The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 535 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, as screenwriters we’re constantly looking for ways to expose a character’s inner states, but what happens when real-life people start performing with main character energy?
Craig: Whoa.
John: We’ll look at the issue from both the perspective of writers creating characters and 21st century humans trying to function in a society.
Craig: We live in a society, John.
John: We live in a society. If everyone’s the main character, society probably doesn’t function. We’ll also have Follow Up and lots of new listener questions, and in a bonus segment for Premium Members, we will talk about population, speaking of society. Craig and I grew up in a time of Malthusian predictions of overpopulation. You remember that, Craig.
Craig: Oh, ’70s.
John: Oh, ’70s, and now there’s just not enough ’80s. We’ll talk through that.
Craig: Depending on where you live.
John: Depending where you live. It’s a very situational and very local thing, but also the trends are pretty clear. We’ll get into some of that. First, Craig, this is pretty huge news. It was hard to sit on the whole week. We almost put out a special episode, but we didn’t. Fans are suing Universal Pictures because the 2019 movie Yesterday did not include Ana de Armas. I was aware she was not in the movie, but I wasn’t aware of the controversy around this, because Ana de Armas is in one of the trailers for the movie, but she does not actually appear in the movie itself. Fans have taken it on themselves to actually sue Universal Pictures over this. Craig, you are the legal expert on the show. Medical expert, legal expert, expert in puzzles. Can you help us figure out what is the likelihood that this lawsuit will go through and that these fans will be justly compensated for the lack of Ana de Armas they got?
Craig: It depends on whether Universal wants to make an example of these people or just settle and give everybody a five-cent coupon for something. It’s pretty silly. Obviously the defense is simply that she was in the movie when they made that marketing material. They do put together trailers before the movie’s finalized. Then they creatively came to the conclusion that she didn’t need to be in the movie, and so they removed those scenes. This happens all the time. I remember when I was in high school, my friends and I were very excited to go see, I think it was Nightmare On Elm Street: Dream Warriors is the name of number three.
John: (sings)
Craig: (sings) Yep. Was that Tesla or Dokken? In the commercials, not just the trailer, in the television commercials, every single commercial, at some point Freddy Krueger would go, “How sweet, fresh meat.” We thought this was the funniest line, and we couldn’t wait to go to the movie and smoke the 1980s weed, which is the equivalent of nibbling one 19th of a gummy today, and then sitting in the theater, and when that line would come, we would go, “Yay! How sweet, fresh meat.” Then he never said it. What we did was we sued.
John: That’s how you raised the nest egg that let you become the successful screenwriter you are now.
Craig: We live in a society. Basically, so this is ridiculous, either Universal goes, “Yeah, we just want to make a point of never having anyone do this ever again,” which is what I will suspect, they will just fight this to the bitter end, because even the people are asking for $5 million. This is a class action, I presume. $5 million spread out over affected viewers in their home states. Even if Universal lost and had to pay every dime these people wanted, whatever. This is ridiculous. I think they’ll fight it all the way. There’s always the possibility they just settle and everybody gets, like I said, 20 cents, a 20-cent coupon for something.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes that lets you see the trailer that actually has Ana de Armas in it. Apparently she plays another guest on a talk show when the guy, the hero of Yesterday, is playing a song. There’s some sort of spark between them. It’s not even clear that it’s beyond the one scene. I do just hope that the end result of this, whether it’s found in Universal’s favor or the fans’ favor, is that it’s really found in favor of Ana de Armas, who needs to be in all movies, because she is one of the most delightful things about the recent Bond movie. She’s so fantastic in Knives Out. We need more Ana de Armas. If this lawsuit is what it takes to bring this awareness to the general public, I think it’s worth it.
Craig: Seems like the general public is saying that she is so compelling, the only reason they went to go see a movie with Beatles music in it was to see her, and no other reason.
John: No other reason.
Craig: No other reason.
John: I’ll say, even the movie without Ana de Armas in it, I really enjoyed the movie. I don’t think people talk enough about Yesterday, because I thought it was actually a really well constructed movie, and took a very high-concept premise and ran with it well. I wish good things upon the movie Yesterday, even if it doesn’t star Ana de Armas. If we get the Snyder cut that has Ana de Armas back in it, maybe that’s the best of all possible worlds.
Craig: That sounds good.
John: Yeah. Now Craig, you texted me last night asking about, “Hey, can we pull this Scriptnotes podcast that you and I record off of Spotify, because,” you said, “F Spotify.”
Craig: Yeah. Spotify has been in headlines lately. Neil Young pulled his catalog off. I think Joni Mitchell just did the same in solidarity with him, because Spotify is the main patron and platform for Joe Rogan’s podcast. I don’t have anything against Joe Rogan the person. I don’t watch his podcast or listen to the show.
John: To be clear, you don’t listen to any podcast.
Craig: Correct.
John: Including this podcast.
Craig: That’s right, so that’s not a judgment.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Craig: Stipulated it’s a thing that one could watch or listen to. Therefore I don’t. But I certainly have read enough transcripts and quotes from him that indicate that he’s not on what I would call the right side of the science when it comes to epidemiology and COVID-19 and public health and vaccination. I think it’s fair for these people to say, “Look, Spotify is … ” I think they made a $100 million deal with him. They don’t like the things he says. They’re not asking Spotify to kick him off Spotify. They’re not asking Spotify to censor him. They’re just saying, “I don’t want to be at that party. If that guy’s talking like that at that party, I don’t want to be there.” I think that’s reasonable. I don’t want to be there either. Now we don’t make any money off of Spotify. Did we get $100 million from Spotify?
John: We did not get $100 million from Spotify.
Craig: I just wanted to check real fast before I said no.
John: Here’s what’s confusing about this is that in terms of a podcast versus a song on this, like Neil Young or Joni Mitchell pulling their catalog off, that means that Spotify cannot play their things anymore. Joe Rogan’s podcast is a Spotify Exclusive, so you can only listen to his podcast through Spotify. Scriptnotes is a free and open podcast for the whole world to enjoy, so people can choose to use Spotify to listen to it, but our files are not actually ever on Spotify. People are choosing to listen to it. Scriptnotes is like a webpage that you could go to in Firefox or Opera or Safari or whatever else. We could theoretically somehow block Opera from opening our page, but that’s not really how the internet works. It’s just an RSS feed. We’re not getting any money from them. The only thing we did recently is we made it so that our Premium subscribers, if they’re using Spotify as their main app, they can now subscribe within Spotify, but it’s not Spotify paying us money. It’s just that they can go to the webpage for everyone else who wants to pay us five bucks a month to listen to all the back-episodes.
Craig: Does Spotify put ads on us or anything like that?
John: No. Just a podcast player. Just like opening a PDF in Acrobat versus Preview or-
Craig: I see.
John: Something like that. It’s just an app. It’s not actually a thing that’s paying us any money.
Craig: It sounds like if we said to Spotify, “You can’t do that,” they would feel nothing, and nothing would change for us either. That’s what I’m hearing.
John: I think if our listeners want to choose to not use Spotify, that’s their choice to not use Spotify, and should not pay Spotify their money. I’m not paying Spotify any money.
Craig: I don’t either.
