The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is episode 725 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, let’s play connections. What do tampons, millennials, ISIS, and collegiate squash have in common?
Craig: They all seemed obvious until you got to collegiate squash.
John: There’s always one stumper when it does throw in something that just knocks it all off. The answer is they are all topics in this week’s installment of How Would This be a Movie? Boy, howdy, do we have a range this week? We also have follow-up and listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about shiny plastic discs. I have shelves full of CDs and DVDs that I will never use again, but I’m not ready to give them up. I suspect I’m not alone. I want to talk through the decisions about our physical media and what we’re going to do with that.
First, we have another installment of This Week John Learned. Craig, this week John learned that skunk spray is yellow, thick, and incredibly sticky. That’s a thing that was different than what I expected. I had this image in my head that skunk spray was clear, and it was thin. First-hand experience, skunk spray is awful. It is a chemical weapon. It is a bear spray that comes from a small little creature.
Craig: Oh, you mean the spray that comes out of a skunk. I kept thinking about this bear spray, like the stuff you bring with you to spray to get rid of bears.
John: Yes. What I learned this week is that they’re much more similar than you would expect. My dog, Lambert, who you love, 10.30 PM on Monday night.
Craig: He got skunked.
John: Let him out in the backyard, and did not see that there was a small creature there that Lambert took out after I realized, oh my God, that’s a skunk. I didn’t know there even were skunks in LA. You don’t see skunks in LA.
Craig: We didn’t lock him out all the time.
John: Yelled at Lambert to stay away. Lambert got hit straight in the face by the skunk. It was awful. My little dog was– he obviously smelled terrible, but he was foaming at the mouth. He was in misery. We were trying to clean it off of him. We’re doing all the things. We’re doing the hydrogen peroxide and the baking soda, all these things. Rinsing his eyes. No damage to him?
Craig: No.
John: This smell is–
Craig: This smell is brutal. Cookie got skunked a few years ago. It’s like 20 baths later, you can almost not smell it anymore. It’s that powerful.
John: Yes. What was so surprising to me is that we got some of it off of him, and I just wrapped him in a towel and carried him upstairs to the bath. Just in carrying him through the house, the house smelled like skunk. He didn’t touch anything, and it still smelled like skunk.
Craig: Famously, you can smell when a skunk gets hit on the road. You can smell it from miles away.
John: It is crazy.
Craig: I believe the chemical you’re smelling is similar to the chemical that’s added to natural gas so that you can smell it if there’s a leak, but in much tinier, tinier– It is fascinating that skunks have, I think, a unique defense system. Why no other animals put that one together, just skunks?
John: Bless them for their ingenuity. Evolution did something really remarkable for them. It is crazy. I would also say that I had this image in my head that obviously I thought it was a thinner substance. What you see in terms of Pepe Le Pew, you see the stink lines. It’s not quite that. It’s more like it reminded me of the feeling after this most recent election, when there was this feeling of constant dread. It’s like a dread that is just around. It’s not like a high note, a sickly, sweet smell. It’s like melting plastic and existential dread.
Craig: To me, it’s like burning hair in hell. I also, weirdly, when I’m driving on the road, and I catch it, I like it.
John: In a distance, I like it.
Craig: Up front, God. Well, poor Lambert.
John: Poor Lambert. He’s recovering.
Craig: He’s going to go through a few baths. One day, it will end.
John: All right. We’ve got some follow-up. First off, with comps, which was one of our last episodes.
Drew Marquardt: Zach wrote, “In Episode 723, Craig said that he’d like to hear from younger listeners what newer comps they hear frequently. A recent title that I think deserves a mention is Get Out, which I hear constantly as shorthand for contained, politically smart genre.”
Craig: That makes total sense.
John: It makes absolute sense.
Craig: I’m angry about it because I hear it in my mind. I’m in the room now. They’re like, “Okay, what we’re looking for is Get Out, but with Tom Cruise action.” The problem with these things is they really just don’t belong together most of the time. The thing about Get Out is it’s not shorthand for contained, politically smart genre. It’s Get Out. It’s a very specific film with a very specific story-
John: I get it.
Craig: -but I completely see how they would use this one as a comp. Yes.
John: Absolutely. The thing about Get Out is that it’s the Blumhouse model of it. It’s basically one location contained thriller, but like most Blumhouse things, you think about as being like they’re bloody, they’re gory. The horror of Get Out is not the centerpiece of it.
Craig: No.
John: Yes. Let’s move on to Kristen wrote in about undeniable.
Drew: “As an executive, all too often, what we get is something that’s half-baked or reads like a million other scripts out there. It doesn’t have clarity or distinctive voice, or it’s a perfectly fine idea, but it’s not a great idea. It’s not insightful in some way. I think that’s what we mean when we say we want something to be undeniable. It’s shorthand for if you want to be noticed, write something noteworthy because most of what I read is forgettable.”
Craig: This makes complete sense. There are a lot of parts that go into these things. Remember that the person who’s reading your script is not going to be the person who buys your script. The person who reads your script is the person who’s going to be selling your script upstairs to someone they work for. The name of the game is, I found this script, and this is great. Everyone goes, it is great, and then they make it, undeniable.
John: Yes. I was a reader at TriStar for a year, and so I read zillions of scripts and wrote coverage on them. Very few scripts where I get a strong recommend or definite recommend because it was a risk. You had to say, “You’re going to read this and say, this is really good.” There’s no second. That’s obviously a really good script, and it’s worth your time to do it. That’s really undeniability.
Craig: Yes, exactly. I think this is really important for people to hear. I’m just going to read it again. Half-baked reads like a million other scripts out there, doesn’t have clarity or distinctive voice, perfectly fine idea, but it’s not a great idea, or it’s not insightful in some way. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just nice. I’m going to Sondheim my way through this, but in short clips so we can’t get sued.
John: Follow-up from Matt about two different episodes.
Drew: We had talked about the Scott Frank School of Writing and orality recently. Matt says, “I’m teaching playwriting this semester for the second time. I’ve never taken a playwriting class despite working as a professional one for two decades now. When it came time for me to teach the STEM class, I was so anxious I just replicated the same cliche factory of unexamined conventions, and it was terrible and worthless.
