The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 635 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Now, sometimes on this podcast we talk craft. Sometimes we talk business. Today on the show, it’s half and half. On the business side, how do you make sure that person you’re hiring for your movie or casting on your show, Craig, isn’t an absolute monster?
Craig: Uh-oh.
John: We’ll talk through best practices on vetting people. And on the craft side, how do write for characters whose native language is not English? We’ll look at and listen to examples for how to do it right and some pitfalls to avoid. We’ll also answer some more listener questions. And Craig, for a bonus segment, something I don’t think we’ve ever talked about enough on this podcast: cults.
Craig: Oh, god, I hate cults.
John: I love cults so much.
Craig: Why did it have to be cults?
John: Why did it have to be cults? Now, I joined the Zoom late, but I think you and Drew were already talking about this first item of business here, which is you love word games, but I was playing the new New York Times beta version word game, and I suspected, this is not gonna be Craig’s thing. I’m talking about New York Times Strands.
Craig: Strands. What a nice way for them to just rebrand word search, the dumbest of all puzzles. It’s not a puzzle. It’s just searching.
John: It’s a word search with a theme you have to discover, unlike a classic word search where a word can be either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. Here, they can go around in various permutations, because it’s all done digitally.
Craig: One of the things that Dave Shukan, my frequent solving partner, and I often discuss when we are going through puzzle suites, you will see certain types of puzzles emerge over and over, because that’s pretty standard. Acrostics, for instance, is kind of a slog. I don’t know if you’ve ever done an acrostic. The New York Times used to run them and just stopped running them online for some reason no one can fathom. But they’re a bit of a slog. Word searches are the ultimate slog.
One of the things that Dave often remarks is, he’ll say, “This is a puzzle, but it isn’t any fun.” I agree with that. Word searches are just simply not fun. They’re just the busy work of puzzles. You just sit there, and you isolate a letter and then look around and see what other letters connect to it, and then you just keep going. But there’s actually nothing to solve. You’re merely just looking.
John: I’m not a huge fan of this. I’m still playing it every day, sort of out of inertia. What I will say is the fact that you don’t know quite what the theme is and what the unifying themes are, then once you actually discover, oh, this must be the pattern, then you actually can start looking for words you think might be there. My standards are lower than yours.
Craig: Listen. If people enjoy it, I’m not taking it away from them. And I don’t want to be a puzzle snob about it. I’m not snobby. There are certain versions of word searches that can be inventive. Foggy Brume, who makes the Panda Magazine puzzle suites, will often do word searches where there is some fascinating little gimmick inside of it. And discovering the gimmick and how it functions is the fun part. The word search itself is fairly easy. You’ll start to see words right away and then wonder, but what does this have to do with anything? And then you realize, oh, I see. If you take the end of this word over here and the beginning of this word over here, they spell a country name. Aha. What does this mean? There’s solving to do. This just looks like find a bunch of words and see what they are. Strands, I’m out.
John: It’s fine.
Craig: No, thank you. I think when it comes to a bunch of words that are then unified by a theme, my prior One Cool Thing, Squeezy, far more fun for that.
John: I thought we might start with a question here as an amuse-bouche, because we have two big topics, but sometimes the questions get shunted way to the back of the episode. Drew, can you start us off with a question here?
Drew Marquardt: M.R. writes, “Yesterday I gave notes on a script and called out what I’ve always heard is script cheating, which is a piece of information that’s written but it’s unfilmable, like an action like saying something like, ‘Kate enters. She’s the sister of Jess,’ or, ‘Mike sits at a desk. He thinks a lot of himself.’ Kate entering and Mike sitting are filmable, but the descriptors are not. And you can’t tell an actor, ‘Just act like Jess’s sister,’ or, ‘Think a lot of yourself.’
“I called out a very similar situation in said script and received this email back: ‘Hey, M.R. I went through some of the notes, and I just want to let you know that your script is supposed to have voice. I don’t think it’s wise for you to give people notes saying script cheating, which is not anything I’ve ever heard of. I think you may be hurting other writers with some of your feedback. Just be careful with notes like that.’ Obviously, every script has a voice, but was I wrong to give this script a cheating note?”
John: Neither side here is completely perfect, but I think there’s some balance and subtlety.
Craig: Everyone’s wrong.
John: Everyone’s wrong. There’s some balance here that I think we need to find. Let’s start with the second person, like, “I’ve never heard of that as called cheating.” I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast as cheating. There’s things you could put on a page that if they’re genuinely unfilmable and they’re not actionable in a way – there’s pieces of information you could put on a script that there’s no way for the audience to have that piece of information – that is cheating. There can be an issue with that.
It also feels like M.R. may be going overboard in what he was considering cheating, because as we’ve talked about on the podcast before too, there are times where you want to give some flavor, some texture, some tone on the page that lets you know what this feels like, even if it’s not directly something you can aim a camera at.
Craig: Look. This is why writing groups and such are problematic at times. We don’t know M.R., so we don’t know the tone. We don’t know if this is the final straw, if this is something that happens all the time. We don’t know if everyone’s like, “Oh my god, M.R., why are you so mean to everybody?” I don’t know. We don’t know the context. All we know is this.
In this isolated bit, script cheating is the nice way of saying bad writing. This is already the nice way, because it’s bad writing to say, “Kate enters. She is the sister of Jess.” That’s bad. It’s bad because it is short circuiting the writer’s obligation to inform the audience in a creative way that Kate is Jess’s sister, which I assume happens in the script at some point, and so the cheating is probably not even necessary.
But yeah, script cheating is a perfectly fine… Honestly, if you can’t handle that, I don’t even know what to tell you about what you’re facing in your career, should you have one. John and I have sat in rooms and been just obliterated. Especially when you’re starting out and you don’t have enough credibility for people to even respect you when you walk in the room. You walk into a room, the knives are out before you even sit down. Yeah, you’re gonna hear some stuff that’s harsh.
Look. John, you and I are old. We’re of that generation. And I know the new generation really doesn’t like this stuff. But as far as I’m concerned, script cheating is a perfectly fine way of saying that’s just bad.
I’m more annoyed by somebody saying, “I don’t think it’s wise for you.” You could always just say, “Hey, you know what? Thank you for that. I have to tell you it kind of hurt. I know you didn’t intend to hurt. I’m just letting you know it did and that maybe if there was a kinder way for you to say that next time, it would just make it easier for me to hear, and it would be more productive for me. But thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.” There’s nothing wrong with that.
John: I’m thinking back to notes I’ve given to writers. At times, I’ve been overly… They’ll send me the script, and I didn’t ask the question first, like, “What do you want? Do you want me to tell you how great it is or to give you constructive feedback or to be really, line by line, diligent about things I’m noticing here?” There have been times I’ve over-corrected on the page, and that was a problem.
In the situation of, let’s talk about, “She is Jess’s sister.” There may be times in a perfectly fantastic script where, on a first introduction of a character, you might say, “Tina, Jess’s sister, comes through the thing.” We’re establishing that they’re sisters, and we’re gonna find that out really quickly anyway. But as a service to the reader and figuring out what the context of all this is, it’s really genuinely helpful. I do find sometimes writers get obsessed with these “have to figure out everything from first” principles, like you can’t put anything on the page that wouldn’t be immediately visible to the audience. That’s not doing anybody a favor either, because again, the script is meant to approximate the experience of being in that movie theater. But in that movie theater, you’re going to say, “Oh, those two characters look a lot alike. They’re probably sisters.” Sometimes you need to give that information on the page, that you would not need to give in the actual film.
Craig: That is true. In those instances, sometimes what I will say is, “Kate enters. We’ll find out shortly that she’s the sister of Jess.”
John: Exactly.
