The original post for this episode can be found here.
JOHN AUGUST: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
CRAIG MAZIN: My name’s Craig Mazin.
JOHN: This is Episode 703 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is mostly just trying to make Drew laugh.
[laughter]
DREW: So far, so good.
JOHN: Today on the show, how do you write a period film that feels accurate but also compelling? Most importantly, not a history lesson. We’ve got at least 10 tips for timely tales, plus some related listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, we are officially in the season of the witch. Let’s do our ranking of iconic witches. I have 13 witches-
DREW: Oh, my God.
JOHN: -from literature and film, and we will put them in the proper order-
CRAIG: We’ll rank them.
JOHN: -from God-tier to D-level.
CRAIG: You do have the witch from Into the Woods in there, I see.
JOHN: We could add the witch from Into the Woods.
CRAIG: Now, we have 14 witches.
JOHN: Yes, absolutely. It’s the Last Midnight.
CRAIG: [singing] It’s the last midnight
It’s the–
JOHN: So good. Although it’s a news to get through before we get started on things. Highland Pro, the app that my company makes, we turn on family sharing, which we didn’t have on before. Now, if you have it, anyone in your family–
CRAIG: Why were you guys anti-family?
JOHN: We were not anti-family at all. Basically, they hide it in the interface for you to do it. It’s like, “Oh, can we turn on the switch?” It’s irreversible once you turn it on, but we did it, and it worked.
CRAIG: I guess that makes sense, right? Once you start sharing with somebody, you can’t take it away. That’s a nice thing. I love family sharing.
JOHN: It’s not only witch season, but it’s also back-to-school season. I want to talk through, almost all the screenwriting apps have a version of student licenses or discounted student licenses. For Highland Pro, that’s free. If you’re a student at a university program, you get Highland Pro for free. You just need to send in an email from your email address at your university, so .edu if you’re in the US, but other countries, it’s going to be other things. Photo or student ID. Fade In has a similar thing. Student pricing is $60. Final Draft has student pricing at $90. WriterDuet has 50% off. $90 student pricing.
CRAIG: Oh, Final Draft. Jesus, Final Draft. WTF is wrong with them? By the way, it’s not worth $90. That software is worth $3. They’re charging students a discounted rate of $90, so what are they charging poor everyone else that’s getting fleeced?
JOHN: I think the most recent price I saw on there was $199.
CRAIG: Oh my God.
JOHN: I think it’s more than that. I think it might be.
CRAIG: No. Why are people still paying for this?
JOHN: Buy now. Let’s see what it says.
CRAIG: Do not buy now. Buy never.
JOHN: Final draft 13 personal license is $174.99. That’s 30% off the regular list price, which is $249.99.
CRAIG: $249?
JOHN: That’s a lot of money.
CRAIG: There are people who have paid $250 for Final Draft.
JOHN: All this is a roundabout way to say if you are a student in a university program, you should use one of these discounted systems for getting it. Highland is free, so you might as well try that.
CRAIG: Exactly. Highland’s free. The maximum you should pay is $60 for Fade In. If you’re a student, you don’t need Fade In either. Honestly, Highland, done, or WriterDuet is also like–
JOHN: 50% off.
CRAIG: Yes. What does that cost?
JOHN: Based on what level you’re getting at, there’s a free version of it.
CRAIG: There’s a free version.
JOHN: My daughter was in a screenwriting program last year. She was screenwriting class last year. They were doing it in Google Docs, and it’s just so painful. Just don’t do it in Google Docs.
CRAIG: Why? What? [chuckles]
JOHN: It’s so painful. Yes.
CRAIG: What? I can’t with higher education.
JOHN: Yes. Any of these, Highland, it’s just like, “Oh, it’s a really good program.” Yes, your father spent 10 years making this program. I’m glad that you enjoy it.
CRAIG: Right. Instead, use Google Docs. Was it the school asking them to do Google Docs, or was it the kids who prefer using Google Docs?
JOHN: Basically, I think the professor didn’t require them to use anything other than this. He said it was fine to use Google Docs.
CRAIG: No, it’s not.
JOHN: No, it’s not, because you and I both had to write– Have you ever written in Word? Your early scripts, did you write this in Word? Or you always were in Final Draft or Screenwriter?
CRAIG: My very, very first couple of scripts were in probably WordPerfect.
JOHN: Yes. It is possible to write in a normal Word processor. It’s just ugly.
CRAIG: It just sucks and laborious. [crosstalk] Yes.
JOHN: [unintelligible 00:04:03] was written in Word, and that was the last one I wrote in.
CRAIG: Honestly, we got a lot of problems in this country, not going to lie. Maybe number one problem is screenwriting professors telling students to work in Google Docs. That may be the worst thing America’s dealing with right now.
JOHN: Indeed. Absolutely. Rise of Fascism and–
CRAIG: Rise of Fascism is like fourth. Because I got other issues, like Final Draft pricing. [chuckles]
JOHN: Last bit of news. Once again, I am looking for somebody. A recurring segment on this podcast has ended up being that I need somebody to do a thing, so I asked our listenership, and someone in our listenership is like, “Oh, I’m exactly the person you need to do this thing.” Here’s what I’m looking for right now. We’re doing a new project, and we need a designer for it. We’ll have a link in the show notes with exactly what the whole description is and what the project is. Essentially, we’re looking for a UI/UX designer with front-end experience. Do you know what front-end experience means?
CRAIG: I assume that means the part that people engage with. That part.
JOHN: If it were a web app, then it’s the parts you click on and do that stuff rather than the background server stuff. This is a web thing. Mostly, we’re going to be looking at the other stuff that you’ve built. You need to have a portfolio that shows cool stuff that you’ve built, and most crucially, just taste. Taste is so fundamental here because you can learn anything else, but you can’t learn taste.
CRAIG: That’s called talent.
JOHN: Yes.
CRAIG: I have taste. I just don’t know how to code or design. I feel like I’m well on my way to getting this job. I just got to quickly learn what UX means, and I’m there.
JOHN: 100%. If you are at or above Craig’s level, you
should click through the link and see the kinds of things we’re looking for.
CRAIG: If you see the word UX and you pronounce it Ux, you’re disqualified. This is not your job.
JOHN: No, it’s not. We are looking for an individual, not looking for a company. This is for one project, and so we’ll probably be on an hourly or daily, or weekly rate, but we’d love to find somebody to bring into the team, work full-time. We are based here in Los Angeles. That’s great if we find a person in Los Angeles, but we can also work with someone remote. If you are that person who is the designer who has done this kind of thing, take a look through the notes. You’ll find the show notes, and maybe this is the job–
CRAIG: You know what? I’m going to take myself out of contention. It’s unfair.
JOHN: You’re busy, Craig. Realistically, how are we going to squeeze this on top of everything else?
CRAIG: I play a little bit less Skyrim on my Steam Deck, and I blew through Oblivion. Oblivion, by the way, I’ve forgotten. Kind of a short game, weirdly.
JOHN: Wait, I’m confusing them. Skyrim–
CRAIG: Elder Scrolls IV is Oblivion. Elder Scrolls V is Skyrim.
JOHN: Oh, that’s right, because you went back and played an earlier version. Is it up rest? Does it look decent?
CRAIG: Oblivion, they did a whole remaster because Oblivion came out in 2003, ’02, or something like that. It was like a company came and made it look decent, and it was fun to play again. Skyrim looks really good still.
JOHN: Skyrim is so long. I never finished Skyrim.
CRAIG: Oh, I did, and I’m going to finish it again.
JOHN: I restarted it a couple of times, yes.
CRAIG: I’m going to finish it.
JOHN: I can’t believe you were able to play it on a Steam Deck. It just looks amazing on a Steam Deck. It seems like it’s maybe too small. I’ll put it on my Steam Deck because I’ve not been playing anything other than Vertigo on my Steam Deck
CRAIG: It’s eight inches away from your eyes. It looks great. Anyway, Oblivion, like–
JOHN: Do you put on your readers when you play it?
CRAIG: No.
JOHN: Okay.
CRAIG: That’s actually an interesting thing. I realize I don’t. I guess because I can hold it–
JOHN: Yes, just at the right distance.
CRAIG: Just at the right distance.
JOHN: Is your posture up, or are you looking down?
CRAIG: No, it’s up. The only thing is sometimes my elbows get squeezy because my elbows are bent. I get that my ring finger and pinky finger start to go to sleep. That’s an indication that maybe I should put the Steam Deck down. You know what? I don’t, because winners don’t quit.
JOHN: At whatever point we actually get VR glasses that are really, really good, my God, that’s going to be an incredible game.
CRAIG: They’re getting there.
JOHN: They’re fatiguing to wear after a certain point.