Then, last fall, I heard your Scott Frank episode and was just amped. I threw everything out, and at my inner city university with students from under-resourced schools and a wide range of background, we just ran that experiment each day. Despite teaching through the crippling indifference it seems we have to fight in so many of these creative classes today, it’s been a blast. We are writing so much with a loose jazz while still learning really good scales, if that makes sense. I’m learning, they’re learning, and we’re doing it through writing, and they are amped.
This week, we used the Orality tool to test some of our dialogue sprints, and the impact was huge. Some students began to experiment on what wasn’t working and why these people sounded like they weren’t talking. They started to make the connections or grow their taste for making imaginary people sound like real people, and it was just great.”
Craig: Well, there you go.
John: It sounds like Matt’s having a good time, but his students are really lucky to have Matt as their teacher.
Craig: I think Matt’s really lucky that he has us. Because we brought Scott Frank on, and Scott was correct. Cranky Scott Franky loves to tell the truth. What I really appreciate about Matt is he’s a teacher, and we have a set of hard opinions about how, generally speaking, the way we teach what we do for a living in this country is broken. Matt had a choice and decided, yes, I’m going to go for a different method. Listen, anything where kids are suddenly engaged, where it’s not work, but they are pushing forward, that’s how you know it’s going well.
John: He’s also not talking about the theory of playwriting. He’s just like, “We’re just writing a bunch of stuff.”
Craig: Yes. Because here, you can’t teach something like August Wilson. You cannot teach August Wilson how to write a play like August Wilson. That’s the play he’s going to write anyway. You can teach August Wilson, and this would be a very young August Wilson, about how to get to where he already can go. You do that through practice. Practice. Not conventions and studying what was before, and formats and blah. I write, you read, we discuss. That’s how acting classes work. It’s great.
John: I noticed in Matt’s email to us, he wrote playwriting with W-R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G. It is a weird thing where a screenwriter doesn’t have the G-H-T and a playwright does have it. I was just looking up whether playwrighting with the G-H-T is common or less common. Officially, the G-H-T tends to go away. We’re not using that.
Craig: What?
John: Yes.
Craig: No.
John: You would do it how Matt does it.
Craig: Of course. They’re getting rid of the G-H because plays are wrought.
John: Plays are wroght.
Craig: Like iron. They are wrought. We just simply write.
John: Websters says it is more commonly without the G-H-T than with the G-H-T.
Craig: I can see how it would be playwriting without the G-H, but then when you say playwright, you’re going to want that G-H.
John: Yes. It would be weird. There’s not a word playwriter, not a thing, the way that screenwriter is a word.
Craig: I think plays are wrought.
John: Plays are wrought.
Craig: Wrought
John: Last bit of follow-up is about our email issues. Last episode, we were talking through issues that we were having with Craig’s emails not coming through. We had a suspicion that our listeners might know the answer to these questions. It seems like they did. We have three different people writing in with different things to test and try.
Drew: Jacob writes, “I manage a few dozen domains and their email configurations, and if I had to put money on it, I’d guess your domain is missing an SPF record or it’s not set up correctly. SPF is basically a way of telling the recipient server, these email servers are allowed to send email on behalf of my domain. Without it, receiving mail servers tend to get suspicious and may flag messages as spam, newsletters, or block them entirely. I’d strongly recommend adding SPF along with DKIM and DMARC so recipient emails can verify that you are who you say you are.”
Craig: I’ll have to check and see if I have boxes that do that.
John: What did Ian write for us?
Drew: “My wife has her own domain for her business, and sometimes she runs into a similar issue. It used to have to do with her hosting company because she used a shared grid service hosting package because it was not exorbitantly priced. I’m not an IT pro, but it basically means that your stuff is on a server with other people’s domains, and if those people’s domains are spamming people and they get flagged by the whitelisting services, her email could sometimes get caught up in that. Switching hosting companies was ultimately the solution.”
Craig: I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. It’s a very large company.
John: Fortunately, Zach has one last thing we can test.
Craig: Great.
John: Zach passed along a free deliverability tester that he’s used before and has gotten decent results. It’s mailtester.com. He says, the name sounds super generic, and the site looks dumb, but it works.
Craig: All right, should I do it right now?
John: Sure.
Craig: Okay. First, send your email to this. I’m going to copy it, I guess, and I’m going to send it from the address that’s causing a little bit of problems. Now, I assume there’s going to be some sort of response that’s going to give me information. All right. This is exciting or not.
John: Or not.
Craig: Then check your score. Oh, I think it already knows what’s happening.
John: Do you want to share your screen so it can see?
Craig: It’s the picture of a rowboat rowing from a lighthouse to a palm tree with coconuts. It’s very strange. My score is 7.7 out of 10. Good stuff. Your email is almost perfect. You’re not fully authenticated DMARC. Turns out to be the problem. Spam Assassin thinks you can improve. I have a minus 2.3. Now I know what to do. This is great. I think between a couple of those there, we may have gotten the answer. Oh, that’s our listeners.
John: Just the best. Again, we’re going to praise our listeners as we get into our One Cool Things. We have another person writing in about a bonus segment topic. In episode 722 bonus segment, we were talking about what a big year for the box offices is looking to be. Someone wrote in with more information.
Drew: This friend says, “If you’re not familiar with us, we’re part of the theatrical ecosystem, assisting those constituents with insights and audience analytics. At the very end of episode 722, you shared a 2026 outlook for the movie business. If you’re interested, here’s a brief 2025 summary that we shared with our friends in the media.
John: This is from Entelligence, E-N-T-elligence.
Craig: Oh, like from the Ents? The talking tree.
John: Yes. The talking trees.
Craig: This is going to be very good.
John: Well, their roots run deep.
Craig: It took them years to put this together just at the Entmoot.
John: I think it’s intertesting just because it’s a different way of looking at the same kinds of data. It looks like they are talking about attendance in movie theaters, sports, special events, everything like that. Whereas we are just looking at box office, they’re looking at total attendance, which, for 2025, they’re saying 780 million seats attended. 4.7 billion seats, 780 million people. If you look at the big titles, they were the big titles, so Minecraft, Lilo & Stitch, Zootopia, Wicked for Good, Superman. They can also talk to you about which genres ended up having the highest attendance.
