The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John, a standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There’s some swearing in this episode.
Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to episode 694 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we welcome back the writers of a new movie in a genre that has almost disappeared to talk about why and how they wrote a new movie in this world. That genre is spoof.
The movie is the new Naked Gun, and the writers are Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. Welcome back, fellas.
Dan Gregor: Hi, guys. Hello.
Doug Mand: Thanks for having us.
Dan: Hi, Drew.
John: I want to talk about the spoof genre, but also other genres that used to be common that have basically now disappeared. We’ll also answer a list of questions on publicists, and complications, and overcomplications. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about movies that Gen Z hasn’t seen, because the spoof genre is a thing that they are just not familiar with, and that has to be a factor as we think about what movies we’re doing going forward. First, Drew, we have some follow-up.
Drew: We do. Back in episode 690, we talked about the new Dogma 25 manifesto. I’m not sure if you guys remember that.
Dan: Listened to that.
Drew: Andrew in Boston wrote in. He said, “A hilarious aspect of the Dogma 95 movement that people might not remember is that the majority of the movies broke the manifesto rules in one way or another. For example, The Idiots and Julien Donkey-Boy both used background music.”
John: Oh, my God. The scrilidge of background music. That’s not authentic to it? No.
Dan: What am I even watching?
Doug: That changes everything I think about Julien Donkey-Boy.
John: It’s moving out of my top 10 list in New York Times.
Doug: Fully mainstream sell-outs. [laughter]
John: Complete sell-outs. Anybody who breaks any of these rules, just banish them.
Dan: Sell-out.
[laughter]
Drew: Justin in Eagle Rock, formerly of Altadena, writes, “I was listening to your segment about Dogma 25 with my seven-year-old in the car. He started asking lots of questions.
John: About The Idiots and Julien Donkey-Boy.
Drew: He’s a big fan of The Celebration. ”I said, ‘Elijah, I will explain this in a minute, but can I please listen to this because I’m very interested in the content.’ When we arrived at our destination, he said, ‘Mama, I changed my mind. You can just enjoy that. I don’t want the explanation.’”
Dan: [chuckles] That’s about how I felt after the entire segment was done. I was like, “What is this again?”
Doug: It’s what I wanted Craig to say at the end of it. I think this kid’s really onto something.
John: Absolutely.
Doug: Very mature take. I don’t even want to talk about it.
John: Yes. It’s a good advice for a lot of things. It’s like you’re curious in the moment, but then ask yourself when it’s over, did you really care?
Dan: No.
Doug: No.
John: There’s this whole, like, cultural moments that have just passed me by. Trisha Paytas passed me by.
Dan: Oh, yes. Trisha Paytas. All right.
Doug: It’s okay to not know.
John: It’s okay to not know things. It’s okay to not actually dig in deep to really fully investigate.
Dan: Will anyone know what the Dogma 25 is in five years, or will it be a weird reference that you’re like–
John: It’s a great question. We have a memory of Dogma 95, but there are films made of it, and it was a thing.
Dan: What are the odds that this is something that people actually adopt, and it creates a movement, and I’m doubtful?
Doug: I guess it depends on the quality of the films that come out of it. If something pops a little bit, maybe, which seems unlikely, but not impossible.
John: Yes. I think that the genesis behind this, or at least one of the motivations, was just the rise of artificiality, and artificial intelligence, and AI, and just a sense like none of this is real underneath this. I think there’s going to be some movement that’s going to happen, but is it going to be called Dogma 25?
Dan: It’s also a callback to a very Gen X thing that mostly is going to be forgotten by most of the filmmakers who are employing whatever this Dogma 25 is.
Doug: I respect the idea of the punk rock, like what is going to be birthed out of this anti-artificial intelligence movement of these big-budget movies, what’s going to come out, and what cool artists are going to emerge. It’s so dogmatic. Obviously, it’s just AI. Listen to that list.
John: Literally dogmatic, yes.
Doug: That list was just like, okay.
Dan: It’s always just about a vibe. If something feels like a low budget, deeply authentic, organic, shot in the right place, all those things are– you feel it. Nobody needs a stamp.
Doug: As we learned, Julien Donkey-Boy used background music.
John: Yes. Betrayed the entire spirit of The Husk. Now, there’s one thing, we’re talking about genres that may not exist, or may never have existed. There’s one thing I know about you guys, is that you think that dead genres should stay dead forever. Never go back. [laughter] Never go back.
Dan: I’ve heard a hundred genres, and no, I put a stake in its heart.
Doug: Absolutely.
John: Just kill it dead. Let’s see if you can do that August 1st with Naked Gun.
Dan: Oh my gosh.
John: You have the new version of Naked Gun. Congratulations, boys. The trailer’s really funny.
Dan: Thank you.
John: I have not seen the full movie, so we’re recording this early. We’re going to have a conversation about this in an abstract sense.
Dan: It’s a theory more than anything right now, and I like the theory of spoof comedy.
Doug: Yes.
Dan: It’s a little college course I’m hoping to teach.
Doug: In this moment, we are infallible, which is amazing.
John: Which is so great. You’re the experts, having done it most recently.
Doug: People will see it and be like, Oh, I wish they could edit some of this up.
Dan: The idiots, they missed the boat.
Doug: They really screwed the pooch on this one.
John: Entirely. Let’s talk about that class. You’re going to teach Dan Gregor on it.
Dan: Please.
John: What are the defining characteristics of a spoof movie to you?
Dan: Yes. I think a spoof movie is something that takes a pre-existing genre, something regarded that everyone recognizes, and then does a, I guess I want to say, deeply silly send-up of that genre. I think that’s how I would most centrally define it. There’s leeway on various sides of it for how sincere your send-up is, how doctrinaire you are about the rules of that. You have your Mel Brookses, you have your Austin Powers, and those guys are also doing spoofs.
There’s a little more character, there’s a little more stand-alone heart to some of those characters, but they’re still fundamentally spoofs of a pre-existing genre that everyone recognizes as its own intellectual space.
John: Yes. When you say send-up, you can only send it up by actually understanding it and deeply appreciating what’s there. You have to recognize what the tropes are, what the cliches are, so you can pull them out, study them, exaggerate them. You have to go way beyond things. That’s probably true for all spoof movies, but I feel like the thing I recognize about The Naked Gun thread of these is an absolute deadpan lack of acknowledgment of the world melting down around you, which seems very crucial.
Dan: Yes. There’s straight manning, where there are people in the world who register that Frank Drebin is dumb, but the world continues to functionally operate regardless that he is still the top cop in the game. The way that any genre movie, Ethan Hunt is the top spy in the world. There’s really nothing he can do that will get anyone else to stop treating him like the best super spy that’s ever existed. That’s almost the spine of these movies, that it’s real. It’s all real. It’s all really happening. The stakes are real. It’s not silly unto itself.
John: Yes. A distinction here, so like Frank Drebin’s character is absurd. The world is played mostly straight, but without acknowledging that he is absurd within the world and the world is heightened to some degree, and then finding that right balance. There are visual puns and gags, and there are things that couldn’t happen in a normal world, but you just let them slide, and that’s got to be an ongoing discussion.
Doug: Everyone lets them slide, and it is an ongoing discussion because it’s a sliding scale where you’re like, “Is this–“
Dan: They’re oddly like really precisely important moments when the actor does straight man, and maybe he’ll look at Drebin like, “Did he just say that stupid thing?” Or sometimes he’ll look at camera and they’ll be like, “What the fuck is happening here?” It’s not that every single moment has to completely play it straight. It’s that the world continues to hurtle forward. Because the truth is, if you are writing the smart version of this movie, the villain would be like, “I’m pretty sure this guy is dumb and we don’t have to worry about him.” Then the movie would be over.
Doug: They have to say yes. The characters have to say yes while still walking the line of being like, “You’re an idiot,” and it’s a balance. Even when we were on set, we would look at Danny Houston and the way he would respond to some of Liam’s takes or Frank’s takes, and we’d be like, “Do we need to get maybe a take where he’s giving us a little bit more like, that’s insane. Do we need to move faster? Do we need to run through the bees on this one?” This is maybe not the moment where we stop and acknowledge it, and we just keep moving because the world needs to keep going.