Craig: To help the reader there get a few things that might be pretty evident on screen, but you’re also telling them, “Hey, you will find out. This isn’t the only time that the information will be available to you here in an action description in a script. Just trust me, you’ll find out, but for now, FYI.” Perfectly fine thing to do. But I don’t know, tone policing here. It feels a little tone police-y to me.
John: Yeah, it does. It does a bit.
Craig: That said, if M.R. is a total jerk and everyone hates M.R., then all the people listening to this are like, “Oh my god, why are you enabling M.R.?” I hope M.R. is not a jerk. I really, really do.
John: I hope so too. It’s not also clear from this context whether the person who was writing back was talking about their own script or maybe they’re part of a group that were looking at some other third person’s script. We don’t know what the whole context of this is. But just again, be cool. As you’re giving notes, make sure you’re understanding the context the person’s asking for the notes, and think about how you would receive those notes as a writer.
Craig: Can I give a guess?
John: All right.
Craig: I think that the person who wrote M.R. is not the person who wrote the script, but rather, that person’s friend. The person who wrote the script complained to their friend about it, was upset, and then the friend said, “I’m gonna go tell M.R. to not do that anymore.” That’s my guess.
John: Hey, Craig, in our actual real life, there have been times where one of us has had to go to a third person and say, “Hey, this is a thing to be aware of.” That’s a scenario that happens in real life.
Craig: Yeah. Sometimes you need to be an intermediary. And when you are, it always goes best if you feel like a neutral intermediary, where there aren’t judgments involved, but rather, just facts and requests. I think the problem with this is, “I don’t think it’s wise. I think you may be hurting people,” and then an imperative, “Be careful.” Not, “In the future, it might be helpful if.” For somebody who’s concerned about hurting people with feedback, this person didn’t seem too concerned about hurting M.R. with feedback.
John: The last little point about voice is there are times where you’re gonna put something in a script that it’s not filmable, you’re never gonna see it, but it just helps give the reader a sense of who that person is, what the space is like. You can describe how it smells. Listen. You’re not gonna actually ever smell that, but it gives us a sense of what it’s ultimately gonna feel like and sound like anyone else to. You say, “Oh, that’s cheating.” It’s not really cheating, because you’re providing context that is gonna be helpful for the reader to understand what this is ultimately gonna look and sound like.
Craig: And for the actors as well.
John: Yeah, totally.
Craig: They can perform smelling something. They can perform having sweaty armpits. We probably won’t see it, but they know what it feels like. No question. As always, our advice is follow the rules but don’t necessarily follow the rules. The only rule we have is write well.
John: Write well.
Craig: Write well.
John: Podcast done. 635 episodes, we’ve reached our conclusion.
Craig: We got there.
John: We got there.
Craig: We got there in two words.
John: Now, Craig, as we’ve established previously on this podcast here, one of my goals for 2024 has been to become better at understanding and appreciating the differences between accents and dialects in English. This is a thing that you have a very natural talent for. You’re very good at performing different accents. I can hear it. I don’t have trouble writing it. But it’s not in my bones. It’s not in my brain to quite the same degree. And so I’ve been studying it. I’ve been working with an instructor on that. I’ve been working through, first off, the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then really learning different native accents in English, so going through the British Isles and other places to really figure out what are the differences here, what is the musicality and changes between these different dialects and accents.
But one of the things we’ve been working on more recently is folks for whom English is not their native language and what are the common characteristics we see, what are the, not just mistakes, but just the structural changes they’re gonna make, what are the sound changes you’re gonna hear throughout that.
This is a thing that I think probably most of our listeners are gonna encounter at some point, is you have a character whose native language is not English. How do you write them on the page? Because you’re not obviously going to go crazy and try to approximate their accent. But they are gonna make different choices. I want to talk about the actual choices that’ll be reflected in the written dialog that you are doing to understand how a person whose native language is not English might be communicating their ideas.
Craig: This is an area where I think people used to blithely stumble about. And in their blithe stumbling, they may have conveyed intention well, but for people who were authentic speakers of that dialect or that accent or that language, they may have thought, “This is just ridiculous,” because we, all of us, I think, just used to just do stuff with less consideration for other people.
If you could look back at some of the scripts that were floating around when you and I started, people would routinely write Black characters with a Black dialect, AAVE, African American Vernacular English, and in doing so, just bungle it, or it just felt weirdly insulting if they were not Black themselves, and it just felt a bit foreign. That’s understandable.
What’s happened is there’s been a correction. But in the correction, I think a lot of writers – and we are always writing people that we are not – are kind of afraid to make a mistake. Writing out of fear is not helpful either.
John: What I want to talk about today is really looking for and listening to the changes in the musicality and the word choices that are gonna be likely for people coming from certain other native languages. And so we have some good examples here. Before we even get into the examples, I just want to talk through some things I’ve observed that are probably helpful if you’re thinking about a character whose native language is not English.
Most other languages are gonna have a different thinking word or sound. In English, we do an “um” or some sort of stalling word. Every language is going to have their own version. People tend to revert to their native thinking sound if they’re speaking English or some approximation of that. Be thinking about what that sound might be. You and I both have been in situations where, other countries, and we are reaching for a word. We kind of know what that word is, but we can’t quite get it. Your characters are gonna be doing the same thing. Be thinking about the pauses they’re taking, the approximations of the word they may try to get to.
If you’re speaking a language and it’s not your native language, you’re probably going to have reduced variation in how you’re forming structures in sentences. Non-native English speakers are gonna probably reach for the simple past rather than “he had” or “he did,” because we have so many ways to create the past in English. Other languages do too, but they’re gonna probably go for the simplest version of that. They will tend to go back to recycle the same word rather than go for synonyms and variety the way that we might, because they’ve found that one word, they’re gonna keep using that one word.
Craig: There is always a risk that you’re going to make your character sound dumb. Part of the counteraction is to show the frustration, if somebody does not speak English natively and they aren’t very good at it or they’re still learning, that there is a frustration, because I’ve felt that frustration trying to speak another language myself, where you’re like, “Okay, I know exactly what I want to say, but I’m struggling to put it into the words that I have available to me.” There’s also even the recognition and embarrassment that other people are looking at you and thinking you’re not doing very well. All of that stuff is good human work to think about when this is happening, so it isn’t just a convenient immigrant patois that we have seen many, many times, where people just say, “Me going to store,” and it just becomes Tarzan.
John: Sometimes when I’m speaking in French, I feel like, “Crap, I’m like a third grader here,” because I don’t have really simple stuff, and yet I have really complicated vocabulary, because I have cognates in English I can reach for. I could say some really complicated things pretty easily, complicated terms, but I can’t stitch together really simple things. I can go into a store, and I can’t describe the ice cube tray holder, maker thing. I don’t have that, but I have “lugubriousness” or I can reach for bigger words. But I don’t have simple things at my grasp. That’s a real frustration.
Craig: I kind of like the idea of you walking into a store, saying, “I need object for the making of ice. I apologize for the lugubrious nature of my request.” How confused would that guy be?
John: So bewildered. Another common feature would be overgeneralizing a rule. This is a thing that happens as people learn English. We make plurals by adding S’s to things, except when we don’t. We have “mice” rather than “mouses.” Those things are going to happen.
If the person’s native language doesn’t use articles the same way, like Russian doesn’t use most articles, they will drop them out. And so you’ll hear that in nonnative speakers, where we would put an “a” or a “the,” and they just plow through without them. That’s going to happen.
Craig: Interestingly, also, I’ve noticed the opposite. Ksenia Sereda, who is our director of photography here on The Last of Us, is Russian. I watched as her English has improved dramatically over the year since she started with us. She speaks about eight languages. She’s just this remarkable polyglot. Her English was good in the sense that she could absolutely communicate, but she had a few phrases. She loved the phrase “such as.” She would struggle at times to get things across, or there were those simple mistakes. For instance, when she would refer to the character of Joel, she would call him “the Joel.” Maybe in Russian, there is something that works that way. As the years have gone on-
John: I think she’s overcorrecting is probably what I suspect.
