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

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

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

Links:

Death by Lightning on Netflix
Mike Makowsky on IMDb and Instagram
Episode 448 (The last time Mike was on the podcast)
Which TV Show Has the Best Coaching Tree? Alan Sepinwall for The Ringer
Size matters: a single representation underlies our perceptions of heaviness in the size-weight illusion
New evidence for the sensorimotor mismatch theory of weight perception and the size-weight illusion
Friedman Personnel Agency
Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
The Ballad of Guiteau from Assassins
The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
Writer's Guide to Character Traits by Linda Edelstein
A Fentanyl Vaccine Is About to Get Its First Major Test by Emily Mullin for WIRED
Heated Rivalry on HBO Max
The Good Lord Bird
Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
Scriptnotes on Instagram
John August on Bluesky and Instagram
Outro by Luke Foster (send us yours!)
Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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

The writer's guide to character traits

Mentioned by

Mentioned in 1 episodes

The AI-powered Podcast Player