Everyone has an agreement almost, that this is happening. Honestly, that really starts with Liam and what started with Leslie, which is just like getting actors to play it straight, and they are not in a comedy. Those lines, those actions can pop even more. They’re not in on the joke. They are fully serious, fully committed. That’s, we were so lucky to have Liam for that. Leslie was obviously incredible, but it was the idea of getting actors who are known as dramatic actors. That’s why some people didn’t know about Naked Gun and really didn’t understand what we thought made Naked Gun so great would be like, “Oh, but Liam isn’t funny,” and be like, “He is. Also, that’s why he’s there.”
John: It’s a specific thing.
Dan: There are other attempts over the years to cast comedians in this movie. That was always, I think, doomed to fail because it would fundamentally misunderstand, like it has to be straight. It has to be like the concept that you expect is you’re seeing and it’s all happening the way it’s supposed to happen. It’s just the edges are stupid, as opposed to the person in the middle himself is not Inspector Clouseau.
John: Yes. Those are clear antecedents. It exists within a spectrum, and we’ll talk about sort of the ZAZ versus the Mel Brooks versus the Wayans and those things. We want to talk about this genre really did disappear. Looking up on Box Office Mojo, if you look for like the spoof keyword,-
Dan: Ooh, I love this.
John: -there were only 10 spoof titles released worldwide between 2013 and 2024.
Dan: Oh my God.
John: Versus 34 in the previous decade.
Dan: Even before that, and probably by, you said 2013, even by then, the genre had burnt itself out.
John: Younger listeners will all know this, but there was a whole, like a yearly series of movies that were like Epic Movie in these things, which resembled this genre, but were incredibly pastiche and just–
Dan: If I’m being honest, I do think that this was this really beloved genre for 30 years. It’s so silly. It’s so funny, but I do think that some of those movies stopped respecting the genre itself and burned it off. It created a generation of kids who were like, “This is stupid. I don’t need it.”
Doug: I think Scary Movie 4 was around 2003 or 2006. I looked at the same thing over the last year of writing, and be like, “When was the last time?” To me, that was like the end of that era. It feels almost 20 years to me. I don’t know.
John: I want us to go back to this idea, Doug, you’re talking about how at some point, you have to figure out like, how are people responding to this idiot who’s doing these stupid things?
A real change that’s happened is we’ve had The Office. We’ve had shows where Jim looked to the camera and that reaction, and he’s acknowledging, like, “This is a crazy thing that Michael Scott is doing,” or, “This is a moment that’s happening here.” That’s the kind of thing that you’re looking for in a spoof movie, or you need to cut out of a spoof movie. It’s finding exactly what the right flavor is.
Doug: Yes, it’s a great observation.
Dan: We move the culture of comedy so much towards like the Apatow and the Mike Schur, which there’s a real naturalism to that. Those people are– Jim Halpert is a funny person. He knows he’s funny. He’s sometimes trying to be funny. He’s regularly trying to be funny, and you’re laughing with him. He’s in on a lot of these jokes. Same thing for the entirety of the Apatow-averse. Of just like everyone in those movies is a funny person, and they’re humorous unto themselves.
It creates a world where the comedy is the space that you’re hanging out in. There’s a sitcom-ness to all of that, actually, that I think is a very different take on the comedy.
Doug: I also find that the– and I love The Office, I love the character of Jim. It almost became a like, “I’m cooler than this.”
John: Yes, like existing outside of the space of it. Schwimmer on Friends also would tend to do that thing, too. You’re not quite in the same universe as all the other characters.
Doug: I’d hope that what we pulled off is that when we do even actually quite literally look to camera, it’s not that. There’s part of the trailer is Frank going, “The new one, Frank driving the new one. I think that take is him being like, “I’m the baddest mother fucker out here. This is not a joke. There’s nothing funny about this.” I think that that’s maybe the difference.
Dan: We had several jokes where we debated, is this too meta?
Doug: Yes, is this too meta?
Dan: We honestly cut all of them except for that one that is like that last trailer moment, because we felt like that one fits in its own bit of genre.
John: We’re talking about the trailer moment where a character who’s supposed to be O.J. Simpson’s son looks to camera, and you have to acknowledge that.
Doug: This is the one on the bank, but that’s also a meta joke as well. It’s in the bank, and it’s after a big bank heist scene, which is in the trailer as well. One of the hostages says, “Who are you?” He says, “I’m Frank Drebin, the new one.” Then takes “the new one” to camera and puts his leg up. He has like heart underwear on under his skirt.
Dan: Right, we had like one version where he was like, “I’m Liam Neeson– fuck. That’s not it.”
[laughter]
Doug: Yes, “I immediately biffed it.”
John: I want to talk about this because one of the challenges you face here is that you have what you need for the movie, but you also have what you need for the trailer. The trailer has to be an instruction manual for how to watch this genre.
Doug: Yes, especially to a whole generation who has no idea how stupid this really is, and what’s the language and what are the rules of this kind of comedy.
Dan: Our test screenings have been really interesting because there are many people under a certain age who have literally never seen this genre before. We’d see that those people for the first five minutes were like, “What the fuck is happening? This is psycho. There’s like, he’s the size of a little girl, and then suddenly he’s a 6’4” Irishman.” They needed their own little mini education of ramping into what a world this even feels like. That yes, something ridiculous and crazy happens, and it bears no repercussions to the reality.
It just snaps right back. We’re still moving forward. Nobody’s acknowledging it. It’s not like this is a magic power that we’re calling back.
Doug: It’ll be interesting to see, too, because those screenings happened really before, like the trailers were coming out. Hopefully the trailers will serve as a little bit of a key and an answer guide to like, “Oh, okay.” Hopefully, there won’t be as much of a learning curve for a certain generation. That’s the hope, but it still might be.
Dan: There’s a silliness that is really doesn’t exist in cinema now, and it’s–
John: Non-animation cinema.
Dan: Yes, non-animation.
John: Last time you were on, you were talking about Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, which ended up turning out great. Because it was animation and sort of half animation, and the world was broken in a way that I think people are used to with animation, and it’s not what we’re used to in a live-action film. We’re used to like, we have heightened things in something like an Edgar Wright movie or in like Dicks or– can’t remember the name of the other, A24 comedy with Ayo Edebiri.
Drew: Bottoms.
John: Bottoms.
Dan: Oh, yes. Bottoms is an amazing movie, but even Bottoms, like those are great ones to talk about because Bottoms is a movie that is light with its reality. It goes away from, like, a strict reality, but it does regularly come back to a take on the genre of high school, like coming-of-age movie. I think Bottoms is so cool because of that.
Doug: I think it’s a cool movie.
Dan: Then what was the other one you just said?
John: Oh, Dicks.
Doug: Oh, Dicks. Oh, yes.
John: Yes, it’s so absurd. You have Nathan Lane spitting lunch meat into his sewer baby’s mouths. It’s like, we’re willing to accept things as being incredibly pushed when it’s just so indie and so strange that sure, but in a big mainstream comedy, we’re just not used to seeing that anymore.
Dan: I think that’s exactly right, that there’s like cartoons keep the silliness alive. It’s in the trailer too. There’s the one shot where Liam is interrogating a bartender and he won’t give him an answer, and he smashes his face against the table, and he pops back up, and his nose has been completely pancaked. Which is just a cartoon joke, fully a Looney Tunes joke. Even just being able to like, “Yes, we’re doing Looney Tunes jokes, but in the real world,” I think people can clue into it soon enough, but it is new.
John: We had Ryan Reynolds on to talk about a third Deadpool, the Deadpool Wolverine movie and the real challenge of finding where the right space is for like within superhero reality, what makes sense and to what degree are you identifying with this person as a real human being underneath that suit or everything is fungible, to what degree is it all just Play-Doh and an ongoing struggle?
Dan: That was a cool movie because there were absolutely elements of spoof in that. There were multiple moments where he is just breaking reality, and nobody else is really allowed to acknowledge that he’s breaking reality. Then we snap back, and it’s just the movie again. It’s just the genre, it’s just the plot. He gets to exist on both sides of in the movie and outside the movie.
John: Yes, but in a broader sense, that’s an example of a mainstream comedy, even though it was inserted in the superhero genre, but we used to do this all the time. We used to have Jim Carrey movies. We used to have big, silly movies.
Doug: Big, over-the-top comedy.