CRAIG: The Quest is a heavy object. I really love that one game that I played on it, the one from the room people from– It was fantastic. I just wait for that one awesome game and then–
JOHN: With some follow-up. Two episodes ago, we talked about connections and the importance of connections. Jay wrote in with some connected and related business. I’m friendly with one of the top screenwriters in town, super A-list, multiple franchises, but our connection is through our daughters, who’ve become best friends at school.
CRAIG: Wait, so let’s see. This is obviously talking about me.
JOHN: Yes.
CRAIG: Let’s see. Who’s my–? Okay, go on.
JOHN: We know each other from play dates and school functions, where we have a fun, casual relationship. Our conversations are about the general state of the industry or upcoming school events. I’ve always felt like I’m not in his league, so I’ve religiously avoided pitching myself or bothering him to read my stuff. Last week, his production company independently read one of my samples. Through my reps, not through him, I now have a general with one of his execs. He and I haven’t spoken about it at all. Should I, A, text him beforehand like, “Hey, funny thing, I’m meeting with your people this week.”
B, mention our connection in the meeting. “Oh, I’m actually friends with your boss. Our daughters go to the same school.”
Or C, say nothing and let it play out, risking embarrassing confrontation later of, “Hey, why didn’t you tell me you were coming in for a meeting?” How do you navigate connection that’s personal first, professional by accident?
CRAIG: I love the amount of neurosis that’s pouring off of this. It’s very familiar to me.
JOHN: It’s a very Los Angeles thing, too. I completely picture they were at the same exhausting kids’ birthday parties every weekend.
CRAIG: Sure, over and over and over. I love this. I would go with A.
JOHN: I would go with A, also.
CRAIG: Hard recommend on A.
JOHN: Let’s remind everybody. That is where you text him ahead of time. Say, “Oh, hey, I’m meeting with your people.” Otherwise, it’s just weird if they told you afterwards. Then if you’re in a meeting, you say, “Oh, I’m actually friends with–” then that puts everybody in a weird spot.
CRAIG: Yes. That’s an easy one. If it were me, meaning if I were this fancy guy and I got a text that said, “Hey, it’s blah, blah, I see you all the time, funny thing, I’m having a general meeting, LOL.” I would be like, “Oh, great.” Then I would probably say to that person, “Hey, I want to be in that meeting,” or “Can I read what he wrote,” or be nice to him, or nothing. What I would never do is not say anything, and then just be like, “The hell?”
JOHN: There’s a small number of people this top screenwriter could be, because I’m trying to think of a screenwriter rather than a TV writer. This person has their own development staff and own people.
CRAIG: There’s a lot of them.
JOHN: There’s a few, but it’s 10 or fewer.
CRAIG: A-list screenwriter, franchises, and so forth.
JOHN: We can think of a couple. I would say, Jay, it’s fine, it’s good. You’re overthinking and overstressing it.
CRAIG: Well, yes, but also, that is precisely the kind of overthinking and overstressing that is fairly normal for us. I just don’t want Jay to feel like there’s something wrong with him. There is something wrong with him, but it’s the same thing that’s wrong with most of us.
JOHN: The extra context we got on this is like, this isn’t Jay’s first job. He gets hired for things.
CRAIG: This is an easy one, A. What I do appreciate is that Jay is being considerate of this other person. Because, look, it’s a tough business. Everyone’s scrambling. There have been times where I’ve been aware that I’m talking to somebody who’s maybe in scramble mode, and I can feel that they want to maybe push on it a little bit. I get it completely. It is at least a good thing to be aware that it’s a little awkward and uncomfortable. The fact that this screenwriter has a company that could hire people for things, yes, totally reasonable.
JOHN: Yes. Another bit of connections follow-up. Jamie in Australia writes, “John and Craig mentioned the awkward situations that happen when a distant acquaintance approaches you, especially when you’re with someone who’s not in the business, or you feel the pressure to say, ‘Melissa, this is blah-de-blah,’ but you’re blanking on them.”
CRAIG: [chuckles] My nightmare.
JOHN: In those cases, proactively introduce the person you’re with. “This is my wife, Melissa.” In about 30% of the cases, your acquaintance will say, “Hi, Melissa,” and leave it at that, and you’re back to square one. For most people, this gives them a face-saving opportunity to say, “Hi, Melissa, I’m Kim. I was Craig’s junior assistant producer on his first feature.”
CRAIG: Okay, but here’s the thing. I’m aware of that.
JOHN: I do it. I did it this weekend.
CRAIG: Yes, and I do that, too. The problem is, no one on the other end is going to be like, “Oh, let me make everything easy for you. I’m Kim.” They don’t do that. They’re like, “Oh, hey,” and they also know what you’re doing. They all know it. There’s a moment where it’s like, okay, I’m going to get an A if I say, “Melissa, this is John. He’s blah-de-blah.” I’m going to get an D if I’m like, “This is my wife, Melissa.” Then she’s like, “Oh, hi,” and that person’s like, “Oh, hi,” I guess he doesn’t know my name.
JOHN: A small variation, which is worth trying, which I think I did this weekend as well, it’s like, “Oh, hey, do you know Mike, my husband? Have you met my husband, Mike?” Then it gives Mike an opening for saying, “Okay, I’m Mike.” Then the other person says–
CRAIG: Okay, let me give you a nightmare scenario. “Okay, have you met my husband, Mike?” “Yes. We all went out to dinner three months ago. We sat next to each other and talked at length.”
JOHN: Absolutely true. Absolutely true.
CRAIG: I feel like there are trade-offs. As you get older, your back hurts, your eyes start to– you get closer to death, sweet, beautiful death. You also get to just be excused a little bit for some of this stuff. Like, “Hey, you know what? I’m older. What are you going to do? I’m losing it.” I’m not. It’s just that I know a lot of people. I know too many people. As time goes by, you keep meeting people. It’s the worst. What are you going to do? I think people are like, “Oh, the old guy, he just can’t remember anyone’s names.”
JOHN: I’m sure I’ve said this on podcasts multiple times, but if I’m going to something like a premiere, not of my movie, but other people’s movies, I will, on a drive over, remind myself in the car, who are the people I’m likely to bump into just so they’re a little bit closer to my name.
CRAIG: You can panic about not knowing their names earlier?
JOHN: Or I can Google them.
CRAIG: Oh, God.
JOHN: I Google them in the car.
CRAIG: Lady whose name I don’t know.
JOHN: No, like a producer of this thing.
CRAIG: Oh, like you remember any details about them? Congratulations. I run into people–
JOHN: No, I remember they produced this thing, but I cannot think of their name. Fair.
CRAIG: That’s a reasonable one. It’s the ones that come up– I got to tell you, it happened to me the other day where I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Then I couldn’t remember who it was, and I should have. I should have, but I didn’t. You know what? I shouldn’t have. It was years ago.
JOHN: It was years ago.
CRAIG: It was years ago, one time years ago, but you know, I felt bad.
JOHN: Yes. There’s also people who I’ve only met on Zoom. I pitched something at eight different places on Zoom.
CRAIG: That one, I think, everybody. Because I just go, “Oh my gosh.” They make the little square in the air, like, “I only know you from this,” as if their face were not enough. Still, any excuse–
JOHN: I’ve only stared in depth at your face for hours on end.
CRAIG: I never saw it bobbing around on the top of the rest of this crap. Now, I know, “Oh, it’s you.” Listen, there’s no–
JOHN: There’s no easy way.
CRAIG: Does this happen to you a lot? You’re young.
DREW: It does a little bit. Although I’ve been the person who’s called out someone for not remembering.
CRAIG: What’s wrong with you?
DREW: Because it was egregious.
CRAIG: What do you mean [unintelligible 00:15:32]? [chuckles]
DREW: It was a person that I had done multiple friend dates with kind of thing, and seen shows with over years. Then I went to a birthday party and they acted like– It was like, “Oh, I have no idea who you are.” I called them out. I bought them a beer afterwards because I felt a little bit bad.
JOHN: There’s also people who have genuine face blindness. Brad Pitt cannot recognize anybody.
CRAIG: By the way, I’m going to start claiming I have face blindness. What a great excuse. Here’s my thing, Drew. What are you going to get out of that?
DREW: In the moment, nothing. It was just pure anger. Hurt, I guess. I’m not saying I was right. I’m not saying you should do that at all. I was in the wrong. This is 10 years ago.
CRAIG: Wait, 10 years ago?
JOHN: Maybe a little less.
CRAIG: How old are you? 12?
DREW: Yes. Yes, I was.
CRAIG: This is like, what, in a sixth-grade birthday party?
DREW: Yes. I was like, we’ve been to school together. We were in fourth grade together all year long.
