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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John, a standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 680 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you write action set pieces that work both on the screen and on the page? We’ll talk with a writer who has made that her calling card. Then it’s a new round of How Would This be a Movie?, where we take stories from the news or history and squeeze the cinematic juice out of them. To help us do all this, let’s welcome back the screenwriter behind Bumblebee, Birds of Prey and The Flash, Christina Hodson.

Christina Hodson: Hello.

John: Christina Hodson, we’re so happy to have you back.

Christina: I’m very happy to be back. I cannot believe you’re on 680.

John: It’s so many episodes.

Christina: That’s so many.

John: Yes, but as we’re doing the Scriptnotes book, now we’re in sort of the last minutes on Scriptnotes book, it feels like 680 episodes. There’s just a lot there. It’s been a lot of sifting through stuff and the culling phase now where it’s like we’ve had these amazing guests on. It’s like, oh, we want to do a little breakout chapter with them. It’s like, oh no, there’s no room. There’s no room for these people.

Drew Marquardt: Ryan Reynolds, gone.

John: Oh, he’s gone. Ryan, if you’re listening to this, sorry. You were terrific. You’re wonderful. Twice.

Christina: They pick you for me, Ryan.

John: Christina, we want to bring you in here right now just to let you know that you’re such a valuable part of the Scriptnotes community and yet you don’t have your own chapter.

Christina: Fuck.

John: You can swear if you want to on the show.

Christina: I forgot to apologize in advance. I will be swearing.

John: All right. We’re going to have some swearing. We’re going to have some good crafty things. We’re going to talk about story. But in our bonus segment for paying members, I want to talk about the cold email, when you have to just email a person you’ve never met before and pitch your case and do that because it’s a thing I find myself having to do a lot and some people are terrified of it. I find it delightful.

Christina: You do it all the time?

John: Yes.

Christina: Who are you sending cold emails to?

John: People I have questions about what they’re doing. Sometimes on a professional level, sometimes for like the apps we’re working on. I’m actually kind of shameless and I have some techniques which I think other people who are scared to send those emails could probably benefit from.

Christina: Is it possible that your technique is being John August?

John: That is a part of it. Just as a little amuse-bouche for the real advice here, is that people are so much better emailing on behalf of somebody else than for themselves, so pretend you’re somebody else. Pretend you’re doing it for somebody else.

Christina: I used to make phone calls and pretend I was an assistant for myself.

John: You’ve got that British accent though. It still helps. It works. It really does.

We have a little bit of follow-up. Highland Pro shipped, we’re so grateful to everyone who’s been playing with it and installing it. You, Christina, were actually really helpful in the launch of Highland 2. Do you remember that?

Christina: I do remember that. Never in the world did I think I could possibly be helpful in anything to do with software.

John: You were, because one of the features in Highland 2 which you helped to work out was gender analysis. We were the first app that had a thing where you could put your script and say, what were the male and female ratios in the script in terms of dialogue and stuff? We put that in there first. All the other apps copied it, which is great. They could all see what that was like. Do you find yourself using those tools now?

Christina: I have not used them in a little while, but I think it definitely made me more mindful of it in general. I think now I don’t start writing a character without thinking a bit more carefully.

John: It really is sometimes in the conception phase where you’re thinking of like, wait, if I do it this way, there’s going to be so few female characters, or they not going to have any chance to actually talk with each other.

Christina: Totally.

John: This just all came out of the realization that there was like a study that you helped out on in terms of– You’re nodding like, maybe I helped out on it?

Christina: Honestly, I can’t remember anything.

John: Oh, it was pre-pandemic. It’s all a blur.

Christina: It was Me Too, and Me Too got wiped out by COVID.

John: Me Too, like hashtag Me Too, not like Me Too, me also.

Christina: No, I feel like my memory of hashtag Me Too got completely wiped out by hashtag COVID.

John: Absolutely. Everything’s been memory hole’d. It’s so scary. One of the things I find so helpful sometimes is just I will Google myself and find like, oh, did I talk about this thing? Because there was a New York Times article we were both in.

Christina: When I Google myself now, I find you.

John: Absolutely. There’s a lovely shot of the two of us at your house.

Christina: Pretending to read notes from my notebook [laughs]. I find that endlessly amusing.

John: All journals are basically 100% accurately portraying what really happened in a moment.

Christina: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

John: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. One of the things I’ve noticed, the difference between launching an app versus launching a series or a movie is that– There’s some things that are similar. Obviously, you get reviews, you get articles written about you, which is great. You get features. I got a feature of the app store for Highland Pro and ratings, star ratings. But with a movie or a feature, you’re just done at a certain point.

It’s just like, oh, it’s out there and it’s finished and it’s this completion versus something like an app. We’re constantly putting out updates and there’s bug fixes and Drew gets emails and we’re all responding to stuff. You have a chance to fix things, which is great, because it’s not frozen in amber, but there’s also a responsibility to keep doing

Christina: Also, it actually hangs over you forever.

John: Yes, it does hang over you for a while. Anyway, thank you to everyone who has left a review, that is super, super helpful and left us a star rating. If you haven’t tried Highland yet, it is available on the app store for Mac, for iPad and for iPhone. It’s a 30-day free trial. Give it a shot.

Next up and follow up, director’s chairs. We were talking to this on a recent episode about sort of the scourge of director’s chairs. We got some really good feedback and follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Sarah writes, “Last summer, I was six months pregnant as the on-set producer. You think your butt hurts? I was dying. Finally, I gave in and bought my own chair, which was an outdoor rocking chair I bought at a sporting goods store. It’s much lower to the ground, so it requires us to stick down the monitors. I had to swallow my pride a little as I was now a pregnant lady in a rocking chair on set, but I was so much less miserable. Highly recommended.”

John: Christina, what’s been your experience with director’s chairs and chairs on sets?

Christina: Very bad. I’m clumsy and I like to sit cross-legged, so I always do something wrong. I also always put bags where I shouldn’t and then hide things in the pocket and make them heavy and then they tip and I’m a disaster. Director’s chairs are terrible.

John: They are terrible.

Christina: There’s got to be a better solution.

John: There are better solutions. Ryan wrote in and what did she say?

Drew: “I was a producer on The Walking Dead and everyone had back problems after using the traditional director chairs at Video Village for the last 10 years of our show. Eventually, our prop master found a bamboo director’s chair and this made a huge difference for the execs. The props team had rolling carts that the chairs would be hung up on and transported to the next set or village move. The train was brutal and these chairs are a bit heavier, but to save a few people who kept us employed safe from back surgery, the team was happy to help out.” She included a link, which we’ll put in the show notes.

John: That’s great. It’s nice to see that there are solutions out there and it’s just a matter of people stepping up and saying, hey, this is important for me and for everybody else around you to just do this better.

The common threads we see, which Sarah’s first email talked about, is that you got to be lower to the ground. Part of the problem is that if you can’t put your feet on the ground while you’re in the chair, you’re going to have more problems. The other problem is the seat, and the little sling seats, you would think it’d be comfortable, but they’re the worst. It just pinches you in a really bad way. We won’t probably fix this problem on this podcast.

Christina: We could burn them all.

John: That’s a thing we could do.

Christina: Just as a suggestion, guys, this is why you invite me back. Great ideas.

John: Great. Let’s continue on with mammograms. This is from 679. We were talking about mammograms.

Drew: Stephanie B. writes, I’m writing in response to 679, where the terrific Liz Hannah’s one cool thing is to get a mammogram. She pointed out that insurance doesn’t always cover mammograms if the patient is under a certain age.

Even after age 40, my health insurance only covers mammograms every other year. I paid out of pocket for my own mammograms on the off years. There’s a little secret hospitals don’t advertise. They will almost always discount an uninsured procedure like mammograms. My hospital in Atlanta gives me an 80% discount for the mammograms if I pay out of pocket.

Always ask and call around to check different hospitals because this is one time when it doesn’t matter if a hospital is out of network since insurance isn’t covering it anyway. My breast cancer was caught early with a mammogram I paid for on my own and it was taken care of quickly. I’m so, so glad I didn’t wait another year to get a mammogram that my insurance would have paid for. Please don’t put it off. To all the men listening, please remind all the women you love to schedule a mammogram. They really do save lives.

John: This is great advice. I was like, I’m not following mammogram advice super closely. I have a daughter who will eventually need mammograms. I will say that the women in my life who’ve had breast cancer, it’s always been a situation like, oh, I should have gotten a mammogram earlier, but because of insurance, because of whatever, I didn’t do it. If you have any suspicions, if you have any reasons to think-

Christina: Even if it’s not an insurance thing, people just put them off.

John: They do.

Christina: Because it feels like you just did it because a year now goes in like a week. You still got to go.

John: You still got to go. Same thing with colonoscopies. When you reach the age of getting colonoscopies, you just do it and it helps.

Finally a bit of follow up, Birdigo, which is the game that I’ve been making with Corey Martin. We had a demo that people loved and a lot of people were running and saying like, hey, I played through the first 50 legs that came for free in the demo and I want to just keep on playing. Basically, I’m jonesing for more Birdigo and I’m locked out. What we’ve done is we’ve unlocked the first level for everybody so you can play it as many times as you want. We added a bunch of new feathers to get your points up higher and we added keyboard support. If you’re playing on your laptop, it’s actually a really great, fast and different game. If you want a little word game that has really cute, fat birds in it, Birdigo is on Steam right now. They’re really cute little birds.

Christina: I’m very excited to pick it up now that I know it’s yours, I didn’t realize, I saw it on the agenda and thought, but now I’m very excited to find out.

John: Birdigo is like Scrabble or Boggle, but with cute little birds.

Christina: Who doesn’t like that?

John: You just play yourself and it’s tremendously fun.

Let’s get to our marquee topic here, Christina Hodson. I want to talk about writing action because you’ve become an action sort of go-to writer. I see that grimace, but it is true. That is probably top of your calling card, is you write big action movies with set pieces in them.

I love a set piece. I love a set piece that works really well and so often you read bad set pieces in scripts. Let’s just talk about what doesn’t work on set pieces in scripts and the bad things we’ve read, because I’m sure you’ve gotten sent stuff where it’s like, oh no, no, no.

Christina: It’s so bad. There’s so many different ways to make them bad. I feel like we should be positive though and talk about what makes them good. Bad things are like, when it’s a whole block of text that you turn the page, no one speaks, and it just makes you go, oh God. Because it’s fine if no one speaks during an action set piece. It’s like, oftentimes people can’t speak during an action set piece, but you can still break up the page. The white space on the page is critical.

John: Yes, this podcast has been about white space on the page since episode one. It’s just so crucial to help the reader get their way down the page, because if you give them a wall of text, they’re going to skim.

Christina: I know, it’s really sad, isn’t it? We can read books, but in screenplays, if you turn the page and you just see like wall of text on two sides, you’re like, no, I won’t.

John: No. Some bad action sequences on a page, I just get lost. I have no idea, like what am I actually supposed to be following? What is the point? What is the purpose? What would I be seeing?

Christina: Sometimes people feel like, because they know they want the set piece to be two or three minutes long, they have to cover two or three pages, but they don’t actually have anything to say for two or three pages. They just write stuff and then you read it and you get so bored and so lost.

The big thing I find really frustrating is when the person clearly has zero sense of the geography of the space. That’s how I think you can tell, and this is where I’ll turn it into a positive because I’m so positive today, John.

When you read a writer who has a good handle of the geography of the scene they’re writing in, it can be in any genre. We ran a writer’s program, Lucky Chap and my company, and we were looking for writers who wanted to write in the action space. Often they didn’t already have an action sample and that was the whole point of why they wanted to do the program. You can tell even in a drama when someone has a handle on the geography of a scene, because they use whether or not someone is in the room, out of the room, coming in, walking in, sitting down, standing up. All of the spatial stuff basically that can add tension and storytelling and character stuff is there on the page, whatever the genre. A really good writer and a really good action writer always has a sense of the geography of the space.

John: Absolutely. You sense that you are in that space with them. We talk about, we see and we hear useful things that a screenwriter might choose to use, but it’s crucial that you as the screenwriter are placing the reader in the seat, in the theater. Experiencing this thing around them and so they’re simultaneously within the space of the scene and what it’s going to feel like on that screen.

Doing both things at the same time, it’s really tough. I think people tend to give short shrift to action writing because they feel like, oh, well, it’s storyboarded and there’s a stunt coordinator and the director and all that stuff. All true, but there has to be a plan for it on the page.

Christina: Yes. Also, I was going to say, this is a really important thing where there’s a big difference to me between a production draft, like a shooting draft and your first draft. The draft that’s going to go out that you’re trying to sell a spec with is written completely differently to the one that they’re going to shoot on the final day. The first pass of the Flash, by the way, first 12 drafts of the Flash, the third act is very, very short because it wasn’t intended to go on and on. It was like quite short and simple and contained and whatever.

By the time we got to the end, there’s 30 extra pages because you’ve got, like you say, HODs who want to do this and actors who want to do that and different set pieces and things that need to be all laid out really cleanly on the page. You can’t be sexy and succinct in the production draft because you’ve got hundreds of people whose jobs are dependent on understanding exactly what it is that the director wants to put on screen.

John: I want to both agree with you and also encourage our listeners not to take that too far. The idea that like a shooting draft is completely different than a script you sell, for a lot of things, it’s not. You shouldn’t at least discount the work that you’re doing in your production, in your own script.

Christina: Oh, I think the first one is way more important, because that’s the one that sells it.

John: Exactly.

Christina: That’s the one that gets you the job, gets you the next draft, sells you the project.

John: Absolutely.

Christina: To me, that’s a thousand times more important. I hate my production drafts. I sometimes like my first draft.

John: Sometimes the production draft, it’s because you’ve had to add all these little scenes to do these different things.

Christina: Costumes are asking you to like state exactly what weapons everyone’s holding and what exactly everyone’s wearing and when the jackets come on and off and stuff that you don’t normally care about.

John: Really inelegant stuff.

Christina: Yes, really inelegant stuff.

John: Absolutely. What we’re mostly talking about here, like this is the writing that you’re doing to let everyone see like this is the movie. You’re selling the movie on the page. That means you have to really clearly communicate what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what we’re feeling.

Christina: I was about to say, feeling for me is the main thing. You can change so many things about the way the action plays out and the specifics of the space, but the feeling should stay vaguely the same. You should know what you want it to feel like, the intensities, like the ebbs and the lulls.

John: Absolutely. And the vibe. Is this a cool, crisp, everything is sort of precise or is it just chaos? That’s the thing that you’re going to be able to communicate on the page. I think most crucially is, yes, you as the writer and storyteller are welcoming us to this world, but if we don’t have characters and the character’s experience within those moments, it’s pointless.

I’m thinking back to The Flash and like some of the moments you have, which I love The Flash, by the way, I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast. All the scandal around The Flash and Ezra and everything else, it’s a really good movie and Ezra Miller is good in it too. As challenging as everything was around that, it was so specific to that character’s experience of those moments is what makes it land.

Christina: I also think just generally people, not even just beginning writers, I think a lot of writers sometimes think put character on hold and just focus on the action. To me, like you’re going to have a dead set piece if you’re only thinking about the action. You have to be telling a character’s story through the action. You can reveal so much about a person in the way that they fight or the way that they run or the way– Like, are they resourceful? Are they sloppy? All of those things and the way people work together, to me, each of those action set pieces should have its own beginning, middle and end that gives you a little story arc and a character arc.

John: I pulled out three examples of some really good action writing and some really different action writing to show the range of what this looks like and feels like. The first is from James Cameron’s Aliens, which we’ve referenced endlessly on this podcast.

Christina: Why not? Just keep referencing it.

John: It’s so good. As you guys are watching, it’s scene 114, but it comes pretty late in the movie. They are waiting for this ship to take them back up to the station. I’ll read this aloud, but we’ll put a link in the show notes too.

They watch in dismay as the approaching ship dips and veers wildly. That’s uppercased. Its main engines roar full on as the craft accelerates towards them, even as it loses altitude. It skims the ground, clips a rock formation. The ship slews, side-slipping. It hits a ridge, tumbles, bursting into flame, breaking up. It arcs into the air, end over end, a Catherine wheel juggernaut. Ripley shouts, run. She grabs Newt and sprints for cover as a tumbling section of the ship’s massive engine module slams into the APC and it explodes in twisted wreckage. A drop ship skips again, like a stone engulfed in flames and crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball. It goes on. It gets to the Hudson’s. We are in some real pretty shit here.

Christina: I want to ask you a question.

John: Yes.

Christina: How do you feel about caps in action?

John: Let’s talk about caps. Here’s what’s uppercased in this section. Crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball, that’s uppercase. Roars full on, veers wildly. To me, these are things that are sort of catching my eye and also, they tend to underline sounds that are happening here. How are you feeling about the uppercase?

Christina: Generally sound I do in caps, generally. In action, it gets so tricky because there’s so many loud moments and there’s so many big moments and crashes. If you do every crash and bang and whatever, capital can get too much. I have had one hilarious experience in a studio job with an old school, terrible producer person who is no longer with us, so I can shit all over him. He was a mean, mean man. He once told me that a set piece I’d written, he was just like, “This is dead. This is nothing. This is terrible. You got to rewrite this completely. There should be real punch in it.”

I was not this much of an asshole, I only did this because this was 17 free drafts and it was early on in my career: I just added caps. I didn’t change anything else. Oh, I also underlined the scene headings. I resubmitted it and he was like, “This is incredible. This is what I’m talking about. This has real pizzazz.” I was like, wow. He just needed capital letters.

John: That’s what he needed. He needed something to hang on.

Christina: Underlining and capital letters. I just think there’s too much sometimes, I find it, like when it’s overused. This to me is nice.

John: This is really nice. These paragraphs are longer than I would normally use myself. This is like six or seven lines, some of these paragraphs. Yet I read every word of it. I was never tempted to skim because it was catching my attention, holding my attention. Sentence fragments are there. Clips of rock formation. Did it need a subject there? Great. You have parallel structures because basically you have the implied subject is continuing from sentence to sentence. It’s just really good writing.

Christina: Nice short sentences.

John: Love it. Let’s compare this to Tony Gilroy who wrote Bourne Identity and many other things including the new Andor. I’ll read this, but you actually do need to see this because what Tony is doing at the end of every sentence basically, it’s a dash-dash.

Christina: Not even end of sentence, he’s interrupting himself constantly.

John: Absolutely. Basically, it shows just constant movement. You feel like what the tension is.

Bourne, the light bulb. He’s tossing it across the room, over her head, into that frosted window and she ducks down as it shatters. Everything starts happening at once. Silenced automatic weapons fire, raking into the apartment, and the frosted window peppered with holes, and Marie on the floor as the window shatters above her. Castel, he’s in the air shaft hanging from an out-of-sail rope, but off guard, firing blind, strafing the apartment, and Bourne kicking that chair across the room, and Castle reacting, instinct moving target, and the chair just strafed to shit, and Bourne rolling away, and Castle, he’s coming in.

The last piece is a window frame crashing away as he swings to the apartment, and Marie, right below him, shit raining down as he flies, and Ward throwing the knife and Castle turning back too late, the knife catching him in the neck, and it just keeps going.

Christina: I think people need to read that, because it sounds crazy when you read it.

John: It does sound just absurd.

Christina: It’s fucking cool on the page.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Christina: Because you see exactly what it is. The thing that he does here, which I like very much and which I think is a little bit also a thing that we should talk about, which is breaking the rules. Which is he’s using the names of the characters to create shots which are almost like cut between.

John: Yes, totally.

Christina: You can’t realistically start. This is easier because you’re just in one room, one space with characters. Sometimes you’re doing an action set piece where you’re moving between characters who are not right next. They’re not really in the room together. They’re in the same, call it like industrial plant, but they’re in different spaces. If you had to do a new slug line for every time-

John: You can’t.

Christina: -it would just be an impossible read. I have had a line producer once who made me insert those later and it was horrific for the read.

John: No, impossible.

Christina: When you’re doing the first draft, forget the rules. Find your style. You can basically break the rules and do it however you like as long as you’re consistent with yourself.

It’s really annoying when people switch up. I’ve seen people who do in capital letters on John August, colon, and then do the next line and do whatever. Here, he’s just doing the name of the character in capitals and it’s one smooth sentence. Whatever you’re going to do, make it your style, but then stick to it throughout. Otherwise, it gets crazy making.

John: If you do have people in different spaces, but you’re constantly in between the two of them, what I’ll tend to do is establish a scene header for one, establish a scene header for the next one, and then say intercut. Then it’s really clear that I’m doing uppercase or whatever for the person when I’m back in their shot or in their space, because otherwise, it’s all scene headers and it’s exhausting for us. Here, what I like so much about what Tony is doing is it’s almost you’re seeing shot by shot. Each line is basically just a shot, and it’s great.

Christina: Oh, I had one that I thought of last night when I was thinking about this. One of my favorite ones. We’re like– Just, you know Tony Gilroy, David Koepp. David Koepp’s Jurassic Park script, the one that he’s got on his website, is so good.

The sequence that is the best where they’re outside the T-Rex Paddock when the power goes down. He does this really well, where he’s moving between the two cars, different spaces, very fluently, and it just ups the attention massively, because every time you move away from one character, you’re wondering what’s happening to the other one and it’s fantastic use of exactly this.

John: Yes. Let’s wrap this up with The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The version I could find for this isn’t properly formatted, so there should be actually a little extra returns and spaces in there. I liked a lot of what they were doing here.

Exterior lab day, Jacobs, a security guard, and the two officers are huddled behind a squad car. Other employees are hiding and watching from the safety of the parking lot. They suddenly realize that everything has gone silent. A moment later, lab doors fly open. Officer 1 says, “Here they come. A massive primate barrel towards them.”

Officer 2, “There’s more of them.” Jacobs, “Those are my chimps.” They duck as the apes run by. Some of them get right up and over the car they’re crouched behind. Bam, bam, bam, bam, as the chimps hit and leapfrog over the squad car and their heads. The apes stampede across the parking lot, where several use Jacob’s black jaguar to vault over the fence. The last is Buck, whose weight crushes the car and then they’re gone, every last one of them. Quiet now, except for car alarms.

Christina: Nice.

John: Nice. It’s really smart writing here. I loved how much I could hear it and feel it. I loved the way crushing the car. There was an anticipation. It felt just right.

Christina: Yes, and you feel the chaos work is quiet, which is lovely. It gives you a nice out on the scene. People sometimes just forget about the end. The end is really important.

John: The end is really important. Absolutely. I always think about action sequences as being like, they’re the songs in a musical. Instead of breaking into song and dance, you’re breaking into this action sequence. Those are going to have beginnings and middles and ends. They’re going to have verses and choruses. It’s going to feel like a thing. Often, it’s just like, action is just happening and then it’s over and you don’t know it. Nothing’s really been achieved.

Christina: You feel nothing.

John: Yes. Empty action is just–

Christina: Such a bummer.

John: It’s a huge bummer.

Christina: It’s a waste.

John: Yes, it is. Talk to us about Flash or Bumblebee or Birds of Prey. Action writing on the page that was surprisingly difficult, that was a real challenge to convey. You might have had a vision in your mind, but it was actually hard to get those words down.

Christina: They’re all difficult. It’s one of the bits I love them most. It’s the bit for our job that feels most like playing.

John: It is.

Christina: I literally will get the toys and play with them. For Transformers, I made them send me Bumblebees, which, by the way, was really hard to get. You’d think that would be really easy working with Hasbro trying to get hold of Bumblebees?

John: No.

Christina: No, it was not easy. Yes, I wanted to the toys, because for me, there were things like the way they transform and using action through the way they’re transforming. That is incredibly hard to write because it’s nebulous.

It’s actually interesting with the Alien, that’s an interesting example, because when you’re writing that stuff that doesn’t exist, you have to pick a lane on how much you’re going to describe stuff. Because you can’t go into crazy detail and just put every new nebulizer and whatever. You just can’t, because it gets so boring on the page. You also need to create a sense that this is otherworldly and it is different. It’s a really tricky balance.

John: Talk us about then on the page, how are you talking about transforming? Are you describing those middle states? Are you describing how a limb as a limb is shifting from one thing or phase to another? What kind of stuff are you doing?

Christina: I have two things that inspired me. One is that I wanted the kids in the audience to feel the way I felt when I was a kid and I was playing with Transformers. Which sometimes it’s really fucking tricky and you’re trying to bend that arm back into a bloody door and you can’t. I wanted do that for Bumblebee. He’s a broken robot. I wanted to sometimes feel that. Mostly, I would go by the way it felt for the characters doing it.

Then I also went with the way it was for Charlie, Hailey Seinfeld’s character, is what does it feel like around her? Often, that was more about scale and sound rather than specifics of names of pieces and things. It was just about what would it be like if your sweet little Volkswagen Beetle just stood up and towered over you. Yes, playing with sounds, feelings, scale, things like that.

John: Scale is a thing that’s often missing in action-side pieces too, or on the page, you’re just not feeling like, you have a semi-truck and you have a bicycle. It’s that difference–

Christina: Missing or just that wildly wrong?

John: Yes.

Christina: The number of times I’ve seen people dive off a thing 300 feet and you’re like, “They would be dead. That’s not a thing. You can’t do that.” People often get scale wrong and distances away from each other.

I really recommend to people that they look online or go out into the world and measure things and feel what it’s like, because otherwise it just feels silly. As soon as people start doing that, as soon as you don’t feel that you can trust the writer, that they know what they’re talking about, you check out a little bit because you’re like, “This is just nonsense.”

John: You mentioned LuckyChap, and I remember having lunch with you. You were talking through this program you were working with LuckyChap to help writers who are not traditionally action writers get some experience there. What were you teaching them? What were the common things you saw that you needed to get people comfortable writing?

Christina: Honestly, it was more about teaching them how to get into the space rather than doing the actual writing. They were a whole mixture of levels. There was one writer who wasn’t even in the guild yet, and then there were many who were experienced in TV but had never been in features. Like I said, when we were reading submissions for those, we were often reading a drama as a sample for someone who wanted to be an action writer. You could get the sense of whether they could.

What we were really “teaching,” I shouldn’t be allowed to teach anyone anything. What we were really focusing on was how we would help them outline the movie. They came in with sometimes a title, sometimes an idea, sometimes just a character dynamic. Then we spent four weeks all day, every day in a room, breaking those movies down, outlining them so that when they were pitching them, they actually had a whole movie rather than just a kernel of an idea. Then we had wonderful people come in, talk to them about–

One of the things actually, which is one of the things we should talk about here, which is Chad Stahelski came in and talked to them about writing action and creating action set pieces. Chad Stahelski did the John Wick movies. If you’re interested in this topic, go look up any of his stuff online. He talks about this stuff incredibly eloquently because he comes at it from a place of real passion and love. He talks about Buster Keaton and humor and storytelling all the way through action. It’s not just like, pull out your guns and go bang, bang, because that’s going to be boring.

John: We had Ryan Reynolds on the podcast talking about Deadpool and really thinking about that as a physical comedy movie. Really making sure the set pieces reflected the specificity of who that character was and what they were trying to do and why those set pieces were not [unintelligible 00:29:33] other things.

Christina: It was so playful and fun and funny all the way through.

John: Absolutely. Getting back to what you were doing with LuckyChap, what’s so important about the way you’re approaching it is that it’s not like an action sequence is something you drop into another movie. You have to build a movie that can support an action sequence. And you have to build the action sequence that actually tells the story, and they have to go hand in hand.

Christina: Yes, absolutely. Otherwise, you just end up with a piece that feels wonky and weird. Which happens a lot.

John: It does happen a lot.

Christina: Wait, you said one thing, though, which I think we should talk about.

John: Please.

Christina: Specificity.

John: Yes.

Christina: Because this is a real Goldilocks one, and I’m sure you, have found this. Either people are way too specific, and they’re using all these terms that you don’t know for martial arts that you wish you knew, but you don’t, or they’re not specific enough and it’s just like, “Uppercut, uppercut.” That’s a bummer, too. You don’t want to– Listen, we all know there are some writers who write, “This will be the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen,” but don’t do that.

John: Never do that.

Christina: Just don’t do that. I know people have gotten away with it, but don’t do it.

John: When you see that in a script, you feel like they’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed by this. They recognize it’s going to be hard to do, and so they just don’t want to actually do it.

Christina: Or, they’re just really cocky.

John: Yes.

Christina: Anyway, but I do think it’s a mix with the specificity. For me, I look at it as zooming in and out as well, particularly in things like battle sequences. I’ve had to write a few, big scale battle sequences where you’ve got hundreds of people and then key characters that you have to follow. For me, often that is about picking the moments that you want to highlight. I’m not saying never use specific martial arts terms. If it’s relevant, because, for example, it’s a character who’s just learned a thing that they didn’t know, if you’re writing Neo, sure, it’s fucking cool to drop in a turn that it doesn’t matter that the reader doesn’t know exactly what that kick looks like. Because the fact that they don’t know what it looks like helps inform the way the character is experiencing it too.