John: Easy for me to stop. You know what? Last week on the show I talked through my experience of coaching a friend, like, “It’s time to leave your reps,” and his career improved. We have a Follow Up question from that from a person named Frustrated. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana Rao: Frustrated wrote in, “I’m a mid-level TV writer who has written/produced several episodes of television. I’ve only ever had a manager and no agent. In the last few weeks it’s become clear to me that my manager has got to go. It was on a new show, my second, when COVID hit, and we went virtual for several months, but eventually the plug got pulled and it never went into production. Since then I’ve tried everything, pitching on open writing assignments, writing new material, pitching original ideas, networking, etc. I’ve had lots of good feedback, but ultimately no paid work. It’s been a year and a half with nothing to show for it. My question is, can you talk more about actually firing your reps? Do you simply send an email? Should I try to find new ones before firing the old ones. How do you sell yourself to new reps when you’ve been out of work for a long time? Are agents or managers better for someone in my position at this point?”
John: All good questions.
Craig: Great questions.
John: Let’s talk about first firing your old rep before getting a new rep. My instinct is that you can start the process of looking for the new rep and get those initial conversations happening. It doesn’t really matter that much if you fire the first one before you start hiring the second one. It’s all going to work out the same.
Craig: I’m going to-
John: You disagree?
Craig: A little bit, because it’s a small town, for being such a big town. The one thing that managers seem to be good at and agents seem to be good at is hearing that other managers and other agents are sniffing around their clients. In fact, they seem to have way more attention paid to that than, for instance, getting their client’s work. What happens is you can find yourself in a weird middle ground where you head out there, you start talking to people, your manager finds out, yells at them about poaching. Managers and agents do poach from each other, but they’re careful about how they do it, because they don’t want to get into open warfare. The new people might back away. Your current manager is super pissed off. Now you’re stuck in a house with somebody that’s not talking to you. Other people feel like, “Okay, just come back when you fire that person,” but it’s gotten weird.
It’s better to go out clean, I think, but before you go out clean, I think the person you need to talk to, Frustrated, is your lawyer. I’m going to presume you have a lawyer, because you say you’re a mid-level TV writer, you’ve had work, you’ve got credits. Your lawyer will be able to give you a decent sense, because they’re the ones who talk to business affairs, about where you stand, and ultimately where you might be able to go. Your lawyer is also able to, in an intermediate fashion, talk to some of the agents or managers that she or he knows, and whisper, if say something was going to happen, and get a sense, a little preview of what the world is like out there. If it’s bad, if generally there’s not a lot of interest, you got to get something going and then walk, but if there is, then I think you cut it clean. I think you can send an email or you can phone call. It doesn’t matter. Maybe they have some sense of what is fair. Who cares? They’re fired. Fire them. Then go out there and start talking to new people.
As far as agents versus managers, as someone better for your position at this point, I am so old-fashioned, and I think that agents are better options, because they don’t mingle production in with representation. It is also true that often, depending on where you are on the ladder, managers may have more time to focus on you.
John: Craig talks about the important stuff, discussing this with your lawyer. I think the other people you should really involve in this conversation are the other execs you’ve been interacting with. Say you’re pitching writing assignments, you’re doing this stuff, there’s people that you’ve connected with. I think it’s worth asking if you have any relationship with them, like, “Hey, what is my manager like? Is my manager actually doing a good job? What do you think? Do you have any better suggestions for me?”
Same with you were on this room writing the show, those are other writers who have reps. Talk to them about your experience and what their experience has been, and they’ll give you a good sense of is this manager doing a good job for you, which it probably sounds like they’re not, and who might be the better people suited for you, because I remember as I left my first agent, went to my second agent, that was really part of the discussion is who was the right person for me to even be going to. You will find those answers by talking with folks who are working with those people all the time.
Craig: That’s a good point, that Frustrated has been in rooms. He or she knows other writers. They have reps. That’s a good place to start. When you’re a feature writer, you interface with executives all the time. When you’re a television staffer, you generally don’t. There may not be that person to go to, but then you have the availability of all these other writers that you’ve been with, and who knows, maybe they have a sense of things. I think you’ve identified a problem when you say, “It’s become clear to me that my manager has to go.” Trust that feeling. It’s not going to get better.
John: Yep. Agreed. All right, some more Follow Up here. Two episodes ago we were just talking about the 100-year-old screenplay format and how frustrating it is that some certain things are hard to include in it. Clint wrote in to point us towards Script Hop, which is a service that can package up your scripts, along with supporting material, so visuals, audio notes, music, and things like that. It feels like something that’s designed for pitching your project to places. It’s not necessarily the kind of format that would be useful for a production, for something to represent the whole project for a production, which is I think more what Craig and I are looking at, but sure, different people are trying different things.
Script Hop is owned or seems like it’s created by Script University, which makes me shudder a little bit, but it feels like the kind of thing where people are trying to do experiments around the edges of that. Great, experiment with it, but I think we are both still looking for what is that service or format that it’s going to be a great way to say, “Here is the script, the text you’re going to be shooting, but here is important stuff that goes with it,” that goes beyond just my suggestion of just like, here’s the deck that the company sent.
Craig: I’m looking at this, and it absolutely does seem like a pitch. They’re literally saying pitch content. That’s what they’re calling it. The Premium fee here is $8 a month. You can create as many packets as you need. This is not exactly what we’re talking about, but it looks pretty. From the demo here, it looks snazzy.
John: Some more Follow Up on We Hear and We See. Alex in Liverpool, England wrote, “I do see the value in avoiding we see/we hear [inaudible 00:14:24] for the sake of brevity. Why have, ‘We see a woman walk into the room,’ when you can simply have, ‘A woman walks into the room.'”
Craig: Oh my god, I never thought of it that way. Oh, I have. We have. We’ve talked about it literally four billion times, Alex. That said, big fan of Liverpool.
John: We love Liverpool. Let’s talk about we hear and we see though, and why it’s useful in situations where you can’t just literally just have the clean sentence there, because, “A woman walks into the room,” yes, that is correct. For me, we hear/we see is most often a case where the cause of something isn’t known, so it’s happening off screen. We experience it as an audience, but the characters in it aren’t there. You can describe a thing that’s happening, but there’s not a verb that goes with it, or if it’s a stand-in for the camera. Really I think the most important thing to remember is that it’s a way of not talking about cameras and shots and angles. It’s really like folks in the audience’s attention on something without calling out the camera does a thing.
Craig: Those are all excellent practical reasons. In addition, philosophically, brevity, this kind of extreme brevity is not the goal. We see and we hear also has a psychological impact on the reader. It is immersive. It means you are immersed. You are feeling and experiencing something in this moment, the way that a character would if they would be right next to it, or the way you would if you were right in the middle of it, which is very different than if you don’t. If the six characters, five letters and a space, gets that done, and gets it done that efficiently, why not? Just brutal, spartan brevity is a style, I suppose, but it is not the holy grail.
John: Two examples I was trying to come up with. Here’s the first one. We’re falling through an emerald void. All around us we hear crackling sounds, like ice shattering. You could do that without the we’s in those cases, but it’d be hard and brutal. The we’s really give you the sense that we as an audience are falling through this space, that we are hearing these things, and it’s not dependent on this character hearing the things. This is what the experience is like in the theater.
Craig: How else would you do it? An emerald voice. Crackling sounds like ice shattering. That doesn’t tell me much, including falling.
John: It doesn’t tell me the experience we’re getting. It’s like pointing at things. Here’s a second example. While Tom is digging through his pack, we see a shadow move across the headlights.
