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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: You’re listening to episode 660 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now one thing I love about our podcast is that we actively solicit suggestions on topics from our listeners. Today’s episode exists entirely because of one email we got. Craig, would you mind reading this email?

Craig: I would not. It says:

“Could you do an entire episode on why Moneyball works? A strange disease I have is watching the same movie over and over again when it affects me, and lately, it’s Moneyball. My older son has been doing this too lately, which I’m either proud of or worried about, and he was the one who landed on Moneyball, a movie I don’t even think I saw in theaters. I would very much welcome an expert understanding of why that movie, which contains so few of the traditional elements of a movie, a B-plot love story, for example, is so effective.” Side note, I challenge the premise.

John, I think we should do this.

John: I think we should. I think this is a great suggestion from any listener, but when it comes from an accomplished journalist, a best-selling novelist, she wrote Fleishman is in Trouble. She also wrote the acclaimed adaptation, the limited series adaptations of Fleishman is in Trouble, who we had her on the show to talk about that, and this summer’s new bestseller, Long Island Compromise. We had to get her on the show. Welcome back to the program, Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me again.

Craig: I love this. We have a genius on. This is great. I get to argue with her about Moneyball, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, and–

Taffy: Is it?

Craig: Extra thank you, Taffy, because we get to talk about baseball on a podcast where 50% of the people on this podcast don’t talk– They don’t even discriminate between various blank balls, basketball, football, baseball, it’s just sports ball to John, and I’m a baseball fanatic. I love Moneyball. I, too, have watched it over and over and over. I think it’s brilliant for so many reasons, and I do think it has all of the traditional elements of a movie, so, huh.

John: Wow.

Taffy: On the surface, the traditional–

Craig: We’ll get into it.

Taffy: Let’s go for it, let’s go for it.

Craig: We’ll discuss.

John: I agree with both of you. I think we’ll try to find the happy middle, the dialectic between these two polar opposites here. This joins your tradition of deep dives. We’ve done it on movies before, so we’ve talked about The Little Mermaid, we’ve talked about Frozen, we’ve talked about Die Hard.

Taffy: Clueless was one of my favorite deep dives.

John: Oh my God, Clueless, incredible. We’re going to do this. Also in our bonus segment for premium members, I would like to talk about money, because, Taffy, your book, Long Island Compromise, is about the intersection of trauma and money. Moneyball is literally about calculating how much a person is worth, so I thought we would dig into our feelings about money and value and how we value ourselves as writers. Money for our bonus segment, premium members.

Taffy: So good.

Craig: Amazing.

John: All right, Craig, you and I have a little bit of housekeeping to do before we can get on with Taffy here.

Craig: All right.

John: About two weeks from now, we are going to be in Austin for the Austin Film Festival. You and I are doing a live Scriptnotes show. I’m doing a 25th-anniversary screening of Go.

Craig: Oh, nice.

John: Yeah. I see that you are on at least one or two other panels. You’re doing the– I can’t believe they drafted you into doing the Pitch Finale. I don’t know how they–

Craig: You know what, I’m there. What else? It’s either I’m drinking while judging the Pitch Finale party, or I’m drinking and not judging the Pitch Finale party. I will say the thing about the– listen, I don’t care about pitches. I don’t think they make any sense. This is like, I don’t know why they keep picking me. They all know this. But it is fun because it’s in a bar, it’s packed, it’s kind of exciting. I feel like Simon Cowell, obviously that’s my part. I play Simon Cowell on the show, and we get to make somebody very, very happy, but the crowd is like really into it. That part I think is fun.

John: That part is fun. Drew will be there. Megana will be there. Craig, I don’t think that Megana’s going to come as well.

Craig: I am now levitating.

John: Chris who does our Inneresting Newsletter will be there as well. They’re there to help support Scriptnotes, but also because we’re launching the new version of Highland and so we’re going to throw a party for that. If you’re in Austin and whether you have your badge or don’t have your badge and you’d like to join us for this launch party for Highland, that’ll be on Thursday afternoon at some point. You need to click the link on the show notes and tell us that you want to come and then we’ll send you the details about that.

It should be a good fun time to see the new version of Highland that everybody else will be using. Let us get to the marquee topic here, Moneyball. We will talk about the development and probably at the end of this because there’s actually a really interesting development history that we can talk through. Let’s talk about the movie that we’re watching on the screen. It’s based on a book by Michael Lewis, screenplay by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin.

Craig: Who?

John: Two hacks, they’ve never done anything else.

Craig: Can you imagine? That’s already screenwriting Voltron. That’s incredible.

Taffy: Right.

John: It is incredible. Story credit by Stan Chervin. Drew has found this undated 166-page draft. It has omitteds in it that makes it feel like it’s a production draft, but it’s not actually a very close representation of what we see on screen right now. Drew at some point made a hop in to tell us like, “This is a thing that was different in this draft as written versus the movie that we see.” Really for our purposes, we’re going to talk about the movie that we experienced.

If you were to download it as we’ve recently watched it, this is the movie we’re seeing. This is why it works on screen the way it works. Let’s get to the premise here because Taffy, you said that this quote contains so few of the traditional elements of the movie, like a B-plot love story, yet it’s so effective. What has been your experience and exposure to Moneyball and what prompted you to actually ask this question?

Taffy: Like I said in my email, my son has started watching Moneyball over and over. My son recites full scenes from Moneyball.

Craig: Yeah, he does.

Taffy: There are a couple of words that you could say that will trigger an entire scene. He is excellent at it. I’m not allowed to disseminate video of it, but I have video of it. In case you see me, I will show it to you.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I think you sent me a clip. We’re not going to post it–

Taffy: Did I?

John: Yes, I think you did.

Taffy: We started watching it a lot together. I have been a sports reporter, but before you get excited, Craig, I do not understand baseball on a level that I have had to, in ESPN Magazine stories, write, “please insert sports stuff here,” which is how it works sometimes if you’re bad. I think of baseball as the language Mandarin. You could learn it, but if you didn’t learn it before you were 11, you will never be fluent at it.

Craig: You might be onto something there because I certainly did learn it before I was 11.

Taffy: See. And by the way, I therefore think that there is something very, very– like I watch Moneyball over and over. I can now recite it. I still don’t know how baseball work. I think one of the successful things about it is that unlike the movie, also about a thing I don’t understand, Rounders? I don’t understand. When I watch Rounders, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to think based on the hand of cards that’s presented to me. I don’t feel that I am missing anything.

I feel like maybe these luminaries who wrote it may be learned about baseball, but understood more from my point of view than theirs, that you don’t need to know anything about baseball.

Craig: I agree with you. I’m running through my mental inventory of Moneyball and it teaches you the things you need to know along the way. You get a basic sense, okay, Billy Beane is the GM. That means he’s deciding who to trade, who to engage, but he doesn’t own the team. Then you have a bunch of scouts whose job, everybody played baseball and they’re old guys and they’re supposed to find you new talent. Then there’s this kid who’s helping him figure out with statistics, how do we solve this problem we have, which is that our team sucks.

One of my favorite quotes of any movie is Billy Beane, as played by Brad Pitt, defines the problem the Oakland A’s are having. You don’t need to know anything about baseball to understand this. “The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap and then there’s us. It’s an unfair game. If you try to think like the Yankees in here, you will lose to the Yankees out there.” Anyone can understand that. We are dealing with an underdog.

John: Let’s talk about digging into more of Taffy’s question. There are things that she is expecting to see in a movie like this that do not appear. Part of it, I think it’s also because the presentation of the movie is not what we might expect. It is shot almost like a documentary. It feels like a documentary at times. The camera’s very loose. There’s a lot of archival footage put in there. You feel like you’re watching things happen in front of the lens, but it’s not as presentational as we might expect from other movies.

Taffy: Can I just say also on that documentary note, we looked up all of the actors in this movie. Some of them are scouts and some of them are professional actors. The professional actors are not acting like professional actors.

Craig: They’re not.

Taffy: They’re acting like people who are in a documentary.

Craig: I’m so glad you said that.

Taffy: It’s amazing.

Craig: Because the person that I’m obsessed with the most, just on a tone point of view, is this actor named Ken Medlock who plays Grady. Grady is kind of the villain scout. He’s the guy who doesn’t want to hear about the idea– the basic premise of Moneyball is baseball’s been around for 100 years. It is imbued with tradition and old ways of thinking, the Oakland A’s are a poor team and they’re losing. This kid comes along from Yale and says, “There’s a better way of thinking about how to evaluate players.”

Grady represents the old guard who’s like, “You and Google boy– as he calls them– aren’t going to change baseball.” This guy, Ken Medlock, I was convinced was an actual baseball scout. He had baseball body, gym teacher face, and just the fluidity and realism of the way he portrayed that character. People don’t talk about a great character actor enough. Ken Medlock, you’re my one cool thing this week. I don’t care. Ken Medlock. So good.

Taffy: Is his name John Henry at the end who plays the owner of the Red Sox?

John: Arliss Howard plays him. Yes.

Taffy: Sorry, Arliss Howard plays John Henry.

Craig: The owner of the Boston Red Sox.

Taffy: The owner of the Boston Red Sox. He’s an actor, but he is acting like somebody I would have interviewed and is trying to figure out how to speak to somebody for the first time in front of a– it’s amazing.

Craig: It really is amazing.

Taffy: It’s like a third kind of movie, a thing that’s conveying itself as the thing we’re used to in a documentary from all these ESPN, 30 for 30 things, right?

Craig: Yes, this stiffness to it.

Taffy: So interesting.

Craig: Bennett Miller, who directed the film, also, a ton of credit there for just both the visual style and also keeping everything so wonderfully grittily grounded. You’re right, like an ESPN 30 for 30.

John: Well, let’s also talk about things you might expect to see in this movie. Let’s imagine that Michael Lewis’s book lands on your desk and like, okay, well, how do we adapt this book? How do we adapt this story? The very basics of the story is Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A’s, has this team that is not winning, does not have the money to do what he needs to do. Ends up recruiting somebody on to help him figure out how to assemble a team in a much less expensive way that is the antithesis of how you’re supposed to be doing baseball.

We get this Michael Lewis book. The things we expect to see in a movie, like Taffy points out, is like, well, where is the B-story love interest? Where is the Brad Pitt love interest? You have Brad Pitt and he doesn’t kiss anybody in the whole movie. Now, Drew, the script that you gave us, there is a love interest in there. Talk to us about what’s different if we wanted to look at this script.

Drew: Yes, from the get-go, he has a girlfriend character who he’s bouncing things off of. A lot of those scenes get repurposed and given to Jonah Hill in the final thing. Yes, throughout, she pops up, they’ll have dinner and just little moments where he gets to talk to her and use her as a sounding board.

John: The movie is almost completely focused on his quest to make this team work under this new principle. Yet there are moments where we are able to hop off of this main ride and see some things who are not directly baseball. We have his daughter. We have Robin Wright who is his ex-wife. We had one scene with Robin Wright and Spike Jonze, who plays her husband, which is great fun.

Craig: Awesome.

John: They’re useful, but they’re not crucial. I think they’re just there to– well, let’s talk about why they’re there. Because almost this entire conversation is going to be about the main arc quest about this. Let’s talk about the little side quests we do with the daughter, with the ex-wife. Why they’re there and what function do they serve in this movie? Because you could have cut them out but they still feel crucial. Craig, I see you squinting like you couldn’t have cut them out.

Craig: I don’t think you should. There’s the right amount of them. To me, the story it’s a classic redemption tale. This character, Billy Beane, is a real person, obviously, was a first-round draft pick coming out of high school, I think, and was projected by scouts to be a star. And he was a complete flop. Ah-ha, scouts, flop, failure, and now he rolls himself into this front office gig, which is generally seen to be a bit like, “Well, you crapped out, so now this is what you can do instead.” His success and that’s what we’re invested in like, can he come back? Can he achieve?

Because in his mind, he’s a loser. His whole thing is, “I am a jinx and a loser. What I’m doing here, on the one hand, theoretically will work and it’s bold. On the other hand, simply because it’s me, it probably won’t work because I am a loser.” We need some stakes beyond whether or not the Oakland A’s succeed. We need to know that there are people at home that he is trying to also prove himself to, that he feels like a loser in context with. The most important one is his daughter.

It’s not like his daughter and his ex-wife are like, “If the Oakland A’s don’t win, then like we said, you’re a loser.” They do believe in him. That’s why it hurts more. He needs to show them, though. He needs to. Or else he goes home with his tail between his legs, again, a failure in the eyes of the people he wishes he could impress. The only people I think he’s trying to impress in this movie are his– really, the only person is his daughter, actually.

Taffy: I also think his daughter is there for a much more practical reason, which is that she is there to talk about his anxiety about being fired. Also, I want to say, I don’t know if this is even an okay thing to say. In a couple of those scenes, Brad Pitt is a different size and wearing a wig. It makes me wonder if he is returned–

John: These small things I never notice.

Taffy: -because there aren’t enough. I notice wigs all the time-

Craig: Oh, goodness.

Taffy: -but Brad Pitt, I was like, “What are those veins in his neck?” He’s bulking up for Troy 2 or whatever. He’s brought back in, and also, she’s a girl at a funny age where she could look like a child or a grown-up within a second.

I guess I think that a lot of this movie revolves around the idea that if you look at the movie in a certain way, Billy Beane is a villain who is just– he throws things. He is cruel to people underneath him. He’s a little bit abusive. He is doing something that actually puts a lot of people’s livelihoods in danger, but she is there to ask him, “Are you going to be fired?”

We have to see with him that the stakes are so, so high. He has another scene with Jonah Hill, with Peter Brand, where he says to Peter Brand, almost apropos of nothing like, “You went to Yale, this is your second job, you’re going to be fine. If I fail at this, I fail forever.” It’s like him against the world, but what is he doing? What about this world? I think the whole thing lands, and he’s saved by the one essential question of the movie, which is, what is the best way to love baseball? Is it to honor its traditions, or is it to innovate so that it becomes what it could be?

Craig: I love having this conversation. I’m fascinated, Taffy, by your view that there’s a slightly villainous aspect to him because I have a very different relationship with this character. My relationship with this character is– one of the reasons I love baseball is that it’s fairly scientific. I remember as a kid reading– I talked about it here on the show before, a book called the Microbe Hunters. There’s this old book written in the 1920s, but it basically catalogs seven or eight great scientists in history who tracked down the cause of disease and figured out a way to solve it.

Louis Pasteur, for instance. One of the things that keeps coming up over and over in these things is how much resistance each one of these people faced by the church, by commonly accepted… And the tension that I felt reading this was, there’s like this innate anger in watching somebody who is scientifically correct having to force their way past ignorance, doubt, fear, and superstition to prevail at great risk to themselves.

Watching this movie, that’s what I connect to. It’s like watching a story about Galileo or Copernicus trying to argue that, “No, the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. The earth revolves around the sun, and I’m going to risk my life and limb to prove it because it’s correct.” I love that. I do. I love him for it, and I forgive him all of his tantrums and his stuff.

Taffy: I think that you’re right, and I think that that’s why it’s a great movie. I think his villainy is just viewed from all of these different parts. I do think he’s doing the work of innovators, and he’s very afraid. Also, there’s no winning for him. Even at the end when he wins, he didn’t win the last game of the season, so he gets to hate himself all over again. I think this is what I meant exactly when I said this doesn’t come along with the traditional, not just a love story. But with a certain kind of sympathy and a certain kind of like a dog, all of the things that you would have if we were showing you were such a great innovator but a really difficult personality.

It’s almost like it’s one of the freest movies I’ve ever seen because it just allows him to be in this story about this thing he was trying to do without– when I was learning how to write screenplays, I was told that if you have this difficult character, you should give him like a disability. The professor, I remember, always said, “Clubfoot.” I don’t know. That’s what he always said.

Craig: Worked for Shakespeare, I guess.

Taffy: Right. I felt like this was free from the constraints of that. That’s more what I mean when I say the protections around a traditional story are that he’s just allowed to do this. He’s allowed to fire people and send them home. He is allowed to have the hate of the people. Also Brad Pitt’s performance in this, his contempt for the people he’s talking to.

Craig: It’s so good.

Taffy: It’s so good.

Craig: “What is the problem? Enh. What is the problem? How can you solve it if you don’t know what it is?”

You’re absolutely right about everything you say. The counter really is just that there are elements that if– and I don’t know what the ordering was. I don’t know if Zaillian sat down and then Sorkin showed up, or Sorkin sat down and Zaillian showed up. It doesn’t matter if you have both those guys. The things that pop out when you look at the book and the story are, A, this guy was first-round draft pick and failed. That’s good character setup.

B, the Oakland A’s suffer this incredible challenge because they lose their star player. In general, they’re poor, and so the owners can never afford to keep the good players. They always leave for free agency. Then by applying this method, which no one believed in, the Oakland A’s go on to tie the record for most consecutive wins in a season by a team, and that is capped off by this insane game where they were up by an enormous amount.

It was in the bag, and then they almost blew it, and then the guy who wins it for them is the very guy that Billy Beane went out and pulled off the scrap heap even though he had unrepairable nerve damage and can’t throw, as Grady says. All of that stuff gives you really basic things. The only thing that would be missing there and then along it comes is what is the central relationship. Where is the love story?

The love story, to me, I would argue, is between Billy Beane and Peter Brand, that it’s Brad Pitt and it’s Jonah Hill. Because obviously it’s a buddy-buddy love story, but it is two guys who decide they’re going to go all in with each other and trust each other. The look when they pull off that trade for Rincón and Jonah Hill, the passion of it. You see these guys are in love with each other. They’re falling in love, and the whole thing will be on their shoulders.

To me, there are those romantic, basic storylines, and of course, the beautiful moment of Billy Beane to say, “Okay, we’re winning. I’ll show up at the 20th game. Oh God, I showed up and we immediately started to lose.” That’s the final climactic test of a character, all that stuff. I agree with you. There is all this beautiful freedom, and then you have all these great traditional elements that I think, had they not been there, this would have been a hard movie to write.

Taffy: Can I just say one more thing?

John: Please.

Taffy: I’m sorry. I agree with all that. The traditional stuff I was talking about was more like someone having sex with Brad Pitt.

Craig: Oh. Yeah, that’s pretty traditional.

Taffy: It makes me always think, by the way, which is why I love sports movies, that I really do believe you just have a freedom in these kinds of movies. I also want to say that I think that the love story– I love their relationship, but I think the love story is between Billy Beane and baseball. It is like-

Craig: Fair way to look at it.

Taffy: -it’s the only relationship that changes. He and Peter Brand are sort of like Butch and Sundance for the long haul. Billy goes from, is the best way to love baseball, to look at its statistics, or is it to just love it? He comes around to the best way I can love baseball is by trying to get to win this game. Anyway, you go on, sorry.

Craig: No, I think that’s a fair point. Look, what’s the line that people quote the most? “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Baseball, which is, if you don’t love it the way I do, is one of the more boring sports to watch on television. Baseball, without question, empirically, factually, is the best sport to turn into a movie. There are so many great movies that have baseball at their center, and so few that have football or basketball. There are some, but you don’t have a field of dreams. You can just go down the list of incredible baseball movies and how much fun they are, all the way down to Bad News Bears. There’s no–

Taffy: What is it about baseball that does that?

Craig: Well, great question. Only a theory. Baseball is one of the few games where everything stops to let one person face off against one person, even though there’s a whole team. Baseball is the only sport that doesn’t have a clock. There’s no like– baseball is full of these traditions. It is pastoral. The fields are all different. There’s this sense that it was cobbled together out of America. I think most importantly, it’s the fact that there’s no clock.

The ability to stop and pause and feel anxiety is enormous. And only baseball has a home run. Everything else, a touchdown is how you score. You score touchdowns or you kick a field goal. In basketball, football in hoop. Hockey, puck in net. Soccer, put ball in goal. Baseball, you can run around the bases. You can steal home. Then there’s the home run, which is just everything stops. Everyone has a party. It’s just dramatic. Slow, but it’s wonderful. I love it.

Taffy: It also has a moment as opposed to moves. It has a moment.

Craig: Has a moment. When we get to the moment in this film where Scott Hatteberg gets to the plate and has a chance to win this game for them, it’s the same moment that you’ve seen in The Natural with Robert Redford. You see this over and over. Everything slows down. Time slows down. Bull Durham–

Taffy: Parenthood.

Craig: Every movie with baseball, there is a moment where everything gets slow and quiet. It’s just me and the hands squeezing on the bat. Everyone almost shoots it the same way and it works every frickin’ time. Because, you put it perfectly, baseball has space for moments and other sports don’t.

John: Yes, if you try to watch a football game or soccer game–

Craig: Match.

John: -you’re trying to follow the ball. You’re trying to follow, where’s the ball? Because that’s where the action is. Versus baseball, you’re looking at the people and what the people are doing. You can follow the action much more clearly and so can the camera, so can the audience, which is fantastic.

Let’s follow the ball in this story and take a look at how it unfolds on screen. We’re going to start with, the movie opens with Billy being listening to– not really listening to this disastrous game.

He’s frustrated. This is where we wonder if he’s a villain because he smashes the radio. He’s really upset. Then, seven minutes in, we get him explaining what the problem is and what he needs. This is a scene where he’s going to talk to the owner of the team. Let’s take a listen to this clip from seven minutes into Moneyball.

Billy: We’re not going to do better next year.

Steve: Why not?

Billy: Well, you know we’re being gutted. We’re losing Giambi, Damon, Isringhausen. Done deal. We’re in trouble.

Steve: You’ll find new guys. You found Jason, you found Damon.

Billy: I need more money, Steve.

Steve: Billy.

Billy: I need more money.

Steve: We don’t have any more money, Billy.

Billy: I can’t compete against $120 million with $38 million.

