Here's Allison.

I call it exploratory writing to differentiate it from the other kinds of writing that we do.

Because when we think about writing, typically we're thinking about writing for other people, right? It's, uh, you get your thoughts on paper so that you can communicate them to other people, and there's a performative element to that.

A- and the idea of writing something down is that you keep it, so you're communicating what you know.

So exploratory writing is about the sort of upstream version of that, which is exploring what you don't know.

Just writing entirely for yourself, um, privately, messily, it, very, very early stage thinking.

It- it's starting a sentence, not knowing how it's gonna finish off, and it's definitely not for anybody else's consumption.

I asked Allison why those details matter.

... and what that looked like at the time and then how that might get done today and what the consequences of those changes might be, so can you tell us about finding McLovin?

Yes.

Greg Mottola and I, and I know Judd loved Michael Cera right from the beginning, but we, we did not really fully cast him until we had read a lot of other guys, which is the legwork, sort of waste of time part of casting is just going through people when I know there's not gonna be anybody as good as Michael Cera, not even close.

But we still had to read all kinds of people.

And I knew we hadn't hit on McLovin yet either.

Believe me, in my heart I know who's a real true geek when I see one.

We just had to keep looking and looking and looking, and I know that most kids who have an agent, at least at that time, just weren't like that.

... comedy shows?

[laughs]

That was interesting.

We, we, um, because of the location, I don't usually get to cast a lot of New York actors 'cause there's never any budget to fly anybody into LA.

Exactly.

So this was great.

So we had a lot of fun with all kinds of different diversities and levels of Broadway experience, which is-