Craig: Tom does not see that shadow, but we do.
John: That’s the important thing.
Craig: Oh sweet, fresh meat, I assume is what the next line would be.
John: 100%. That is exactly what I had planned. Literally, you reached into my mind and pulled the words out before I could even say them.
Craig: I love that commercial. I’m going to sue. The example that Alex gives us, why have, “We see a woman walk into the room,” when you could have, “A woman walks into the room.” “A woman walks into the room,” that feels like, I don’t know, a very dull man is telling a story, “A woman walks into the room.” Wait, does everybody notice that a woman walks into the room? Are we really close to her when she walks into the room? Are we really far away when she walks in? “We see a woman walk into the room,” I already have an idea. The camera’s pointed toward the door, I’m going to say a wide shot here, because we see her walk into the room. We don’t see at the door, a woman enters frame. There’s lots of information here. That’s why I think we get so frustrated by this whole, “Don’t say we see or we hear,” not because it’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t hurt.” It helps. It’s incredibly helpful. There we go. I think at this point we should just change the name of this podcast to the We See Cast.
John: That’s what we do. One useful exercise for people who still are bucking up against we hear and we see is to go through some of the screenplays that we’ve mentioned, like some of these award-nominated screenplays from this past year, and look for situations where the writer was using we hear or we see, and try to rewrite those sentences without them. I think you’ll find it’s a little more difficult than you would’ve guessed.
Craig: Or not as good.
John: Or not as good. Honestly, probably just not as good. It’s not to say you have to use it. Many screenwriters do not use it, and that’s absolutely their choice, but I think it’s a useful tool, and to take it out of your belt unnecessarily is dumb, in my opinion. Aaron from New York writes, “I’m pretty certain I first read the instruction that discouraged the use of we see and we hear in David Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible,” which was first published in 1994 and Aaron read back in 2004. “I’m not sure if it matters. I’m not sure if Trottier himself started it.” I think it predates that, because, Craig, I think I remember a prohibition on we hear and we see from when I first started in film school, which would’ve been ’92. Do you have a sense of when you first heard this as a quote unquote “rule?”
Craig: It was on the internet somewhere.
John: Yeah, I guess, early internet, because you were in a film school situation that would’ve discouraged that.
Craig: No, late ’90s or early 2000s I think maybe. Who’s Dave Trottier? Trottier?
John: I recognize that name. I think he’s still a person who does stuff about-
Craig: I’m looking him up. Tell you what, not to be a jerk about it, but go ahead and everyone out there just choose who you think you should listen to. I’ll just leave it at that. How about that? Not being a jerk. I’m just saying-
John: Not being a jerk.
Craig: You have choices in to whom you listen.
John: Now another thing we’ve discussed in a previous episode I think was a listener question talking about how this person’s partner, spouse was not supportive of his screenwriting, he was feeling frustrated. I think you and I actually had a good back and forth about how supportive that partner needs to be. Some Follow Up that Megana can read for us.
Megana: Once Felt Neglected Too wrote in and said, “I’m a recently produced screenwriter. The film has some serious household name actors in it. While the film was in production, I started dating someone. This person was lovely, with a regular, non-creative office job, who only displayed a mild, passing, supportive, light interest in this accomplishment and a general disinterest in my career choice and abilities as a whole. I would be lying if I didn’t feel some disappointment when I wanted to express something about a project and was met with a superficial support one might give a child about their 5,000th drawing. This attitude persisted even when we were exiting the movie theater after watching the first screening of my film. My head knew they were a good person and supportive in their own ‘I support you as a person’ way, but my heart felt it was death by 1,000 ambivalent cuts I tried my best to ignore. This all became very clear one day when an old college crush had seen the movie and I met them for coffee.”
Craig: Oh, no.
Megana: “They expressed such awe about the film and what I had done.”
Craig: Of course they did.
Megana: “It felt like I had touched their soul. I remember thinking if my partner had looked at me for just five minutes like this person across the table had for a couple hours that day, I might still be with them. It’s one thing to be recognized on a surface level. It’s another to be wholly and completely seen by your companion.”
John: Craig, this person’s having an emotional creative affair with this other person. That’s what it is. Someone is looking at you with those big eyes, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I want to feel this desirable.”
Craig: It feels great, obviously. Those of us who write or create, any artist of any kind, we all are making things for others. It is a rare artist who is so self-sufficient in their motivation that they legitimately don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, good or bad. Certainly for those of us who are trying to make movies and television, which is a fairly popular artistic kind of pursuit that is entirely driven by audience, yeah, we’re looking for applause. That’s our dream. Our dream is we write something and everyone just looks at us and goes, “Oh my god, you’re incredible,” and then you win awards and you do your speeches. That’s our dream.
When your old college crush met you for coffee, which is quite a commitment on their part, and expressed such awe about the film and what you had done, which must’ve taken an enormous amount of effort on their part, yeah, it felt like you touched their soul and maybe they really liked the movie, but also here’s the thing. Not everyone loves movies that way, and yet maybe they do other things for you that this college crush couldn’t. Look, practical advice for Once Felt Neglected Too. John, you’ve read Love Languages. You’ve read Love Languages.
John: I’ve not read Love Languages. I’m sorry. I know the term, but I’ve not read it.
Craig: There’s a book, I think it’s called the Five Love Languages. It’s a staple of couples therapy, but it’s also great for anybody in any kind of relationship, friends, whatever, coworkers. It’s incredibly useful. The basic thesis is that people experience love in different ways. For some people, when someone spends a lot of quality time with them, that’s what makes them feel loved. For some people, receiving gifts from people is what makes them feel loved. For some people it’s very much a physical thing. For some people it’s words of praise. Now I think a lot of screenwriters experience love through words of praise. I think it is useful, Once Felt Neglected Too, to say to your partner, “I’m not asking you to be a different person. I’m not asking you to care more about this than you actually do. What I’m telling you is the way I experience love most viscerally is through words of praise. If you love me and you want me to feel loved, that’s how it works. I’m not asking you to lie. I am asking you to figure it out. Then I think it might work better. I just feel so sad at the thought of someone’s solid relationship with a human being that would look after them when they were sick and back them up and defend them and stay with them and be faithful and loyal, all going to hell because they just also didn’t super love movies or know how to express love for a movie, because I got to tell you, people can say stuff like that over coffee and it means nothing. Nothing.
John: You don’t want a relationship with a fan. This coffee date was a fan. That’s not a strong foundation to build a relationship with. Now it’s entirely possible that your relationship, sounds like it broke up with this partner who wasn’t as supportive as you needed, maybe that was not a right relationship for you either. I’m not saying you need to go back to this person or that was the end all, be all of things, they should sacrifice what you want out of this for that relationship, but yes, there’s levels of support. It wasn’t like this person was standing in your way or telling you to give up your writing career or mocking your writing career or doing anything to hinder you. They just weren’t as rah rah, enthusiastic about it as they could be. Maybe you need rah rah enthusiasm. That’s fine. Maybe that’s why the relationship doesn’t work. To compare it to the super fan is only going to be at your detriment.
Craig: I couldn’t agree more. Let’s get personal for a second, shall we?
John: Let’s do it.
Craig: Has Mike ever just not really loved something you’ve done? I’m not talking about a script. I mean just the movie comes out, or the show, and he watches it and he’s just like, “Okay. Yeah, not for me, but great. Good for you.”