Steve: We’re not going to compete with these teams that have big budgets. We’re going to work within the constraints we have, and you’re going to get out and do the best job that you can recruiting new players. We’re not going to pay $17 million to players.

Billy: I’m not asking you for 10 or 20, 30 million dollars. I’m just asking for a bit of help. Just get me a little closer and I will get you that championship team. I mean, this is why I’m here. This is why you hired me. I got to ask you, what are we doing here-

Steve: Billy, I–

Billy: -if it’s not to win a championship?

Steve: I want to win just as much–

Billy: That’s my bar. My bar is here. My bar is to take this team to the championship.

Steve: Billy, we’re a small-market team, and you’re a small-market GM. I’m asking you to be okay not spending money that I don’t have. I’m asking you to take a deep breath, shake off the loss, get back in a room with your guys, and figure out how to find replacements for the guys we lost with the money that we do have.

Billy: I’m not leaving here. I can’t leave here with that.

Steve: What else can I help you with?

John: All right, such a great scene. You guys are talking about your experience with baseball and so you were making fun of me for sports ball and not knowing anything. Here’s what I will say. I had not seen this movie in the theaters, I don’t think. Until Taffy wrote in with the email, I was like, have I seen Moneyball? I watched Moneyball and it’s of course fantastic. What I found useful is I could see the analogies to the studio system that we’re used to working in this movie.

Billy Beane is the producer. He’s not the director. He’s not the coach. He’s not the one who’s directing all the action on the field. He’s the producer putting the whole thing together, but he’s not the studio head. Right now he’s talking to the studio boss saying like, “I need more money.” They’re like, “There’s no more money. You got to figure out with what you have.” He has to figure out like, “Okay, well, I don’t know how to do this. I’m explaining very clearly what I need, and I’m not getting what I need. What am I supposed to do?”

The scene we just played is essentially I want song. If this was Moana, this is How Far I’ll Go. This is I have this thing I need to do, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to need to find a way to win because I want this team to be a competitor at the highest level. I want to win.

Craig: You nailed it there, and I love your analogy of, because it’s dead right, this guy that he’s talking to is the studio chairman. He’s the producer. The director is the manager, and the actors are the players. He is saying, “You guys want me to, and I want to win.” He’s not even saying, “If I need more money to be able to do the job, you’re asking me to do so I can keep my job.” He’s saying, “I need more money so I can win.”

“I want to win,” and what this guy is telling him is,” I don’t have more money. You’re not getting more money.” I love just how stolid he is, “And hey, I’d love to win too, but also, it’s not actually that big of a–“ really, as long as our tickets sells and I profit, he’s not in it for the same reason Billy Beane is. That’s very, very clear. What a wonderful way of establishing where Billy is in the pecking order, what he wants, and what the problem is.

John: Yes, I agree with you, establishing what is the problem so that the hero can go about trying to solve the problem. So Billy Beane goes back to his scouts because he needs to find a replacement for the players that he’s lost. The scene in the movie is terrific with all these– a mix, I think, of real scouts and some actors in there playing scouts, and as we talked about, the documentary feel of this is fantastic.

Now, the script that Drew found actually has a scene that’s different that’s really, really good, and so I thought we might do a little play acting here, and let’s read through the scene that’s actually in the script for this thing. Craig, will you play Billy Beane?

Craig: Sure.

John: Taffy, can I have you play Grady? I’ll do Poat. I don’t know whoever Poat is. This, we are in the conference room with a team talking about how to put this together, and Billy Beane has lost his patience with his scouts.

Billy: What if we’ve been wrong this whole time about what ingredients manufacture a win? What if this whole time we thought it was the chicken that made the chicken soup taste good when really it was the onions that made the chicken soup taste good? Onions are a lot cheaper than chicken. You see what I’m saying?

Poat: I don’t have the first idea of what you’re saying.

Billy: We got to go start over. We got to go rethink this thing. We got to go look where others aren’t looking.

Grady: With all due respect, we’ve been doing this for a long time.

Billy: It doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. You watch nature docs? You know what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies. I’m open to any solution, as long as it’s not what the other guys are doing. Now, I’m going to Cleveland to poach an outfielder named Brandon Garcia.

John: All right, so this is a scene that’s not in the movie. At the end of this whole segment, we’re going to talk about sort of the development process of this, because this is a really weird situation. What I like about this is like, this is the feeling of the scene, but it’s not the actual words that are in the scene. You can see the scene like, oh, I get the shape of this. I get like what it is that he’s trying to do, but these words are not what we’re actually seeing on screen.

Craig: I think runt of the litter made it in, as I recall.

John: Yes.

Taffy: Runt of the litter did make it in, but it also feels like you’re doing a baseball movie and you’re writing it and you don’t know how much the person reading it knows about any of this. You just over-explain so that everyone’s on the same page and then you could take it out.

Craig: That’s a really good point. One of the things that they threaded beautifully on the page and then on the subsequent film is, they make sure that the way Billy is explaining things to these guys, and specifically the what is the problem scene, why I love that scene so much is, he’s explaining it to them, but not in a way that you would have to if you were with baseball people. He’s explaining a baseball thing to baseball people, but he explains it in a way where you go, ah, they haven’t considered doing it like this before and very specifically, he talks about how important it is to get on base.

What he says is, “I don’t care how people get on base,” because these guys do. All he care is how he gets on base. This is who we have to replace, Jason Giambi. This was his on-base percentage. We have to get three people who in the aggregate recreate Jason Giambi. That is a way of explaining things to baseball people where I go, oh, yes, whereas the chicken soup thing here feels a little bit like, oh, none of us know baseball, so let’s use a cooking analogy.

John: Yes. All right, so we zoom ahead and so he’s going to talk with the Cleveland Indians about doing a trade there. It’s in that room that he sees Jonah Hill’s character. He’s playing Peter Brand, who’s just a guy off in the background who would be a day player, except that Brad Pitt notices him and is like, “There’s something, people are listening to this kid for whatever reason.”

He goes and finds this kid in the bullpen and talks to him. There’s a scene which is like a first kind of an aggressive meet cute between them there. Then the real meat of the scene happens in a parking garage below. He’s just like, “Follow me down to the parking garage.” Let’s take a listen to that parking garage in which Peter Brand explains his theory of the case.

Peter: There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. This leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. I apologize.

Billy: Go on.

Peter: Okay. People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. You’re trying to replace Johnny Damon. The Boston Red Sox see Johnny Damon and they see a star who’s worth $7.5 million a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. The guy’s got a great glove. He’s a decent leadoff hitter. He can steal bases, but is he worth the $7.5 million a year that the Boston Red Sox are paying him? No.

No. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions. If I say it to anybody, I’m ostracized. I’m a leper. That’s why I’m cagey about this with you. That’s why I respect you, Mr. Beane. If you want full disclosure, I think it’s a good thing that you got Damon off of your payroll. I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.

John: Wow. I pulled that clip this morning and so I was watching it as I was playing. Now that I just listened to the audio, you realize that music cue comes in at just that moment and says like, aha, this is where we’re getting a resonance between what he wants and what I want, that the light bulb is starting to glow there.

Craig: We also start to shift to footage of Johnny Damon and what he does. Johnny Damon, it always hurts me in my heart a little bit because the Yankees eventually make the same mistake the Red Sox do with Johnny Damon, no offense to Johnny Damon, but everything that this character is saying here is correct. The most important part of this is baseball thinking is medieval. It’s hard for us now, if you are a baseball fan, to process how medieval it was all just this short time ago.

Spoiler alert, not only do the Oakland A’s and Billy Beane adopt this way of thinking, everyone does, and not just a little, an enormous amount. It hits its crescendo with a guy named Theo Epstein who becomes a very young Billy Beane-ish general manager of the Boston Red Sox. Boston Red Sox don’t, they’re not able to get Billy Beane. They end up with Theo Epstein. Theo Epstein applies all these principles and breaks the curse. The Boston Red Sox finally win the World Series after a gazillion years.

Then what does Theo Epstein do? He leaves Boston Red Sox and goes to the Chicago Cubs, the only team with a longer curse, and they win the World Series using all of this. The problem baseball deals with now is that maybe they’ve gone a little too far with this. They have a billion statistics now. It has become insane. Just a short time ago, what they had was a bunch of scouts going, “He’s got a good baseball body. He’s got good hands.”

John: Yes, it was like phrenology. Yes, it felt medieval. Now, I’m not pushing back, but I’d say like, growing up, I always heard about baseball stat. People were always obsessed with stats.

Taffy: That’s what I was going to say, that you could look in The New York Times and–

Craig: Sure, there’s a box score.

Taffy: Yes, and see what happened at every point in the game. I also just want to say, my birthday is on October 26th. I can’t tell you how many game three, four, five, like surprise dinners I’ve had with boyfriends that forced me to watch one of these games. It feels like it’s all statistics and that’s what every– people make snow angels in statistics. It’s hard for me to understand why this was such a big deal.

Craig: Here’s what statistics used to be. I, of course, collected baseball cards like every little boy baseball fan. On the back of the cards, there were statistics. A hitter has a batting average. That’s how frequently they get a hit. They have home runs, hits, stolen bases, runs batted in. Those are your five statistics.

Here are what you have now just for hitting: You have batting average on balls in play. You have isolated power, late-inning pressure situation, on-base plus slugging. You have slugging percentage, which wasn’t a thing back then at all. Pitches per plate appearance, runs created, weighted runs above average. The most important one, wins above replacement. They figured out how many wins you create above the league average of who you are at your position. There are weighted runs created plus. There are maybe, and pitching– don’t get me started, there are about 40 statistics that they have now, including things I literally don’t know what they mean, like skill, interactive, earned run average. The spreadsheets that are happening right now with these players is insane. It’s insane.

John: Now Craig, what I would say though, is the success of this movie is that we don’t need to know about any of those statistics, because the only thing that Jonah Hill is introducing is that we need to actually figure out how much they are worth. Because we, as people, understand money. It’s like we don’t have the money to do this thing, so how much money is this person worth? I think one of the things when we’ll get into the bonus segment too, but like the movie talks a little bit about assigning a value to a person and reducing them down to just their statistics and not think about them as human beings.

Craig: As people.

John: Yes.

Craig: I will say like the one thing that they did brilliantly here was, and this was an early day’s thing for this sort of stuff, sabermetrics is ultimately what it was called, is on-base percentage. Like I said, it used to be, how many hits do you get? How many walks do you get? How many home runs do you hit? How many hits do you hit? What he’s saying here, what Peter Brand says in that speech we just heard is, I see an imperfect understanding of where runs come. Your goal should be to buy wins, and in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. What he boils it down to is, to get runs, you need people on base.

They have to reach base. The imperfect understanding of baseball was walks. It’s mind-blowing to think that this was revolutionary, but the big revolution at the time was saying, a guy who reaches first base by hitting singles, and a guy who reaches first base by walking a lot, are the same guy. We’re paying the singles hitter an enormous amount more. They boiled it down to just that one concept. So why do you want Jason’s little brother, Jeremy Giambi, because he gets on base? Why do you want David Justice, an old guy whose best days are behind him, gets on base? Scott Hatteberg, gets on base.

Taffy: Am I correct to think though, in baseball, that it’s more interesting to watch someone run to the base than to walk to the base?

Craig: Of course.

Taffy: Is that what it is? It’s that like betting changed this? It’s that it didn’t matter anymore if it was entertaining, it mattered what you were betting on?

Craig: The ultimate entertainment, I think, is winning. What fans want is winning.

Taffy: I feel that way.

Craig: You, as a Yankee fan, if a pitcher wants to fall apart and walk eight guys in a row, which means a bunch of guys are going to score just by being walked in, awesome. Getting on base is not as exciting as getting a hit, no question. Winning is the most exciting thing. That’s what sells out a stadium and sells out your season tickets for the next season.

John: And in baseball and other sports, if there’s a thing that is happening that is not entertaining, they will change the rules to make the more entertaining thing happen. That’s happened in baseball in the last few years, right, Craig? Where they’ve changed some of the things to speed up the play and just make-

Craig: They have.

John: -it a more interesting game.

Craig: By the way, after a century of refusing to. I just want to say, baseball has been the most rules-change-resistant sport there is. Over the last 10 years, I think they have made a few, not dramatic, but a few good rules changes. For so long, they refused to change anything. Whereas basketball is like, you know what, they love the three-point line. They love it in colleges, screw it. Let’s do it. Let’s put it in.

John: Brilliant. All right, so let’s get back to the actual movie that we’re watching on screen.

Taffy: Especially since it’s so sad that I’m not going to remember anything you said, but I understood it in the moment. So sad.

John: Getting back to the movie that we’re watching on screen. Billy Beane is implementing these changes over the resistance of his scouts. He’s making trades and changes to the lineup that his head coach hates, that everyone says is not going to work. I think according to movie logic, it doesn’t work. Luckily, the true story is that it does not work at the start. They’re not winning games. Everyone is coming down on him like this is a stupid idea and he’s doomed for failure until it starts to work.

Taffy: And they have this moment where the two of them have to really recommit to each other. Billy and Peter have to decide like, “Do we really believe in this?” That’s a very touching moment to me. I think that so many of the things we’re talking about are aided by music and showing something on the screen that is illustrating the thing that they’re saying. In that moment where they recommit to each other about it is the moment that I understand really what I’m watching.

Craig: We have to personify the resistance. The resistance was personified by this scout Grady. Grady gets himself fired by putting his hand on Billy. His very baseball-y kind of thing. Then we have a new villain. The new villain is Art Howe, the manager. Played brilliantly as always by the late greats Philip Seymour Hoffman. The problem now is, okay, I’m the producer of the movie. I’ve come up with a plan that might make this movie good with the tiny amount of money we have. The director isn’t going along with the plan. And I can’t set the lineup directly.

What I can do as a general manager though is start to trade guys that I don’t want playing to make the manager have to play the people I do want playing. This is the great tension and in the best part of it all is that in the end, you see Art Howe– by the way, this isn’t really how it worked in real life. They did not fight like this. Art Howe makes the fateful, wonderful decision when everything is on the line. They’re trying to make baseball history to send Scott Hatteberg to the plate, which is his commitment to being honorable and pursuing of truth rather than baseball medieval thinking.

John: Now, so one of the things that the story does do, they establish that Billy Beane does not watch the games. He does not want to listen to the games. He doesn’t want to have any direct interaction with the players. He doesn’t travel with them. There are moments along the way that he is actually becoming more involved in the day-to-day. He’s in the locker room more and talking with them. A scene I think really embodies this is his conversation with David Justice, who they’ve now recruited on-

Craig: So good.

John: -to play for them. This is a senior player, and they’re having tension. This is all happening at a batting practice. Let’s take a listen to this scene.

Billy: Had a few thoughts.

David: Yeah?

Billy: Yeah.

David: Can you teach me some things?

Billy: Excuse me?

David: I’ve never seen a GM talk to players like that, man.

Billy: You’ve never seen a GM who was a player.

David: Huh.

Billy: We got a problem, David?

David: Nah, It’s okay. I know your routine. It’s patter, it’s for effect, but it’s for them. All right? This shit ain’t for me.

Billy: Oh, you’re special?

David: You’re paying me seven million bucks a year, man, so, yes, maybe I am a little bit.

Billy: No, man, I ain’t paying you seven. Yankees are paying half your salary. That’s what the New York Yankees think of you. They’re paying you $3.5 million to play against them.

David: Where are you going with this, Billy?

Billy: David, you’re 37. How about you and I be honest about what each of us want out of this? I want to milk the last ounce of baseball you got in you. And you want to stay in the show. Let’s do that. Now, I’m not paying you for the player you used to be. I’m paying you for the player you are right now. You’re smart. You get what we’re trying to do here. Make an example for the younger guys. Be a leader. Can you do that?

David: All right, I got you.

Billy: We’re cool?

David: We’re cool.

Taffy: Villainy. This is such a mean scene. This is so mean.

Craig: It’s so wonderful you think that.

Taffy: I feel like his arc is like, yes, he keeps a distance from his players. There’s this point where he’s trying to give them a pep talk and it’s like an eight-word disaster. “You don’t look like a winning team, but you are one, so play like one,” is what he says. In things like that, I feel like we are being set up storytelling-wise. By the way, patter is such a showbiz word. I do not believe at all-

John: Don’t believe it.

Taffy: -anyone here [unintelligible 00:50:00] yes. I think we’re being set up for a guy who is trying his hardest to keep his distance and can’t do it without getting a little bit messy. That’s what the three-part runner about cutting players is, when he’s trying to show art and he keeps cutting players.

Again, on my 30 millionth viewing, I started to think, that’s actually pretty terrible. You are firing people and ruining their lives because you’re having an argument with this guy. It’s the same thing as a guy who throws his chair across the room. It’s like a display of something that hasn’t aged very well.

Craig: I shockingly have an entirely opposite point of view about this.

Taffy: Good good good.

Craig: One of the things about sports, and when you listen to fans discussing sports, they’re brutal. The fans are the meanest ever. A little bit like the way the audience out there on Twitter is the meanest about, we never talk about each other’s shows or movies the way people online just go, garbage, blah. People are brutal. There are entire, still functioning, listen to AM radio stations that are nothing but call-in shows for 30 to 50-year-old, 60-year-old men to yell about players sucking. There is a brutal reality to sports, which is winning is winning. Every athlete gets into it to win. It is a binary function. There’s winning and losing.

Billy’s job is to make them win. He’s not cutting those players to win an argument. He’s cutting those players because that’s their best chance to win, and there’s somebody in the way of their best chance to win. That’s the thing about sports where it gets super focused. This scene, to me, is not villainy. This is actually kindness, because when you start to lose it as a man, where you’re like I had this physical capacity as a man, and there’s a reason the scene is set where it is. It’s in the stadium, in the back area of the stadium inside, and David Justice, who was an amazing player, is in the batting cage crushing these pitches coming out of the pitching, the little machine, right?

He’s putting on this display of masculine power, and Billy is like, you need to graduate because you’re 37. If you’re hanging on to what that was, it’s leaving you. I’m telling you have to redefine the value of your masculinity, and your masculinity’s value is no longer physical prowess, it’s wisdom.

Taffy: It’s we’re all told that we can’t always play the children’s show, right? Is that what it is, the children’s game? That’s what it’s called?

Craig: Yes.

Taffy: I feel that the movie agrees with me that it’s villainy, which is why he gets the soda in the end. I think that you’re right. I also think that when he restores the soda after David Justice is like, why am I paying for my own soda? It is an admission of villainy.

Craig: I don’t know if it’s an admission of maybe imperfection, but I want to point out how fantastic the beginning of this scene is. This is where there’s this formalized romantic way of portraying men talking to each other, and Mamet is the king of it, right? Sorkin and Zalian both excellent at it. The beginning of this: I got a few thoughts. Yeah? Yeah. Teach me some things? Excuse me? Never seen a GM talk to players like that, man. You never seen a GM who was a player. We got a problem, David? Now, there’s so much being said there in this blah way. You got a few thoughts? Get out of here. Yes. You have no validity with me. Teach me some things.

He’s just going basically, dude, you suck. You’re not a player. Then Mr. Sensitive/Villain goes, yes, I was. David Justice goes, not like me. Not even close. What are you doing down here, man? Then this thing about the money. I’m sorry, he’s right. The Yankees were paying $3.5 million dollars for David Justice to play against them. It’s hard truth and that’s why at the end, I think David Justice says we’re cool because he knows it’s true.

Taffy: Right, he can’t win.

John: My previous analogy, like this is actually a story about show business. You can map everything into the equivalent show business thing. I think about Amy Pascal running Sony Pictures while this is happening and she was the owner of everything and she had to make this decision. The three of us have all been the person in charge on set or we’ve had to make tough calls. I remember going to the first AD saying like, “I never want to see that extra again.” Just like, “Make them disappear.” That’s villainy but it’s also like this is standing in the way of what I need to do my job.

This conversation is really, it’s having the conversation with your lead actor, the top of the ticket. I need you to be a leader here. We had Ryan Reynolds on the show. We were talking about that, about when you’re number one on the call sheet, I need you to do a certain thing. Act like the number one on the ticket and be the example here. Having that honest conversation is just so crucial. I can’t imagine the back half of this movie working without this scene.

Taffy: I agree. I will say that the second AD having the conversation with the background person is the villainy. You were incredibly passive in that as you were supposed to be, right? You were supposed to not, you’re not supposed to fire them yourself. That’s the thing is that all the more so, this is him doing it in a way that we understand, but is brutal.

Craig: Yeah, and effective.

Taffy: Very effective. It pokes at every masculine little point. He just punctures everything.

Craig: But then builds them back. Yes, that’s the thing. I think the reason it works is he’s not saying you shouldn’t play or you should quit. What he’s saying is the implication of the movie was David Justice shows up and he’s just like, this team sucks. I’m just going to take my money, go out there, dog it, not try that hard, whatever. If the stuff works great, if it doesn’t, I don’t care, right?

Then he’s coming and saying, no, no. Actually, you do have a role here that could matter. It won’t be by occasionally hitting a home run. It’s going to be by teaching, mentoring, and leading by example. That’s your new value. You can feel in the scene– who’s the actor that played? He did such a good job.

Taffy: He did such a good job.

Craig: Playing David Justice. You can see him actually like, yes, actually, there is a competitive spirit in me that resented the fact that I have to give up and not care. Billy’s given him a reason to play.

Taffy: It’s so interesting because maybe the whole runner about cutting people is about how the most direct conversation is actually the kindest. That you don’t sit there and you don’t sit– maybe the movie is trying to explain that to you, this scene.

John: Yes. Brad Pitt’s character explains to Jonah Hill, this is how you cut a person. We actually see Jonah Hill having to do it and how to have the grown-up conversation about how to be the second AD who’s telling the extra that I don’t ever want to see on set that goodbye, you’re being paid for the day and see ya without a reason, why you were so annoying in that shot.