CRAIG: “Yes, I’m Michael G. I thought you were Michael F.” My thing is, what do you get out of– They don’t know your name. You’re not going to change that. I would just have fun with it. I would laugh about it. You know what I would say, honestly? I would say this is amazing because I’m the one who’s usually doing this. I’m so happy that you’re the one doing it, so I get to enjoy this. Five minutes from now, I’m going to be you with somebody else.
JOHN: Craig, I don’t think we talked about you show up at a party, a friend’s party, and there’s a person there who is actually just a villain. They have done you wrong. They’re apparently friends with the host of the party. Those awkward situations. I’ve had a couple of those. I was like, “Good Lord.” I can generally just avoid the person.
CRAIG: Yes. Do you end up talking to that person?
JOHN: Sometimes it’s at a dinner party or something. It’s like, “Ugh.”
CRAIG: How does your friend not know you have some secret villains?
JOHN: Yes, just people in the industry who have just done me wrong. There’s one director who is just– He’s the worst. Everyone loves him, but he’s just the worst.
CRAIG: Oh, that’s fascinating. I wonder who that– It’s not Steven Spielberg.
JOHN: No. Steven’s great.
CRAIG: How great would it be if you were like, “Oh, man, you nailed it”?
JOHN: Nailed it. We’ve talked about one director who we wanted to have on the show, but he has a villainous history with another one of our friends. That kind of situation does come up. If those two people were at the same event, what do you do?
CRAIG: I don’t really have villains, I don’t think.
JOHN: I have very few, so that was a surprise to this person.
CRAIG: I can think of, honestly, one guy that I don’t want to be at a dinner party with, but I don’t think that’s going to be happening anytime soon anyway. Doesn’t seem like a dinner party guy, to be honest with you.
JOHN: All right, let’s get to our main topic today, which is writing period stuff. We talk on the show a lot about world-building. If you’re building a futuristic world, you have to be very specific about what’s in that world, what’s different, how not to overbuild, and all these things. What we haven’t discussed a lot, as I was looking through our catalog here, are actual period films and period series, things that are set in recognizable moments of the past.
CRAIG: We’re not talking about female reproductive health today?
JOHN: No.
CRAIG: I was confused. Go on.
JOHN: Yes, but I want to make sure that the stuff we’re writing is accurate, but also accessible for audiences. The tension is really between those two things often because done wrong, these can feel like history lessons, but done properly, it’s like, “Oh, this is the color and the context for the world. The history is the plate upon which you are serving the food.” Often, we can confuse the foreground and the background. As we have this conversation, it’s so easy to think like, “Oh, we’re talking about Victorian times or this.” Also, the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s.
There was a thing I was writing that was in 2010s, which is like, that’s period. You have to remember what is specifically different about this. Last weekend, I went to go see a screening of Showgirls at the Academy Museum. Showgirls and I have this weird history because–
CRAIG: At the Academy Museum.
JOHN: Yes. It was their summer camp. It was a so-called summer camp.
CRAIG: Okay, fair.
JOHN: Here’s the history, briefly, of my experience with Showgirls, is that script by Joe Eszterhas sold while I was in the Stark program at USC for a total of $3.5 million. One of us got a copy of the script. It’s like, “We have to have a dramatic reading of Showgirls.” We had a dramatic reading of Showgirls at my apartment. There were 10 of us, and we read through the whole thing.
CRAIG: Whole thing [unintelligible 00:19:59]
JOHN: Kind of, but it’s also just boring and bad. The movie is actually boring and bad, but also fabulous. It’s a maniacal glee, and the performances are awful, and yet it all works together until it goes just darkly off the rail and cannot be fun anymore.
CRAIG: You know what? We got to get Joe Eszterhas on this show, and I’ll tell you why.
JOHN: Please.
CRAIG: I’ve never met him, never spoken with him. He was ’90s screenwriting.
JOHN: He was the spirit of 1995.
CRAIG: He was it. Year after year, that guy was just crushing it, at least financially.
JOHN: Yes. Jagged Edge. I love Jagged Edge. I haven’t gotten to rewatch it.
CRAIG: Awesome.
JOHN: Basic instinct. Absurd, but sure. Iconic.
CRAIG: Love it. Then it started getting a little wobbly there. Also, Joe Eszterhas, pure screenwriter. Never directed, as far as I know. Did he?
JOHN: No.
CRAIG: I don’t think so. He was completely at the mercy of directors, which is why I would want to talk to him. Plus, there is that amazing thing that went down with him and Mel Gibson that people have forgotten.
JOHN: I’ve forgotten that, too.
CRAIG: Joe Eszterhas was working on a script for Mel Gibson. I don’t remember what it was. Mel Gibson, I think, has some sort of compound in Costa Rica. Joe Eszterhas was down there. Mel Gibson was apparently super off his rocker, angry. I don’t know why. Joe Eszterhas recorded some of it of Mel Gibson screaming at him, basically. The stories that must be there from Joe Eszterhas, I wonder if he would come on and just tell a story.
JOHN: In my head, I think I played with him with the Final Draft guy.
CRAIG: Oh, no.
JOHN: Yes, I’m sure he’s delightful.
CRAIG: The Final Draft guy, Rocco Three Shoes, or whatever that guy was, who we talked to. Who was that guy? [chuckles]
JOHN: I don’t remember either.
CRAIG: Quasi-mobster. [chuckles] He’s not really a mobster. He’s not a mobster, but he had that kind of vibe.
[laughter]
JOHN: We’re in business to stay in business.
CRAIG: That is such a mobster thing to say. No, what he said is, we’re not in the business of going out of business. What do you want from us? We’re not in the business of going out of business. Well, it’s not a reason to extort people. Hey, listen, what are you going to do?
JOHN: The whole reason I brought up Showgirls is watching that movie. It’s set in 1995. You’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s right. That’s what 1995 looks like.” It wasn’t trying to be a period. It literally just was that thing. One of the real advantages when we were making a story that is set in the time of motion pictures is we can go back and look like, what did it actually look like? That’s just so fantastic.
CRAIG: Yes. You can look at what it looked like. You can look at it or even look at what the glossy version of what it looked like looked like. The ’90s are amazing, because of our age. We graduate college. We come to Los Angeles. We go through this. 10 years of personal growth and relationship growth and career growth. It seems so separate to us from the ’80s. Everybody else is like, “Meh, it’s basically ’80s blobbing into another thing.” It was just sort of like ’80s plus. It is a fascinating time.
I had never thought about even the 2000s as being period until I had to write scenes in The Last of Us that are set in 2003. Suddenly, I’m like researching, what phones they used and what kind of– I couldn’t remember. Did people have widescreen TVs then, or were we still on square? What was our deal?
JOHN: We’re doing a rewatch of Community, which is a great rewatch if you haven’t seen the show. The phones in it are crazy, because iPhones show up at a certain point, but every other kind of phone you can possibly imagine. There’s sidekicks, there’s trios, a lot of flip phones, Blackberries, everything else.
CRAIG: Palm pilots, somebody has a Newton.
JOHN: Previous episodes, we’ve talked about [unintelligible 00:23:44] stuff obviously with Chernobyl, the deep dive into The Unforgiven. We had Robert Eggers on to talk about Nosferatu, which is period but also that heightened. Mike Makowsky was on to talk about Bad Education, which was ’80s. Mari Heller’s been on a couple times, and it seems like everything she’s done has been a period thing up until the last movie. She took a lot of period.
CRAIG: Yes, I think that’s right.
JOHN: Let’s talk about general goals, no matter what period you’re writing. Fundamentals, story first, history second. The historical setting is the backdrop. It’s not the protagonist.
CRAIG: Yes. There are certain cases where the nature of the story pushes the period forward dramatically because it is about living in the ’80s as opposed to a story that happens to be in the ’80s. I’m thinking of Super 8 or Boogie Nights. Those two movies were ’80s because that was so much of what the story was.
JOHN: All the same, both of those movies, if you needed to transplant them to a different decade, the central character conflicts, the thematic issues, you could find a way to do it in a different decade.
CRAIG: Always for all good drama, which is why Christopher Nolan is making The Odyssey. Always.
JOHN: Pick the scope of history you need. By that, I mean there are certain kinds of movies, it’s history with characters in it. I would say Lincoln is that, Oppenheimer is that, where the history is really foregrounded. There’s other movies where it’s a character story that is taking place in a historical world. I say Titanic is that, Almost Famous is that, where it’s just like the space around it is really, really important, but that’s not the focus of it. Even though Titanic is a real historical event, the movie isn’t about the history that was made there.