John: Yes, but I would say that in those situations it’s also been a thing where I wasn’t incredibly delighted with how it turned out either. I think there’s also recognition that there’s genres and things that I will like that he will not like. I think we know each other well enough to know that I’m not going to be expecting wild praise about those things. Same with you and Melissa?
Craig: Very much so. It’s always been surprising to me, the things that have grabbed her that she’s loved and the things that were like, “Meh, not so much,” because it wasn’t an easy thing to predict. Then again, that’s the least surprising thing of all, because people are unique. They like different things, even within genres. It’s never been the kind of thing where I thought, “If you don’t understand what I tried to do here, then you don’t see my heart,” because there’s an us that is beyond and separate from the work we do. That’s really important to differentiate. Megana, in your extensive life, I’m keeping you as young as I can.
John: Absolutely.
Megana: I’m very young.
John: The few years that you’ve been out of high school.
Craig: Exactly.
Megana: Exactly.
Craig: In the few decades you’ve been out of high school.
Megana: In my youthful experiences.
Craig: In your youthful experience.
Megana: I was telling John that this … A couple of things. The dynamic that this person is setting up with wanting to feel like they’re touching their partner’s soul, that doesn’t feel like an equal partnership to me. They want someone who is going to make them feel like this really visionary auteur. I think that it goes back to something you guys have been talking about in recent weeks, that success often feels like failure. You also can’t expect to be receiving that external validation from the people closest to you. It just seems like the dynamic and the expectation is off.
Craig: Yeah. That’s a great way of putting it. Look, if you guys are farting in front of each other, how much worship can you expect.
Megana: The other thing I was telling, because John and I were talking about this yesterday, was that it would be so stressful for me to be in a dynamic like this, because I feel like professionally for myself, and I have reps and all of these other people invested in my project success, to also have my partner invested in that would really freak me out. It would feel like way too much pressure. I think the creative process can be messy. None of us are always producing great work. If I felt like my partner’s support of me was contingent upon that, that would be horrible.
Craig: I agree. I agree.
John: Craig and Megana, I have some advice that could change your life, so if you just want to take a seat, because it sounds simple, but it may actually bring about some changes for you.
Ashley Ward on TikTok: You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character, because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed, so take a second and look around and realize that it’s a blessing for you to be here right now.
Craig: What is that?
John: That’s main character energy, Craig. That is main character energy. That’s our marquee topic for today. I think it’s good that we have Megana on here as the Gen Z Millennial cusp person to talk us through this, because it’s not quite what you might at first expect, because we have main character on the internet, which is not this at all. Main character on the internet is the villain that Twitter chooses every day for everyone to pile onto.
Craig: Oh, I see.
John: Main character energy is that sense of life is a movie and you are the central character and you just start acting like the central character in your movie.
Craig: I see.
John: It’s different from I think a thing that I’ve advocated a lot on the show, which is treating yourself as a protagonist and recognizing the protagonist struggle. This is really almost more about an aesthetic series of choices that you’re making about how you’re going to present yourself and how you’re going to perform as the character in a movie. Looking into a little bit of the history of how this came to be, but hopefully also really look at how screenwriting invented this problem and the weird way in which we now have characters who are aware that they are characters in a drama and are living their lives this way. Emily In Paris is an example of a character who has main character energy and she’s actually the main character of a show. I want to grapple with this a bit.
Craig: Is that where that is from, that clip you just played?
John: It’s not, no. That was actually from a TikTokker from this last year. Some really good things we will put in the show notes that link to it, there’s an essay by Coco Klockner. They have a really good overview of the philosophy of main character energy. Here’s an example from Lauren Is Oversharing. “It’s drinking out of a wine glass and looking over a balcony so everyone on the beach knows I’m the main character.” You get that. You get that feeling?
Craig: This is crazy.
John: This is from Coco Klockner’s essay, “Main characters have an impeccable magnetism to them. They’re creative. They don’t play by the rules. They’re a little ugly, but in a hot way. They’re full of themselves, but humble in the right moments. They’re self-aware, but unanxious. They’re not perfect, but if they stumble, a lesson is learned. Perhaps foremost, a main character emerges as someone who can pull of the paradoxical feat of conveying interiority in a world of surfaces.”
Craig: Oh god.
John: “Main character energy is not a matter of being individualistic or singular, but rather a matter of being extremely legible.” What I think they’re pointing to here is that it’s projecting interiority, it’s projecting an inner life, only through these surface manifestations. What as screenwriters we’re trying to do is trying to expose an interior life through what we can see on a film and TV. In this case it’s real-life people trying to present that they’re having this interior life just through all the outward trappings and through the Instagram stories and the trips they’re taking with influencers. It’s this weird thing that’s happening that I want to grapple with a bit.
Craig: I’m horrified. I’m legitimately horrified by this. I guess maybe movies and television just got too clever for their own good, because what we’re supposed to be doing is creating … Drama is not meant to be life at all. In fact, that was the point. When they created drama, back in … They created Western drama in Greece. There was certainly drama predating Greece. The idea was we’re all aware this is not life, right? Get it? There’s a stage. Or you’re sitting in a room watching a fricking piece of glass on the wall. It’s obviously not real. In this unreal representation of the world, you will learn some interesting things that might actually be thought-provoking or make you think about stuff in your regular life, or maybe they’ll make some sense of things in your life, or maybe you’ll just feel like you’re not alone in your emotions and that other people have felt the things you have felt. In no way, shape, or form should anyone ever want to live their lives like a, quote unquote, “main character.” That’s insane. You’re not a character. Help.
John: Let’s let you stew on that for a little bit.
Craig: Help.
John: We could talk about movies, which is a easier way into it, because there are characters in movies who seem to be aware they are characters in movies and are living their life that way, so Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off seems like he’s aware that he’s a character. He’s performing with main character energy, because he’s literally stirring stuff up and creating adventure around him at all times. Emma Stone in Easy A has main character energy, and it’s not just because she’s narrating. I think narrating is an important part of this. She’s also presenting herself on video in a pre-TikTok way and communicating what her arc is and what her change is, what’s going on. Fight Club has it. Emily In Paris we talked about before. The whole series Search Party is all about I have to be the central character driving the story. Girls is about that. We had Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge on to talk about Deadpool and Fleabag. Those are both characters who are aware that they are characters and aware that they were being watched and how they’re being perceived by audiences.
Craig: Yes. They’re all characters. If you actually met somebody like Fleabag, you would be repulsed and go running, because that’s awful. It’s amazing when you watch it on television. The reason why, and Phoebe’s a genius, because what she’s done is create an externalization of the inner ticker tape in her mind, the hamster wheel that runs, the self-commentary that we go through, but we never go through it in the moment. Normally we go through the day, we have these encounters. Then we go home and then we get into bed and then we start thinking about them and rummaging them over and over and over in our heads and reliving them and thinking, “I should’ve said this,” or, “That was weird.” She takes it, because she can, inside of art and makes it happen all in the moment contemporaneously as it’s happening. It’s fascinating to watch. It’s a really cool way of showing the way the human mind and heart function. If you act like that actually in your life, you’re nuts and you’re awful. This just feels like a very fancy way of saying be a pointless, empty narcissist.