Craig: Or over apologizing or dragging it out or making it, there is– and Billy Bean’s character is brutally direct. You can also see from that very beginning scene that you cited, John, the problem that he has is also brutal. There’s no way to win if you pussyfoot around it. You have to just go straight at it. When you see the, my favorite scenes in the movie are the two scenes where he’s with the scouts because he’s so brutally direct. It’s wonderful. Watching again, that greatest character actor.

Taffy: My son Ezra is available to act that out for you right now.

Craig: Ezra may just do it all day long. One day I’ll be Billy, he’ll be Grady, then he’ll be– and then we can do the Fabio.

Taffy: Oh, he’ll do both sides.

John: Who’s Fabio?

Craig: He’s a shortstop.

Taffy: Who’s Fabio? I think he’s a shortstop.

Craig: He’s a shortstop. Yes, no, you got to go carry the one. There’s so many great little moments in there that are incredible. He walks a lot. Do I care if it’s a hit or a walk? Then he points, you do not. Do you want me to talk when I point at you, yes.

Taffy: When you point at him.

Craig: So many great things in those scenes.

Taffy: Yes, oh my God.

Craig: Anyway, this movie, and can we just talk for a second about the beautiful thing at the end? This is why I love baseball. They have this incredible moment where it does all work. Billy seemingly is able to overcome the curse of him even being near the team and they win and they win because of Scott Hatterberg and a home run. It’s tremendous, but they don’t win. They don’t, ultimately they don’t win the World Series. There’s this lovely, it’s a metaphor, Stone Hill over in the Plains-

Taffy: I know what it is.

Craig: -of this guy in their farm system who hits a ball and because he’s a big guy and he’s slow, he thinks it could be a double. He rounds first, gets scared that he’s going to get thrown out, tries to get back to first, falls. Then it turns out he hit a home run.

This is true. The Billy Bean didn’t think he did it and he did. He changed baseball permanently. By the way, the Oakland A’s winning 20 games in a row that season, that is insane. That is bigger than winning the World Series. It’s so special. The tragedy, of course, is that the Oakland A’s are no longer in existence as of right now.

Taffy: Last week.

Craig: That’s correct. The Oakland A’s played their last games as the Oakland A’s. The entire franchise is leaving Oakland and is being reconstituted as the Las Vegas Aces. This is not the first time this has happened in baseball. This has happened a lot in baseball and in all sports. There’s a reason that the basketball team in Utah is called the Utah Jazz. It’s because they used to be in New Orleans.

John: Because jazz is what I associate with Utah, yes.

Craig: Of course, the Los Angeles Lakers, because of all the lakes in Los Angeles.

Taffy: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Craig: Yes. These teams come from elsewhere and keep the names sometimes. In this case, they do not. The A’s became the Aces. It’s clever but it’s sad. The Oakland couldn’t survive. They just couldn’t survive. One of the reasons, ironically, they couldn’t survive is because everybody else picked up on it. The big market teams that do have a better fan base and do sell more tickets and can spend more money, they all follow the Billy Bean model. All of them.

John: Let’s now close up this discussion and talk about Brad Pitt’s character. Billy Bean and the decision he has to make at the end. The end of the movie finds him going to Boston. He’s talking with John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox. It’s a really interesting scene. It’s raining. There are umbrellas. They’re in this semi-outdoor space. We’re going to hear some rain in the background here. This is that discussion and ultimately a job offer for Billy Bean.

John Henry: Steve told me he’s offering you a new contract.

Billy: Yes.

John Henry: Why did you return my call?

Billy: Because it’s the Red Sox. Because I believe science might offer an answer to the curse of the Bambino because I hear you hired Bill James.

John Henry: Yes. Why someone took so long to hire that guy is beyond me.

Billy: Baseball hates him.

John Henry: Baseball can hate him, you know. One of the great things about money is that it buys a lot of things. One of which is the luxury to disregard what baseball likes, doesn’t like, what baseball thinks, doesn’t think.

Billy: Sounds nice. Well. I was grateful for the call.

John Henry: You were grateful?

Billy: Yes.

John Henry: For 41 million, you built a playoff team. You lost Damon, Giambi, Isringhausen, Pena, and you won more games without them than you did with them. You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent 1.4 million per win, and you paid 260,000. I know you’re taking it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall, he always gets bloody. Always.

This is threatening, not just a way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood. It’s threatening their jobs. It’s threatening the way that they do things. Every time that happens, whether it’s a government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people who are holding the reins, they have their hands on the switch, they go bat shit crazy. Anybody who’s not tearing their team down right now and rebuilding it using your model, they’re dinosaurs. They’ll be sitting on their ass on the sofa in October watching the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.

John: There he slides a piece of paper across the table.
[movie scene playing]

Billy: What’s this?

John Henry: I want you to be my general manager. That’s my offer.

John: All right. What’s crucial to me about this scene is that he’s done it. He went out with this goal and someone is finally saying, yes, Copernicus, you were right. The solar system is the way that you described it, not the way that everyone always described it. It’s so nice to have an outside person come in and say, you did this.

It’s important for us to have the people who we’ve established in the movie, who he loves, who love him, provide that support, but to have an outside person that he’s always been pushing against come say, no, kid, you were right, is crucial.

Craig: Absolutely. Even more so, give our hero, I still think he’s a hero, give our hero a chance to do one last heroic thing which is to stay loyal to the sloppy mess that he helped improve. It’s like listen, I inherited a broken down trailer home and I worked really hard to make it look like a mansion. And I’m going to stay with it. And Even though I know I’m going to be losing to you probably, because now you now, Bill James was the guy that invented sabermetrics, which leads into the whole thing that Peter Brown was talking about. Now you got Bill James, now everything I know, I’m going to lose.

I’m going to lose over and over and over because now I’m not, because the trick is out, but I’m not leaving because I’m loyal. Literally, that’s exactly what happened. He stayed with the A’s and the Boston Red Sox won the World Series.

Taffy: I also think all sports movies have a stoic guy. In a romantic comedy, the equivalent would be a “you complete me” or a big sweeping kiss. In a sports movie, it’s the stoic guy cracking a smile. It’s Kurt Russell in the tunnel in Miracle. I think in this movie, I know, I know. You’re like, everything in your body just needs them to be happy for a minute.

Craig: For one moment.

Taffy: I think when he turns to Peter Brandt and says, “You’re a good egg.” That is our sweeping kiss. That is everything I need, which sets me up for that car scene that murders me dead every single time. I just need three notes from that song and I’ll need a minute. It’s really beautiful.

Craig: Yes. In the end, you have to boil all the sports away and get down to who am I as a person? What is my value? Have I performed up to the level of expectation that my loved ones should have of me? It doesn’t matter if their love was unconditional. It wasn’t to me. I needed to fulfill conditions for their love. Did I? The answer is yes, I did.

That’s why everyone who sees a movie like this can connect to it. Everyone. It doesn’t matter. This is where I do think this is different than Mamet when you talk about movies about men being all men-ish.

Mamet movies are brutal and Mamet stories are brutal and they’re wonderful and I love them. Glengarry Glen Ross I’ve gone all day about it. The sentiment of Sorkin and Zaillian, and they are sentimental to me, is why I love these movies. Love them. I get transported by them. They’re just wonderful.

Taffy: You didn’t have to learn about sports. I leave with as much knowledge as I came in with and it’s fine.

Craig: True. That’s absolutely true.

John: I want to go back to something you said quite early on about shame. We were talking about, and I think Craig, you also mentioned that Billy Beane is a character who was recruited and was going to be a superstar and was not. He feels shame. He feels this thing that was supposed to happen didn’t happen. It was his fault and he just did not live up to promised potential. The journey of the story is like how do you get past that shame? How do you get past the fact that you were seen as an underachiever, that you didn’t do this thing?

He’s actually able to finally do it. Having this outside force and everybody else say, yes, you did it. You changed baseball. You are worthy in baseball. For a movie that is so much about what is a person worth? What is a person in baseball worth? He’s proven his worth. That’s ultimately what he seems to be going for here. Like most movie protagonists, he couldn’t explain at the start of the movie what he actually needs inside. We as an audience see at the end like, oh, he got that missing piece that he was so hungry for the whole time through.

Taffy: That’s so interesting because the thing I always think with this is one of the plots is changing baseball, but it’s actually about a man processing his failures. If you look at the structure of it, it’s exactly at a third that you see the first flashback. The question is like, how long are you allowed to play? We’re all told we have to leave the children’s game and we don’t know when it is. The question that looms throughout this, is this when I’m leaving? Even as the GM, I’m playing the children’s game. Is this when I’m leaving? Is this when I’m leaving?

Craig: Wrapping this up, we talked a bit about how the screenplay that we have that we can look at is not a very good reflection of the actual movie that’s in front of us. Some of that is, I think, related to the development of the movie. Here’s what we know. This writer Stan Chervin pitches and sells the idea to Sony in 2004.

We’re going to talk about Amy Pascal. Amy Pascal was running Sony Pictures at that time. Brad Pitt was attached to a draft by Steve Zaillian in 2008. Chervin apparently wrote something, but Steve Zaillian came in and wrote a draft, and that is the draft that got Brad Pitt attached.

Steven Soderbergh attached himself to the project in February 2009. There’s a quote we have from him saying, “I think we have a way in making it visual and making it funny. I want it to be really funny and entertaining, and I want you to not realize how much information is being thrown at you because you’re having fun. We found a couple of ideas how to bust the form a bit in order for all that information to reach you in a way that’s a little oblique.” Former athletics players and manager Art Howe were set to play themselves. Dimitri Martin was cast as Paul DePodesta, who was the actual real person in real life who became later the Jonah Hill character.

The Jonah Hill character is not the person in the book. It’s a composite of other things and stuff put together. DePodesta ultimately asked, “Can you change the name of my character?” Because, it’s not me. The movie was given a green light with a $58 million budget.

Then five days before it was supposed to shoot in July 8th, 2009, Sony canceled it. They stopped production on it, and Soderbergh left. Bennett Miller was brought in December 2009, and Amy Pascal brought in Sorkin for a rewrite. We don’t know where stuff was at quite with this, and so we don’t know, I’ve never seen the Zaillian draft. I don’t know what stuff is what. I think we always can reach for and feel what feels like a Sorkin-y bit, but I’m not sure we really know.

My speculation is that there’s a draft, but the way scenes were actually shot, it feels like in going for that documentary feel, they probably did it a bunch, and they weren’t as text-obsessed as you would expect in a Sorkin movie.

Taffy: The thing I heard was that maybe the previous version was more literal documentary, real players, people looking at the camera and interspersed. I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t know that apocryphal, I just–

Craig: I think that’s what Soderbergh was going for, from what I understand.

Taffy: Yes, which is its own great way to go.

Craig: Could have been great, that’s the thing.

Taffy: You never know.

Craig: You could have three different versions of this movie that are all great. I am just thrilled that we got what we did get, which was very romantic, sentimental.

Taffy: It’s a very sentimental movie.

Craig: It’s very sentimental, it’s very dramatic at times. It clearly is, like the score is borrowing from those, the score for The Natural, like one of the great movie scores of all time. Ba-bam, ba-bam bum bum. It has that when Hattenberg hits the home run, that, whoa, that dramatic swell. I love the tone.

John: The movie was given a July 2010 start date, so about a year after it had been stopped, it got started again. Brad Pitt’s still attached, budget reduced to $47 million, and they went ahead. Amy Pascal coming in there and saying, “We got to go change some stuff, and you don’t have as much money,” feels very much like the owner of the ASA, no, this is how much money you have to do it, and figure out a way to do that.

Craig: What else can I help you with?

John: On the first Charlie’s Angels, I remember a meeting on a Friday afternoon going in, and Amy Pascal’s going through the script, and she’s like, and she just ripped out five pages and she’s like, “These are gone, figure it out. Basically, got to go save some money,” and that’s how we did it.

Craig: Figure it out is one of the great lines. Robert Weiss, who I worked with, he’s a producer, go all the way back to Kentucky Fried Movie and Naked Gun. He produced one of the great bad movies of all time called Nothing but Trouble, starring Chevy Chase.

Taffy: I love Nothing but Trouble.

Craig: Yes, it’s insane. It’s terrible, but it’s also so crazy that it’s worth watching. In the development of it Chevy Chase, the characters start in Manhattan and then they drive into Pennsylvania, and Chevy Chase, Bob Weiss was like, “We’ll do the New York stuff in Toronto. We can’t afford to shoot in New York.” Chevy Chase is like, “No way, no. If it’s New York, we’re shooting in New York. In fact, I’m going to call–“ the head of the studio was Mark Canton. “I’m calling Mark Canton right now.”

He picks up the phone, “Mark, Chevy Chase, I’m hearing that we can’t shoot this in New York. I demand we shoot in New York.” “Thanks.” Click. “We’re shooting in New York” and then he walks out, and then Bob Weiss picks up the phone and calls Mark Canton and goes, “Did you just tell Chevy Chase we’re shooting this in New York?” “Yes.” “Are we?” “No. Figure it out.” I always love figure it out is like-

Taffy: I love it.

Craig: -that’s amazing. Yes, no.

Taffy: Oh my gosh.

John: All right, that wraps up Moneyball.

Taffy: Thank you.

John: Quickly, let’s go through some one cool things. Taffy, do you have one cool thing you want to share with the audience?

Taffy: I do. I went to a Yeshiva high school, so I always feel that I am behind in my education.

Craig: My dad would teach, he worked at Grady High School in Brighton Beach, and then after that day was over, he would go to Mirror Yeshiva.

Taffy: That’s serious stuff. To teach what?

Craig: To teach the Yeshiva book, his history-

Taffy: How to read.

Craig: -because they had to pass the Regents exam.

Taffy: I know, it’s because of the Regents exam.

Craig: The Regents exam.

Taffy: Everything we know is because of the Regents exam.

Craig: The Regents exam. Everything is secular that you know.

Taffy: Right. I did not read great books but I read the Scarlet Letter four times.

Craig: Because you had to.

Taffy: That’s like cheating on your husband. Also because it was kosher. It punishes women for infidelity. It’s good, it’s good.

Craig: It’s good.

Taffy: I always feel that I am behind in my education, and I found this app recently called Imprint, and it is teaching me philosophy. It’s teaching me step-by-step. Also, I feel that I have several undiagnosed learning disabilities. It is teaching me exactly how I would like to be taught, short sentences and cartoons. I think that is my-

Craig: Imprint.

Taffy: It’s called Imprint. I think it’s like $25. It’s so good, and I am learning all about Stoicism. Right now learning about Stoicism. We’re moving on to Kant.

Craig: Oh, Immanuel Kant. Boy, you’re about to get into synthetic apriority and posteriority.

Taffy: Someone didn’t go to yeshiva.

Craig: Correct. Also, Kant, as it turns out was wrong. If you can avoid reading his massive super boring book, then you’re–

Taffy: I’m just going to see a cartoon about it. I think I win this.

Craig: The best way to learn Kant. The best way.

Taffy: All right.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I have two uncool things that are very closely related. These last two weeks I was traveling. I was first in London, then in Paris. I was in London in large part, to see ABBA Voyage, which is the ABBA show outside of London. It is incredible.

This is a sanctioned ABBA thing that uses, I thought it was holograms, but it turns out it’s not holograms. It is just done with really good visual effects and ILM and a real band that’s playing and just a purpose-built space. It was really incredible. The illusion that, I am somehow back in 1970 and I’m watching ABBA do these songs was great.

Really, I just thought ABBA Voyage was fantastic. If you like ABBA, even to some medium degree and you’re in London, see it, because I thought it was really good. Relatedly, weirdly, the apartment we were staying in, we got there and it had one of those narrow, stripped fireplaces that was lit when we went in. I’m like, this is really wasteful. Let me figure out how to turn this off. Then I realized, as I got very closer it’s like, oh, this is actually not a fire at all. This is some sort of virtual screen thing that’s incredibly compelling and looks like a fire.

It turns out it was actually the same basic technology as what I was seeing in ABBA Voyage in that there are foreground elements which are actually up above in the enclosure and there’s a split glass thing like how we do teleprompters that is making it look like it’s at the base and then there’s a video screen that’s really compelling. We ended up leaving it on the whole time, and I genuinely miss that fireplace in the apartment.

I was just astonished that both in the ABBA Voyage show and in this fireplace, synthetic things that felt so real and compelling are possible in 2024 through recording this. I applaud the technology behind them and encourage people to check out both of these things. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this Opti-V fireplace, which is the European version, but there’s many other ones out there.

Craig: The Dimplex Opti-V Duet. Well as promised, my one cool thing has to be Ken Medlock. I was looking Ken Medlock up as we were talking here because if you look at his resume, it’s classic character actor resume. He’s happily still alive. He’s 74 years old, but he hasn’t done much in movies since Moneyball. Really, it seems like he might be like possibly semi-retired because he really hasn’t done much since those years. Here’s something not surprising at all to find out. He played baseball. He played in minor leagues. He was a pitcher for the Decatur Commodores in the 1970s.

That’s a team that I don’t believe exists anymore. Then later worked as a coach for the St. Paul Saints. He was like most people that have ever had any experience in professional baseball, he never made it to the major leagues but he’s a player. You could just tell. That’s the thing. I’m so not surprised. I would have been so much more surprised if he had not played baseball just because he has that thing. He’s got baseball face, baseball voice, baseball– it’s hard to describe. Anyway, brilliant, absolutely brilliant job. I’m obsessed.

I think he’s only in three scenes. He’s in the two scenes with the scouts and then he’s in one scene where he confronts Brad Pitt. By the way, you’re going toe-to-toe with Brad Pitt and he just ate him up. He ate him up. Yes.

John: I want to congratulate Ken Medlock, Bennett Miller for directing him so well, but also let’s shout out the casting director who found him and found that this is the person who can do this role. Whenever we see those moments where that one actor was in one scene and killed it, that’s some great casting directing there probably.

Craig: Let’s find out who the casting director was, shall we? Casting director. Casting by Francine Maisler, who’s-

John: Oh, Francine Maisler–

Craig: -just a legend.

John: Indeed.

Craig: Legend.

Taffy: I’m sad that we didn’t get to talk about Brad Pitt’s stress eating in the movie.

John: Oh my God. The greatest.

Taffy: The Twinkie.

John: Constantly eating.

Taffy: Yes, the Twinkie that he jams angrily into his mouth. It’s not in the script.

Craig: It’s so great. I think it was a thing, he was like, I want my character to always be eating.

Taffy: Same.

Craig: It’s a real challenge when you’re directing because of continuity. It’s just the sandwich is too big, too small. You have to have a bucket. You have to spit the thing out or otherwise you’re going to be barfing after take seven. They committed and just pulled it off. It’s great stuff.

Taffy: Because he shoves everything in his mouth. There’s no continuity problem. You just need 30 Twinkies.

Craig: That’s true. That is also such a guy thing. Like oh, screw you food. I win.

Taffy: We do that. Just so you know we do that too.

Craig: We do it in front of everyone and you guys are like, there’s no one watching.

John: That is our discussion on Moneyball. Scriptedness is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew, thanks for all your research and help here. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on money. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, thank you so much for joining us.

Taffy: Thank you for having me. I just want to say thank you to my assistant Chris Logan, who is wearing a Mets jersey right now and is so excited about this. Don’t spit on him right now. He’s having the best day of his life.

Craig: It’s going to be over real soon. If they make it to the Yankees, if you’re so lucky to make it to the Yankees, we will destroy you.

Taffy: I still don’t know what that means, but thanks, everyone.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. We are here for the bonus segment. We’re going to talk about money. Listener note here: Craig had to disappear at a certain point. If he vanishes for a bit in this conversation, it’s because he had to give up the room that he was recording in. Taffy and I are going to be talking a little bit in the middle part without Craig there, but you’ll hear him at the end because of editing magic.

All right. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, I just finished reading your book, Long Island Compromise, last night. I was reading it on the flight on the way back, and then I stayed up and read the final chapters. Such an accomplishment. So well done.

Taffy: Thank you.

John: I want you to go out and read it. Taffy, your book is about the intersection of trauma and money. Do you feel any resonance between the things we were talking about in that and Moneyball?

Taffy: Yes. If we’re talking about worth, and thank you so much for saying such nice things about my book, which is about how money makes you crazy. I want to say that people ask me very often, what was making a television show like? I answer with actually what is a good answer to your question, which is this:

I work at the New York Times. I work at the New York Times Magazine. I’ve worked there for many years. Before that, I was a freelancer. I know how much you get paid and I know how hard things are. I think very often about this story I wrote about sexual harassment at Kay Jewelers. Remember every kiss begins with Kay?

Craig: Yeah, mall jewelers.

Taffy: Oh my God, terrible stuff. Two and a half years it took to write that story. Maybe 14 cities, thousands and thousands of New York Times dollars. It was dangerous. There were threats. There was crying. There was protection ordered for people. It was hard. It was scary. And it came out and the money I got paid for it was the same amount of money that I got paid per scale to write a six-page outline for an episode of a television show based on a novel I’d already written.

Craig: Voila.

Taffy: I couldn’t get over it. I would say, I’m writing paragraphs that are true, that are out there in the world and people took a risk in talking to me. I couldn’t get over it. I still can’t get over it because I think what does this mean?

Also, maybe we know what it means because we see how news is being treated. We see how entertainment is treated, although it’s starting to happen in entertainment too, this lessening. But it made me understand that it’s just crazy what we value in this system. To assign money as an assignation of what is valued, that way lies madness.

John: Yes. I’m thinking about the times often on this podcast, we talk about why are screenwriters paid the way that we’re paid, which is arguably too much. It’s interesting we’re talking about Moneyball because there are fewer professional screenwriters than there are professional baseball players. It is, in the end, a unique skill, a thing that we’re able to do and that gets us paid the way that we’re paid. And that I’ve also been in the same situation you’re fine. It’s like, I feel like I’ve been paid too much for the amount of work that I’m doing here or that I’ve had to play tricks on myself saying like, I just do not want to write this. If I actually break down the amount I’m being paid per page, I’m of course I’m going to write this. It’s crazy.