Craig: It may have been. She may have been overcorrecting. There are all these wonderful little things that over time she… When we switch a lens, like we’re on the 27, and we want to go to the 35, she would say, “Switch on 35.” One day I said, “I’m regretting saying this to you, because I love listening to you say, ‘Switch on 35,’ but for switching a lens, we would say, ‘Switch to 35.'”
John: Totally.
Craig: I do regret telling her that, because I miss it. I miss, “Switch on 35.” But it has been amazing watching somebody’s English improve so wildly and so impressively over the course of just a couple of years.
John: That gets back to our prepositions. Language is language. There’s just not gonna be a one-to-one match. Anybody who’s had to suffer through “por” and “para” in Spanish, it should be clean, how it does it, and some things just don’t work right. Some things don’t fall directly that same way.
Same thing happens with the verb tenses, and particularly in terms of how we’re dividing time. Very near future, far future, recent past, further back past, we have ways that we do it in English that just don’t match up with other languages, and there’s never gonna be a one-to-one match. Our present progressive, there are equivalents in other languages, but they’re probably not gonna get there very quickly as an ESL speaker. You may be stuck in the present rather than present progressive or the near future, because it’s what you have handy for you.
Lastly, I would say a thing you’ll often notice is, if a character is doing reported speech, so like, “He said to me this and this,” that’s really challenging to flip into that, because I’m staying in the present, but I’m reporting something that happened in the past. I have to get prepositions right for how all this fits together. Reported speech is often a place where you’re gonna notice inconsistencies. That’s often an opportunity to reflect the difference and difficulty of trying to communicate these ideas in English.
Craig: Native speakers will even struggle with that. That’s also part of recognizing it. There is this other thing when we’re trying to write people speaking English who don’t natively speak it. What they do speak and where they are from also should influence how they sound.
John: 100 percent.
Craig: If you listen to, for instance, comedians are so helpful for this, because so many comedians who are first-generation Americans will talk about their family and talk about their parents and do impressions of their parents. Listening to that gives you this incredible insight into the specificity of the pattern. It’s different. Koreans who have learned English sound different than French people who have learned English, because the root language is always there. The root patterns, the intonations, musicality, tempo, rhythm, all of that stuff bleeds across.
Here’s some really controversial advice here, folks. When you are writing someone from a country who is speaking English as a not first language, talk to people who know, if you are not one of them, and have them look it through. Have them advise. They will help you. They will make it so much better if you do.
John: Absolutely. Last, I would say always consider when that character started learning English, because that will not only affect the accent down the road, but also their facility with the language. For my dialect class, I was going through some Japanese speakers of English, and there were these diplomats whose English was just so spectacularly good, and there were also folks who had learned it much more recently. You could really hear the differences and how in their bones it was, and also, which English did they learn. You can definitely hear some of them learn British English versus American English. Those changes carry through.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: Let’s listen to some examples here. We’re gonna start with a clip from Anatomy of a Fall, the amazing Sandra Hüller here. This is a really amazing performance, because it’s all in France, and yet she is a German woman who is much more comfortable speaking English than speaking French. Some of her most pivotal scenes take place in English. Let’s listen to her in Anatomy of a Fall.
Sandra Hüller (as Sandra Voyter): You complain about the life that you chose. You are not a victim. Not at all. Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner. You’re incapable of facing your ambitions, and you resent me for it. But I’m not the one who put you where you are. I’ve nothing to do with it. You’re not sacrificing yourself as you say. You choose to sit on the sideline because you’re afraid, because your pride makes your head explode before you can even come up with a little germ of an idea. And now you wake up and you’re 40 and you need someone to blame. And you’re the one to blame. You’re petrified by your own fucking standards and your fear of failure. This is the truth.
John: Just so, so great. You could listen for her accent and her dialect, but really I want to focus on the word choices. A native English speaker probably would not have constructed those phrases in that way. I think she goes through a phrase, and then she repeats the end of that phrase in a way that feels kind of German to me. But Craig, what’s your telling on that?
Craig: It’s difficult to separate it from the accent, because the accent does add a certain… You just start to think this is definitely a German person talking. It doesn’t have the backwards syntax, or I suppose what Germans would call the non-backwards syntax, forward syntax. German syntax is very Yoda-like to us when we learn it.
John: The verb at the very end.
Craig: Yeah. It doesn’t have that. What’s also of interest here is that the person writing this, who is now an Oscar award winner for their fine screenplay, was also not a native English speaker. There’s all sorts of possibilities going on here. There’s a clipped nature to the pronunciation of the words that is wonderfully German. If you were to remove the accent using some horrible AI de-accentifier, you would notice. I think you would notice something would be strange. You just wouldn’t be able to put your finger on it.
John: If you look at the words scripted on the page – I haven’t gone back to the script to see exactly whether she’s saying word for word what was on the page – you would not guess that this is an American speaker. It doesn’t have an American way of putting stuff together. I could hear the same thing with an RP British accent. I could feel that working more, but it’s not an American accent. There’s a musicality to it. It’s really what I’m trying to get to. It’s that the order of the word, how it fits together, it feels specific to this character and this world, and it’s not some generic American accent.
Craig: There is a formality to it. Even the fact that the pronunciation is so careful. Even though there are words where it’s supposed to end in a D and it sounds like it ends in a T or something like that, which is typically German, or I believe she says, “Germ of an idea,” and she pronounces it “cherm.”
John: “Cherm.”
Craig: There is nonetheless a kind of over-pronunciation of some words, whereas, you’re right, a native American speaker would be eliding and slurring a bit more of the pronunciation there.
John: She’s speaking passionately and very quickly, and yet every little phoneme is coming through. That feels very specific as well.
Let’s jump through it. We don’t have the clip for it here, but we actually have the pages in this case. This is Past Lives. We had Celine Song on the podcast earlier. Here I want to take a look at, this is a scene happening in the East Village bar with Hae Sung, Nora, and Nora’s husband, Arthur. Just Hae Sung’s dialog here, he’s not a comfortable English speaker at all, and so his first line here is, “When I was 24 year, I… ” That’s right. That’s absolutely correct. The idea of 24 years old is a complicated thing. “When I was 24 year” is probably the Korean way of constructing how old you are.
Craig: There’s a video I saw floating around that a Korean American did, basically he was having a conversation with himself, like two people on a phone. The idea was what a conversation would sound like if Koreans just spoke English but in a perfect translation of what the Korean was. It’s remarkable. It is nothing at all like what we would understand the translation to be. It is very specific. Way fewer words are being used than you would use in English. It’s more compact. It’s more efficient. But it is very, very different. There’s a lovely extraction of that here. Listen. Oscar award nominee, Celine Song.
John: When we had her on the show, we didn’t have the script in front of us. I do like seeing how Nora’s dialog here when she’s talking to Hae Sung, the Korean comes first, and then there’s a slash and then what the subtitles would be come after it, which is a very natural, native way to do this. It feels really great.
Just going back through to Hae Sung’s English dialog, “But. Military, work, it’s… same.” Just as written on the page, you can sense he’s searching, he’s trying to find a way to communicate this idea. “There’s overtime pay, stuff like that here, right? In Korea, you work overtime all the time, but there’s no overtime pay.” He’s found the words. He’s keeping to the words he actually has and that have worked before. He’s staying with these simple patterns.