Then also have moments where you zoom out, particularly if it’s a big, long battle sequence or something. Go from a tiny detail of swords clashing between two characters you know, and then zoom back out to what it feels like to be on that battlefield.

The other example that I love of this that I read often when I was writing, I wrote a Swords and Sandals thing at some point. David Benioff, of course, is masterful. David Benioff’s Troy script, that film is fun. It’s not one that anyone ever talks about. The battle sequences in that are incredible. Then there’s a really good one-on-one fight scene where he does another thing of “breaking the rules”, where he does–

It’s the Orlando Bloom plays Paris, when Paris fights Menelaus in that one-on-one in front of everyone. He does a very cool thing where he goes into Paris’s POV and he switches to second person. It’s all, you’re in there sweating, like you can feel your heart beating. It’s really fun and it’s really evocative.

John: All right, we’ll find that script and put a link into the show notes. Actually, I’ve never read it.

Christina: It’s cool. It’s very cool.

John: Awesome. Let us move on to our next topic, which is how would this be a movie? For folks who are new to the podcast or new to this segment, every once in a while, we’ll put out a call to our listeners and say, hey, tell us stories from history or from the news that you’re curious about how we might make these into movies. The examples that we’re talking through today, some were things that I just happened to stumble across and bookmarked. Other stories come from our listeners who sent them in.

All right, our first one is A Man of Parts and Learning. It ran in the London Review of Books. It’s written by Fara Dabhoiwala and it tells the story of Francis Williams and sort of the backstory, but mostly centers around this painting, which was a real question of like, is this painting a portrait in a positive light or a negative light? Is it just super racist? Drew, can you help us out with a summary of what we know about this?

Drew: Sure. In 1928, this unknown, strangely proportioned painting turns up from the 1700s. It’s determined to be this portrait of a black Jamaican intellectual named Francis Williams and that it was formerly owned by a white writer named Edward Long who wrote the book History of Jamaica in 1774.

John: Let me stop you there because at this point in the article, you actually see what the painting is, which is included here. If you look at it, it is a man who’s dressed in a formal attire. He’s got a blue coat, gold trim, white waistcoat, knee length, breeches, and his impossibly skinny legs. He’s got this powdered white wig. His hands are tiny. One is resting on this open book. His face feels out of proportion to everything else. You’re like-

Christina: Is it very good?

John: Is it very good? It reminded me a bit of, there was that Spanish painting, The Restoration of Ecce Homo, with the Jesus face. I don’t know if they have repainted it. It’s not that bad, but it’s not good.

Christina: Yes, although I will say so. I looked at it and was like, “Oh, why are we going to talk about this just not very good painting.” By the end of it, I fucking love the painting.

John: Yes, isn’t it great?

Christina: Yes.

John: You cannot tell at the start, is this a mockery? Is it a satire? Continue with what the description is.

Drew: Francis Williams was born enslaved, but he eventually gained his freedom. He was wealthy. He was Cambridge educated. He was arguably the most famous Black man in the world at the time. Lon’s book is actually a racist hatchet job. It’s incredibly denigrating and dismissive of Williams and many white scientific racists, which is a term they used a lot in this. At the time, they attacked Williams’ achievements in order to argue that slavery was necessary.

At first, this portrait’s value is dismissed. Then later it’s rediscovered. It’s assumed by scholars that it is this caricature meant to mock Francis Williams. After this author commissions a modern high resolution scan, it’s discovered that the painting is actually a rebuke of the racist assaults and character assassinations that Williams endured. The author researches every detail to discover it was likely commissioned by Francis Williams from this avant-garde American painter named William Williams.

Christina: I love this article.

John: Yes.

Christina: I’m not going to lie. When I saw it on the internet, I was like, this is going to be dry. It’s so long. I was like, John, why are you making me read this? I loved it.

John: Yes, I loved it.

Christina: There’s twists and turns and reveals. Everyone should go read it. That doesn’t make it an easy movie.

John: It doesn’t make it an easy movie. Let’s talk about sort of ways into this movie. Because, okay, this is a biography of Francis Williams, which is certainly possible. He was the most well-known Black person in the world at a certain time. Grew up enslaved, got out of slavery, but then ended up having slaves of his own. That’s problematic.

Christina: Problematic, yes.

John: Studied at Cambridge. Clearly very, very smart. He was a member of scientific organizations. In the forensics of doing this painting, Dabhoiwala actually discovers that, oh, that’s Halley’s Comet in the background. He actually literally had proven when Halley’s Comet was coming back. Clearly a brilliant man. You could do the straight biopic without looking at the painting. I don’t think you would. The painting is too interesting.

Christina: No, I was thinking of like comps. If you do the academic version where it’s about him, there’s like the theory of everything, but that’s Hawking who everyone knows. There’s a beautiful mind, but that’s really about something actually very different. I then thought about Belle written by Misan Sagay and Amma Asante, which was also actually based on a painting. There was very little known about her story. It was really just a painting, and then they created this fictional story. None of those feel quite right for this one. Did you find a way in?

John: I’m not sure I found a way in.

Christina: I’ve got two, just to be competitive.

John: All right. I have zero, you have two. My halfway in is I do think you’re probably intercutting between the investigation of the painting and the real person and sort of how stuff reshapes around that. I’m curious what you’re-

Christina: That was one of my two, John. Thank you for saying you had zero. That’s one, and I was trying to find them. Please, for the love of God, can one of your readers find the movie that is on the tip of my brain that I cannot find? There is a movie. It’s not The Hours, but it’s not totally similar to The Hours, where it is playing with someone in the present investigating something in the past. It’s a little bit Possession, but I haven’t seen Possession, so I know it’s not Possession, the A.S Byatt one. It’s doing that intertextual thing where someone is discovering and learning something in an old thing, and then you’re seeing that thing play out at the same time.

I do think you could do that. I think the reason, though, that we both want to do that, is just that it’s so fascinating what this very, very deeply passionate, nerdy person did. Who doesn’t love that? Someone going deep diving on this, the details and the twists and turns and how exciting it is when they reveal, this tiny little detail that you didn’t notice before. I think it’s too nerdy to be a movie.

Then the way in that I actually got excited about was the person that painted it, William Williams. Super fucking interesting. The first known paintings of this person, one was a celebrated Native American, one was an outspoken abolitionist, and then the third, according to this, is this guy. It’s Francis Williams.

John: If you look at the other paintings, they’re all weird in the same way.

Christina: Oh, and that’s why I came to love it. There’s details, like the wrinkled stockings. How cool and weird is that little detail?

John: I had assumed that he was just a bad painter who just didn’t see anything.

Christina: He’s not.

John: He’s actually not.

Christina: He’s not. He’s awesome.

John: It’s the same way that Tim Burton draws really exaggerated people. He draws exaggerated things.

Christina: Totally. There is something I think potentially really interesting about the relationship between– The idea is that Francis Williams, at the end of his life, he’s wealthy. They all said he was by then nothing. He’s wealthy and successful, he is. He does own some slaves, and I’d like to gloss over that. He’s doing Rodale, and he chooses to commission this. He’s the one who chooses what goes in the painting. There is something really powerful about the idea of an older Black man, and this young white artist. This man is trying to tell the story of his life through the white man’s paintbrush, because that’s the only way he can get his story to actually be listened to, because no one will fucking listen.

He’s got this idiot, Ed Long, who’s written this horrific book that just makes him sound like nothing and has basically erased him from history. He’s choosing to put himself in history. There is something potentially really beautiful about that friendship between them that could be– Obviously, it’s not a Portrait of a Lady on Fire, that becomes a romantic relationship.

Lindsay Doran, I went to one of her amazing talks at Austin Film Festival, and at the end of it, she was talking about King’s Speech and how they tested that movie, and it didn’t test that great. Then all they did was add the title card at the end that talks about the lasting friendship between the King and his speech consultant, passing, and that friendship.

Just that title card, just saying they were friends until they died, just completely transformed the scores. It makes sense. This is what I was missing from the story, is I want a friendship or a relationship story at the core of it. That, to me, felt like the most obvious place to put it. Let’s sell it.

John: We’re selling it. We’re selling it tomorrow.

Christina: John, taking it out tomorrow and we’ll sell it.

John: I’m embarrassed. Seemed to me like there’s no relationship in here. You need to establish those relationships because it cannot be between the person investigating him and Williams himself, because that is–

Christina: You could, but it’s such a struggle.

John: It’s Julie and Julia, and they’re separated by time and place. I do feel like some equivalent of the journalist of Fara Dabhoiwala feels important because there are so many cool things he discovers along the way. He discovers that like, oh, that book on the shelf is actually this book and this book could have only gotten there by–

Christina: I know, but aren’t we just excited about that because we’re nerds? In a movie, is that as exciting as we think it would be, or would it be cool to see it from the perspective of Francis having William Easter egg it in the thing? I’m so with you. I loved reading it.

John: Yes, but it is a cinematic idea.

Christina: I don’t know, but it’s cinematically exciting being like, oh look, this book was published in this year so it couldn’t possibly have been 1726. It must’ve been 1762. We’re excited, but we’re losers.

[laughter]

John: We are losers, but I think that’s potentially a good story. Really difficult to break. I think just the outlining of this is really tough on how you’re moving back and forth between the timelines and how you’re telling stuff. I think it’s also really cool.

Christina: Everyone should read it.

John: Everyone should read it. Second story, when a deadly winter storm trapped a luxury passenger train near the Donner Pass for three days. The article we’re reading is by Robert Klara for Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a true life event that happened. Drew, talk us through what the reality was.

Drew: In January, 1952, a severe blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada and traps this luxury passenger train, the City of San Francisco, near the Donner Pass. The train, en route from Chicago to San Francisco, becomes immobilized by massive snow drifts, stranding 226 passengers and crew members for three days. During this period, they endured freezing temperatures, dwindling food supplies, and the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rescue efforts were hampered by the harsh conditions, but eventually, all individuals are safely evacuated.

John: Christina, so we’ve had many train movies. We have Snowpiercer, we have Murder on the Orient Express, which actually features a train that gets stuck in snow as a plot point. This was a real-life historical incident. Some people died in the process of rescuing things, but no one on the train itself appears to have died. Is there a movie here, in your estimation?

Christina: I think it could work as a setting in the way that those movies used it as a setting. I think it could be a really fun setting for anything from a heist, to a murder thing, to a whatever. Is there a version where it’s really– It’s not Society of the Snow. They don’t eat each other. It’s only three days. They’re a little thirsty and a little hungry. I’m not that excited about it. I would want to either add a big genre element, like a thriller, heisty, murdery thing, potentially a romance.

By coincidence, these are both train movies, but Brief Encounter and Before Sunrise came to mind, where you have some intense love story that develops in three days. Then at the end of three days, they have to say goodbye to each other forever. The one detail in the story that made me giggle and made me think of Triangle of Sadness was that there were some dedicated staff who remained on latrine patrol, and they would take buckets of snow and deal with all the piss and shit [laughter], which you could do some funny satirical class thing, maybe.

John: Yes, Train to Busan hits on some of that stuff too. I agree that this is a setting, but it’s not actually a movie. It’s not a story, because we don’t have characters in there yet. We just have a general place.

I think them being trapped is part of it, but I think they’re going from where they’re stuck to whatever tiny town they end up in, it’s also fun. There’s something about that feels interesting too, and it could lend itself to a comedy. It could lend itself to something else, because there’s like, the whole point of a train is that you get to bypass all these places that you would otherwise get stuck in.

Christina: Oh, like that. A bunch of rich people descending on a small mountain can be kind of funny.

John: Absolutely. There’ve been various versions of it, but for 9/11, when all the planes got grounded, there was a plane that was stuck in a tiny town in Canada. There’s an article called When the World Came to Town. It’s essentially just like, it’s a bunch of people stuck in an unfamiliar environment. It’s always a good setup for comedy. I didn’t feel like a pressing need to take this one exact point.

Christina: We won’t be pitching this one tomorrow as well?

John: No.

Christina: We’ll just stick with A Man of Parts and Learning.

John: Yes. Next up, a UK teen’s parents send him to Ghana. He took them to court by Lynsey Chutel for the New York Times. Laurie Donahue, a listener, sent this through.

Drew: British parents send their teenage son to a boarding school in Ghana believing he is at risk for being drawn into gang culture in London. The boy, initially unaware of his parents’ intentions, thinks that he’s visiting a sick relative, but upon discovering true reason for the trip, he contacted the British consulate and initiated legal proceedings against his parents, alleging abandonment and seeking to return to the UK. However, the judge ruled that the parents acted lawfully within their parental rights to safeguard their son from potential criminal activities.

Christina: He’s still there, guys. I read this and then only got to the very end where I was like, “Oh, this kid is still only–” He went when he was 12. He’s still there. He’s only 14 or 15 now, still stuck.

John: Still stuck in Ghana.

Christina: It’s harsh.

John: As we said before, relationships are important. Lots of relationships here and lots of really interesting relationships. You can definitely see the multiple perspectives on what this is. This is a family that wants to protect their kid, and they believe that their kid is safer in Ghana than he would be in London. That’s really interesting. That perspective is really interesting. We can see it from the kid’s point of view. It’s like, “Oh my God, how could you ship me away to Ghana when I have this life here in London?” You would think that the life would be better and easier for him in London. Yet-

Christina: The judge said no.

John: The judge said no, and also knife culture.

Christina: Oh my God, I know. The judge said it was like a sobering and depressing moment. I was like, “Yes, as a British person reading this, this just makes me real sad.” The picture of the knives in the London like [crosstalk]–

John: All the seized knives, yes.

Christina: London, not so good. If you’re willing to trick your 12-year-old and send them away to a country where they basically know no one, because I think he actually doesn’t– They’re from there, but he really doesn’t seem to know anyone from there. Just sending your kid anywhere where they don’t know anyone and in that situation, you’ve got to really be worried about where things are at in London. Yes, I feel bad for London.

The only way I would want to see this as a movie is if it starts with this setup, it’s super depressing, but then it becomes magical and wonderful. He finds incredible friends and the school is amazing, and he ends up really happy. The version where he sues his parents is– The version where they send him and then he discovers great things and connects with family and whatever, that could be great.

John: There’s a version of this where he wins the lawsuit and is able to get back. It’s a question like, do you need any–

Christina: Gets back to the knives on the streets of London.

John: Get back to the knives, or that, basically, his parents’ vision for what his life was like is actually not accurate or he’s able to overcome it. Those tensions are really interesting. I don’t think you need these actual people at all. I think the situation is what you care about and you could pick a different kid, a different family. It doesn’t have to be Ghana. It could be whatever.

That idea of this immigrant family who’s come to a place with one vision and then they see the dangers in this vision and they want to send their kid back to the place they came from, it’s really understandable and relatable. We can see both the family’s point of view and from the kid’s point of view, why it’s [crosstalk]–

Christina: Maybe that’s the way it is, that there’s something nice about if the kid can learn to see in his parents’ home country what they see in their home country, and they can then see in their new home country what their son does. Maybe there’s something redemptive and nice there.

John: Also, I think about the non-immigrant families, you’re always worried for your kids and you’re always, you want to protect them. What that means and what you’re able to do really depends on where you come from. A family of greater economic means can send them to a private school. They can shelter them. For this family, this is what they thought their best option was. From the kid’s point of view, of course, they’re going to say no. That’s not what they want. Is it a movie?

Christina: I’m going to say no.

John: Yes, I think it’s maybe a movie. I feel like it’s like a Sundance-y movie.

Christina: Oh. Yes.

John: I think it’s a smaller movie, but I think it could– I don’t know. I think the good version of this gets some Academy Award attention.

Christina: Do you end it happy or sad?

John: I don’t know. You could end it in a way that like a Palme d’Or winning movie at Cannes is neither happy nor sad, just sort of in that place.

Christina: Crunch [laughs].

John: It’s a crunch. I could imagine this being a movie that actually comes from the country that they’re being sent back to. Essentially, if it was a Ghanaian movie and this is basically the same setup, but you really follow the story as it happens back in Ghana, that’s also really interesting.

Finally, zombie colleges. These universities are living another life online and no one can say why. The article we’re looking at is by Chris Quintana from USA Today. Drew, talk us through what this article is describing.

Drew: The author starts looking into these zombie colleges. There’s one called Stratford. It ends up being these colleges that used to be real, but have since shuttered and they’re online, but they’re connected to nothing.

Christina: To be clear, Drew, there are no zombies attending the colleges.

John: Yes, I was a little disappointed too when I ended up past the headline.

Drew: We don’t know.

John: Here’s the reality. There are these colleges that shut down because they were no longer economically viable. Then somebody, somewhere, it’s like, oh, I can pull them up online and get people to-

Christina: Give me application fees.

John: Give me application fees and basically cash the application fees. In some cases, they will actually like, someone from that college will call you about what major do you want to study. A person naively could think like, “Oh, this is a real place.” I guess because these colleges were real as of a couple of years ago, googling them, you might think that there’s still a viable college. It’s not nearly as much fun as a college for zombies, though.

[laughter]

Christina: Oh, I know. On my little notes that I jotted down last night, for the first one, as you could tell, I got excited and wrote a whole page of scribbles. Then there’s like less for the train, and there’s like three lines for the UK teen. For the zombie one, you will see it’s literally just the bullet point and nothing.

John: An empty bullet point. There’s something cool about that. The term “zombie college” is better than the actual story.

Christina: Than the actual story [laughs].

John: It’s just a scam. A journalist investigating a scam can be interesting, and maybe it can lead someplace. At the end of this article, I didn’t have a bigger perspective on it’s just scammy people doing a scam.

Christina: People who go to college and want to eat each other’s brains, who doesn’t want to watch that?

John: Yes, that’s good. Yes on zombie colleges, no on this specific article. Let’s do a recap of how this would be a movie. I think we’re both excited for A Man of Parts and Learning, a Francis Williams movie. Difficult, but potentially great. Some really good roles in there. The trapped luxury train, it’s a setting, but it’s also a setting we’ve seen, so you’d have to do something interesting and new with it. I don’t think you need to have that specific incident as the basis. The Ghanaian teen, I think it’s a small movie. You’re less convinced.

Christina: I’m less convinced. I think you could, but I think anything could be a small little indie. Is it going to be a good small–? I think you should start out writing a small little indie being like, this could really work and move people. I see why people leave the Eccles Theatre clapping.

John: Yes. Honestly, I bet there’s a filmmaker out there who won’t have the identical life, but will have a similar life. I think you could find somebody who can make this movie and is like, oh yes, that’s my story. Honestly, the opposite is probably very common too. I have a couple of friends who’ve- they grew up in a struggling country and the parents shipped them off to the US or to the UK. They never saw their parents again, but their parents did everything they could to put them out there in the world.

All right. Let’s answer a question or two. We have Albin in Finland.

Drew: I was wondering how you create side characters specifically. Are there any guiding practices to help you figure out what side characters should be present in a story and what role they should play, or does it come up naturally? I found that it’s difficult to write a first draft when I don’t exactly know what roles all the characters should play in the narrative. I think getting a better grasp of this would help immensely.

John: Side characters, these are supporting folks who are not your protagonist, they’re not your antagonist or a key love interest. They’re characters who are in multiple scenes, but maybe it sounds like Albin doesn’t know quite who they are yet or what function they’re playing. Christina, as you are mapping out a story and you were actually just working on a project with a writing partner too, what are the conversations you’re having about those not central characters?

Christina: It’s really tricky because they take up space.

John: They do.

Christina: You don’t want them to be so generic that they’re just interchangeable. “I’m the funny best friend.” They’re always such a bummer to read. You also do want to utilize sometimes the shorthands. If you choose to have an assistant who is unusually older– Do you know what I mean? If you do something unusual with one of those characters, it can be really distracting in the reader and people go, well, something more is going to happen to that character, right? There’s got to be a reason why you made your assistant 65 years old.

It’s just a tricky one because it’s a bit Goldilocks. In theory, you want every side character to be like all the side characters in True Romance, where they’re the most amazingly specific, wonderful, life-enhancing humans. But also, you don’t want to be tediously shiny things all around the story.

John: I found that in planning out a story, those side characters who might appear in like three scenes over the course of the movie, I won’t really know who they are as I start writing. Then as I get into scenes and I recognize what I need in scenes, then they’ll become more specific and I’ll realize, okay, that’s this person who keeps coming back through, or I realize like this kind of character shows up in three different scenes, it should be the same character.

Christina: I sometimes think of it in terms of what our main character, what it says about them in the relationship with the main character. Often, I’ll use it as a parallel to another relationship. It’ll be a subtle thing that hopefully no one will ever even pay attention to, but you might just feel it there as an echo.

John: You can feel sometimes in scripts and in movies where a character is just there to set the ball so that the hero can spike it. That can be really annoying, and yet it’s also functional. Is that the character there who can evoke dialogue or actions from our hero that moves the story forward, that’s a good use for the character. You don’t want to think of them as strictly functional, but ultimately to you, they are, just the same way that your scenes are functional, even though they are hopefully engaging themselves.

Christina: I would say if you’re doing a pretty detailed outline, look back at the end of it and just make sure you clock which of the three scenes, and then maybe it’ll occur to you as you’re looking at it from a distance. Oh, I could do this, and then they would have their own mini little arc because people like to be closed out.

John: They do, yes.

Christina: No dingly danglies.

Drew: Let’s try one more here from Daryl. How can I establish a writing routine whilst trying to seemingly balance so much? I’m a student and I’m somewhat struggling to balance writing with school and exercise, healthy eating, living, and whatever else. Am I trying to do too much or do I just lack discipline?

John: Oh, Daryl, it’s all your fault.

Christina: Oh, Daryl, please get a good answer from John August and then give it to me because I don’t know yet. I still haven’t figured it out.

John: First, I want to ask about whilst. Do you use whilst?

Christina: Whilst, if I’m trying to sound very British and posh.

John: Yes, but you probably grew up using it. Are you using it in daily life in America?

Christina: Out loud with my mouth?

John: Yes [chuckles].

Christina: No. No whilst. Whilst. No, I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud.

John: [laughs] Listen, Daryl, you have to give yourself some grace. Yes, you’re trying to do a lot and if you are having a hard time fitting writing into your life and you want to do more writing, you need to recognize, okay, well, what are the times that I’m doing other stuff that I’m willing to not do that other stuff and write? That could just be giving something else up. It could mean making different choices about other hobbies and other stuff, but you’re going to have to make a choice to do some writing.

Christina: I’ve actually got recycled John August advice here.

John: I’m excited to hear it.

Christina: Because you changed my life a little bit with this, but it only lasted briefly because I’m an idiot and I can’t stick to anything. You, I can’t even remember if it was on the podcast or just in life, you told me about sprints.

John: Oh yes, let’s talk about sprints.

Christina: Just doing little short periods, setting yourself a goal. It can be really short, but giving yourself– Even if it’s 40 minutes, set a timer, just do it and don’t– Sometimes trying to clear out an afternoon for writing or a morning or a day is just impossible.

John: We won’t get more done in an afternoon.

Christina: No, you won’t. If you have a job and you have the whatever, and you come in the door and it’s the 40 minutes between walking in the door and making your dinner, and you just have 40 minutes, you will not get distracted. You will not look at your emails because you’re like, I only have 40 minutes. You have the timer running right next to you. Then you just go. You just give yourself a junk.

John: Yes. Just yesterday, I was doing that for edits on the ScreenPants book. I set the timer for an hour and I just did an hour’s worth of work. When the timer beeps, I went a little bit over that. If I had not set the timer, I don’t think it would have actually, I wouldn’t have opened the file.

Christina: I want you to know, I’m such an evangelist for your advice. I give it to everyone and I never do it myself. I don’t know why, because the period that I did it, I was the most productive I’ve ever been. I’m terrible.

John: Yes. Daryl, timers could help. Adjusting where you’re prioritizing that writing time can help too, because it can feel selfish to just take the time and to shut everybody else out to do stuff. That’s what writing is, yes.

Christina: We’re all selfish.

John: We’re all selfish. Be a little selfish. It’s time for our One Cool things. I have two comedy-related one cool things. I went and saw Mike Birbiglia’s new show, The Good Life, this last week. It’s so funny. He’s just so smart and so funny. He’s been on the show multiple times. It’s just observations on life and the way he’s able to weave in personal stuff and family stuff in ways that’s generous to the folks he’s including, but also helps talk about larger themes.

It’s so great to see somebody who can just do that so effortlessly. See his show. I think there are more dates on. We’ll put a link to his website in the show notes. You should also listen to his podcast called Working It Out, which is like Scriptnotes, but for standup comics and just talking through their process and how they come to what’s funny and they workshop some jokes in the course of it.

Second comedy thing is the print version of The Onion is just so good and people need to subscribe to it because it’s just so great. This last week’s just- everything, every story on the front page made me giggle. Trump administration offers free at home loyalty tests, Baby Saves Affair, US military bands man with girls names from combat. It’s all just so smart and to get it delivered.

Christina: It looks so lovely in your hand.

John: It feels so good. I strongly encourage you. We’ll put a link in the show notes to The Onion site, but it comes once a month and it’s just delightful. Christina, what do you have for us?

Christina: My one cool thing is a person and his company. It’s Padric Murphy who runs a company called the Research Department. It’s researchdebt.com. Drew will hopefully find a link and include it. He is amazing. I’ve known him for a number of years. He was a co-producer on Babylon, worked on a number of movies for a long time, worked with Baz Luhrmann for a long time, has always done research for movies just as part of his job.

Then a few years ago, just went out on his own, made it his job, set up this company. It’s just him right now. Although I think people should beg to be working with him because he’s just incredible.

I hired him last fall to research a story. I knew what I wanted. I knew the character stories. I knew the character dynamics. I knew everything that I wanted on a personal level, but I didn’t know when or where the story was set. I knew it was period, I knew I needed to deal with some colonial stuff, and I didn’t know what country or what time period because I didn’t know how I would then lay it into the history. It’s not about the history, but it’s very important that I have the setting.

Working with him was the most incredible experience because he’s not just a research nerd, he’s incredibly creative. His instincts on story and just listening to it and hearing it were amazing. The thing that he would do that was coolest was actually taking it all the way back to side characters.
I would have things like, “I’ve got this side character. It’s a maid.” We landed on Malaysia in 1914, which is not a place or a time that I knew much about. Then I had this side character who was a maid. I needed her to be of a certain ethnicity, a certain age. I was like, “This is what I think I want to do in the story. Does it sound plausible?”

He would go off and then find journal entries of people who were basically that same age, race, in the same time period. I would get actual flavor of what those people’s lives were like. That kind of thing is so extraordinary. I don’t even know how he physically does it, but then he scans all the pages in the books so that you have all of the resources, and then he puts it into a credibly digestible format. He’s amazing. He’s worked on a few TV shows and features as well. For any executives or creatives or whatever listening, he is amazing.

John: That’s fantastic. Researchdepartment.com. Dept. Love it.

Christina: D-E-P-T.

John: dept.com. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chialelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Kotrla, who’s a first-timer. If you have an outro, please send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Art of the Cold Email. Christina Hodson, so great to catch up with you.

Christina: [chuckles] Great to see you and speak with you for the first time today.

John: Come back anytime and sooner, please.

Christina: Anytime. I’d love to. It’s a delight.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. As billed in the opening, the cold email. I’m old enough and you’re probably old enough too [crosstalk]–

Christina: What are you saying, John. I’m a child. I’m so young and fresh.

John: Did you ever make a cold call where you just had to call somebody?

Christina: That’s how I got started in this industry.

John: First, let’s talk about the cold call because the cold call is genuinely terrifying because you’re interrupting someone’s life with a phone call, which is just scary, but we had to do it.

Christina: How else did we do it back in the day?

John: We didn’t have email.

Christina: It was when I wanted to work in film. I had gone to my university career service and they said, “You can’t work in film. That’s not really a thing. Do you want to be a journalist at the BBC?” I was like, “No, I want to work in movies.” They were no help. I went online, but it was early crappy internet when you couldn’t really find anything good. So I got a yellow pages and looked up film production and then just made a list of all of the offices and cold-called all of the numbers.

I need to tell you that I am a person that, to this day, I’ll like go and do big studio pitches with big grownups. I still can’t make restaurant reservations on the phone. I’m so bad at speaking on the phone. I hate it. It like cripples me with anxiety, but I did it.

John: I’m so impressed that you did it. You made a list and you just did it. How did you set yourself down on a phone and pick up the phone and just do it?

Christina: I forced myself to do it. I reminded myself that the person picking up the phone was just the receptionist. They are probably not having the best day in the world. As long as I’m nice, as long as I’m not annoying and an asshole– No, sorry, I probably was annoying, but I wasn’t an asshole, I don’t think. I wasn’t demanding too much. I was pretty specific in what I was asking for, which was, do you offer any internships? Is there anyone that I could talk to about possibly doing any work as a runner? I’ll photocopy or I’ll pick up sandwiches.