Taffy: Right.

Craig: What we get paid doesn’t necessarily make sense from day to day. The same talent that we have earns us X. Then two years later, for some reason, it earns us twice X. Then for two years later, it’s half X. There’s no real rhyme or reason when you focus on it. Overall, one of the things I’ve come to understand is, and it’s hard to process, no one would ever suggest that what we do is as valuable as, say, somebody that’s working on a vaccine.

John: Right.

Craig: Those people get paid less, probably, than the people working at the New York Times Magazine. Then there are people who get paid even less than that, who are doing other things that are just beautiful work. Then there are people who don’t get paid at all, the unpaid labor of the world, particularly among women. Then the question is, how do I morally reconcile all this? Kant will have some stuff to say about this as you go through your course. One of the things that I’ve come to just understand is that entertainment which we think of as frivolous, while it certainly doesn’t save anyone’s life, seems to be one of the reasons people like to live.

It’s one of the things we’re here for at all. If we took it all away, including watching sports or playing video games or movies or television or reading great fiction, then at that point, people may not care as much about having their lives saved. Because what’s the point? People’s value of entertainment is so profound — way more than I value it, by the way. I love the creation aspect of it but sometimes I do I can feel guilty about these things. The bottom line is, the demand for what we do, particularly if it works for people, is so high that this is how the market functions.

Taffy: Right. I don’t think I feel bad about it because now I’m both people. I’m making that for an outline. It’s just astounding to me. It makes sense to me that athletes and actors get paid an inordinate amount. They have at least the perception of an expiration date of their prime, whereas you and I can imagine that the older and older and older we get, eventually we’ll keep. You’re right. I don’t know. We may be dwindling already. I don’t know.

John: We also have an opportunity cost. Part of why I’m getting paid this thing is so that I’m not doing something else.

Taffy: I think these are all these questions about how we value a person. I think the answer is, I was always this person and then I got an amazing agent who suddenly had access to things like this. But I was always like this. If you go back to when I was being ridiculed at my first job at Soap Opera Weekly, I was writing the same things that I am now highly valued at the New York Times for writing. It makes no sense. What are we supposed to do with that?

Craig: Let’s go back to your book here. One of the characters in Long Island Compromise, Beamer, is a screenwriter. He’s a screenwriter who’s written with a writing partner. It’s really clear that Beamer’s not the talent there. Beamer has some soft skills but he’s not the writing superstar here.

Now that the partnership is broken up, he is questioning his own worth because he was getting paid good money to do this as a writing team. It’s a real question, can he do it himself? Is he worth anything by himself? He comes from a family where he didn’t necessarily need to make money. This was all a game for him to start with.

Taffy: Right. He, by the way, when you’re as wealthy as Beamer Fletcher is, the money isn’t meaningful. The question is when we meet him is my value dwindling? My agent hasn’t called me back in two days. That is what he knows. That is what I live in fear of, is I haven’t heard from you. Oh, it’s been Sunday, okay. You still love me, my agent? Thank you.

John: Our sense of self-worth is like a price tag on it. There’s the number of likes we get on a post. There’s the number of people who show up to a book signing. There’s all these little ways in which we determine our value based on outside forces coming in to tell us things. None of that actually reflects our own internal sense of valuation.

I think you’re going to be looking at in your Imprint app probably, is really where is the sense of self, the degree to which our self-perception is internally generated versus externally put upon us. That balance is tough. The dollar figure people are paying you is one of the ways in which you calculate your own self-worth.

Taffy: It’s one of the ways they calculate my self-worth. Can I ask you, what do you think? What do you think about all this? Your quote, it goes up and it goes up. Do you feel better about yourself? Or is there a point at which you’re like, I’ve made it. Is it success or is it money or is it money defined as success?

John: There was a point early in my career, like project after project, my quote was going up. I remember at one point, my agent, my lawyer, were pushing really hard on the studio to pay me more than this, or basically better, or John won’t do it. I was upset with them because I felt like they were pushing too hard. Basically, ah, I’m not worth that much, you’re asking for too much.

Then we moved into a period which was supposed to be technically post-quote, where they’re not supposed to be asking for quotes, but people still supply them. You’ll wait to get an offer. Then they’ll say like, “Oh, no, let me send you these last few things so you can say this is how much he’s actually worth.”

You can also as a writer, get to a place where your quote is so high they won’t even consider you for certain projects. That’s a situation that people will run into, where it’s like, I was at a lunch with a producer and she was talking about this project that they were looking to do. She said, “Oh, no, we’re looking for a younger writer for that.” I heard younger writers, like babies really, she meant a less expensive writer. I was 30 at that point. I was like, “How much younger do you want?” But they meant less expensive. There are certain things which you’re just not on the list for because they just know you’re too expensive.

Taffy: Which is where money backfires, because the more they’re spending also in this business, the closer they’re watching and the more their ability to make a decision is jostled by the immense amount of money. There’s a sweet spot, it seems, where you stay under the radar of anybody being up at night worried about the money that’s being spent.

John: Yeah, it’s crazy. Then I would say like over the course of my career, a lot of the places where you really feel your value because it’s just so direct is when you get paid on a weekly to come in and do on a project, it’s like my weekly quote got really high. It’s like, that was exciting, but also I felt like you’re on a tightrope. It’s like, Jesus, am I really worth this amount of money for this one week’s work? You quickly realize, yes, they want your writing, but they mostly need you to be able to survive in a room with some of these people because these are sometimes monstrous, sometimes just really talented, but also very demanding people.

And there’s very few people that, there’s a scarcity problem. There’s very few people they can put into that room who can survive in there and then also still deliver the project that comes out of there. That was really what I was going to be paid for was not necessarily the words I was writing, but the words I was able to say in those rooms.

Taffy: That’s so interesting. Also, that is the true opportunity cost because every time you’re doing one of those weeklies, you’re not doing something that is the product of your brain, the product of your creativity. It is maybe the least gratifying thing. What if the way you can define your self-worth in this business monetarily is the amount of money someone like John August is paid to fix your terrible screenplay? I would like to think that they don’t pay more than $150,000 a week to fix my crap. If they do, I quit because I should be doing something else.

John: I’ve actually heard that rationalization not applied to me directly, but someone saying, no, yes, they’re replacing you. They’re bringing on this big writer, but it means they really love the project because look how much they’re paying that person. Which is absurd, but also true because it means if they’re willing to spend six figures on something or seven figures on something, they really are planning to make it. So it’s good news that you’re being replaced by this big giant, expensive writer because it means they really want to make it a thing. It’s crazy.

Taffy: You go home that night and you share the same blanket that David Justice had to say, well, Billy Bean thinks I’m a good leader. That’s all you have to keep you warm that night. I guess I’ll be a good leader.

John: You’ll be a good leader. You are a fantastic guest on the program. Thank you again, Taffy for doing this.

Taffy: You guys are the best. I had such a good time.

Craig: Bye, guys. Thank you.

John: Bye. Thanks, Craig.

Links:

• Moneyball on IMDb
• Moneyball screenplay
• Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• Scriptnotes LIVE! at the Austin Film Festival
• Highland Pro Austin launch party – sign up here!
• ABBA Voyage
• Opti-V fireplace
• Ken Medlock
• Imprint App
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to Episode 659 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Often, in film and television, our protagonists are facing economic hardship. Today on the show, what if your hero’s problem is too much money? We’ll look at three stories in the news about excessive fame and fortune and ask, how would this be a movie? This week, we have a ringer to help us answer this question. Mari Heller is a writer and director whose credits include Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Her new film is Nightbitch, which just debuted at Toronto. Welcome back, Mari.

Mari Heller: Yay, thanks, John. I’m so glad to be here.

John: In addition to all of your writing and directing credits, you also played MacGruber’s mom. Craig would be really upset if we did not acknowledge that you are officially canonically MacGruber’s mom.

Mari: I was expecting you were going to say Queen’s Gambit, but I like that it went to MacGruber’s mom. I appreciate it.

John: Queen’s Gambit, sure, a meaningful, dramatic role, but come on.

Mari: The most important role of my lifetime. Not the mother to my own children, but the mother to MacGruber on the MacGruber TV show on Peacock.

John: Yes, everyone can see that there today. We’re going to talk through, probably not very much MacGruber, but we’re going to talk through Nightbitch. We’re going to talk through, how would these be movies? In a bonus segment for premium members, I would love to talk film festivals because I think maybe all of your movies have gone through film festivals. Is that right?

Mari: Yes, all of them have.

John: I want to talk about film festivals, both for when you’re trying to sell a movie originally, but when you’re also trying to launch a movie into the world and what writers and directors need to think about when their movies are playing at film festivals.

Mari: That’s a good topic. I like that.

John: Yes, great. I try.

Before we get to any of that, Drew, we have actual Scriptnotes news.

Drew Marquardt: That’s right, we do. You, Craig, and I will be headed to Austin for the Austin Film Festival at the end of October. We’re going to be really busy.

John: We are going to be so, so busy. Currently, on the books, we have four official events. We have a live Scriptnotes show and a separate three-page challenge. I’m going to be doing a panel on video games and graphic novels with Jordan Mechner. Plus, there’ll be a special 25th anniversary screening of Go with a Q&A afterwards led by Matt Selman of The Simpsons fame.

Drew: Oh, that sounds great.

John: Yes, I’m really excited for all of those. If you’re going to go to Austin and you already have your festival pass, you should be able to attend all of these for free just with your pass. There’s one more thing. We are planning an afternoon event in Austin, probably on Thursday the 24th, for the launch of the next version of Highland. This one is open to everybody, but we do need you to RSVP so we can figure out the logistics and how big a space we need and other stuff. So if you are interested in coming to that, Drew, how should they get on a list?

Drew: I will put a link in the show notes for the RSVP and you can just go through there.

John: Thank you, Drew. Now, let’s get on to the other news. We’ll start with this article by Matt Belloni and Puck about Hollywood’s 10% problem. He’s referring to a study that came out a couple of weeks ago that only one-tenth of the 500-plus movies that were either released or scheduled for release by the major studios and streamers between ’22 and 2026 actually came from an internal development slate.

The movies that development executives are theoretically working on at studios, very few of those actually are the movies that they’re releasing. Often, as screenwriters, we’re thinking like, “Oh, I’m going to go off with this open writing assignment that’s at a studio,” or they have this internal idea or they’re buying a spec script. And really, very few of those movies are actually getting made.

Mari: Yes.

John: It’s funny that Disney has not created an original live-action movie franchise since National Treasure 20 years ago, so two decades for that. It feels like so much of the theoretical work that we’re doing as writers does not ever actually make it to the big screen. Did this feel true to you, Mari?

Mari: Feels true to me in my limited experience. I’m sure it does for you too. When I was starting out and had first gotten an agent based on a spec script that I wrote with a writing partner, we were constantly going out for assignment jobs. We were constantly answering every call and getting– our first paid jobs were all things that never got made. I started to see a journey where I was an employed screenwriter with nothing ever getting made, where I wrote a made-for-TV movie for Disney for YA audience.

I wrote a number of pilots that sold for the networks when it was still more of the pilot game. I was like, “Okay, this is great. I’m getting health insurance and I’m making enough money to live.” But at some point, I want actors to say these words. The purpose of writing these scripts is that I want somebody to say them out loud and for it to get recorded and maybe even somebody sees it. I started to see a situation where development hell just becomes your experience of Hollywood. That’s all you get to do is just develop, develop, develop, but nothing actually gets made.

John: Absolutely. To slice apart these numbers a little bit more. Obviously, some open writing assignments are based on studio IP. That’s probably not quite what this is here, but that it’s sense of, “I have this original idea that I’m going to take out on the town and sell as a pitch or sell as a spec script.” Very few of those are getting made, at least at the majors. Now, this study omitted A24 and Neon. Some places are also making more originals. That also probably is undercounting genre movies that are getting made. There are horror things that are at certain price points.

Mari: Horror, it’s like the exception to every rule, right?

John: Yes.

Mari: In terms of theater audiences and how they get made and how much money they make.

John: Yes. You and I were both in the same situation where, listen, I was lucky to get some movies made, but I had a lot of movies that did not get made. I know so many writers who were in the guild for years and had no credits to show for all the hard work they’ve done. I think that partially pushes people towards television where at least like, “Hey, my name is on a screen at least. The work I’m doing is being said by actors,” like you’re saying, and it’s actually out there in the world.

The other part of this study, which I thought was interesting, is there’s charts. Listen, I don’t know that we can actually verify all the data that’s in there, but they talk about how many of these movies that are greenlit really came with so many elements attached. It was almost greenlit by the time the studio bought them. They had director attachments. They had progress to production built into the thing. The studio couldn’t help but make these movies. It wasn’t that the hard work of development executives brought this thing to fruition. That’s frustrating. It also feels like it was always true in this industry that most stuff has some other aspect to it. Increasingly, everything has to be completely safe before they’ll even consider greenlighting it.

Mari: Well, I think it’s a minor miracle when anything gets made. I think it takes so many things coming together at the right time and so many pieces have to line up. Sometimes having a lot of different attachments to something, I know I do that as a filmmaker, is I try to make sure that by the time I’m trying to get something greenlit, it’s an impossible thing to say no to because everything’s already moving.

The train is already going and all of these actors have slated this into their schedule or we got this tax incentive or whatever it may be. It’s putting enough pieces together so that you feel like you can push the thing over the finish line and actually get it shot because it’s just so easy for– particularly movies is what I know more, but it’s so easy for a movie to fall apart. There’s eight million ways that it can fall apart and there’s only one way it can get made.

John: Well, let’s jump ahead, though, and talk about Nightbitch because I want to talk about this as a movie and how this came to be because this is your fourth feature film as a director?

Mari: Yes.

John: Great. You’re a known quantity. Everyone knows you know what you’re doing here, but my understanding is like this wasn’t a thing where you went to them. Instead, they came to you. Is that accurate?

Mari: Sort of. This movie is based on an incredible novel called Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. It was her first novel, but it was a splashy-enough novel that it got on the radar of a lot of people. It was acquired by Annapurna, Sue Naegle, who was working at Annapurna at the time. Amy Adams and her company and Stacy O’Neil together both read the book and decided to option it.

John: That’s great.

Mari: So the book was optioned before I came on board, but it hadn’t even been published yet. It was one of those situations where it was an early manuscript and it had enough buzz to it that people started reading it. Amy Adams and Sue were the ones who said, “Let’s try and send this to Mari.” I hadn’t worked with Amy before, but she knew my work. She sent it to me.

Really, nothing had been done. All that had been done is it had been optioned. It was like, “Who knows if this is a movie? If anyone could make it into a movie, we think you could.” She sent me the book and I read it and came on board really early.

John: Let’s break down some of the parts of that because I think some people outside of the industry might not know who these players are and how they all fit together. Annapurna is an independent motion picture-producing entity and Sue Naegle was running it at that point. Sue Naegle was my former TV agent. Sue Naegle is fantastic. I love her to death. And it’s not surprising that they read this book when it was in manuscript because most books that sell in Hollywood sell very early on, way before they come out. Every Friday, I get this email that has summaries of all the different agencies that are covering all the different books like, “These are the books that people are talking about.”

Mari: There’s whole departments at the agencies, literary departments who cover all the books that are coming out, especially the ones that have a lot of buzz.

John: Beyond that, there are book scouts out of New York who are looking for those things. Individual producers might have their own book scouts who are hunting those things. They have bandits who try to find, “These are the areas of literature that we’re most focused on.”

Mari: Right.

John: When Yoder’s book came out and got the buzz and attention it did, it’s maybe not so surprising because the people who are the early barometers of what’s going to be cool had already read it and said, “This is going to be interesting.”

Mari: Right. I think what’s surprising about it is that it was her first novel. I think often, it’s a novel from a known entity that comes out that gets bought up quite so early. I think it was very exciting.

John: Amy Adams had read this book. Annapurna read this book. They decided together to work together to option this book. Then they need to find a filmmaker, a writer. Ideally, a writer-director. They came to you. What are those initial conversations like? Are you both feeling each other out in terms of like, “Is this a movie?” What are those conversations like?

Mari: My first initial conversations, and I can say this in this type of situation and podcast and I wouldn’t say it necessarily to everybody, but is I’m often looking for– I don’t want to get involved in projects that are so far along that I’m just being brought on as a director for hire. I really want to be able to make something my own. I want to be able to come with a vision and make something from the ground up. The fact that the first conversation I had with Amy after I read the book and I was totally moved by the book, I found it really impressive. It spoke to me in a really emotional way. I was postpartum. I was about six months postpartum on having my second kid. It was very personal in the moment that I read it.

John: What year would this have been? Is this 2020? When is this?

Mari: 2021. My daughter was born in 2020 and it was post-pandemic-ish, but still pandemic vibes around town. I was very isolated. I had moved out of the city. I was living in the woods, raising two kids. This book really spoke to me.

John: Actually, we know that you were isolated, living in the woods, because there was an episode we did of Scriptnotes where we asked a bunch of our previous guests, “Hey, during the pandemic, what the hell are you doing?” You were generous enough to tell us about moving out of the city and being in the woods and homeschooling your kids in New York with a group of other people. You’re just making it work.

Mari: You have such a good memory. Maybe you are a robot. You remember something from so many years ago on Scriptnotes. Yes, we were in a pod with another family. We were splitting up the homeschooling duties. We were each trying to get time for our creative work, which was so difficult at the time. That’s when this book got sent to me, not too long after that, once my daughter was born, and I was really home with her. Actually, Jorma was off prepping the MacGruber TV show.

He was away and I was home alone with two kids for the first time. The book, it spoke to me on an emotional level. Then when I spoke to Amy about it, it was great that she basically said to me, “I have no idea if this can be a movie or not and I don’t really know what it should be, but I would trust you to figure it out.” That was exactly what I needed to hear to also know, “Okay, this isn’t a train that’s already moving that already has everything figured out.” I get a lot of creative latitude to make my decisions.

John: Let’s talk about the decisions you’re making here because I haven’t read the book, so I’ve just seen your movie, which is fantastic, and everyone should see. Just so we don’t forget, when does it come out?

Mari: It doesn’t come out till December 6th. We’re doing the festival circuit right now. We just did TIFF. We’ll be at festivals all over, from the Hamptons to London to Middleburg and throughout the fall, and then it’ll come out in theaters on December 6th.

John: You said the book speaks to you, but what is your initial instinct about how to adapt this thing and to find your way into it?

Mari: It’s like a big internal monologue of somebody who is living as a newly stay-at-home mom and is isolated, has moved out of the city, is living in the suburbs with her son. Her husband travels for work a lot and she’s losing her mind. It wasn’t immediately clear how I would adapt it or what the form would be exactly, but I knew that the themes were something I had been wanting to explore for a while.

I’d been wanting to write a movie about motherhood and bodies and women’s aging bodies for a while. I had been toying with a number of ideas along those same themes. This just gave me enough excitement. I don’t know. I was so excited about what the book made me feel that I just was like, “I’ll figure it out.” I embarked on my adaptation without having a totally clear plan of how I was going to adapt it.

One of the first things that I realized was the central question of the book, or at least when I read the book, in my mind was, “Oh, God, have I made a horrible decision by becoming a mother? Did I screw my whole life up?” That felt like it was the central question that I was going to explore, and then that gave me some framework for what I wanted to focus on because the book has a lot more storylines and plot that happen where there’s a pyramid scheme with all the other mothers.

There’s a number of other storylines, but it became clear like, “No, this is a story about long-term relationships and parenthood and motherhood.” My central question that I want to be exploring and thinking about is, has this woman made a huge mistake by becoming a mother? Then really early on, that gave me the ending of the movie, which is not too much of a spoiler, but there’s a birth at the ending of the movie. I thought that’s the way to answer the central question is by seeing a birth. That’s something that wasn’t in the book.

John: The character’s journey gets her to a place where the idea of being a mother is not an affront to her. She comes to embrace both what she needs as a person and motherhood and able to find a unification of these two different sides of herself.

Mari: Exactly, a unification of the rage and all of the untethered parts of her that have felt like motherhood broke her apart and is able to bring them back together. If you think about that time in the world coming right out of the pandemic and I was pregnant during the pandemic and I remember I had one of my really good friends said to me, “Having a baby is the ultimate act of optimism,” and I thought, “God, that’s true.” I wasn’t feeling very optimistic about the world in that moment, and yet I was embarking on this journey of optimism by having another child. Yes, the end of the movie speaks to that choice and how you make that choice even when it doesn’t always feel like the clearest answer.

John: I want to go back to the question of, “Is this even a movie?” Because if you think about the internal monologue aspect of the book and you’re able to stage some of this as voiceover that’s directed to the audience, it could be a stage monologue. It could be what the Constitution means to me. It could be a thing where it’s ready to deliver to the audience, except that then you wouldn’t have the actual child in front of you.

I think one of the things I need to ask you a question about is, “How the hell did you get this performance out of the twins, I guess?” I’ve never seen young people on screen so much like such young people who have to actually do the thing you need them to do so that the scene could happen. As a writer who knew that they needed to direct this movie, I would never have put such young people in so many scenes, and you did. Talk to me about both the decision as a writer to, “I’m going to try this,” and as the director who actually had to pull this off. What was that process?

Mari: Well, first, I’ll say, thinking about whether this should just be a stage monologue or whether this was something that I wanted to be more of an experiential film where you get to put yourself in the shoes of a parent of a very young child and really feel what it feels like to be that person, I thought a lot about Diary and that this piece feels like a companion piece to The Diary of a Teenage Girl because it is a very subjective movie.