Craig: Phrases like “all the time” are easy to remember. But then later down, when she asks him, “It’s hard physically, or mentally?” he says, “Both. Definitely physical. Hard. And… ” She says, “Mentally?” And he says, “Mentally, I… strong,” which is probably how I would… If I were thinking about that in French, I would be like, “Je,” and then if I was just emotional, I would just go, “Fort.” Because “I am,” “je suis,” and then yeah, it just falls apart there at times.
What’s fascinating here, and Celine understands, when you’re talking with somebody who doesn’t speak English as a first language, you will naturally reply back with what they’re saying but in the correct format, almost as if you are teaching and confirming. “You’re strong mentally,” she says. And he says, “Yes, right.” There’s an appreciation there of, okay, good, you understood me, because part of the discussion between a person who speaks natively and a person who doesn’t is a confirmation that one is being understood by the other.
John: Absolutely. So crucial. The next clip is something that Drew found for us. This is from Irma Vep. The context here, we have a Hong Kong actress shooting a movie in France, and like Anatomy of a Fall, English becomes the British language between these two characters.
[Irma Vep (1996) clip]
Zoe: And you went to see the Batman, you know?
Maggie: Batman?
Zoe: Yes. No, not Batman, for with all, you know, Catwoman?
Maggie: The Return? The second one?
Zoe: Yeah.
Maggie: Oh, yeah.
Zoe: And you liked it?
Maggie: No.
Zoe: I thought, you know what, it was completely crap. I just went because Rene was mad and he said to me, “You have to go there to understand the film.” But I think it’s a movie for the fans, you know.
Maggie: The first one was bad enough, right?
Zoe: Yes.
Maggie: I don’t know why they’d make three.
Zoe: That’s true.
Maggie: But I think Catwoman was all right.
Zoe: Yes, it’s true. I like Catwoman. She’s nice. You know, I tell you everything, and then you can know me a lot. I mean, I don’t like American films. No.
Maggie: Right. I know what you mean.
Zoe: Yes? Everything is too much decoration, too much money. You agree with me?
Maggie: Sure.
Zoe: And all this money, this big money, big-
Maggie: And they’re so lucky to have so much money.
Zoe: Yes, but why? For what? For this? Or this? Nothing, you know.
John: Again, here we have two characters who are obviously seen in the film that they are looking at each other to try to get confirmation, like, do you actually understand what I’m saying, are we talking about the same things. Their levels of English are approximately the same. The French actress has a stronger French accent. But again, I think you could read it on the page and understand that these are characters communicating at 100 percent because they are trying to cross this bridge.
Craig: They’re using very simple phrases, a lot of questions. A lot of questions to make sure that the other person understands what they’re saying. This is an inherent insecurity of people that do not speak English as first language. They’re making sure that the other person gets it. Luckily for these two characters, they’re discussing something that everybody around the world shares, which is a ridiculous hatred of American movies that they all seem to watch over and over and over.
French people hate McDonald’s. They’re like, “Get out of our country, McDonald’s.” I’m like, McDonald’s would totally get out of your country if you stopped eating at McDonald’s. It’s a business. This is kind of amusing in that regard. It almost feels like a French textbook discussion. “Do you like American movies?” “No, I do not like American movies.” “Do you agree?” “Yes, I agree.”
John: Getting back to the question of, “Do you agree?” Do you answer that question with an affirmative or a negative? There’s the, “Yeah, no.” There’s all these little subtleties that we have in English. Every other language has their own specific subtleties there. When it’s not native in your bones, you’re going for the simplest way to make sure that the other person understands that you hear them and you can follow what they’re saying.
Craig: Yes. And if these people were speaking their native language, the discussion would be even more obnoxious, because it would be full of brilliant examples and wonderful moments. And there would also probably be much less agreement, because it’s too hard to disagree when you’re struggling to find the words. “I don’t like those movies, but I like Catwoman.” “Yes, I also like Catwoman.” Do you? Sure. At this point, now you’re just trying to have the conversation, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. There is a social grace to agreement. Disagreement requires subtlety, care, a lot of small discrimination between words, some of which will push things into a bad place, some of which will push things into an interesting discussion place. If you don’t have the instantly accessible toolkit for that, you may just default to agreeing.
John: I would say even though they’re both ESL speakers, I can imagine on a page that their voices still can read differently. Zoe, the French speaker here, the choices that she’s making and the small mistakes she makes feel French to me. The musicality feels specific to it. Maggie’s, who’s from Hong Kong, who has a more British background, also feels specific. I suspect even on the page, you can really read them as two very different voices, even though they’re still nonnative English speakers.
One of the most difficult exercises I had to do for my dialect class was take a scene that I’d already written, that was supposed to have two American speakers, and have one be Irish and one be Scottish. Really tough for my brain to switch between the two of those, because they’re distinct sounds, but in my brain they’re hard to hold apart.
Craig: What’s interesting, John, one of the things I admire about you is that you find these areas that are challenging for you and you just steer your boat right into them. Accents are fun for me. I enjoy them. That exercise you just described, I would actually look forward to. I don’t think it would be too much of a challenge for me. But there are things in my life that are incredibly challenging, like for instance, drawing. I am so bad. I have such a zero ability to naturally create realistic looking things, perspective, any of the fundamentals. The thought of taking a class to try and get better just makes me pee my pants in fear.
This is a honest question for you. My concern is, I would put a lot of time and effort in to become as good as somebody who had talent was when they were in kindergarten, because you either do or you don’t have that thing. What is your goal here?
John: With drawing, for example, that was one of my earlier areas of interest. I spent a year and I learned how to draw. I learned how to see and how to draw. I’m much better at it than I was. I’m not doing my practice every day or anything like that. But I got much better at it. But I also realized that, as you said, I’m only gonna get up to a level who was a 6th grader who was pretty good at drawing when they started.
With this, this is actually useful for me to be better at, because if I can hear these voices distinctly in my head more clearly, then it’s gonna be easier for me to write those characters and really hear their voices in my head clearly before I’m putting them down on the page. This is genuinely useful for me, I feel.
Again, recognizing what your weaknesses are and striving to improve them is fun to do. I picked up running, and so I can run really far now, which is surprising to me. Again, it just took practice and recognizing that you’re going to give up some other things in order to spend the time running.
Craig: There’s a topic for us to discuss maybe in a future podcast, if we continue to do the podcast. What episode are we on now?
John: 635.
Craig: That seems like a good round number. In any case, let’s say we were to keep going. That is about help, the concept of help, and recognizing as you move through your career where you’re going to need help. Even if you’re trying to shore those areas up, there are places that you identify.
I’m gonna give you an example right now for me. As I go through production, as I’m directing, one of the areas I know I need help with is – because, again, I have a very good sense of composition, but what I struggle with is just the very simple notion, as we’re shooting, of eye lines and which side of the shoulder you should be on. I need help with that. I have a fantastic sense of how things edit together. I understand where one shot should die and where another shot should pick up. I understand what kind of coverage I’m going to need. But oftentimes, I really do need help trying to figure out, wait, so in this shot, when they’re looking across the room from this one to that one, should the camera be over on this side or that side. I have help. I have camera [crosstalk 00:38:43].
John: You have help.
Craig: I have a script supervisor. I have a DP. There are all sorts of areas where at some point you just have to say, no matter how hard I’m trying, here are the following areas were I need help. But that’s a topic for another time.
John: Absolutely. I guess the last point about why I learn new things is that I enjoy being bad at things and struggling and being a newcomer at things, because it also just makes me feel young. I remember when I was young, things were hard. It was like, “Oh, I can’t figure this out.” Then you get better at it. It’s like, “Oh, I feel young.” It’s nice being a beginner at things sometimes.
Craig: I do enjoy the horror and excitement of being a level 1 character in D&D or starting a new video game that’s level-based, where you’re level 1 and basically one punch takes you out. You have no idea what the hell you’re doing and where you should go. You’ve barely mastered anything. It is like growing up all over again. It’s fun.