John: Narcissism is a interesting word for it, because you’re staring at yourself, but also we are all living in the Truman Show anyway, at least a generation is living in the Truman Show, because they are constantly performing and presenting themselves on YouTube, on TikTok, on social media, to present themselves as a certain kind of way. Megana was talking about people she knows who are especially, I don’t know if you want to say adept, or entrenched in this means of self-identification through self-promotion. Megana, you have one great quote, which I want to make sure you get credit for here.
Megana: I have some friends who are self-professed aspiring Instagram influencers. I was telling John, I was like, “Why is everyone always on a boat?”
Craig: Why is everyone on a boat?
Megana: Why are they always partying on a boat? I don’t get it.
Craig: What’s special about the boat?
John: Because the boat photographs well.
Megana: You can shake champagne.
Craig: They’re all doing the same goddamn thing in the same way. I don’t even think anybody at this point is like, “Oh, influencers, I want to be like them,” because people want to just be like influencers to influence other people. They don’t actually want to, “Oh, that influencer came up with a great way to do makeup.” They don’t even care about makeup. They just want to be the person that’s doing the makeup on the camera that other people think about the makeup for.
I do have to believe that these people who are extremely online and who are obsessed primarily with how they present to the world are experiencing some very serious issues when the camera is off, and that as time goes on, it is fascinating to see how reality simply doesn’t go away, it just waits for you and catches up. You cannot keep that up if this divorce between who you actually are and who you want to show the world, because you’re not a real person but a character, that’s a recipe for ruin.
John: When I was doing my Arlo Finch book tours, I was visiting a whole bunch of schools, I would give the same presentation twice a day, sometimes three times a day for groups of 6th to 7th and 8th graders mostly. One of the things I tried to stress towards the end is that … We were talking about heroes and what heroes in stories do, what protagonists do in stories. Protagonists are always struggling. They’re growing. They’re changing. They’re facing obstacles. They’re overcoming adversity, but it’s tough. They’re creating change by changing themselves.
I tried to just turn that around and say, “Listen, if you think about yourself as the hero of the story of your life, you’re going to face obstacles. Heroes also have principles, they have codes, they have things they learn to live by, they have rules they set for themselves. Most importantly, they have allies, they have people who were on their side and they are an ally to somebody else.” What I find missing in a lot of this main character energy discourse is forgetting about the other people, forgetting that we live in a society, forgetting that we live-
Craig: We live in a society.
John: That you have relationships with people. It goes back to our previous email about the guy who wasn’t getting support from his partner. It’s like, yeah, but you’re thinking about yourself as only the main character and not recognizing that your partner also has needs and stuff too. You’re not acknowledging those.
Craig: It’s really interesting. There are lots of different kinds of characters. It seems like this main character energy is really focusing on poorly written characters. The quote that you played about romanticizing your life, I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate the exact opposite thing that I think about everything, than that quote. You can go ahead. Go ahead, start romanticizing your life. We’ll wait, because here’s the thing. Life is not romantic. You’re a big sack of slowly decaying meat that will eventually stop functioning. Everybody that you know and meet and love will eventually die. You are going to be sick. You are going to ache. You are going to have moments that are wonderful, moments that are terrible. You also don’t deserve everyone’s attention. You almost never deserve anyone’s attention.
The best thing that you can do with your life, other than fulfilling yourself and feeling like you’ve achieved something you wanted to achieve, is helping someone else. Go ahead and make a life or help a life or nurture someone or something, teach someone something or something. You know what’s not romantic? Teaching. This romanticization is just really superficialization. That’s what it is. You don’t want to be a main character in a good thing. You want to be a main character in a soap opera that holds wine and looks out over the balcony or the boat railing. Megana, what is going on?
Megana: I think that example is sincere, but a lot of the other examples that I see on social media are funny and tongue-in-cheek. I think it’s because there is this awareness of constantly curating and filming your life and playing with these tropes. There is a self-aware humor to it. I’m curious also how that affects how you would write people who are grappling both with their own presentation of image versus themselves in film.
Craig: I’m just not interested in those people. I got to be honest. I’m not.
John: Here’s a great example though of a character predating social media. This is from Sleepless In Seattle, which is a great script, Nora Ephron’s script. Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell are talking. Rosie O’Donnell’s line to her is, “That’s your problem. You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” Nora Ephron, thank you very much for that-
Craig: Good quote.
John: Good insight. Good quote. It’s the unrealistic expectations of how life is supposed to be, that life is supposed to be like a movie, that things should be as extreme, as beautiful, as perfect as that. It’s that desire for impossible perfection. It’s like some sort of body dysmorphia disorder applied to your life, where you don’t actually see things as they truly are.
Megana: Have you seen Bo Burnam’s Eighth Grade? I think it’s just such a brilliant depiction of that.
Craig: It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous because it confronts what Nora Ephron was getting at here, you want to be in a love in a movie. She’s literally saying you want main character energy. You want to be the main character. If the movie ever got this right, it was The Graduate. It’s the last shot of The Graduate. It’s brilliant. It’s the most wonderful thing. It still remains just like a little miracle to me.
John: He’s done this big dramatic thing that is such main character energy.
Craig: He stopped a wedding. He stopped a wedding by banging on glass and, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” and stopped a wedding and comes up to her, and she goes, “Yes,” and leaves the stupid guy that she shouldn’t be marrying. She runs off with him. They run out. All the adults are like, “What’s happening?” These crazy kids, they’re in love, and it’s the most romantic thing ever. They get on a bus and they sit down, full of just this romantic energy, and then the camera just stays with them, and you see the reality of what they’ve done slowly sink in.
John: As the adrenaline fades.
Craig: The adrenaline fades, and now, “Where are we getting lunch?” and, “I guess we need an apartment,” and, “Yeah, I don’t have a job.”
John: This has been on my mind, partly because the thing I’m writing right now has characters who are struggling with main character energy and presentation and public shaming and all the things that wrap up in that. It’s a thing that’s going to be there. I just want to make sure as we’re wrapping up the segment is that we don’t be afraid of having your protagonists protagonate, but those are actual actions and choices and difficult things that they are doing to achieve the thing that they want. The thing that they want is probably not to be a character in a movie. Hopefully they want something that is actually tangible and real that they need to pursue for their own inner being, and that as screenwriters, it’s our job to externalize these internal thoughts, but make sure the characters have internal thoughts and have internal drives and desires, because otherwise they’re going to just feel like empty puppets running around, which is what I think Craig and I are worried about, some of these Instagram influencers are just feeling like empty puppets running around.
Craig: They tell you they’re empty puppets. They just say it. It’s wild, man. It’s wild.
John: It’s wild.
Craig: You know what? The kids are all right. They’re going to be fine.
John: They’ll sort it out.
Craig: I just think that the internet has essentially become the playground of people with extreme personality disorders, that yes, main characters have an impeccable … Most main characters, if you really study them, have personality disorders.
John: Ferris Bueller is pathological.
Craig: He’s evil. The things that he does, it’s evil. He’s a terrible villain. Anyway, thank you for this. I’m stunned and horrified, but hopeful that everybody knows, like Megana says, a lot of it is obviously tongue-in-cheek. It’s like the new version of big dick energy. I get it, but also I feel like for people like the lady that said you have to start romanticizing your life, deromanticize your life, and then you might actually get a chance to live an interesting life.
John: Use your drones to spy on people, not to photograph yourself. That’s what they’re really made for.
Craig: There you go.