Because I was offering something and because I made myself fairly succinct, which is hard for me, as you can imagine, it helped. I finally got someone who asked me a question and we had one thing in common. From that one thing, I like spun it out into like a 5-minute conversation and then 10-minute conversation. Then he was like, well, we don’t have anything now, but come in and have a cup of tea with me and maybe you could do some reading. That’s how I got my first job. Reader, then runner, then intern, then free intern assistant for a year, then an assistant. Yes, it’s tough.

John: Yes, but you did it. You were able to make that cold [crosstalk]–

Christina: It was cold calls.

John: Cold calling is much worse than the cold email. Let’s talk about the cold email, which is at least you’re not ruining someone’s day by calling.

Christina: No. Sometimes they ruin my day. They make me so mad. Because it’s a cold email, you should try harder. You’ve got all the time in the world.

John: Let’s talk about a bad cold email you get and a good cold email you get. What does Christina Hodson get as a cold email?

Christina: I’m so mad just talking about this. The bad ones, the ones where they’ve copied and pasted it, and they’ve like changed the font on your name because it’s copied and pasted and so the formatting is all wrong.

John: Oh, the worst. The worst.

Christina: They’ve copied and pasted the credits in to be, “I love your film, bah bah bah,” but they’ve like copied and pasted that and you can tell. They also sometimes haven’t removed some of the other ones that you didn’t write. It’s so maddening. There’s just no point in doing it. It actively makes me want to block you forever.

John: Yes, I hear that. The mismatching fonts is just a dead giveaway. To me, a good cold email is one that is from the subject line, I can tell what it is they’re trying to do, what they need. It doesn’t say like from a fan or something like that. That doesn’t help me out. It’s specific about a movie.

A good cold email is like, hey, I’m putting together a documentary about women in Tim Burton movies. If the subject line was like Women in Tim Burton movies Documentary, oh, okay, I can see what that is. Quick introduction of like, this is who I am. These are some of the things I’ve done. I’m working on this thing. Could I convince you to come in for an interview for 90 minutes one day?

I’ll probably say no, but at least I’ll understand what the request was. It’s when something is so vague or takes forever to actually get to the ask that I’m like [sighs] “Ugh.” It kills me.

Christina: What about when they’re coming from, not someone trying to make you jump, when it’s someone that is starting out in the industry, that’s reaching out to you for advice? Now you have a whole podcast, they have a whole system they can go through. Do you have any tips for those ones where it’s like– I very often get a, “Could I take you out for a coffee?”

John: The answer is no, from my side. Also, I have a podcast and I can push people towards–

Christina: You’re like, I’ve got 680 episodes you can listen to.

John: Yes. The answer to that has generally been no. Let’s flip it around when you or I need to ask an expert in something about a thing. You were just talking about the research department, who’s a guy who is probably doing a lot of those cold emails to- trying to get those things. When I need to reach out to a specialist in something, I’ll just be very clear like, hey, I’m a screenwriter, I’m working on a thing about this. I see you’re an expert in this field. Could I get on the phone to ask you 10 minutes worth of questions about this subject?

If I read an author’s book and I really liked it, I’ll just reach out and say like, “Hey, I really enjoyed your book. Quickly, I’m John August and this is my thing. I just really wanted you to know how much I appreciate that.” No one’s going to get upset to read that.

Christina: No one’s mad about that.

John: No one’s mad about that.

Christina: No one’s mad about those.

John: If you’re a cold email, make someone’s day a little bit better.

Christina: Yes. I also think with that, in your example of reaching out to a specialist, because I’ve actually recently done that, some people don’t want to talk on the phone. Some people are like me and don’t want to make restaurant reservations because it involves being awkward on the phone. So I give them the choice. I say, “I’m happy to talk on the phone for 20 minutes or whatever, but if you’d rather email, I can lay it out here,” so that they have the option.

John: Yes. Give them choices. Don’t let them feel boxed into a thing.

Christina: Be specific about the ask. The general, like, “Can I take you out for coffee one day and pick your brain?” I’m like, no.

John: No. I never want my brain picked.

Christina: No. If someone emails and say, “Can I pick your brain? It’s this.” Then they give me one question in an email and the rest of the email is actually thoughtful and I think they have bothered choosing to ask me specifically rather than just generic screenwriter, then I might be like, oh yes, actually, this is an interesting question and you seem nice.

John: Do you seem nice and not like a crazy person?

Christina: Do you seem like you bothered proofreading your own email? Typos in those emails drive me crazy. Especially if it’s someone trying to be a writer, which it most often is.

John: One step better than cold email though is the introduction email. When some neutral person has done this or you’ve asked for a CC into a thing, then best practices are, they’ve CC’d you in, you put them on BCC so they can disappear off the thread and you can actually just do this. Drew, you’ve had to do some cold emails.

Drew: Oh God, yes.

John: Talk to us about what you find successful and what you dread.

Drew: It’s being specific with the ask and making the ask easy, to your point. If it’s one specific question, it’s a very short, that can be a fun after– If you need a break for something, you can answer that question. The general is always death. Especially like, because I’m essentially John’s firewall for emails.

Christina: [laughs] You must get so much.

Drew: We get a lot. To your point on the, it’s usually an assistant who’s having their own day. The things that are easy to elevate, that’s great. That’s fun. Think about that intermediary, whether that person exists or not. I think if it’s an easy ask, great. If it’s not, if it’s more complicated, you’re probably not going to get anywhere.

John: We did a 100th birthday party for our house. Our house turned 100 years old.

Christina: Congratulations house.

John: Stuart Friedel, who’s a former Scriveness producer, undertook this giant research project to figure out the whole history of the house and basically everyone who ever lived in the house.

Christina: That’s so cool.

John: One of the things I’ve always admired about Stuart Friedel is he is incredibly good at the cold email. He actually has none of that shame in there that stops someone from reaching out. He will just do it.

Christina: He does it in a way that’s charming and that people respond to.

John: Absolutely. He was able to get all this information because he was just unafraid to reach out to people and make that happen. In the setup to this, he said, “Oh, it’s easier for you because you’re John August?” It’s like, sure, but it’s also easier if you’re working on behalf of somebody else. For that, sure it’s his job. He’s sort of doing it for us. I was able to do it brilliantly because he had no sense that it wasn’t proper. Of course, it was proper. His asks were Also really clear. It’s like, we’re talking about one house.

Drew: There’s also that sort of motivation too. If it’s a thing that’s important to me, I will always be terrified to send the email or call or whatever. If it’s easy, if it sort of doesn’t matter–

Christina: This is just for John, who cares? [laughs]

Drew: Yes, totally. My wife’s favorite animal is a red panda. I was like, I wonder if a zoo would let us hang out with the red panda. I got shockingly far up the chain at I think the LA Zoo, maybe San Diego Zoo, where I just called. I was like, hey, can we hang out with a red panda? They were like, let me ask. I don’t know. I got like three or four people up the chain. The only reason we couldn’t is they were like, well, the red panda’s pregnant. We’re going to have some weird–

Christina: What? They’re going to get inundated now.

Drew: I know, right? That was one of those things that was like, that doesn’t affect the rest of my life. It’s just fun.

Christina: I’m going to think you like an email to hang out with animals.

John: Christina Hodson, Instagram. Will you message people on Instagram or not?

Christina: I’ve done it once, drunk, but I don’t know how to use Instagram. I have it under some– I had a cat who’s not even alive anymore. It was under her name. I drunkenly, in an Uber, once messaged someone and then didn’t know how to check my messages. The reply, I found two months later.

John: No.

Christina: No, I’m not.

John: Not a good strategy for you.

Christina: I don’t think I would do anything professional on Instagram.

John: Yes, I’ve done a couple of professional things on Instagram.

Christina: You probably have a very professional Instagram.

John: It’s also the difference of I think being a man versus being a woman on Instagram. Just the amount of crap that a woman gets on Instagram is much higher. Back when Twitter used to exist, that was the really useful way for me to reach out to somebody because I could– If I already followed them or if I deliberately followed them on that, they would get a notification because I was a verified person and then I could DM and that was–

Christina: Back in the early early days, it was just like, are you a funny person? If I scroll back in your tweets, are they witty?

John: Absolutely.

Christina: Then you can get anything you want. It’s a very different world now.

John: Yes. That is the nice thing, though, about even Instagram is that there’s a little bit better sense of like, oh, this is the actual person, versus an email could come from anybody. It’s really hard.

Christina: Yes. Sometimes it’s a catfish.

John: It could be a catfish. You never know. Christina Hodson, you’re not a catfish. You’re an actual real-

Christina: I’m a real human.

John: -a real star.

Christina: [chuckles]

John: Thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me.

Links:

• Christina Hodson
• That New York Times article with John and Christina
• Bamboo Director’s Chair
• Birdigo on Steam
• Action samples: Aliens, The Bourne Identity and Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• David Koepp’s Jurassic Park screenplay
• David Benioff’s Troy screenplay
• A Man of Parts and Learning by Fara Dabhoiwala
• When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days by Robert Klara
• A U.K. Teen’s Parents Sent Him to Ghana. He Took Them to Court. by Lynsey Chutel
• Zombie colleges? These universities are living another life online, and no one can say why by Chris Quintana
• Mike Birbiglia
• The Onion in print
• Padraic Murphy’s Research Department
• 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 Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Vance Kotrla (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.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 673 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, let’s get back to basics. Structure, Craig. What is it? Why do writers keep freaking out about it when it’s a fundamental part of storytelling going all the way back to caveman days?

Craig: I think why do writers keep freaking out about it is a perfectly good place where we should start once we get there.

John: Then how do you enjoy a movie? We’ll teach you how not to be so meh about the things you’re watching.

Craig: [chuckles] Be born before 2000.

John: Plus, we’ll answer some listener questions because it’s been a minute. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about the wearables, the devices we wear to track what’s happening in our bodies.

Craig: Fantastic. Let’s do it.

John: First, some news. We had Oscar nominations this morning as we’re recording. We’re recording this on Thursday.

Craig: Yes.

John: As always, I’m so happy for the people who got nominated. I am bummed for the people who didn’t. And it’s all going to be okay.

Craig: Everything will be absolutely okay. Even being considered for something like that is extraordinary. I assume everybody going into that has grown up enough to know that sometimes weird stuff happens. Somehow Conclave got nominated for best picture and best actor, but not best director.

John: Yes, there’s a couple of those.

Craig: Wasn’t quite sure about that one.

John: Wicked also.

Craig: Wicked, best picture but not best screenplay?

John: Yes.

Craig: All right. Not fair to our friend, Dana Fox. There are these strange things that happen but it’s all priced in. At the end of the day, while it is nice to have a trophy, this is all part of advertising. For those folks who did get nominations, I think it’s really exciting that their movies will get more marketing money so more people can see them, particularly for the little ones.

John: But also congratulations, now you get to do six more weeks of work promoting this thing.

Craig: It is a full-time job.

John: You don’t get paid for it.

Craig: No.

John: Drew, tell us about Weekend Read because I think you have all of these scripts in Weekend Read right now.

Drew Marquardt: Every single nominated screenplay we’ve got up from Weekend Read. Should I run down the list?

John: Go for it.

Craig: Yes, please.

Drew: We have A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, Anora, Conclave, Emilia Perez, Nickel Boys, which is a really fun read, September 5, Sing Sing, The Brutalist, and The Substance. They’re all in the “And the nominees are…” category and you can read them there.

Craig: That’s great. It used to be five things, right?

John: Yes. Now that we have both adapted and original screenplay.

Craig: Oh, I see. There are 10 best.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m in the Academy. I should know this, right? I vote very quickly. I shouldn’t say that. I vote studiously.

John: I do too.

Craig: But I clearly don’t pay attention to how many people are in the category and I’m voting. There are 10 best pictures, but then everybody else is five. Is that right?

John: That’s correct. Every other category is five. Drew has gone through each of these scripts to make sure they actually work properly in Weekend Read. So I would just say, rather than doomscrolling on your phone, why don’t you scroll through a script and actually read something and read something good?

Craig: Anything is better than doomscrolling, anything.

John: Now, Craig, I know you took a mandate to consume less news and you’re off all the social media. How is that going for you?

Craig: Amazingly well.

John: That’s good.

Craig: I am aware of what is going on in the world. I get my news through the old-fashioned method, which is to pick a couple of periodicals that I find at least thoughtful and look at their curated reportage of what happened the day before. Not what happened 10 minutes ago and with some breath so that there can be some thoughtful analysis and context. That’s it. I do not get my news from the fire hose of insanity and I don’t watch anything with anyone talking. That’s the key. [chuckles] I do not watch talking heads. I do not look at tweets. I do not look at Instathoughts and it is spectacular.

John: During the height of the fires, I was reminded of how useful it is to have local news. It was one of those rare situations where I turned on the TV and actually watched local news as fires were happening. It was useful to see like, “Oh, my gosh, the fires are getting close here. We actually need to start packing up.” I was so grateful to have that as a service, but I do not want that in my veins all the time. I grew up in a household where the TV news was on at least four hours a day, local news and national news. It’s not helpful.

Craig: Local news, in particular, and this is no slight against them, the work that they do when something like the fires happen is extraordinary and people put their lives at risk and they’re flying around the helicopters. But for the most part, they don’t have either enough things to report that they think anyone will watch or they only have lurid things that aren’t worth reporting that they know people will watch. You get a lot of, there was an accident here and there was a shooting and there was a stabbing.

What you don’t get are, say, this bill was deliberated. All the sudden frenzy over why were tanks empty? What was going on with the firefighters? Why didn’t the pumps work? That’s been being discussed for years and the local news reported on 0% of it. It’s not a great thing to have on all day unless there’s something serious happening.

John: Indeed.

Craig: Like a car chase.

John: Like a car chase, yes.

Craig: Yes.

Craig: All right, let’s do some follow-up because it’s been a while since you and I’ve been here in person to do some follow-up on previous episodes. Drew, take us back to 671. We had a How to view a Movie about an IVF mix-up.

Drew: Several people wrote in that there were already movies out there with a similar premise. Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers. There’s a Danish movie called Maybe Baby. There’s an Indian comedy called Good News and a Mexican sitcom called Daughter from Another Mother.

Craig: Looks like they’ve covered this one, John.

John: They have covered it. Internationally it’s been well covered.

Craig: Everyone all across the world enjoys this story.

John: Also, we talked in that same episode about a Unabomber movie and several people wrote in to say there’s a series called Manhunt about Ted Kaczynski starring Paul Bettany and Sam Worthington.

Craig: Okay.

John: Sure.

Craig: Done.

John: Done.

Drew: We’ll put links in the show notes for all those.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: We also had some follow-up on way back to episode 454. We were talking about erotic fiction.

Craig: That was a long time ago.

John: Yes.

Drew: Jenny in New York City writes, I was listening to that bonus segment of episode 454 where you and Craig discuss but disappointingly do not read erotic fiction. In it, you bring up Fifty Shades of Grey as the prime example of fan fiction that managed to cross over into popular culture. Craig says that Fifty Shades of Grey seemed like it was heralding the beginning of something and that he’s surprised that nothing similar followed it. Four-plus years later, we’re seeing the floodgates open. There’s a through line from fan fiction to TikTok or BookTok to the traditional book publishing industry.

A well-known example is The Love Hypothesis, which was originally a Rey and Kylo Ren, or Reylo, fan fiction published online in 2018 and then scrubbed of all the Star Wars references and traditionally published in 2021. A film adaptation is now in development. There are also three Draco and Hermione, or Dramione, fan fictions all slated for major publication in 2025.

Craig: Okay. Wait, but also scrubbed of any–

John: Yes. That’s the thing. Fifty Shades of Grey, of course, was fan fiction that was scrubbed.

Craig: Scrubbed from Twilight.

John: Yes.

Craig: Right.

John: We were correct but just ahead of the curve.

Craig: We were ahead of the curve.

John: Now, BookTok caught up with what we predicted four years ago.

Craig: Yay, erotic fiction.

John: Yes.

Craig: Is there anything less sexy than the phrase erotic fiction?

John: Yes, it’s a —

Craig: Boner killer.

John: It’s not so good.

Craig: No.

John: I’m going to be optimistic. I’m going to be positive. This is a movie that we didn’t have in theaters before. The same thing with Fifty Shades of Grey. We weren’t having sexual thrillers on the big screen and hooray.

Craig: Not since the ‘90s.

John: Yes.

Craig: There has been a lot of discussion about millennials and Gen Z’s general lack of interest in seeing sex portrayed on screen. I think we’ve talked about it before, possibly because if they want to watch sex on screen, they watch people having sex. They don’t need it or want it in their traditional narrative. But it is part of our life and it’s very much a part of how we relate to each other on very deep levels. It screws things up. It makes things better. It makes things worse. It creates all the people around us and at least most of them. Let’s bring it on.

Also, it is interesting that so much of fan fiction turns toward the erotic. All the way back to– You’ve heard the phrase slash fiction?

John: Of course. Yes, Kirk/Spock.

Craig: Exactly. It began with people writing erotic fiction about Star Trek and specifically like Kirk has sex with Spock or Kirk has sex with McCoy or McCoy has sex with Scotty, whatever it is. It’s not like the stuff that happens now is only because of that. I think it’s always been that impulse is there’s a fandom and they want to write sexy versions of the characters.

John: They do. Also, they’re pining for something that they cannot get in the mainstream version of it.

Craig: Oh, that’s an interesting point.

John: I think the reason why slash fiction is it’s an attempt to take these characters out of their normal molds and use them how they want to use them. There are, obviously, queer writers were behind part of it, but also women, basically. It’s a way of taking control of these male characters and using them how they wish they could be seen.

Craig: Also, if you love those stories, you make a great point. You’re never going to get sex in a Harry Potter film. Of course, you have to wait until they’re old enough, right? Their senior year, you’re still not going to get sex. It’s not how it works. There’s a unsatisfied desire for a certain version of that relationship. That makes total sense.

John: All right. Let’s go on to our marquee topic. This is actually prompted by another listener question. This one from Christine. Drew, help us out.

Drew: She says, in episode 662, which was the 20 questions, Craig responded to a listener saying something like, there’s a lot of people who can write glittering dialogue but so few who can use structure well. It had my husband and I fist-pumping. We agree. I certainly can’t do it well. Sometimes it feels like perfect pitch. Either you have it or you don’t. Craig and John, would you talk to us about examples of how you used or struggled with structure in some of your own work?

John: Great, happy to. I think first we should just talk about structure and what we even mean by structure because it’s one of those terms that I think is used as a cudgel against newer writers. Once you actually think about what it really is, it’s, of course, fundamental to every story you’ve ever heard.

Craig: It is story. It’s a fancy word for saying, this is what happens, this is who it happens to, and this is why. That is what stories are. People get excited about the clothing that we put on that stuff because that’s what hits their eyeballs and ears first. What do they look like? What are they saying? The saying, in particular, gets overemphasized. But how do you tell a good story?

Everybody who grows up in any family that’s even moderately sized or even if you just see your extended family at Christmas, doesn’t matter, everybody knows that there’s somebody that’s going to sit around and tell a story that is so boring and bad. But you also know there’s somebody who’s great at it. When that one starts telling a story, everybody leans forward because they know how to do it, how you begin, how you middle, how you end, what’s the point, how it all comes around and coheres together. Poetics by Aristotle.

John: I was a journalism major, and so in journalism, you’re taught to answer the basic questions, who, what, where, when, why, and then how. Structure’s really– John’s talking about the when. It’s like, when do events happen? What is the order of those events? When does the audience learn something? Those are all fundamental parts of storytelling. When you have somebody at a family gathering who is just awful at it and boring, it’s like you did not plan the details and how you’re going to lay out the story and the storytelling in a way that was actually interesting and intriguing.

You’re starting way too early, you’re going way too long. There’s just no clear structure to the story. We know we’re trapped in this endless middle of things. When something is well-structured, you feel beginnings and endings, you feel the closure of moments, you feel that there’s just– There’s a rhythm to it. You’ve recognized what the audience needs and where they’re at and how to move forward. That’s what structure is. What it’s not is some cookie-cutter template. It’s not like, “Oh, here are the magic clothespins which you’re going to hang all your things on. It’s not a thing you impose upon a story. It is the skeleton that’s holding the whole story up.

Craig: I think when you said recognize, that’s where the talent is. Because I don’t know how to teach somebody to recognize something. It might be instructive for people at home to think about Boring Uncle Ron and how Boring Uncle Ron does tell stories because at least you can say, “I recognize why that story stinks.” For instance, he looped back around. He told me something that should have been told earlier. I can’t explain why, except I wish he had mentioned that earlier. It screws up the context.

There was no suspense. He told me what was going to happen before it happened. He just casually said something that he should have milked and understood that I would have found meaningful. There are parts where there are too many details. There are parts where there are no details at all. It doesn’t end. He’s not sure how to end it. It doesn’t have a point. If it doesn’t have a point, it wasn’t the point that the beginning was getting at. There’s no revelation, no purpose, and it is episodic. This, and this, and this, and this. A boring Uncle Ron may be able to teach people more about structure than we think.

John: The other thing that’s important to recognize is that structure is all around you. You just may not be seeing it as structure. Every song you’ve ever heard has structure. There are verses and choruses and hooks and it has bridges. There’s a pattern that fits your brain well. Because there are things like verses and choruses, you can break from them and that surprise us, which is great.

There’s still a sense of what those things are. The equivalents for those are scenes and sequences in movies and TV shows. It’s why learning to write the four-act or five-act structure of a classic one-hour TV show is really, really useful. Even if those commercial breaks are taken out, there’s still a sense of like, “I know where we’re at in this show.” There’s a flow to it.

Craig: There’s a rhythm. It’s a little bit like having a conversation with yourself. One of you is going to tell a story and the other part of you is going to be listening to the story. Part of structure is saying, how does hearing this for the first time me like that? Did I like that? Did that make me happy? Did it bore me? Does it seem clunky? You need to have a relationship with an audience even when there is none because we are performing a service.

Nobody other than Kafka, theoretically, who tried to burn everything he wrote, is just writing to be not read or filming to not be seen and so forth. You have to let the audience in.

You don’t need to let them all in. Your audience can just be you and what you like. You then need to be responsive to yourself and go, “No.” Even though I just came up with that, even though that was my idea of what should happen now and why, the me that’s listening, unimpressed.

John: Let’s talk through our assumptions about the very fundamental structure of a movie or a pilot, the things that are introducing a character for the first time and introducing what it is that they’re trying to do. Early in the story, near the very start, we need to have a sense of who the character is, what they want, what the world is like, what the obstacles in the way that are going to be there, who else is important.
Those are fundamental things. The fundamental choices you’re going to be making, even if you don’t think about it, you’re making those choices by which order you’re putting those scenes in and how you’re telling the audience about those things.

As they’re going off and doing some things, what is the sequence of events that’s happening? What are the choices that they’re making? Where are they going? What are the obstacles along the way? When you see somebody criticize the script for being, “I think you have some structure issues here,” it’s what they’re really saying is like, “I got lost. I got lost in where we’re at, what I should have been focusing on.

The characters might have great dialogue. It might be really enjoyable to have watched them do their thing, but I didn’t feel any momentum. I didn’t feel like there was anything going there. I didn’t know what to even look for in terms of what’s going to happen at the end. What am I even expecting to happen down the road.”

Craig: Oftentimes there’s a lack of intention and we interpret that as a structure problem. Every time, you’re right. When people say there’s a structure problem, they’re trying to say there’s a problem of some other kind. You just don’t know what the word is. Sometimes it’s as if you’re watching a conductor who doesn’t have a sense of how to alter tempo, create anticipation, where to use silence, as opposed to sound. There’s no shape.

John: Yes, there’s no shape.

Craig: There’s no shape. It’s just there and it’s not picking you up and then throwing you down. It’s not putting its hands over your eyes and then revealing something new. These things get shuffled out as structure problems, which for writers can be very frustrating early on because you immediately then go running to some structure book. The structure books are not going to help you. You do need, I think, to think a little bit how to write a movie. A lot of structure is about the main character and how they change. The story is revolving around that. It’s the nucleus and everything’s revolving around that. That creates a sense of intention and purpose, which in theory, will imbue this story with structure.

John: Going back to Christine’s question, when you talk about examples of how you use or struggle with structure in some of your own work. Looking back at the movies I’ve written, by far the most complicated movie structurally was Big Fish because in Big Fish, you have two protagonists who have their own agendas. There’s two different timelines.

They’re intersecting with each other. They are each other’s antagonist. There’s so much stuff to set up and plates to start spinning. Those first 10 pages have to do just a lot of work to sort of start the engines for things going.

The setup is so important, but then it’s deciding, when am I moving back and forth between these different stories? How is my choice to leave this storyline and go to this storyline progressing both of them? How to make sure we’re really moving forward in time and energy as we’re going through the movie, even though we’re intercutting between these two things?
That was a case where I had an instinctive sense of what the story was I needed to tell, but it literally did have to just like pull out a sheet of paper and work out like, “This is how I’m moving back and forth between these things. Then I had to plan scenes that would make transitions between those things feel logical and natural.” That is the hard work of structure sometimes.

Most movies I write don’t need that, but there are situations where you have multiple plot lines happening at the same time and you are going to have to just do that logistical planning work to figure out how you’re going to do that. TV shows are a great example too. Oftentimes, I guess, Last of Us is much more classically, you tend to follow a smaller group of characters, but you are cutting back and forth between them, and deciding when you’re going to cut back and forth between them becomes really important. With Joel or with Ellie and deciding when we’re going to move back and forth to those things are important writing decisions well before they become editorial decisions.

Craig: No question. Television episodes are I find generally easier structurally to deal with because they’re shorter and there is an understanding and expectation that you will get to have multiple starts and multiple endings. So you simplify a little bit. By simplifying, you get to be a little crazier with structure. Television shows are structured way weirder than movies are. You look at the structure of a season, any season, pick any season of Breaking Bad. No movie is complicated like that. It’s not even a complicated show.

John: Also, in series television, you’re looking at the structure across multiple episodes too. Where’s the audience at? What are we setting up?

Craig: There’s episodic structure, there’s season structure, there’s series structure. Movies are, I find to be really challenging because you get one shot and that’s it. When it’s in, there’s no multiple innings. There’s no, “well, that wasn’t my favorite episode.” It’s one episode, that’s it, the end. I won’t name titles, but I will say that I have worked on things that I’m not credited for that were big pieces of IP and they had a lot of expectations and they also were from different media. It wasn’t like I was taking a movie and remaking it. It was another thing.

In those cases, sometimes the freedom of whatever that medium was made it very hard to structure a movie such that the movie was in movie time. It wasn’t five hours long and it wasn’t 40 minutes long. It was roughly movie time and got you through the movement you needed to get. All the things you needed and wanted were there and the stuff wasn’t. Most importantly, everything made sense because other things, a lot of other things can afford to not make sense for a while. Novels can wander off and not make sense for a bunch of it. Kurt Vonnegut novels routinely don’t make sense and then they do in the end and it’s beautiful. For long stretches, you’re like, “What is happening?”

Musicals can wander off down weird alleyways, do bizarre songs, and then come back and it’s fine. It’s fine because also you’re in a big room with them and they’re singing and it’s cool and who cares? Songs can do this, but movies, it’s harder. It’s harder particularly when you’re doing movies like you and I have done. Logic, as it turns out, is also part of structure, making sure that facts are in evidence that one thing follows another reasonably, and that people aren’t contradicting themselves or their story.

John: You were talking about adaptations and adapting a piece of IP. It’s been my experience is that when I’m adapting a novel, there’s so much you love about the novel and you recognize I can’t just tear off the pages and feed them in the projector. They fundamentally have different engines. I have to have an honest conversation with the author if the author’s around, the engine of the movie is going to be different than the engine in your book. Some things are going to need to happen in different order and different sequences and some things are just not going to happen because it’s a movie and the movie has to be about two hours long.

There’s just expectations and payoffs that are just very different for a movie. Having written three books now, I can say it’s really nice to be able to describe the texture of the streets and all that stuff and it provides such incredible rich detail and it’s immersive. That’s not movie stuff. You got to move on past that. When I’ve been tasked with adapting a piece of IP that’s more like a character or a video game or something like that, one that’s not especially narrative, then you do have a lot more freedom to actually make a movie.

Craig: If they give you a toy, just make sure that the toy is named the toy and that it does the one signature thing that the toy does and the rest is up to you.

John: There’s a liberation to that where it’s just like, I’m not so stuck and beholden on those things. I don’t have all the benefits of the stuff that was in the book, but it’s not so stuck on it.

Craig: It’s almost like the challenge is taking something that has been properly structured for its medium and then telling it again in a different medium. It’s almost like you’ve got to break a lot of bones and then knit them back together because like you get a dolphin and you need to deliver a penguin. A lot of work happens there and some bones just are left behind and it can be messy and it will never really be a penguin and it certainly won’t be a dolphin. It’ll be its own thing. It’s hard, but this is how important structure is really. It’s like we need to be able to tell the story coherently for this medium.

John: Do you have other examples from your own work of things that were particularly challenging to structure or things that surprised you in finding a structure for telling the story? We talked through Chornobyl and figured out where the breaks were in that story.

