not alone and please keep writing.