627 - Unbelievably Agentic

Scriptnotes Podcast

John August

Screenwriter, Tv & Film, Writing, John, Screenwriting, August, Craig, Screenplay, Mazin

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2024

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John welcomes back Aline Brosh McKenna to look at how both you and your characters can become more “agentic.” What are the traps and pitfalls of going after what you want? How do you get people to engage with your protagonist, especially when the protagonist is yourself?

Then it’s another round of How Would This be a Movie? We look at stories about a harm-reduction hotline, countertop cancer, loyalty testers and a mathematician who exploited the lottery.

In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Aline talk about their strange new reality of being empty nesters.

Links:

How to be More Agentic by Cate Hall
What’s Stopping You? by Neel Nanda
Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic by Evie Cottrell
“Agency” needs nuance by Evie Cottrell
The Woman on the Line by Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris for Slate
California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times
Would Your Partner Cheat? These ‘Testers’ Will Give You an Answer by Gina Cherelus for the New York Times
The man who won the lottery 14 times by Zachary Crockett for The Hustle
Musely
So you wanna de-bog yourself by Adam Mastroianni
Aline Brosh McKenna
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Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
John on Mastodon
Outro by Larry Douziech (send us yours!)
Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at [email protected]

You can download the episode here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome
0:02.7	welcome my name is John August and this is episode 627 of Script Notes a podcast about
0:07.2	screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters today on the show we
0:11.5	welcome back the O. G.G Script Notes guest host writer, director, showrunner, producer
0:16.3	Alene Bross McKenna. Welcome back, Alene.
0:18.0	I'm so excited to be here. There's so many people I need to thank.
0:21.6	Oh wait, that's not the right place to do it.
0:25.0	You have to comment on how surprisingly heavy the award is.
0:28.0	Oh, it's so heavy, I'm gonna put it down.
0:30.0	I'm just gonna put it down.
0:31.0	Yeah, you put it down and pull out your notes of people you need to think. It's going to mess up the line of my dress. Yeah, 100%. Today I would like to talk about agency in the sense of characters and what characters are doing in our stories, but also in real life people about making choices about what they want to do next.
0:45.0	And then you've seen in the workflow, we have another round of how would this be a movie, where we discuss stories in the news and think about how we would adapt them into quality filmed entertainment.
0:54.3	Alene, I've stretched, are you ready for this?
0:56.8	I'm really ready. I'm ready for a word I'd never heard before.
1:00.5	Yes, which is, how you're going to pronounce it?
1:03.2	Agentic. Yeah, Agentic.
1:05.2	Yeah, Agentic. Yeah, Agentic. Yeah, Agentic.
1:05.4	It's a word I saw a ton this week.
1:07.8	And so I thought we talked about that.
1:08.8	It's agency as applied to real people kind of.
1:12.0	And it's a word. I plan to use and misuse this word
1:15.4	liberally. Yes at the end of the day it's how you use catch phrases to to fill
	...

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