John: All right, we have time for two listener questions. Let’s listen to questions from Bex and Alex. Megana, can you start us off?
Megana: Bex asks, “I’ve taken a particular online screenwriting course from a writing instructor who teaches at UCLA, and I learned a great deal, but he said to be careful about submitting your work to agents, managers, or studios too soon, because if the writing isn’t good, your name goes on a do not read this person’s work ever list. That list is maintained and shared by all, or at least a majority of the industry. Once you’re on that list, you’re blackballed from ever having legitimate industry people look at your material, no matter how improved your work is. My question is, is this true? Does the industry share and maintain such a list of blackballed unknown writers? The writing instructor says he’s seen the actual list.”
John: No. The simple answer is no.
Craig: No.
John: Here’s the answer with a little bit more subtlety is that within a certain agency, they will keep a database of who they’ve read, just so that if one agent has read and passed on a thing, that they won’t keep reading it, the same person again and again, if it’s not for them, but the idea that there is an industry-wide list of like, “These are all the upcoming writers, the ones we’re not going to pay attention to,” is absurd, because not only would it be collusion, no one would make that list. It’s just not actually helpful to anybody.
Craig: They’re not even competent enough to maintain a list like this. This falls under the Bush did 9/11 heading. Do you really think Bush was smart enough to do 9/11? No. He couldn’t even figure out how to plant weapons of mass destruction in the middle of a desert. I don’t think he did 9/11. Similarly, Hollywood is just not organized enough to even keep anything close to a list like that, nor would anybody care. Here’s the thing. Unknown, unproduced writers, who have never worked before, nobody knows who they are. Nobody’s going to sit there and make a list of names. You know how much time it takes? You know how quickly I could figure out if the script is good or not? Three pages.
John: Three pages.
Craig: Who needs to look at the list?
John: I do like the idea that there’s a anti-Franklin Leonard out there somewhere, who’s making a list of all the unrepped writers, all the unproduced writers who are just trash, who should never be produced. That’s great.
Craig: That’s great.
John: That’s a great James Bond character, but no.
Craig: You get ranked from negative one to negative 10?
John: Uh-huh.
Craig: I love it. No, that’s crazy. To the writing instructor who teaches at UCLA, stop it. That’s just not true. You think that she or he is doing it as a scare, oh he, that it’s a scare thing, like, “I’ll just motivate you by-“
John: I want to be generous in interpretation. I think that perhaps the writing that he’s reading right now, he knows it’s just not at a level to be getting work, and so he doesn’t want these people, writers he knows will improve over the next year or two, to go too hard too fast and try to get their stuff out there, because they’re just going to hit a meat grinder. He sees potential in them and he wants their potential to be-
Craig: Got it.
John: Better.
Craig: It’s like parents telling their kids that Santa knows if they’ve been naughty or nice.
John: Yes, that’s what it is. How about Albert’s question, Megana?
Megana: Great. Albert writes, “I’ve been writing for about three years now, and I always have this internal battle about using ing in my screenplays. After writing my first script, I was heavily criticized for using ing words by a professional screenwriter after submitting it to a screenwriting feedback service. When I looked it up on Google, I keep coming across, quote, ‘Screenplays are written in the simple present tense.’ Is this correct? Did the dude punch me upwards or downwards? I appreciate the time and hope to hear an amazing reply soon.”
Craig: Amazing reply forthcoming.
John: Forthcoming. I’ll put a link to a blog post I did about this at some point, because what you’re really talking about is simple present tense was like, “I kicked the ball,” versus present progressive, like, “I am kicking the ball.” Screenplays are largely in the simple present tense, but Craig and I both use ing forms, the present progressive, in times where action needs to be interruptable, where you’re showing simultaneity of things. There’s reasons to use the ing version of things.
Craig: Absolutely. This is very similar to the let’s save a little bit of page count by removing we see. There’s something that’s happening while I’m doing something. Doing something. As John is loading the gun, Craig comes up behind him and hits him in the head with a golf club.
John: Jesus. Craig, what did I do to you? First off, where did I get this gun? I’m not a gun [inaudible 00:49:27].
Craig: We’re going to get into what happens next, because then it goes, “Three weeks earlier.” John loads a gun. Craig comes up behind him and hits him on the head with a golf club. That means the gun got loaded.
John: It’s finished.
Craig: Then I came up and I hit John in the head with the golf club. You can see that once again, I know this is crazy, the full breadth of the English language is valuable when writing in the English language. If you were, underline, heavily criticized for using ing words by, and then you put it in quotes, “pro screenwriter,” all I can say is you may have just been using them way too much.
John: That’s entirely possible.
Craig: Make sure that when you use them, you’re using them purposefully, because they are not as elegant inherently as the standard form. I’m fascinated by this final question, “Did the dude punch me upwards or downwards?” Wouldn’t that depend on who that guy is and who Albert is?
John: Absolutely.
Craig: If Albert is royalty, then the guy punched upwards. Are you a prince?
John: Is he punching or did he punch? That is a simple question. Is he still punching?
Craig: Is he still punching?
John: Is the action interrupted? I agree with Craig’s generous interpretation that maybe you were using it too often. Any time you’re using one, it’s worth a look, like do you need that present progressive or could just a simple verb work? If a simple verb works, use a simple verb.
Craig: There is an answer to that question. There is always one form that is more accurate to what you want to show on screen than the other.
John: Yep. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is The Afterparty, a new series on Apple TV. Plus created by Chris Miller, produced by our friends Lord and Miller. It’s delightful. It’s a comedy. It’s a murder mystery. Each episode follows the same crime from a different character’s point of view. Terrifically done, as you expect from these. Craig, in this workflow here I have two pieces of artwork from this. This is the movie within the show. The character who dies, this is not a spoiler, his name is Xavier. He is I think a musician and an actor. The poster I want to point to is Private Eyes: The Hall and Oates Story. As you look at this poster, so much of it is fantastic, as Channing Tatum plays Oates. Yeah, Oates. I have an issue with the credit block. Can you tell me what my issue is with the credit block?
Craig: Yes. In the credit block for a film, these days it would go, at the bottom, reading left to right, producer, then writer, then director. In the old days it would go writer, then producer, then director. This one, for some reason, doesn’t even … Does it have a director?
John: Yeah. It says A Stephanie Preston Film before Private Eyes, but no, there’s no director listed.
Craig: There’s no director. For some reason also, it says executive producers are listed last, when in movies the producer would be way more important than the executive producers. There doesn’t appear to be a producer. We have to talk to Lord and Miller about this. This is just a disaster. I can’t recommend the show anymore.
John: Hopefully there is time to go in and do the post-work on the poster that’s on the wall and put that in there. I would also point out the written by credit is Karen Tate Wallace Doe, and there needs to be something between those two, unless the person’s name is-
Craig: Karen Tate Wallace Doe.
John: Unless this one writer’s name is Karen Tate Wallace Doe, there’s either an and or an ampersand between those names.
Craig: That is correct. There are so many problems with this. We have to talk to them. This can’t happen again.
John: This is the only flaw I saw in the first episode of the show, which I think is actually just delightful. It stars a bunch of talented folks, including Ike Barinholtz. Your golden girl pal Tiffany Haddish is the central investigator there.
Craig: Did you say my golden girl pal?
John: Yeah. I’m sorry. Your Golden Globe pal.