John: They weren’t spoofs, but like, The Cable Guy or Liar Liar, they were all really big and broad.
Doug: Physical and broad and bring people in to laugh out loud and throw their popcorn around. It’s been a long time.
Dan: I know.
Doug: I think that it was great that ushering in of the Apatow comedies, which were great, were so like, you weren’t laughing out loud. You were like, “Oh, that is funny.” Oh, yes. You’re acknowledging that life can be funny, can’t it? It was enjoyable. I loved it.
Dan: There’s an authenticity, and it was a heartfeltness.
John: There were funny people being funny. Even though they weren’t laughing at each other’s jokes, you could tell that they knew that the things that they were saying were funny. Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan’s show, one of the things I really respected about that is they would laugh at the jokes when they were funny.
Dan: They were funny people who would make each other laugh.
Doug: Which is also really hard to do, though.
John: It is hard.
Doug: It’s hard to write characters who are funny and are being cheeky and cute and brilliant.
Dan: Fleabag did it, too, where she was like aware that she was really clever.
Doug: Fleabag broke the fourth wall immediately by looking at camera in the first episode. They pulled it off. There’s something about the British take that leaves you a little bit–
Dan: Also, it takes a next level of balls to not just write a joke, but write a joke that you are telling the audience is funny in this reality. It’s like when you say, “Our band wrote the best song of all time,” You better write a fucking great song now.
Doug: It’s really the, like in Hacks, when she’s a standup comic. She’s supposed to be funny. And the jokes are good. What a swing that is to be like, “Yes, Deborah Vance is a great comedian.”
Dan: Because if those jokes are no good, then the whole reality falls apart. It’s all based on that.
John: It’s good you brought Hacks, because I think that is one of the real challenges facing you trying to do a mainstream comedy is that comedy on television is so good right now, and streaming comedies are so good. You have the shows like Hacks, you have the Successions, which aren’t technically comedies but are written-
Dan: Oh, it’s hilarious.
John: -with comedy genes. I think audiences are used to now, we watch comedy on our screens here and we don’t get to see comedy on big screens.
Doug: I think one of the things that we’re hoping for and banking on, and Paramount is, it’s not our money, is that people want to go back to theaters and laugh in a community and have that experience.
John: The first M3GAN certainly was that experience. It should never have gotten so big but it was so fun to see crazy things.
Dan: Horror to me proves the point which is there are certain emotions that are better experienced in a group because it’s this collective gasp, it’s this collective release of a laugh, and it’s just funnier together. I also think that’s hopefully the point of diving into the action comedy or the action spoof, because we really did work to make this feel like an action movie. Liam Neeson’s real stunt coordinator doing real Liam Neeson stunts, and his whole team had the best time, basically doing the things they would be doing on any Liam Neeson movie.
Doug: Sending up the things that they’ve been doing for the last 10 years for Liam. They were so excited to do it.
Dan: There’s a scope to it that feels cinematic, hopefully, and I think that’s what we’re hoping for. I think we’re hopeful that this is going to be a movie that people are excited to see on a big screen because it feels like a big-screen movie.
John: Back when we were doing Charlie’s Angels talking about action comedy, that was a very successful and very difficult tone to hit which is that we are in an action comedy space and we’re going to be doing the things we’re used to seeing but we’re going to be approaching it with a very different attitude, a very different style. Yes, there are going to be jokes, and yes, it’s going to be silly at times, but not silly that it completely undercuts the stakes of what the movie is and what the heist is that they’re trying to pull off.
Dan: We write a lot of action comedy, just like normal action comedy, and that’s always the thing that you’re really up against, which is like we have to write a real action set piece. We have to write something that is exciting and gripping, but it can’t just be dry action for five pages, right? Then it’s boring also, but they can’t be so out of it that there’s no stakes again, that suddenly the reality is broken. In this one, you get to have the carte blanche to never really have to worry about that. The bank set piece.
John: Let’s talk about that because we can talk about something that we’ve seen in the trailer. Talk us through the bank heist because we’ve seen a bunch of bank heists in movies before.
Dan: It certainly comes straight from The Dark Knight and just that crazy opening of, okay, we’re in the most intense instantly this bank job, and we watch a bunch of different bank job heist action set pieces. Once you get into these, we probably ended up filming five or six more actual fight sequences than we ended up using, because we were like, they’re all pretty modular jokes. The reality is we don’t really need to care about much of the mechanics of like, “How does he get from here to the other side of the bank and how do they stop this guy from entering,” and all the actual mechanics you might have to care about in a real set piece.
We’re just like, “All right, let’s identify the 10 most common tropes within these movies and how do we undercut that?” One of the ones that’s in there is there’s the circular firing squad when you convince two bad guys to accidentally shoot each other because you’re dodging that. We just undercut that with having them take a very obvious dummy, not a human body, by any means, and just like toss it like a rag doll into the middle of 10 bad guys who all are just like, “Okay, I guess we’re shooting at this now,” and they all kill each other.
You’re like, “Okay, great. That was a great way to just functionally get rid of 10 people.”
John: Yes. Treating those moments as comedic moments and believable and plausible within the universe that you’ve created, but they don’t have to pay into higher stakes. We’re not worried about like that bystander over there.
Dan: We just kept watching these sequences where it was like, “Oh, the way that these guys disassemble guns is so ludicrous. It’s so easy.” Then you’re just like, “It’s like they’re treating it like papier mâché,” and then you’re like, “Okay, that’s the joke right there. What’s our run of ways that you can just take apart a gun in the most psychotic way?” We ended up eventually getting it to like, “Is it cake?” [laughter] It suggests to him, they literally made– Yes, that’s in it. He bites the gun, and so they literally made one of the guns out of cake, and he just like ate a bunch of guns on set.
Doug: He ate a ton of chocolate cakes and a ton of chocolate guns. He just ate a lot of them. I think also the important, and Akiva did this so well and stressed this, and we know this is–
John: It was Akiva Schaffer who directed this.
Doug: We wrote with him as well. It was the three of us writing this, and he directed Rescue Rangers, but is setting the world in a very real way too. The beginning of that bank sequence is shot, it should look and feel like Heat and Place Beyond the Pines. It should feel like a tense bank ice until you break the reality. Everyone settles into like, “Oh, I know these tropes.”
John: Yes. Okay, exactly.
Dan: That was really fun for us to also, whenever people see the real movie, like we were like, “How long can we not make a joke?”
Doug: How long can you hold?
Dan: It was just like, okay, we’re in this bank scene, and everyone gets the genre. It’s really intense, and that music is just like piercing your ears and it’s like, how long can we just keep building this tension before we have to pull the plug on it and like reveal that this is a little girl and is actually Frank Drebin in a dress. That’s great.
John: That’s great. The other bank heist that was reminding me– which is another example of like a big comedy that did work was Free Guy. Free Guy also goes back to a heist, but in that heist, you’ve already established that you’re in a video game world. Everything is heightened to some degree. We’re already looking at this bank vault with the expectation, like this is a heightened space that we’re not expecting Heat.
Dan: Right. Again, it’s like rules of the world. That movie is so amazing for rule-building and world-building. It’s, you educate yourself very quickly on like, “Okay, this is a, this is a totally different set of reality.”
Doug: Video game rules. I love Free Guy. I think that the time you get to the bank scene, you’ve been in it for at least 10 or 15 minutes. I think so.
John: He’s woken up in this space. He knows where the reality of this place.
Doug: They can go right into that raw red meat a little faster.
John: Before we leave Naked Gun, I want to talk about Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which I think is a terrific show and is a heightened police show, but doesn’t work on that same scale anymore. It’s like, it’s a comedy without being a spoof and it has to have a groundedness in like, do you believe the characters, like if that physics applies, that the characters cannot Looney Tunes.
Dan: Right. It’s funny. We wrote this movie from the Lonely Island offices. It shares an office with Dan Goor, the creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He would regularly come in and be like, “Oh, what’s that? You guys need any jokes? You got any jokes?”
Drew: Again, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a great–
Doug: Procedural comedy in all the best ways. It’s silly. It pushes the silliness as much as they can.
John: It harkens back to, like a Barney Miller. We have an expectation. It’s the next version of what a police sitcom would be.
Dan: It’s still real cops in the real world, basically.
Doug: It is not Police Squad.