John: Let’s segue to our next topic, which can rely a bit on our experience of not being complete newcomers to things, which is on vetting. This past week, Craig, you and I were talking about a producer who had done terrible things. We were both surprised to learn about this, and shocked. But I also was reading this article in Slate talking about what they called Mean Too, so the extension of the Me Too movement, which is just like, oh, these people are assholes, and now we actually are going to identify these famous people as being assholes. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.
A point they made in this article is that once you’ve hired a star, once they’re in wardrobe fittings, that star has a lot of power and control, and that you’ve ceded some of the power and control to a person who may not be a great person. I texted you, Craig, because as we were talking about this producer, you are a person who’s hiring a ton of people. You’re hiring actors and crew and everybody else. I want to ask you, how concerned are you about not just can this person do this job, but are they going to be a monster either on set or do something off set that’s going to reflect badly on the show?
Craig: It’s an enormous concern. The tricky part when you’re dealing with actors, there is a lot of information floating around out there. A lot. Now, there are actors that people just say, “It’s gonna be worth it.” There are actors – and it could be the same actor – where somebody else says, “Life’s too short.” I have a little bit more of a “life’s too short” vibe. There are certain people that have been proposed, and I would think to myself, “They would be perfect, but life’s too short.”
But when you’re talking about all these other people that you can be hiring, heads of departments and things like that, the danger is that there is an interaction gap. I typically will call fellow showrunners to inquire about potential heads of departments. It’s also a joy when I can report back to them. I texted Albert Kim just the other day to say that the prop master that I checked in with him about and hired has been doing just such a wonderful job, and that’s great.
But we, who are running things, have a certain kind of interaction with those people, because we’re their boss. What’s happening though when we’re not there, and they’re the boss in their fiefdom? How does that go on?
One of the very interesting aspects of showrunning that I hadn’t even anticipated was that if there is any kind of serious HR complaint, that the executive producers are filled in. We’re told. Thank god it does not happen frequently at all. But it is an eye opener to go, “Oh, okay, that’s surprising, because my interactions with that person were of this kind.” Apparently, once the cats were away, the mouse was mean. That’s a little nerve-wracking. It’s harder to get a read on that by checking around.
John: Let’s talk about vetting, because when you are considering hiring a person, be it an actor, be it a crew person, you’re going to look at their references, but hopefully you’re gonna find somebody who you can go to to say, “Hey, can you tell me honestly what it was like working with this person?”
When I get those incoming emails, I will say, “Yes, let me call you about them,” unless that person is just so spectacular that I will just email back, like, “This is the best person in the world. You should absolutely hire them.” The phone call is your friend here, because people will be honest and direct in a phone calls in ways they will, for reasonable reasons, won’t want to put down in an email.
Your point about, yes, ask showrunners, but if you could find somebody else to ask, that’s also going to help a lot too, because you get a sense of who are they like to assistants. There have been cases where I’ve called up folks who were assistants to people, said, “Tell me about them. What was it like to work with them?” Because if I’m just asking the people who hired them, they could be really good at managing up and managing their bosses, but absolute a monster when it comes to the people working for them. I don’t want that in my life.
Craig: No, you don’t. But there’s only so much you can do. That said, do all the things you can do as best you can. There are going to be errors. As you try and figure out who should be joining your crew, whether it’s as an actor or as a craftsperson, do your best, ask your questions. Just understand some people will be lovely and yet not a good fit for the show, in which case a change is made, and sometimes some people will be very talented but nightmares for various reasons, in which case there must be a change. But you’re hoping for that beautiful thing where what you expected is what you get. We don’t tolerate what we used to.
I myself have become way more aware of my own anger levels. I’m angry all the time. I’m like the Hulk. I wake up angry. I go to bed angry. But my anger is not at people. My anger is not this irrational whatever. My anger is entirely about trying to figure out how to get the stuff that’s in front of me to be like the stuff that I want to be in front of me.
There are times where I get frustrated, because, let’s say… They make me go to meetings, John. I go to a lot of meetings. I don’t want to go to the meetings, but I go to the meetings, because they tell me it’s really important, because I have to answer the questions so people know what to do. I will go to a meeting and I will get asked a question and I will answer it. Then there’s like three more meetings that feel very duplicative to me, and the questions get asked again, and I answer them again and again. And then I show up on the day, and the answer I gave 12 times in meetings has not occurred. This is enormously frustrating.
I’m just very aware that the frustration can be expressed, I can express it firmly, but volume is kind of a thing. Also, I’ve become aware – this is something like, if I taught a showrunning school, this would probably be lesson of day 1. You as a showrunner may think of yourself as – you may have a low self-esteem. You may have a lot of core shame. You may think of yourself as a schlub. You may have imposter syndrome. It doesn’t matter. When you interact with all of these other people, they are looking at you as the person who can fire them. You have this enormous influence on their lives. If you loathe them, not only will they get fired, but people are gonna call me, and then they’re worried that I’m gonna tell them that they’re no good. There’s a lot of just built-in fear. You have to remember what it was like talking to the big boss. You have to remember how intimidating that was, before that person even opened their mouth, before they did anything.
That lesson in awareness of your own power is really important, because I think a lot of people in Hollywood with power don’t feel like they have it, and so they don’t act like they have it. You have to just remind yourself that you have it.
No one’s perfect. There are moments. But we are hearing quite a bit about some people for whom it seems the moment of awareness will either never come or has yet to come, and no matter how many times people have officially complained, they don’t seem to care.
John: We’ve talked about Scott Rudin on the podcast before. There was a person who – it was like this weird badge of honor to have survived working in his office. That was incredibly screwed up. We completely misunderstood the assignment in terms of how to think about having survived in a difficult office. I think and hope we’ve moved on a bit from that and that we have come to understand, both as employers and as employees, the social contract we’ve made there cannot be about subjugation and control.
Craig: That’s right. We will always be a strange business in that we are empowering artists with a lot of money and a lot of control, and that means writers, directors, actors, as well as other artists, like cinematographers and production designers. Artists aren’t necessarily the most rational, calm-headed people in the world. It’s one of those things. There’s brains that work a certain way. Everybody accepts a certain amount of that. There are things that I think showrunners or directors or actors do, that if you did in an escrow office, you’d probably be shown the door almost immediately.
John: Oh my god, the number of conversations I’ve had with Mike where he’s like, “I cannot believe that this is permissible in your industry,” because he’s coming from a more corporate setting. He’s like, “How is that even possible?” It’s how it all works.
Craig: It is possible because you are dealing with very specific brains. You’ve gathered a lot of people together who are artists. There is a case to be made that extreme artistic talent and mental illness are very hard to distinguish from each other, that there’s probably quite a bit of overlap. People understand a little bit of it.
Also, specifically with actors, there is this understanding that no matter what we’re all doing, they’re the ones on screen, which means if they’re having a day, you gotta figure it out, because we can’t have the scene, which will exist forever in fixed form, be bad because they were having a day and everyone else said, “That’s unacceptable.” Then of course, you don’t want to necessarily encourage them to have their days. You have to figure out how to make it all work, and we generally do.
John: That’s very familiar to anybody who’s a parent. It’s like, how do you get through this tough situation without creating a pattern in which this is how you’re gonna deal with these situations all the time.
Craig: Showrunning and parenthood are remarkably similar. Remarkably. When you were raising Amy, I’m sure you and Mike at some point turned to each other and said, “She’s gonna be complaining about us in therapy, what, in about 10 years,” because you can’t help it. You can’t help it. It’s gonna happen. It’s just gonna happen. I know that there are probably people that have complained about me to their therapists, because I’m in charge.
Do you remember when you were starting out, the people that were in charge, it didn’t matter who they were, that one thing that everybody could bond over is either making fun of or complaining about the boss. You hope that you can be as close to, “You know what? He’s a great guy. He just has his weirdnesses.” That’s the best you can hope for.