Craig: Other than the things that I– There were a few jobs where I thought this probably shouldn’t be a movie. There were some things where I thought this should probably be three movies, not one. Famously the Weinsteins had the rights to Lord of the Rings and they refused to let Peter Jackson make three movies. They wanted him to make one movie to cover the three books of Lord of the Rings. Just to be clear, I watched the extended version every year of each of those three movies.

The extended version of each movie is three and a half hours. The theatrical maybe were two and a half. The idea of we’re going to smash all that into one movie is insane. Sometimes you’re running into– I have been in those spots, really when you feel like you don’t have enough runway to either take off or land, it’s terrifying.

John: I will say that when I look back to like stuff I’ve passed on, sometimes it just didn’t spark for me, or the character didn’t spark, the story didn’t spark. There have also been times where this is not a movie or I can sense it’s really fundamentally a structural problem that we’re not going to get past. The audience expectation of when it’s to make it to the screen and what I can actually put on the screen, it’s just not going to match up right because there’s just not time to do it.

Craig: There have also been situations where I found as I was going through it, that the other people involved, be they a director or producer or star, felt that the value was more in some other aspect of it. The pure storytelling was just don’t worry about that because we’re going to do this and it’s going to be cool. I think sometimes action movies fall prey to this. We all love Die Hard because it’s so perfectly structured, but a lot of action movies you can feel them going and we have to have this cool thing so just make a lot of convoluted reasons why it’s going to happen because really people are there for the action.

If you miss that thread of story, like so our friend Chris Morgan who works on the Fast and Furious movies, they found a smart way to create a simple structure, family. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be complicated because they’re smart. They know people are coming for the cars, but that’s why they think they’re coming. The reason they keep coming back is for the characters and the relationships because you could just watch cars doing crazy stuff on YouTube if you want. It’s also important to have partners who recognize we’re going to tell everybody this is about the cars privately in this room. We do know it’s about basic fundamentals that we have to get right.

John: I completely agree with you in terms of family was a central unifying core idea. I would be nervous about conflating that with structure.

Craig: It would have to be an argument, right?

John: It’s a central argument. That’s the central thing we’re always doing.

Craig: Family is worth more than blank.

John: Then as you’re looking at what are the events of this movie? How are we going to structure them? How is this all going to feel and tie back into it? It’s making sure that you are able to remind the audience and remind the characters that it’s all about family, that it’s all going to tie back in there, making sure that of all these set pieces you’re building, which is these things are musicals, but with explosions.

Craig: Exactly. What is the fundamental difference between the structure of one of your favorite Fast and Furious movies and one of your favorite Pitch Perfect movies? Both universal films, oddly enough, family, right? A bunch of people come together. One of them is not, is a loner of a sort. The other ones need them. There are villains that must be overcome. They all find that they are more powerful together and they face their fear and they win through performance of some kind, be it driving or singing a cool song.

John: Absolutely. Those writers as they’re looking at how they’re going to structure their stories. They’re looking at these are the singing moments, the big action set pieces. These are how we’re going to do it. Looking at the note card layout, which is the way they think about like– I don’t actually lay out cards, but you used to do that. You just don’t need cards anymore.

Craig: I now do more whiteboard.

John: As you’re looking at the big whiteboard map of where the story is, that’s what we’re really talking about, structures. It’s making sure that they’re not just individual things but they’re connected in ways that are meaningful and actually provide value.

Craig: And if you’re looking at structure in that way, when you put up a card that says a big race or they sing, you have to know why. They race, but the point of this race is he disappoints somebody and feels horrible or he chickens out or he realizes that he’s better than he thought he was. Why do they sing this song? Because this song shows that they’re all thinking about themselves only and not about each other. That’s why those note cards happen. That’s structure.

John: You’re asking, why is this happening now? What is the effect of this happening now on the stuff before and afterwards?

Craig: How does this change what comes next?

John: We say you’re asking yourself, but that’s one of those cases where having the writer’s room, if you’re in a TV situation or having a writing partner, we know a lot of partners who one person is the person who’s better at sensing this overall map of story and another person is really good at the execution details.

Craig: David Zucker, when I first started working on Scary Movie 3, he didn’t know me. I was shoved in there, right? It’s week one and he has no idea who I am and he’s like, “I don’t know this guy.” He was like, “You’re like structure boy.” I was structure boy. Then it was funny. It was funny. He didn’t mean it as an insult. He actually really respected structure. He was obsessed with note cards and he was a big believer. I’m talking about him like he’s dead. He’s perfectly alive. He would appreciate that I’m talking about him like he’s dead.

He was very rigorous about logic. Actually, he was quite grateful that structure boy was there to help because I think he had real problems with that in his part– He had been trying and there is a great structure to like, for instance, Naked Gun, fantastic structure, but it was hard for him. It took him a lot of work. It was useful to have a structure boy.

John: Just thinking back to last week’s conversation with Jesse Eisenberg, he was talking about like an idea and needing structure in order to actually have the idea make sense. He was talking about how originally he had this approach for the movie and he realized the big reveal happened at the end of act one and he just didn’t have an act two or an act three because things just happened too early. He needed to change everything around and he needed to change the premise so that he could actually have a structure that made sense for the course of the movie.

Craig: Therein is the difference between good writers and not good writers. Good writers will make a mistake and then go, “Oh, that’s a mistake.” Bad writers will make a mistake and go, “This is awesome.”

John: The bad writer might just spend a sec, “Oh, but I’ll figure it out later.”

Craig: No one will care.

John: Or they just give up.

Craig: They give up. I think the biggest issue is it’s that having that other you that can just be the audience with its arms crossed going, “Yes, that’s fine.” What’s worse than hearing that’s fine? I’ve said that to myself before and I’m like, “Oh boy, let’s not do that.”

John: All right. On the topic of that’s fine, let’s talk about the meh. This comes from a newsletter that somebody sent me, it’s written by Sasha Chapin. He writes that, “I believe one of my skills is that I’m good at liking things. I intensely enjoy many of my experiences, whether we’re talking about music, art, people, food, places, books, movies, anything. It’s not that I don’t have critical judgment or favorites. The ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high too.”

He runs through some of this advice for enjoying things. I thought they applied really well to enjoying a movie because what I do find is I feel like people have, some of it’s just as you age up, but there’s a cynicism and it’s like, ehh, that I feel happening more. I just want to remind people of ways to enjoy a movie. Because sometimes if you’re sitting and watching a movie, you’re like, “I could just look at my phone.” No, there are other things you can look at instead.

Craig: I think sometimes people say they didn’t like a movie because there is a risk of saying you like something you can be sneered at. No one will sneer at you for not liking something. If anything, you can be like, “You all cretins. You’ve taken delight in this, you idiot.” It’s hard to say you like things. People will sit through a movie silently watching the entire thing. Then when it’s over, go, “I mean, it was okay.” What else gets you to sit there silently fixated upon it for two hours? Nothing.

John: While you’re staring silently at a thing, wondering whether you like it, some of his advice first is look at the other part. He’s saying, move your attention beyond the part that you’re immediately focused on. For his example, it’s like, listen to the baseline in a song and listen to actually hear what the bass is doing, which can be fascinating. For me, sometimes if I’m not fully enjoying that, but I can then I can look at the sets, I can hear the score, I can just appreciate the world in which the story is in. That’s okay. It’s okay to not maybe be enamored by everything in the movie that you’re experiencing but to focus on one thing, one part of it is also okay.

Craig: Sometimes people think that unless a movie is perfect, it’s bad. Movies will make a mistake. That mistake is not an objective mistake. What it is a disruption in your relationship with it. You are on a great date with a movie and then it did something and you went, “Oh, no, I don’t like that thing.” Well get over it because, like dates, movies will have flaws for you. Other people might enjoy those. You didn’t like it, accept it as part of the process where nothing is perfect, and then get back to liking it. Don’t just go, “There it is.” You know what? The movie had me until this person said this thing and then I was like, “Oh, this is garbage.” That’s stupid. That’s how stupid people talk.

John: Another bit of advice, let the intensity in. He’s talking about how people don’t generally like heavy metal because it sounds like an assault on their ears.

Craig: Yes. An awesome assault.

John: Sometimes a movie will do something like and I’ll just cringe on its behalf. Sometimes you just let the movie be the fullest version of itself and try to appreciate for what the movie is doing, even if it’s not necessarily your taste, just watch it enjoy itself.

Craig: Yes. And if a movie is doing what it was intended to do and you can feel they wanted to make a large macaroni and cheese and I just got a huge bowl of macaroni and cheese. Who love macaroni and cheese? What do you mean? Yell at the macaroni? They did what they would. Really absolutely appreciate at least this is for macaroni and cheese. They cared. They delivered it. What else could we ask for them?

John: 100%.

Craig: I feel like comedies in particular get judged so harshly for this. Again, if it’s not Tootsie, it’s no good.

John: “That joke didn’t work for me.”

Craig: What about the 5,000 other words? You laughed a bunch of times and you’re not even in a comedy club where everybody’s drunk. Do you understand why? The two-drink minimum is the reason 70% of comedians have a job. Everyone’s a little toasty and it’s fun and you’re all together and somebody’s doing it live and adapting and feeling you out and saying, “You don’t like this joke. You’re going to– Oh, you like that one? I’ll give you more of those.” Movies are stuck. They’re only going to do the one thing. That’s it. You could be alone in the theater and you’re like, “Eh, yes.”

John: Next bit of advice. Develop a crush on the creator. Allow yourself to be transiently infatuated with the person who produced the work.

Craig: Who likes that idea? Sexy Craig. You’re infatuated with me.

John: Think about the artist’s intention —

Craig: He wasn’t even giving any of that. He’s so horrified by Sexy Craig.

John: Here’s what I’ve learned is don’t acknowledge it.

Craig: You just turn away from it. At the end of Nightmare on Elm Street, she turns her back on Freddy Krueger and he disappears.

John: That’s my hope.

Craig: You keep hoping.

John: Thinking about intention, why did this creator do this? What are they trying to achieve? Actually, it can be useful to stop and if you’re not enjoying this moment right now, think about the actual person making it or what the intention was behind the thing can get you reengaged in what they’re doing.

Craig: Give people the benefit of the doubt. Now, there are times where you will watch a movie and you will think, “Oh, this is just poorly done.” In those circumstances, sometimes I will think to myself, “Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, something went wrong here.” Rather than me presuming that everybody sat down and said, “This is exactly what we want to do,” did it, showed it to me, and it was a mess. What if I think to myself, “What was this supposed to be? What, who, how, what went wrong? What collided with this?” That in and of itself is interesting, to allow something to be bad without saying and it was intentionally so. It is almost never intentionally so.

John: Even if something isn’t bad, but it’s just mid or meh, it’s like–

Craig: Mid or meh is the worst. I am so frustrated with this mid or meh. No, it’s not. It’s not mid or meh. The only thing that I find mid or meh is the usage of mid and meh, which is the most mediocre thing you can do, just repeating a blase indifference that 1,000 other people have repeated in the last five seconds.

John: What I do find, I try to stop it myself, but I see other people doing it as well, is I feel like people are writing their letterbox review while they’re watching the movie.

Craig: Oh, the worst.

John: To this whole exercise, I’m just trying to remind you to be present for the movie that’s actually in front of you. Don’t try to anticipate your reaction afterwards.

Craig: You bought a ticket, give yourself to it. You’re giving it your time, give it your time. Everybody grew up on 1,000 film critics and they all want to be a film critic. By the way, that’s a job that I guess everybody feels like they’re going to just do for free. It’s so strange. It’s as if people go to a restaurant, have a great meal, they hate on it, they call it mid, they go home, and then they make their own version of it. It’s just, don’t be a critic. That’s a job, which is already questionable.

Just give in and just watch it honestly. There’ll be time enough. How many times have you seen something, and then four days later, you went, “You know what? I actually love that. I was wrong. It won’t leave me. Now I realize I just needed some time.” You don’t give yourself time if you immediately go home and start, letterbox.

John: Here’s the other thing I think is, letterbox, you’re rating it one to five stars, and you’re also giving a thing, but just move beyond like or dislike and just appreciate something he says in his articles, like begrudging enjoyment, or like– There are multiple ways to experience a thing.

Craig: Flavors.

John: here’s things like, I don’t want to watch that movie again, but I’m glad I watched it.

Craig: I’ll give you an example.

John: Please.

Craig: I went to go see a movie called, I believe it was called The Island by Michael Bay.

John: Oh yes. I remember that.

Craig: Remember Michael Bay’s The Island.

John: Scarlett Johansson.

Craig: Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor. It wasn’t a movie that I thought after when I walked out, “That was awesome.” I didn’t have that feeling. There were a lot of things I remember thinking, a lot of this doesn’t seem to add up. As I was going along, I would keep getting jostled out by logic convolution.

But there is a car chase in it that is so spectacular. For me, that was worth the price of admission. I marveled at it. I still marvel at it. I don’t understand how they did it. It is so incredible to me. When I see things like that in movies that I otherwise maybe I’m not enjoying, I go, well, there. You know what? I’m still talking about– Do you know how many movies I saw that I was like, it was really good? I don’t even remember seeing them. But I remember the car chase in The Island.

John: Last bit of advice here that he gives us is, notice how your body enjoys it. What are the physical reactions? Again, we’re talking about being present for it and actually looking at your own feelings. When I’m watching something that is genuinely scary, that’s part of the reason why I’m watching it, so I actually get that physical sensation. When I’m watching something that’s so funny that it hurts, that’s why you go. Just acknowledge and clock that because I think so often you forget afterwards like, “Oh yes, it was actually so funny that my stomach hurt.”

Craig: It was so funny that I laughed. That’s a physical response, just laughing of any kind. It’s so hard to make people do. I love that aspect of it. I find that the physical response that I notice the most when I’m being dislodged from the experience is a wandering. My mind begins to wander and I feel myself returning to my body. It wanders away from the movie, back into my skull. When I’m in it, whether it’s a show, I’m gone.

John: Yes. You’re not physically there.

Craig: I’m not there.

John: You’re inside the world.

Craig: What an amazing trick of the mind.

John: All right. Some advice about movies, TV shows, I would say just let yourself be entertained by the things you’re choosing to watch and see and listen to.

Craig: Be brave enough to like things. It’s actually a more mature and more enlightened state of being when it comes to interacting with art.

John: Agreed. Let’s turn to questions. First, we have Elizabeth in Brooklyn.

Drew: Elizabeth writes, “How does a screenwriter for hire best work with a director? I find that more and more I’m coming on to studio and streamer projects where a director is already attached. Every director is different, obviously, and I’m finding that a good many of them are not story people. They don’t have a sense of the necessary scaffolding or how to build a character’s journey.

Craig: Structure.

Drew: “They obsess over the weeds without zooming up to see the whole landscape. The real problem is those who don’t know what they don’t know. They want to do script brainstorming sessions with me, which is actually them just excitedly pitching contradictory suggestions or plain old bad ideas. They fight me on beats that the studio loves. Should I be thinking of this relationship where you don’t speak the same language?

Sometimes they’re infuriating, but you need to be patient and respectful so that you can create material that suits them and so that the relationship endures. Or is it okay to set up boundaries so that you can go off and write your draft without being subject to many unhelpful brainstorming sessions? When the director doesn’t want me to write something studio has approved, which master am I supposed to serve?”

John: All right. Craig, you and I actually know this writer who’s writing in. Congratulations, Elizabeth. You’re at a point now where you’re dealing with directors on projects and you’re–

Craig: The way we have a million times.

John: Yes. This is all so familiar. I just say like, big giant hug around you. I know how hard this is. Craig is shaking his head.

Craig: If you listen to that question and you put it in the context of any other business when she gets to the point of, should I just be really patient? What? This happens all the time because our business has overindulged directors in film for some reason. It’s a little bit like a history teacher is paired with a history student to write a report on history and the history student is put in charge. That’s what it’s like.

John: To me, it’s like you’re any software engineer who has to talk to Elon Musk.

Craig: That also works. [chuckles] You realize the authority is backwards. It is not earned. I want to be clear about something. There are directors who are brilliant at this. You know how you know that a director is deserving of the authority they have? They are deserving of the authority they have. They earned it. They demonstrated it either through their own writing o– With somebody like Steven Spielberg, he works with screenwriters all the time and he is so good at it that he brings the best out of them. He respects what they do and then does what he does so brilliantly.

We have a situation where somebody’s been writing for 30 years. Let’s give them a couple Oscars while we’re at it. Let’s say that they’re paid $4 million to work on this. The director is a first-time director. Why would you put that one in charge of that one? What do you do? I’m a big fan of boundaries and I’m a big fan of remembering that you do work for the studio. The studio, which bends over backwards and is all worried about directors, needs to know. Otherwise, you just end up writing bad things to make a conversation go better. That’s not going to help anybody, particularly you.

John: What I want to draw the distinction between is the conversation and the writing. I think sometimes, Elizabeth, you just have to like– It’s almost going back to this conversation we just had about how to enjoy a thing. It’s like all this stuff is coming your way from this director and you just have to take it in and feel it. You get much better at like, I hear what you’re saying there and it feels like that could match up with this thing we were talking about earlier.

You get a sense of how to feel that stuff and how to make it all work. But some of what you’re getting paid for, and I hope you’re getting paid well, is just to exist in those rooms and hear that and make people feel heard and then still be able to go off and write a freaking great script that they’re going to be excited to do. The other thing, which originally I was really nervous about, but I became clear that they won’t remember all the things they pitched at you.

Craig: Oh, no. They won’t be delighted by anything more than a good script, regardless of what all the conversations were because they’re not writers and they don’t know. I’m assuming that this is a non-writing director. I’m also assuming that this is not a director that has earned his or her stripes through achievement and success. It doesn’t sound like that. There are directors that you and I know of who are just bananas. Everyone knows they’re bananas. Their thing is when they capture footage and work with actors, their bananas-ness sometimes gets great things. The script has to be the adult in the room.

You and I have talked about ScreenwriterPlus. It’s not enough to be talented. It’s not enough to have a great work ethic. You also need to be extraordinarily diplomatic and shrewd. You are being hired to manage, sometimes, to manage that person. To deliver a good script that the actor will like and the studio will like without the director blowing up and going crazy.

Don’t overindulge the director and don’t be too afraid of them. If that director has so much authority that they can boot you off the movie because you’re not writing down their insane stuff, then you don’t belong there. Then you’re writing a different movie anyway.

John: Going back to Spielberg, I was lucky to work with him on three different projects. He is so smart and is also not a natural writer. He does have the understanding of what he wants to do in a movie and how to make movies. He knows how to do it and he’ll pitch you things. But it is your responsibility to find out how to go from that thing to what actually needs to happen in the movie and the script. Recognizing that people can be awesome at certain things and not be as good as other things. That’s great. That’s true. You also can’t design costumes. You can’t do other things.

Craig: Neither can we. We know how to do it. I write and I direct and I produce. You know what I don’t do? I don’t light. I don’t know how to light. If you put a gun to my head, I know what a bounce does and what a flag does. That’s part of how I tell stories. When I’m working with my cinematographer, I look at something and I’m like, okay, here’s what I think about this and why, or here’s what I want to achieve and why.

Then they execute it with a level of technical prowess that will never fully be understandable to me. There’s a lot that’s going on invisible under the surface that I don’t notice. I just see the end product. And I appreciate them for that because I can’t do what they do. That’s how a great director will work with a great writer, by understanding they need to go do their thing and I’m going to give them a good target to hit. I acknowledge there’s a lot of stuff under the surface that’s happening that I’m not aware of.

The ding-dong directors will casually kick things around like drunken toddlers with no understanding of what they’ve just unraveled and done. It’s very frustrating. [laughs] You know what you’re hearing is the 25 years of working with directors, some of whom I deeply love. I love working with Todd Phillips. I love working with Denis Villeneuve. There’s so many directors that I really enjoyed working with. On my show, there are directors I love working with, even though it’s a different circumstance and I’m the authority. But man, ooh, John, you and I both have been in some rooms where we are just like hostages to a madman.

John: Yes. That’s reality. Let’s do a simple question. Let’s do one from Tad. He’s writing about point of view.

Drew: Tad says, “I get confused about how to return from a point-of-view shot. If I use a his POV slug line, do I need to use another slug line when I leave his POV. If I use John as the next slugline, then I’m trapped on John until I get to the next scene heading, or else I get into a string of sluglines as I jump from character to character.”

John: I understand what Tad is running into here, and I think it’s the assumption that once you put in an intermediate slugline like his POV, they were trapped in there forever, and you’re not. Sometimes is good to signal to the reader like, “We’re no longer in POV.” In my own scripts, I’ve done end POV, or it’s not that, it’s a separate slugline.

Craig: It’s lengthy. Then I think it’s reasonable to say, we begin this person’s POV, and then there’s multiple paragraphs of what they’re seeing, what they’re seeing, and then it says end POV if it’s like a section. If it’s just one moment, I think the next paragraph, John’s POV, Brenda enters the room. On Brenda. You can do that.

John: Yes, totally. That also work.

Craig: Walking into the restaurant.

John: It’s also good to remember the intermediary slugline is really useful, breaking up stuff on the page and give you a sense of how stuff flows. If you’re just popping into POV for one shot or something, you can put POV as part of the paragraph.

Craig: Always. I don’t think I ever break it off on its own because it feels so technical. I want people to just be in the POV rather than being in, now, the POV you’re portraying, and then the POV. I just want them in it. You can be informal about that completely.

John: A case where intermediary sluglines can be really helpful is, let’s say you have a scene that’s happening and then you have characters who are breaking off and they’re having their own little side conversation. That’s a situation where it feels like it’s a scene within a scene, and that’s useful for that. In those situations, it’ll probably make sense that you’re just sticking with those characters and then you have to get us back over to the other shot.

Craig: Sometimes I just use capital letters to do the same job. I might say, OFF IN ONE CORNER, all in caps, then dash, and then spacebar, dash, spacebar, stuff happens. Off in one corner will tell me the story.

John: Totally. All right. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My one cool thing is a good blog post article by Maggie Appleton called Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks, which is just talking about what she learned during her first pregnancy here. She’s about to have a baby. A quote, I’ll read from it. “After decades of existing in a culture that worships rational, modern scientific knowledge, preferably discovered within the last 500 years, it’s been humbling to realize how much the pre-modern animalistic parts of me know and are capable of, and how much of me feels innately, subconsciously designed to want this and feel perfectly equipped to do it.”

What I like about the post as it goes on longer is that it’s recognizing that, oh yes, I’m an animal who’s doing this thing. It’s not even in my control. It’s just like, this is just a thing that’s happening. I’m just a passenger to it. Also, that sense of, so many people will tell you there’s one natural right way to do a thing. She brings up the example of that organic banana you’re picking, bananas exist only because we made them. The banana in the wild is not a thing at all. Just to recognize that you’re living in this messy place of like, yes, it’s fully human and natural, but it’s also a cultural system that we’re in and just you got to float in that.

Craig: “No genetically modified organisms in this.” It’s all genetically modified. It’s called mixing the strains. What are they talking about? No genetically modified stuff in this tangelo.

What’s fascinating about what Maggie says is because her body is designed to do an extraordinarily complicated thing, she is now in the mix of that, discovering how much that is part of who she is and how weirdly not in conscious control we are of it.

Over on the other side of the aisle, simpler, dumber people, like say a lot of men will be horny, angry, violent, hungry, where we’ve always been in touch with that. We just called it horny because of the different way it works. Our culture, boys will be boys, indulges this notion of, they’re not really in control of all these things. We are, but there are aspects of it that are underpinned by subconscious things way beneath this level. It is interesting how a complicated person doing a very complicated process can suddenly discover this.

John: We have a new baby in our life and it’s been so great to be able to have a baby around and to be babysitting and just to have this small human. I was just watching my daughter hold a baby and feed a baby. She’s like, “Oh my God, it all kicked in.” She really felt all this —

Craig: Oh my God. Are you going to be a grandpa?

John: No, not anytime soon. But that sense of like, oh yes, it’s like a primal physical thing that happens.

Craig: That’s why we keep making more people. It is primal and people will laugh about it, but it’s real. Absolutely. It’s not for everybody. There are plenty of women that pick up a baby and go, “Get this baby away from me.” Perfectly fine. The biological clock syndrome and all that stuff, it’s just science. It’s just hormones.

John: This is me talking out of my ass, but I do wonder if some of the population decline is young people’s decision like, “I don’t want to have kids.” Maybe it’s because they haven’t been around– They’ve just not kicked in because they never got to do that. Because there are fewer babies, there are going to be fewer babies.

Craig: That may be true. Being around babies makes you like babies. Although being around babies casually makes you like babies. That’s why grandparents are like, “Give me, make me a grandparent so that I can show up for an hour and be like, oh, it’s crying now. Bye.”

John: I’m getting the grandparent ability to hang out with the kids.

Craig: You and I have parented our own babies.

John: Still, I’d recommend it.

Craig: Yes. The ride of a lifetime, the ride of a life. There ain’t nothing like it. You want to talk about like when you watch horror movies to feel scared? I’m kidding.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Now you know what fear is.

My one cool thing this week is the 2024 rules of D&D in a different aspect. I finally got to play.

John: Fantastic.

Craig: I’m in another campaign where I play. It’s the first campaign I played where it was D&D 2024 rules from the start. It works great.

John: That’s great.

Craig: It works great.

John: What are some surprises, the things you didn’t anticipate? Because we talked through some of the changes.

Craig: Sure. Character creation is a little bit tricky if you are well versed in the old method because the old method honestly was a bit simpler and a bit stupider when it came to your abilities. It was all tied to are you a dwarf? Are you a gnome? Are you a human? You get plus two strength. You get plus one wisdom. That’s it. Boop. The end. Now it’s not tied to that at all. It’s tied to backgrounds. Each background gives you a chance to add one point to three different things or two to one, one to another, but the three different things are different for each background.

They’re very clever. It’s never the three that would work together in the most min-max way. It’s a little complicated in the beginning to do some math. Once you get through that, and of course you get to, it’s very customizable. The flow of the play has been greatly improved. Every single class gets some fun choices to make. For instance, I’m not a rogue, but another character is. Rogues are notoriously boring to play because even for Arcane Tricksters, mostly they hide, jump out, shoot or stab, go back into the shadows. If they get sneak attack, you roll a bunch of dice. Whoop-dee-doo.

One of the things they’ve done is for at least this version of the rogue, you can trade some of those. If you get sneak attack, you can pull some of those dice out and use them to do other things. You’re always facing those interesting choices as you’re playing. A lot of options, so many options, but they don’t seem cumbersome. It’s just smooth and it’s fun. I have not run into one thing yet where I was like, even the things that nerf stuff a little bit, like Divine Smite’s a little nerf now, but who cares? It’s better, honestly. It makes more sense. Let’s put it this way. Having done it, I wouldn’t want to not do it.

John: We’re finishing up a campaign right now, which is using old rules, but next campaign we’re already planning to use 2024.

Craig: I will encourage everybody to dive in. Honestly, you don’t have to read the whole damn book. You just learn your one thing. D&D Beyond is particularly good at teaching you by helping you build your character. Roll20 doesn’t teach you a damn thing when you build your character. It’s a mess.

John: You would recommend people, even if they’re going to play in Roll20, build your character out in D&D Beyond, then just transfer it over.

Craig: Yes, because D&D Beyond is laid out so much better. Every step of the way, you can click on things and it will tell you, this is what this means. This is what this means. This is what this means. You can go back easily and rejigger it easily. It’s so much simpler.

John: One of my previous One Cool Things was this book on sort of role-playing game history. It’s basically starting with D&D, like going up all the way through where we’re at now, but like all these games I’d never heard of. I’ve loved just buying some of these games that I’m sure we’re never going to play. As I’m watching the evolution of the systems and how things fit together and what this game took from this game, it’s just interesting to see a whole form evolve.

Craig: It really has. Hats off to those guys. They did a great job.

John: One of the games I just was reading about was Fiasco if you remember.

Craig: Oh, yes, sure.

John: A few years ago. At the Kelly Marcel episode.

Craig: That’s right. Fiasco. Poor John. [laughs] I don’t even remember what happened. I just remember that we did terrible things.

John: Yes, absolutely. It was a Coen Brothers movie.

Craig: It was a Coen Brothers movie, and you were like Brad Pitt in it.

John: Yes. [laughter] That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Guy Fee. 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 like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware, you’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau.

Craig: Oh, drinkware.

John: You can find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers.

Craig: Yes, thank you.

John: You make it possible for us to do this every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back-up episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on gadgets that tell us what our bodies are doing.

Craig: Yes, wearables.

John: Wearables. Great. Thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thanks, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, so for the holidays, I got myself an Oura Ring, which you can see I’m wearing right now.

Craig: I see it on you right now.

John: It’s a little black ring. I’ve worn an Apple watch for a long time, which is also keeping track of healthy things. Friends who had Oura Rings liked them, and so I got one, and it’s impressive. It feels like an Apple product that does not come from Apple. It’s smartly done.

Craig: Does it feel like it will rule them all and in the darkness bind them?