John: No.
Dan: No, it’s not.
John: Great. Let’s move from here and talk about, this is spoof genres, but I want to talk about other genres that used to be valid genres that we just don’t see anymore. We touched a bit on this on episode 400, but it’s been a minute. The reason I’m bringing it up is I feel like sometimes the audience forgets, like with spoof, that it’s even a thing and they forget how to watch them and they forget, they don’t seek them out. In the cases where we’ve been able to make them, I think we don’t even put them in the context of everything that came before them.
What would be like a melodrama? We used to make like Now Voyager or big Douglas Sirk things. They used to be giant programmers.
Dan: Got our Baldoni and Blake Lively.
John: That’s what I’m saying. A counter example is like It Ends With Us was a melodrama in a way that was incredibly successful. Yet no one who saw that movie put it in the context of those movies that came before it.
Dan: No, the vertical stories–
John: I think those are the melodramas now.
Dan: Yes, exactly. I think there’s a truth to a lot of these genres that are undeniable. They went away for whatever market reasons, but people are drawn to this swath of genres forever. I think that people are interested in types of stories. If something hasn’t been around for a while, there’s a good reason to believe that it absolutely is still relevant.
John: I know, it feels like, “Oh, it’s a brand new thing,” but like, it really isn’t. It’s just pulling off of that tradition.
Other examples of melodramas would be Marriage Story, but was it more of a comedy? It still feels like fundamentally a comedy. Spencer, the Diana movie, it plays as a melodrama. Tar, kind of, but it’s just such a bizarre, weird, extravagant thing.
Dan: I don’t know. I wouldn’t put Tar into–
Doug: I don’t know. It feels like such an arthouse, auteur-driven. I don’t know. It’s definitely big in a way that you don’t see a lot–
Dan: I guess to start the conversation the way we started the spoof conversation, like, what does melodrama even mean? How is it different than drama?
John: I think it’s heightened emotions around a domestic issue, around a domestic relationship. I think that’s where it comes down to. It’s a family, it’s a man and a woman, and it’s a soap opera, but a soap opera told in a smaller space.
Dan: We have to go to sex melodramas, the sexy movies.
John: I want to talk about sexual thrillers.
Doug: There was like sexual thrillers, sexual noir, Florida sexual noir.
Dan: Florida sexual noir is its own genre.
Doug: Florida noir is a whole genre.
John: We had Body Heat, we had Jagged Edge, we had Fatal Attraction.
Dan: No, there’s a whole podcast about this.
Doug: Yes. Great.
John: We talked about this and I think when Rachel was on. We also talked about sort of like, we just don’t put sex in movies anymore.
Dan: Did you listen to the You Must Remember This season about this?
John: Oh, that’s right. Karina had a whole–
Dan: It’s spectacular. She analyzes the whole 25-year rise and fall of this whole genre.
John: We’re going to send everyone to Karina Longworth’s podcast about this because I totally forgot about that.
Dan: Amazing. Because again, she talks about how it starts as this very artistic endeavor, where it’s really experimental and there’s simultaneously a whole generation of experimental filmmakers who are like, “When and how will we actually merge pornography with art?”
John: I watched Altered States recently. I was like surprised how much sex and nudity there is. It’s not even a sexy thriller. It’s just like there’s just sex.
Doug: Yes, it’s just what happened, and now it doesn’t. Now we’ll see all kinds of grotesque violence.
Dan: I know.
Doug: Then if you see one sex scene, you’re like, “Did they have to do that?”
John: I think Challengers feel so shocking because, like, oh, they have sex.
Doug: That was– Yes.
John: Yes. It’s PG-13 by comparison.
Doug: I just watched Dead Ringers the other night, which is a totally different thing. Also, it’s like that would be rated X at this point if you put out Dead Ringers for sure.
John: Traditional Westerns. High Noons and Shanes, things that were historically Westerns. Now if we make Westerns, they–
Dan: They’re Star Wars.
John: They’re Star Wars or they’re revisionist Westerns. They’re really Western, but it’s not really Western. It’s the other way around. Power of the Dog is, it’s a Western. It’s set in the West, but it’s not doing Western things.
Dan: Western to me is one of those questions where, like, what is it other than an aesthetic? Is there some more elemental part of what makes that a universal story or an evergreen story that people were so obsessed with it for so long that is still a story that we’d be telling today?
Doug: Look, I’m obsessed with the Westerns. I’ve only been reading Westerns this year. I’m about to finish Lonesome Dove and I’m just like in love with it. I feel like there’s a lone character aspect of like just writing alone and more morally ambiguous that I’m always excited about when I get to see in movies now. It’s far less–
John: A man alone on the frontier. There’s a bunch of things that–
Doug: I think it’s a reason. Besides, Quentin Tarantino is very similar, but he’s making his version of Sergio Leone films. They’re so exciting for those reasons.
John: Sword-and-sandal epics. We used to make them all the time. We know it’s Ben-Hur and Spartacus, but we used to do that. There’s hundreds of them.
Dan: I love the last Gladiator. I had a great time watching that. I thought that was great. I absolutely would watch dozens of those. You know what’s very popular is Jesus stuff.
John: Oh, yes. It’s doing great.
Dan: The Jesus guy, this guy, Jesus, he’s got a real–
Doug: [crosstalk] Jesus show on like Fox International. Some channel that I’ve never heard of is like, “Martin Scorsese presents Jesus, the early years.”
Dan: More people are watching that than anybody is watching anything on HBO.
Doug: For sure. There was the architect movie, the Adrian Brody movie.
John: Oh, yes. Sure.
Doug: That did feel big to me in a way that was amazing that they did it for that amount. It was sprawling in a way that–
John: The sword and sandals turn like the– and the Cleopatra’s. We used to do that kind of thing a lot. Maybe like, some of our superhero movies are doing.
Dan: Would you call Aladdin a sword-and-sandal movie?
John: It’s the sword-and-sandal movie. Yes. A little bit of that. The residuals would say [crosstalk]
Doug: I think about epics like-
John: It’s big scale.
Doug: -big large-scale movies that [crosstalk] that cover large periods of time in a way that just feel big.
John: Big adult drama. English Patient, Out of Africa. Even though it’s going to be a much cheaper, it did feel like part of that universe.
Dan: Man, those are the those are the best.
John: They were great. I loved them.
Dan: That’s, to me, the version of public domain IP that is so valuable of just like these are these are the most recognizable people in history. How are they not interesting?
John: Going back to melodramas or sort of adult dramas, I guess like Celine Song’s, both of her movies feel like that, too. Past Lives or Materialists.
Dan: That’s interesting. Where does it now blend into rom-com or–
John: Yes, exactly. Melodrama is like rom-com, but not like emphasizing the jokes.
Dan: I guess so. Then now we’re back to the indie comedy of it all, which is like it’s a comedy because I said it’s a comedy, but I didn’t laugh once in an hour and a half.
John: On this podcast for the last 12 years, we’ve talked about, oh, the rom-com. The success of Anyone But You broke ground for more big-screen stuff. My hope being is that you can break that ground for spoofs.
Dan: We’re bringing it back, baby.
John: Mid-budget adventure films. We used to make Romancing the Stone, a thing that didn’t have to be like epic titanically.
Dan: This is a depressing podcast, John. [laughter]
Doug: Or IP-driven. Something.
John: The exception of like The Lost City was delightful and funny and did well, but it didn’t open up space for those movies.
Dan: I remember a moment where people were like, people want more movies like that, but it didn’t…
Doug: How much of it is about the finances and how the system being broken, that the bar is so high for what you have to pass to make it worth putting in theater or something, to give a big theatrical release. It feels like so many things just don’t pass the bar. A movie making $110 million that is not IP-based, but they put $100 million into it. That’s not a huge hit anymore. How much does that cost?
John: Everyone’s like, “Oh, we can’t make a musical,” and then like Wicked makes a gazillion dollars. Meanwhile, I was doing the Grease prequel, which felt like obvious, and no one would gamble on the prequel to Grease.
Dan: Yes, it seems like that’s IP.
John: It was the assumption like, we cannot release a studio musical because West Side Story didn’t work, because In the Heights didn’t work.
Dan: I thought then, those were good movies, too.
Doug: They were good movies, too, but they didn’t. [crosstalk] The tags were too high on them, I guess.