John: That’s the best you can hope for, for sure. 100 percent. As we wrap up this topic, it’s easy to think about red flags. Let’s talk about some green flags. This is something, if you’re seeing these patterns, that’s a good sign.
One thing I always look for as a green flag is they repeatedly work with the same people again. They’ve worked with that director, that producer time and time over. There’s something there that’s working, and they’re willing to work together again. That’s generally a green flag for me.
Craig: Agreed. Also, what is their personal life like? It’s not anything that’s determinative. But if somebody is clearly going through a phase in their life where they have a relationship that’s falling apart, they are being sued, they’re getting into bar fights, they’ve become unreliable, that’s a problem.
Best practice, green flag, somebody whose life appears to be rather stable. They’ve got good people around them. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been married for 30 years to the same person. It just means that there’s a certain stability in terms of their management, their friendships, their living situation, the way that they comport themselves. That’s always a green flag to me.
John: When people say spontaneously, “I love them,” you get a sense, oh, people love them. They didn’t have to say that. It’s not just they love their work. They actually love being around that person. Green flag.
Craig: Huge green flag. The thing is, we want to love people. When you hear that, you’re like, what a relief. The best information is exactly that: “I love them.” I’ve said to people – they’ve asked me about an actor or they’ve asked me about a crew person, I’m like, “I would take a bullet for this person.” The best recommendation you can get, the best green flag is, “I absolutely love this person. You may not hire them when I need them.” That’s the best green flag there is.
John: Red flag/green flag combo here. If you’re looking at their social media and they seem like a not stable person on social media, they’re not gonna be a stable person in your actual life. The green flag version of this is, you look at their social media, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I get this person. I get what they’re into. They’re posting some dog photos. They are also talking about things in a rational way.” That’s a green flag for me.
Craig: Yes. When it comes to actors, I have to say I’m old-school in the sense that I believe that backstage is backstage. What we want people to see are the characters that the actors play. That’s what we want. Obviously, there’s enormous interest in actors’ personal lives, and people are always gonna be asking questions.
But if social media feels a little bit like, “Hey, once the cameras are off, my reality show begins,” that’s a red flag for me. Green flag, like you said, once the cameras are off, the things that I put on social media are not that different from what anyone puts on social media, that implies a certain stability and maybe possibly the absence of extraordinary narcissism, which is always a red flag.
John: Probably – this is something you actually texted me – one of the best handers-out of red flags and green flags is your casting director, because casting directors, they know all the actors. They know the actors who they’ve seen over the last 20 years and the interpersonal relationships between those actors. They get a sense of that. You said casting directors. I said other actors. Those are folks who know what these people are actually like.
Craig: Yes. If I had a choice between asking an actor or a casting director, and I can only pick one, I would pick the casting director, because actors can have remarkable on-screen relationships with actors who are nightmares everywhere else.
John: True.
Craig: But casting directors hear back from everybody. They hear back from the directors and the producers, so they get the feedback. And they have been tracking people over the course of years. And they also saw those people when they were starting out. They can also say, “This person’s become a monster,” as opposed to, “This person has been just a solid human being from the very, very jump, and they continue to be.”
Our casting director this year is Mary Vernieu, and she was so helpful in that regard for a lot of the people that we’re bringing on. I have to say it’s been fantastic. Every choice, we’ve been rewarded. Green flags everywhere. Very, very excited.
John: Let’s answer one more question. I see one here from Steve about Dungeons and Dragons, so of course we have to answer this question.
Craig: Oh, gotta answer this question, yeah, obviously.
Drew: Steve writes, “My son Elliot is big into the Dungeons and Dragons world. He watches the movies, loves the 1980s cartoon, reads Monster Manuals from the library. Now he wants to play the actual game. However, it’s recommended for 12 and older, and he’s only 6. This hasn’t stopped him from designing dungeons,” he has a little image attached here, “and using monopoly dice to create characters. I’ve looked for junior versions but haven’t found any. Do you have any recommendations for a 6-year-old who desperately wants to be 12, so that he can better understand D&D?”
John: Oh, god, I’m so happy for Elliot. I’m so happy for Elliot’s dad, Steve, who’s gonna contribute to his love of Dungeons and Dragons. Googling around, I found a link I’m gonna put in the show notes here – it’s on Everhearth Inn – about how to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids. It gives some suggestions for here’s how you scale down the experience so it actually is appropriate for younger kids. It goes down to six. It goes down to Elliot’s age in terms of how you do that and how you get the sense of, okay, I am playing this character who’s doing this thing. Some simplified rules, so it’s very straightforward, but also fun for a kid that age.
Craig: It’s a tough one, because I think, Steve, probably Elliot is special. A six-year-old who is reading the Monster Manual and is designing dungeons and using Monopoly dice to create characters is pretty advanced. The issue is, who is he gonna play with? You know your son better than we do, Steve. If you feel like your son is particularly advanced and can do this, then my suggestion is, perhaps there’s a world where if you play, Steve – I hope you do – that maybe you can build a little one-shot for you and maybe a couple of your friends who play and also Elliot. Then maybe if Elliot has a friend that really, really wants to play, then now there are two kids who want to play. But six is very young. It’s exciting, I think, for Elliot. But I think he’s probably a rarity.
John: My friend Quinn has a kid who also loves to play D&D and started really young. Quinn’s frustration was that it’s hard to find other kids his age who can actually do stuff. They got a little school group together, and they eventually started doing it, but it’s a challenge.
I think Craig’s instinct, where you, Steve, are gonna be the DM, and Elliot and hopefully some other friends or some other adults are going to play through a little bit with him, feels right, and you’ll find ways to have it make sense.
I love that he is really into the actual Dungeons and Dragons game, so I don’t want to send him into a video space, but there are some video game versions of D&D or things that are like that, that could scratch that itch for a while before he has the ability to sit down and roleplay with others. I’m just nervous about it because I don’t want to lose this ability to imagine worlds in his mind and the reading of it all to be looking at a screen.
Craig: The video games unfortunately will probably not be content-wise appropriate for him at six. Certainly would not steer him towards Baldur’s Gate 3.
John: Not Baldur’s Gate 3.
Craig: That would be bad, although, boy, I love that game. But no, he’s six. He’s so young. He’s so young. It really is about providing a fun environment for him, and also, no matter how special he is, making sure that the adventure or the nature of it is short. Anything beyond an hour is going to seem like a thousand years to him.
John: Or it might be he might want to play for six hours, but again, you have to be the parent who’s structuring this. I want to talk about Elliot’s dungeon here, because look at how great this is. It has a gibbering mouther in it, a mimic surprise, some flameskulls.
Craig: I would say gibbering [said like jibbering], by the way.
John: Jibbering, gibbering. I like jibbering. I like jibbering.
Craig: You like jibbering? I don’t actually know how that is pronounced.
John: We’ll look it up.
Craig: Oh, it’s jibbering. Yep, it’s jibbering.
John: Okay. But it’s great. The fact that he’s into this, that his handwriting is actually pretty good for a six-year-old too.
Craig: It’s outstanding. It’s so much better than mine was. Again, to reiterate how bad I am at drawing, this right now is about what a map I would draw would look like. But I love that he understands some basic concepts. For instance, it looks like there’s some sort of water in the beginning. And then there’s an arrow, which I love, that says turn to the right. And then there’s a huge room with the gibbering mouther. Obviously, that’s not an easy two words to have as a kid. Then mimic surprise, he corrected his spelling of “surprise,” which a lot of adults fail to do. I love that he understood what the point of the mimic was. It looks like he might’ve drawn a T for trap there.
John: I think it’s a trap, yeah. But he’s got his door symbols there just right too.