Craig: Look at this, the studios, Disney at 26%, Warner Brothers, 20%. It’s getting sold.
John: It’s getting sold. Of course, Warner Brothers has the two top contenders for best picture made by great singular vision filmmakers.
Craig: Yes. Sure hope that they let it be what it is. This is fascinating to look at. Los Angeles is still the largest market, followed by New York. Dallas, of all things.
John: Oh, yes. I know Dallas is big.
Craig: How about this one? Political, blue, red. This shocks me. 56% of movie attendance are by people who consider themselves blue, or is it from blue states? 34% from red.
John: My guess is it’s based on market, but I don’t know.
Craig: That’s crazy. Pretty even spread among the ratings. Action, still the king at the box office, 40%. Animation, comedy, 5.5%. Now, I would argue that’s because there aren’t any.
John: Yes, or because a lot of things that are our comedies, we’re labeling as other things because that’s just what we choose to do. Cool. Film format, 3D, is about 6% of the earnings here. I guess we can’t really say box office, but they’re saying 6%. That’s higher than I would have guessed. 70 millimeter or 35 millimeter shown on film, each is less than 1%. Yes.
Craig: I wonder if 3D is all about Avatar.
John: Maybe.
Craig: Right, because he puts that out in 3D, right?
John: Oh, yes. First, you’re meant to see it in 3D.
Craig: Yes. I think that is entirely– Avatar had more foot traffic than any other movie, as they say, 30%.
John: Overall, male-female split, 50.1% male, 49.8% female, which is?
Craig: I love that. I don’t know what the margin of error is, but I would imagine that’s within it.
John: Yes, for sure. There are slightly more women than men in the United States. That’s also part of it.
Craig: Yes, because the men keep dying. Go to an old age home, just look around. Just that one guy. No one talks to him.
John: All right. It was our listeners who wrote in with this great follow-up. Our listeners who are premium members got an email this past week saying, “Hey, we’re going to do a new How Would This Be a Movie, and we would love your suggestions for articles for How Would This Be a Movie.” Drew, talk to us about the response you got when you sent out that email.
Drew: We very quickly got tons of responses. We got 40 in total, and a lot of them were really fantastic.
John: I went through the longer list, and someone’s like, “Wait, that sounds familiar.” Two of the honorable mentions, one of them was Paula Dakin, who was in Witness Protection. We talked about that, episode 525. It’s a really good idea, which we talked about it in episode 525.
Craig: That’s how good it was.
John: Yes. There was another one, which is about a mother who, basically, she and the kids were on a rowboat that got swept out to sea. She ended up sending her 14-year-old son in to swim to the shore for safety, which was a four-kilometer swim. He did it and saved them all.
Craig: A ton of people wrote in with that one.
John: Yes. It was just too stressful for me. I don’t want to even talk about it. I had palpitations just reading the story.
Craig: Also, what is that movie, just watching the kids swim?
John: It’s an incident. It’s a beep in a bigger movie. There wasn’t going to be anything to talk about beyond that. Of the other 40, there were some really great ones. I picked four of them that I think are going to be good topics for us to get into. Let’s start off with how an errand for a 12-year-old immigrant in Minneapolis became an underground operation. It’s written by Jasmine Gossard and Sarah Venture for NPR. It’s sent in by Christopher Boone. Drew, can you give us the description?
Drew: Sure. A 12-year-old girl in Minneapolis who we only know as E, got her first period last month in January 2026. E needed menstrual pads, but because E and her family are undocumented, she’s been in hiding in their home for the last several weeks. E calls her dad for help, but dad’s at work and doesn’t have a car with him, so that he’s not targeted by ICE. Her dad calls their pastor, who then calls a church member named Lizette, but Lizette’s also scared to go out, so she calls the neighbor, Ade, whose daughter Fanny is a US citizen. Though they’re still scared, Ade and Fanny decide to get pads to E, traveling through back alleys to avoid agents and deliver the menstrual supplies to her safely.
Craig: Two things, Minneapolis Tampon Run would have been the best sequel name to Cannonball Run. Back when, the Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise version of this would be outstanding. We first have to just say how horrible it is that this is a freaking thing that we aren’t even talking about at all, that this is happening is insane.
John: Last night, I was walking Lambert, and I started thinking about Minneapolis, and I started to weep. I was like, “Why am I weeping? What is actually going on?” It wasn’t ICE, specifically. It wasn’t the horrible brutality and the killings there. What I think what was actually making me weep was the recognition that a whole community had come together with whistles and phones to document and stop, and the sense of protecting people you don’t even know. I was weeping for a happy reason within all this. This story reminds me of the ways that, in crisis, people come together.
Craig: Yes, it’s still infuriating. I haven’t to be happy about the positives yet. I’m still in fury. This is an interesting idea. I don’t know if it’s a movie, if only because there’s a strange clock on it. There is an argument that there is a movie where an undocumented, and in this case, child, I think is correct because the stakes get even higher when it’s a child, an undocumented child has something that could be a problem medically, and they have to wait and see. It does get worse. They have to figure out how to get her somewhere to adopt, and this is all in America. I could see that. This would be a good episode of something.
John: Yes, I was thinking of The Pitt or some sort of show that is taking place more in real time. Craig, I would say the movie version of it, this is a plot line in, and it’s an Altman-esque Nashville situation where a bunch of stuff is happening. It’s all the same day, but this is one of the threads that’s happening through that. Feels right.
Craig: I think you’re absolutely right. Either it’s episode of something or fit into a story that normally accommodates these kinds of things, or it’s a thread line in a Magnolia-ish or Robert Altman-esque parallel storylines. I could see that. It’s disgusting that this is a problem.
John: Well, the resonance with Anne Frank is obvious here. You have a girl on the verge of womanhood, terrified, alone. She’s going through normal adolescent development in this incredibly extreme environment where she’s hidden, where everything is just turned upside down. That is compelling about this part of the story, but I think it’s a bigger tapestry around it. Right now, we’re following just this young girl and the people who come to help her, but her father is a really interesting character. It’s like the universality of a girl’s first period feels right.