John: Maybe.

Craig: Have you thrown it in the fire and looked for the black speech of Mordor?

John: You know what? I haven’t unlocked that aspect of it yet. Maybe that’s a subscription bonusy thing.

Craig: It must be cast back into the fires from whence it came.

John: The reason I got it is I don’t wear my Apple watch to sleep. It’s actually really good at sleep tracking. Last week, it’s like, “Oh, you’re cold. You’re sick.” I’m like, “Oh, yes, I am sick.” Then it actually anticipated.

Craig: Or were you sick?

John: Was I sick? It’s like a somatic force had been there.

Craig: I’ll tell you why I stopped wearing. It was very comfortable. That part I was fine with. I stopped wearing it because what would happen is I would wake up, feel perfectly refreshed, look at my phone. It was like, “Oh-

John: Oh, you slept so poorly.

Craig: -you slept five minutes.” I’m like, what? Then there are times where I’d wake up like, “Oh my God…” It was like, “Great job!” I’m like, either you’re guessing or my brain isn’t working right. Either way, I would get like, oh, I guess I didn’t sleep that much. I don’t want to know. I didn’t want to know. If I’m feeling okay, I slept enough.

John: I was talking to Julie Turner about this last night. It’s that issue of what metrics do you actually want to know and when is it actually helpful for you. Right now, it’s feeling helpful, but there’s other stuff I’ve stopped doing. I was like logging food for a while. It was easy for me to do.

Craig: It’s tedious.

John: I wasn’t getting insightful information out of it. I want to talk about your wearable because you actually have something that you need, which is tracking your glucose.

Craig: Yes, so I wear the FreeStyle Libre from Abbott Pharmaceuticals Corporation. It is a continuous glucose monitor. I don’t have to do the finger sticks. This is for people with type 1 diabetes, but also for people with type 2 diabetes. It’s basically anybody that has any blood sugar issue, it’s very helpful.

I just read that they are now starting to make a version for non-diabetic people to help with weight loss and things like that. One thing that’s amazing about it is it does connect you to what is the impact of the food you eat. Writing down what you ate and then weighing yourself the next day, it’s kind of useless. Could be water, could be poop. Who the hell knows why you weigh what you did that morning?

I’m going to eat something and look at my phone 45 minutes later and go, “Oh, I shouldn’t have eaten that. That’s not working well for me.” It is extraordinarily valuable feedback and I check it all the time. I had a piece of birthday cake. Let’s see how I did. You’ll see it on here. There it is. See it?

John: Oh wow, right up there, yes.

Craig: I had it. This is right when I had it. Now, the good news is, also the arrow is very important.

John: It’s coming down.

Craig: Happily, it’s only in the yellow. It’s not in the red. I try and live my life in the green. Mostly I’m 90. It tells you what your range is. I live 91% in the green, which is amazing.

John: Great.

Craig: The key is that arrow. When you see a high number and the arrow’s straight up, go outside and walk. Walk real hard because there’s problem. If you’re low and the arrow’s pointing down, eat something.

John: How often is it just a surprise to you? At this point, you can just anticipate where you’re at.

Craig: It is rarely a surprise. The only time I get surprised is if I eat something that I haven’t eaten before. With this, I remember the first time I had sushi, I just was like, “It’s just sushi, it’ll be fine.”

John: It’s white rice.

Craig: Oh no, it’s not just white rice. Sushi rice has a lot of sugar in it. There’s something about rice plus the sugar in it that just sends my blood sugar skyrocketing as opposed to say, whole-grain bread. The surprises are only the first time. Day-to-day, I could have told you that was going to happen. That’s not even that bad.

John: My Oura Ring does know if I had a drink. It’s like, “Oh, it sounds like you had a drink.” It does know that you don’t sleep as well when you have a drink.

Craig: I sure don’t and I don’t need an Oura Ring to tell me that. I know I don’t. If I had some trouble sleeping and then I hit Saturday and it’s like, we’re going out to dinner. I’m just like, it would be great to have a drink with people and be social and stuff. I’m not going to because I’m in trouble right now.

John: I’m enjoying the ring for now. I don’t think I necessarily need it for all things. I don’t swim with my Apple Watch, so it’d be useful for that. We’ll see where I’m at down the road on it, but I’m enjoying it.

Craig: It’s a good thing. It just was bumming me out.

John: Don’t stick with things that bum you out.

Craig: No, I want it to be useful. Also, it’s a very after-the-fact thing like, “Oh, you’re having a drink.” Yes, I know, I drank it. “Oh, you didn’t sleep well.” Yes, I know, I’m here. I just woke up and I don’t feel good. It’s like an I told you so ring, which is like not as useful to me as, oh, you shouldn’t eat this next time kind of thing.

John: It does nudge you to go to bed, but I have plenty of other things that are not telling me to go to bed.

Craig: Like the clock.

John: Yes, like the husband.

[laughter]

Craig: The husband, exactly. Is Mike a go-to-bed-early guy?

John: No, actually, I’m generally the person who goes up the stairs first and I’m the person who closes the curtains and turns on the humidifier and puts the dog away.

Craig: Do you need to go to sleep before he goes to sleep?

John: It’s good I do, but it’s not mandatory. Sometimes in D&D nights, I’ll be second, yes.

Craig: You’ll be second.

John: I definitely have a sleep window and if I am not in bed by 11:00, I’m awake again and it’s hard for me to get to sleep.

Craig: I have some windows like that too. Melissa falls asleep so easily and she naps. Sometimes it’s 8:15 and she’s out, and I’m like, “All right, no problem.” We’ve always been on different sleep schedules.

John: Even though we have no kids in the house anymore, we wake up at 7:20 every morning to get Amy off to school and even though she’s not here anymore.

Craig: It’s just the biological clock.

John: Yes. Which is fine. It’s a good time to be up.

Craig: 7:20 is a great time. Listen, having been in production for so long, 7:20 sounds like a luxury. Wake up a lot of times at 5:10.

John: Brutal.

Craig: The worst. Especially when you wake up and it’s dark.

John: In Canada.

Craig: Then you go to bed and it’s dark and then you wake up the next day and it’s dark and you’re like, oh. Going to work in the dark is such a heartbreaker.

John: Not good. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• Weekend Read on the App Store
• Oscar nominations 2025
• IVF Mixup movies: Parallel Mothers, Maybe Baby, Good Newwz, Daughter from Another Mother
• Manhunt
• The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
• How to like everything more by Sasha Chapin
• Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks by Maggie Appleton
• 2024 Player’s Handbook
• 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 BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Guy Fee (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.

Craig Mazin: All right. Okay. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 671 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it’s one of our favorite regular segments, How would this be a movie? Where we take a look at stories in the news and find their adaptable angles. We also have follow-up on AI, listener questions on partner credits, and in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss Home Automation, Craig.

Craig: Oh.

John: Over this past year, we’ve added a few things to our house, and you just moved into a new house. I’m curious what your take is on home automation and what you’re doing and what you’re thinking about doing.

Craig: This is going to be very educational for me. I already can tell. I’m going to learn a lot, and this probably will end up costing me a bit of money.

John: Yes. A little bit.

Craig: What are you going to do?

John: First, I have a small rant.

Craig: Ooh.

John: Ooh. Craig is excited I have a rant.

Craig: Rubbing my hands together.

John: All right. This is a thing that happened twice. Because it happened twice, I know it’s actually a real thing. It’s not just like one person being weird.

Craig: Okay.

John: Okay. So I’m at the dentist, and I have a hygienist who’s really good. She’s a fast scraper. It’s not painful. Great. She chats a ton, but whatever. She’s not expecting me to answer back. It’s just a monologue-

Craig: You can’t.

John: -on her side. Good. Great. She says, “Your wife must be so proud of how good you are at cleaning your teeth.” It’s like–

Craig: It’s like [mumbles]

John: [mumbles] I’m like, okay, well, sometimes people don’t read me as gay, which is fine. I would otherwise correct her. Then I realized like, no, she also cleans Mike’s teeth, so she knows that he’s a man. Following this through, her belief is that the partner of a man is a wife, that you call that person a wife.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: Oh, no.

Craig: No.

John: It’s happened to other places too. It happened with other medical professionals.

Craig: Really?

John: It’s so strange. Here, I just want to state clearly so that everyone knows this, a male spouse is a husband.

Craig: Yeah. Is this one of these cases where someone feels so comfortable with the gay community that they’re like, “I’m going to use your words?”

John: No, no. No, no, no. It’s actually just a genuine, had never occurred to them before. It’s just like a misunderstanding of how English works.

Craig: In Los Angeles?

John: Yes. Isn’t that wild?

Craig: That is wild. Yes. Don’t do that.

John: There was no malice intended. It’s just strange though, right?

Craig: Wait. You said, by the by, spit, rinse. “Actually, I have a husband.”

John: Yes.

Craig: She said, “Oh, I know.”

John: No. She’s like, “Wait, you call him a husband?” I was like, “Well, yes.”

Craig: What did she think– You’re both wives in her mind?

John: I have no idea. I couldn’t get that far deep into her thought process, but essentially any person married to a man would be a wife.

Craig: Oh, honey. [laughs] That’s just wrong.

John: It’s wrong.

Craig: No, it’s just wrong. Wait, you said it’s happened twice.

John: It’s happened twice. It’s happened once and then it was another, this is a few years back, a different medical person.

Craig: Wait, so it’s only the medical people that are doing this.

John: I’m noticing among the medical staff.

Craig: All right. Let’s talk to our health professionals out there. What are you doing? Cut that out. That’s ridiculous.

John: I can understand people who are nervous about understanding pronouns or they’s, them’s. We’re in a place where it’s complicated. You can’t always be sure how a person wants to be addressed by themselves. But I think this is just a subtle matter of how English works is that a guy who’s married to a guy has a husband.

Craig: Yes. A married man is a husband.

John: Yes. Now you could say partner, spouse, other things like that.

Craig: Sure. I think I’ve done a little rant– Have I done a rant about partner?

John: Sure. Go for it.

Craig: I’ll do a little rant about partner. Very common in Europe. I’ve noticed in the UK, everybody refers to their spouse as partner and I’ve also been seeing it more common here and I think in part it’s because people are trying to be really inclusive and remove gendered partnering language. The problem is, partner-

John: Business partners.

Craig: -means two different things.

John: Writing partners.

Craig: When I meet somebody and they’re like, “Yes, I’ve been working on this show and I actually, I showed the script to my partner who was really thrilled,” and I’m like, ”Aah, is that–“

John: Part of the reason why we get to partner is also because it’s the unmarried person you live with who we, for all functional, is your spouse for everything else but law.

Craig: That’s the other thing.

John: I get that. Yet it’s a frustrating situation. It’s ambiguous in ways that it’s not useful.

Craig: It’s ambiguous in ways that are, that is not useful. I’m all for coming up with language that makes people comfortable.

John: Totally.

Craig: I think that’s great. I can see why there’s a need for a term that is different than husband or wife or spouse that covers somebody you’re not technically married to. Although my feeling is if you’re objected to technical marriage, go ahead and claim just virtual marriage and call them your spouse. That’s a perfectly great word.

John: Yes. Oy.

Craig: Oy.

John: Not solvable, but just, I wanted to put this out in the world for like the husband situation, the husband-wife situation, I think is at least standardized enough in American English. You shouldn’t need to worry about this.

Craig: That one, that lady invented a new problem. Now we’re about to get a bunch of emails about partner. I’ll take it. I’ll take it on the chin.

John: All right. Some more follow-up. Drew, start us off.

Drew Marquardt: Yes. We had been talking about Flightplan and how it came from The Lady Vanishes, which is a Hitchcock movie. Andrea Bartz wrote in and said, “As a thriller novelist in the throes of adapting my own novel, I had to point out that Hitchcock’s masterful The Lady Vanishes was an adaptation of Ethel Lina White’s criminally underrated 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins. Levels of genius all the way down.”

Craig: Ooh. I love that. Yes. Isn’t that interesting? Someone writes a book in 1936, you said. Then whoosh, you go 75 years into the future and there’s a movie about people on a plane. They had planes in 1936. I’m stretching a little bit. That speaks more to the immortality that you can achieve through art than just about anything I can think of. That’s really cool. Because someone’s going to take Flightplan 15 years from now and do it again. It’s never going to end.

John: The central sort of gaslighting, no, no, it never actually– that person was never there. You’re imagining this whole thing.

Craig: That’s good. It’s just good.

John: It’s good stuff. What is also apparently good was your Belfast accent, Dave in Belfast wrote in. Let’s listen to what he said.

Dave Marks: Hey John and Craig. Long time podcast listener and big fan. My name is Dave Marks or Dave Marks, as anyone outside of Belfast would pronounce it. Speaking to Craig’s Belfast impression from Say Nothing or say no’hin’ as we’d say with no T in it.

Do it nye, do was a bit more ooh and a bit less ooh. With do we just say do, not do. Little bit Americanised. The nye however was bang on point and that’s the bit most people get wrong. You just need to work on the old. How now brown cow becomes hye nye brown cow and that gets you all the way to Belfast.

Craig: Hye nye brown cow.

John: Great. A thumbs up from Dave in Belfast.

Craig: I am elated. Elated. It really is a fascinating accent. There are so many things that are so specific to the Northern Irish accent. Somebody, I’m sure, has a linguistic term for how this functions where accents are created in part by a political boundary because it really is a political boundary accent. The Dublin accent feels like an entirely different English from the Northern Irish Belfast accent. There are so many wonderful, wonderful things in that accent that just, I don’t know, make my heart sing. I’m glad that I got one and a half words right. [laughs]

John: Excellent. All right. We have some more follow-up on AI. In episode 669, we’re talking about they ate our words.

Drew: Benjamin writes, “Craig says he didn’t know if people were freaking out about Google linking when Google first started. They absolutely were. In fact, there were lawsuits over scraping and linking. The compromise that was eventually reached was that linking to something is acceptable because you are pointing to the source. Quoting or showing content on another site, however, had to undergo fair use scrutiny the same as if you were quoting in a book or magazine article.”

Craig: Okay. First of all, always comforting to know that we’ve always been freaking out. That’s a good reminder that every time some new technology comes along, we do tend to get a bit reactionary. It didn’t occur to me that the real issue wasn’t so much the pointing to things, and I agree with that, pointing to something doesn’t feel like you’re stealing it.

But the little tiny bits of summary that go along with the link, that’s a republishing and that’s an interesting fair use case, which, obviously Google prevailed. I think that’s reasonable, actually. That does feel like what fair use is about, a little snippet that is, meant to lead you to the intellectual property as opposed to replace it.

John: I think it’s also important to remember that we talked about this under the legal framework. What is legal, what is not legal versus what is ethical and versus what is not ethical.

Craig: Oh, right. Two different things.

John: I think we’re always looking for what are the laws, but what are the moral rules behind what you should be doing or publishing or claiming as your own. I see this on Instagram a lot where people will republish someone else’s thing without giving them credit or they will give them credit. It’s like they’re doing it for their own clout versus actually creating an original thought. To what degree is that just spreading culture?

Craig: It does feel like sharing culture has led to a lack of interest in attribution, whereas in academia and journalism, attribution is still considered an extraordinarily important thing. The levels of fact-checking that The New Yorker did on a piece, an interview with me, I mean really, why? It was down to like, you said you were at a cafe with this person, and we had to call and check and make sure that you were. Then everything is attributable and notable and checkable. Then in sharing culture, nothing is. It’s not even a question of people going, “Oh, I’m going to put this out there and pretend it’s mine.” They don’t even think about it.

John: No.

Craig: No one seems to care. That’s horrible, actually.

John: Yes. That’s always been that way. It’s like, I think the fact that we are now looking at digital things where you can try to do the forensics and track them back. We’ve had sharing culture for jokes for forever. We’ve had sharing culture for story ideas have always propagated throughout. The fact that, all of Shakespeare’s plays are directly inspired by things that came from before them. That’s always been a part of–

Craig: Yes, inspiration for sure. Jokes are a really interesting case because they are designed to be shared without attribution. It would be an interesting project to figure out who was the first person to come up with this joke that we’ve all heard 400,000 times. On the internet where things begin with a clear attribution, that’s a time-stamped attribution. Then what happens is, of course, people complain and say, “You stole my thing.” Then that becomes a thing. Then people share that and da, da, da, da, da.

John: It’s worth acknowledging that joke theft is a real thing. Among comedians, that’s a huge issue. The issue comes up of to what degree have you made something your own or are you ripping off this type of joke versus the actual wording of a joke?

Craig: Joke stealing in comedy is a fascinating topic. There have been a few notable cases where accusations were made. I won’t go so far as to say that proof was given in some sort of legal way, but there was a huge brouhaha over Carlos Mencia. There have been similar arguments made about Amy Schumer. Then people will show side-by-sides and things. Sometimes you look at these and you’re like, “Well, I can see how two people might come up with the same joke here.” Sometimes you look at it and go, “Oh, no, that’s like kinda word for word there.”

The world of stand-up comedians and that culture, that whole joke theft thing is fascinating. It is a major concern for them. They will talk amongst themselves. Comedians know, for instance, “Hey, if you see so-and-so at the club and you’re going up there before them, after them, it doesn’t matter, if they’re there, don’t do new material. Don’t do new material because they’ll be doing it next week and they’re more famous than you.”

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s scary.

John: More AI feedback here from Anna.

Drew: We got a lot of great AI feedback, so this one comes from Anna.

Craig: Is the feedback from AI?

Drew: Oh my God. no, I don’t think this one is, but other ones, you never know.

Craig: You don’t think?

Drew: You don’t think. Anna writes, “I just found out that a series of novels I co-wrote with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were part of 38,000 or so fiction books.”

Craig: Hold on.

John: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has written quite a few books.

Craig: Also this sounds like something AI would say.

[laughter]

Drew: True.

Craig: It really– “I’ve written 4,000 books with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” That just feels like a learning language model. Just put some things together. Maybe it was like, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is tall and he got confused with height and amount of writing. Anyway, please–

Drew: It’s only a few novels out of 38,000, I guess.

Craig: Please, restart the question, but keep in mind my concern.

Drew: Just found out that a series of novels she co-wrote with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were part of 38,000 or so fiction books, both classic and contemporary, used to feed AI. “Apart from feeling thoroughly ripped off, I’m also bewildered. Our novels are historical fiction. They have fictional as well as historical characters. Queen Victoria comes to mind. There are half a dozen minor characters who do things they never did and say things they never said.

I do a gargantuan amount of research to portray an era, in this case, the 1870s accurately, but not to put too fine a point on it, I’m still making shit up. How would AI know this? In that great repository of info dumping, how will AI weed out the fake from the facts?”

Craig: It won’t.

John: It won’t. Anna, so I want to back up in here and say like, you’re feeling thoroughly ripped off and bewildered. Those are natural emotions. I totally get why you’re feeling that. Something that may be helpful for you to understand is that the LLMs, the models, they don’t care about the actual subject matter you’re giving them. What you’re giving them is a bunch of words in English that all fit together, that are complete whole thoughts.

They’re not looking for facts. They’re looking for long strings of words that all fit together and actually make sense together. That’s what your book provided. I don’t think you need to worry that some other piece of writing that’s generated by one of these things is going to involve these fake stuff that you made up in historical fiction. It’s unlikely to actually happen that way. Mostly what this is going to do is create a tool that is going to generate an email for somebody that’s a little bit better than it would have been otherwise.

Craig: Yes, that’s exactly right. I do think this is a common misconception that what AI is doing is taking chunks of stuff and regurgitating it as its own. If it were doing that, it wouldn’t be intelligent, artificially or otherwise. It’s just learning how our sentences are put together, how grammar functions and what words are related to other words and how closely.

So on the one hand, don’t worry that people will think that Queen Victoria, I don’t know, used an iPhone, whatever it was that happened in this book that was maybe anachronistic or just incorrect. Do worry that your work was sort of used for this.

This is where it gets interesting because AI isn’t taking intellectual property and using it as intellectual property. It’s almost like it’s taking a painting and just looking at how paintings are made. What do you do with that?

It feels to me like copyright law needs to be amended. Just side note here, because if we try and apply existing copyright law to this, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere. It feels like copyright law needs to be amended to say that one of the rights that is inferred by copyright is the right for the material to be used as the basis for learning. That’s tricky because–

John: Human learning versus training on a model, it’s incredibly complicated.

Craig: It’s complicated.

John: Yes, there’s not a great easy way through this. Again, I understand what you’re feeling. Months ago, when we were looking at these examples of songs that were clearly, this is a Beach Boys song. Those examples were like, okay, well, you fed in all this stuff and it spit out something that looked exactly like the original. You can obviously tell what its references are. This is not going to happen based on your book being fed into this.

Craig: No. No, no.

Drew: More feedback here from Caleb. Caleb writes, “We’re at a new birth of artificial intelligence. It makes pretty things, but is it art? Why not?” He shares from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The Conundrum of the Workshops. “When the flush of a newborn son fell first on Eden’s green and gold, our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in the mold. The first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart till the devil whispered behind the leaves, “it’s pretty, but is it art?”

John: I read that whole poem. Put a link to it and we’ll put a link in the show notes to it. It’s a really great Kipling poem. It’s so clever to bring in as like, at every point in the artistic process, I’m going to question whether it’s actually artistically worthy. The poem goes on to sort of great things are made, the towers of Babel is created and the devil is always whispering, “But is it really art?”

Craig: Yes, and I don’t know. The word art is a trap. I hear it all the time. I sometimes use it to describe what you and I do. Rarely, because it feels a bit goofy to me. I think the is it art, what is implied in the question is it art is is it valid?

Validity is seemingly something conferred upon art by not artists, by critics. I don’t care. I don’t care. That’s all they do all day. The devil is a critic. [laughs] The critic is whispering in the creator’s ear. Is it good? Is it art? Is it worthy? Is it valid? Basically, not today, satan.

One of the things that does give me pause to describe what I do as art is it sometimes feels almost that the lady is protesting a bit much. “My art, you assholes, who say it’s not art.” I would rather just call it a TV show or a movie and let it be what it is. If it were a painting, I’d call it a painting. If it were a statue, I’d call it a statue.

The fine arts, let’s say, for instance, painting, everybody agrees, “Oh, that’s art,” and we call it art. Just as how people seem to all agree that the best picture is a drama because that’s what’s best. It’s not, and other things are art. The word is loaded. Is what AI does art? The critics can all, “Let the devils discuss amongst themselves,” they say.

John: Meanwhile, just keep making things.

Craig: Meanwhile, just keep– thank you. Just make stuff. The word stuff, by the way, perfectly good.

John: Absolutely. Some of the stuff that’s being made increasingly are videos, and so months ago, we talked about Sora, which has now been released, so people can play around and make clips off of Sora. Google released this new product called VO2, which also looks really good. It can generate video clips that have– the physics in them looks much better. If you have a dog running down a beach, the VO1 looks really impressive. You realize that, you believe that dog is running down the beach.

People wrote in and said like, “Oh, what does this mean for us and for filmmaking?” At this point, not a lot. I think stitching these things together to create bigger projects hasn’t worked out so well. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this film festival that was debuting a bunch of short films made by filmmakers using these tools, and they’re terrible. They’re atrocious.

Craig: Much like most short film festivals. Everything in them was atrocious.

John: It was. But you can see the edges. You can see how hard they were trying to make some of this stuff work, trying to get people’s faces to look consistent, trying to get dialogue to sync and match. These are all tough things. It does a really good job at like, here’s three seconds of a person moving quietly through a space. Much harder for it to do real things.

Yet, I want us to always remember, this is the worst it’ll ever be. These tools will get better, year after year after year. Things will improve along the way, but just we all recognize there’s a big gap between where we are and where this becomes a profound danger.

I think my bigger concern is that well before these things are able to make an hour of television or a two-hour movie, they can create something that is interesting and compelling and different enough that it takes the attention of people who would otherwise see movies and television. If that were to happen at a big enough scale, that could have huge impacts on our industry. Basically a new form of entertainment comes out of this generation that just obviates the need for what we’re doing.

Craig: It doesn’t have to be better than us. It just has to be as good. If it is as good, we lose instantly because of volume. Because they can just create things at speed and volume and we can’t. Even if it’s almost as good, we lose. There is an article I will cite as my one cool thing that provides a glimmer of potential hope. It is a little bit of a pipe dream theory, but it is promising for those of us who are just hoping that AI can only go so far and that the singularity is perhaps unreachable.

Drew: Let’s wrap up here, I’ve got a question here from Michael. Michael writes, “You discussed what it means for AI to use our work, but not what it means for us to use AI. I wondered if you could share how you’re feeling about using it in your own work.”

John: Yes, so this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about for the last couple of weeks. We’re trying to draft up sort of like an official policy company-wide, but also thinking about sort of what I feel like personally. There’s a couple of different areas I sort of want to focus on. First off, would the use of AI be in some sort of public-facing role? Is this something that the world outside is going to see material that’s being generated by AI? Would it be text? Would it be images? That’s a no for me. Anything that’s representing our work or my work should not be generated by AI.

I ask, is this work that would normally be paid work, that we would pay somebody to do? That’s a huge red flag for me. Is this technology being used by the person whose job it is to make the thing? If it’s a coder doing coding, that feels different than having Drew be doing coding using one of these tools.

That’s what I’m thinking about company-wide, but then I think you have individual choices that might be different. As a writer, for me, I’m asking, am I using this the same way I would use Google? If I’m asking ChatGPT a question that I would normally ask Google for a question, that doesn’t feel that different to me. I don’t actually have big concerns with that.

An example I’ve cited is, I’m working on this graphic novel, and one of the characters in it is a philosopher. I was wondering, okay, well, what would this classical philosopher think about the situation they’re in, which they’re all hungry? It’s like, what do classical philosophers say about hunger? Not the state of famine, but the experience of being hungry.

That’s a really difficult thing to Google or to search for, but it’s actually like a really good question to ask a ChatGPT, because they can spit out answers that like, “Based on these things, this is what Socrates said about this, this is what Plato said about this,” and that was useful for me. I don’t feel bad about that, because it’s doing a thing that would be almost impossible for me to do otherwise.

Similarly, I’m reading Seneca’s tragedies, and I had ChatGPT open, I was just asking questions about like, “Wait, who is this character? What is this based on?” That was incredibly helpful. I don’t feel bad about using those ways. What I do feel bad about is any situation where the stuff that I’m doing, even internally, has an aspect of these tools being used. I think we talked about on the show is pitch decks. If there’s an image I need for a pitch deck, is it fair to generate that through one of these models versus pulling it out of some other movie still frame?

Craig: All of those objections, concerns, and allowances feel very on point to me. I don’t use ChatGPT at all. I don’t use AI at all. However, I don’t use it as I guess I would say, overtly. My suspicion is that a lot of the things I do, the underpinnings are already using AI. There’s that invisible AI I’m not aware of. The one area that I do think it’s interesting, and I would feel okay with is in temp work, not temp work like working as an assistant somewhere for a week. I mean to say in production, doing things that are placeholders until you can do the right thing. That’s interesting.

For instance, when we’re editing, I’m constantly throwing in little lines that I know I’m going to have the actors come and do later down the line with ADR. I’ll say, “Okay, I want this line where let’s say, Isabela Merced off camera says, “Wait, where are you going?” It’ll either be, if it’s a guy, any guy, it’s my voice. If it’s any woman, it’s usually our editor, Emily’s voice. But what ends up happening is you send this cut into the network and you know that they’re going to hear your voice 12 different times in 12 different places. Emily is not Isabela Merced and all of the women shouldn’t sound like Emily. Things like, okay, make this sound more like Isabella Merced for the purposes of this, knowing that then I’m going to have her come in and do this properly.

Just like have Emily do it and then just make the vocal quality sound a little bit more like somebody. I could see something like that being incredibly useful as long as, like you said, it never takes the place of the actual performer doing it. It’s just a placeholder to help you feel out if you’re doing it right.

In that regard, it’s not anything that I think is taking anyone’s job or taking away money. There are things that we do in post-production that I think probably are already using AI. Obviously, I don’t know what’s going on in some of the VFX places where they’re doing rotoscoping. My guess is AI is involved. Okay, someone is in front of a green screen, their hair is blowing around. Each one of those hairs has to be rotoscoped, against the background or comped somehow. I don’t know how they do it.

My guess is they’re using tools that are powered by AI and will be doing so more and more. I know that there are things like beauty fixes, so very common to– if there are some blemishes or things, back in the day, there used to be quite expensive retouching of things, because if an actor just has a honking pimple one day, it’s going to sort of grind your movie to a halt, especially since we don’t shoot things– So like oh, in the beginning of the movie, they had this huge pimple, then it went away, and then a year later-

John: It comes back.

Craig: -the pimple’s back in the same spot. AI can do those things very simply now. I think the people that are using these tools are using that. I, myself, I don’t use it to compose any writing. I recognize, however, that I’m close to 54 years old. I don’t think my experience and the way I conduct my career is probably going to be particularly relevant to somebody who’s 25 right now. I think they’re like, “That’s nice, grandpa. Here’s how we do it. Here’s how the kids do it.”