CRAIG: Right. It’s worth asking this question, does this need to be a period piece or not? The reason it’s worth asking is, because while it may afford you some interesting things to do in your script, it can be a little bit of a crutch. The first thing that somebody making a budget for that script is going to do is go, “Oh, no, it’s a period piece.” Period pieces cost more money. The end. Every single time. You’re spending more to transform what the world looks outside, even just replacing all the cars as a thing, getting the accurate clothing and the hairstyles, and all the rest.
Period pieces, in that way, can be a trap where people just go crazy with it. Like, “Oh my God, this movie’s set in the ’80s, everyone’s got crazy shoulder pads.” Well, not everybody was walking around with crazy shoulder pads in the ’80s.
JOHN: Most people’s clothes and most people’s– the stuff in people’s houses is actually from 10 years, 20 years before that. People hold onto their stuff. Really great production design, you’ll see that’s set in a period in that specific era. It’s not all new stuff of that era. It’s stuff that’s dragged along. One of the nice things about setting a movie in the present day is you get so much stuff for free. You can just go outside and aim a camera at something like, “Well, that’s 2025,” or whatever year you’re in. You get the modern buildings, you get the modern cars, you get everything else.
All that stuff which would have to be replaced if you’re doing it, say, in the ’80s. A reel showed up on Instagram yesterday that was talking about The Apprentice, the Donald Trump movie that Sebastian Stan was in. It was showing the visual effects they used to put buildings in proper context and make things look right. For an inexpensive movie, they were very, very smart about, “This building looks right, it will just replace the buildings on the side of it.”
CRAIG: Yes. The nature of a skyline is a very interesting research. People will catch you and laugh at you. If you’re making a movie that’s set in 1980s New York and the Freedom Tower is there and not the Twin Towers, people are going to laugh at you. That’s an obvious example, but it creates a lot of issues. At a minimum, just ask, at least why does this need to be set in this time period? Then if you have a great answer, terrific.
JOHN: One of the first movies I wrote, which never I made, thank God, it was a Western. It was like Aliens Out West. It was like a Western, but with an alien creature in it. Doing the research for that, I did not need to know about the 1880s on the East Coast. I just needed to know very specifically, in a Colorado mountain town, what was daily life like. That’s the right scope. I find so often when writers are approaching a period of things, I feel like, “Well, I need to know everything about everything.” It’s like, “You’re probably procrastinating and avoiding writing.”
I would say, all that said, don’t assume you know how things worked. Always stop yourself and ask the question, “Wait, is that really how it is?” Here’s some good examples of things you might not be thinking about. How are letters delivered? How did mail get from point A to point B? How do people light their homes at night? It’s so important. It’s going to be important for production, but also just for what a scene can make sense. If things are happening by candlelight, it’s just fundamentally different.
One of the projects that we’re running right now is in a medieval-y kind of world. Candlelight is tough. It’s challenging to live under candlelight. If you have two characters who are in a room by themselves and just lit by candlelight, everything else is going to darkness beyond that. That is–
CRAIG: Unless they’ve got that candle candelabra. I love a candle candelabra. There’s so many candles. Who’s lighting all those candles? What happens when they burn down?
JOHN: How much heat is that thing putting off?
CRAIG: How many candles did they have?
JOHN: Candles were so expensive. So much of a person’s daily income was spent on candles.
CRAIG: Candles. Then the candle maker, there’s probably a good word for candle maker, right?
JOHN: Candlestick maker.
CRAIG: No, that’s a candlestick. Candlestick is the thing the candle goes in.
JOHN: No, candlestick maker makes the candles.
CRAIG: No, the candlestick maker makes candlesticks.
JOHN: Oh my God. Are we going to fight on this?
CRAIG: Yes. Who’s making the candlestick then? Somebody else?
JOHN: All right. Drew is looking it up to give us the answer.
DREW: A chandler.
CRAIG: A chandler.
JOHN: A chandler.
CRAIG: Chandler makes candles. I knew there was a weird name for it. It’s like Coopers make barrels. All they did was add an H, and they were like, that’s good enough. Chandler. They should have done that with barrels.
JOHN: Chandler, yes. It was probably a hard C-H. That’s a certain one.
CRAIG: Chandler. Chandler Bing. He made candles.
JOHN: It was candles, yes.
CRAIG: Can we agree that the candlestick maker made candlesticks? Come on. It’s a weapon and clue.
JOHN: It is a weapon. That’s true. It’s a candlestick. You’re right. Okay. I will yield on this.
CRAIG: Thank you.
JOHN: What time were meals eaten, and what counted as– did they eat breakfast? How people addressed each other is important. Finding that what streets and roads actually looked like. Were they gravel streets? Gravel is actually a much more sophisticated thing than just a rut down the middle of a road. What was it like?
CRAIG: Here’s a weird one that I remember going, “Whoa, I didn’t know.” And this is why it’s great to look at photographs, because you can pull things from photographs and then go, “Wait, what is that?” and find out what its use was. In the video game LA Noire, which took place in post-war Los Angeles. We’re talking 19– I think it was like 1949 or ’50 or something like that. There was also a section before the war, where it was like the ’30s. I think in the ’30s in Los Angeles, there were no traffic lights. There was like a sign that went ka-chunk.
I was like, “What is that? That is so cool.” By the way, traffic, what a breeze. In the ’30s in LA? Whew. High wind. I love things. Those details. As you’re going through your details, there are details that it’s like, “Okay, I want to get this right. How many candles are in the room? Is anybody going to look at that scene and go, ‘Whoa’?” No. If there’s some interesting whoa, throw it in.
JOHN: If it creates an interesting moment, yes, for sure.
CRAIG: The characters don’t have to say, whoa, nor would they. You might go, “Oh,” that’s the kind of thing that makes you go, “I really am in a different time.”
JOHN: Here’s the challenge is you need to do the research so you have the answers to those kinds of questions that could be relevant and not shove so many of them in that it feels like, “Okay, you’re just showing off here.”
CRAIG: You don’t want it ever to feel like the movie stopped to go. Now, everyone in the mall will dance to Madonna because it’s the ’80s.
JOHN: LOL.
CRAIG: Their hair.
JOHN: Haha.
CRAIG: Well, I guess Wonder Woman did that. Wonder Woman did do that, but you shouldn’t. In general, it’s not a great idea because it takes people out of the story, and it turns it into more of just a look at us.
JOHN: Other things to keep in mind is a people’s sense of
time. Do they have clocks? Do they have watches? Even if they had those, I’ll see if I can find the blog post for this, but the idea of time as a resource that you control is actually relatively recent. People didn’t talk about saving time because you couldn’t do anything with time. Basically, you did your work, you tended the field and stuff, but there wasn’t any sense of like, “Oh, I need to save some time here. What was time?”
Time, as a thing you can sort of touch or control, is a pretty recent invention. It’s really kind of an industrial-age invention.
CRAIG: Yes, I mean, time management, definitely. The other thing to think about is how you prompted this when you talked about time. I think about just night in general, and the world at night. Depending on what time your period is, how dark is it out at night? Because boy–
JOHN: It’s probably really dark.
CRAIG: Your movie that took place in Colorado in the 1800s at night, it’s pitch black. If it’s overcast and the moon is dark–
JOHN: I feel like so often, writers never have been outdoors at true night, like out of the city at night, and you’re like, “Oh, man, it’s dark.”
CRAIG: It is dark, but also you do have the sky itself if it is not overcast. You have a setting– You don’t see this very often in Westerns, and I think it’s in part because it would look fake. At night, clear sky, back before light pollution, the world’s a planetarium. You can see stars ahead of you. It’s gorgeous. I only know that because I’ve been to Alaska, which is as close as we can get to that. It’s insane. You just don’t see that. I think I know because it just would look fake.
JOHN: Money. What was the money? Do people have currency? How are they doing this? How do they handle money? It’s always so weird to me that people’s entire life savings were in their pockets or in a box.
CRAIG: Of course, buried under a floorboard.
JOHN: How much things cost relative to wages? You don’t understand that people used to spend half their money on food.
CRAIG: Also, Louis CK. Are we allowed to cite Louis CK? He had this great bit about how in Westerns, somebody would come in to a saloon and ask for food for their horse, and a beer, a meal, a shave, a room, and then you would just hand a guy one coin. The guy’s like, “You got it.” The guy would bite the coin, and then you’re like, “Done.” What is that coin? Also, he’s like, the guy never adds up all those things. He’s like, yes, you’re actually short one, or I owe you two subcoins for this.
JOHN: I’m going to clip off a piece of that coin.
CRAIG: Everybody just vaguely was like, “That’s about a coin.” Two, better.
JOHN: You’re looking at who could own property is always a question. Obviously, it was only the white man who could own property. Even in Downton Abbey, the whole premise of Downton Abbey is based on the fact that Lady Mary can’t inherit Downton Abbey because of the entail, which prohibited a daughter from inheriting it. Do people smell? People always smell.