Craig: An important character note, he’s a single dad. He’s a single dad, and I suspect probably either doesn’t speak English or is limited in some way. He’s not going to be able to just casually and charmingly go about getting something and not feeling like he’s targeted by the goon squad. It is a fascinating story, and with a really nice ending. Also notable in the story is that E has no idea what’s going on. There was not a conversation.
John: She has no idea what’s going on in terms of why she’s bleeding.
Craig: Correct.
John: She has a sense of the overall what’s happening outside her door, but not inside her body.
Craig: That she is. Correct. All she knows is she’s bleeding, and she doesn’t even know why, which immediately would be a terrifying thing to experience. There’s been a lack of education there. Not only does someone have to get her menstrual supplies, they also have to explain what it is and how it’s going to go.
John: Yes, which in the actual original story is the next day, a nurse calls her and talks her through all this stuff.
Craig: That’s a rough day. Shameful. Shameful. Just outrageous.
John: I think there’s something to do here. I think it’s part of a larger story, but I can absolutely see why we were sent this article. Let’s completely shift gears and go to something much lighter.
Craig: My god. Interesting.
John: This is a millennial travel group. This is based on an article by Katie Weaver for The New York Times. I recognize Katie Weaver’s byline, so I looked up and she’s done a lot of stuff that I’ve read over the years. I went on a package trip for millennials who travel alone. Help me. This was sent in by Dr. Stephanie Sandberg. Drew, give us a description here.
Drew: Katie Weaver, who’s a millennial woman, books a package vacation to Morocco through Flash Pack, a company whose stated aim is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends. Katie is put in a group with 13 women who are all different flavors of Type A. They go on a hyper-scheduled tour around Morocco. There’s sightseeing, cooking lessons, steam baths, goat feeding, ATV riding, glamping. It’s all calibrated to create a group dynamic, which the company takes so seriously that it’ll kick out anyone who throws the dynamic off.
The group bonds together quickly and tightly and are relentless in their stated objective of fun and friendship. One cold, wet, miserable day, the only way to have fun is to drink at a vineyard, so the group gets exceptionally drunk. When Katie eventually returns home, she finds that the demands of her normal life are a breeze compared to the intense responsibilities imposed by the trip.
John: I’m going to say from the start, I think there is a movie here. It doesn’t have to be specifically this article, but the idea of a bunch of Type A women who are strangers going on a trip together, could be to Morocco, could be to anywhere, is a good idea for a movie. You have the diversity of people and types. I think Katie Weaver or a Katie Weaver-type character is a character in this, in the sense that she is both a participant but also the journalist/documenter of these things. She holds herself outside of it and is then forced into it.
Weaver describes this sociological paradox. To have many friends is a desirable condition. To plainly seek to make friends is unseemly and pitiful. Millennials’ broad acceptance of the taboo around extending oneself in friendship, perhaps an aversion to participation inherited from their direct predecessors, Gen X, is particularly irrational, given that millennials report feeling lonely often or always at much higher rates than members of previous generations. Yet Weaver herself says, “I am pathologically that person who will try to make friends with people.”
Craig: I don’t understand. Millennials have a taboo about reaching out, which is insane. Also, weirdly, millennials are lonely. Yes, if that’s your taboo, then yes, you will be lonely. Also, don’t put that on Gen X. We love having friends. We don’t know taboo about making friends. Also, millennials aren’t our kids. They’re boomer kids. I defend my generation. That said, what you have here absolutely is a movie. There’s a bunch of different kinds of movies to make.
John: Yes, there are.
Craig: One version is you’ve got a woman who is Type A who had a group of friends that she has started to leave because she is on a more successful track, because she does feel pitiful, whatever her weird millennial problem is.
John: Or her friends started having kids, and she doesn’t have kids yet, and that’s a factor.
Craig: That’s a thing. She starts to feel like either I’m lonely or I need new friends. I’m going to sign up for this thing because this is a very like, “Hey, I did a test and I got a good score. I win.” She goes on this vacation. Meanwhile, her friends and their kids happen to also go on vacation at the same place, but I’m the one to bitch over or something. She’s having her new friends and this Type A maximum lifestyle.
Over there, the other character who was like her best friend is having a horrible time because her kids are sick and someone’s barfing and they’re crying, blah, blah. Yet they are each getting something valuable. They’re each also looking at parts of this going, “This is horrible.” Maybe it’s better if the friends that we have are the friends we actually made because we’re friends and not because we were in a program to make friends.
John: Intentional friendship is its own special flavor. A couple of different movies this is reminding me of. Bridesmaids, obviously, because it is about female friendship, but I was also thinking about A Real Pain. We had Jesse Eisenberg on in episodes six, seven, and two. That’s all centered around a trip to famous Jewish sites with a bunch of strangers. Well, Holocaust sites, but also the town where his family grew up.
Craig: [unintelligible 00:29:30] Famous Jewish sites. Some of them are infamous.
John: Infamous, famous, yes. A group of strangers and, of course, his cousin as well. Sideways, which is friends traveling. That idea of, okay, the whole movie is about this trip and this traveling, what you’ve learned along the way.
Craig: It’s also The Hangover.
John: The Hangover, yes.
Craig: They get drunk, and they go crazy. There’s somebody in charge of them who you can quickly see becomes the villain. There is a bonding that occurs, possibly through perfect people who have been selected because they’re perfect people behaving extremely imperfectly together, and through that, actually, friendships are created.
John: I was also thinking about David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which is about him going on the cruise. What is the conversation between his perception of what his role is there as a documentarian there, and Katie Weavers, who is actively trying to make friends? They’re very different characters in similar situations.
This last year I went on a cruise with my family to Alaska. We started in Anchorage and went down to Vancouver. Because Mike and I are the people who will try to make friends, we went to one of the mixers and met a bunch of the solo travelers. There’s a whole community of people who go on cruises themselves. They will do it all the time. They make friends on the cruises, and then they all plan to go on the same cruise again and again. They love doing that.