The attempt is to really place you squarely in the shoes of a person who’s in the middle of a major life transformation and she’s sleep-deprived. Every day feels like the same as the day before. Things are blending into each other. She doesn’t remember when she last changed her shirt or when she last took a shower or when she ate anything but Mac and cheese and fried hash browns.

That got exciting for me to think about creating a totally subjective world, where we’re trying to give an audience an experience of what it feels like because I realized, “Oh, friends of mine who haven’t had kids or family members who haven’t had kids, they have no idea how insane I felt and how this experience of being a first-time parent with a very little kid stuck at home, how much you do lose your mind.”

That became the fun thing about thinking about it as a film and why it is more than just a monologue. Then, yes, I have a big pet peeve about kids in movies who look like little Hollywood actor kids who don’t act like kids because I feel like it’s so deceiving. I don’t know about your kid, but my kids are wild. I had a little boy first. He always had so much energy.

He was up at 5:00 in the morning running crazy right away, even from the time he was really little. Just not a kid that you would have seen on screen. Not a kid who’s just quietly sitting in the corner while the grownups have conversations. Somebody who’s climbing on your head and it’s a very interactive physical life that I embarked on with him. So I really wanted to find kids who weren’t really actors and were really kids who would play.

John: Well, how old are these twins? Because when you say they’re not really actors, to what degree are they even aware of what they’re doing or they’re just having fun?

Mari: They were two when I cast them. They turned three on our camera test day. We found them through a twin forum on Facebook. We were out plastering with twin forums to find twins who could come. Then the way that I cast them was I just hung out for days at parks. I had twins come in batches basically to come and meet with me and I just played with them for hours on end until I found the twins who I felt really could play and pretend and were down to play these different games with me, and yet were also good listeners in their own way even if they had a lot of energy and wildness and spunk and humor, but also could listen and take direction and understand pretend.

These two boys, Arleigh and Emmett, they were just the perfect twins. I feel so lucky that I cast them because it could have gone really poorly. They gave one of the best toddler performances in a movie, as you said. They really are very realistic. We made the environment really fun for them, I think. They loved coming to set. They knew everybody’s names. They knew where to put the microphone. They got really into the mechanics of filmmaking. We let them check out the camera. We let them check out the props. They understood everything about what we were doing and what everyone’s job was. We made everything a game. So I think they had a really good time.

John: I’m doing this animated movie right now. One of the first conversations I had with the director was, “To what degree is this camera looking into a world versus the world that’s being projected onto the screen?” They’re really fundamentally different aspects. One of the things I think you do so nicely is that balance between the camera feels like it’s just documenting a thing that’s happening in front of you.

You feel like the kid is just actually a natural kid and Amy Adams is a good actor. She’s just rolling with it, which totally works. Also, the subjective reality is you’re pushing things at the screen that are not necessarily just the camera documenting a moment. When we’re in her point of view, it is a subjective experience. We’re shoving things at the audience rather than we’re supposed to believe that this is really what’s happening in front of the lens.

Mari: Right. It’s that tricky balance of having it feel not staged. You do want to feel like the kid is just a kid who’s acting like a kid. Between the editing and the framing and the ways in which there’s repetition, you realize it’s actually all very carefully planned. There was the trick of needing the kid to be able to say certain lines that scenes needed in order for the scene to actually progress the way I had written it.

There were certain scenes I wrote very much knowing we will improv whatever the kid ends up saying. They’re walking down the street hand-in-hand. “What do you want to talk about? That leaf up there or a truck rolling by or whatever it is? It doesn’t matter what you say. We’ll find something great in whatever your conversation is as long as it’s not about the cameraman.”

Then there were other scenes where I knew, “No, I need a really specific thing. I need you to ride on your mom’s back, tell her to play horsey with you, and then tell her that she’s got fuzzy hair coming out of her back.” We figured out games for how to do this. A lot of times, it was call and response. I would do a game of like, “Ready. Repeat after me. Say poo.” “Poo.” “Go.” “Go.” “Moo.” “Moo.” “Ruff.” “Ruff.” “Ah.” “Ah,” or get rhythmic games going, and then you say, “Mama fuzzy.” “Mama fuzzy.” “Louder. Mama fuzzy,” or whatever.

However it was, it was getting this to be something that was fun and playful for them, but sometimes it was trickier than others. I’d have a plan for how we were going to make something into a game for the kid. They would not be in the mood to do that thing that I was thinking of, or I’m thinking of this one scene where Amy thinks she’s lost her son at the playground. When she finds him, she runs for him. We had him sitting on this grass. I think this was day one or two, so he had just met Amy.

I had him sitting on the grass and I said, “Okay, and then she’s going to run up to you.” Well, he didn’t know as soon as I said action, she was going to be screaming, crying, running up to him. He turned around and saw this woman who he had just met really the day before screaming at him. He stood up and started running away, a very natural response. We realized, “Oh right, we need to figure out a way to make this game. Okay, you’re playing hide-and-go-seek. You count to 10. Even when she screams and runs for you, you can’t get up until you get to 10,” something like that.

John: In addition to all the challenges of these very young actors, you put a bunch of dogs in your movie. These are another classic rookie mistake, putting dogs in your movie. Dogs at this point, there are trainers. There’s ways to do it. How much of the dog action we’re seeing are, “This is what the lens saw,” versus you had to go in and post and move dogs around to make this all work?

Mari: Most of it is totally practical. There’s a tiny bit of adjustment in post when it comes to, “Oh, this one dog was misbehaving,” so we moved them over here or whatever. Actually, what we really did was we worked with really great trainers who spent a lot of time casting and training the dogs for the very specific behavior that we wanted in the movie. I wrote scenes and action for dogs having no real basis on how dogs behave.

Because the dogs are supposed to be a little bit magical and non-realistic in the movie, the things that I needed them to do were not necessarily things that dogs would do. Things like bowing to another dog. I had read things about wolves and how they’ll sometimes show their neck to another dog, so I would take things from research like that and put them into the script, but then we had to actually get dogs to do those things. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t work.

John: In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we had to train hundreds of squirrels to pick up nuts and shake them and then put them in the right places. Each time you see a squirrel, they’re trained for that one specific thing, and then you’ll never see that squirrel again. It’s all unique stuff.

Mari: We needed a squirrel to just run up a tree for this. I remember as I was going through my budget at one point, it was going to be $13,000 to train a squirrel. I was like, “But the squirrel doesn’t do something that a squirrel wouldn’t do. It just needs to run up a tree.” I was like, “No, we’re not doing this. I can’t pay $13,000 to train a squirrel.” We took that out of the budget and we just wandered around the park until we found a squirrel and filmed a squirrel.

John: I want to wrap up by talking about tone because you mentioned that the dogs were somewhat magical. One of the things that is so fascinating about your film but also unsettling is it always feels like it’s just about to tip into a different genre. Music-wise, we’re often getting close to horror moments at times. It feels like it’s a horror movie that doesn’t ever fully get to the horror thing.

Obviously, there’s a whole tradition of body horror that’s part of this. The experience of being a woman of that age and motherhood is a body horror story, and yet it’s also a comedy. There’s funny moments. There’s moments of marital strife that are appropriate in other movies. How did you think about the tonal shifts and how did you communicate them? Were there discussions both on the script stage and on the set about, “Where are we at here?”

Mari: Well, a lot of what I thought about was when reading the book, the mother does turn into a dog, but it’s not like The Fly or other transformation movies where that metamorphosis is painful or horrifying. If anything, it’s cathartic and euphoric. There was this whole element of body horror and the metaphor being as you enter into perimenopause and you go to look in the mirror and, “Oh, God, what’s that weird hair sprouting out here? What new wrinkles do I have?” and all the ways in which we look at our own bodies as we age and we think, “Who is that? I don’t even recognize myself,” taking that to a sort of extreme level.

That has a level of horror to it and just gore and grossness. We get some really great groans when we see this movie in big theaters as you can imagine. There’s some really nasty stuff. When it came to the actual transformation, it was really important that the transformation itself didn’t feel painful or horrible, but it felt euphoric. That was our guiding force. We did always want to be dancing on that edge.

I definitely think there’s a misconception if anybody goes into this movie thinking it’s a horror movie. I think it’s more of a psychological drama with a lot of comedy, more than anything in the horror realm. We played with horror tricks. We played with visual styles that tip their hat to the more horror genre, whether it’s like she’s walking down a hallway and we’re doing the push-pull visual styles or music as well. Ultimately, it’s really a story about motherhood and transformation. I don’t know. The things I got more interested in were less of the full horror parts of it and the more parts that made me laugh.

John: Well, let’s put Nightbitch to the side for a second because everyone will get a chance to see that and they should and think about some other movies down the road. Someone might be coming to you, Mari Heller, to say, “Hey, how about this article to adapt into your next thing?”

You have three choices here. We’re going to start with one that’s not even an article. This is the first time on Scriptnotes where we’re actually just going to a Threads post. Not even a Twitter post, a Threads post.

This is a post by Bo Predko. I have no idea who Bo Predko is, if it’s a real person or if it’s some other corporate entity. This is so short. We’ll actually just read this all aloud. Let me read the setup and then you can read the bullet points here.

All right, so it starts, “You’re 23 years old dating Leonardo DiCaprio in LA. Private parties, yachts, jets, signing NDAs every month. You’re 100% sure Leo loves you because he let you touch his Oscar. Let’s be real. You’ll be forgotten in two years. Here’s what to do when you’re dating a celebrity.” All right, help us out.

Mari: Number one, keep the contacts you make in a separate list. Number two, network like a shark at high-end parties. Number three, leverage the relationship to collaborate with luxury brands. Number four, save and invest the money from the lifestyle perks. Number five, eyes will be on you. Grow your social media following. Number six, read every paper you sign. Number seven, learn from Leo’s work ethic and use it to fuel your own goals. Number eight, stay out of unnecessary drama and keep things private.

John: All right. Mari, you and I both know famous people. This is not unfamiliar territory to us and it’s not unfamiliar as a setup for a movie in a way. We’ve seen other stories like a normie dating a celebrity and what that looks like and feels like, and yet I like that it’s an inversion of what we normally expect where the wide-eyed, young, doe-eyed girl falls in love with this guy and has her heart broken and learns a valuable lesson. Assuming that you know this going in and here’s how you’re going to plan for it.

Mari: Right, and not just plan for it, here’s how you’re going to abuse the system that would abuse you.

John: Yes, which I thought was exciting. Let’s think about this as, how would this be a movie? If this came towards you, what is your instinct? Where do you start? Are you thinking about who this young woman is? Are you thinking about the situation? What’s interesting about this to you?

Mari: I guess what’s interesting is the way that younger generations are approaching everything with a savviness that maybe I didn’t grow up with and playing the game. Everything about this scares me a little bit, to be honest. The idea of using a romantic relationship for your personal gain, it’s just so dirty and gross, but I also see the humor in it, especially using somebody like Leonardo DiCaprio because he so famously dates young women and drops them quickly.

I think in all of the comments below, so many people were commenting on how young this person would be, who he’s dating. It’s a funny subverting, I guess, a subversion of the expectation, like you’re saying, especially if it could be a misdirect, maybe. Maybe there’s a way that you start off really believing that this person is a bit of a dupe and that they’re in this situation having no idea what they’re doing. Then you start to realize, you could uncover it like The Usual Suspects or whatever and realize that they’ve been manipulating it the entire way.

John: Absolutely.

Mari: Everything’s been a plan.

John: There’s a Taylor Swift song, Mastermind, where she reveals like, “Oh no, you thought this was an accidental thing, but actually, I planned this whole thing the whole time through.” It also made me think about All About Eve because in that, you have the young assistant who, of course, takes over the role. What’s different is that in something like All About Eve, the assumption is like, “Oh, I want to be an actress. I want to be you. I have this other skill, which I’m going to be able to manifest by getting close to you.”

Here, and I think this is a generational difference that you’re pointing to, is that it’s not just about, “This is how I’m going to become the famous actor or whatever.” It’s like because we have this role of influencer and just like a person who’s able to monetize their fame, the goal is, “I need to become famous and get the brand deals, and that’s what I’m going to do. I want to become like Kylie Jenner. I don’t need to be Charlize Theron.”

Mari: Right. It could be fun if you did a movie like this that has the Being John Malkovich thing where the celebrity is in on it, in on the joke of it all, enough that they’re willing to use their own real name like if Leonardo DiCaprio would do this movie, let’s say it was a movie, as himself, right? It could be poking fun at his own celebrity and expectations of him as a celebrity. There could be something fun about that.

John: Well, if you think about Seth Rogen’s This Is the End, and you look at that as an example. They’re all playing themselves like highly characterized versions of themselves. There’s something really interesting and clever about that.

Let’s talk about the inversions of this because right now, this is a young woman dating Leonardo DiCaprio. What is the version of this where she’s famous and he’s the guy who gets swept up in there?

Mari: It’s not as fun.

John: It’s not as fun.

Mari: It’s just not as fun.

John: No.

Mari: It’s the person you always assume is going to be the victim, which in a scenario like this where the man has all the power and the age and all the influence and the fame and all the money and the woman is in the more subversive role and then she turns out to be the one who’s actually controlling everything, that could be really fun.

John: I guess because of the setup and because it’s supposed to be Leonardo DiCaprio and there’s this history of him dating for two years at most and then discarding, the idea that there’s an expiration date on the relationship is built in, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Matt Damon’s wife was a normie and I think that’s still going fine. There are famous people who marry normal people and it’s not always a Ben Affleck or a J.Lo.

Mari: I just love how comfortable you are with saying “normie.” That’s really making me laugh.

John: We know other people who aren’t Leonardo DiCaprio level but who work in the industry and who are comparatively famous, who are married to non-famous people. That can work. It’s just it has to be–

Mari: In fact, I think I see those relationships and I tend to believe in them the most, especially people who’ve been together since before they got anything. Often, if somebody has a really cool spouse, it can make me like them more.

John: 100%. Someone who does have a cool spouse, at least a very devoted spouse, is Palmer Luckey. This is an article by Jeremy Stern writing for Tablet Magazine. He’s talking about Palmer Luckey, who is an inventor, clearly brilliant, clearly some things about him that are challenging for people around him. He created Oculus Rift. He sold that to Facebook for $2.7 billion, then got fired by Mark Zuckerberg after he made this $10,000 donation to this pro-Trump troll group that was dedicated to “shitposting” in real life.

He tried to build this nonprofit that was about prisons. Ultimately, he founded Anduril Industries, this defense technology startup. It makes autonomous weapon systems. It’s now valued at $14 billion. It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook. There’s a two-step thing here. He’s able to rise and fall and rise again in ways that are really interesting. He’s married to or still with his high school sweetheart.

Mari: Except for they didn’t go to high school, they were both homeschooled.

John: Exactly right. The homeschool of it all feels relevant and appropriate. This comes in your direction. What parts of this are interesting to you? Where do you think a movie exists here? What are even the boundaries or the edges of the story you might want to tell on this?

Mari: Well, that’s the issue. The story is fascinating. Fascinating and overwhelming. I got tired just reading this story because there are so many twists and turns. I think the question comes down to, what type of story are we telling? What are we meant to feel about this person? Are they a hero in this story? Are they a tragic character? Are they somebody that we’re rooting for or are they somebody who we’re vilifying? Also, what are you saying? I couldn’t even feel through reading this article what the takeaway is.

What am I meant to feel about this person and what he’s done in the world? Yes, his brain is impressive. Yes, what he’s accomplished is impressive. I love somebody who’s been in this long relationship with somebody for so long through all these ups and downs. He has a thing in the article where he talks about how other people in the tech industry are all trying to keep all options open at the same time. He likes to pick a path and stick with it. There’s something about that ethos, which is really fascinating. But god, I would not know where to begin with this. What did you feel?

John: Listen, you could do the cradle to present day with him and rise up through the homeschool, but that’s going to be too much. It’s not going to be interesting. I think the instinct of, do a Social Network, where you’re focusing on one aspect of that person’s career and take that and you’re fictionalizing and fudging what you need to fudge to create the version of the character who makes sense for the course of your two-hour movie feels right, but it actually just misses so much.

Because if you’re talking about the sale of Oculus to Facebook, eh, that’s actually not– he’s getting fired is interesting. Maybe he’s getting fired from Facebook is the starting point and then having to build back up. It feels like that second founder story and the revenge story. Again, like you, I don’t know if he’s the hero of the story or if he’s an anti-hero that we’re following through the story. I don’t know where we want the audience to sit with our relationship with him.

Mari: No, and I don’t know what the ending is. I don’t know where you’re taking it to because Social Network, it’s all around the court case, right?

John: Yes.

Mari: What would be the framework that you were taking this person’s life through? It feels like the story is not over yet.

John: That’s really a part of the problem is that because of the court case, you could have a resolution of the court case. Even though Zuckerberg is still making a new story, it feels like that’s the resolution here. I don’t know what the resolution is at this point. We also need to talk about how challenging it is to make a movie about a living person. You’ve made two biopics.

Mari: Sort of three.

John: All right, so can you ever forgive me? Are those people alive at this point?

Mari: No, everybody’s dead.

John: Great, so that’s helpful for you.

Mari: Ooh. That’s the best-case scenario. I hate to say that.

John: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was still alive as you were making this?

Mari: No, he passed away. His wife was still alive. A lot of the people who we were putting on screen were still alive, but he was not alive.

John: What’s the third biopic?

Mari: Well, it’s not exactly a biopic, but The Diary of a Teenage Girl is based on Phoebe, who wrote the book. It’s based on her real life and real people in her life, including her mom and her mom’s boyfriend. It wasn’t a biopic, but it was still based on people’s real lives. I actually cringe at the idea of calling any of the movies biopics because they aren’t cradle-to-grave stories and I don’t love biopics in general, but they are based on real people.

John: Yes. Where I come out with Palmer Luckey and Tell Me How You’re Feeling is that I think there’s so many things that are fascinating here, but I don’t think this article or any story about him specifically right now at this moment makes sense to do.

Mari: No.

John: If you could make this with his permission, I don’t see that working out very well. If you make this without his permission, he feels like a person who could be litigious and you could be in for some real situations there.

Mari: I could see like an organization on the right, somebody within the Trump world wanting to make a biopic of him as a hero for the right because the contribution he made was to a Trump troll account. Then eventually so many of the other people in the tech world ended up coming out for Trump and he feels like he was the one who started that. I don’t know. I wonder, it would almost be like a propaganda film.

John: Yes. I could also see if someone tried to do that, I could see him pushing it back against that too because I think he believes himself to be outside of those systems completely.

What I do think is maybe useful about this is to think about this as a kind of character and think about it as a template for sort of like an interesting character to build a new fictional character off of.

Mari: I think you’re right. He’s like an archetype that we don’t see very often and it makes you realize, my husband always says he finds it interesting when I adapt books because things don’t follow a certain way that they’re meant to go. Books take narrative in different directions or characters are more complex than they would be otherwise.

I think there’s something about him that’s sort of contradictory, like the fact that he is in this long-term marriage and has chosen to become a parent. It’s not what you would expect, but it gives you permission to look at a character and think, oh, you can make weird choices.

John: Yes. Agreed. I think he’s fascinating. I think people should read the article and think about him as a character, but I don’t feel like people are going to rush out and like, I want to make the Palmer Luckey movie. I just don’t see that working out well.

Mari: I can’t tell. Somebody might. It would not be me.

John: Look at Succession. You’re not going to make a movie or a series about the Murdochs, but what you can do is take some of the framework and some of the area around them and make a fictionalized story, and that may be the best approach here.

Mari: I miss Succession so much.

John: I miss it so much. It’s so good.

Mari: It’s so good.

John: It’s so good. All right, let’s wrap this up with sort of the opposite of Succession, which is How to Give Away a Fortune. This is by Joshua Jaffa writing for the New Yorker.

This is really fascinating. I’d sort of heard about little pieces of this before, but this is the first encapsulation where this is all together. It centers around Marlene Englehorn, who’s this Austrian heiress. Her family is incredibly wealthy because of a pharmaceutical fortune and her focus is like, I don’t believe I should have this fortune. I want to give away this fortune, but I want to give it away in a way that actually most benefits society.

And so to do this, I’m going to recruit a bunch of Austrians, 50 Austrians who are representative of our country and have them come together over the course of weekends to make decisions about how this $500 billion, this big chunk of money is going to be distributed to the world. I thought it was cool and ambitious and felt naive at times. There were lots of things that were interesting about it. I was trying to think like, could this be a movie? Would this be a movie? If this were a movie, who would you even center it on?

Obviously Marlene Englehorn is one choice, but the story actually puts a lot of its time in Emma, who’s this 80-year-old retiree who gets this letter recruiting her, which sort of feels like the Golden Ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, come to this thing and we’re going to do this thing. She doesn’t even believe it at first, but then she participates in it. Marielle, what’s your instinct here? Is there a movie here? If so, how would you start?

Mari: What I think is so interesting about it is it plays on something culturally that we as Americans, I think, feel is very foreign to us, which is this idea that we’re such a capitalist society. I didn’t even really realize how much that’s baked into our everyday life until I spent time in Berlin. I was talking to an American acquaintance who had moved to Berlin, and he was somebody I knew from my days of making theater, and he was working as a theater artist in Berlin.

He was saying, yeah, the thing about having a job here or about Berlin in general is nobody’s going to get very rich, but nobody’s going to be very poor. We’re all working and making a good living wage, and doctors and theater artists make somewhere around the same amount of money. We all have jobs, and we all have health care, and education is free, and the quality of life is really good, and nobody’s going to be too rich, but nobody’s going to be hurting too much, or not nobody, but in general, it’s just much more socialistic in that way. We’re operating from a very different perspective.