CRAIG: Oh, the smell thing. I think about this all the time.
JOHN: In your show, right now, they’re in a civilization where they have some running water, but otherwise, they would have been smelling a lot.
CRAIG: Yes. We presume that if you’re in a civilized settlement, like, say, Jackson, not only do you have laundry, and you showed a lot of laundry and cleaning, but you’ve also probably rummaged a whole ton of deodorant. It’s not like there are stores full of it that you can go rummage through. Maybe they’ve even started to make their own. The issue is more like when you’re dealing with, say, let’s go back to your little town in Colorado in the 1800s, everybody stank. Because everybody stank, nobody stinks.
JOHN: Nobody stank. It’s not notable.
CRAIG: I think about it all the time. I also have this thing about people that start kissing as soon as they wake up.
JOHN: We’ve heard this on the podcast.
CRAIG: On my show-
JOHN: Doesn’t happen.
CRAIG: -when two people woke up and wanted to kiss, one of them said, “No, morning breath.” “I don’t care.” “I’m not–” and I see it all. Why do people do it? I understand why they want to do it, but it’s not cool. Do you just immediately start kissing your wife when you wake up?
JOHN: Me?
CRAIG: Yes.
JOHN: All the time.
CRAIG: Oh, gross.
JOHN: No, never. We’ve both got night guards in.
CRAIG: Sexy.
JOHN: Playing it against each other.
CRAIG: Melissa wears this thing to prevent snoring. It does not work that well. It’s like a hockey tooth guard. It’s massive. She’s like, [mimics heavy breathing]. Oh my God. Sexy.
JOHN: It’s good stuff. Finally, talking about language and voice. This is a thing where you can just go way out, drop the deep end. Can you define something that makes the audience believe that they are speaking properly for the space that they’re in, and yet the audience can actually understand what they’re saying? That’s where I feel like you have to be aware of what the conventions are in other film and TV that the audience have seen, so it doesn’t seem weird.
You can make a very compelling argument for the accent should act like a British person who is speaking in the 1800s should have actually had a New York accent, but we’re not going to hear it right. That’s the reality.
CRAIG: I love the use of language in The Crucible, the
Daniel Day-Lewis version. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but I assume it’s accurate. People often would say, “I were,” instead of “I was.” I were, which we never say.
JOHN: But we can understand it.
CRAIG: We can understand it. It was so specific, and it felt– I have to assume it was accurate. It was such a lovely way of placing us in a different time, but completely understandable.
JOHN: Wrap this up to say that you, as the writer, are going to be making some of these initial decisions, but there are going to be so many more people who have to weigh in on them. A director, a production designer, historians, subject experts, props, the horse person.
CRAIG: The horse person, the picture car person, everybody.
JOHN: You need to be both able to explain and defend your choices, but also be adaptable to other people, their expertise, and make sure you’re just all rowing in the same direction, which may not be your initial direction, but is a good direction.
CRAIG: I will say that costume people, props people, those two in particular, get so excited about period stuff because it’s such a way to zero in. You just have to make sure that sometimes they don’t just turn it into an ’80s museum. With Chernobyl, we were just like, “Look, accuracy, 100%. Don’t feel like we have to push anything.” Did some people in the Soviet Union in the ’80s wear very bad suits? Of course, but people wear very bad suits now. Don’t give them very bad suits. Give them suits that were correct to a normal dressed-in person then.
JOHN: Agreed. All right, let’s move on to some listener questions. The first couple of these are actually about period stuff.
CRAIG: Okay.
JOHN: Eliza writes, “I’m writing a series that follows a family over several generations from present day to the 1930s. I know the arcs for each character, but I’m struggling with how to move between decades in a way that feels elegant feels elegant and motivated by theme without being too on-the-nose. Do you have any advice for transitioning across several timelines in a television series so it feels organic and thematically connected?” This is a television series.
CRAIG: Well, I guess the first question would be, are you moving within decades within an episode, or is it episode to episode that is a different decade?
JOHN: Let’s talk about why we’re asking those questions. Because if each episode is its own decade, I think you have a lot more latitude to just, you’re just restarting things, and the audience is with you. If you have to move between decades within episodes, that’s more challenging. The thematics, I think about the overall, what is the question that you’re trying to address in this episode or in this series overall, and those aren’t necessarily the transitions I’m worried about. I think actually the visual, auditory, story transitions are really what you need to focus on because if it’s– The bad example is I open a door, and then I open the door in the earlier period as we’re moving back and forth. Those things, the audience can understand what you’re doing.
CRAIG: If you’re inside of an episode and you’re going between decades, it’s the same game you play if you’re not moving between decades. The game is, what would make this interesting from here to here? There’s certain versions where you cut to black, start playing, fade up on a song from the 1960s, fade up, you’re in the 1960s. There’s the visual version where there’s a 2025 bus that’s– you’re looking at it as it pulls forward and stops, and then you cut around to the side and starts pulling away. There’s a billboard for cigarettes on the side of the bus, and you look around, oh my God, we’re in a different time. Play the games. Just play the games.
JOHN: See what feels right and natural. Since you’re saying it’s a family over several generations, you’re probably going to see young and old versions of the same characters, and that can work, but can also be really challenging. Just be mindful of, we’re seeing two characters who are roughly in the same space, but you think they’re going to be different actors. Just be mindful of what we’re actually seeing on screen, because if you have the 30-year-old and the 40-year-old version of a character, that’s a hard thing to distinguish.
CRAIG: That’s just clothes. If they are two different actors, then you can use objects. One actor takes his watch off, it’s all scuffed and scratched, and then the next shot is somebody putting that watch on, it’s brand new, and it’s like, okay, it’s him. It’s just from 30 years ago or something. Use props. Use wipes. Natural wipes, not Star Wars wipes. Use music. Music is a big one.
JOHN: Music helps a lot. Makes you feel like you’re in a
consistent, intentional place, and you’re moving from one thing to the next.
CRAIG: That actually ties back into something interesting about what we said earlier. Music is one of those areas where, if you are using a song to signify a time change, you actually have to use an iconic song. It doesn’t have to be the most overplayed song ever, but it needs to immediately go, “I’m from this time.” Not, “What decade was that from?” Because there are songs where you’re like, “I’m not really sure what decade that’s from.”
JOHN: Absolutely. There’s a lot of early rock and roll that could be from any of those.
CRAIG: It could be from anywhere.
JOHN: Nick has a question about period dialogue. “It seems like most films default to Shakespeare lite when it comes to dialogue for anything set before 1900. If John and Craig were doing something set in the past, like about a barbarian tribe during the Roman Empire, how realistic would they get in using the language of the actual time? How do you strike a balance between accuracy and specificity to the era while still making the dialogue understandable to the audience?” What Nick’s describing is we default to an RRP, received pronunciation, for a lot of historical things.
CRAIG: Ish.
JOHN: Ish, yes.
CRAIG: He said before 1900. I’m thinking, no. Westerns mostly take place in the late 1800s, and people aren’t talking like Shakespeare.
JOHN: We’ve established a Southern Western sound for the West, and if you’re in that general space, you’re okay. To a specific example of a barbarian tribe during the Roman Empire, you would probably want to have one voice that sounds like the Roman. Assuming everyone’s speaking the same language, we think it’s a reasonable choice. One voice for the Romans, and I think we have as an audience an expectation that they’re going to speak in a– that Rome is England, and so therefore, in our minds, it’s England. Therefore, the higher status people are going to speak more what we associate with a higher status British person, and lower class people will speak in lower class accents.
CRAIG: Because the English language is stratified by class in the UK version, we do tend to use RP to mean powerful, wealthy, educated, and then your East London to be rabble. At times, it borders on offensive. For instance, especially if you grew up in East London, where a lot of cool people live. Lord of the Rings, which I love, has this thing where the orcs are all cockney, and it’s insane. That’s what?
JOHN: Dwarves are either Scottish or Irish.
CRAIG: Dwarves are Scottish. The hobbits are southwest England. They’re Bristol and stuff like that. Mr. Frodo. I don’t know Mr. Frodo. Also, pirates, weirdly, are all from somewhere there, like Devon. I think they’re all from Devon for some reason or something like that. I don’t quite think that’s fair. On the other hand, you are implying they’re all part of a cluster because the orcs all grow up together. It would seem bizarre if the orcs were like, “I say, I do believe there’s man flesh out there. Let us feast tonight.” The Aragorn was like, “Oy, we just got to move on.” It would be stupid.
JOHN: Again, we approach everything with a set of expectations. If you’re going to abandon those expectations, you’ve got to have a really good reason to do it. In Nick’s example, if we have the barbarians, then the barbarians probably have a German tint to their accent. They have something that they’re probably still speaking English, but they’re speaking with an accent that implies that they have a just as good space.