I don’t want to come off as a Luddite, I don’t want to come off as somebody who’s scolding. I guess all I can say is, it’s certainly not necessary to do good work. I can say that. Yes, ethically, I think we do have a responsibility to try and look out for each other as human beings and not replace each other as quickly as we can.

John: Yes, so examples of the visual effects you’re talking about or the beauty correction stuff, you’re describing the person whose job it is to do that thing, using these technologies as one of the tools in their toolkit to do that thing. That feels like much more defensible. It actually tracks with the recent negotiations and the recent IATSE deal is like, if those technologies are going to be used, they have to be used by the person who’s supposed to be doing them, which makes sense. You’re not trying to replace a person with those things.

Becomes a trickier line, though. I was thinking back at your example of like, okay, well, using AI to create a sound of life for placeholder lines in a movie. In the first Charlie’s Angels, there was a time where we didn’t have John Forsythe to do Charlie’s voice. We had a different actor who was doing that. We kept hiring him and bringing him in to record all these temp lines because he really did sound a lot like John Forsythe.

Ultimately, John Forsythe came in and did it. Realistically, now we could just do a digital John Forsythe for his voice for those placeholders. That’s one actor whose job, we wouldn’t have hired during that time in the meantime. Even though you’re just trying to do a placeholder, sometimes there is the economic cost to somebody.

Craig: Yes, one would hope that SAG continues to refine that language because I think they are probably in the front ranks of soldiers that are going to be fired at by this technology. That’s the scariest. I think writers and directors will be behind them still in danger, but the actors will go first. I think they know that. I think they’re terrified. I think reasonably so. I would be.

John: All right. Let’s get to our main topic, which is how would this be a movie? From the moment this first story started, it’s like, oh, this is going to be a discussion on this podcast.

Craig: How won’t this be a movie?

John: Because we know that our listeners sometimes tune into these episodes 5 years, 10 years after the fact, I need to actually explain this story which is happening so presently that everyone’s like, how can you need to describe this? On December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare is shot on the sidewalk outside of a New York City hotel by a masked assailant. The attacker flees and a manhunt begins.

Now the initial speculation was that it was some sort of professional attack by a hitman, which turns out there are no such things as hitmen. Details emerged quickly that the attacker was staying at a hostel in New York City and that bullets found on the scene had the words deny, defend, and depose written upon them. Several photographs of the suspect show his time in New York City leading up to the shooting, including one of which one of these photos in which his face is visible.

Then on December 9th of this year, Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Craig: Hold on. Say that sentence again because I think future people need to hear it carefully.

John: On December 9th, Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Craig: Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. That sounds like a ChatGPT sentence.

John: It does. It does. The whole thing has a sort of made-up fictional quality, which I think is what’s so compelling about it.

Craig: Yes. Yes.

John: A customer noticed him and believed he looked like the man in the photographs. As we record this, Mangione has pled not guilty to state and federal charges. This is the world of a movie about this event. You can come at it from any angle, but I think what’s so notable out of this to me is like from the start, from the moment you first heard about this, oh, whoever did this perceives themselves as being the central character in a movie story. It was one of those rare situations where it’s like, oh, we’re not forcing a narrative on this. This person is actually perceives themselves as having a role in a narrative.

Craig: Yes. Luigi Mangione is a evidently very smart young man from a privileged background who, as far as I gathered, has experienced both physical issues because he had back surgeries that didn’t seem to work very well and he was in pain, but also clearly was experiencing a mental health episode because he just dropped off the grid, disappeared, stopped talking to friends, stopped talking to his family, moved away to Australia, I think, for a while. Didn’t really tell anybody. And then started writing manifestos. Never a good sign. Essays are nice. Manifesto is not so great.

John: Let me push back a little bit. Any blog post is a manifesto. If after the fact, it looks like it came from a certain person.

Craig: Yes, I suppose a manifesto is an essay followed by a shooting. For sure. It’s fair. Okay, the shooting part is definitely the issue. Luigi Mangione does something that is both on the one hand, the worst crime you can commit, which is cold-blooded murder. On the other hand, becomes a folk hero because everyone hates the American healthcare system and he shot and murdered the CEO of the largest American healthcare corporation and there was this sudden sense of we got one of the fat cats.

That’s this deep class anger and resentment that had been built up over a large amount of time, which is completely unfair, by the way, to this one man and his family-

John: We’re going to talk about that.

Craig: -Brian Thompson. This is where our brains are weak and we can’t help ourselves. The most important factor to creating this as a big story the way it is that Luigi Mangione is very handsome.

John: He is.

Craig: Therein is the goof of it all. If this guy were ugly, no one, and I mean no one, would be on his side. No one. This is pretty privilege at its highest. If he were ugly, people would have been like, “Okay, yes, he was this crazy ugly guy who shot somebody and you shouldn’t do that.” Look, yes, our young colleague is suspicious.

Drew: No, I am. I think the act itself, because before we knew who he was before we even had the face of him, I think there was quite a lot of support for the act, at least online.

John: Let me take both sides here. I think when the act happened, there was a mystery of who this person was, but also there was immediately a sense of like, we are not in any danger. The normal American person is not in any danger, which is such a unique situation because usually there’s a manhunt because that person is a danger to society. This guy wasn’t.

We wanted this guy off the street because he had done this thing in a very public, big way and the police were embarrassed. There were lots of other factors there, but we never saw him as being a danger. He was just this mysterious man, but the slow trickle out of like, okay, here we can see a little bit more of his face because the mask is down a little lower. Oh, here he was flirting with the woman at the hostel.

Craig: That one picture changed everything.

John: Absolutely. Oh my God, he’s a smoke show and therefore the Timothee Chalamet and all the other stuff comes out. Absolutely.

Drew: But I think of the 24 hours before, I think the competency in a way was the most attractive thing.

Craig: Well, the idea, there are two possible ways of thinking about this. One way is there is a masked avenger out there who is fulfilling our need for street justice against evil corporate overlords.

John: It feels like a Robin Hood.

Craig: It feels like a Robin Hood, except instead of stealing money from the rich and giving it to the poor, he’s just murdering people on a sidewalk, which isn’t great. Then the picture came out and everything changed. Then it was like, “Oh my God, he’s hot. A hot guy is doing this.” Then when they caught him and they said his name was Luigi Mangione, everybody– it got even better because it was like, it felt like a meme name.

I saw a headline when they caught him and the headline, when they finally figured out, okay, who’s this person? They figured it out. The headline was, “It’s a me, Luigi,” which made me laugh. Then I thought, why am I laughing? A man was murdered on the sidewalk. Saturday Night Live did Weekend Update. Of course, they mentioned Luigi Mangione and many, many, and they were women, you could tell by the pitch of their voice, went, “Woo.” Colin Jost went, “Oh. Yes, okay. We’re wooing for justice, right?” Because he’s a murderer. How do we make this a movie?

John: How do we make this a movie? Because so really it’s, where do you choose to center the story? Obviously, it is a movie versus a series. I think there’s a good case for making it a series. I’m sure Ryan Murphy is going to be, those conversations are already happening to make the series.

Craig: I’m sure they’re on day 40 of shooting already.

John: Yes. The question is, you can easily imagine the narrative that’s all centered on him leading up to and after the shooting because it’s compelling. The planning, the escape, the being on the run, the camera, the surveillance state, all that stuff is really exciting. In that version, it’s really hard to center or anchor around this man who was killed and the actual, the crime itself in a way, because the crime itself becomes secondary to the cultural phenomenon.

Craig: I tend to think about these things as much as I can from the least privileged point of view and make that the interesting point of view. The least privileged point of view in this case would probably be Brian Thompson’s family, because listen, we can discuss whether or not it is fundamentally unethical to be the CEO of a health insurance corporation. However, that is our system.

The health insurance corporations exist. You could argue that it is unethical to not be the CEO of a health insurer. If you think you would be better at providing health to people than the alternative. If it’s me or that asshole, I guess I’d do better than that guy. That’s the system we have. He was murdered because somebody with mental health problems felt aggrieved by decisions that that guy probably had nothing to do with.

Now mine husband, my father, my brother is dead and everyone’s cheering. They’ve turned this kid who, by the way, looks terrified into a hero. He is not. Now it really becomes an exploration of how we distort truth to create narrative. The Luigi Mangione backlash will be coming soon. It’s going to come. It’s inevitable, because that’s how this pendulum swings.

I would make, probably, a movie about the way people lost their minds. I probably would also fold into it the other least privileged point of view, which is somebody caught up in the UnitedHealthcare System because there are poor people who are suffering because that insurance company is gross and they’re not murdering anyone. Who’s going to look after those people while we concentrate on the most powerful two people involved in the story, the man who ran a corporation and the person who was pulling the trigger of a gun?

John: We recorded this and Mangione has been arrested. He’s now being transferred back to New York City, but we don’t have information from his point of view. That’s all we know is like his note is his manifesto. We don’t have any greater insight and that’s going to completely transform everything once we have his current explanation of why he did what he did, how it all fits together and that’s going to really influence things.

So I do wonder about trying to map out the story now when you don’t, he’s still just a cipher. We still don’t have a way to handle him and you say like, “Well, he’s going through a mental health crisis.” Sure, that tracks with what I’ve seen, but until we actually see an interview with him, we can’t know what this is because he could also be incredibly savvy in ways that we’re not anticipating.

Craig: He was pretty savvy. He wasn’t savvy enough to not sit in a McDonald’s, which by the way, is a corporation with his manifesto in his bag and the murder weapon in his bag, duh. He was exhibiting what I would consider to be a high intelligence and also disordered thinking. Anyone that thinks that murdering somebody is the solution to their problems is exhibiting disordered thinking, I would argue.

He’s also a fan of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who in a very similar way was brilliant and targeted people that he felt were putting technology ahead of humanity. It wasn’t, again, “random”. Those of us who weren’t involved in research labs to, I don’t know, whatever, invent new plastics or Ted–

John: We were not going to get a bomb.

Craig: No, we weren’t getting mailed a bomb. Then there is that weird sense of, “Yes, someone’s doing something about it.” Americans love the story of a violent loner. Hollywood has been celebrating violent loners since film was invented. Probably not a good idea.

John: Getting back to where he fits in this overall cinematic universe, we have other examples like Bonnie and Clyde, the villains who were sticking it to the rich man, do become cultural heroes. That’s not a unique experience for us to be having with Mangione in this situation. I’m also struck by not that atypical. I think you could find a lot of people who meet the general characteristics of a Mangione, the kinds of podcasts he listened to, that self-improvement, that kind of stuff.

I think part of what’s so compelling to me about this story is that, well, what’s different about him versus the other thousand guys out there who fit in the same template?

Craig: Well, a circuit breaks and we don’t know which circuit and we don’t know why. I would say the great majority of people, if put in front of their enemy or the person that makes them the angriest and handed a gun, would not pull the trigger.

John: Yes, but that’s not what he did. It wasn’t that he was in a situation where he had the opportunity. He had to make a plan and systematically put the plan into place. I feel like we reward society for those individuals who can build companies, create great new things. He sort of has that founder’s mentality, but for–

Craig: He still had to pull the trigger.

John: Yes.

Craig: My argument is that’s where he steps away from the rest of us. Because the reason most people build businesses as opposed to murder, aside from the illegality, is because murder is not an option. I say this as an atheist. I feel like atheists get special points for saying this. I don’t not murder because I’m afraid of hell. I don’t not murder because I’m afraid of God’s punishment or disappointment. I don’t murder because my brain is organized in such a way as to find that horrifying. I could not do it.

I’m fascinated by portrayals of people who struggle to murder people. I do oftentimes think about how interesting it is when we watch movies where the tone is I can happily murder. The ’80s really went all in on that. The happy quipping murderer hero. That’s where this is scary.

John: The reason why I don’t want to drop this is that I feel like we feel like we’re in a time of increasingly violence as– political violence being a thing we see in the world and even in the US after the–

Craig: Attempted assassination on Donald Trump.

John: Absolutely. Also, I would say January 6th before that was the political violence we just aren’t used to. We used to have more of it. We used to have bombings and those kinds of things. I just feel like I can envision a character like Mangione who sees this as a killing baby Hitler situation where they feel themselves as like, “This is a chance for me to alter the future. Therefore, this is not just a murder, this is actually an act which will change society.”

Craig: Yes. That would be a thought of deep, deep delusion and also not particularly smart for a guy who is smart. Somebody else has to be the CEO now. It’s like that company isn’t going away. A little like Tim McVeigh drove a truck bomb up to the Murrah Federal Building and blew it up. Hundreds of people died, including children. That accomplished nothing. Nothing.

There is that sense of, “We’re going to start something. We’re going to kick off this big war that everyone’s ready to go fight.” No. Most people are not ready to go fight. I think social media has amplified some of the worst voices and made them feel more plentiful, I suspect, than they are. I’m just thinking about the Trump-Biden election. I think Trump got 68 million votes or something like that, or maybe tens of millions of people voted for him. 5,000 showed up that day. Very small number, happily.

My argument being most people are good, or if not good, terrified to commit violence. Luigi Mangione was not. That makes him terrifying to me. People that are celebrating him, I think, should not. That’s what’s terrifying to me is the idea that somebody can calmly walk up to somebody on a sidewalk and after all they’re planning, do it. That’s the scary thing.

John: Yes. All right. Let’s move on to our next story. This is an article by Paul DeBole written for Commonwealth Beacon in Massachusetts. It is, how do you license a fortune teller? In the state of Massachusetts, fortune tellers have to be licensed, which is great. You basically investigate what the licensing requirements are and what different cities in Massachusetts do for this.

How do you even define fortune-telling? Well, this is how it’s laid out in the law. “Fortune telling is the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing, or there’s such reading through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind reading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any similar such thing or act.”

I just respect them so much for like pulling out the thesaurus and figuring out what are the things– because they have to be careful like not to define probability or statistics or other things that are fortunes.

Craig: That’s an amazing list of things, although necromancy really shouldn’t be in. Necromancy? The raising and manipulation of the dead? Anyhoo, they could have just said bullshit. This is an interesting– I actually understand why they do this, because let’s say you decide reasonably, business licenses are for businesses, not for a bunch of bullshit. We’re not going to license bullshit, that’s ridiculous.

Now you got 20 bullshit shops in the rundown part of town, because weirdly, the people that peddle this crap, they can never seem to afford nice places. You’d think that they would, but it’s always crap. Anyhoo, they can’t leave that unregulated. I suspect that the licensing of these places, even though there’s this wonderful moment in the article where they ask like, “Why do you license these places?” The woman says, “To make sure that they’re good at it or something.” [chuckles] It’s really just to limit how many of them there could be, I suspect.

John: In certain cities, like there’s Amesbury City, lifted the cap on one license for the telling of fortunes for money per 50,000 residents. Basically, you’re trying to control a thing that’s out there and also to make sure that because they’re actual legitimate businesses, they’re collecting taxes and there’s not shady money laundering stuff. There’s reasons why you have to do it. Yet I just found it this delightful, and I think there’s some– it’s not probably the central focus of the movie, but I think there’s some delightful thing about either a family business, a family fortune telling business that loses their license or some legal drama, some sort of, My Cousin Vinny is like, you have to like defend this company.

Craig: You could also see a supernatural, comedy adventure like Men in Black where you meet a guy and his job is to check and grant/renew licenses for these people and they’re all real. He finds that one of the one thing is no necromancy. Everyone is, can’t do necromancy. Then he’s like, “Someone’s clearly doing necromancy here,” and follows it into some Ghostbusters-y sort of thing. It’s a great like beginning where you take a job and you’re like, “None of this is real.” Then it turns out some of it’s real. It is mind-blowing to me that people go to these things and believe any of it. It is mind-blowing. There’s so many of them. There’s so many.

John: Yes, I know really smart people who have gone to them and I found them useful and helpful and then also became sort of weirdly obsessed with the people who were giving them their fortunes, which makes sense, and get bilked for money.

Craig: Yes, they became weirdly obsessed with the charlatans that are con artists that–

John: Are very skilled at doing this thing.

Craig: Yes, digging their claws into you and extracting your dough. I’ve said this before. If I could do any of those things, I would be performing those things for free as a saint because that’s what I would be, a saint. I would be the most famous, most beloved person in the world if all I did was legitimately help people talk to the dead. The people that claim to be able to talk to the dead, they would prefer to be in a small shop in a strip mall next to a nail place, charging $25 a read. Interesting.

John: Lastly, we have an article by Susan Dominus for The New York Times Magazine. This is about an IVF mix-up, a shocking discovery and an unbearable choice. Here’s the brief version of this. We have a couple, Alexander and Daphna, who give birth to their second daughter, whom they name May. She’s a great, easy baby. The husband, other people start to say like, “This does not really look like it came from either one of us.”

Craig: This was a baby that was implanted in the mother via IVF.

John: Absolutely. They had the baby with IVF. They did a home genetics test and they found out neither of them is related to this baby. They have this moment of faulty decision.

Craig: It was sort of around three or four months.

John: Yes, so quite young. The question’s like, what do we do? Do we tell anyone? Do we go to the clinic? They end up hiring a surrogacy lawyer, went to the clinic, and it turned out that one of their initial suspicions was like, “Okay, this is not the right embryo that I gave birth to. What happened to our embryos? What happened there?” It turns out there was another baby born about the same time who was their embryo.

Craig: Living 10 minutes away.

John: Yes, which is crazy. They meet this other couple who are in fact– well, one’s Asian, one’s Latino. That’s why these babies don’t look anything alike. They make the decision like, “Well, we are going to swap the kids back, but what will that even look like? What is the process going to be? How do we do this?” In the background of all of this, there’s the lawsuit against the fertility company.

But the story really focuses on like, what do these families do? If there’s older kids, how does it all fit together? Craig, what did you take from this? Where do you think the interesting points are to hold on to if you’re trying to adapt this?

Craig: I thought maybe approach best straight forward. The part that was heart-wrenching and fascinating was what do you do when you’ve had a baby for four months and you find out that all of this love and attachment that has occurred shouldn’t have? You now are supposed to have that same love and attachment to a baby you don’t know. Now, I will tell you, if you have an asshole baby, this is a dream come true because some babies are assholes. I’m not going to lie. If you have a good one, I don’t know.

John: I got to babysit over this weekend, the best baby in the world.

Craig: Right, like an angel baby is amazing, right? Our first baby was not an angel. I would have been like, definitely? No, not definitely. That’s my kid. The question at the heart of it is, what defines parenthood? Let’s be even more specific. What defines motherhood? These women didn’t just receive a child from a surrogate mother. They carried these babies to term. These babies grew inside of them. They gave birth to these babies. They were nursing these babies. What is parenthood?

Now, the fascinating question to me is how this is approached differently by the father and the mother. You can see, even in the story, the fathers are like, “Oh, this is an easy one, switch them.” You didn’t grow it in you. You didn’t grow it inside of you. You’re not keeping it alive with your body, not only prenatally but postnatally. What is the nature even of love?

What’s beautiful about this story is that the two families decide to just sort of combine and let these kids grow up almost as sisters, even though there’s really no reason that they should, and the parents struggling. I think in a drama, you would want one of the parents to want to switch and one to not. You’d want to create some conflict, and you’d want to create a sense of that tearing apart. There’s some interesting ways to conclude it, but the issues at the heart of it, if we’re looking for, oh, what’s our central dramatic argument? The central dramatic argument is you do not have to be related to a baby to love it like it is your baby, and in fact, fiercely so.

John: Yes. To me, the most interesting moment was weirdly before the two couples match and where the first couple was like, “What do we do? We do nothing. Are we under any legal obligation to say anything?” Maybe not. I think there’s a moral obligation, probably, but there’s not a legal obligation, so they could have just said nothing, but then there would always be this time bomb out there, like at some point, this is going to come out, and at what point do we figure out that? I think that’s a really interesting. I would love to see that moment staged, and that this actually could be a play in a weird way for that reason. That discussion, that debate is really great.

Craig: This is a theme that goes all the way back to old stories and fairy tales, the idea that you have stolen a child from another mother because the other thing is they don’t know what the deal is with the other family.

John: Yes, at that point, they don’t know that they have their own kid that’s out there someplace, too.

Craig: Exactly. So A, they don’t know if their own kid exists, their biologically owned kid exists. B, they don’t know if the parents who are supposed to have had this embryo, they don’t know if those people have a different baby, another baby. Now you’re just quietly raising someone else’s baby. You know it’s not “yours”, but it kinda is. That’s the fascinating part.

Maybe the more interesting statement isn’t you can love a child as if it is your own, even if it is not biologically your own. Maybe the more interesting statement is you are capable of not loving a child that is your own biological child if you don’t know it, because one of the fascinating things is they each meet their other child and they’re like, “Yeah, nice baby, but who the F are you? I don’t know you.” That’s fascinating to me.

John: Yes. I have lots of good ways into this. This feels like it’s not a series. I think it has to be a short thing. Unless you were to actually do the blended family, but then it becomes– then it’s a comedy probably.

Craig: It’s just blah. We’re sisters, but we’re not. Our parents went to birth.

John: Yes. Having had our daughter through surrogacy and knowing that there are going to be other siblings out there because genetically there are going to be other siblings out there, yes, it’s what’s interesting and not so uncommon about this era that we live in. What’s interesting about this story to me is that it’s not classically like the two babies were switched out at the hospital and you’re just going to switch the babies back. There’s more complicated unknowns in there, too.

Craig: Just the fact that you are carrying a child within you all the way to term, it’s just an entirely different thing.

John: Craig, should we just be doing genetic tests at birth?

Craig: It did strike me that if I were running a fertility clinic and part of my job was implanting embryos, that, yes, at birth, immediately that day, make sure that we didn’t mess up. I don’t understand how that’s not just an immediate thing to do.

John: All right, let’s review our three movies here. There’s going to be multiple Luigi Mangione murder.

Craig: Multi-Mangione.

John: Multi-Mangione. I think there’ll be at least one feature film. There’s definitely going to be some sort of series, some sort of Ryan Murphy-ish series, probably several of them.

Craig: We’re going to hit peak Mangione in about two years.

John: Was there ever a Unabomber movie? I’m not sure I ever saw one.

Craig: I think there might have been some, yes, I bet you, Drew, if you Google up Unabomber movie, there’s going to be some miniseries or there has to have been some, right?

Drew: Yes. There’s one documentary, it seems like.

Craig: Oh, okay. Interesting. You know why? Wasn’t that handsome.

John: Was not handsome.

Craig: Was not handsome.

John: Lived alone in a cabin.

Craig: Lived alone in a cabin. Looked like a crazy old man.
John: Yes. No one liked that.

Craig: His sketch was handsome. In reality, not handsome. That’s why.

Drew: Oh, I lied. We had a Ted Kaczynski movie in 2021 with Sharlto Copley. Oh. I could see Sharlto Copley.

Craig: Okay. Sure. What was it called? Unabomber?

Drew: Ted K.

Craig: Ted K. Oh, boy.

John: Second story, licensing a fortune teller. There’s nothing in Debole’s story that you need to buy. There’s nothing there to buy. The idea of licensed fortune tellers, I think there’s a comedy there to be found.

Craig: Seems about right. I would agree.

John: The IVF story. I think there’s a made for lifetime movie. That’s pretty obvious. Whether there’s a bigger movie to be made out of this, possibly, maybe. What was the Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore movie, which was about the–

Drew: May December.

John: May December. Yes. May December was inspired by actual events. There’s definitely a big feature version you can make at some point, too. I can envision somebody doing this

Craig: Cool.

John: Let’s answer listener questions. Let’s start with Jane Doe here.

Drew: Jane Doe writes, “I’m writing a pilot with a buddy based on his memoir. Credits wise, I’m sure an ampersand makes sense as we’re absolutely writing this thing together. My question is about order of names. What exactly does it mean to order the writer’s names chronologically? Does that mean alphabetically? He’ll obviously have the based on the book by credit for himself. That’s not in dispute at all. Just curious if I’m right that it should be written by Jane Doe and John Everett, D first, E second, or if chronologically means something other than alphabetically. Also, does the fact that it’s Everett’s book affect the byline order for the script in any way?”

John: The chronologically comes if there’s multiple writers over multiple drafts and it’s separated in time, you list them chronologically. That makes sense for that. If it’s an ampersand, you’re considered one writer.

Craig: We don’t actually list them chronologically. Writers that are separated, not as teams, are actually listed in order of prominence of authorship.

John: Before it goes through arbitration.

Craig: Oh, before it goes through arbitration.

John: Basically on that top sheet, you should list.

Craig: Is that what she’s asking or is she asking about like the final credits?

Drew: I think final credits.

Craig: Yes. Final credits still doesn’t apply to her case because she’s a writing team. You can order your names in a writing team however you want.

John: Yes. You can argue about it, fight about it, but eventually, you’re going to have to put out a title page that has your names in one order, and that will be the order you have to go for.

Craig: Sometimes people will put their names in based on how the town refers to them. If the town calls you Smith and Jones, then you’ll probably say written by Smith & Jones.

John: Yes. I think Lord and Miller are always Lord and Miller, and I don’t know that that was chronologically, I don’t think.

Craig: Yes, because it sounds better than Miller and Lord. Yes. Lord and Miller. That’s the actual ordering within the ampersand doesn’t matter. Nobody cares. Doesn’t imply anything. It’s just sort of almost branding more than anything else, because the ampersand means writer.

John: We’re one.

Craig: We are one entity with multiple brains. No, the source material credit has nothing to do with that either. She should stop worrying about that.

John: Agreed. All right. It is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a book called Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath. I brought this to D&D last week. It is this remarkable book about the history of role-playing games, starting with Dungeons and Dragons, which was the first in the ’70s, and continuing up through the 2020s. It’s really a remarkable excavation of a lot of games I’d never heard of so much, which I did know, and sort of how this whole system of role-playing games developed and grew.

Stu Horvath is publishing this through the MIT Press, but it’s all based on games that he collected over the years. They’re all from his own personal collection. His interviews with a lot of the folks who were behind them, sort of piecing together sort of what grew and what changed, how one game influenced the next game. If you love D&D and other role-playing games, you will love this book. If you don’t care about them, this won’t probably make you care about them. I found it to be just incredibly useful and just a delight to read.

My one observation about this kind of book is it’s the size of a monster manual or a player’s handbook. Its dimensions, but it’s also thicker and heavier. It’s a difficult book to read sitting on a couch. It’s actually not a comfortable book to hold. There’s a class of books that are like, this is a great book, but I need almost like a lectern to sit it on to read because it’s just too big to enjoy that way, but a small cost. Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground.

Craig: Fantastic. My one cool thing is this theory of quantum consciousness.

John: Tell me what this is.

Craig: Quantum consciousness, like almost every theory of consciousness, is completely unsupported by anything we would call evidence. Consciousness is the most– it’s like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. It’s so hard.

John: Consciousness is a feeling. Basically, we have the sense of what being conscious is like, but it’s actually hard to put that into concrete terms.

Craig: It is not only a phenomenon that is difficult for us to describe, we are also asking the phenomenon to describe the phenomenon, which already introduces a huge problem into the mix. We also know that it is pervasive across humans. It is, in fact, probably what defines us more than anything else, more than standing on 2 feet or having opposable thumbs. It is the fact that we are conscious, that we can metaphorize our existence, that we experience things moment to moment and can put them into words, what is going on.

There is this rise of a concept of quantum consciousness, which suggests that the old model of consciousness, which was whatever it is, it’s clearly the function of wiring neurons leading from one to the other. It’s like a huge circuit board, which then would imply AI, right? If it’s just a big circuit board, we can just build a big circuit board over here and it’ll do it.

This other theory is, no, that there are inside of cells in the brain, these microtubules, these very tiny protein things that are behaving in ways that show some sort of quantum mechanics at work, which I will be clear to say, I do not understand at all. All I know is this, quantum functioning has nothing to do with circuit board stuff. If they’re right, that human consciousness is the product of some sort of quantum state occurring rapidly and in this massively distributed manner, AI will never get there until we build quantum computing.

John: Which we got much closer to this last week, I’ll put it there.

Craig: Here’s the other fascinating thing is, at deeply frozen states and all the rest. One of the knocks on quantum consciousness and most scientists are like, “Screw you,” is that the brain is too warm and too wet, as they say. I have no idea. The mystery of consciousness is profound. I find that in and of itself fascinating, that we have no idea how it works. We can barely define it.

John: Yes, like art. It’s one of those tough things. You sort of know when you see it.

Craig: You know it when you feel it.

John: I understand why people are reaching for these things. They want to have a sense that what we do in our brains is different than everything else and that there must be some magic. There’s some homunculus in there who is the real us that is the thing. I think what we’re going to find is that consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon that happens when you have a certain amount of processing capability. It just erupts because also if you look at animals around us, primates, octopuses, and other creatures, it’s clear they can do some very sophisticated things that would, by any of our normal standards, involve consciousness. The things that ravens can do feel like they’re conscious.

