The Bully in the Locker

In an interview about his high school comedy BRIAN, writer Mike Scollins offered a small, perfect observation about updating a tired trope. He and his team considered having the protagonist get hip-checked into a locker. They decided against it. “No that would never happen in this school,” Scollins recalled thinking. “What would happen is Brian would like get accidentally knocked into a locker. and the guy would be like ‘Oh my god I like didn’t even see you there I’m so sorry.’” In that moment, a cliché evaporated, replaced by something much sharper: the modern high school truth that the opposite of being popular isn’t being bullied. It’s being invisible.

This is more than a clever subversion. It’s a diagnosis of a common writing weakness. The bully, the hip-check, the swirlie: these are not characters or actions. They are dramatic placeholders. They are shorthand for “teen conflict” that saves the writer the trouble of inventing something authentic. By replacing the placeholder with an observed truth, Scollins does more than make the scene feel real. He builds the story on a stronger foundation, forcing the conflict to come from a more genuine place, namely the protagonist’s internal state of being overlooked rather than externally persecuted.

This discipline of replacing the placeholder runs through Scollins’s entire project. He applied the same logic to the story’s depiction of mental health. The dramatic placeholder for healing is the tearful third-act breakthrough, the sudden cure that ties everything in a neat bow. Scollins rejected it. The film ends with the protagonist’s mother confirming he still has a therapy appointment. The journey continues. As he put it, the goal was to show his character as “better equipped,” not fixed. The observed truth is that healing is a process, not a plot point to be resolved. It’s less tidy than the placeholder, but it’s the reason a story like this resonates. It has the integrity of lived experience.

The principle scales from an indie coming-of-age story to the largest possible canvas. For his adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan faced a similar series of choices. The placeholder for an epic hero is a flawless warrior of unimpeachable virtue. But the observed truth of the source material, and of human nature itself, is far more complicated. Nolan focused on an Odysseus who was not just a hero but also, in his words, “arrogant and duplicitous.” Casting an actor like Matt Damon, who can carry that moral weight, was a deliberate move to ground the myth. Nolan sought the poem's core by rejecting the placeholder and embracing the specific, messy humanity of its hero. He made the ancient story feel present not by modernizing its particulars, but by finding the recognizable truth already within it.

This work of identifying and replacing placeholders is one of the primary functions of a healthy writers’ room. It is a collective act of quality control. Showrunner Lauren Sequeira, speaking on The Young Film Academy Podcast, described a collaborative process where one writer plants a “seed” in a script for the next writer to cultivate. This is how specificity grows. One writer’s placeholder, born of deadline pressure, can be spotted by another and replaced with an observed truth from their own experience. Sequeira’s practice of hiring writers with a deep connection to the material, both supernatural and terrestrial, is not just about representation. It is about stocking the room with a wider array of observed truths to draw upon. The more varied the experiences in the room, the fewer placeholders make it to the screen.

Even the dreaded studio note process can serve this function. Nolan, a director with more leverage than almost anyone, still values the feedback. “The day we don't take notes anymore is the day we make a crappy movie,” he told the Los Angeles Times. Good notes, whether from a peer at Netflix or an executive at Universal, often question the placeholder. They ask why a character does something, what a scene is truly about. They push for the specific over the general. The risk Nolan mentioned in relation to his work on Memento was not in being confusing, but in being conventional. The biggest risk is always playing it safe, and the placeholder is the safest, most forgettable choice a writer can make.

Ultimately, this is a question of authority. An abundance of placeholders signals to the audience that the writer’s primary source material is other movies and television shows. The specific, observed detail, the accidental bump into the locker, does the opposite. It signals that the writer has been paying attention to the world. It builds a quiet, powerful trust. Look at your own pages. Where have you used shorthand? What are the placeholders in your script, and what are the harder, truer things waiting to take their place?