Craig: He’s got flameskulls.
John: Who doesn’t love a flameskull?
Craig: [Crosstalk 01:00:09].
John: Adventurers don’t.
Craig: It also says “the end dungeon,” so I suspected that there’s more planned.
John: There’s more.
Craig: Elliot is terrific. I will say this, Steve. Your son will be a DM. He has big DM energy.
John: He has DM energy. It’s true.
Craig: No question.
John: He’s also very lucky to have you as a dad, because you’re trying to figure out how to help him do what he wants to do.
Craig: Thank you for not being a total monster.
John: It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Ronan Farrow – it ran in The New Yorker this last week or maybe the week before – on RuPaul. The article’s title is RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business, which I think is just great. If you ask RuPaul how are you doing, RuPaul says, “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” which I think is just the best answer.
Craig: Oh my gosh, that’s great.
John: I watch Drag Race. I’ve known of RuPaul for forever. Never met them in person. I thought the article was great and really dug into the weird contradiction of a very public face who’s incredibly private and is always trying to draw out, “You gotta reveal the real you,” from the drag queens who are competing on the show, and does not want to reveal the real him very much at all. Of course, this is all in service of a memoir that’s coming out. It’s just really good writing by Ronan Farrow, just a really good profile of an important media figure, RuPaul.
Craig: This goes exactly to my earlier comment about in front of the curtain and behind the curtain and, especially when you think about somebody who has specialized in bringing drag to the forefront, how presentational and performative that is – not performative like the fake performative, but performance-oriented – and how there is a backstage. Even on Drag Race, which shows you the backstage, that backstage is on stage. There’s a real backstage that you never get to, which is correct.
He says something in this article that is so – I don’t know if he’s been to therapy, but it sure sounds like it. “Feelings are indicators. They’re not facts.” That’s a fascinating way of putting it.
John: That’s very therapy, yeah.
Craig: Very therapy and a wonderful thing. Also, the thing about RuPaul that’s always been evident is how smart he is. Reading this, it just sounds like… We do profiles of people that do these things that seem overtly funny and frivolous and silly, and then when you meet them, you realize how smart, because again, or awards should only be won by people that do comedy, and Drag Race is comedy.
John: Also, you recognize that what RuPaul wants contestants to be able to do are not things that RuPaul himself could’ve done coming up. The expectations, the levels have gotten so high that you have to be able to be an amazing designer, an amazing performer, an amazing dancer, amazing everything. And that’s just the table stakes to start playing.
Craig: Yeah. I also love how much of a businessperson he is. But you can’t make a show like that without being a very rigorous, serious person. Comedy is serious. I’m gonna read this. I’m fascinated by him. I really am. I just think he’s such a force. I’m so tired of us taking people who pretend to be serious seriously. I like taking people who pretend to be not-serious seriously. I think that’s far more interesting.
John: In our last episode we talked about counterfactuals. The counterfactual where we didn’t have RuPaul, where RuPaul wasn’t born or didn’t do drag or did some other thing, we would be at a different place. There would be drag 100 percent. But would we have the popularization, the mass platform of drag that we have now? I don’t think we do.
Craig: I don’t think we do. I think he’s an incredibly important person in that regard. There’s just an entire vocabulary we wouldn’t have. I think we know this for a fact, because until RuPaul came along, that culture existed.
John: 100 percent.
Craig: But mainstream wasn’t looking at it. Just wasn’t. Even when it popped through a little bit, like, what was the documentary, Paris is Burning?
John: Yeah, Paris is Burning. Fantastic.
Craig: Yeah. It popped out, and then it popped back down again. It’s not the same.
John: We always had drag performers. We had [unintelligible 01:04:32]. We had that gay camp sensibility. But it wasn’t all put together in a way like this.
Craig: No, and it wasn’t also unapologetic. When I was growing up, when you were growing up, it always seemed like we were laughing at the drag performance, and now we laugh with the drag performance. It’s very different.
I’m not a religious watcher of Drag Race, or any television show for that matter, as you know, but when I see it, it’s incredibly entertaining, and it’s so funny, but it also feels very authentic. Even though I know it’s reality television and a lot of it’s drummed up and not, you do feel like you are seeing the authentic culture happening in front of you. The people that they pull from are real. They’re not finding people and saying, “If you would be willing to start dressing up in drag, it would be great.” They are who they are.
John: Also, having been on the air for so many years, the queens who are competing now grew up with RuPaul’s Drag Race existing, and so they’ve been swimming in this water the entire time. Not just the expectations of performance but also the culture has changed too. In early seasons, contestants who were trans were hiding it, because it felt like that’s cheating to be trans and be on Drag Race. That seems absurd now, but things move pretty quickly.
Craig: Things move pretty quickly. I think RuPaul is at the center of it all. Also, he’s 9,000 feet tall. I wanted to go up and say something to him at the Emmys, because he’s at the Emmys every year, because he wins every year. I show up every four years, I guess. Maybe I’ll never show up again. But when I do show up, there’s RuPaul. I’ll tell you why I didn’t go up to him. Can you guess why I didn’t go up to him?
John: Intimidation?
Craig: Yes. Terrified. Terrified. In looking at the Ronan Farrow article here, I feel vindicated. I think that he would be like, “Get the eff away from me. I don’t know you.” But I would love to. I’m such an admirer of him as a creative force.
John: Craig, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?
Craig: My One Cool Thing is a game. There’s a company called Glitch Games. I’ve definitely promoted them before on the show. They make escape room, puzzley type point-and-click games for iOS typically. I think it comes out maybe on Android, but who cares. This latest one, I can’t tell if I like it or if I loathe it. I’m putting it out there for people to see what they think.
John: It’s a $4 game, so it’s not a huge burden.
Craig: It’s a $4 game, so it’s worth the $4 bet. It’s just like their other games in that you’re in a facility and you have to figure out how to get out and there are a lot of puzzles, but the gimmick is that this facility was working on some sort of time loop thing. It’s an increment of time that you can set, I think, between 3 minutes and 10 minutes. It sends you back to the beginning and undoes most of what you’ve done. You solve puzzles. You figure out how to proceed. Then it goes schwoop, you’re back to the beginning, which means you have to re-solve a bunch of puzzles – not hard to do – to get further. I gotta be honest. I found it incredibly frustrating and I quit. But the puzzles are quite good, and I do love their game in general. People who have a little bit more patience than I do may actually really, really appreciate it.
John: Recursion.
Craig: Give it a shot. Recursion by Glitch Games.
John: Give it a shot.
Craig: It’s four bucks.
John: That was our show for this week.
Craig: Yay.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-
Craig: Woo-woop.
John: … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Wop-wop.
John: Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments.
Thank you, a little shout-out to our Premium members, because it just keeps growing, which is fantastic. This last year, we were able to not just pay for Matthew and Drew, but we also were able to give some money away. We zero out our balances every year. We were able to give away some money to some really good charities. Thank you very much for our Premium-
Craig: You and I also got to buy really nice beach houses.
John: That’s what it is. It’s the beach houses plus that. For clarification, we get no money ourselves out of this. It all gets donated away.
Craig: Yeah, no beach houses.
John: No beach houses for us. But thank you again to our Premium members. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, Drew and I both just watched a documentary series on HBO Max called Love Has Won, which is about a Colorado cult. Drew, you saw it most recently. Tell us what you liked, what freaked you out about it.
Drew: Everything freaked me out about it. I always have a terrified feeling that I’m somehow susceptible to cults, even though I’ve never actually run into one. Love Has Won is about the cult of Mother God.
Craig: She’s the one where they just left her body in the room?
Drew: Exactly. It starts with you seeing the body cam footage of the cops coming in and finding basically her mummified corpse, and then it goes from there.