Craig: Nightmare cruise people deserve to be loved also.
John: Yes, they do. I think there’s a lot of really good, rich space here. You could use this article as a jumping-off point. I don’t know that you need it because you’re going to probably want to just do your own thing. There aren’t a lot of great specific characters, I felt like, oh, yes, that’s somebody you want to pull through into your movie.
Craig: Yes, it’s the article somebody options so that they can feel like they have a project that they can get writers to come in on. It’s such a producer thing to do. I can see that.
John: I’ve gotten sent articles like this. Someone will do it, and I can imagine this or essentially this idea becoming a movie 100%. It could be a theatrical feature, but it could also be made for a streamer.
Craig: Totally.
John: Love it. It could even be a limited series. You could do the Mike White version of this. One might notice [crosstalk].
Craig: I guess Mike White has done the Mike White lotus of this version in a way, but I feel like this feels like movie to me.
John: Yes, I think it’s a movie too. I think it’s a comedy.
Craig: Yes, I think it’s a comedy for sure.
John: Next step, switching gears even more radically, How the US Hacked ISIS. This is an article by Dana Temple Raston for NPR. It was sent in to us by Brian Notten. Drew, help us out.
Drew: In the spring of 2016, Steve Donald, who’s a captain in the Naval Reserve and a computer whiz, is ordered to put together a team to conduct cyber operations against ISIS. At the time, ISIS is the first terrorist network to use the power of the internet to recruit and launch attacks. After tracking them for months, Neil and his team learned that ISIS has just 10 core accounts they do everything through, from file sharing to financial transactions. He presents this to his higher-ups, and they begin Operation Glowing Symphony.
They use phishing emails to gain access to the administrator accounts one by one. They map the entire network, and then in a coordinated attack, they take over the 10 accounts, lock the administrators out, and take everything down. Then after the initial take down, the task force shifts to ongoing disruption and high-tech psyops to cripple their organizing efforts, frustrate their users, and tank ISIS morale.
John: Craig Mazin, what do you see here? What’s interesting? What’s challenging to you?
Craig: All of it is interesting. None of it is a movie. It is so hard to make drama out of somebody going, “Okay, click, yep, all right, I deleted that. Click, yep, I blocked him out of his account. Click, yep.” I could see this as a scene in a movie or like a moment where we’re screwed, we don’t know what to do, and someone’s like, “I know who to call.” These tough soldiers end up in a room with a bunch of nerds who are like, “Oh, this is what we do.”
The problem with this kind of thing is it is impossible to portray on film the effort and ingenuity required. You can’t sit there and go through hours of people going, “How do we break through their firewall and da, da, and the SSI, and you [unintelligible 00:34:09].” One day they do, and they type things on a keyboard, and it happens. It is profoundly uncinematic, which is why when we do show hacking in movies, it tends to be ridiculous and overblown because we’re trying to make it cinematic, and so we have things on screen going rah, rah, rah. I think it’s a great moment, scene, possibility. I would not know how to make this a movie.
John: Yes. I’m a little bit more optimistic that there’s a movie to be made here. I’m thinking about what have I seen of hacking that truly is cinematic, and I think Mr. Robot is the best version of it I’ve seen. You have a very compelling character, and what he’s doing, when he’s click, click, click, typing, typing, typing. We quickly see what’s happening, what the actual effect is. That’s why I think this can’t just be from one side where we’re just seeing what we’re doing. I think you have to see ISIS’s side and what they’re actually able to achieve and who these people are so that when we’re doing things, we know who those people are as stuff gets frustratingly worse for them on the other side of this.
Craig: That scene is also really funny because they do it, and on the other side, someone’s like, “Oh my God, what’s going on with my password? John, my password doesn’t work.” “Restart.”
John: You need to see the same people who’ve done a bombing and who’ve done serious things and killing people, and then they can’t log into Instagram.
Craig: Yes, someone took my Insta.
John: The other thing that’s reminded me of a bit was The Imitation Game. In that movie, Alan Turing has to figure out how to crack the Nazi codes. That movie was successful in physicalizing a lot of stuff that is otherwise an intellectual process. There’s moments in just the story as written, which is like, he’s going in on the whiteboard, and he’s actually drawing all the things. Literally, he evokes the image of Charlie in, as always done in Philadelphia, with the red strings and all. Sure, that’s one little snapshot, but you have to then figure out who are the people that you need to do, to what degree is this a heist mentality?
That could be exciting, which is like, this is the plan, but these are the things that go wrong. Because they are physically separated, because there’s the whole internet in between them, the stakes don’t feel quite real enough. I recently saw A House of Dynamite, which Kathryn Bigelow directed so brilliantly. That is a bunch of people typing into things, but it ends up being quite cinematic. There may be ways to take some of that grammar into this.
Craig: A House of Dynamite, that’s a good example of a Altman-ish view of what happens over the course of one hour of real time, but divided among three different stories where there are quite a few different things, one of them is the President of the United States. The Imitation Game obviously had the great character of Alan Turing to explore, and the difficulties in his life and how that impacted him.
The other thing about The Imitation Game is that what they were trying to break, the Enigma machine. To do it, they had to build this big physical thing that was awesome to look at, and it’s accurate with these dials that go, [unintelligible 00:37:29], so cool. The stakes, of course, were World War II, and no offense to ISIS, but they haven’t World War II’d the world. They haven’t yet hit Hitler status. There’s stakes, but if there were a great character in the heart of this, if someone like Steve Donald, the captain of the Naval Reserve, was also a fascinating person with a challenging life story, then maybe you could see how this could be a thing.
John: You can’t believe it’s him, but it could only be him. That’s an aspect that we don’t know if that’s true or not. That’s why you need to do a lot more research beyond just what we see in this story. That’s three of our stories. Our fourth is completely different on another axis. Drew, help us out on this fourth one, which is based around The Best College Squash Team in History, James Zug, writing for Squash Magazine. There’s a Squash Magazine. Of course. It was sent in by Dan Zaitchus.