John: Yes, and so that becomes the challenge.
Dan: Yes, this is all a budget problem. Movies have gotten so expensive to make and to promote.
Doug: Everyone has this vertical integration of just like, we can put it on our streamer, and it’s cheaper, and it will keep the dollars rolling in. What is the point of doubling our budget and promoting this thing? It’s just–
John: I do wonder whether, like, oh, we could put it on our streamer. There’s some lessons to be learned in terms of like Lilo and Stitch. The live-action Lilo and Stitch was made for the streamer and then made a gazillion dollars in theaters, which is great.
Doug: Will still destroy on Disney+.
John: Yes, 100%.
Doug: Didn’t take away from it all. If anything, it boosts Disney+.
John: Moana 2 was also made for streaming.
Dan: They’re just like, why would we waste it on streaming when we could make a billion dollars?
Doug: It was supposed to be a TV show, too, first of all.
John: That’s what it was, yes. I was looking at my Aladdin participation statement recently, and so–
Dan: Let’s talk about numbers.
Doug: I would love to open up that WGA. Look at those.
John: The residuals are good. I post the residuals for that frequently because it’s a really good comparison between that and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because they’re both big four-quadrant family movies that made about the same amount in the Box Office. The residuals on Aladdin are lower, but they’re not dramatically lower. The categories in which it makes the money are a lot different because it’s not about DVD sales. It’s about streaming and other things.
The gains that the Guild has made over the last couple of negotiations in terms of new media residuals, they’re making up the difference in a very comparable movie, which is great. The participation statement I get for Aladdin is different because they have net points that will never actually pay off. You look at the theatrical money that Aladdin’s brought in, those are what’s considered film rentals. This is a little bit wonky, but basically, when you see Box Office, that is the money that’s going into the theaters.
Rentals is what actually comes back to the studio. Rentals for domestic theatrical distribution and international theatrical distribution are still a huge number on a movie like that. While you talk about, oh, all the ancillary money is great, the hundreds of millions of dollars you bring in that initial launch is great.
Dan: Oh my God. It’s enormous.
John: To give that up for streaming is so–
Dan: No writers are arguing with you.
Doug: Maverick was so huge for that reason, too. I think it proved that people will come to Paramount Plus, who could be more coming to it. No, we’re with you. I’m still shocked to this day. We’re still here. Until Naked Gun is in the theater on August 1st and I see it there, I still won’t believe it’s going to be in the theaters. I was like, they can pull it at any time. They can just decide that they’re going to be like–
Dan: Today was the day that CBS settled with Donald Trump.
John: As we’re recording this.
Doug: How did we not lead with that? Come on, the news.
John: The news.
Doug: One of the greatest screenwriters of all time, Donald Trump.
Dan: Yes, he was a Broadway producer briefly. [crosstalk]
Doug: [laughs] The Producers is about him.
Dan: I know. Anyway, there were multiple moments where we were just horrified that somehow Donald Trump was going to destroy the movie.
John: Just stop the release of this thing.
Dan: We were afraid–
Doug: Or just the regular wheels in motion of Hollywood being like, “You know that? We’re not going to put that much money into–“
Dan: Again, if Donald Trump stopped the merger, then suddenly Paramount’s entire business model falls apart, and there’s no guarantees anymore. You just don’t know. It’s such a scary world to live in.
John: I want to acknowledge how dumb it is that we’re in a world where the president decided to do something could have an impact not just on the quality of the planet, but also just really mundane, anodyne business that we’re working in. It’s so dumb.
Doug: Could affect whether or not I can send my daughter to college if it goes into theater.
Dan: Yes, she’s not going to college if this movie doesn’t open.
Doug: If this just goes right to Paramount+ she’s staying home.
John: Obviously, all in context are like many bigger problems in the world. It’s just it’s absurd that such small petty things are happening.
All right, let’s get to some listener questions. We have one here from Frank.
Drew: I have a movie coming out this fall in theaters, hooray. Not a huge release, but 4 to 500 screens, and it’s my first produced work. Congratulations, Frank.
Doug: Ooh, congrats.
Drew: Should I hire a publicist? What could or should I expect from that publicist? Part of me feels like the publicist is just for my ego, and I’m basically paying to go on a few podcasts, but is there more to that I’m not aware of? Obviously, I want to be a smart caretaker of my career, so maybe there’s no reason not to hire one. You never know what could come of it, that sort of thing.
Dan: John, I’m going to let you start. We’re more in the listener’s category than–
Doug: This is our second studio release.
John: You have a movie coming out in two months. Do you have a publicist? Did you hire a publicist?
Dan: Yes, we did.
John: Your own publicist.
Dan: Daryl Borquez, Apex Talent. Perhaps the listener would like to get in touch.
John: Talk to us about the decision to do this on this movie.
Doug: Yes.
John: What is this publicist doing for you individually?
Doug: We had multiple conversations with our reps about this, with other writers, with writers’ directors, with actors. I think what we found, and you can correct me, Dan, if I’m wrong, but as a writer of a film, we felt and we’ve seen that writers can be pushed to the side a bit when it comes to releases. Actors first, actors and actresses, stars, directors right up there, and then–
Dan: The caterer-
Doug: Yes.
Dan: -and the grip.
Doug: The writers get the dregs. Our fear was we wouldn’t even get the dregs of the runoff if we didn’t have a publicist reaching out to Paramount or Disney and saying, “Hey, Dan and Doug would like to have some interviews and be on the red carpet and answer questions.” That it’s very easy to be forgotten as a writer, especially if you’re not one of the few really famous writers. Even then, that might have been your experience. Our idea was that it’s like, this is our moment. I think he’s right to say that you do get out there. I think it does matter and it is helpful to be in articles, be on Deadline or be in Variety.
It makes the town know your name a little bit more. It does feel good. It’s definitely an ego thing. My fear would be without it is that we would be just hustling ourselves to try to get all these things.
Dan: John, you’re nice enough to put us on your podcast regardless.
Doug: It would probably stop at John-
Dan: Yes.
Doug: -and coming on and the day of the release. We did it for Rescue Rangers and we had a full press day.
Dan: This was such a deep in COVID movie that was pretty great because we were like, we really were not going to go anywhere per se.
Doug: We just did a Zoom day of 10 to 15 interviews and that stuff is out there and it felt like it got our names out there. That felt like money well spent.
John: Let’s talk about the money. My assumption is this is based on, I haven’t brought on a publicist for a couple of years, but it’s a couple thousand a month and you do it for the month.
Doug: We’re doing it for two months.
Dan: We’re doing it two months.
John: Two months is what it is.
Dan: Yes, the two month lead up and then once the movie comes out, then a little bit more depending.
Doug: You’ve got to go feel it out.
John: It’s different if you’re in like the awards season contention and like, I love you guys, but you don’t need to worry about that.
Doug: How dare you?
John: For things where I did need to do that, like for Big Fish, it was incredibly valuable having a person on my team who’s just helping to navigate all this stuff. Honestly, the studio publicists weren’t upset that Bibi was around. They’re like, “Oh my God, there’s a person who can coordinate and wrangle all that stuff it’s really good.”
Doug: One less thing for them to do.
John: Absolutely, so it’s good.
Dan: I think, again, it’s an expense for sure. I just don’t think it’s an expense you’ll regret. Don’t hold onto them forever because then you’ll feel crazy.
Doug: I also think get someone who, and this was something that our agent said, and they’re right, and it’s why we like Darryl, is that Darryl was actually excited about Rescue Rangers and excited about Naked Gun. I think it goes with like any other relationship. Do they want to be in the relationship or are they just like, they’re going to do this, they’re collecting a check, it is a business, but are they excited about the project? Do they believe that they can do things? Ask before you sign. What do you anticipate being able to get me on this? What’s realistic for a first-time writer, director?
It was just a writer, I believe, he didn’t direct. Yes, what is realistic for me? Then you can like say, “Is that worth it?” They’ll say, “Maybe we’ll get you like four or five podcasts and I think I can get you a Variety article.” You can be like, “I think that’s worth it.”
John: Yes, your agent and your manager will have recommendations for this situation. There are people who are a little bit more cued into big studio releases versus Sundance, which is its own specific beast. It’d be great if you’re going to a festival, it’s good if you have somebody who does that, but also they can’t be repping 10 different clients there or else it’s just not going to work. You have to recognize.