Craig: Oh, my Golden Globe pal. She was my Golden Globe pal. She’s fun.
John: Yeah, you had that weird, awkward moment there on the stage with Tiffany Haddish.
Craig: It wasn’t awkward for me. Her feet were hurting. She took her shoes off and just leaned on me. It was fun. That’s what happens on those shows. “My feet hurt. Can I lean on you?” “Absolutely.”
John: From that moment forward, the Golden Globes really went down. It was really the highlight of the Golden Globes. From that point forward they realized, “We cannot top this. We need to stop the Golden Globes all together.”
Craig: They keep on rolling. I was lucky enough many years ago, so this has been in development by Chris primarily for the longest time, and many years ago I actually went and saw a staged reading of this one. I think it was a movie.
John: I think [inaudible 00:53:49] was originally a movie. I’m sure it was great as a movie. I think it works much better as this series, because you can just do more. You’ve got time.
Craig: I think almost everything does at this point. An additional fun bit, and you know what, maybe I’ll make this my One Cool Thing. I’m going to tack on to yours. I had another thing that was technical. I’ll get to that next week. In addition to The Afterparty being a delight, no surprise, and featuring posters that are visually hysterical, but in terms of credits, absolutely horrible, the show The Afterparty also includes quite a few hidden hints, clues, and puzzles that were developed by my wonderful, magical friend David Kwong, and my wonderful, magical friend Dave Shukan, who is a puzzle master and indeed was one of the primary puzzle creators of the MIT Mystery Hunt, which I think was my One Cool Thing last week.
John: Nice. The character that Sam Richardson plays in The Afterparty is an escape room designer, which feels exactly in your wheelhouse there, Craig.
Craig: Probably modeled after me. One would think.
John: Actually, yeah. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Indeed.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Julia Hostetler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes, more often than not now, @clmazin.
Craig: I’m around.
John: I’m @johnaugust. You could find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Our whole main character energy thing came from Chris Csont’s newsletter about main character energy, which was in Interesting. Thank you, Chris, for putting that together. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also get the hoodies now. The hoodies are so comfortable. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on population. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Craig, can you help our younger listeners understand how we thought about population in the 1970s?
Craig: Sure. In the 1970s we were constantly warned about two problems that were going to come and kill all of us. Sorry, three. Three problems that were going to come kill all of us.
John: Let’s see if I can name them. Nuclear war.
Craig: Four problems that were going to come and kill us.
John: Oh wow. Nuclear war was not even one of them.
Craig: Yep, sorry. Four.
John: Wow. Nuclear war was my only go-to. Obviously population was going to be one of them. Population and famine, those are really related, right?
Craig: Population and famine, connected. Nuclear war.
John: What were the other things we were worried about?
Craig: People snatching you off the street with a van.
John: That’s entirely true, because that happened a lot.
Craig: It didn’t. It actually didn’t.
John: No, seriously, Craig, it happened all the time.
Craig: It did not.
John: That’s a thing.
Craig: It did not. Gary Gulman has an amazing bit about this in his show The Big Depresh or The Great Depresh. Basically a guy went on TV and said there are 50,000 kids being pulled off the street every year. Everyone lost their minds. Three years later he came back and he was like, “It’s 3,000 kids.”
By that point, when we grew up, Megana, so John and I would go to school and we would have milk, because you had to drink milk when you were a kid in the ’70s or you would die apparently. On the milk cartons were pictures of missing children. Gary Gulman has this amazing bit about how, “What were we supposed to do about it? We’re eight. Are we supposed to be out on the hunt? What?” “Have you seen this child?” “I’m in third grade!” It was horrifying. You would have to drink milk from a carton with this sad kid staring back at you like, “I don’t drink milk anymore.”
John: We have men in white vans stealing children.
Craig: Men in white vans, nuclear war, overpopulation and famine, and acid rain.
John: Oh yeah, I remember acid rain.
Craig: Eventually the rain was going to come down and melt the skin right off your bones.
John: Here’s the thing. We actually got some of the acid rain taken care of to some degree. The hole in the ozone layer was probably a little bit later than that. We actually dealt with that in a way.
Craig: Yeah, unfortunately, because the ozone layer is holding in all the carbon dioxide. Everything’s working out great for us.
John: Everything’s working out fantastic. Let’s just solve the population problem, because China took it upon itself to actually solve the population problem. This is a thing that I remember learning about in grade school was the one-child policy, which is basically a couple can only have one kid. I didn’t understand how math worked, because I was in third grade. They explained, “Okay, so when the mom and the dad die, that one kid will replace them.” That’s only half people, but then you realized they actually have grandparents too, and so it all works out. It sounded like they took care of it, but it didn’t work out so good.
Craig: There aren’t many examples of grand social architecting that does work out.
John: That’s true.
Craig: Particularly when you’re interfering with basic biological functions like how many children do you have and how much do you eat. What we know now is that Malthus, the father of this fear, Thomas Malthus, who was doing his best in the 18th century, and in the 18th century, there was this very rampant population growth within urban centers. You could see London transforming and these other places. People were dealing with crowding in a very specific way in the West. There’s this fear that the more people you had, you would eventually run out of food, because industrialization hadn’t occurred yet, and so our ability to feed ourselves was not as advanced as it would be even 50 years later.
John: We would have to turn to cannibalism at a certain point.
Craig: At some point we would eat ourselves.
John: That was always part of the stories, like, “Oh, and eventually we’ll have to start eating people, because that’s what happens.”
Craig: Yeah. “We’ll start with grandma, because she’s got to go.” By the time it got around to us, obviously the United States is spatially enormous, although they kept talking about overpopulation, even in the United States, which is bizarre, since no one lives in Wyoming, for instance, or Alaska. There certainly were places in the world, and there still are places in the world, that deal with overpopulation, including China at the time certainly, India, Indonesia.
There were famine issues, because in the ’70s we didn’t realize, because we were children, how close we were to the ’40s and ’50s. Kids who are growing up now don’t realize how close they are to the ’90s. The famine that was happening around the world in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s was astonishing. It made sense that people were scared of this. No one talks about the Bengal famine. The Bengal famine was one of the worst famines that ever, ever happened ever, on any planet, as far as I’m concerned. Two to three million people died in 1943 in Bengal.
John: I agree with you. In the ’70s I associated overpopulation with famine as being the same thing, not understanding famine is actually caused by many things. It could be crop failures, but more often it’s just actually poor government. There’s a reason why democracies don’t have famines. It’s all about power and control. That was the problem. Let’s fast-forward to today.
Craig: By the way, just to back you up on that, ultimately the cause of the Bengal famine probably was Churchill. You’re right, it was not just as simple as too many people, not enough food.
John: This one-child policy in China went on for 35 years. They eventually took their foot off the brakes a little bit. It feels like they should’ve been aware of it more quickly, because you look at what happened in Japan. I remember hearing about the stories in Japan 10 or 15 years ago about, “Oh crap, we are so far below our replacement rate, we’re going to have a bunch of old people, and no young people to look after them.”
One of the findings that came out of Japan is really it comes down to once you educate women, once you give women opportunities, that they’re going to choose to have fewer children. You don’t have to have a government policy about it. You just make it so that they don’t feel the need to have large families, because if you’re not in a agricultural society anymore, they’re going to have smaller families. Depopulation is now more of a concern to most certainly Western countries, but really countries around the world.