Then he pointed something out to me, which was he was like, have you noticed that when you talk to people here in Berlin, the first question is never, what do you do? It made me realize how much we’re focused on just wealth and career and what we do and how we make money and all of these things in our country. That I found it really liberating and beautiful to think about a society that was really thinking about wealth distribution in different ways. Berlin had capped rental increases at that point as a city because they just didn’t want housing to become unaffordable.

All of these things that the society in itself was supporting a more socialist view of the world, and somewhere it jived with me from an ethical point of view where I just thought, “God, we’re an unethical country.” That makes so much sense. Even just reading this, I felt the same feeling of like, “Could you do this? Could you change the whole way we perceive money and capitalism in such a jarring way?” There’s something fun about it.

John: There’s something fun about it. I like that. You could look at Marlene Englehorn as being sort of the antithesis of an Ayn Rand character, basically, not believing that any individual is worth more than society, therefore, she should not be worth more than everybody else around her. There’s something really noble about that. One thing that the article has to do a lot of work to explain is that, well, how did this family become so wealthy in a country that is not to have such great disparities? It’s because of sort of inherited wealth and sort of the way that inherited wealth becomes this perpetual cycle that’s very hard to break out of.

As a story purpose, I’m not sure who the antagonist is in a way, I’m not sure like what the–

Mari: I wonder if from a story point of view, if it’s the type of story that starts out with this great idea and great intentions, and then as soon as you get into the nitty gritty of it, things go really wrong and you can’t– she sort of, like you said, has a little bit of a naivete about what this would do for people’s lives that is probably coming from a privileged position where she actually really doesn’t understand what people who haven’t grown up how she did need or want, the sort of rich person, “I’m the hero of my own story” narrative vibe. Then maybe she could actually come to a point where she actually has to grow and change also in some other way, I don’t know.

John: Yes, we were talking about Succession before, it feels like she’s almost like the Siobhan’s character in Succession if she actually believed the things she sort of professed to believe in Succession, and then she sort of keeps getting pulled back in. The other thing that reminded me of was The Good Place and that it was a chance for have characters wrestling about like what is good and right in society, like how do we do this thing?

Because the probably most interesting parts of the story, which I think is probably a better documentary than a feature film, is about sort of like, well, how are we going to prioritize these choices that we’re making as a society and as a subset of society who gets to make some of these choices? It comes down to at the end, I’ll spoil a little bit, is that they have a slush fund at the end where they have like these stickers, they can just apply their stickers that are each worth like $50,000 to different projects and it’s like they’re putting my posters around.

Mari: Very Succession.

John: Yes, which is absurd, but also you get it. There’s a certain point you’re throwing money at things.

Mari: Yes, it does feel like it’s a fun way to explore some bigger ethical questions, and you would almost want like economists and ethicists to come in and weigh in on all of the like pitfalls that you couldn’t anticipate. If you were fictionalizing this and narrativizing it, like what’s the most extreme thing that could happen in this situation?

John: Let’s do a recap of our three How Would this Would Be a Movies.

I think the surprise for me is like the one that’s probably closest to a movie is the Thread thread of Dating a Celebrity because How To Give Away A Fortune is so interesting, but it’s probably a documentary, it’s probably not really suited for a two-hour theatrical experience. Palmer Luckey, I don’t think we want to tell his specific story over the course of this time. We’d like him as a template, but I could imagine several different kinds of movies that are based on essentially this list of advice for dating a celebrity.

Mari: Yes. When I first read it, I didn’t think it would be a movie, but as we talked about it, I got convinced.

John: As we drop this podcast, you and I both be racing to get our versions of this story down and get them sold off there.

Mari: I’m going to call Leonardo DiCaprio right now.

John: Right now. Appian Way, we’re going to get in there and make that movie.

Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Teresa Justino called, You Get To Be Fulfilled Now. She’s talking about how as writers, often we need day jobs to sort of get through and pay our bills and pay our rent. Often we think of those as survival jobs and she wants to recast those as what she calls thrival jobs, which are jobs you can thrive in even while you’re making a living to do your thing.

She says, “I love thrival because I believe it’s possible to find a job outside your chosen field that nonetheless contributes to your ultimate goals, supports you financially, and provides some sort of joy, fulfillment, and purpose. In other words, a job that allows you to thrive rather than just survive.” She talks about what that was like for her, but I think that’s a nice framework for us to be thinking about what we’re doing in terms of the work we do that is not the work we aspire to do. It applies to writers, directors, actors, everybody.

Mari: It reminds me of some advice you guys gave on the podcast a few weeks ago, I think, to somebody who was asking whether they should take a certain job within the industry even though they felt, I can’t remember what their hesitation was, and I loved that both of you were like, take the job, make the money, do the thing you need to do, and we need to all, not that you’re saying, “Oh, you just have to pay dues and we all have to pay dues,” but there is this sort of, I think, thing within Hollywood where people sort of believe somehow they’re just going to get handed their dream job out of the blue.

It just never has happened from what I can tell in the world. I agree, I feel like working in restaurants for 15 years and all of the different jobs I’ve done where I was a hard worker and I was good at multitasking and I learned lots of skills that helped me be a director and that everybody who I worked with recognized that I was a hard worker. There were times that I felt like that would be what I did for the rest of my life, and oh no, I want to do something else. But I was still going to give my all to jobs. I was still going to work hard and be the person I want to be in the world.

John: I think I always talk about with my early jobs, my sort of survivaly thrival jobs, is it was helpful for me to have a job that I didn’t hate, but I didn’t love, and that I could leave with enough brainpower left in me that I could still go home and write. That’s the balance, and there’s some, I do see sometimes people who will take a job that is so overwhelming that they don’t have anything left in the tank, and that’s not going to be the right choice. It made more sense to take a job, like waiting tables is physically exhausting, but it’s not using that same creative spark that you would otherwise be spending.

Mari: It’s true. My main thrival jobs of my life were all waiting tables and working as a camp counselor or for a daycare and taking care of children. That was much more exhausting on an emotional level than was waiting tables.

John: Yes, I can see it. What do you have to recommend for our listeners?

Mari: My one cool thing is a book that I just started reading that’s beautiful by my friend Priyanka Mattoo, and it’s called Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones. It’s a memoir, and it’s funny and relatable and just gorgeously written, and I recommend everybody reading it. She’s just a beautiful writer, and it’s a series of essays, and I think it will just warm your heart and make you feel less alone, which is what I think the goal of all art is.

John: Fantastic, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones.

Mari: Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, which is also just such a great title, right?

John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

It’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware now. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become our premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on film festivals. Mari Heller, an absolute damn delight having you back on the show.

Mari: It’s so nice to be back, like coming home.

John: Check out Nightbitch, which is going to be coming out in December and many festivals before then, right?

Mari: Yes, please come and see it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we just mentioned film festivals. Let’s talk about film festivals. Nightbitch debuted at TIFF, but this was not your first experience at film festivals. Was the first time you were there with a movie, was that Diary of a Teenage Girl?

Mari: Yes, so Diary premiered at Sundance and that was a very specific and special experience because the movie had been supported by the Sundance Labs, a place you and I both know and love. Sundance had been, sort of my creative home in that way because I had developed both at the Writer’s Lab and the Director’s Lab. Then I got to premiere the movie at the Sundance Film Festival.

John: That’s amazing. So in that case, you want people to see your movie, but you want them to buy your movie, right? Because it hadn’t been sold yet?

Mari: Absolutely, it had not been sold yet.

John: There’s a lot of pressure there.

Mari: It sold at Sundance back when that still happened, which from what I can understand, movies don’t really sell at film festivals the way they used to.

Mari: Probably a topic for a bigger discussion, but like a lot of times, there’s been a lot of screenings ahead of time so people know what they’re going to buy or they premiere there and it’s weeks or months later that the actual sale happens.

Mari: That seems like it happens more often now, yes.

John: The case of, Diary of a Teenage Girl, there was that excitement of like, oh my gosh, there’s like two in the morning and the offers are going back and forth. That’s so cool and exciting.

Mari: That’s exactly what happened, which blew my mind that it played out in that way. What we did at the time was I took a lot of meetings before the movie premiered with a number of companies. I got to know the players and sort of people who were maybe going to be interested in the movie before they had seen the movie.

Then once the movie premiered, we were in that exact game of trying to sell the movie. Then three weeks later, I went to Berlinale with the movie to try to sell it to foreign markets. We had our foreign sales agent and I did a million meetings there and worked on basically selling off different territories to the movie too.

John: Good. I had two Sundance experiences. My first one was with Go and Go was a premiere at Sundance, but we already were sold. Columbia owned the movie everywhere in the world. This was just a happy premiere situation, like getting hype for the story and it was great. The second time was with The Nines and The Nines was not sold anywhere. We had that, the big screening, but really the purpose there was to find a buyer for the movie.

Like you, we had some conversations ahead of time. They hadn’t seen the movie, but they’d sort of knew who we were. We enlisted both a film sales agent and a film publicity agent who were there to make sure all the right people were coming to the screening. Of course, they don’t actually come to the screening because they’re getting busy with other stuff, so they have to come to a later screening or we’re burning a DVD for them so they can watch it in their hotel room. It’s so stressful to try to sell a movie at a film festival.

Mari: It is so stressful. At the time, I had just had a kid. He was five weeks old. I was at the film festival with a five week old baby and trying to understand the sort of ins and outs of selling this movie. UTA was representing the movie and having all of these meetings. It was, yes, it was very stressful and exciting. I’m glad I had that experience, but man, it was stressful. None of my other film festival experiences have been like that.

John: Let’s talk about the happier situation generally of a film festival where you are there to premiere your film, to debut it, to talk about it, but you don’t have to actually sell it. Something like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Nightbitch, what do you go in with? Who has seen it before? Let’s talk about Nightbitch. Who had seen the movie before it debuted at TIFF? The programmers at TIFF, somebody had seen it, right?

Mari: Yes, so we had actually shown the movie to the programmers at TIFF the year before, before the strikes happened, because the plan was to premiere then. They were so passionate about loving the movie that they basically said, if you need to hold it for a year, we’ll hold a spot for you for next year, which was so kind and wonderful. So yes, programmers see the movie early. We had tested the movie. We had shown the movie to test audiences.

We had done some sort of tastemaker screen, or no, not tastemakers, not the right– toe-dip screenings, as they call them, where you sort of show them to journalists who will never cover the movie, but you get a sort of sense of how people might review the movie. We had done all of those preliminary screenings, and then, of course, I had shown the movie to everybody I had, no, in my house or living room or screening room or whatever, and done a million friends and family screenings. Because we weren’t selling the movie, the movie was already with Searchlight. It wasn’t the same situation where we needed to meet with people ahead of time in order to have them see the movie.

John: Let’s talk about the actual experience, then, of the premiere screenings. Was it at nighttime? Was it 7 PM, were you at one of the sort of marches?

Mari: It was 9.30 on Saturday night, which was a pretty key time, but late for me.

John: As a parent, yes.

Mari: Yes, I started that day at 8 AM doing my tech check of the DCP and checking all the theater stuff and showing up to make sure everything was going to sound and look great, and then I got into my glam, which is a wonderful thing, but, exhausting, too, and did pictures and press all day, and then the movie didn’t play until 9:30 at night.

It was really fun, though, because we were in a huge theater, this gorgeous theater that sat almost 2,000 people, and it felt like it was the hot ticket, Everybody wanted to see the movie, and I was getting calls and texts from everyone, “I can’t get into your movie, do you have any extra tickets, blah, blah, blah.” It just had this feeling, this energy, which I think that’s the best part about film festivals, is this energy of being together communally, watching movies, and people getting excited about something and hearing about something.

John: Because it’s in a big theater they’re not on their phone doing anything else, they’re actually just focused on the screen for once.

Mari: People are there because they love movies. People are geeking out over movies which is such a fun place to be, it’s always scary to show your movie to an audience no matter what but you feel like you’re watching with a ton of people who love movies and love watching movies and there’s just an energy that you can’t replicate. I remember Jorma talking about MacGruber premiered at South by Southwest and he was like, I’ll never have a better screening than that in my life. That was the most exciting, best audience reaction I could ever have.

John: Yes, Go’s premiere was also, it was at nighttime at Sundance. It was a great big party. My movie, The Nines, we had like the great big premiere, but like it went well, but like that’s by far the biggest house that’s ever going to see the movie. That probably is true for Nightbitch as well. You’re going to have a theatrical release, but this is the only one time you’re going to have that many people looking at their eyeballs directed towards your film at one place.

Mari: I sit in the audience and watch the movie at these film festivals because of that exact reason, because it’s so satisfying and fun to watch that many people watch your movie. I know a lot of filmmakers who can’t, who can’t sit there while it plays, and it just feels too much or actors who feel like it’s just too much to sit there while everybody watches the movie.

I think even when I was sitting there, this was only now two weekends ago, sitting there with the audience watching Nightbitch premiere, I was, as it was happening, doing that thing of being like, remember this, remember this feeling, remember that laugh, this feels so good, it’s never going to feel like this again.

John: It’s not your last festival, so let’s talk about that, because it’s not just, because this is really the start of awards season, and TIFF sort of kicks off awards season, part of the goal of doing this is to sort of get that first initial buzz started about sort of the things people might say like, “Oh, this should be on our list for picture, for screenplay, for Amy Adams, for other things.” All those things, those conversations are going to start happening, and you keep those conversations happening by going to different festivals. What does the runway look like ahead of you?

Mari: Yes, I’m so lucky that I can talk about this with as much experience as I’ve already had, because I had two years in a row, 2018 and 2019, where for Can you Ever Forgive Me, and A Beautiful Day, I did a very similar trajectory of film festival to film festival to film festival and press. An awards campaign, essentially. I am a little more prepared, I guess, this time around for all of that. I will be going to the London Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival, the Savannah Film Festival, the Chicago Film Festival, Hampton’s Film Festival.

I would be doing even more if my husband wasn’t off making a movie in Finland right now, and I wasn’t also solo parenting. I’m going to do as many as I can, and I have called on all the grandparents to help because it’s going to be quite a fall. Once you do the initial film festival, the rest of them don’t feel nearly as terrifying. They are a little bit more fun. You start to get your talking points down.

We all went to TIFF, the cast, me, the author of the book, the producers. Often what then ends up happening is we sort of split up and we each cover different territories when it comes to the film festivals. you become less– you’re more alone doing the next sections of it, so a few of us will go to London but I think like when I go I don’t know to Middleburg it may just be me I might be the only one really there representing the film, there to answer questions and do the press around it so it doesn’t have the same energy as the first time when everybody comes together and gets to celebrate.

John: The Nines went to Venice Film Festival it was like, “Oh what movies did at Venice?” I’m like, I saw nothing. I was there. That’s the other irony.

Mari: I saw nothing at Toronto either, no. I’ve never seen anything at a film festival when I’m there for a film. You’re working the whole time. Going to Sundance when I haven’t had a movie there is one of my favorite experiences because getting to see three movies a day or whatever you might be able to sneak your way into is such a cool experience. No, when you’re there with your own movie, you don’t see anything.

John: Yes, you’re in work mode. Mari, congratulations on the film you’ve made so far, on the festival so far, and all the festivals ahead.

Mari: Thank you.

John: Thank you for talking us through this.

Mari: My pleasure.

Links:

• Nightbitch | Official Trailer
• Marielle Heller
• Highland Pro Austin launch party – sign up here!
• MacGruber on Peacock
• Hollywood’s 10 Percent Problem by Matt Belloni at Puck
• Dating a Celebrity – Thread by bo.predko
• American Vulcan by Jeremy Stern for Tablet
• How to Give Away a Fortune by Joshua Yaffa for The New Yorker
• You Get to Be Fulfilled Now by Teresa Jusino
• Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
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• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 656 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you create a film genre? If you’re a filmmaker, perhaps your work inspires others to copy or remix those elements until the resulting movies feel like their own genre or subgenre. I’d argue that’s how we get slasher movies, for example. While there were definitely antecedents, we probably wouldn’t have the slasher subgenre without John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978. That’s not the only way you can create a film genre. If you’re a journalist or movie critic, perhaps you notice a common thread connecting a bunch of existing films and give it a name, like a scientist discovering a new taxonomy.

That’s the case with a microgenre we’re going to discuss today. I’m happy to have its originator as our guest. Max Read is a journalist, screenwriter, editor, and the owner operator of ReadMax, a weekly newsletter guide to the future. His writing has appeared in various publications with the word New York in the title, including New York Magazine, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, all put together there. He’s also the former editor of some defunct websites, including Gawker and Select All. Welcome to the show, Max.

Max Read: Thanks for having me.

John: As we were discussing on email, you’ve actually been mentioned on the podcast before, correct?

Max: Yes. I have a lot of friends who subscribe and they never ever text me after my newsletter goes out. Then lo and behold, I was on John August’s podcast and all of a sudden I got a lot of texts about my newsletter.

John: What were we talking about? Was this about–

Max: There was a Harper’s piece about the future of labor in Hollywood, I guess, in particular screenwriter labor. It was a riff that I’d been thinking about for a while about YouTube, TikTok, online influencers, a lot of which is my beat as a journalist, thinking about those people as competitors to what we do and thinking about one of the problems that we face as unionized writers is the fact that there’s this huge non-union workforce who are doing remarkably similar jobs to us, similar jobs to actors and directors as well. I gave it a goofy headline that didn’t live up to the promise of the headline. It’s something that has been on my mind for a long time now as a journalist, as a person online, as a person who consumes a lot of crap online, but also as a member of WGA and somebody who is a little nervous about the future of Hollywood right now.

John: Talk to us about why you’re a member of WGA. Is it for feature and TV work or is it because through the Writers Guild East and how that has organized some labor under the journalism?

Max: I am a member through TV writing, though it’s funny you ask that question. I was at Gawker between 2010 and 2015. WGAE organized Gawker while I was there. Then the week I left, the week after I left, they were finally certified. I was never actually a member of WGAE at Gawker. A few years later, I sold a show with a friend of mine based on our time at Gawker as it happened. That was what jumped me into the WGAE.

John: I love that you say jumped into it. Like it is just a mafia thing.

Max: There really weren’t enough initiation rituals in the end.

John: Totally. We have on the show to talk about halogencore, which is this micro genre you brought up. That’s something we’ll get into in a second. While you’re here, I also would like to talk about journalism and the overlap with what we do in film and TV writing, because those are blurry boundaries now. Actually how one makes a living in journalism these days, because it feels like a transition is happening there that’s going to be familiar to anybody working in television, for example.

Because once upon a time, you were a staff writer on Cheers, and that was your entire job for all your year, was doing that. Now it’s about assembling a bunch of jobs over the course of a year. It’s about making your year, earning enough money to actually stay in this business. That feels very much like what so many writers working in other parts of the media are doing these days.

Max: Like you say, I’ve had a number of jobs over the 15 or so years that I’ve been a journalist. My career has both been very traditional and very unorthodox. I got my start working at Gawker as a blogger at a time when that was still a pretty new thing to be doing. Then I went and worked at New York Magazine for five years. That was a fantastic education on how a magazine is made. Some of my favorite things I’ve ever written and worked on came out in that time. Then I left New York to pursue screenwriting, and then also to start this newsletter that we’ve been talking about.

The newsletter is probably the newest of job that I’ve been doing. I’m essentially a columnist. I write two newsletters a week. I’m also the publisher. I have to keep track of subscribers and think about how I’m gaining subscribers and keep track of my numbers and think about all these things. For me personally, I like it a lot. I like the independence. In some ways, it’s motivating to be my own boss in all these ways. It’s not for everybody. I would hate to see a world where this is the only way that journalists are getting work.

Unfortunately, it has not been a good few years since the pandemic. In particular, jobs at newspapers and magazines have just been hemorrhaging. It feels like basically everybody these days works for either the Times or one of the big Condé Nast publications, which it’s good that I can be making money doing this newsletter but it doesn’t feel good. I don’t have a good sense of what the next 10 years look like either.

John: I definitely want to dig into that. We’ll take care of some news and follow up first, but then we’ll get to halogencore. Then we’ll get into what it’s like to make it living as an independent writer. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I’d like to talk with you about the acceleration of time and events that we’re going through right now, because it feels like the last eight weeks, something broke and everything is now just happening faster than it’s ever happened before.

I know you’re a person every year who does a recap of what happened over the course of the previous year. I fear for you because it just feels like so much has happened so quickly that as you’re bringing down the months, like January and February and March might look normal. Then just the length and volume of what’s happened in the last period just seems unfathomable. I’d love to get into this sense of the acceleration of time with you.

Max: In some ways, it’s very good. If your job is working off the news, the more material, the better. There was a time when August was just absolutely dead as a month to do it. Now it’s like, “Oh, there’s always something to write about every week.” I don’t have to spend all weekend worrying about what my column’s going to be like the next year. It’s also it’s exhausting. It is a really good way to bring yourself out.
For a long time, I’ve said to myself, I don’t want to be a weekly columnist, I need to work on longer projects or whatever. I also just think, personally there’s just something about my metabolism, my processing metabolism, that really helps to just when stuff is happening to be able to take it, put something on the page, work out how I feel about it in writing, think it through, and then be able to move on instead of– The writing actually helps the sense of being buried under all this stuff.

Look, if you’re reading a lot of things, you’re getting a lot of ideas. If you’re also doing fiction at the same time that you’re doing nonfiction, you’re just constantly getting stuff that might work or might not work for something you’re doing in the future. If you can’t sort that out well, then maybe that’s a bad thing. I think it can be nice to know that you’ve got this big, I don’t know what people have, a bookmarks folder, or just a document where they’re pasting links or whatever, it is that people are doing to just know next time you’re stuck, you’ve got something you can go scroll through to remember everything that happened in July that might be useful to you.

John: Let me make a note, because I do want to get back to how you organize all the stuff that comes in and how you think about that stuff. First off, though, we have a little bit of news here. Highland, which is the screenwriting and general purpose writing app that my company makes, has an amazing new version that’s out in beta now. I’ve been using this version of it for some 18 months or so. Now you can too. It’s really good. It’s for the Mac, it’s for iPad and iPhone. Drew, you’ve been using it?