CRAIG: Therein also is a problem. This was something that we dealt with on Chernobyl very early on. If you speak English, asking somebody to do an accent that is outside of their accent is fine if they’re good at it. Some actors are not good at it, and what you end up with is the Boston Syndrome. The Boston Syndrome, I don’t think, has ever been overcome by any film. Even films that were written by and performed by almost exclusively people from Boston still suffer from Boston Syndrome.
Good Will Hunting has Robin Williams in it, and he does not know how to do a Boston accent, but he tries. RIP, wonderful man, great performance, horrible Boston accent. Those guys knew it, and they were like, “Eh, what are you going to do?” The Boston Syndrome is real. When you ask a group of actors to say, you’re all going to be doing English, but this is slight German. Some of them will be fine, and some of them will be horrible. Now you have the Boston Syndrome.
JOHN: It’s a danger. Last question about period stuff. This one comes from Concerned. “My screenplay takes place during the American Civil War, and while its main story doesn’t focus on slavery itself, people that are slaves are featured in the script. My question is, how should I refer to them? Enslaved person feels modern in a way that could take people out of the moment and may confuse people, but simply referring to them as slaves feels wrong. Roast the question if I’m overthinking it.”
I think there’s two things we’re getting at. You have characters in your story who are enslaved, and I think you can say enslaved as far as scene description, but they need to actually just be character characters, and the fact that they are enslaved should not be the defining aspect of their characters. The people who are referring to them in the course of the story would refer to them as slaves because they’re not going to say, you can’t use modern words for these characters who are in this world where they would say slaves.
CRAIG: This feels a little bit crazy. Whether or not there is some sort of careful language that says we no longer call enslaved people slaves, although they are, that’s what they are. It’s bad. Being a slave is a horrible situation. No one’s saying, “You’re a slave,” and therefore, ha, ha, ha. That’s what everybody called people who were enslaved, and specifically at that time, that’s what everybody called them. In fact, that is what everyone has called people who have been enslaved up until, I don’t know, maybe let’s say 10 years ago.
If you’re writing a script that takes place then, and you are– even if you’re saying just in your description enslaved persons, you’re going to look wrong. Art is not here to conform to academic standards or anything. Art is here to express life, and that is what life was.
JOHN: The term enslaved person, it makes sense for why we want to foreground the fact that these are actual people and human beings who exist independently of their current situation of being enslaved. That makes total sense. In the context of the people inside world of this movie, they’re not going to have that information. Make sure that whatever you’re doing, as the person setting this up, you are being mindful of the reason we want to think of these people as human beings and treat them with the respect that all human beings need.
CRAIG: Unless your movie is making an argument for slavery, I really don’t think this is a problem. Also, I don’t think anybody is going to see the word “enslaved person” and not think slave. Ultimately, the information is exactly the same. You do what is true to that time. Therefore, people, let’s say, in late 1910s, when World War I is going on, they might call their German neighbors Huns. What I wouldn’t do in that script is say, every time in parentheses, slanderous against or crude against German because it’s just– Put yourself in the time. Put yourself in that place. Be inside of it. Be true to it. Don’t let that other stuff-
JOHN: Your instinct to never minimize the characters who are enslaved, to have that one identity of being enslaved, is the right instinct. I just feel like you’re not going to need to use that word in your scene description, probably at all. They have names.
CRAIG: They have names. Also, they’re people. That’s how you show that they’re people. Let’s say you are like someone’s riding by on a horse. They pass a field. Slaves are working. You’re saying enslaved people are working. It takes me out of the world that I’m in because, theoretically, it’s not you saying those people are doing something. It’s the people going by who are thinking it or observing it. It still has to sit within the context of those people.
JOHN: At the same time, in saying that, the sense that you don’t want people to be set dressing. Making sure that if there are people working in the field, find something more interesting than just that because then they do feel like set dressing.
CRAIG: Sometimes background is set dressing. That’s fair. There’s a movie in prison, and somebody’s walking by, and there are a lot of prisoners. Now, people can say a lot of imprisoned people. Sure, but there are a lot of them, and they are set dressing because they’re filling the world out in a natural way. In fact, sometimes showing how many people are just anonymously left to wither away or suffer is in and of itself interesting. It’s not like in Schindler’s List. All those people in the camp had names or anything. No, they didn’t. They were just continuation victims.
JOHN: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Thing. For our One Cool Thing, I have two examples of some new thinking when it comes to alternative power that I thought were both really cool, and I’d never heard about them before. The first is this thing called standard thermal. Right now, we can put up a bunch of solar, and you can get really cheap electricity out of solar, which is great. It’s the cheapest way you can get power for things. The challenge is when you have all that power, you can store it in batteries for a while. If you’re in a place where you need power other times of the year or you need heat other times of the year, what do you do with that extra capacity that you have?
This place called Standard Thermal, their thing is they use extra capacity to basically just generate heat, and they pump it into the dirt, which sounds like it would not work very well, but apparently, you can just store a bunch of heat in dirt. During summer months, you make a bunch of hot dirt, and then you use that hot dirt to create heat for the winter months.
CRAIG: Dirt just stays hot?
JOHN: Yes. You basically pile up, and you make these big dirt piles.
CRAIG: The outside parts of the dirt are insulating the inside parts of the dirt?
JOHN: Yes. Then you basically just pump the heat out of there to use as heating in buildings for the winter months.
CRAIG: How do you pump heat out of dirt?
JOHN: You’re running water or coolant, or you’re basically running–
CRAIG: Coils of water through it.
JOHN: Yes.
CRAIG: It doesn’t lose the heat over time, or just heat
loses it slowly.
JOHN: It holds enough onto it. Again, they’ve just built some test projects there in Oklahoma. What’s smart about it is, it’s just so cheap. It’s a cheap and very-
CRAIG: It’s dirt cheap.
JOHN: It’s literally dirt cheap.
CRAIG: I can’t believe I made Drew laugh.
[laughter]
JOHN: What I like about it is it’s just engineering, and you don’t have to invent anything new. You could do it on a site, and you’re not trying to pump stuff. You’re not trying to move electricity all around the world.
CRAIG: You don’t need rare earth materials to make fancy batteries or anything like that. You just–
JOHN: Battery technology has gotten really good. For when you need power at night, batteries are fantastic. When you need power in February and there’s not enough sun, this seems like a really good way of generating at least heat, which is some of what you need in a lot of places.
CRAIG: That makes all sense.
JOHN: The second energy thing, which I thought was cool, is this company called Pantalasa. I’m going to show you the picture to correct you, so you can see it. It are these nodes that float in the ocean. They look like these spheres with long tails. They basically just bob up and down in the waves. In bobbing them down constantly, they’re just constantly generating power.
CRAIG: Oh, that’s really interesting.
JOHN: Isn’t that so clever?
CRAIG: It’s basically just some electromagnet in there that’s moving up and down.
JOHN: Yes. Actually, what it’s doing is water gets pulled up, and then it gets shot out. It’s spinning these turbines.
CRAIG: Spinning a little flywheel or something.
JOHN: The free float, in fact, generates a ton of power.
CRAIG: Then there’s a battery inside that’s getting–
JOHN: The question is, it’s really easy to generate power on these things, but how do you get the power off of those things? One of the ways they could do it is use the power of electricity to create hydrogen. Then every so often, you send a boat through to pick up the hydrogen.
CRAIG: That’s a little explosive.
JOHN: Yes, but liquid hydrogen, they’ve actually done enough stuff figuring out how to handle that more safely. The other potentially really good use is maybe you don’t need to get power.
CRAIG: How do you get liquid hydrogen, though? You have to really reduce the temperature dramatically.
JOHN: I’m saying liquid hydrogen. I think it’s just compressed hydrogen. I don’t know.
CRAIG: That’s explosive.
JOHN: There’s ways to do it because hydrogen adds an alternative fuel power. It’s the thing that we’re doing more.
CRAIG: I love the idea of that wave motion.
JOHN: The other thing which is potentially smart for it is maybe you don’t actually need to get the power off that. Maybe you can just use that to do power, where you can just use it on the site. You can use it for direct carbon capture. You actually are just pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and converting it that way, or you could use it for long-term computing capacity because basically, you could compute on these things and then just satellites or whatever and beam it to other places.
CRAIG: You could surround an oil rig with these, and then you could use it to pump more oil. No?
JOHN: No.
CRAIG: Okay. Just you know, it’s just brainstorming.
JOHN: Right now, we don’t have good ways. I don’t have wireless. I don’t have electricity to transmit any power, but we can transmit data. If you could do a lot of compute-intensive stuff on one of these things, great.
