683 - Our Take on Long Takes
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John and Craig break out of coverage to look at oners and long shots, cutting through any directorial showboating to compare the pros and cons and cons and cons of those unbroken takes, offering ways to decide when they are necessary or purposeful, and how to recognize when it’s better to cut.
We also look at changes to Sundance and the Nicholl Fellowship, answer listener questions on house lights in movie theaters, Oscar voting, improv movies, and share a few horror stories from John and Craig’s early career.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig look at their relationship with their phones and consider dumbing down.
Links:
- HBO’s The Last of Us Podcast
- Sundance is moving to Boulder, Colorado!
- Changes to the Academy Nicholl Fellowship
- Adolescence | The Studio
- Meryl Streep and Viola Davis in Doubt
- The Alien RPG by Free League
- Assassin’s Creed: Shadows
- The Show 25
- The DIY Dumbphone Method by Casey Johnston
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at [email protected]
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome. My name is John August. |
| 0:04.0 | Aw. My name is Craig Mason. |
| 0:06.5 | And you're listening to Episode 683 of Script Notes. |
| 0:09.2 | It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. |
| 0:12.8 | Today on the show, what if we just never cut? |
| 0:15.3 | We'll discuss long takes and wonders and the decisions writers need to make when implementing them. |
| 0:20.0 | Plus, we have news and follow-up |
| 0:21.5 | and listener questions on movie theater lights |
| 0:23.6 | and outlining for improv. |
| 0:25.6 | And in our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, |
| 0:27.9 | how do we manage our phones and how do they manage us? |
| 0:30.3 | We'll talk about the growing, maybe, movement towards dumber phones. |
| 0:33.7 | Yeah, yeah, I've just been reading about it. |
| 0:35.7 | Yeah, so we'll get into that. |
| 0:37.1 | We'll dig in. |
| 0:38.0 | All right. Craig, we'll start off with the news that your show just debuted. Congratulations on |
| 0:42.0 | season two. Well, thank you. Obviously, we're recording this a little bit ahead of time, |
| 0:45.9 | so I have no way of knowing if people watched it or if they like it. But I hope they did. |
| 0:53.0 | The culmination of two years of very hard work. And so |
| 0:56.1 | it begins a month and a half of The Last of Us and hopefully people like it. |
| 1:02.4 | Yeah. So if people want to hear more about The Last of Us, they should listen to you on the |
| 1:06.0 | other podcast, the official HBO podcast. There's an official HBO podcast. So the first episode |
... |
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