Drew: Yes. I love it. It’s so clean, and it’s gorgeous, and it’s fast. I’m excited for people to try it.

John: Over the summer, Drew had to do some work in Final Draft because I was working on a project where he had to deliver some Final Draft files as well. That was brutal to transition to Final Draft after that.

Drew: It hurt to go back.

John: Anyway, if you would like to beta test this, we’ll put a link in the show notes for how you sign up for that. It’s not going to be a very long beta. It’s only a couple weeks before we get this out into the world, hopefully. We’d love to have some more people out there testing it. Max, what do you write in? The columns you’re doing, what has Read Max written in?

Max: This is a sin for most journalists, but I write directly into the CMS, the content management system that the blog publishes to. For a long time, you were never supposed to do that because there was no way to save things on the web. If it crashed, you would lose the whole post. I have to say, I write on Substack as the platform I write for, and they have created what, as far as I’m concerned, is the best CMS I’ve ever used in all my years working in these things. It auto-saves. I never feel uncomfortable. It’s a little like when you’re writing a screenplay, you like to have it formatted as it’s going to be in the end. It’s much easier to do that. I like being able to see how it’s going to look on the page as I’m writing it. When I do longer magazine features, I go in Google Docs, partly just because the sharing is the easiest way to do it, and commenting is really easy for editors. My editors always take it out of Google Docs and put it in Microsoft Word. I just have version of this everywhere, basically.

John: No, it’s brutal. We’re testing this one and see if there’s stuff in Highland that you like. Other follow-up here, Drew, back in episode 582, we were talking about this playwright who wanted to move into screenwriting, and we had someone write back with some extra advice for that.

Drew: Yeah, Laura wrote, “As a playwright turned TV writer and feature writer myself, I wanted to offer some advice to Bethany. It sounds to me like her impulse to put people in a room and let things explode comes from an exposure to a lot of single-set, single-room plays, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, August Osage County, et cetera. I highly recommend she does some deep study on films that essentially do the same thing to see how she can begin to adapt from one medium into another. Shiva Baby and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande are great places to start. Leo Grande feels the most like a stage play, two characters, one location, except for the final scene, with time passing in between each scene. Shiva Baby is a great example of how to chuck a bunch of people into the same shared space and keep things propulsive because the protagonist is trapped in a house with her antagonists.”

John: I was also thinking about My Dinner with Andre is it another classic film where there’s a bunch of people in one space doing one thing. Those are all great examples. As I thought more about this initial question, see it feels like Bethany is struggling not so much with keeping people in one location, but understanding how to jump forward in time and that it’s really about the ability to cut forward in time and to eliminate those moments in between stuff that is the power of film, the ability to cut. It’s really understanding how cutting works and how things can move forward.

Some of these movies that Laura was mentioning here have examples of that where you’re in one location but you’re jumping forward in time. I think you just need to be more comfortable with the form of not having characters walk in and say their thing than exit, but rather the movie itself is telling its story through cutting and through time. She’s just going to have to experiment with that and just write some things that necessitate cutting.

Also had some follow-up on Hallmark movies. We talked a little bit about like Hallmark Christmas movies. Craig had wondered aloud how many Hallmark Christmas movies there were. Stephen Follows, who’s the guy who does all the data analysis of film and stuff, has done other projects with us before. Stephen Follows wrote this great blog post about just how many Hallmark Christmas movies there are and really detailed into the tropes and the expectations of a Hallmark Christmas movie.

Drew: In his blog post, Stephen Follows says he found a total of 307 Hallmark Christmas movies with production reaching an average of 30 a year over the past few years.

John: He included some great charts to talk through how much the production of these movies has grown over the years. 30 in a genre per year is crazy that there’s 30 of these being made each year. He listed the genres within them. Obviously romance is very high for these Christmas movies. Most of them come out in November and December, which also makes sense. If you’re curious about holiday movies on Hallmark, this is the definitive source, the definitive article, I think, for the data behind this. 180 degrees, I think, not as opposite as you can get from a Hallmark Christmas movie is this genre that Max Read has described in, I think originally on your Letterboxd, but then became a blog post. Can you tell us about what Halogencore is? Try to define this genre for us.

Max: If you don’t mind, I can just read a little bit.

John: Sure, go for it.

Max: I’ll just read a short thing that I wrote, partly just me trying to list out what I liked about these movies.

“Halogencore movies are stories of corporate intrigue and malfeasance told from the point of view of characters on the outside of the inside, low-level apparatchiks, functionaries, subordinates, and middle managers, navigating crisis from the periphery of real power. They usually take place over a short timeframe, day or a night or a weekend, and against a ticking clock. They are not stories of lasting change, stunning revelation, or dramatic reversals of fortune. They’re stories of beaten-down people acquiescing to or negotiating compromise with power. The victory of a happy ending in a Halogencore movie is not that power has been toppled, but that our compromised hero has managed to survive inside the machine without being crushed. As the name suggests, Halogencore movies feature lots of fluorescent lighting and nighttime city shots. The action is largely office-bound.”

John: At this moment, I’d love to actually play a clip from Margin Call. Margin Call is one of the ones you identify. Let’s take a listen to this moment from Margin Call, which I think actually does hit a lot of these beats. I think you’ll recognize it once we play it.

[plays a clip from the movie Margin Call]

John: Max, that to me feels like what you’re describing here. You have a bunch of folks who work for this investment firm. One of them has discovered something that is highly amiss, but they’re not classic outsiders coming into a space and having to learn about a space. They were already part of the system and they’re discovering a new flaw. They’re discovering a new way that the world is broken. Is that a fair description?

Max: Yes. And you’ll notice they don’t quite know what’s going on themselves yet. They’re ahead of you, the audience, but they themselves are still behind somebody else who’s not on screen. Their first action when they uncover whatever secret or whatever revelation they’ve just found is they have to call their bosses. It’s not like a, “Let’s go get this published.” It’s not like whatever. It’s like the subordinates have to find the guy, the middle manager has to call the middle manager above him. Margin Call is a movie that’s great with working through hierarchy and establishing and demonstrating hierarchies in that way. The music does a lot there. It’s a great music cue, but you can feel the tension mounting just through the dialogue in that scene without really ever learning. If you’ve never seen Margin Call, it’s about banks, but if you didn’t know that, you don’t need to know what they’re talking about or what’s happening to understand just through what they’re saying to each other how serious everything that’s happening is.

John: Yes. Let’s talk about some of the other films in the genre because if it was just Margin Call, it’s like, oh Margin Call is a one-off. It’s an example of this thing, but it’s not a genre until there’s many films that can be categorized with it. Talk to us about the other things you identify as being, oh, this feels like halogencore.

Max: To me, the big one is Michael Clayton. Michael Clayton, in some ways, this was me attempting to define movies that are like Michael Clayton because it’s just one of my favorite movies. Michael Clayton is similarly, again, it’s about a lawyer who’s on the outside of his own law firm. At one point, his brother says to him, all the lawyers think you’re a cop, all the cops think you’re a lawyer. He’s in this liminal identity space. He’s working against time to find his mentor. It’s all in offices. There’s the similar droney music making you feel anxious the whole time.

I actually didn’t write this out, the set of observations out till I’d seen The Assistant, which is a relatively recent movie where Julia Garner plays the assistant to an unseen and unnamed, but very clearly Harvey Weinstein-based movie producer. The movie is about the office environment under a tyrant like that, where everybody knows something bad has happened or is happening and nobody is able to talk about it or do anything about it. Again, it has the same sense of like, you the audience are a little bit behind the characters. They do this in a really enjoyable feeling. You don’t quite know what’s going on.

Part of the reason it works is that the characters themselves are also a little bit behind. They themselves don’t quite know the depth of wrongdoing or exactly what’s happening. They’re trying to figure it out themselves, but also to figure it out without getting in trouble. They’re not crusading. To me, that’s three that really hit the mark. There’s a bunch of others that have a similar, let’s call it a vibe. There’s earlier movies, movies that were made– Shattered Glass, it’s a great movie about the New Republic and Stephen Glass, who is famously identified as having fabricated a bunch of stories.
Syriana is a total favorite of mine, is a Stephen Gaghan movie about– It’s a little like Traffic. It’s all these interconnected stories about geopolitics, extremely depressing movie, just unbelievably politically bleak movie, but similarly has a lot of these– Jeffrey Wright plays a high-powered corporate lawyer who suddenly steps into the world of oil money and political assassination and realizes how much more insane everything has gotten than he understood.

Even a more recent movie, High Flying Bird, the Steven Soderbergh movie, which is a very different arena. It’s not banks. It’s not oil. It’s about an NBA agent who’s trying to break the owner’s cartel in the NBA. It’s a little more fun than these other ones, I suppose, but it has the same rhythms because a lot of people are on the phone all the time, they’re having these secret meetings. You’re constantly catching up to the action as it happens.

I could keep going on, there’s another movie that I want to really recommend, because I don’t think many people have seen it, called Azor, which is, to me, one of my favorite movies of the last few years. It’s a Swiss-Argentinian movie, Swiss director, set in Argentina about a Swiss banker who comes over to Argentina during the Dirty War, under the military junta, and is looking for his partner, who’s disappeared. He spends the whole movie in these shadowy meetings with these very scary Argentinian fascists and military apparatchiks, trying to uncover what’s happened amidst this world where kids are disappearing, students are disappearing all the time.

He’s recognizing and uncovering, and unlike what you might expect from a Hollywood movie, it’s not about, “I’m going to uncover this, bring everybody to justice.” It’s, “I’m going to uncover this and then cover it right back up because I didn’t really want to know in the first place and I just need to get my own thing and get out of here.” Those are some good ones. There’s a Letterboxd list, there’s my newsletter, people are welcome to come suggest ones to me, too, if they’ve got them.

John: Let’s talk about the common elements we’re seeing here, because there’s structural elements. We talked about how these tend to be stories that have a protagonist who’s already part of that world. I love that you say they’re on the outside of the inside. They’re already part of the system, but they don’t know quite how the whole system works, but they’re ahead of us as the audience is. But really, the vibe is what’s crucial. The vibe, you say anxiety, you say dread, paranoia, this pessimism, this sense of a crushing doom. In this setup, I was talking about slasher films, and in a weird way, there is an aspect of a slasher. It’s not about bringing down the system, it’s just about surviving.

It’s just being the person who actually emerges at the end, and there’s not a sense that you’re going to topple this regime, you’re just trying to get through it. I think back to the end of Michael Clayton, and we do see Michael Clayton, the George Clooney character, be able to get a victory over Tilda Swinton’s character, but then as he’s in his cab ride leaving, he recognizes he didn’t really do all that much. It’s not like the problem of the movie is fully solved, it’s just he got through this one situation, he got through this one moment.

Max: Yes. One really obvious antecedent to these is paranoia thrillers of the ‘70s. Three Days of the Condor is a really classic one that has– What’s the final line? Something like, “But are they going to print it?” He’s got all his documents, he’s taken into the Times. What’s one of the things that’s interesting to me about this is that, as we’ve been saying, there’s not a do-gooder figure. It’s really rare that there’s a crusading — It’s not Pelican brief. There’s not a Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington crusading to uncover something. It doesn’t have like a journalist at the center.

It’s guys who work at law firms or at banks or in big glass offices who are forced to compromise whatever small measure of integrity they have left. That’s the vibe of that, like you say, of that pessimism and bleakness is, to me, all about that sense that you can’t do anything. You can save yourself, maybe. That’s maybe the best thing you can do. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is get out of there.

John: The relationship between these movies and the paranoid thrillers, which tended to focus on investigators or on journalists is really interesting because in the journalism thrillers, it tends to be, we have our crusading journalists going in and looking for answers. The point of view is from the journalist. Look at Spotlight, which is a movie that feels like it’s close to this in some ways, except that they are an outsider looking into a system. In those, the POV tends to be, in my estimation, fairly well locked to the characters investigating. But as I think to Margin Call, or I think to Michael Clayton, the movie is willing to switch POVs and show us things that our central protagonist does not know yet.

We’re able to cut to Tilda Swinton’s POV and see how she’s freaking out in the restroom stall. In Margin Call, we’re able to cut to Kevin Spacey’s character trying to get his way out of the situation. We as an audience have information that at times even our protagonist doesn’t have. I think that leads to this overall greater sense of dread, the same way in a horror film, where sometimes we’re cutting to the killer’s point of view and we know where the killer is in relationship to our hero who’s trying to hide or succeed or get away from the killer.

Max: Margin Call does something I think is absolutely brilliant, which is it hides– It’s about the Lehman Brothers crash in ’08. You know what’s going on. It effectively hides the actual mechanics of the secret and the problem. You focus is almost entirely on internal personal dynamics at the bank and fear and frustration and paranoia until the bank’s CEO arrives with an unbelievably great cameo by Jeremy Irons, just being the most Jeremy Irons he possibly can be. And he’s the guy who’s like, “Can somebody please explain to me what the fuck is going on as though I were a dog or a small child?”

It both works really well because finally the audience is clued in, and they’re clued in a great, natural and organic way. We get the explanation from Kevin Spacey and Zachary Quinto about exactly what’s been happening. But it’s also thematically great because you finally see that, even the guy at the very center, even the inside of the inside, doesn’t really know what’s happening. Everybody is out on a limb. Everybody is piecing together information as it comes in. Everybody’s fearing for their own ass. Everybody is trying to get out. To me, that’s the best scene in the movie. It’s a boardroom scene. It just works really well. It just nails exactly what’s happening.

John: Let’s look at other movies that are doing similar things, but sometimes funnier or sometimes just in a different way. We talk about financial shenanigans, The Big Short, of course, is a great look at the collapse of this housing bubble and how everything goes awry. We have those moments where we need to explain to a character on screen, but also to the audience, what’s really happening here. I think the difference is that while some of our characters are complicit in what’s happening here, there’s not that same sense of dread to it. We know that a calamity is coming, but there’s not that sense of impending doom.

Another example would be Moneyball. Moneyball is very insider. You have characters who know things that the audience doesn’t know. They recognize how complicated the situation is. Yet the movie ultimately lets itself have more fun than it’s not just all dread the whole time. There are moments of real tension and suspense. That’s not the overall goal of the story.

Max: It’s funny because there’s a bunch of techniques. Moneyball, for example, looks– It’s got that Soderbergh digital camera washed out look and the post-rock soundtrack to give you a little bit of that feeling. But it subverts the expectations of that in a nice way, that it’s funny and it’s a little inspiring, even if it’s ambiguously inspiring. It’s not like the A’s won the World Series. I like a movie like that, that can magpie pick things that create certain expectations in the audience and then subvert them a little. Soderbergh is, to me, a huge influence on this general genre, probably because of his use of digital cinematography. Early traffic is probably an early version of this. He loves his really intricate screenplays that are hiding all kinds of things from all kinds of characters.

But probably his most halogencore movie is actually The Informant with Matt Damon, which is a great, very funny and probably underseen movie that takes all the halogencore ideas and tropes and then just plays it like a straight comedy. It’s a really interesting exercise in what you can do when you set up a set of expectations and then just tweak one of your knobs a little bit. You’re like, “What if we accept that this is actually quite funny and we make it and we just play that up a little bit?”

John: As we were listening to the clip from Margin Call, I was also thinking about Glengarry Glen Ross in the sense of the overlapping dialogue, the sense of characters never fully completing a thought, but they’re recognizing they’re building on top of each other. There’s a sense of power that’s created by ideas not being fully expressed, but recognition that this motion is happening. Or The Insider, which is another great story, identified as being a proto-halogencore, because it has a journalist at the center of it, it’s not quite the same situation as being trapped inside the space with these characters, but those are all aspects of that.

Going back to Soderbergh, I think you’re right to nail his digital cinematography, but it’s also it’s pulling a documentary aesthetic into a classic narrative space. He didn’t end up directing Moneyball, but Moneyball is often shot like a documentary. It’s shot and has that aspect that you feel like you’re wandering into conversations that were already happening. Even the scouts are talking around the table, it feels like, “Oh, this could have just been an actual real thing that they just set up some cameras and shot.” I think you get that in a lot of these movies where it feels like the camera happened to find these characters having this conversation, which is an aesthetic on that.

Max: Pretty true to most of these. The immediacy, I think, is really important because, to me the ticking clock is one of the most important things of movies like this, that there is a deadline that people are working against and that creates all the urgency and the camera wobbling and turning corners, that Wiseman documentary, it’s like very Frederick Wiseman, like just a guy with a camera wandering around the high-powered lawyer’s office for some reason. It heightens that sense. There’s no stately compositions or anything. It’s just like, we got a snippet of this conversation. It mimics the idea that you might overhear something at the office and realize that– The Assistant is particularly good at this, because so much of that is she hears things going on behind the closed door and your acid reflux starts to activate because you’re feeling just as stressed as she is.

John: We’re talking about feature films. Feature films obviously are a story with a beginning and an end in a short period of time, which feel like they’re crucial aspects to the structure of the halogencore movies. They’re not necessarily in real time, but they’re at a compressed period of time. Yet, I see some of these aesthetics also being done in series television. If you look at Succession, I think there’s an aspect of this dread happening in many individual episodes of Succession. I think Severance has aspects of this too, where there is this sense of crushing dread and characters who are the part of it, but they don’t see the whole picture. They’re touching a piece of the elephant, but they don’t know what the whole elephant is. Even though we’re talking about something that is a film or genre, aspects of that can absolutely apply to series television as well.

Max: We joked about proto-halogencore, about movies that are maybe a little too early to be considered the genre but are obviously like serious influences. A few that come to mind are actually ‘70s and ‘80s BBC television series, which are limited series. It’s in this ambiguous space between endlessly serial and the TV. The original BBC, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is very– John le Carre as a novelist and all the movies that have been based on his novels are also very important, I think to– Nobody’s better at cultivating that sense of rot on the inside than John le Carre.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there’s a great series called Edge of Darkness from the ‘80s about a detective, it’s a nuclear paranoia, a detective looking for his daughter, that have a lot of these things. It’s like 1980s England in the minds of filmmakers of the time was one of the bleakest places imaginable. They nailed it, I suppose. Those are great examples of ways to, even if you don’t necessarily have a ticking clock to draw out these threads of bleakness, of paranoia, of despair, of just mopping up a mess that is never really going to be fully clean.

John: I want to close this up by talking about the actual practical takeaways from this, because it’s one thing to identify a genre, but it’s actually can be useful for people who want to make movies, because it’s hard to say, “I want to make a movie like Michael Clayton. I want to make a movie like this.” Once you identify it’s in this space, and so you don’t necessarily need to use the term halogencore, but once you can identify multiple examples of this thing, and what is the aesthetic, what is the choice that you’re going for, that’s really, really useful.

If you’re setting out to write a project that is in this space or you have written a project that is in this space, to be able to talk about how it fits into the overall landscape is really useful. I do hope, and I think it’s a plausible hope, that some folks are out there writing films that could fall into this genre. Just by having this conversation and by giving a word for it might make it a little bit easier for them to find the financing, find the champions for the project, because they see like, “Oh, I get what this is.” This is not a one-time unique thing.

Max: I’ve taken generals and tried to explain this concept to executives, and there’s a lot of executives who love these movies. They’re great movies. Who doesn’t love Michael Clayton? The more we can spread the gospel of halogencore, the easier it’ll be to sit down across from somebody and say, “I’m writing a halogencore movie.” I would like to watch more of these personally. I would like to get more made. So I hope that’s true.

John: Talk to me about halogencore as a title. I’ll confess that it took me a beat to figure out what it was that you were going for, because halogen, to me, I think of my dorm room that had the torch here, halogen light, that always, word was going to set the whole room on fire. There’s that light aesthetic. I see what you’re going for there.

Max: This is the problem with doing this as a one-off letterbox list before it became a running theme on my– If I had thought it was going to come back, I would have sat on it a little bit longer. I didn’t let my New York Magazine packaging instincts really take over.

I do think we talked about this documentary, the washed-out digital, like Michael Mann and Soderbergh, early digital cinema pioneers, the documentary aesthetic, that feels so important. Just trying to communicate that idea of the establishing shot of so many of these movies is a huge tower in the city at night, and one floor or one office is lit up. You’re in for a good ride if that’s the establishing shot for your movie. That was what I wanted to get at, was that halogencore. That’s what I’m looking for when I start my movie.

John: Great. Let’s transition to talking about the– Oh, what is the New York Magazine package for it? You have to have an image for it. Let’s talk a little bit more about journalism and what your history has been, writing for other people and writing for yourself now, because most of the folks who are listening to this podcast are probably writing for themselves. As a screenwriter, I’ve always been writing for myself, going from job to job to job. More classically, as a journalist, you were employed at a publication. You were there exclusively for a time. That’s not the reality now. Can you just quickly chart through how you got started and what the trajectory has been for you?

Max: I had a normal start. I was an intern at the Daily Beast back when Tina Brown ran it. I met a woman named Maureen O’Connor, a great journalist who had gone to Gawker. She was working nighttime. I wanted to leave Daily Beast. She said, “Come take my night shift.” So I spent a year doing 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM. That was the entrance. Once I had that job and could demonstrate that I could do it, I was able to advance in Gawker and then get this job at New York Magazine. I love both experiences, but in terms of working for people, Gawker was a much more independent place, and I think prepared me for my current, much more independent job in a lot of ways.

We had editors but not at every moment was every single thing cleared. Certainly, very few things, until the later stages, were deeply read through or crossed out. We were mostly writing 200, 300 words. A lot of the training there was activation energy to find things, come up with an angle, write them fast, whereas New York Mag, in general, especially on the print side, was a much more collaborative thoughtful place. It was still a little bit helter-skelter because we were putting out a magazine every two weeks, but you’d have a month, two months, three months of lead time. Oftentimes, you’d spend a lot of time reporting. You’re in meetings with your editor. You’re in meetings with the art department. I really loved that. I love that collaborative work.