Drew: In 1977, the student editors of the Whitman College newspaper start writing stories about how the university squash team is having this incredible undefeated season, except the school doesn’t have a squash team. This is a joke, and the editors try to make it as obvious as possible with ridiculous scores and matches against world champions, but no one at the school figured out it was fake or bothered to fact-check them.
They continue to write about this championship squash team and are eventually invited to a real squash championship in Calgary, Alberta, which the school administration gives them money to go to. They lose their matches quickly, and they party for the rest of the trip. When they come back, they report factually about their trip and thank the administration for the money and encourage them to support the drag racing team.
John: In 1977, I loved the period setting of this story. There was a bunch of college kids pulling a prank that went on too far. Then, of course, they get recruited into doing the thing. It’s such a comedy premise and then a comedy consequence to have to go do the thing. A lot of stuff you’re going to want to bend and change. Craig, do you think there’s a space here that’s interesting for a comedy?
Craig: No, only because the problem is, you put your finger on it, actually, you have a group of people that, as a joke, make a fake squash team. As it turns out, one of the guys actually played squash, I think, but most of them did not. Then, the joke is somebody believes you and puts you in a tournament. You have to go. Now, it’s like a dodgeball, underdog situation, but anyone can play dodgeball. That’s why dodgeball worked.
Squash is a sport, and you’re just going to lose fast, and you’re obviously fake, and that’s not fun to watch. Not fun to watch it. If you go, and you’re awesome, and you end up losing, that’s interesting. If you go, and you stink, but you prevail, that’s interesting. If you go, and you’re just fake, what happens? Is flatlining lose, and then you go home? I don’t know. Also, as pranks go, this is the most milquetoast, sort of mealy-mouthed prank. You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to make a fake squash team. I know it was supposed to be like all those scamps, but mostly I was like, I need to see it.
John: I think what you’re hitting on is that it’s like a prank just for the sake of the prank doesn’t feel like enough of a driving engine. There has to be something they’re actually going for. Some of this reminds me of former Scriptnotes producer Stuart Friedel. One of the characteristics I love so much about Stuart is he will have a goal, or he’ll see an opportunity, and he will engineer things to achieve that opportunity.
For example, Stuart wanted to sing the national anthem at a major league sporting event. He engineered the way for him to get to sing the national anthem at, I think, a minor league baseball game, and he did it. He figured out this is an opportunity to do it. With Stuart Friedel-type character who is driving this for a specific goal, which is not just an inner ambition, but something he wants to achieve, you can imagine that being enough to get us to why we’re creating the fake squash team, to win the girl, to do the thing, to get the scholarship, to do something.
Craig: I could see where it’s a little adjusted, where you have a squash team that is pretty bad. They want to be good, and you get all the different reasons why. My dad was a squash player. He wants me to be a squash, whatever it is. They’re okay, but mostly, they’re in the cellar in their very tiny Division III college league. Somebody, as a joke, because they’re so bad, somebody, as a joke, just starts flipping the scores when they print them.
They get invited to a tournament because of it, and they’re like, “We’re going. We have to try. We can be better.” Every year, you play up to your competition. Then they have a chance to be a Cinderella story. Then, of course, right before they’re about to go into the championship match, somebody discovers that the records were flipped, and they’re disqualified, and everyone’s like, “Let them play, let them play.” Bad News Bears. I could see that.
John: I think we’re talking about what are the interesting edges of the sports comedy genre. We reference dodgeball, which is, of course, a parody of the sports comedy. Challengers is also a parody of what a sports comedy is. Happy Gilmore, another great example of a movie that is a comedy that is existing because of what our expectations are of sports comedies. Bad News Bears you referenced. I think there’s something smart you could do there, but this is just a very tiny little seed of an idea. You’d have to really have characters who are interesting and have a good way to introduce the audience to, what does 1977 feel like?
You and I were little then, and we have some image of what that’s like. In that pre-internet era, I can see them getting away with this because anything that was in print was true. Of all these– they’re all execution-dependent, but this one is especially execution-dependent. This either works great or it’s nothing. Once again, our listeners totally stepped up. Thank you to our premium subscribers who got this email and sent us in these great suggestions for stories. I really loved talking through all of them.
Craig: Same.
John: Let’s answer a listener question. Heidi has a question about querying reps.
Drew: A few years ago, I wrote a feature script based on a quirky and obscure historical event. I rewrote the script as a picture book manuscript and sold it to a major publisher. The book’s coming out this year. I’ve since revised the original script and now have a few more scripts under my belt. I think I might finally be ready to seek representation. My question is, should I send the picture book and the press kit with my script when I query managers? The illustrator the publisher chose is fabulous and the illustrations are quite cinematic. I’m wondering if it will serve as a sort of early pitch deck or I’ll just seem hokey.
John: I think, Heidi, yes, you have something that people can see, which is nice. Mostly, you want them to be reading your scripted material to get a sense of, “Oh, this is who they’re going to try to sell you as as a person.” The book is the thing they’re going to send out to get people interested. Yes, you should send them the book.
Craig: Of course, send them the book. If for no other reason, then it makes you legitimate. You wrote a book and a major publisher bought it and published it. Now you’re somebody that is different than the just, “Hi, I’m a 23-year-old from Kansas and I wrote a movie that’s mostly based on my life.” You go flap, into the other pile. This is different. It’ll at least get attention. Yes, I think you have to. Be crazy not to.
John: Fred sent in some rage bait. Here we go.
Drew: Should writers repeat the plot three or four times assuming that most viewers are watching while on their phones?
Craig: Oh, my God.
John: I can see the color changing in Craig’s face.
Craig: Oh, my God. I have heard about this.
John: Mostly in reference to Netflix, honestly.
Craig: Correct, Netflix. Nobody at HBO has ever brought that up. Apparently nobody at FX has ever brought that up. I think Justin probably would have complained to me by now. This is not a thing. This is just the computer spitting out too much data and their pattern recognition. It’s just pattern. This is faulty. This is faulty. People know when they’re not paying attention that they’re not paying attention. It’s not like people don’t pay attention to something, then turn back to it and go, “What’s going on? This movie makes no sense.”