Craig: Yes. Depopulation is becoming a serious problem in Europe, a very serious problem in Russia. Depopulation is one of the driving factors behind the rise of nationalism, white supremacy, because as traditionally majority white countries depopulate, there are labor needs that have to be filled, and the gap is filled by immigration. Now Russia just won’t let anyone in. Russia’s just like, “Nope! We’re white people only!” Let’s see how that goes for them.
In standard Europe, as we’ll call it, there’s been a lot of immigration. The immigration is necessary, because as traditionally white countries just cannot keep up a replacement rate of birth, then yeah, you’re going to need more people. What one would hope is that most people would understand that what it means to be English or Swedish or German is not, “Let’s start with white.” It’s not. Their culture is not skin color. Also, of course, America has, in our finest moments, has shown that there is a proper melting pot and that cultures can collide together and make something beautiful.
There’s this panic that’s going on because it’s the great replacement theory, that they’re panicked. The truth is the tenets of the great replacement theory, they’re not there yet. I think the white paranoia is extreme. You are in fact seeing issues of depopulation in non-white countries as well. What does humanity do as it no longer is I guess what a net positive human creation.
John: Yeah. You run into problems of how do you keep a standard of living going for a country when there aren’t enough people to actually do the work, to do all the things that need to be done, how do you take care of older people. These are all real challenges. I’m curious for Megana, who’s coming into this whole conversation 20 years later, going through school, did you hear about population being a crisis one way or another way? How does this land for you?
Megana: I feel like when I was in school they told us about overpopulation and some of the same fears that you guys described having, being taught in school were still in our curriculum.
John: When you were visiting your family in India, did you perceive that India perceived population as being a crisis, a problem? What was that experience like for you?
Megana: It’s interesting. It’s just so overwhelmingly crowded, as an American going back to visit. I don’t know that that came from my Indian family or Indian relatives that this place was too crowded, but I do think it came from the white people I grew up around in Joplin, Missouri, who would be like, “Oh, you’re from India. That place is overpopulated and it’s a Third World country.” That sort of mentality I think I internalized. I think that came from my experience of being an Indian immigrant in America and what older white people said to me.
Craig: As you were growing up, the rate of population change in India was starting to slow. There is still a net positive growth in India. There’s still a net positive growth in the United States, but it’s very tiny. India currently, population growth rate is 1% annual change. The United States it’s .4%. Now let’s take a look at Russia. This ought to be good. Russian population growth, yeah, so they’re minus. They’ve gone into minus territory. They were as low as minus .5% in 2000. They are currently at minus .2. They are losing population, and that will probably accelerate, which is bad, and they’re going to have to figure that out.
John: Let’s talk about what solutions governments and societies, because we live in a society-
Craig: We live in a society.
John: Let’s look for what are the things that can be done to address this. Obviously first and foremost is creating policies that actually make it easier for people to have children, because we have so stripped away a lot of the support systems that should be there for families to just begin to have families, to have a kid, but much less two or three or four kids. It’s funny that we used to think about poor families would have a bunch of kids, and now it seems families of a certain means are the only ones who can afford to have a certain number of kids, because they worried about educating them, food is cheaper than it’s ever been and clothing is cheaper than it’s ever been, but that there’s still all these expenses that come with a kid. If we’re not creating policies that make it possible, both financially and time-wise, it’s just not going to happen.
Craig: I agree with you. I think if a country is concerned with maintaining its population so that the functions of its structure are functioning, then it has to make this a priority. In the United States in particular, it’s like, “Screw you. You want to have a kid, fine, go, do it, but we’re not paying you. We can fire you. We’re not giving you time off. If you’re a dad, you get nothing.” Also maybe you don’t have health care. There’s no child care. We don’t have extended families here. It’s not like there’s grandmas and aunts and uncles. Basically, yeah, lol. It’s hard. It was hard when we had a kid. When we had our first kid, it was hard. Melissa wasn’t working. It was hard.
John: It’s challenging. The other obviously thing to address is immigration, because the other way a society can function if it’s not creating enough people of its own is to import people from other places. Certain countries can afford to import a lot of people here and bring them into the fold. America has had a tradition of being a country that can take in groups from other places and make Americans and change America’s identity to include new people. We need to remember that and ber better about it.
Craig: We’re terrible.
John: Easier said than done.
Craig: We suck. The celebration of immigration was part of my education in the ’70s. We used to celebrate it. The poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty was a big deal. Now it’s just like, do you remember that idiot Pat Buchanan?
John: Yeah, I do.
Craig: Pat Buchanan used to be considered a loony, and now I think he would be actually probably not conservative enough. “America first.” There have been idiots saying, “America first,” forever.
John: It was always up against the Italians or the Irish or whoever the new group was coming in.
Craig: Yeah. The Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews. Boy, if they were that pissed off about white people showing up … We’ve always had this fricking problem. I’m like, isn’t it a sign that you’re doing well, that people want to come to your shop? People want to live here, on purpose. This is great. We have massive, massive stretches of land and resources. We have more than we need, way more than we need. What happened? What happened to who we … We should be celebrating immigration as much as we can.
Megana: I do remember that as a distinct shift, because I was in the fourth grade I think when 9/11 happened. I remember in elementary school feeling like, “Oh, I am a super-American because I am a child of immigrants.” I think after 9/11 it was no longer a thing that was necessarily celebrated in school.
Craig: This country lost its goddamn mind on 9/11. Lost our minds.
John: It did.
Craig: Lost our minds.
John: Absolutely. It did. We didn’t solve anything, but at least discussed it.
Craig: I think we convinced people earlier that they can use we see, so there’s that.
John: There’s that. If we all think of ourselves as the main character in this story, as main characters we need to solve the issues of population and immigration and really family rights.
Megana: Yeah. I think the other thing you guys mentioned is having more progressive policies instead of shaming and blaming young women.
Craig: This is the thing. We live in a society.
John: We do.
Craig: Men only understand one mode. That is control women, force them to have babies, that’s how we’ll get babies. That’s it. They don’t know any other way. They can’t think. They cannot possibly fathom any other way to encourage birth. Pregnancy and birth.
John: It goes straight to Handmaid’s Tale.
Craig: Yeah, basically.
John: On a future bonus segment I want to talk to you about your show and the post-apocalyptic, I guess you consider your show post-apocalyptic, and that sense of when population drops so low, just that certain functions cannot be fulfilled anymore, because I find it so fascinating. I feel like we explore that in fiction all the time, but we will actually experience some of that in real life.
Craig: Until next time.
John: All right. Thanks, guys.
Megana: Bye.
Links:
- Fans Are Suing Universal Pictures Because a 2019 Movie Didn’t Include Ana de Armas
- How Sweet Fresh Meat clip on YouTube
- Ashley Ward’s original Main Character TikTok
- Main Character Energy: Interiority in a world of screens by Coco Klockner for Real Life Mag
- We All Have “Main-Character Energy” Now by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker
- Rediscovering ‘The Truman Show’ in the age of Main Character Syndrome by Mischa Anouk Smith for Far Out Magazine
- Gary Gulman’s The Great Depresh Kidnapping Hoax
- Main Character Energy and Narcissism – Inneresting Newsletter by Chris Csont
- The Afterparty on Apple TV from Lord Miller, First Ep on YouTube
- Puzzle pals David Kwong and Dave Shukan
- Malthusianism
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Julia Hostetler (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.