A good TV room can be very similar where you just have a lot of people with a lot of great ideas, able to bounce off one another to really craft something that feels like it’s the best possible version of what it can be. Now my job is like, I don’t even have coworkers. I’m here at home. The closest thing I have to coworkers is a bunch of group chats that I just am constantly hitting every day that function as the slack room of my coworkers. It’s a challenge in some ways.

I have a three-year-old, and it’s been really useful to have a very flexible schedule when I have a toddler. That, to me, is the best thing about working by myself with no real obligations. It is hard. I find this when I’m trying to write spec scripts or whatever, that it can be really hard. Everybody who’s listened to the podcast knows how hard it can be to force yourself to work when there’s no stick and maybe no carrot either. You’re just like, “I got to go put some words on the page.”

But the structure of, I obligate to my subscriber, I am obligated to produce one post or two posts a week to my subscribers, is really useful to just keep my brain moving, keep the wheels greased, so to speak. But Journalism is so volatile right now. I hope the newsletter process can sustain itself and people will keep wanting to pay for years to come. I feel like I may have to jump back into the office world sometime soon, or who knows.

John: Talk to me about making your year, making your month, because you’re publishing through Substack. For that, you have a certain number of subscribers and the subscribers are paying you a certain amount per month. You can expect how much to get in, which is our premium members to Scriptnotes, they are paying us five bucks a month, and that is income that we can count on, which is great, it helps stabilize things. That’s not the only thing you do. You can also write pieces for existing magazines if you want to, you can do special things. What do you find is the balance there, and how much are you pursuing just writing for yourself versus outside work?

Max: I’m trying to do a couple feature, like magazine features a year. It depends a lot on the work itself. If I get a freelance offer that I am passionate about, that I know I can complete quite quickly, then I will usually say yes, just because why not? It’s not going to take a lot of my time. But I find that a long, full-length magazine feature really takes it out of me. Whether or not I was doing the newsletter, it requires a lot of work. Despite producing two newsletters a week, I am a pretty slow writer, and I don’t want to be tearing my hair out. It’s good, I think, to challenge yourself. It’s good for me to challenge myself and make sure that I have some end of year or end of quarter, or whatever it is, goal.
I’m going to finish this piece, I’m going to finish this script, I’m going to do this. But I don’t like the system changes every six months. It’s like some months it’s really nice to have, Monday is the day I work on this project, and then Tuesday I do the newsletter, and then Wednesday is the whatever. That just isn’t going to work. Especially because when you’re doing the newsletter, if something happens in the world that you have a quick response to, you have to listen to that, that’s the best, quickest, easiest way that you’re going to get a newsletter out that week. You might think Monday is my script day but then news drops that you’re like, “I have a 1,600 word idea about that I can just bang out right now,” and now Monday’s not your script day anymore, so I hope Tuesday can be your script day or Friday or whatever it is. It’s hard. If somebody out there has figured out a solution to this, please let me know. It’s a matter of picking projects that I don’t dread working on in the end of the day.

I shouldn’t say this. I hope my manager’s not listening. If I have a pilot spec that I’m working on, and it’s taking me a lot longer than it should, it might be because I don’t actually want to do this pilot spec. That I had this idea and it– maybe it’s just time to throw it in the can and say, let’s find something that I actually will want to work on after my kid goes to bed or that I’ll want to work on in the middle of the day or after lunch or whatever. It’s the hardest thing about being a writer, I think.

John: For the Scriptnotes book, I was just editing the chapter with Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Like you, is a writer who works both in journalism, doing celebrity profiles, but also writes her own stuff, or writes her own books, and now runs her own TV shows. She talks about sort of the challenge of figuring out like, how am I spending my time right now? What is the best use of my– thing to do right now? Unlike you, she’s a very fast writer, so she can do all these things at once, but it is that juggling act.

One thing you mentioned is that you have group chats with other writers and that that becomes, essentially, your Slack channel, your newsroom. It’s the people around you. But I do notice that there’s an ecosystem within these writers who are doing Substacks and doing other things that I feel like you’re also always in communication with each other. I think I probably first found you because Today in Tabs have linked out to an article that you had done.

There’s also like the Noahpinions and the Tyler Cowens. There is this web of independent people writing stuff that does feed on itself and sort of supports itself. Do you actively try to sustain that or is that just a thing that naturally comes up?

Max: That’s a good question. We used to call that the blogosphere when they were blogs.

John: Sure. Back in the day, yes.

Max: From a business perspective, it’s hugely important. Actually, if I’m just separating out the creative process part of it, I get new subscribers like you because these other people link to me, so I need that as a growth plan. From a stuff perspective, I presume that I could. It probably wouldn’t be great if my newsletter every week was just something I came up with completely off the top of my head.

This dialogue with other writers, the ability to hear what they’re saying and respond to it, I think not only gives me– means that I’m doing a little bit less work every week in terms of ideating, to use a horrible neologism, but also that I’m responding to things out there in the world that are actually happening. It brings in new readers, and I actually think readers enjoy it.

One of the weirdest and funniest things about my job as a newsletter writer is that, a lot of ways, what I do is I’m like a YouTuber for Gen-Xers and elder Millennials. It’s as much about me and the way I think about things and my personality and my preferences as it is about the specific topics under review or my arguments or whatever else. That makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m just at the very early end of a generation that is comfortable with being a social media influencer.
I think you have to make a little bit of peace with the fact that this is how people get to know you. This is how they follow you and why they follow you. When I have an article, I have 40,000 people on my list who will go read it because I say, “Here’s an article I read.” If I were to write a book or what– any other project that I want people to get to, I now have this audience.

Part of that is just they know me. They know how I think about things, they know what kinds of things I like. I don’t like to do super personal — I’m not really a personal writer, I like to give my son and my wife a little bit of privacy, but it’s the sense that I have a particular way of thinking about things and people like to read me think through things in that way that I think is the kind of thing. Just to connect it back to your first question, I think that’s true of a lot of these writers.

There’s these sort of personalities who are like, I don’t always agree what Tyler Cowen says, but I think he’s somebody who– he gives me a valuable perspective from that particular kind of person he is and the expertise he has or whatever, and I want to read him because it allows me to set my own, to think about how I feel about something. The more people there are in that kind of network or ecosystem the more fertile and fruitful it can be.

John: You’re making your living through the Substack and yet that’s not the only place you express your ideas. There’s this aspect of like we’re expected to do multiple things at once or sort of have multi-media presences at once. I was a blogger, so my johnaugust.com was a blog and for many years it was a blog. The whole reason we started the podcast was that a blog is just a monologue. It’s just me having a conversation with myself.
There were comments on the blog for a while and there was that sense that people were reading it and there was some feedback there. It wasn’t until there was a podcast that it could actually be a conversation and people could engage and dig in on a topic. The overlap between what we do on this podcast and what I do on the blog versus an influencer or a YouTuber is really interesting. It’s a generational shift.

I would say that one of the real advantages, though, to doing it as a print is it’s easy for me to go back and look through your old posts on Halogencore. I could see what you’ve written on Halogencore before and YouTube would be almost impossible for me to go back and assemble like what all that stuff was before. It’s just a real advantage to print. One of the reasons why we’ve had transcripts of the podcast since the very beginning is because it makes it simple for us to actually go back and find what was there and what the history was.

Have we talked about this topic before? What did we say then? How has our thinking changed? That’s just a huge advantage to writing stuff down versus a YouTube video or even tweets. I sometimes see and Tyler Cowen will often link out to things that I think are going to be blog posts were actually just a thread of like seven tweets. Well, is that an article? What is that? Do you ever struggle with the idea of like, is this something that should be a newsletter or should this be a tweet?

Max: Well, I quit Twitter. I quit Twitter in 20– like during–

John: Yes, I noticed you’re not on there.

Max: No.

John: You’re not really on threads either so you–

Max: No. One thing I can say for Substack is, once I had– once I recognized that I could make money from my tossed-off thoughts, as long as I expanded them to 600, 800, 1,200 words, I’ve– there’s no looking back. I was like really active on Twitter when I was at Gawker and New York Magazine. In a lot of ways, I owe a lot of my career to Twitter. I don’t think I would have been able to start this newsletter without the audience I’d already built up on Twitter.

At some point, it became clear that I just, like many people, did not really have a healthy relationship to it, spent too much time on it. I would find myself, before going to bed, looking at my phone and getting furious at somebody I didn’t even know. It’s like, what a waste of my energy and time. I quit and around the same time I started the Substack. I wasn’t really thinking of the Substack as a replacement for Twitter but now that I know that I can put out to an audience that really wants to receive it, my thoughts, and I will probably get money for doing so, it has helped nip in the bud–
In addition to the fact that the Musk takeover has scattered everything that was special about Twitter to the winds, and Threads and Bluesky haven’t quite hit the mass or the whatever it is that allows them to replace it. To answer your question, this is something that I think I learned really well at Gawker, is that if something occupies your mind for a certain amount of time, for five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, it actually probably is worth writing about.

Maybe you don’t have anything more to say about it in a sentence, but I bet you could squeeze a paragraph or two out of it. You can have multiple items in your newsletter. You could do blogs where you just do a short thing every time. We used to have this joke, Slack is a workplace chat app There was a rule- It wasn’t a Gawker rule, it was for Deadspin, the sports blog. -there’s a certain number of Slack messages, if 10 Slack messages about a single topic went by, somebody had to write about it for the site.

If it was interesting enough for 10 messages, then it needs to go on a site. Don’t hem and haw, don’t think about it. If you’re a writer, almost– you’re almost guaranteed to be overthinking this kind of thing all the time, just go for it.

John: The reason this episode is this is because I posted a link in Slack to Drew saying like, “Hey, this is a really interesting article,” and I realized, as I post, it’s like, “Oh, you should probably have him on to talk about Halogencore.” It does circle all back around. I want to wrap this up by talking about, you are also a person who wants to write film and television.

You have a manager, you have that as an aspiration as well. How do you think about balancing what you want to do there versus what your– what is your day job, at a day job you actually really like which is running the Substack, because there’s an opportunity cost to doing all the 600, 800,000 words on a topic because that’s time you’re not writing a script.

Max: Yeah. The newsletters only two years old. I haven’t been in a room while I’ve been doing it. So far, it’s been like a, “Well, that’ll be a good problem to have whenever I have it.” For me, the real balance is the having a family and a social life and all these other things. If I had no other obligations, I could easily be in a room all day or do punch-ups on a script or whatever, and then write the newsletter at night, but I want to spend time with my son and my wife, and I want to go out and have dinner and all these other things.

To be brutally honest, right now, the way TV writing in particular is looking in Hollywood, it feels like I should be concentrating my energy on the guaranteed income I make from the newsletter versus the sort of possibility that I might be one of the 10 TV writers getting work this year. Part of the thing I was saying before about passion, the passion stuff, is I hadn’t written fiction, until I started writing this show with my friend back in 2018, I hadn’t written fiction since high school, basically, and I’d forgotten how much I loved it. I’d forgotten how those muscles worked and how much I enjoyed being able to exercise that part of me. And so in some ways it’s like, I’m having ideas throughout the day- It’s similar to what we were just talking about, -I’m having ideas throughout the day, so why not?

Even if it’s a slim chance that this thing’s going to get made, or it’s going to get me in the right room or whatever it is, why not, therapeutically, just for the hobby sake, do that? But again, as we keep saying, the balance is impossible to figure out. There’ll be weeks where it’s like I won’t do anything on the newsletter, but I will get 40 or 50 pages out on a script that I’m interested in.

Then there are months where I’m like, it’s just a newsletter every week and maybe a magazine feature. I haven’t opened final draft, it’s just the moldering on my desktop somewhere.

John: Maybe not opening a final draft is the right choice, we need to get you writing in Highland instead.

Max: Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe that’s what I need.

John: That is the secret. That’s what’s going to change everything for you. Everyone was listening to the moment that his whole life changed.

All right, let’s get to our one cool things. I have two one cool things this week. First is an article by Sarah Schaefer about leaving Los Angeles. I guess it’s actually a blog post. Maybe it’s even a Substack post.

Sarah Schaefer has been on the show before. She is super smart. She’s a comedy writer, and she writes in this post about her decision to leave Los Angeles, basically. That Los Angeles was so expensive that she decided to move with her husband to Virginia and why she decided to do that. Also, the weird way that you have to talk about like, I’m not giving up on my writing career, it’s just I’m moving to Virginia, but that’s not a change from that.

The question of, what are you doing right now in a time when, especially in TV writing, it’s so tough, that maybe we should stop asking, “What are you working on,” and instead be asking, “Where are you? Like, “What’s happening in your life?” It is a Substack. I look at the URL, it is a Substack, so another Substacker to follow.

Second one cool thing was, I went to the show, Mike Birbiglia had the show in Los Angeles at Largo, invited me to. It was Mike Birbiglia and a bunch of other really incredible standup comedians.

The final act was this guy Billy Strings who I’d never heard of before. He’s a Bluegrass performer. I would never have guessed that I liked Bluegrass. This guy was just remarkably talented and just the fastest picking playing I’d ever seen. Really good song craft, so it’s a thing you probably don’t know that you would enjoy, but I’ll put a link in the show notes to this video so you can see a sense of what this is like. Let me play a little clip for you right now just to get a sense of what this sounds like so you’ll, hopefully, click through to the video.

[music]
I ain’t slept in seven days, haven’t ate in three
Methamphetamine has got a damn good hold of me
My tweaker friends have got me to the point of no return
I just took the lighter to the bulb and watched it burn
This life of sin (life of sin) has got me in (got me in)
Well it’s got me back in prison once again
I used my only phone call to contact my daddy
I got twenty long years for some dust in a baggie
[music]

John: If that’s at all intriguing, click through the video and take a listen to Billy Strings. Max, what have you got for us?

Max: I just read a book that I am trying to push on everybody. I’m a big sci-fi guy, and the book is called In Ascension. It’s by a guy named Martin McInnes. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but I haven’t seen it get a ton of attention or reviews. If you’re a sci-fi guy like me, it’s sort of a– it’s a little bit Jeff VanderMeer, it’s a little bit Ted Chiang. It’s even a little bit Carl Sagan, but it’s also its own thing.
It’s about a Dutch biologist who first investigates a mysterious crevice at the bottom of the ocean and then is sent into space to investigate a mysterious object on the outer edges of space. I don’t want to say too much more because I don’t want to give it away, but there’s also– it’s just a beautiful, beautifully written, beautifully structured, beautifully composed story. I can’t wait to read more by McInnes, and I highly recommend this one.

John: That sounds great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Brown. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.
That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the acceleration of time.

If you’d like to sign up for the Highland beta, there’s a link in the show notes for that. Click through to that, and you can take a look at the next version of Highland. Max Read, thank you for coming on the show to talk to us about Halogencore and journalism and other writing topics.

Max: Yes, thank you so much for having me.

John: If you would like to read more from Max, you should go to his Substack. It is maxread.substack.com. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, too, but you will find him writing twice a week about all sorts of topics on the future.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, in our bonus segment, we are recording this on the Friday after the Democratic National Convention. Kamala Harris has just received the nomination of the Democrats to run for president. This caps off a month of her being the candidate, which is just crazy. It’s crazy how much has happened this summer, and it feels like things are only happening faster and faster. Max, as a person who has to– takes it upon yourself- You don’t have to do this. -but you’ve taken it upon yourself to recap the events of the year each year, man, it’s going to be a very long block for this summer. It’s just so much has happened.

Max: As a journalist, this is actually what you want. I can’t take my journalist hat off here. Just there’s more stuff to write about, more stuff to talk about, more grist for the content mill. It is going to take me a long time to sort through everything. At the end of the year, I do these– I call them the year in weird and stupid futures, and I try to round up everything that’s like a harbinger of our very weird and stupid present, let’s be honest, but also future. My bookmarks folder is already basically full. I’m going to have to be deleting stuff rather than searching it out at the end.

John: I want to talk about how you organize your stuff. You say a bookmarks folder. Is it literally just in Safari you have a folder of all the bookmarks for things? How are you organizing things?

Max: It’s like MTV Cribs, and you walk into my room, and it’s like such a mess it feels so embarrassing. Right now, I’m using a product called Aboard, which is made by a friend of mine named Paul Ford, who’s a great writer and programmer. Aboard is a bookmarking service that creates little cards with images and links, and you can put notes, and you can tag them, and you can sort them and whatever you want.

It’s a really useful way for me to just be saving snippets of things that I might use for future articles. I’m working on a piece about generated AI slop right now, and I’m tagging stuff that I find so that I can save it for later. I’m tagging weird futures things. I see a link to a musician I want to listen to or a book I want to read, I’ll throw it in there too. It’s just a bucket for everything.

I’m using a browser called Arc that I really like. It’s got a really great tab system where you can separate– you can save tabs, and you can separate them out and do sort of things. Some stuff is getting saved in the Arc tab system-

John: Yes, it’s dangerous.

Max: -and but some stuff’s getting saved in the board, and I’m going to lose a lot of stuff, I’m sure. It feels very clean because everything’s designed so well.

John: I’m using Pinboard for all these sort of things that come up. I see something, I make a pin, and it goes to Pinboard, which is like a very bare bones. It’s been around for 20 years. It holds together.

Max: Yes, well, so I was a longtime Pinboard user, and I switched to a board because I wanted to support Paul, and I just have been sort of stuck in it, but I love Pinboard too. It’s just very straightforward, easy, to the point. I think I still pay for mine because I’ve got eight years of Pinboard links to look back upon.

John: Absolutely. As you think about all of the links that are now being put into Pinboard or a board, it does just feel crazy. There are moments in time when it feels like, oh my gosh, I’m actually in a part of a story. I remember, obviously, the 2016 election, the moment like, oh shit, like I could feel that everything has changed around me. Start of the pandemic felt like that as well. This summer, Craig and I were recording this podcast when Trump got shot.

Trump got shot. It’s so weird that a presidential candidate was a attempted assassination, and his ear got bloodied, and could have died, like inches away, he could have died, and we barely remember that as actually even happening this summer. Just so much has happened so quickly. The other thing I would say is that I feel like the advent of ChatGPT and just the realization like, oh shit, like AI is like much better and faster than we ever had anticipated, accelerated the sense too that we are– that line between like here’s where we are now, and that’s the future, instead of like, oh, we’ve jumped into the future, and we really weren’t quite ready for it.

Max: Yeah. I think about this sometimes just as a journalist. We live in a relatively fragmented media environment. It’s not like there are three networks that we all sit down in front of every night to help us sort of memorialize things that happened. Which means that if it was, obviously, if it was 50 years ago, we probably would still be hearing about the Trump assassination attempt because that– we would have our agendas set by three networks and five major metropolitan papers.

Now, novelty is such a premium in this kind of environment where you’re getting your news from whoever and whenever and wherever. For the worst, usually, not for the better. Novelty is such a premium that the collective boredom of the internet sets in so much earlier on everything. It’s like hard to grapple with, kind of. One of the funniest things we noticed at Gawker when I was there is that we could do incredible traffic with a rubric we called remember when, and we would just we would just lift tabloid stories from maybe 10 years earlier.

Some of this is sort of urban legend stuff, like remember when Tim Allen was busted for doing cocaine. I mean, that’s not an urban legend, but it is a story that everybody knows, but not everybody knows it online. There’s this funny thing where not only is everything happening and being forgotten all at once, everything is also being remembered all at once right now, too.
The remember when thing is now you go on TikTok and there’s TikToks constantly of Zoomers describing the first World Trade Center bombing or other things, other ‘90s news stories that were part of my childhood that I remember relatively well, but the Zoomers have never heard of and are now sort of breathlessly telling each other about. A total flattening of time in this very funny way.

John: Yes. Obviously, there’s going to be peaks and valleys and things will probably normalize to some degree, things will slow down a little bit, probably, and yet we’re racing up to an election. September, normally is– like you said in the setup here, August is usually a very slow month. No one deliberately does anything in August because people are gone and there’s sort of nothing happens in August. People are on vacation.

Now, suddenly, things are happening. It’s not just in the US. UK calls for snap elections and suddenly they have a new person in charge of the UK. Macron calls for elections in France and suddenly, like three weeks later, they’re voting, and they have new people in power. I think as it became clear that, after Biden’s disastrous debate, everyone’s like, well, we can’t actually do something that’s dramatic and swap out the candidate because it takes years to do that stuff and there’s the whole expectations.

I would point to Europe and say like, yes, but like Europe just does it. We can suddenly just do it. The result of this DNC process was just a reminder like, oh yes, we can actually do things quickly when we need to. So many of our systems are there because of just inertia and because we’ve always done it that way, but it doesn’t mean we couldn’t do it much faster if we needed to do it much faster.

Max: This is the sort of acceleration of time, like increases itself, right?

John: Yes.

Max: When that you can accelerate it, you’re like, well, let’s just keep on doing that, maybe.

John: Yes, let’s go faster and faster and break things and see, sort of see what happens there. It sets a weird expectation. If nothing happens in a week, it’s going to feel like, wait, no big thing happened? Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck filed for divorce this past week, and I would have totally missed it except that it showed up on one little thing, but like it was the perfect time to announce that you are separating because like, who can pay attention to that?

Max: I know. Really, if you’re a crisis PR person, and your first advice isn’t, “Don’t do anything,” then you’re not good at your job. Whenever a bad thing happens just ignore it and see if it goes away, because it probably will.

John: Yes, it probably will. Yeah, that is the cycle these days. Max, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about time and the acceleration of time and Halogencore. An absolute delight getting to know you.

Max: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, John.

John: Cool. Thanks.

Links:

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