They’re aware. They go back and watch the part they missed. This is silly. I hate it. I will never do it. No one should ever do it. It’s gross. Why don’t we also repeat the ending twice? Why don’t we do that? Why don’t we just repeat entire scenes? Let’s do that.
John: Let’s make soap operas.
Craig: Let’s make soap operas that also repeat within the episode of the soap opera. Everyone should always say their name when they talk to each other. John, as you know.
John: Craig, I absolutely know what you’re saying.
Craig: Right, John? Let’s rephrase it. Shall we, John?
John: This is maddening and it’s not real. It’s not true. Also, we’re saying Netflix here, but Netflix’s biggest hit, Adolescence, that was not recapping what was happening moment by moment. You actually had to watch the screen and pay attention. People don’t mind paying attention to things.
Craig: I don’t think it was developed by Netflix either.
John: Here’s where I think the reality is coming here. If you’re doing a competition show, if you’re doing a baking show, they are trained to repeat things again and again, going into a challenge, coming out of a challenge. They’re just constantly filling up with that kind of stuff, but not in a scripted dramatic stuff. Don’t do it.
Craig: No, don’t ruin your story. Don’t.
John: Just don’t do it. It is time for our One Cool Things. Mine is a paper by Cornell University and Anthropic looking at disempowerment in the age of AI. By disempowerment, it’s where people seed control or seed decision-making on certain axes. What I liked about it, and there’s a little table chart, which I thought was the most useful part of the article, is a summary and classification of ways that people disempower themselves. They talk about reality distortion, which is on a spectrum from none to severe. If you’re going to an AI, it’s like you’re going to just look something up in a book and you’re just trying to get information and context and understanding, that that’s not disempowerment.
With increasing sycophancy, the AI is telling you, “Oh, yes, you’re absolutely right,” even if you’re absolutely wrong. If it’s reinforcing negative beliefs, that can be very, very bad. There’s a person in my life who has fallen down that rabbit hole and clearly is believing things that are not true because the AI is just telling them that they’re right when they’re clearly wrong. That is troubling, and that’s a thing we need to be aware of.
They also talk about outsourcing decision-making, which is basically like when my dog got sprayed by a skunk, I was looking up online to see, what should I do? That’s an answer that I can find. There’s an expert out there. If I’m exporting more fundamental life decisions to this kind of thing, that is disempowering and it’s taking away your own agency to do a thing. I think it’s like, oh, I’m making a choice to ask something and to ask for advice, but honestly, you’re giving up the insight and the self-determination of what is best for you.
I thought this chart was really helpful. The paper is good at looking at what the issues are without providing good solutions to these issues, but we have to think about the guardrails that are beyond just like, let’s not let AI take over all of our systems, but let’s also not let it take over our internal determination of what we want to do, what we believe in, what is objective reality.
Craig: Those were some really good observations, John. I think we’re really onto something. [laughs]
John: Absolutely.
Craig: I hate that. Oh my God, do I hate that. If anyone talked to me like that in real life, I would be like, “What is wrong with you? Stop your toxic positivity.” I hear the feedback. I’m happy to make that adjustment. Oh, [unintelligible 00:50:20]. I do have one cool thing.
John: Please.
Craig: You’re familiar with song Day in the Life by the Beatles from Sgt. Pepper’s. There is a young man, he’s British. It’s like a 20-minute video where he goes through how that song was first written. It was initially written by John, because the song has two distinct parts to it. Then there was this hole where John said, “Paul, you put something in there.” Then they began to record it. While they were recording it, Paul then came up with his little bit. They literally were like, “There’s going to be 24 bars in this song where Paul’s thing is going to go.” They record the whole thing. This is the part that blew my mind. Then Paul has to go in and do his bit. Back in the day, if he goes too long, he’s going to overwrite.
John: [unintelligible 00:51:25] on tape.
Craig: There was this very tense moment where he had to, “And I went into a dream, la, la, la, la, la, la.” That part’s recorded. Went into a dream had to fit right there. If it was a little too long, it was going to mess it up. It was going to erase it. Not overlap, erase. There was all these crazy things. Then getting the final note and how they got that final note was fascinating. How they were able to get an orchestra to play the way they did because they wanted an orchestra to just play crazy. Classical musicians do not know how to play crazy. That’s not a thing they do.
It’s just really well done. It’s a fascinating history of how that song came together, literally down to the fact that– I read the news today. He blew his brains out in his car. Then 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. Those were two articles in one day in a newspaper that John read. He was like, “I’ll take that one, and I’ll take that one.” It’s pretty remarkable. There’s also some really good footage of them doing it all together. It’s just a great analysis of a song that deserves analysis because it’s very complex.
John: I love any sort of explainer video that really dives deep into how an artistic work was created because we just have this assumption like, “This thing is wonderful and perfect.” Until you know the actual genesis of how it got to be there, it just looks like, “Oh, well, this person was clearly just a super genius.” Then you see like, “Oh, there were actually many steps along the way, and there was collaboration, and there were decisions that were made and reversed and other things.” Song Exploder is a great podcast and video series that also talks through a lot of other songs.
Craig: It’s just fun to watch people solving problems that today are not at all problems. That final note, they’ve got six different pianos, and they’re all hitting versions of [makes sound]. The problem they had was getting everybody to hit [makes sound] exactly at the same time. If it was a little off, they wouldn’t take it. I think it took them nine tries. Now, you hit one record, hit one, just beep, beep, beep, and you would never have that problem of, “Fit your lyric in here or you erase.” It’s wild that that’s the way it worked, and it’s awesome.
John: I think it’s also worth noting, there’s really frustrating things about YouTube and the short-form video and how it’s destroyed our attention. Short-form video like this is also just an amazing opportunity to see how things are put together. The fact that somebody made this video, that wouldn’t have been possible in a normal TV documentary way. It’s like you can have very specific channels and focus on very specific interests, and that’s incredible.
Craig: Yes. It is a great feeling going into something that is documentary and knowing I’m going to get the thing I want, and then I can go away and do something else.
John: As you were able to know right from the start, how long is this video? Do I have time to watch this now?
Craig: Yes.
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 Gloom Canyon. 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 like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. Thank you for continuing to buy the Scriptnotes book.