CRAIG: We know this, that there is a massive amount of energy created by the moon because the moon moves the water around. If we could just start harnessing that, wow. That’s just wonderful. Big wave-capturing spinning wheels. It’s going to screw up some beaches and stuff. Who cares? Just the tide coming in and out, water flowing. I don’t know. It just feels like you’d be able to do it.
JOHN: The other thing I saw recently was the proposal for not a thing we were ready to build yet. Basically, you can just take a silicon that’s the size of a cafeteria tray. One side is just basically the silicon is used as a solar cell. The back side is just used as computer processing. You can just stick them in space, and they actually just float around and do useful, valuable things.
CRAIG: That’s nice. Maybe help us with generating everything through AI. Thank God.
JOHN: Thank God. You have an electric thing here, too. Talk about this.
CRAIG: I do have an electric thing here. I’m not a huge car guy, but I do get excited when they start to make electric cars really cool. We have a gazillion uncool electric cars out there, which is fine. They’re doing great. Baidu is making $20,000 a second. Tesla is making plenty that just sit there and do nothing because nobody wants them anymore, lol. Audi has a concept car. A lot of times, these concept cars are like, “We’re never making this.” They’re making this. It’s called Concept C. It is an all-electric roadster.
JOHN: It’s a roadster, I was going to say.
CRAIG: With a hard convertible top that looks like it folds in and retracts. It is so cool-looking.
JOHN: I would say it’s sexy, but it looks uncomfortable to me.
CRAIG: There’s no back seat or anything. I think it’s probably very comfortable for the person driving and the person right next to that person. There’s no space for anybody else. It looks so cool. It looks like an actual future car. The other thing I like about it is in the interior, they’re adopting this thing that I guess Mercedes or BMW had initiated. I think this will be the trend moving forward called Shy technology. The idea of shy technology is, no, we’re not going to put some massive screen in the middle of the dashboard and go, “Look, it’s our technology.” We just blend it in nicely. It’s muted, and it’s a screen. It’s not screaming at you. It’s not huge. There are still some physical buttons.
When my younger daughter and I went to go buy her her first car, one of her must-haves physically, manipulable air vents. She’s like, “I don’t want one of these cars where I have to go into menus to move air vents around. I just want to be able to grab a thing and move it to get the air on me or off of me.”
JOHN: I understand that tone.
CRAIG: That’s a good example where I think actually our hands work better than technology. I don’t need technology to tell me where the air goes. Anyway, this car looks fantastic. I do have one other bonus, one cool.
JOHN: Oh my gosh. This is a rare treat. Coming with not one but two.
CRAIG: Our friend, Derek Hass, has a show called Countdown on Amazon.
JOHN: Derek Hass, who is responsible for the Chicago universe.
CRAIG: Every week, we watch it together. Melissa and I and Derek and Christy watch together in my house and have a blast. So much fun. The season is almost over. This comes out on Tuesday. Last episode is Wednesday. The specific one cool thing is that Countdown within its season, and I believe it’s 13 episodes, does something that I don’t recall another show like this ever doing. Structurally, it innovates something that I actually think is genius. I wonder if it will catch on. Other people will notice what it did. I think it’s a very smart thing. I won’t spoil it. I’ll spoil it off the air for you guys, but I won’t spoil it here for our viewers.
JOHN: People should check out Countdown on Amazon Prime Video. We’re supposed to just say Prime Video rather than Amazon Prime Video, but I always say Amazon.
CRAIG: We’re saying Amazon. We’re not even saying Prime Video. It’s Amazon.
JOHN: We’re saying Amazon now.
CRAIG: It’s Amazon. What are they going to do? Take away my Prime?
JOHN: That is our program for this week. Script notice is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Whit Morless. If you do an outro, you can send us a link to Ask@johnaugust.com.
CRAIG: It’s done by program.
JOHN: I know. I didn’t hear our program.
CRAIG: I was shocked. Keep going.
JOHN: Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. Craig, I’m sorry we’re not using the drinkwear today for this episode.
CRAIG: I have a lovely glass here.
JOHN: You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all the premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We have a cool thing, I think we’re going to try in the next couple of weeks for our premium subscribers. Stay put. You’re going to get a little advanced sneak preview of a new thing we’re going to try.
You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Witches. A reminder, if you are the designer, who I should be hiring on for this project, please click through the link to look at that. If you’re a student who is at a university right now and wants to try Highland for free, just go to “apps” and click on Highland. You’ll find all the student licensing information there, or just install Highland and click on the student license button. That would also work. That works. Craig, thanks for a fun show
CRAIG: Thank you for a fun program. All right.
[music]
JOHN: Okay, Season of the Witch, we are going to talk through iconic witches, and we’re going to rank them in [unintelligible 01:03:51] here. You can get [unintelligible 01:03:52] tier A, B, C, or D.
CRAIG: We call that S tier.
JOHN: S tier.
CRAIG: S tier.
JOHN: Wow. S tier. What does S mean for you? Superior?
CRAIG: Yes. That’s just straight from video game.
JOHN: Oh, yes. 100% S tier. All right. You had proposed that we needed to add on a witch who was not originally on my list.
CRAIG: Yes. Of course. Well, it’s Meryl Streep. How can you not?
JOHN: Give us the case for her and where you want to put her in.
CRAIG: Well, I don’t know what the other witches are, but she is a tragic figure who both creates the problem of everything and also leads to the solution of everything.
JOHN: She’s the witch from Into the Woods. Does she have a name independent of that? Just a witch? Witch.
CRAIG: She has this gorgeous relationship with her daughter, who turns out to be Rapunzel. You feel so much for her. She sings two of the best songs in the show.
JOHN: Witch, iconic. Iconic is the-
CRAIG: If you are a musical fan, she is the most iconic witch there is.
JOHN: No, that absolutely cannot be true.
CRAIG: I disagree with you.
JOHN: We’re going to go through the list.
CRAIG: I know because you’re going to say Elphaba.
JOHN: I’m going to say Elphaba. We’ll get to Elphaba in a
second. You put her S tier. I would put her-
CRAIG: She’s S tier. Elphaba is A-tier because of Defying Gravity and for that reason only.
JOHN: You’re putting her S tier. I’m going to put the witch from Into the Woods at B-tier just because she was not even– We thought about this for a while, and she didn’t even enter my consciousness. All right, let’s go to the ones who are already on the list. Bellatrix Lestrange, played by Helena Bonham Carter in the Harry Potter franchise.
CRAIG: I don’t even think of her as a witch because that movie is full of women who have magic who are all theoretically witches.
JOHN: Is she C or D?
CRAIG: She’s D because she doesn’t really impact the story that much, and I don’t think of her specifically as a witch.
JOHN: Cersei.
CRAIG: Oh, wow. Cersei is a sorceress, but we’ll go ahead. Cersei is so classic and is about to have a moment, I assume, once Odyssey comes along. I’m going to go with A-tier.
JOHN: Oh, okay. That’s higher than I would guess. Cersei, she polymorphs people a lot.
CRAIG: She’s classic. She turns you into a pig.
JOHN: She does turn you into a pig. There’s a book about her that people love.
CRAIG: I don’t even know that book.
JOHN: Oh, it’s about Cersei. It’s a big seller. I’ll go A. I think she’s the oldest in terms of-
CRAIG: Exactly. She’s the orig.
JOHN: All right. Now we’re at Elphaba. I cannot believe you think she’s anything less than S tier.
CRAIG: She’s A-tier because she sings a great song, but she’s derived from an S-tier witch.
JOHN: Okay. Let’s combine them as one character. I think-
CRAIG: Whoa. Hold on. You can’t.
JOHN: Wicked Witch. Oh, so we can’t?
CRAIG: No, no, no.
JOHN: Elphaba does not exist without the Wicked Witch of the West.
CRAIG: Exactly. This is my point. Elphaba is a modern reimagining of the Wicked Witch of the West, but the Wicked Witch of the West from the bound books and most importantly, the movie, that’s S-tier.
JOHN: Wicked Witch of the West is clearly S tier, but I think they are– I can’t separate the two.
CRAIG: I’m giving Elphaba a gift by making her A-tier because she is derivative of it.
JOHN: We are in agreement that Wicked Witch of the West is S-tier because it’s who you picture when you think of a witch.
CRAIG: That is the witch.
JOHN: You’re putting Elphaba at A-tier. I guess I can see that if we had Elphaba without everything else around her, great. Hermione Granger from Harry Potter.
CRAIG: Again, it’s tough, I guess technically a witch. If we consider her a witch, then she’s– I’m going to say B-tier because I don’t think her magic is necessarily the thing that makes her awesome.
JOHN: The Sanderson sisters, otherwise the Hocus Pocus cutout.
CRAIG: Oh, well, I think they’re C-tier. I think they’re just a little cartoon for me.
