161 - A Cheap Cut of Meat Soaked in Butter (Encore)

John and Craig invite Aline Brosh McKenna back to celebrate the third anniversary of Scriptnotes. It's a jam-packed, glass-and-a-half of wine, listener-favorite episode.

They look at ways to breathe new life into scenes and characters that aren't working, box office journalism and how Hollywood is always dying, scene geography, and the role of emotional intelligence (or EQ) in a writer's career.

In our bonus segment for premium members, we have original outtakes from the episode where we look at what changed in the world in our first three years on air, make predictions for what's to come, re-invent Spanx, and of course talk about D&D.

Links:

• Going to the 2025 Austin Film Festival? Submit to our LIVE Three Page Challenge here!
• The original episode 161 and its transcript
• Aline Brosh McKenna on Instagram and IMDb
• Why do people throw tomatoes? from How Stuff Works
• The Knowledge
• Global Entry
• From 2014: Movies Have Worst Summer Since 1997 by Brooks Barnes
• Mimeographs on Wikipedia and eBay
• Maguire Watch on Everything is Terrible!
• Filthy Scriptnotes episodes The Angeles Crest Fiasco and The Dirty Show
• The Honourable Woman
• This Movie Will Require Dinosaurs by C. W. Neill
• N3TWORK
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Robert Hutchison (send us yours!)
• This episode was originally produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.