You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram, also at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers-
Craig: Thank you.
John: -both for what you sent and solutions to email problems and great articles to discuss. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on CDs and DVDs and what the hell we’re going to do with all these plastic discs in our homes. Craig, Drew, thank you for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, how many CDs or DVDs do you own?
Craig: CDs nuts. It has to be said. You can’t say CDs without saying CDs nuts.
John: 100%. I walked right into that. It’s not a problem.
Craig: It has to happen. Everyone at home listening to this should just add the nuts to tapes or CDs. [chuckles] It’s a classic. I personally am out of that business.
John: What did you do? At a certain point, you did have a bunch of CDs and you had a bunch of DVDs too.
Craig: So many. I had so many. I had, well, it goes further, video games, which were on DVDs.
John: Yes, psychical video.
Craig: Physical video games, physical DVDs, physical CDs. I held onto them for quite some time. At some point, you began to feel like you just had a victrola. I do still have a Blu-ray player. It sits in the room with the other, but it doesn’t get touched.
John: Do you have any Blu-rays to play in it?
Craig: It’s there in case. It really was about screeners, but now screeners are all accessed online. That’s gone. Thank God, because as you know, if you’re a member of multiple guilds and academies, there would be like 100 DVDs getting mailed to you every award season. It was a nightmare. Now that’s gone. They’re gone.
John: Craig, when did you get rid of them? As you were moving from your house in La Cañada Flintridge to Hancock Park, was that the big purge or what happened before then?
Craig: I had all my CDs in this big, heavy box. I think Melissa might have had them pack it up. Maybe it’s in her closet somewhere. It’s the sort of thing I could see her keeping. I have no emotional attachment to the objects. I just like the songs. I know for my daughter, CDs is not a thing. Vinyl is a thing. They enjoy the idea of vinyl. They get vinyl just to put on their wall as art. CDs are nothing. To them, songs are Spotify and Apple Music. That’s what songs are.
John: Hey, Drew, how about you? How many shiny discs do you have in your possession?
Drew: I have a few. I have a lot of Blu-rays. I probably have 50.
Craig: Wow.
Drew: I feel like, especially because I’m early career, the benefit of those is you get to learn from commentary, from the little featurettes with the DP on how they decided the color palette or something like that. That has a lot of value that you really can’t get anywhere on streaming or something like that. It does feel like a bunch of crap that I have to lug around. It used to be like a feature of a bookshelf or something to show my taste. Now I keep that in a box if I need them or if I want to–
Craig: Always hide your taste.
John: Drew, what was the last Blu-ray or disc of any kind that you bought?
Drew: I got the Pee-wee’s Big Adventure Criterion for Christmas.
John: Great.
Drew: That was the last one I got.
John: Have you watched it yet?
Drew: I have not watched it yet.
Craig: Have you ever seen it?
Drew: Oh, yes. It’s my favorite movie of all time.
Craig: Oh, thank God. It was that.
Drew: The last one I bought was Real Life by-
Craig: Albert Brooks?
Drew: Albert Brooks. Albert Brooks’ Real Life.
Craig: Oh, that’s a good one.
John: There’s that fantasy of the criterion closet, which is just like, it’s all these movies, like, “Oh my God, I have all these choices of things to watch, and there’s something nice about seeing the spines of those movies.” It’s like, “This is my curated experience of what I want to do.” In my case, all of our DVDs and CDs are in these drawers in our bookcase so we can pull it out and it’s all alphabetized. It’s easy to see all the things. It’s been years since we’ve taken any of those discs out and put them into a player.
One of our goals for this year is to just deal with them and get rid of the ones that we’re just never going to listen to again. The issue is, what would I actually do with these discs? There’s still Amoeba Records, so I, in theory, could sell them to Amoeba for no money. Who would want these discs, these movies?
Craig: No one.
John: It’s just not a thing. Because I listen to music just through Apple Music, I think my strategy is I’m going to look through the albums, see if there’s something I’m just forgetting that I actually love, and I’ll check to make sure that this is actually available on Apple Music. I might just add it to my library so I know that I will see it more often. I think I get rid of those CDs because it’s not helpful for me.
Craig: It’s that moment in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones shows the tiny new version of how they’re going to put music out, and he goes, “I have to buy the White album again.” There are so many albums I’ve bought. It’s a little bit like our D&D thing. I buy the Player Handbook, I have a physical one, I buy it on D&D Beyond, I buy it again on Roll20. So many albums that I love, I’ve bought five different times.
John: Which is fine, which is fair.
Craig: It’s fine.
John: It’s more money to the creators of those things. I will be sad to have them go, but they’re not doing me any good. It’s easier, honestly, with physical books because I can still rationalize, is the best place for this book on my bookshelf or somebody else’s bookshelf? If it’s somebody else’s bookshelf, I give it away and a library sells it and it’s good. I just don’t know that our CDs and our DVDs, if that’s even meaningful anymore because nobody wants this plastic thing anymore.
Craig: Nobody wants it. Because it doesn’t deliver an experience that’s any different than the experience they’re getting without it.
John: Right now, some of our listeners are typing a few of those emails about like, I can’t believe you would do this because you don’t realize that anything that you say like, “Oh, it’s always available on streaming, there’s no guarantee it will be.” They are correct. It is a chance that I’m taking by getting rid of some of my physical things.
Craig: Yes. I don’t believe– As long as one CD of something exists, they can quickly make 14 million of them if that’s what it came down to. I don’t think that’s where this is going.
John: Craig and Drew, thank you so much.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Drew: Thanks.
Links:
- How an errand for a 12-year-old immigrant in Minneapolis became an underground operation by Jasmine Garsd and Sarah Ventre for NPR
- I Went on a Package Trip for Millennials Who Travel Alone. Help Me. by Caity Weaver for The New York Times
- How the US hacked ISIS by Dina Temple-Raston for NPR
- Whitman College: The Best College Squash Team in History by James Zug for Squash Magazine
- Shipping Out by David Foster Wallace
- Email deliverability tester
- Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage by Cornell University and Anthropic
- The world’s greatest song that simply shouldn’t exist
- Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
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- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.