John: Then we go back in time to follow it. But what’s so fascinating about this documentary is – because it’s all very recent, there are still members in that cult right now – they were online all the time. They were also posting YouTube. They have so much footage of just inside the cult while it was just doing this normal stuff. It’s not all recreations or just talking head testimony. It’s a lot of just actual real footage of what it was like being inside this cult.
I love cults. I just think they’re great story fodder, because you have charismatic leaders, you have people who are devoted to it, who are sacrificing other things. There’s that sense of a mission that is so cinematic. There’s something just really appealing to me about cults. I don’t ever want to join one. I don’t want to ever start one. Maybe Scriptnotes is a cult. I don’t know. But I dig them.
Craig: We’re the worst cult ever.
John: We’re the worst cult. We don’t make any money.
Craig: I’m just fascinated by where cult leaders come from. In this case, Amy Carlson, prior to becoming a cult leader, was a manager at a McDonald’s. Being a manager at a McDonald’s is probably very hard to do. But I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of overlap between the skillset required there and running a cult.
John: The documentary would actually push back about that, because she was a manager at McDonald’s, but a rising manager. She wasn’t just managing one store. She was moving up the corporate chain a bit.
Craig: I see.
John: She was able to really motivate her employees in a way that feels like has analogous skills to getting people on your side and following you to believe that you are the incarnation of God.
Craig: I see. Do you think that her belief that the Jews wanted everyone to do the work and they would take the money was part of how she got them to do their jobs better? Why is it always the Jews? I don’t know this lady.
John: A fair criticism of the documentary, which I think you can look at both ways, is that in trying to really look at the cult from its own perspective and emotionally connect inside the cult, they did leave out a lot of their crazier conspiracy beliefs and their QAnon stuff and all that kind of stuff. They really were focusing on what it felt like personally in there, rather than their bigger belief system. But it’s funny to me how once you believe yourself God, you do look for villains, and funny how they often become Jewish.
Craig: I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know why it always happens. I like that their belief is that Adolf Hitler’s intention was to serve the light. I think he was pretty clear about his intentions, actually. I don’t think we have to guess there, do we? He wrote a whole book.
John: He did, yeah.
Craig: He wrote a whole book.
John: Of his struggle. Thinking to cults in general, they’re easy targets for cinematic stories, for villains, because they’re sinister, they have dark motivations. You and I grew up in a time of panic over Satanic cults and these people who were sacrificing babies. That never happens.
Craig: That just doesn’t happen.
John: It doesn’t. Instead, we have a lot of people who believe themselves to be incarnations of God and to have divine messages, and the people who follow them believe they are doing right for the world. They believe that they alone can save things.
Craig: It does seem like the Catholic Church and the Baptist Church and Pentecostal, all the big traditional Christian movements, big ones, do think that there’s a lot of these Devil-worshiping cults out there. And maybe there were in the, I don’t know, 1400s, but now, that’s not a problem.
Every now and then, some town will want to put up some sort of religious thing, and then they’re saying, okay, the court said you have to let every religion do it if they want, and then the local Satanist group shows up, and they’re just a bunch of dorks that like to wear black. They’re always like, “We’re really actually very nice.”
It’s this kind of New Agey baloney. It’s baloney. A lot of baloney about energy, past lives, and all that stuff. And a lot of the things that I think a lot of people believe, but in a perfectly innocuous way, some people take so seriously. That plus the cult of personality leads to these extraordinary situations, where people are so deep in, there’s no way out, because once you start picking at one thread, the whole thing falls apart, and they’re so brutal about you leaving. Once you’re in, you get love bombed, and only they understand you, and only they care about you, and then you’re stuck.
John: The obvious reflection is like, what is the difference between a cult and religion? Religion has structure around it that lives on beyond its creator. Obviously, so many of our religions, if you look back in the early phases of them, look a lot like our cults. But I’m curious about secular cults, cults that don’t go for any grand or religious view. They still have to have some perspective on what’s next.
I imagine there will be some kind of AI cults coming up here. Some of our charismatic founders of these corporations are very analogous to cult leaders. People will follow them to the ends of the earth.
Craig: Elon Musk feels culty.
John: Yeah, it does feel culty. I’ll be curious to see what that looks like. I guess in some way, Elon Musk, there was an expectation like, no, you need to sleep at the factory in order to make sure this all works right. The people who were working for him were not just working for that paycheck. They truly believed in the mission.
Craig: Yes. Donald Trump clearly is a cult leader. There’s no way to argue he’s not. That is a cult. They behave in the most cult-like way possible. All of these movements seem to collapse when the cult leader dies. They are ultimately about the person. They cannot exist past it. This woman, Amy Carlson, she dies in 2021, and that’s the end of that.
John: Actually, it’s still dribbling on a bit. Her people, they still believe what she believed, but they haven’t all held together.
Craig: It’s gonna fall apart. It just doesn’t work. L. Ron Hubbard died pretty early on in Scientology. It was David Miscavige who really continues to be the hub of that wheel. I don’t know how old he is, but one day he won’t be here. He will go the way of all mortal beings, and then we’ll see what happens to Scientology too.
John: We’ll see what happens. Did it jump past that initial needing to have the charismatic founder where it can keep going with its own energy? Maybe. But we won’t know until we see.
Drew: I feel like LA is lousy with those centering cults though. Scientology is probably the most prominent of that. But there’s the workout cults. There’s all those certain workout gyms. There’s one right now that will give you money off your membership if you get a tattoo of the brand.
Craig: That’s disgusting. That’s insane.
Drew: Isn’t that crazy?
Craig: That’s insane.
Drew: All the acting stuff too. Those are all little mini cults.
John: Oh, god, yeah.
Craig: No question. No question. They’re built around people.
Drew: That’s fair. And an idea of better… It’s all that, yeah.
Craig: Life improvement?
Drew: [Crosstalk 01:17:46].
Craig: Yeah, life improvement.
John: Exception proving the rule, QAnon, it feels like a cult. There is an entity who’s supposedly Q, but there’s no actual person there. There’s nothing you can point to. Q could be anybody, anything. It feels like it’s now dying down. But I was surprised it was able to be as successful as it was without any visible figurehead there.
Craig: There was Q. That’s why the QAnon movement was so pernicious, because there isn’t a single person that you could pick apart and point at as having feet of clay. It was this thing that would just show up, like receiving messages from the sky. It was actually quite brilliant. It’s stupid. It’s floridly stupid. But again, people, once they dig in and they believe it… And it does appear that Q was the son of the guy that owns 8chan or whatever that thing was, and then other people probably posed as it. It’s kind of remarkable how they did a little end-run around having a person be around.
John: Getting back to the main episode, how do you make sure the person you’re gonna hire is not actually a cult leader? Check their social media. Do they claim themselves to be God? That’s a red flag.
Craig: Do they have a lot of people following them around? If you’re like, “Yeah, we’re thinking about casting you,” and they’re like, “Great. One request is that my entourage of 80 people come with me, and also no one can wear the color blue,” and blah, blah, blah. You’re like, “Oh, no.”
John: There are some celebrities who have those entourages. Maybe we have to watch out for them as being cult leaders.
Craig: There are celebrities who could, in a second, make a cult. Thank you, Taylor Swift, for having some restraint. If Taylor Swift wanted to install herself as the head of a religious movement, she could, within a day. It would be massive, and it would be serious. Thank you. Once again, I should say, thank you, Taylor Swift.
John: Let’s leave it there. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Drew: Bye, guys.
Links:
- Strands from the New York Times
- Anatomy of a Fall – Clip
- Past Lives by Celine Song
- Irma Vep – Clip
- Is This Hollywood’s #MeanToo Moment? by David Mack for Slate
- How to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids
- RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
- Recursion – Glitch Games
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (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.