Dan: I would say that festival space is probably even more valuable, to be totally honest, because that’s more of a wild west and what you get out of it is really an unknown.
John: You don’t know how to do it and you need somebody who knows how.
Doug: You can get really swallowed up in a festival if you don’t have the right person guiding you, leading the way.
Dan: Yes, the studio system is this giant behemoth that you’re just trying to ride the coattails on.
Doug: Festivals are really star-driven. If you’re there and you’re the writer, no one is trying to get you into the gifting suite.
John: Yes. Next question from Nicole.
Drew: “Having struggled through many scripts, I found my biggest problem is creating a plot that’s way too complicated and then not knowing how to cut through the Gordian Knot I created in a rewrite. I find myself bogged down in logic questions whose answers only add more complications and any fix that makes substantial changes to the script makes me worried I’m veering too far from what the actual story is. I’d love any tips for writers like me.”
John: Yes, we’ve all been there. It’s often a second draft problem. Second drafts are generally worse than the first drafts because they fix the problems of the first draft but add a whole bunch of new complications and garbage too. My general advice, Nicole, is you have to look at taking away the questions, taking away the things that are gunking stuff up and so rather than try to answer questions that come up, just make sure that the audience and the reader is never asking the question. That it’s streamlined in a way that people aren’t getting hung up on a thing because it was just never there.
Dan: I find that this question is, the best way that I answer this question is thinking about the edit. Every time you’re in the edit, you’re consistently looking to cut, to slim, to move faster.
John: When you’re looking at the edit of the actual finished film, yes.
Dan: Of the actual finished film. Yes.
Doug: Trying to picture it in your mind’s eye though.
Dan: Try to picture sitting in that edit, editing the movie and being able to ask yourself, is this a thing that I’m going to want to sit in?
You regularly start realizing, this is repetitive. Man, the amount of times that you have repeated things that the audience knows or basically knows and if you just let them figure out the last 10%, 20% of their information, they’d be fine. That you don’t need to handle them at every turn. You don’t need to repeat the information, reiterate it as many times.
I find that the exercise of imagining being in the edit is the thing how I always get through that problem of what’s not really necessary. What am I going to feel burdened by when I’m sitting there? I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe we have to like get through this scene so that we can get to the things that are actually fun.”
Doug: Yes, I think that’s great. I think also the over-explanation usually does happen in the second draft when you’re getting notes from studios and stuff because they really want to hear it so sometimes you have to put it in there just to take it out later.
Dan: I always feel like I want the script and then I want the explainer side thing that’s for the reader who wants to be really handheld where it’s like, this is what the movie’s going to be. If you’re wondering what they’re thinking when they have that concerned look, it’s this two pages of backstory.
John: Yes, little footnotes, yes.
Doug: I would also just try to go back to the emotional arc too, which being like, that’s what we care about in movies. We care about the human stories, I think. What are we following there? Then what parts of the plot are you, like Dan said, going to be, I don’t really need to know this.
A lot of times I think always helps to just go back and watch the movies you love and see how in so many ways, some of the best movies are just very clean and bare bones and you’re just feeling emotions. I’ve been going on Script Slug a lot now too and reading scripts of movies that I love after seeing them, and I find that to be incredibly helpful to just to see ways people are just, how thin certain things are in really great ways and being like, this is one sentence.
I’m reading The Departed right now. 15, 20 pages every day, I’m just like looking at it and it’s wonderful. It’s wonderful, but there’s very little handholding in it and I’m shocked by it. It’s such a joy to read because I’m like, “Yes, I know what’s happening here. I understand.” I think giving your reader some benefit of the doubt, it can be helpful.
Dan: I always find that projects confidence in the writing-
Doug: Agreed.
Dan: -that is more enticing anyway and the writer is writing in a way that is making me lean in a little more and
ask questions, think about it, as opposed to, there’s nothing less enjoyable on the page than long blocks of contemporary text.
Doug: Blocks of scene direction. You want to fly, and it doesn’t mean people don’t like reading, it just, but you want to feel, there’s something that actually that Akiva talked a lot about too when we were writing. It’s like, when you start reading this film, and we did it for Rescue Rangers and for this, and it might not be for everything. He’s like, “When is the moment where you feel like, I’m in good hands, and I’m watching a movie, I’m in a movie?” It’s amazing once he pointed that out there, because we would then read a draft and be like, “Yes, it’s not until page 13 where I feel like I’m in the movie.” What are we doing wrong?
John: How to reset it?
Doug: Where are the roadblocks, what are the things, where are the traffic jams that are getting in the way of this feeling like, I’m in. I’m in this movie.
John: Over the weekend, I was talking to a friend who’s in the edit room on a movie, and he’s saying, “Oh, but the producers want to cut this scene,” and he was describing what happens in the scene. He’s like, “I guess if we cut it, the audience can figure out that this and this, and they wouldn’t know about this until later on, but does it matter?” Like, you have to cut that scene. I’m just like, “I’m sorry to agree with your producers, but —
Dan: I’m literally in my bed right now, and I’m curled up in a ball.
John: Yes, because it’s just like, if that scene could be cut, you have to cut that scene.
Doug: If it can’t be cut, and it’s not important, you got to go cut it. Just, and also, and it’s what’s really hard, is just trust that those words and those ideas will come back.
John: Yes.
Doug: I think that’s also something that people get caught in, is being like, “But I love this scene, but I love this one detail of the scene.” The thing I noticed about writing over the years is that things never die. The scene that you’re cutting in this movie that just is not working for whatever reason that you love will find its way into another screenplay, television show, a pitch. They’re there, they’re not dead. They’re very much alive.
John: All right, let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is, a preview of something that’s hopefully coming, but it’s also a good cautionary tale of why headlines can be misleading. BBC Science Foundation had this headline this week, Breakthrough Cholesterol Treatment Can Cut Cholesterol Levels by 69% After One dose. That seems great, because I take statins for high cholesterol, my whole family does. In this article, it says, high levels of LDL cholesterol increase the risk of this buildup, which is why millions of people, over 40 million in the US, take daily medications like statins to keep their cholesterol levels under control.
They’re like, “Well, that’s going to be great. That’ll be a huge breakthrough.” I’m excited for that. Then I found a different article about the same thing, and it’s actually, this drug is targeting something very specific that only certain people are having. Lipoprotein A is a type of cholesterol that lurks in the body, undetected by routine tests, and undeterred by existing drugs, diet, or exercise. There are people who have familial conditions where it’s really bad. This could be a great thing for them, but it’s not necessarily going to affect.
Dan: Not a medical revolution.
John: Yes, the three of us around the table here, it may not actually be the thing that does this. It’s both good news, but it’s also like, oh, it’s just a bad headline.
Dan: This is more of a one cautionary thing.
John: Yes, a one cautionary thing. It’s still cool that this thing exists, but it may not actually–
Doug: Consult your doctor and find out, what elaborate testing do you need to do to find out if you’re a candidate for this?
John: I think we’re going to quickly reach the edge of my knowledge and then people are going to write in. Basically, when we get our normal cholesterol tests, they’re testing for LDL, HDL, total cholesterol, but there’s actually a different thing, ApoA and ApoB, that they probably should be testing for, which are the actual things that tend to cause the clumping and the problems of why bad cholesterol is bad. This targets one of them in a very specific way.
Dan: I hope that you live a long and healthy life.
John: I hope we all live long and healthy lives, yes. I feel like, it seems like most people I know are on statins because–
Dan: Are you on a statin, Doug?
Doug: I’m on a statin and I give myself a shot every two weeks of something called Repatha, which is because heart disease runs in my family and it’s my biggest fear. It’s having a heart attack. Yes. There’s a lot of especially health, real health fanatics who are against statins and have–
John: And there are side effects of some people have muscle loss and things like that but–
Dan: Doug’s fucking strong.
Doug: Wait till you hear my one.
John: I’ve actually had twice the scans where they pump in the radioactive stuff so they can just see where the plaques are. It’s like, there are plaques, but they haven’t actually grown very much in 15 years, which is great news.
Doug: I think statins are saving lives in that way. I don’t think that’s undeniable. Maybe there’s some side effects. You’re, can I-
John: No, yes, Doug, I’ll cue you up.