Craig: That’s the interesting thing is we’re not sure because we don’t know because we can’t be in their heads. If there is a difference between intelligence and consciousness, it seems like there is. There have been arguments that consciousness is a function of language itself. That if you do not have language, you can’t be conscious because that’s what consciousness is.

Animals don’t have language. Everyone’s going to write in, “Dolphins can talk,” and blah, blah, blah. No. They don’t. They have communication. They don’t have language. I don’t care. I’d send whatever emails you want until a dolphin talks and says stuff. “Actually, there’s one dolphin.” I don’t care. They’re not talking. The end.

John: Yes. The situations where that boundary between what is animal communication versus animal language is interesting. The grey parrots who learn to speak and actually can do some sophisticated things in talking, it becomes a question of like, well, how much is that the training given them to a place? They can say novel things, but does that really mean that they’re conscious in ways that–

Craig: They’re combining sounds. Again, birds communicate through song, and whales communicate through song, and apes communicate through grunts and hand gestures, but none of them are currently writing a limerick. We are different. Now, you’re right, it may be that this is all just this desperate narcissism, neuro-narcissism, that no computer could do what we do. You’re probably right, because after all, we’re not real either. It’s just a question is, how sophisticated is the matrix that we’re inside of? Probably pretty sophisticated. Seems pretty sophisticated.

Drew: Why is language the benchmark for consciousness? I still don’t–

Craig: It may not be. It’s just a theory that consciousness is a function of the brain having an understanding of what the word I means, what the word you means, what tenses mean, am, were, going to be. Those concepts alone create a sense of consciousness, memory, planning ahead, experience right now, and then metaphor, which is a very complicated thing. It’s a very complicated way of thinking.

John: It’s a form of pattern matching, but is generalizable to ways that are so different.

Craig: Yes, and now I can explain something to you using metaphor, which even the word metaphor is a fascinating word. The vocabulary that we have, the thousands of words that we know, all of that stuff is perhaps what is leading to this mush in our heads. Moment to moment, if you try and define your own consciousness, you will fail.

John: The experiment we could never do, which would be telling, is if you could actually raise children in an environment with no language whatsoever and see what are they like, and do they have–

Craig: We’ve seen some of those cases. What happens is they start to create their own language. It seems like language is neurologically innate. Chomsky’s big theory, which seems true, is that grammar, the basic concepts of grammar, are true across all languages, that all languages ultimately do have subject, verb, object.

John: They could put them in different orders. They could have different rules for forming them, but that they all have that concept.

Craig: Yes, that all languages erupt out of the same neurological instruments. Yes, because why? Why would we need me, you, doing things? Somehow that’s how we organized it.

John: A sense of the future, a sense of the past, and we build, communicate those.

Craig: Then conditionals. Conditionals alone. Just the word “If.” That word is so powerful, and I’m not sure a lot of animals have if. If this, then this. If this, then this. If not this, you’ve lost my dogs. If, sit, then treat. I don’t even think they get that far. I think their brains are like, “Sit, treat.” Regardless, it’s not language.

John: All right. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, outro is also by Matthew. 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 like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for things we talked about on today’s show in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for Craig and I to do this show every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on home automation. Craig, thanks for a fun and freewheeling episode.

Craig: Yeah, no, we won’t get any emails for this one.

John: Not a bit. Not a one.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, let’s talk home automation and sort of what stuff in your house right now can you ask an assistant, digital assistant to do? What things happen automatically? What do you have working in your house right now?

Craig: Very, very little. I have my thermostats or Nest thermostats.

John: Do you use the app for it or just do you just turn it on and off?

Craig: I generally use the app, although from time to time, I’ll walk by, wave my hand in front of one of them and adjust it. I have reduced the amount of automation they have. The auto scheduling, I found to be brutal. I don’t think it’s very good at figuring out what I want. I found myself constantly being like, “No, Nest, I don’t want it to be 67 degrees. I would like it to be minimum 69, please.” It’s cold as shit in here. It’s like, “Oh, okay.” Then the next day, “You like 66?” I’m like, “No.”

I actually turned auto scheduling off. I do like the auto away, auto home. It knows, okay, if we’re out of the house, but then I worry about the dogs. I don’t want them to get too hot. I’ll probably turn that off too once it gets to the summer. Other than that, my lights are not all wired into a system. I don’t have Alexa. I don’t. You’d think I would. Tell me what to do.

John: In our house, Mike has rewired all our light switches to be programmable and sort of beyond the system. It’s actually really good. It’s actually really nice because I can ask to turn down the lights to 10%. I can turn the lights up. In my office, when it gets a little dark, I can tell it to turn on the lights. It’s really nice for it to do that. I can do the same with our Nest thermostat. I say like, I can ask like, “What is the temperature in the room?” Turn it up to 70 degrees if it’s too cold. That stuff has been really useful.

The other app that we tend to use a lot is as we leave the house, we can turn on the lights to sort of– it sort of randomly turns on different lights as we’re away. It makes it feel much more lived in, which is really, really good. Our locks are on the system, so we can have it lock the doors, unlock the doors. We get a notification if the gate has been opened or a door has been opened. We get a sense of like, “Oh, the housekeeper’s here.”

Craig: I do have that. I have the Lockly is my front door. My question for you is, do you put an Alexa? I assume that’s what you’re using.

John: Oh, in the house, yes.

Craig: Yes. Do you put one in every room so it can hear you everywhere you go?

John: Yes. There’s one in most rooms and you can sort of call out for it. We were always an Apple family. We were using the HomePods, because we rented an Airbnb that had Alexas and it was like so much better that we ended up switching everything off to that. It has been good. On my watch, I can open and close the gate. I can do that kind of stuff. When I’m calling out for someone to do something, it’s generally Alexa.

Craig: Nest is a Google product. Alexa is Amazon. They work together, I guess? They’re happy with each other?

John: The systems for communicating between each other have gotten better. They’re not nearly as good as you sort of would hope they would be, but they’ve gotten better.

Craig: They’re using some sort of protocol, like a standardized protocol. For your lights, what system did Mike put in?

John: I don’t really know.

Craig: Your wife.

John: What does my wife do, by the way?

Craig: What does your wife do?

John: I don’t know which light switches we ended up going with, but they’re all standardized now. My daughter hates them.

Craig: Oh, tell me why.

John: She’s been away at college when it changed. Now, a classical light switch is like the top turns it on, the bottom turns it off, unless it’s a three-way switch with somebody else and then it works the other way. Now the top always turns it on, the bottom always turns it off, but it doesn’t lock in the bottom place or the top place.

Craig: It’s a two-pole or a three-pole. This is another side, a good bonus episode is dealing with your children when they come home from college. Poor Jesse. Poor Jesse, please. I love her to death. We got a different house and she was upset. She was like, “I didn’t want to come home to some weird house, I wanted to come home to my house,” which I completely understood.

Then also I understand, let’s say we had stayed in that house, but only changed the light switches. It would still be somewhat traumatic because that’s where they grew up and they remember something. It’s also a little bit of a sign. I really do sympathize with our kids. They leave to go to college and they come back and they’re like, “Oh, the second I was gone, you started undoing things,” like as if to say, we could have done all this light switch work, but the kid was here. All right, you’ve got your lights automated, which is interesting to me.

John: Generally very useful. We’ll start to watch a movie. It’s like, “Oh, turn the lights down to 10%.”

Craig: That does sound great. Do the switches themselves have to be replaced, or is it some central thing somewhere that–

John: Replacing the switches. Basically, each individual switch knows where it is and what’s going on.

Craig: So many switches.

John: It’s a thing, electricians will come out and it’ll take a day to switch out all the switches.

Craig: They’ll do all the switches. Then you’ve got your switches. You’ve got your lights. I have Spotify, but I suppose if I had Alexa, it could tell Spotify to do that.

John: Yes, it plays then for sure.

Craig: Which would probably be better. I do worry about the Alexa. We had an Alexa briefly and it started to creep me out. Does it ever creep you out?

John: Not so much. We get frustrated with it. We will ask it for like, the daily news, like as we’re making breakfast and sometimes she won’t hear it right or the wrong one will answer or it’ll want to keep playing after we told her to stop. There’s those frustrations. No, on the whole, it’s been fine.

Craig: Do you yell at it?

John: Sometimes I lose my patience a little bit. The, “Damn it, Alexa,” is probably a thing it hears a lot.

Craig: Wow. Do you think Alexa eventually is going to sort of come out and do an article in Variety about you?

John: Absolutely. What an abusive employer.

Craig: Just toxic home environment.

John: Never asked about me.

Craig: Never, but also just yelled. Just a lot of yelling.

John: Wants to know like the air quality a lot for who knows why.

Craig: Also, here’s a transcript of everything they’ve said for the past five years. They do hear everything.

John: Apparently, how these systems were supposed to work is that only when they hear the trigger word, then they start paying attention to what comes after it. That’s how they’re supposed to work.

Craig: Supposed to.

John: Supposed to. It’s a thing I just had to learn to live with like that.

Craig: You sort of go for it. Last question about home automation. I’d love to hear from some of our listeners who are super gear heads who have like really wired their homes up because I feel like there’s some great total solution. This will do it all, because instead of this patchwork of products, maybe I’m wrong. Your Nest thermostats. Do you have the latest Nest thermostats?

John: We don’t. We have ones we’ve had for years and they’re fine.

Craig: I was looking at the latest ones. I can’t tell really what’s different about them other than that they look somewhat cooler. They also look slightly like HAL from 2001, which is unnerving.

John: It’s not the best. I’m curious to hear from our listeners because I also think there’s a sweet spot where it’s like the amount of home automation we have is like it’s useful but not a pain in the ass. I’m never against it. There’ve been other times along the way where we’ve tried to do things that were a little bit fancier and it’s like, “Oh, God.” In the old house, we had a home theater system where the projector would drop down from the ceiling and there was a screen that came down. It was always a nightmare. It was maybe a 20% chance it would work properly the first time, and you’re not helping yourself that way.

Craig: I’m open to it. I would love something that would be– the dream is something integrated where there’s one thing that is running the door, the lights, the thermostats. I’m not sure what else there, the gate.

John: Things like your sprinklers, things like that, yes.

Craig: Sprinklers.

John: The pool pump.

Craig: The sprinklers– and yes, sure. There is an app for the pool pump that I have and I just never look at it because to me, the pool pump belongs to the pool people that come and maintain it. The sprinklers belong to the gardeners who come and maintain that. Now, if I were working on that stuff myself, if I weren’t such a dandy lad, yes, I would want to have all of it integrated would be– that would be the dream.

John: Cool. Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
• The Conundrum of the Workshops by Rudyard Kipling
• OpenAI’s controversial Sora is finally launching today. Will it truly disrupt Hollywood? by Wendy Lee for LA Times
• I Went to the Premiere of the First Commercially Streaming AI-Generated Movies by Jason Koehler
• A timeline of the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and search for his killer by Michael R. Sisal and Cedar Attanasio for Associated Press
• How do you license a fortune teller? by Paul Debole
• An I.V.F. Mix-Up, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice by Susan Dominus for NYT Magazine
• Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath
• Your Consciousness Can Connect With the Whole Universe by Manasee Wagh for Popular Mechanics
• 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 BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (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.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 666 of Scriptnotes a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to Satan.

Craig: We will eat your soul.

John: Probably not, but today on the show it is a deep dive into the unholy trinity of films that established the genre of movies about Satanism. We are going to discuss how we got here how these films work and the future of the devil on screen.

Craig: The future of Satan. It’s like the worst deadline article ever.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Like Satan ankles hell.

John: Totally. 100%. Our bonus segment, we’re premium members. We will pontificate on our best candidates for the Antichrist.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. Who would it be? Who should it be?

Craig: Think of a couple of people.

John: I can think of a few. Let’s start off by talking about Satan. We don’t talk about Satan very much, Craig, at all. I don’t think we ever even discuss him.

Craig: Weirdly, it doesn’t come up.

John: It doesn’t come up that much.

Craig: I know that some people in certain parts of our country probably presume that here in Hollywood, we talk about Satan all the time. While we’re drinking the blood of children or whatever it is that they think we do, when in fact, mostly what we do are things like, figure out why there are all these fingerprints on the refrigerator door and take the dog out for a walk. So it doesn’t come up.

John: Quotidian life just doesn’t involve nearly as much Satan as one would guess.

Craig: Also, Satan’s not real.

John: That is true. Let’s talk about Satan, at least the modern conception of Satan. Because when we talk about Satan as an idea, I think we have an image in our head for who Satan is. Satan, in modern conception, is an individual who was thrown out of heaven-

Craig: Fallen angel.

John: -fallen angel, yes. Very, very powerful.

Craig: Yes.

John: The nemesis of God.

Craig: Right, so Satan occupies a very difficult narrative space because he is the antagonist in the Bible, or if you– the Old Testament doesn’t really talk much about Satan, but–

John: Also, we’ll get into that, the New Testament doesn’t really talk about it.

Craig: The church love to talk about Satan. They set up Satan as this rival. Then when you get into Revelations, and then here’s the narrative problem for Satan: Currently, the theory is he’s down there in hell, ruling over a lake of fire, where people burn for eternity but he’s going to come back through his form as the Antichrist or I guess that’s his avatar.

John: Yes, that’s one of the ways he could do it. He could be the equivalent of Jesus where he’s like is incarnate through the Antichrist.

Craig: Yes, he creates his Satan incarnate and son of Satan, whatever you want to call it. And that brings him back to earth where he gets into a huge battle with God and Jesus and all of God’s forces and it’s an actual battle that takes place in a place called Armageddon, I believe, or it’s Megiddo and it becomes Armageddon something, and Satan loses.

Now the narrative part here, that’s rough for Satan, said apparently he knows he loses. It’s already like. What’s he getting ready for? That big fight that he’s going to lose one day?

John: I would say often in our cinematic stories we have heroes who know they’re going to lose and yet they carry on the valiant fight anyway.

Craig: The heroes do.

John: The villains–

Craig: The villains never do.

John: Well, you know what? We’ve just had Wicked. We’ve just reformed the Wicked Witch of the West.

Craig: Yes, but that’s not–

John: That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Craig: No. This devil, this Satan doesn’t seem to be– he’s like he missed those pages. I assume everybody else has read it and then no one wants to tell him. It’s a preordained loss. That’s Satan for you.

John: We also have like the South Park incarnation of Satan, which is basically packaging up all these things and then making him a sad, lonely figure.

Craig: Also a musical theater figure, which is like the best.

John: Absolutely the best.

Craig: Yes, he just wants love.

John: Importantly, we should say that our modern conception of Satanism, and really Satan, is that there are cults who are there who are trying to bring about the end times, hell on earth. He has his minions on earth, which is, without that, there’s really no story to tell.

Craig: Satan is constantly using us to try and get his way and there are the versions where we never actually meet Satan. There are versions where we do, so for instance in Constantine, we meet Lucifer and he’s quite annoyed actually that his son is trying to get back because his son is going to take over his throne or something. Then there are versions where Satan is walking around among us and just by lying and manipulating gets us to just be evil and that would be The Devil’s Advocate where, “I’m a fan of man.” God is an absentee landlord. That is a great line.

John: It’s a great line.

Craig: Yes, it’s a great line.

John: Let’s go back into the roots of Satan and Satanism. This idea of an existential cosmic evil makes sense. It’s always sort of been there and so there’s always been some embodiment, some agent behind misfortune, it’s useful to believe that. It’s useful to believe that there’s some force that created the universe, some fatherly figure or motherly figure who is shepherding us all, but also that there’s a villain out there who is responsible for all the bad things that happen to us. You see that across all ancient mythologies.

Craig: Absolutely. Nyx was the Greek goddess of shadow, I believe, and she gave birth to a bunch of children, discord, war, disease, famine, all the baddies.

John: Then we have Hades who rules over the underworld, so the idea of like ruling over the land of the dead, you sort of combine and conflate these things.

Craig: Hades is a little bit more management than the traditional Judeo-Christian sower of evil. In American tradition, because we go all the way back to our Puritans who came over and Puritans, a lot of people think the Puritans left England because the English wouldn’t let them be freely religious. The problem was that Puritans were too religious. The discrimination was, “You guys are way too religious.” They were like, “Well, we want to be as insanely religious as we want.”

John: As hardcore as we want.

Craig: As hardcore as we want. “We’re going to go.” They really, really had a thing about Satan. They were very much convinced that he walks around. Today we indeed have churches who refer to Satan all the time.

John: Go back to the ancient roots of things too. You have, other religions like Zoroastrianism, had the sense of there’s an evil, there’s a balancing force of evil that’s out there. The idea of a duality between the good and the bad makes sense. You can understand why it’s naturally there. When you have a monotheistic religion like our Abrahamic traditions, it’s understandable that they would feel like, okay, well, what’s the counterbalancing force there?

Craig: Especially if you start to organize yourself, then you need something to scare people with. Jesus was like, “Here’s all this wonderful positive stuff. It’s really difficult to do. You have to be poor, you have to put everybody else first, you have to allow them to hit you and not hit back.” And everybody that came after him was like, “Great. Also, you have to give the church your money and you have to follow our rules or you will be sent to hell. If we don’t like you and you’re saying things we don’t enjoy, like for instance, the earth revolves around the sun, for instance-

John: Yes, heresy.

Craig: -clearly, Satan is working through you.” That’s a nice way to dehumanize somebody and burn them alive.

John: Yes, it’s good. Now, before we get to Christianity, we of course have Judaism, and we have the Old Testament, and we have all the other things that didn’t make it into the official Old Testament. Going back to your Bar Mitzvah days.

Craig: My Hebrew school days.

John: Your Hebrew school days. There’s not a lot of Satan there. There’s the idea of a Satan, which is any sort of adversary, it’s like an obstacle there, and they would use Satan as a verb, like to oppose. It’s not the same thing.

Craig: It was not a thing. I remember asking my rabbi about it because we grew up, everybody watches cartoons, you see the red devil with the pitchfork. Why a pitchfork? I don’t know.

John: Actually pulled from Poseidon is what they’re thinking.

Craig: Maybe. I don’t know why.

John: Maybe the trident of Poseidon.

Craig: Barbed tail, not sure why. I remember him saying, “We don’t even really have a hell.” There’s like a theory of a place you go if you’re really really bad, where it’s just like cold and empty and it’s a wasteland and you’re lonely. We didn’t have that personified guy, the guy who sits there and laughs as you burn and burn and burn, it was just more like, you’re going to be disconnected from other people and you’ll be miserable. Which is enough for me.

John: Yes, we had bad people and bad forces in the Old Testament. The snake in the Garden of Eden is often matched up to Satan, but there’s no direct connection there.

Craig: No, that was– he was not. Yes, it was just more temptation.

John: Temptation. Throughout the Middle Ages, you don’t see a lot of the devil, you don’t see a lot of Satan. If you see him it’s as a comic character, like a pathetic character, and just the same way we have a devil versus the Devil, it’s sort of a blurry line between the two of them. Book of Revelations, you mentioned before, is where we first start to really get into this notion of this capital S Satan of Armageddon. He’s this big third-act villain. It’s important to sort of put the Book of Revelations in context because I think the movies we’re going to be talking about will reference it.

Craig: All the time. It’s the worst book.

John: It is referring to specifically the Roman Empire, which it was written in. Even 666 is actually probably referenced to Nero rather than to any other sort of thing.

Craig: Likely was written by somebody who was mentally ill. It has all the hallmarks of somebody who experiences schizophrenic breaks, is hallucinatory, or I don’t know, it was John of something who was writing Revelations. Maybe that he was just snacking on shrooms because it sure feels shroomy to me. It feels altered. The imagery does correspond a lot to the way people experience hallucinatory images when they take drugs. It’s an incredibly unreliable book, even more so than all the other ones that are also ridiculous in their own way.

John: One of the things that’s different is though, like the rest of the Bible is a history and this is a prognostication of things to come.

Craig: It’s not gospel. A bunch of people kept telling the same story about what happened with Jesus and disagreed slightly from time to time.

John: Sure. That’s why you have four copies.

Craig: Then this guy was like, “Yes, yes, great.”

John: Let’s say what’s going to come.

Craig: I’ve seen, yes, I see the whore of Babylon.

John: He’s mapping out the future seasons.

Craig: Then she’s riding with a host of lions screaming and I’m like, “Get off the drugs, buddy.”

John: Early modern church starts to personify in the season. It’s increasingly powerful. It’s really with John Calvin, Martin Luther. It’s less of a metaphor of like, of temptation or wickedness, but actually an individual. Then of course we have John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is sort of mapping that out. It’s important to understand Paradise Lost is literature. It’s not actually canonical Bible anything.

Craig: No. It’s a story. Calvin was definitely– Look, here in the United States, we’re all still living in the shadow of John Calvin and his crazy ideas.

John: Yes. 2013, a YouGov poll found that 57% of Americans believe in the literal devil compared to 18% of British people, which is just such a shocking difference.

Craig: The answer is again, Britain said, “Go away.”

John: That’s true.

Craig: “Leave. Please leave. Stop saying things like babies are evil because they were simply predetermined to be predestined to be evil. Stop it. Just go. Go away.” I’m not surprised. I’m fascinated by the 18% of British people who are like, “Yeah, I do believe the devil is real.” It seems like such an unpopular thing to talk about in the UK.

John: Also, the British people are also living in popular culture. They’re living in a global popular culture that’s often dominated by American stuff. They’re seeing the three movies we’re going to be talking about.

Craig: True.

John: It’s possible that that’s the influence.

Craig: They’re movies.

John: They are movies.

Craig: They’re movies.

John: Milton’s Paradise Lost is a book.

Craig: I know. I know. Ghostbusters also is a movie. Do you think more Americans believe in– It seems like more Americans probably believe in angels than in Satan.

John: Probably so. I want the polls. I want the polls. People love angels.

Craig: People love angels.

John: They love angels. They love ghosts.

Craig: They do.

John: They do.

Craig: It’s like the idea of children flitting around on wings, just saving them from stuff or I don’t know, making sure Starbucks opens up on time, whatever people pray for.

John: It’s a lot. I think we also, as we get into this, there’s a weird connection to the Catholic church and the Catholic church, not that the modern Catholic church has done a lot of talking about Satan or Satanism, but I think there’s some sense in like the Catholic church being organized and like that it’s a secret conspiracy that they’re hiding from you. The movies we’re going to be talking about often have Catholic priests who are, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but–“

Craig: Yes. What we find when we’re telling this story is that the Catholic church is incredibly useful if you’re a screenwriter because A, it is powerful and it is wealthy. Also, it’s the oldest of the traditions, particularly in the United States. It feels like it goes back to the beginning. The Holy Roman Empire essentially was Catholic. That was what it was. They speak Latin. It has this ancient vibe. It’s almost like they’re as old as the devil himself. Therefore, we need to go into these old scrolls and talk about these things that only the Catholic priests would have access to.

John: I wonder if there’s also an aspect of racism there because you look at the Protestant foundations of the United States and the Puritans and all this stuff, and you had this influx of immigrants who were largely bringing in Catholic traditions, which were also Christian, but not the same kind of Christian. It’s a way of differentiating. We obviously have anti-Catholic leagues. We have this sense of anti-Catholicism. I wonder if some of that gets folded into why we’re thinking about them as being involved with all this.

Craig: Yes. There could be some catholiphobia going on there. I’m not sure it’s racism, per se, because in the United States, there was tremendous fear of white Catholics. John Kennedy, the big thing about him was like, no one’s going to vote for a Catholic. As if that were a thing, it used to be.

What’s interesting is that in our country, we’re predominantly not a Catholic country. Satan is talked about constantly in our Protestant churches, in our Southern Baptist churches. Satan is a massive thing. It’s sort of their big selling point, and yet it feels like a different Satan than the Catholic Satan, which is like older, creepier, more in the shadows. The Protestant Satan comes up to you and offers you a weed.

John: Yes, absolutely. Before we get into our actual movies, let’s talk about the Antichrist because that’s a thing that’s sort of come up in, I think, all three of these, which is the Antichrist is mentioned four times in the New Testament as sort of a false prophet to take the role of Jesus. Again, it’s sort of like a lowercase antichrist, it’s not sort of an individual, it’s like sort of anybody who’s standing in the way of the prophecy of Jesus. According to my Wikipedia research, the first big reference to all this is 400 CE, which is Martin of Tours saying, “There is no doubt that the Antichrist, has already been born, firmly established already in his early years. He will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power.”

Craig: I think it was a running theme. Every generation is like, “This is it.”

John: This is it. It’s always the end times.

Craig: There has to be a term for generational narcissism. Maybe that is the term.

John: Sure.

Craig: We always think that we’re the ones living at the end of the world or in end times because we’re the special ones. No, we’re not. Ever.

John: Ever. And yet, even as we’re saying this, it does feel like it.

Craig: Yes, like probably it is happening.

John: All right. Before we get into our movies, because we’re going to focus on three movies and obviously they’re not the first movies or only movies to talk about Satan or Satanism, we should talk first about Faust, because right from the start of cinema, there were a bunch of movies about Faust. Let’s talk about the Faust story, which is really the devil’s bargain. It’s the idea of a pact with the devil.

Craig: Selling your soul becomes this big thing. The soul itself, the concept of the soul is a very murky one that, at least in Christianity, it’s murky until it becomes part of this bargain story where it’s now this thing you can give away. Again, it’s one of those stories where everyone knows the ending and yet somehow people keep falling for it over and over and over.

This goes to even in the American Black tradition, blues. it was always, thought like this blues man sells his soul to the devil and so that he could play this well. I’m like, but you know how that’s going to end and then lo and behold, you get movies like Angel Heart where it’s how it ends. Every time.

John: Every time.

Craig: Every single time. No matter what. I can’t understand why anyone makes that deal.

John: No.

Craig: Bad deal.

John: Bad deal. Bad deal.

Craig: Totally.

John: We can understand where that story comes from because if you look back at like Rumpelstiltskin or sort of the classic fable myth kind of things, there’s that sense of like, we’re going to make a deal and that person is going to come collect on that deal. Always there.

Craig: Well, what’s interesting is like the Rumpelstiltskin story is a good devil’s bargain story, except in the end he loses. That story is sort of like, this guy took advantage of this poor woman who wanted a child and made the deal and she spun the straw into gold and — oh, that was it, because she just wanted to stay alive.

John: How dare she.

Craig: Right? He lets her turn straw into gold, but his price is, “I’m going to take your baby,” which is crazy. Also, what are you going to do with it? Then she figures out a way to beat him. The whole point of the devil’s story is you lose, every time.

John: That is a whole different class of devil stories. For this episode, I really want to talk about the Satan that is Satanism and how that all fits together.

Craig: I need a chorus going while we talk. [hums] There’s always a chorus. [hums]

John: Latin, you couldn’t understand, but it’s just creepy because it’s there.

Craig: Exactly.

John: The three movies I want to talk about are Rosemary’s Baby from 1968.

Craig: So good.

John: The Exorcist from 1973.

Craig: My favorite.

John: And The Omen from 1976.

Craig: Also a movie.

John: Also a movie. The commonalities, I should say, we’re going to put links to the scripts we found for these three things. You can take a look through those. One thing I’m struck by is they’re all about the horror of parenthood. It’s interesting that our window into these stories of Satanism and satanic cults is about parenthood, which is specific. I guess there’s an aspect of like Antichrist being born. Parents are just a natural thing. If you were to even take out the Satanism of it all, they’re all unified about stories of how scary it is to be a parent.

Craig: Even though they shift gears and sort of concentrate on the father in The Omen, they are all about the conception and then how to deal with the fact that this symbol of innocence, a child, is in fact evil. That contrast is horrifying to us. Even though in Rosemary’s Baby, there is no child until the very, very end and you never get to see him. But, “he has his father’s eyes.”

John: He does.

Craig: It is the year one.

John: We’re starting in 1968, which I’m going to count as the ‘70s because it’s really more– By that point, we’re in the ‘70s.

Craig: It’s ‘70s vibe.

John: Let’s talk about the ‘70s vibe because looking at these movies, they do feel like they’re responding to a thing that’s happening in American culture. We’re starting to realize like, oh, the year 2000 is not that far off. That feels like a marker. That millennial change feels like, oh, 2000 years ago, we had Christ being born, and so there’s that aspect. We have Ouija boards. We have that sense of like, there’s a spiritual outside world there that feels different. We have changing social structures. We have the women’s liberation movement. It’s a different time, so it’s not surprising that we feel like there’s some end-of-times angst going in here. What else about the ‘70s strikes you?

Craig: Well, that was pretty much America’s low point. The late ‘60s, early ‘70s, our cities were suffused by riots, racism. Even though the Civil Rights Act had been passed, the echo of what occurred after that was violent and long and led to multiple assassinations. Presidents were being assassinated. Civil rights leaders were being assassinated. Candidates for president were being assassinated. Cities were on fire. Crime was very high, and there was a sense that America had fallen into, you remember when we were kids in the ‘70s, pollution.