JOHN: They’re not who I go to first for this. Drew, you’re welcome to chime in here if we’re getting something [crosstalk].
DREW: I just feel like I’m going to get so much mail on that one. With Hocus Pocus, I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus.
JOHN: I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus. It was around.
CRAIG: I remember it coming out, and I remember it not being particularly successful. Then I think over time, it became a cult thing, and it’s super campy. They should have had it in summer camp. It’s fun for people to dress up because it’s a great dress up. They were parodies of witches. They weren’t real witches to me.
JOHN: I do feel like C is too low for somebody who– It’s a seminal and important witch image for a generation.
CRAIG: I’m not in that generation.
JOHN: I think they might be B for our safety.
CRAIG: I’m excited for the hate mail.
JOHN: Maleficent.
CRAIG: Oh, well.
JOHN: Technically, Maleficent is an evil fairy, but she’s
coded as a witch.
CRAIG: Maleficent isn’t a great character, to be honest with you, from the original Snow White story. Angelina Jolie’s version, they try to zhuzh it up. I’ll give her a B just because, in her old lady image, handing out the apple, she’s spectacular.
JOHN: Oh, no, you’re conflating her with the witch. Maleficent is the villain in Sleeping Beauty. She has the crow. She has this.
CRAIG: Right. Maleficent. Sleeping Beauty isn’t a great story. Just the original.
JOHN: The challenge of it, you have your protagonist who is knocked out.
CRAIG: I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about her.
JOHN: C or D.
CRAIG: I’m going to put her in D, actually. Not a big fan.
JOHN: Morgan le Fay.
CRAIG: Well, I can’t put her into S because I put Cersei up there for historical versions. I’m going to say Morgan le Fay as a horror witch goes into A. She’s pretty amazing. If you’re a King Arthur fan, which I am.
JOHN: Again, an horror witch in the sense of she’s establishing a lot of templates for what we’ll explain this. Here, I originally had Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My daughter was like, “Oh, no, it has to be Selena Gomez’s character
from Wizards of Waverly Place. I’m going to put them in as a group component of–
CRAIG: Nickelodeon/Disney Teen Witches?
JOHN: Absolutely. A young TV show teen witch.
CRAIG: We might as well throw in Bewitched.
JOHN: Bewitched separately.
CRAIG: Okay. B, they’re fun, but not great for me.
JOHN: They are a teenager plus.
CRAIG: Yes.
JOHN: All right. Next up, we have Samantha Stevens, the protagonist of Bewitched.
CRAIG: I love Bewitched.
JOHN: I love Bewitched, too. Dora, come on. Paul Lind, oh my God, his uncle.
CRAIG: Paul Lind anything. [chuckles] I love her. Also, I love the sitcomy vibe as opposed to the adult sitcomy vibe. There was an interesting proto-feminism thing going on there.
JOHN: There really is. Also, just the sanitizing of witches. They’re like, “Oh, they made a show about a witch,” but this is in a conservative time.
CRAIG: Yes, but happily before Satanic Panic hit in the 80s. I’m going to say A.
JOHN: I think it’s fair.
CRAIG: I think she’s A.
JOHN: I think she did some good stuff here.
CRAIG: Yes.
JOHN: Next, we have Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch of the Marvel Universe.
CRAIG: Not a witch. Just can move stuff around with red.
JOHN: It’s interesting because if you look at her role in the Marvel Universe, particularly in WandaVision and more so in– particularly in WandaVision, they really were trying to pull the– to emphasize the witch aspects of it.
CRAIG: Agatha is a witch. I think of The Scarlet Witch as
not a witch, but a woman who can move stuff around using her red power. She’s incredibly powerful. If we were going on power alone, she’s S.
JOHN: She’s not doing a lot of witch stuff. That’s the thing, whereas as opposed to Agatha is doing witch stuff.
CRAIG: I’m going to say C.
JOHN: I think C feels fair for this.
CRAIG: Do you have the witches from Macbeth in here?
JOHN: I don’t have the witches from Macbeth. Okay.
CRAIG: Those three witches over a bubbling cauldron. Bubble toil and trouble.
JOHN: I like that for them. They’re iconic in the sense of the image. They are a coven. They are doing that [crosstalk] stuff. They have no real power. They’re just foretelling things.
CRAIG: Yes, but they’re pretty witchy. They’ve got a cauldron. Just the iconography of the cauldron alone. Just witches stirring a brew in a cauldron, there’s no-
JOHN: Baba Yaga, I think, exists independently of that. It may be an older story.
CRAIG: Baba Yaga also is incredible. Kind of a witch but not really. Do we have the witch from Hansel and Gretel?
JOHN: We don’t have the witch.
CRAIG: That’s S+++. To me, that’s the ultimate witch.
JOHN: She lives in a candy house.
CRAIG: No, she builds a candy house to lure them and then shoves them in an oven and eats them. S+.
JOHN: It’s a good fairytale witch. Can they compete with Wendy the Good Little Witch?
CRAIG: I love Wendy the Good Little Witch. I loved Harvey Comics. First of all, I love that Harvey Comics was called Harvey Comics. They didn’t even try. There’s Marvel, there’s DC, Harvey. Just some guy. “Harvey, what should we call this? Me, call it after me.”
JOHN: There’s a great movie to be made about either Harvey Comics or a fictional version of Harvey Comics. They’re desperately trying to compete against–
CRAIG: They had great stuff. They had Richie Rich, which I loved. They had Casper the Friendly Ghost, and then Casper Sidekick.
JOHN: Wendy the Good Little Witch.
CRAIG: Wendy was adorable. A. She was good, and she was legitimately a witch.
JOHN: I have no sense of what her actual abilities or powers were. They were just–
CRAIG: Same, but you know what? The word witch is in her name, and she actually was a witch. She wasn’t like Scarlet Witch, where she’s just like, “Oh, it’s a fun name.”
JOHN: I remember our last two on the official list. We have the White Witch from the Narnia movies.
CRAIG: Oh, I always think of her as the Snow Queen. Was she called the White Witch?
JOHN: She’s both.
CRAIG: She was fantastic. I would not know what Turkish delight is if not for her.
JOHN: I know about it.
CRAIG: I’ve had Turkish delight. It’s fine. I don’t quite know if it’s something I would sell my family out for. Edmund, you little bastard. I just love that in that version, CS Lewis was like, “Okay, so this is Jesus, and this is Satan. Oh, this is Judas. Now, what should be the 30 pieces of silver? Turkish delight.” That’s awesome. He made it candy. She’s great. She’s an A.
JOHN: I think she’s an A. She’s identified as a witch, but we don’t see her doing–
CRAIG: She petrifies.
JOHN: She petrifies. That’s her big skill, and she actually clearly has world-shaking power, which is great.
CRAIG: Yes, and she’s Satan.
JOHN: Let’s wrap it up with Willow Rosenberg from Puffy the Vampire Slayer.
CRAIG: This is a huge blind spot for me.
JOHN: Oh, yes. I’ve seen every bit of it. I will say Willow is iconic in the sense of she enters as a nerd who then gets into witchcraft just to help out, and then that pulls her into the dark side. It’s metaphors of addiction. Then she has a witchy lesbian lover. Fantastic stuff throughout. I think she is genuinely iconic in her overall play.
CRAIG: This is what I know that people love the Buffyverse. I’m going to admit something. I don’t know any of it. Then there’s so much because there’s Buffy and there’s Angel. I got to tell you, the only times I interact with it, people that make puzzles really dig Buffy. Sometimes datasets will happen where there’s a puzzle, and you’re trying to figure out how do these things go together. It’s like, well, there’s a willow tree, and then there’s an angel heart. Like, “Wait, all these are names from the Bu–” I’ve picked up stuff from that, but I feel bad.
JOHN: I’m putting Willow in A safely. The reason she’s not S-tier is that she’s still a relatable human. The young woman that we’re rooting for. She’s not just an iconic witch at all times. Our S-tiers are the Wicked Witch of the West.
CRAIG: I think so.
JOHN: You say–
CRAIG: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth.
JOHN: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth. Then did we put–
CRAIG: I put the Hansel and Gretel witch up there.
JOHN: Hansel and Gretel witch. Again, they’re iconic. They’re Halloween witches, all of them.
CRAIG: Exactly. All three of them look like Halloween witches to me in my mind.
JOHN: Good. Useful. We’ll put a little graphic up there for people to enjoy.
CRAIG: Now the emails come.
JOHN: Now the emails come from our premium members.
CRAIG: Could you not mention the–
JOHN: Because we didn’t think about it.
CRAIG: Because we didn’t think about it. What do you want from us?
JOHN: Craig and Drew, thank you for figuring out which witch is which on our program.
CRAIG: On our program.