Doug: -because I was worried about bringing this one in anyway, because it feels so lowbrow and silly. Now it feels even, it is on the opposite spectrum.
John: Ooh, I can’t wait.
Doug: I am very fearful of heart attacks and I’m also very vain. This last year I’ve been going to the gym consistently and trying to eat right and change my relationship with food. It’s started to happen slowly and I’ve approached it differently and I’ve never been this consistent. I would never promote Instagram and social media in a way because I do think it’s terrible. However, the algorithm knows that I’m doing this and I’ve been fed a lot of protein, what I call protein bros. Who are just like, “You got to eat like this. You can have a burger, but have my burger.”
John: You’re supposed to be eating a gram of protein per–
Doug: Per pound, they said.
John: Which is just so much–
Doug: I started tracking my macros, but I will say this. I found people on Instagram who are showing me recipes that I am making. I’m not just scrolling and I love it.
John: That’s great.
Doug: I found someone named Calvin Kang. He’s one of them. He’s a Korean American who has amazing high protein, lower fat Korean dishes. He has all kinds of dishes, but he has Korean chicken and he has kimchi, pancakes, and all this stuff that is delicious. I would just say, if you’re getting served all these things, you don’t have to go to Calvin’s page, but you’re looking at this all night, might as well get something out of it. This is the one positive thing that’s come out of Instagram for me, that and kids drumming videos. I love it. I’m starting to eat food that I’m like, “This tastes good.” It’s scratching the itch of eating crap. That’s what I’m doing.
John: That’s awesome. The Instagram algorithm has started feeding me just this week, a guy who– multiple people, but one guy in particular who will go through men’s Tinder and Hinge profiles like, “This is why you’re not matching.” Basically, just go out and talk to their photos like, “This one, you look like a psycho killer. This one, this one, this is your mom’s bathroom.”
Dan: I love this.
John: It’s just, it’s so savage, but it’s so necessary.
Dan: Oh, I love that. There’s a feature on your Instagram that lets you reset your algorithms back to zero. I was like, oh, my thing is just, I don’t even know what it is. I got to reset. I got to go back to square one. The problem is that the first thing you click on, Instagram is like, you fucking love this thing. I made the terrible mistake to click on a pimple popping video. Truly within two weeks, I was getting Third World, like abscess videos. I was getting a lot of cleft palate stuff. It just keeps jamming that thing deeper and deeper.
Doug: Now you’re wishing you had that old algorithm.
Dan: I know. I was like,
DougI miss the days of those burgers getting served to you-
Dan: I know. I know.
Doug: -and dogs that are friends with bears. That’s really.
John: Mine is rescue dogs in shirtless men. That’s what I–
Dan: That’s pretty much you. I love it.
Doug: Having a non-toxic like algorithm is wonderful. My algorithm next to my wife’s, she’s looking at awful things that make her upset. I’m watching protein bros, kids drumming.
John: Yes.
Doug: Maybe like nice, like golf courses maybe sometimes and it’s wonderful.
John: That’s great. Dan, what you got?
Dan: This is my one cool thing. I’m such a curmudgeon. I’m always like looking to really yuck people’s yum. Obviously, a couple of years ago, there was this big report about aliens came out from the government. I’m a real skeptic son of a bitch. The government was basically saying aliens are maybe real. Everyone was like, “What are we doing? Let’s talk about aliens.”
Basically, the Wall Street Journal just did a long deep dive into that report and what was actually going on beneath it, which is that most of these UFO stories are actual disinformation from the military itself who are trying to actively get our enemies to think it’s aliens and not our own weaponry.
My favorite detail within this story though, which is absolutely something that could be on one of How’s This a Movie segment for your show, is that for 50 years, there has been a hazing prank that they have done to new recruits in the CIA where they will bring someone into a secret room and they will give them pictures of UFOs, doctored fake pictures of UFOs, and basically say, “If you tell anyone about this, we’ll make you–“
John: Incredible.
Dan: There’s this generation of military and CIA operatives that have basically been hazed to think that this is real. There’s an immeasurable amount of veterans who have actively been tricked to not talk about it, but of course, some have talked about it. When you see these people, unfortunately on documentaries or all this stuff, they’ve been gas lit into these things.
Doug: It’s very real to them.
Dan: Yes. Anyway, aliens are still not real. I’m sorry.
John: Oh, I’m sorry.
Dan: Yes, I’m sorry to everyone.
Doug: I like you more when you were watching Pimple Popper movies.
John: We were talking about, you’re reading a bunch of scripts. Doug, Drew, what do you have in Weekend Read? Because you’ve been putting up a new collection.
Drew: Yes, we do. I’m sure you guys use Weekend Read all the time.
Dan: I do, and I have complaint.
John: All right. Tell us your complaint.
Doug: Here’s the curmudgeon.
Dan: There you go. I love the app. Use it all the time. Doesn’t work in my car. Can’t get it to work.
Drew: Sorry. I’m so sorry. This week, we’re doing sports comedies. We have A League of Their Own, Bull Durham, Caddyshack, Cool Runnings, Dodgeball, Glow, I, Tonya, Talladega Nights, The Sandlot, Tim Cup, and The Bad News Bears.
Dan: Yes. I love this. Doug and I wrote the reboot of Rookie of the Year that’s currently collecting dust in between the cracks of the Disney and Fox merger.
John: I was going to say, there aren’t a lot of recent ones in that list, and it’s a genre we’re not doing much.
Dan: Yes. There’s some boxing movies coming out now.
Drew: Oh, yes.
Doug: That’s comedy?
Dan: No, comedy–
Doug: I feel like Jay Baruchel made a hockey movie called Goon that people really liked. It just sticks out to me because I was like, “Oh, it’s a sports comedy.” That could be five years at this point.
Drew: I think it’s 10 years at this point.
Doug: Oh, my gosh.
Drew: Yes.
Doug: What is time?
John: What is time?
Dan: Sports movies, sports comedies are the genre that I most, I like sports movies more than I like sports. I think they’re the fucking best.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes. Have you looked at the videos on our YouTube now? That is something you actually will enjoy.
Doug: Oh, are we being recorded right now?
John: You’ll find t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about. In the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You also get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Gen Z and how they haven’t seen these movies. People who are premium subscribers can go back and listen to your previous episode.
Dan: Great. Please do.
John: Several episodes where your wife, Rachel Bloom, has joined us here.
Dan: Of course, my fake godmother, Aline Brosh McKenna.
John: Yes. Aline Brosh McKenna, an icon of the very start of Scriptnotes. Doug and Dan, thank you so much for joining us.
Doug: Thank you for having us.
Dan: Thank you.
John: Take care.
[Bonus Segment]
John: I was Googling this and I came across a series of articles that were talking about a study, but I can’t find the actual study. It was a press release that a bunch of British newspapers ran. Basically saying that Gen Z hasn’t seen these movies and maybe that’s a crisis. The first one on this list was Airplane, which I want to talk to you about. It’s an iconic spoof movie. I remember showing it to our daughter and she’s like, it was so funny. It’s also just so weird for a kid who has never experienced anything like it.
Dan: It’s funny because I feel like I’ve watched some TikTok channels now that probably unintentionally take this aesthetic of weird, just sort of weird, nonsensical, non sequitur comedy that is very much of a piece with the deep silliness of those old Zucker Brothers movies. It’s really talking about the cartoons that they all grew up on that, I think about Adventure Time and all the Adult Swim stuff are so weird. I do think that they are more primed for this than we give them credit for.
John: Yes. Again, they haven’t seen it in live action. There’s things that are new to them. The top 10 things that were listed on this study, Airplane, Vertigo, Night of the Hunter. Good but also, I don’t think it’s iconic. If you haven’t seen it, it’s hard to understand things. Casino is a really good movie.
Doug: Oh my gosh. Gen Z hasn’t seen?
John: Gen Z hasn’t seen Casino, Citizen Kane, Casablanca.
Dan: Wait.
John: A lot of people haven’t seen Casablanca.
Doug: I’m sorry, but this is more than The Godfather or more than–
Dan: There are other greats that they have seen?
John To whatever degree we can trust in this study, they’d be more familiar with The Godfather, but they wouldn’t have seen Casino. They wouldn’t have seen Moulin Rouge, which feels like an important– You certainly need to understand that aesthetic.