There were ads that were just basically begging people to stop throwing garbage out of their car window as they drove. There were also ads that said, “It’s 10:00 PM, do you know where your children are?” What the hell was going on where parents had to be reminded by television? Maybe it was five o’clock. I can’t remember what the time was. Like, “Hey, by the way, remember? You also have kids. Find them.” Everything was falling apart, and the notion that there was some explanation to this, that there was evil in the air made sense.

You had the Night Stalker, and you had Son of Sam, and serial killers-

John: I agree, yes.

Craig: -they were always there, but I think in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we suddenly became very aware of them.

John: I think we were also aware of conspiracies and things happening behind the scenes, and we had investigative journalism that was uncovering things. The idea that there is a group of people, a cabal, who has secret plans feels like a very natural fit for the time.

Craig: Nixon.

John: Nixon, yes.

Craig: It was happening. So it feels like a smart thing to do. America was still quite religious, and also, you were starting to see shifts in the politics of motherhood. The birth control pill was available. The idea of being a mother was now difficult. People were looking–

John: The idea of choosing when to become a mother.

Craig: That’s right. Single parenthood was now– single parenthood prior to the ‘60s and ‘70s was– and you and I both remember how, even in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Murphy Brown, the sitcom–

John: A woman who chose to have a baby by herself.

Craig: She was yelled at by a vice presidential candidate.

John: Yeah, she was the Antichrist, though. All right, let’s talk about Rosemary’s Baby. Written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin’s novel. I’ve not read the novel. Apparently, it’s a very faithful adaptation.

Craig: It’s a really good book.

John: Development-wise, we know that Polanski wrote a 272-page screenplay for the film in approximately three weeks. I guess it got cut down.

Craig: I’m going to go with cocaine on that one.

John: I think it’s a safe bet that some cocaine was involved. It apparently was very faithful, and it lifted dialogue and stuff directly out of the source material. In our story, we’re following Rosemary Woodhouse, who’s played by Mia Farrow, and her husband, Guy, played by John Cassavetes moving into a new apartment in New York City, they meet their neighbors, Ruth Gordon among them-

Craig: The best.

John: -iconically. It doesn’t start out being about a woman wanting to have a baby.

Craig: No.

John: Talk to us about your experience of Rosemary’s Baby.

Craig: It feels at first like a story about a little bit of a fish out of water, because Rosemary, as Mia Farrow plays her, she almost has that mid-Atlantic accent. She’s very refined, and she’s very delicate. Her husband feels urbane. She is not so much, and she’s trying to figure out how to be a good wife, and she’s trying to figure out how to fit into this world which is–

John: A young wife.

Craig: A young wife, which is very metropolitan, and there are the weirdos down the hall. It’s a pretty good start. We would never be able to get away with it now. The length of time you have to just feel the discomfort of feeling out of place. It also allows the film to zero in on her perspective. Much of the movie, you’re with her, feeling how she feels. Then some things start to go wrong.

John: Notably so, husband is an actor, so he goes off, he’s cast, and things are sort of percolating for him. She’s being left alone more, and the neighbors are starting to intercede. I didn’t go back to him when we watched this, but at what point does she have the chocolate mousse that sends her into slumber?

Craig: The mouse.

John: The mouse.

Craig: The mouse.

John: That sends her into slumber.

Craig: I think it’s middle-ish because there’s someone who dies. I can’t remember. There’s like an early death in the movie that’s very suspicious. It does strike me, we talked about agency recently, and so much of this movie is about somebody trying to find their agency, and everybody keeps taking it away. Ruth Gordon is concerned that she’s not– “Oh, you’re not feeling well, you’re not eating enough, I made this special mouse for you,” which is a mousse. Everybody then begins the gaslighting process. That is followed by one of the most terrifying sex scenes I’ve ever put on.

John: Yeah, it’s a rape.

Craig: Oh, definitely a rape. Also a monster rape. We should probably talk about Roman Polanski for a second because Roman Polanski raped a girl. He raped a child and fled the country, and has never returned. Is he still alive?

John: He’s still alive.

Craig: He’s still alive. And this town only seemed to acknowledge that recently, but even, it was like maybe 10 years ago or so, he got like an honorary Oscar or something, and everybody stood up and applauded, and you’re like, ”The hell is going on here?” Roman Polanski definitely falls into the, okay, person who did very bad things, person who made very good movies.

And that scene in particular is disturbing because it’s oddly restrained. There’s not nudity. There’s just this sudden flash of this thing. Then there’s a delirium that follows and paranoia.

John: Yes. The Satanism of the movie comes from this sense that this pregnancy that comes out of this rape, that there’s something wrong about it, that she’s not being told everything.

Again, we’re locked into a very limited POV, which is really helpful for our storytelling here. It sort of leads to the paranoia here. And yet the edges of the conspiracy are nebulous, which is actually a case with all these things. You never quite know, how big is this? Who’s behind this? Whose plan really was this? How far back did it go? I think that’s one of the hallmarks of these movies is that by being vague, they’re sort of more sinister.

Craig: Sure. The less the more scared you are. There is this entire genre of, I’ll just shorthand call lifetime movies, where a wife or a girlfriend is being gaslit by her husband. Other people join in but she’s like, “No, I know it’s–“ and then there are movies like, was it Flightplan? Is that the one where Jodie Foster is in a plane with her daughter and then her daughter disappears and they’re like, “You never had a daughter on the plane. What are you talking about?”

That’s this thing that echoes how people treat women in society. We now create this wonderful allegory and then you discover how mundane it all is. It’s the mundanity of Rosemary’s Baby that’s so brilliant. When she finally comes to understand what’s happened, everybody’s weirdly relaxed. They’re also so normal. You not only have Ruth Gordon playing the lovely old lady who lives down the hall, but you have just like, there’s this guy from Asia who’s taking photographs and he’s just like a tourist almost. You have Ruth Gordon’s husband, who’s just an old goof. Then there’s like women that look like from the steno pool. The evil, it says, is everywhere you look.

John: Let’s move on to The Exorcist. The Exorcist is 1973 and by that expression, you love The Exorcist. My recollection of The Exorcist is having watched it in like little small segments when it was broadcast on TV because I was too scared and my parents would be out of town. The Exorcist again is a story of the terror of parenthood and the terror of this child being possessed, literally possessed by the devil. What are the responsibilities of a parent?

Craig: Even worse, she’s possessed by a demon.

John: I’m sorry.

Craig: So it’s worse because the devil–

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: One of the things that they did that was so smart, it comes from the book, William Peter Blatty.

John: Yeah, so Blatty wrote the novel and the screenplay.

Craig: Right, brilliant. William Friedkin, of course, directing it. The entity that has occupied her is very powerful and not even close to being the devil, which makes it sort of worse. What you immediately note in the small amount of time between Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, the gulf between how vulgar and how shocking things are in The Exorcist. Mia Farrow’s got this like, “What is happening? I don’t believe you. What?”

John: Meanwhile, Reagan is vomiting.

Craig: And masturbating with a crucifix, and using the most foul language possible, and just doing these things. She’s a child. The thought that we could, some of the scenes in The Exorcist now, you simply would not– you wouldn’t even be able to get past the script. People would be like, “We’re going to– No.” Are you going to have your intimacy coordinator come in and talk about how this is going to work? But it also was graphic, deeply graphic in ways that Rosemary’s Baby wouldn’t have even thought of.

John: Because I remember even long before I’d actually seen any clips of The Exorcist, I was aware of the tropes. I was aware of the spinning heads and the vomits and the crawling on the ceilings, because it was just part of popular culture. It was a meme before we had a word for memes.

Craig: I watched The Exorcist in the most ill-advised fashion. I was 9 or 10, which is the perfect age to be deeply traumatized by The Exorcist. I was staying at my friend Eric Freeman’s house, and he had a basement. This was 1980. There was a service in– that’s right, 1980, there was a service in New York called WHT. New York infamously did not have cable for a long time, because of like–

John: It was hard to plug wires and stuff in.

Craig: It was laws. It was just laws and the mob or something, I don’t know, for some ridiculous reason. Then there was a service, WHT, that you would pay for, and it would basically send an over-the-air, scrambled signal, and then you had a little de-scrambler. They would run movies. They would also run some soft-core porn after hours that’s when I also saw porn for the first time. Eric Freeman’s basement was like– it was the hottest club in town.

I knew nothing about what I was in for, and it was so impactful upon me. To this day, it still scares me. I know it shouldn’t, but just seeing her face sometimes scares me.

John: Let’s jump ahead, then, to The Omen. We’ll talk about this for all three of them, and sort of their financial success, and why that’s cemented their place here. Let’s talk about The Omen, because I’d never seen The Omen, so I watched it last night. Written by David Seltzer, directed by Richard Donner. This is where we get the popular culture or knowledge of 666 because they’ve mentioned it a lot in the course of the movie because it wasn’t known at that point. People didn’t know Book of Revelations 666, so they had to explain it a lot in the movie.

Story follows Gregory Peck, who is an ambassador, first we see him in Rome, then he’s coming into London. He and his wife have a young child. Only he knows that it’s actually adopted, because their child died when it was born. This is Damien, which is such a great name. It became iconic in terms of the demon child.

Craig: Basically, we were like, let’s take the word demon, and change it to Damien.

John: Perfect.

Craig: Yes, that sort of goes to why, to me, The Omen feels like somebody said, “Get me Rosemary’s Baby, get me The Exorcist, blend them, and let’s see what comes out the tube.”

John: I’ll try to find a link to it, but I was looking through one article, blog post that was arguing that the movie was deeply impacted by one episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which actually, an episode that had many of the same beats in terms of like politician raising the child, who is the Antichrist. This child, Damien, sinister things happen around them, a nanny hangs herself in a really graphic fashion.

Craig: That’s the best scene.

John: It’s the best scene.

Craig: “It’s all for you.”

John: It’s all for you. There’s a photographer who is tracking the family, who keeps noticing, funny that all these images are showing up in photos they’re taking of you.

Craig: Then he dies.

John: Then he dies. My frustration in watching it is that I really enjoyed how it started, I loved the filmmaking, and that ‘70s feel, it’s like this handheld–

Craig: Real grimy.

John: Yes, it was great to see, and then the movie gets dumber as it goes along.

Craig: Unfortunately, it does, because there’s nowhere for it to go. In the end, Rosemary’s Baby is about Rosemary. It’s not about the baby. The ending of Rosemary’s Baby is so horrifying, because all it is a mother who can’t help but be in love with her child, even though her child is the Antichrist. Because it is about motherhood, and it is about lack of agency.

Rosemary’s Baby is almost like, love is so powerful here that it doesn’t matter what happens, you’re going to love your child. The Exorcist is about saving a child. It’s about a priest who’s started to lose faith, and who feels like he hasn’t been able to help anyone, including his own mother, finally being able to do what Jesus did, give his life to save an innocent. The Omen is just sort of, just the kid is the problem.

John: The kid is the problem, and Gregory Peck ultimately doesn’t have to wrestle that much with it. He’s like, “Oh, I can’t kill my son,” but he can take those daggers. He’s ready to do it.

Craig: Yes, that’s the problem is, you’re just waiting, and then it’s just sort of the same thing of, okay, I can’t do it, I can’t kill him, and so then you end up, everybody dies, and Damien’s the devil who runs everything. That’s the thing. I just think it’s so much more remarkable that the ending of a movie like that, be the parent chooses to pick the child up and love it.

John: Yes.

Craig: That movie just got a little goofy.

John: Yes.

Craig: I don’t like saying bad things.

John: No, not a bit. We should stress that all three of these movies were giant hits.

Craig: Huge.

John: Phenomenons, and they were lines around the block, which is the reason why they’re so anchored into place in popular culture in terms of establishing what we mean by Satanism. I would posit that we would not have our understanding of Satan and Satanism without these movies, in the same way, we didn’t used to be so afraid of going into the water until Jaws. It created a thing that is actually not really a thing. The moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music and all that stuff wouldn’t have happened without these three movies.

Craig: It would not. Just as our understanding of who Santa Claus is because Coca-Cola drew a picture of a guy, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a song written by an advertising firm for a department store in Chicago, I believe. We think these things have been there forever. They have not. We think that there’s been this concept, and it hasn’t. It came out of those movies. It came out of that time.

Then you’re absolutely right. What happened almost immediately, in terms of speed of a nation moving, was something called the Satanic Panic. These movies presented a situation where there was, not in the case of The Exorcist, but in the other two, a kind of conspiracy of people to bring about Satan in our world, who would then do bad things.

Very shortly thereafter, people started to say, I think that there’s a conspiracy to bring Satan out in our world. Just as they did with Galileo and everybody else, it became a great way to take people that no one liked and accuse them. It was Salem Witch Trials writ large. America got so stupid. We think of America now as stupid. No, no, we have been stupider than we are now.

John: Let’s jump forward to where we’re at now and the sequels to these movies. There were other movies that were in their same place. We saw Satanism in our television shows to some degree. Our serial killers that we would put in our stories, might sometimes be satanic. Right now, we’re not actually doing a lot with Satan or Satanism in our movies. Longlegs, head nods in that direction. We have a movie like Hereditary, isn’t Satanism, but it’s adjacent to it.

Craig: It’s adjacent but that feels more like possessory. Again, The Exorcist was about a possession, and the whole concept of exorcism, which is a very Latin word, is connected deeply to the Catholic Church, and it’s the idea that you can be possessed by something. There have been so many possession movies, all of which, ultimately for me, I just wonder, I wouldn’t know, it just feels so weird. It’s like making a movie about two young people falling in love on an enormous boat that’s going to hit an iceberg and sink. Now, do something original, and you’re like, I can’t. It’s done, as good as it can be done.

You’re right, Satan has gotten goofier now because we sort of, again, like The Devil’s Advocate, it’s broad, and it’s very winky, and sort of like, “Satan,” come on. When you see Peter Stormare’s depiction of Satan in Constantine, it’s almost like they said, “All right, you saw how big Pacino got, go bigger.” So Satan becomes broad because he presumes we’ve all heard of it, we all know it, and then it’s almost like he’s rolling his eyes about 666. It’s old-fashioned, it’s hokey.

John: It’s hokey, and I also wonder whether we’re reaching for other forms of cosmic horror. It’s not like we’re making Cthulhu movies all the time, but there’s other senses of just existential dread out there that don’t have to be so tied into one specific mythology there. Maybe we should be reaching for other ways of acknowledging the horror of the unknowable darkness.

Craig: Yes, and it may be that because we’re American, our tradition is so steeped in Satanism, going back to Salem and all the rest. It’s hard for us to feel the same things that we would feel about, say, Cthulhu, even though, of course, also a creation of an American.

John: Yes, 100%. I think we should also maybe wrap this up by saying, of course, this is all based on our very sort of Western views of what Satan is just because it comes out of that tradition. I’d love to hear what the Asian equivalent of this is. I guess we have The Ring.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: Yes, some of those movies. Again, so we’re talking about this otherworldly horror that is unknowable and unstoppable.

Craig: Which, again, draws a lot of it, it seems to me, from The Exorcist. We are all people. We are all scared of the dark. It doesn’t matter where we grow up. We’re scared of the dark, we’re scared of the unknown, and we’re scared of ghosts. Japanese horror does a particularly good job of figuring out how to make ghosts really scary as well. Korean cinema does a beautiful job with this as well. Every culture has its nightmare creatures.

John: Absolutely, a way of showing those primal fears in a cinematic form.

Craig: Lord of the Rings. Sauron. That’s Sauron, Satan, nightmare. That’s on–

John: Absolutely. I say it as opposed to like a Voldemort who is a character who has a full, rich backstory and does it like, even though there’s a cabal trying to bring him back to life, there’s a little of that, but it’s not the same thing.

Craig: No, because Voldemort has not always been. The idea is that Satan was here before man. Before God made man, and Satan makes a bet with God about Job, and there’s all this stuff where it’s quite clear he’s floating above all of us or underneath all of us, I suppose.

John: All right, we have a couple of listener questions that are on topic.

Craig: Great.

John: Eric writes, “As you said, in a good screenplay, the protagonist goes from ignorance of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. It seems to me that in most movies, that involves a process of gradually embracing a positive truth that the protagonist needs to live a better life. What about movies with tragic endings, in particular horror films, where the protagonists end up dead, or at least much worse off than how they started the movie? Are they also still gradually learning to accept and embody a theme? It just happens to be a theme that destroys them instead of making them better. How does the journey from anti-theme to theme play out in The Exorcist for the protagonist, Father Damien, as he approaches his tragic ending?”

Craig: That one’s pretty easy. It is just a straight-up guy who’s questioning his faith. He has doubts. He is not sure how he is supposed to be an effective priest to anyone. He’s certainly not the person that the Catholic Church is thrilled about to go help this girl. They send– the exorcist is somebody else. It’s not him, it’s Max von Sydow. He’s the exorcist, but he dies. It’s really there so that Father Karras, at some point, can decide, “I’m going to commit myself to saving somebody at any cost, even if it’s my own life.”

And so in his final words, he says, “Take me, take me, take me.” It happens. Then he throws himself out the window and goes down those amazing stairs. That is about as clear of a going from anti-theme because in the beginning, he’s like, “I’m not very good at being a priest.”

John: I think other sort of horror films. the first Alien is a horror film. Ripley’s journey is great, to get singled out and actually rise to the occasion in ways that embody a lot of the themes we’re supposed to be doing here. In a lot of other horror films, especially slasher films, you can say that, yes, it’s actually tougher to chart the journey of that character. They’re surviving, but are they growing and changing in a way that is meaningful? Sometimes, yes, but a lot of very successful movies in that genre, you’re not seeing those same dynamics.

Craig: No. Myself, I’m not a big student of those films. Sometimes, when you look at how people describe the mechanics of screenwriting, you should also ask, what kind of movies do they make? I talked about the mechanics of screenwriting all the time, but there are kinds of movies that I’m not that into. I’m not that into– I was never a big fan of the Halloween films or the Friday the 13th films, because it didn’t really do anything for me, mostly for this reason. Didn’t seem like there was much there other than, “I’m not going to let you kill me.”

John: Absolutely, the final girl, “I will survive.”

Craig: The final girl.

John: I’ll see essays that really talk about the dynamics of that, and it’s great. I’m so glad you’re finding meaning in that. It just doesn’t resonate with me.

Craig: Right, and so what I would say to Eric is, you might not see this applying to some of these movies, and that’s okay because that is not really a skeleton key for everything. I think I pretty clearly said this is for mainstream storytelling of a certain sort.

John: I can imagine a better version of The Omen that has a lot more of that character arching, too. It’s not like the father’s desperate for a child and then to have to decide to kill the child.

Craig: It could be better.

John: It could be better.

Craig: It could be better.

John: Emily asks, “What’s the difference really between thriller and horror?”

Craig: Well, it’s whatever we want to say it is. Ultimately, it’s terminology.

John: There’s overlap between the two, but there’s a lot of thrillers that are horrifying, and there’s horror things that actually aren’t thrillers in the sense there’s not suspense. They’re just dark.

Craig: Thrillers, in my mind, are designed to quicken your pulse and get you chewing on your fingernails because you’re nervous. Horror movies are supposed to make you look away because you’re scared. Those are the two–

John: Sure.

Craig: Those are supposed to scare.

John: Absolutely, because there are political thrillers. I guess you could imagine a political horror movie, but it’s like it’s not the, it’d be very different. Michael, our final question. “I wanted to get your opinion on horror films never doing well during awards season. It seems like regardless of the quality of horror films or the performances in them, there’s never any Oscar buzz around them. Does Hollywood hate horror?”

Craig: Does Hollywood hate horror? Hollywood loves horror.

John: Loves horror.

Craig: That’s why they keep making horror films. What you’re asking is-

John: It’s so much money. It’s so cheap.

Craig: -do Oscar voters hate horror? I don’t know if they hate it. They just don’t seem to be that into it, but again–

John: If you look at the films that have incredible quality, they still do get singled out. The Silence of the Lambs, horror film. Well, horror film, thriller, both.

Craig: Thriller. It’s a thriller-

John: It’s scary.

Craig: -with scary moments. Look, the genre films, yes, of course, like comedies, they are generally overlooked in favor of the Oscars to some extent become about these smaller movies a lot. They’ve expanded it to make it a little bit better. Repeatedly, we end up in a situation where, yes, big movies that are very scary and have really lasting, deep impact on culture aren’t even considered.

John: No.

Craig: Because they’re genre and the Oscars are snobby.

John: Also, let’s be realistic that the makers of those horror films aren’t trying to win those Oscars and they’re not doing the work that it would take to win those Oscars.

Craig: Because they know it won’t work.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s a trick of the day problem, yes.

Craig: I think it would be fair to say like, “Look, you make a big comedy and everybody laughs and they have a good time. You also know, we’re not going to spend money on an Oscar campaign, it’s just not happening.” The Oscars are for dramas and they’re for a certain drama that appeals to a certain age of people.

John: It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing, I’m reaching back, I’ve probably, this has been my one cool thing, maybe three times, but it’s so topical that I need to do it, which is the short story Gifted by Simon Rich, which is about these parents who discover their child– the child is born with horns. It is the Antichrist. They are so obsessed with getting it into Dalton to get it into a really good private school and to make sure their son’s life is as awesome as it can be. It is just hilarious. It’s just a great reminder of, for all the tropes you set up in a genre, the antitropes can be just hilarious.

Craig: So funny. My one cool thing this week is a television series. You know me, I don’t watch a lot of things. I’m two-thirds of the way through, it’s called Say Nothing or in the parlance of the show, Say Nothin’. It is a series about a woman named Dolours Price, who was a member of the IRA and most infamously perpetrated car bombings in London and was imprisoned and went on a hunger strike and was force-fed and tortured and then sent back.

It’s also about Gerry Adams, who, and this is fascinating. I’ve never seen this before. At the end, so Gerry Adams, this show is based on a book, and Gerry Adams runs the IRA, he’s going through all this stuff, and at the end of every episode, it comes up and it says, “To this day, Gerry Adams denies ever being a member of the IRA or participating in any violent activities.” That disclaimer, I’m sure Gerry Adams’ lawyers thought would be real good for him. It is the most damning disclaimer I’ve– and the fact that they repeat it at the end of every episode is so brutal. I think it’s just beautifully done.

John: Great.

Craig: It’s gorgeously performed and filmed, and the writing is excellent. Josh Zetumer is the showrunner here. Just beautiful work. My kind of show. Congratulations to everybody that clearly worked so hard on Say Nothing. Oh, and also now, because I’ve been watching it, I think I can do this, and if you’re from Northern Ireland, please go ahead and write in and tell me I blew it. This is the phrase I’ve been working on, is do it now. Okay, ready? “Do it nye.” How is it?

John: Nice.

Craig: Well, it may not be nice. We’re going to hear from some folks from Belfast. I want to hear how bad I did, or how good.

John: How good, How good. Where do we see that show?

Craig: That’s on Hulu.

John: Hulu.

Craig: On Hulu.

John: Hulu.

Craig: Hulu.

John: Hulu. That is our show for this week. Scripnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Chilelli, who did our very special outro this week. Matthew, thank you for this.

[music]

John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. It’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll 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 and drinkware. You’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Antichrist.

Craig: Oh, there’s more Antichrist?

John: Yes.

Craig: Good.

John: Good.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Craig, thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, the Antichrist today. Let’s figure out who we should– Who’s a good candidate for the Antichrist? Because, and we should also specify, which aspect, is it just supposed to be the son of Satan, or is it supposed to be the false prophet who leads us away from the true teachings of Jesus Christ? Do we need the person who seems evil, or the person who seems really good? There’s lots of ways we can go here, so what are some of your instincts?

Craig: Well, the way that people tend to treat this is somebody shows up who is really slick and appealing.

John: Up-facing the crowd, yes.

Craig: Everybody wants to vote for this person, this person seems great, but then casually starts to convert us all to a one-world government, which is the worst possible thing.

John: Yes, of course.

Craig: Like a one-town government or a one-state government. Why would everybody just– what? Okay, so one-world government’s the worst possible thing, and then they start doing horrible things, and of course, it’s over. The person who would be the most hysterical Antichrist to me would be Kirk Cameron.

John: Oh yes, that’d be great.

Craig: Kirk Cameron was a child actor on sitcoms in the ‘80s.

John: Growing Pains.

Craig: Became very, very religious, and then has dedicated his time since to a lot of evangelical Christianity, but also making these movies about the Antichrist. In those movies, he’s the hero who’s trying to stop everybody from believing in the Antichrist. That is what the Antichrist– that is the movie the Antichrist would be making to get the lens off of him.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: It’s very clever, see? That said, Elon Musk is a pretty decent candidate.

John: Mr. Beast. Name is right there.

Craig: Wow.

John: Mr. Beast, he’s doing all this good in the world.

Craig: What a put.

John: He’s helping blind people see. He’s giving away all this money.

Craig: Mr. Beast.

John: He’s obviously the most generous person on Earth.

Craig: You’re right. It’s sort of like in Angel Heart, Robert De Niro plays the devil, and he introduces himself as Louis Cypher.

John: Yes, can’t figure that out.

Craig: Lucifer.

John: Wow. Mind is blown.

Craig: Jeez Louise, come on devil, do better.

John: All right, so if we’re starting with somebody who’s already powerful, then Elon Musk or some other billionaire feels like a good choice. Taylor Swift in terms of her influence, in terms of her ability to get the young people motivated to do terrible things like vote.

Craig: This is why I think people get real keyed up about the UN. If you know anything about the United Nations, you know that the one thing you never have to worry about is the United Nations doing anything-

John: Oh, 100%.

Craig: -in a particularly effective, quick–

John: People want to think of the UN as like a government. Does it govern anything? No.

Craig: It’s the biggest Zoom meeting where nothing happens ever. Yet, because it smells of one world government, yes, the person, whoever’s running the UN, the Secretary General of the UN is always looked at as a possibility.

Then I think you’re right, in the modern times what’s happened is kids through rap culture and through hip hop culture have swung over to this idea of the Illuminati. They’re super into the Illuminati, when in fact, I don’t think there is– there seems to be some really screwed up parties going on.

John: I think we should talk about it because I didn’t know that was happening.

Craig: You and I, I think, we are on the outs, man. We have never been invited to anything like that, nor did we– We’re actually quite sweet in that, I’m sure you were like–

John: I’ve been invited to board game nights.

Craig: What? Yes, when you read that, you were like, “What? Really?” Yes, we play D&D and I do my puzzles. It turns out that some bad things are happening. That said, they aren’t satanic. That’s the whole point, they’re just people being jerks, and a jerk is a very mild term for the things that they were doing. They were being criminals and violent criminals. That’s always been a thing. Maybe people would think like Sean Combs, but he’s in prison now.

John: Sort of by definition, you want the Antichrist to have a lot of sway and power in popular culture and he at the moment does not.

Craig: Who are we all cheering for?

John: Obviously a president feels like a good candidate for an Antichrist because they have so much power. They can literally do a lot of things. They can start wars.

Craig: Donald Trump, it’s too obvious. He’s too clumsy, he’s like Mr. Magoo.

John: Yes, so like Hillary Clinton would be a better choice.

Craig: Well, Bill Clinton, really. The thing is–

John: Oh, he’s charming, yes.

Craig: That’s the thing. The devil is charming. When these charming– Justin Trudeau, there’s so much weird pretty privilege that turns into-

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: -pretty paranoia where we are terrified of these good-looking men, more so than women, it seems. Good-looking men who get a lot of power, you’re like, “Wait a second.”

John: Ryan Reynolds.

Craig: Ryan Reynolds. By the way, Ryan, the thing is, if we are going to have Satan, and it is Ryan Reynolds–

John: Satan or Antichrist, it could be a manifestation. It could be the son of the devil.

Craig: If it were, you want them to be Canadian and you want a nice– A nice Canadian Antichrist is going to be like, okay, it is one world and so we are going to– there are going to be more traffic lights and things. I’ve lived in Canada for a while now. We’re all going to drive the speed limit. We’re all going to drive like we have nowhere to go. This is my impression of a Vancouver driver. Just driving like I don’t need to get somewhere. That would be the worst of it. I think Ryan actually would be okay if he was in charge of the one world government. He does a really good job at the gin.

John: I think part of the challenge with the term Antichrist is that we think of it as being just like a polar opposite of Jesus Christ. Therefore it would have to be like, not humble, but like boasty and caring for only the rich and all this stuff. We can envision that, but it doesn’t actually– it’s unattractive. It doesn’t lead to power in any good way.

Craig: No. No. I wonder if Ryan’s going to hear this and just go, “What? I was just on the show.”

John: “I was just on the show.”

Craig: “I don’t need this. No.” Ryan Reynolds is not the Antichrist.

John: He’s not the Antichrist.

Craig: No, he’s not the Antichrist.

John: It would be, if you were the devil–

Craig: You would want to look like Ryan Reynolds.

John: Most men wouldn’t be upset with you.

Craig: I also want to look like Ryan. I don’t want to be the Antichrist. I just want to be able to do sit-ups.

John: Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Rosemary’s Baby – Screenplay
• The Exorcist – Screenplay
• The Omen – Screenplay
• Gifted by Simon Rich
• Say Nothing
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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