Dan: That’s very Y2K. I feel like that’s something that would be really in vogue right now, actually.
John: Blues Brothers, also on the list. I haven’t come back to watch Blues Brothers.
Dan: I have. I’ll be honest. That whole era of the ‘70s, ‘80s, coke-fueled, Belushi, Chase, Aykroyd.
Doug: It’s not my favorite either.
Dan: It doesn’t hold up honestly, a lot of it. Some of those are really great moments, but there’s a lot of stuff that feels very masturbatory.
John: Gone with the Wind. Sure. Do you need it?
Dan: I also think that’s a movie that probably lost a lot of its ability to break through because it’s just so fucking racist.
Doug: Yes.
Dan: You get a lot of credit on being on AFI 100, and it’s one of the greats. It is an impressive piece of cinema.
Doug: How do you find, do you need to watch this or not? It’s also–
John: Craig and I, in bonus segment from last week, Craig and I were also talking about this but in terms of the New York Times 100.
Doug: Yes, seen that everywhere.
John: That one is like, well, I feel like if you’re working in this industry, most of those movies you should probably see because they’re in the conversation all the time in ways that–
Dan: Gone with the Wind is not.
John: Gone with the Wind is not, Blues Brothers is not.
Dan: No, it’s not. It’s, again, interesting how would you define what that genre even is and how is it replicable today?
Doug: Why is it important? Again, if you’re in the industry, that’s a different conversation. To me, Casino, which is one of my favorite movies, if these Gen Z has seen Goodfellas, then they’ve seen the Scorsese aesthetic, they’ve seen the Stones, they’ve seen the scene where the Stones are playing and De Niro and Pesci are doing– before they became characters themselves, then it’s okay. You don’t have to see Casino.
John: That’s my argument for Airplane or one of the other great spoof movies. I think it’s important to see it just so you actually have a sense of what that is as a thing. If you didn’t see all of them–
Doug: Or Naked Gun, I think.
John: Or Naked Gun. Yes. Top Secret, I also love.
Dan: I love Top Secret. We watch that a lot.
Doug: Top Secret is really cool. Not as accessible to people, I feel.
Dan: No, because also they’re a little more-
Doug: It’s a little experimental.
Dan: It’s more experimental, which is really cool, but it’s also more blanketing different genres. It is less-
Doug: Focused on-
Dan: -fidelity to a genre. They hop around genres more in that. It breaks some of the rules that I think we are all talking about.
Dan: What are the other movies? Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.
John: The Shining.
Doug: Ooh, yes.
John: I feel like The Shining is a really important one. It seems like really high elevated horror. I don’t think you really get the origin of Ari Aster or some of the other really high end horror directors unless you’ve seen The Shining and what that can do.
Dan: The point of this is that we don’t like Gen Z.
John: We don’t like Gen Z. Here’s the thing–
Doug: They’re just big dum dums.
John: Yes.
Dan: The whole era of people.
John: Going back to what we talked about in terms of spoof, it’s like if you’re not aware of this genre of movies, if you have no exposure to it at all, it’s very hard for you to get to your first one. It’s like, yes. If they’re not seeing it and they’re the people making the next batch of movies, those whole genres could go away or the number gets reincorporated into the culture.
Doug: Yes.
John: ET. It’s like-
Dan: Really?
John: Yes.
Dan: That’s shocking to me.
John: My daughter never saw ET. Has your kid seen ET yet?
Dan: No. It’s too scary for her. She’s only five.
John: All right. She’s little. Has she seen The Sixth Sense?
Dan: Yes. Of course.
John: That’s an important one. Everyone has to see The Sixth Sense.
Doug: Yes. Totally. You want Hayley Joel Osment’s career, kid. Yes.
Dan: She did not see The Twist coming. She’s a dum-dum too.
Doug: A big old dum-dum.
John: I don’t know. I think there’s, to me, there’s a good argument to be made for making the list of here are iconic things in each of these little genres, and just so you have a sense of what that actually is. Even if you’re not sort of going into film and television, a sense of what the broad culture is, the same way that you have as you’re reading books and going through the genres of reading stuff in school, you just need a sense of what is out there, because otherwise there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s cut off to you. If you really respond to Airplane, and then you’re just like, “I love this” or “Here are all the things that are like this,” but until you have that one that lets that it exists.
Doug: I think that’s the biggest thing, is that if you love movies, then it just makes movies richer. This will be the second time I brought this up, but I love Tarantino. I had never seen any Sergio Leone. Once I started watching it, I was like, “Oh, this is wonderful.” I was like, “Oh, that shot is just straight up from Django.” That’s what he took from Django, and he’s made that. It makes me enjoy his movies more, and it opened up my world to Westerns in a way that it hadn’t been.
It was just a great discovery, and a language in films that I didn’t know before. I just think it’s like, I’m not going to tell a bunch of kids to watch these things, it’s just important, but if you love movies, it’s going to make you love them even more, and be like, “Oh, that’s where that came from.” Also, it’s really cool to discover, “Oh, that’s what makes Jack–“ I think about The Shining, I’m like, if you haven’t seen that, what do you know Jack Nicklaus from, and if it’s just The Departed-
John: From golfing.
Doug: Yes, Jack Nicklaus, what a performer on the 18th green, no, but Jack Nicholson, I’m sorry, then what do you know him from, and then you’re like, “Oh, I get it.” I remember seeing Deer Hunter for the first time, and being like, that’s Christopher Walken? This is not the Christopher Walken I know now with the SNL sketches and his voice, and this is before the parody.
John: Yes, I definitely want to come to the point where it’s not just like, “Oh, as a Gen X-er, these are things I loved as a kid, so therefore you should love them.” That’s useless for everybody. There’s some way to be, not prescriptive, but to invite people into these different phases.
Doug: Oh, you like that, you might like this. It’s the same thing about music, too, you don’t want to be like, “Oh, you got to go listen to this music, because you’re a dum-dum if you don’t listen to it.” It’s like, “Oh, you like this? You should listen to this.”
Dan: Yes, if you like Haim, you’re going to like Fleetwood Mac.
Doug: Yes, exactly. You should listen to James Brown, because you’re listening to Bruno Mars right now, or whatever, check it out.
John: My husband will point out that, when I’ve referenced something that I liked, a band I liked in the ‘80s or ‘90s to my daughter, that’s like me, if my parents were recommending somebody that they liked in the ‘30s or ‘40s. Yes, it’s crazy how much time has actually happened.
Dan: It’s horrifying. It’s very scary.
John: We have this expectation like, “Oh, you should understand the history of rock music.” It’s just an extra 50 years between, and that means the stuff that–
Dan: I’m sure you feel this all the time, there’s stuff when you’re like, “Well, this is pretty new.” You’re like, “No, it’s not.”
Doug: It’s really not new at all.
John: No.
Doug: Very old. It’s so old.
John: I know. Everything is so old, and so are we.
Doug: Immediately, yes, that’s just what it is.
Dan: I’m dying.
John: Congrats again on the movie, boys.
Dan: Thank you.
Doug: Thank you for coming back on the podcast.
Dan: Yes, thanks for having us. This is the best.
Links:
- The Naked Gun in theaters August 1st!
- Dan Gregor and Doug Mand
- Doug and Dan’s last time on the show, Episode 548: Made for Streamers
- Bottoms and Dicks: The Musical
- Melodramas: Now, Voyager, It Ends with Us, Spencer
- Sexual thrillers: Body Heat, Jagged Edge, (Bonus: Altered States, Dead Ringers)
- You Must Remember Thins: Erotic 80s
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
- Adult Romantic Dramas: The English Patient, Out of Africa, Past Lives, Materialists
- Mid-Budget Adventure Films: Romancing the Stone, The Lost City
- John’s Aladdin residuals
- Breakthrough cholesterol treatment can cut levels by 69% after one dose by Hatty Willmoth for BBC Science Focus
- One dose of experimental drug nearly wipes out stealthy cholesterol in ‘remarkable’ trial by Erika Edwards for NBC News
- The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha for WSJ
- Calvin Kang on Ingstagram
- Weekend Read 2
- Top movies that Gen Z have never watched revealed – including Oscar-winning classics from The Sun UK
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Ryan Gerberding (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.