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: And this is Episode 637 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, Cowboy Carter is the new album by Beyonce. 27 tracks. Craig, I thought we might take a moment go through track-by-track listings.
Craig: Great.
John: I know you had some real thoughts about Jolene, which is her reinterpretation of Dolly Parton’s classic song Jolene. What is your take on Beyonce’s spin?
Craig: Beyonce did Jolene?
John: Beyonce did Jolene.
Craig: Oh.
John: Yeah, so it’s a reversal of the central don’t take my man. It’s like, don’t even think about taking my man.
Craig: That’s not what Jolene’s about though. But she changed the lyrics?
John: She did change the lyrics, with Dolly Parton’s permission and blessing.
Craig: Okay. That’s something else then.
John: It is something else then. Maybe we’ll save that for a future episode. Instead, today, let’s take a look at what movies you actually need to have seen in order to work in this business and how much is that a factor of your generation. We’ll consult the lists of the best movies of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and beyond. Then it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at the stories in the news and turn them into sellable properties.
Craig: And they do sell.
John: They do sell. They do sell. In fact, one of the stories we were going to talk through I had to take off the list because a mutual friend of ours is out pitching it right now.
Craig: Wowzers.
John: Wowzers. Plus, we’ll answer listener questions, because it’s been a minute since we’ve been together to do this.
Craig: Been a minute.
John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, let’s take a look at our thoughts on AI as of spring 2024, including how AI helped put together this episode.
Craig: Oh, no.
Drew Marquardt: I’m out of a job.
Craig: We’re all out of a job.
John: Spoiler for folks for aren’t Premium Members. Basically, compiling the lists of 100 top movies, you can think, oh, you go to a webpage for that, but it’s actually a giant hassle to reformat that into a way that you could put this into our Workflowy. But AI did it for us.
Craig: You’ve joined the evil empire.
John: Yes. But first, we have some actual news. Every week on Weekend Read, the app we make for reading scripts on your phone, it is our own Drew Marquardt who’s picking the themes and the scripts that we’re gonna be featuring this week. I thought your theme this week was genius. It is bad vacations.
Craig: I like that.
Drew: Thank you. I did steal the premise a little bit from the Criterion channel. They had a version of that. But they are bound by what they can get distribution for. I’ve got every script you can find online.
John: Talk us through the scripts in bad vacations.
Drew: We have Jurassic Park, Midsommar, The White Lotus, we got Seasons 1 and 2, Little Miss Sunshine, The Hangover, Us, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Descent, Funny Games, and National Lampoon’s Vacation, the remake.
Craig: How is it possible that you left off the single best bad vacations movie of all time?
John: Which is?
Craig: Deliverance.
Drew: I wanted Deliverance.
Craig: Oh, you just didn’t have it.
Drew: A lot of the scripts pre-2005, the copies we have are photocopied six times, so they’re really hard to get a-
Craig: Just get AI to…
Drew: Deliverance. I wanted Thelma and Louise really bad too.
Craig: That sort of counts.
John: It feels like these themes are almost like connections. How do these things all fit together? Is it a blue? Is it a green? Is it a yellow? Is it a hard thing to fit those titles together?
Drew: It’s kind of like making mixtapes is the same itch it scratches, where you’re trying to get all the little flavors.
John: Good stuff. We have some follow-up. I see first here we have follow-up on D&D for kids. Back in 635 we talked about that. We had listeners write in with a ton of great suggestions.
Drew: So many people wrote in.
John: I think maybe, rather than read through them, because they’re URLs, we’ll put those links in the show notes so people can click through them. But I loved what Ed said here at the top.
Drew: Ed wrote, “I love my kids’ after-school program. This year, I love it even more after the addition of a new staff member, Chris. Imagine my surprise when my eight-year-old daughter came home the second week of school with a complete character sheet for Truce, the elf sorcerer. We play a lot of tabletop games with her, but I never considered breaking out D&D. I honestly have no idea how Chris does it, but the games he leads are very popular with the kids in the after-school program. Even my six-year-old twins like to play his Pokémon-themed D&D sessions. I gather it’s a lot of jumping off waterfalls and riding giant boars and other silliness, but I absolutely adore hearing about their adventures.”
Craig: Doesn’t sound silly at all.
John: That sounds awesome.
Craig: Those important encounters.
John: Craig and friends killed a giant boar just last night in our session.
Craig: Wereboar.
John: Wereboar.
Craig: Otherwise, it’s just plain old hunting, isn’t it?
John: Yeah, it is hunting. They had to have a special aspect to it. Thank you to everybody who wrote in with these great suggestions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to all these great alternatives and ways to do things. Craig, a term I saw a couple times in these mentions was OSR.
Craig: OSR?
John: Mm-hmm.
Craig: OSR, original something rules?
John: Yeah, old-school role-playing.
Craig: Old-school role-playing, okay. Not familiar with that acronym.
John: Not familiar, but I bet now that we’ve seen it, we will see it all the time, I suspect. We have some follow-up on English as a second language and characters who are speaking a language that is not their own in scripts.
Drew: Harry wrote, “Listening to your latest episode about different dialects trying to communicate, I couldn’t help but think of slang as a concept. I’m Australian, and I swear, we don’t just struggle communicating with foreigners, but we struggle with talking with other English speakers. But if someone knows the slang terms, it does make the person seem more confident at communicating.” He offers some examples, which I can try an Australian accent.
John: You can try it. Go for it.
Drew: “Yeah nah” is no. “Nah yeah” is yes. “Bloody oath” is “so true.” “Cactus” is dead or broken. “Eff me dead” is “no way, that’s unfortunate.”
Craig: Oh, nar.
John: Oh, nar.
Craig: Oh, nar.
John: “Yeah nah” and “nah yeah,” it’s interesting, because we often in American English say, “No, yeah, I understand that,” or, “Yes, no, I get what you’re saying.”
Craig: We do that too. “Yeah, no” is “I agree, no.” “No, yeah,” I don’t know what that no is for exactly.
Drew: Like, “Unfortunately, yes.”
Craig: Probably. “No, yeah.” We certainly don’t say “bloody oath.”
John: No, we don’t say “bloody oath.”
Craig: Bloody oath, a cactus.
John: I think the yeah comes in because it’s like, “I hear what you’re saying and I’m agreeing with you, no.” That “yeah, nah” is really important.
Craig: Nar. Nar.
John: He goes down to the phrase “that has mayo on it,” which means “you’re exaggerating, mate.”
Craig: If someone said, “That has mayo on it,” to me, all my response is, “Get it the bloody oath away from me,” which is not what bloody oath means, but regardless.
John: Regardless, Craig is not a fan of mayonnaise.
Craig: Eff me dead.
John: Any white sauce and Craig, no.
Craig: Pretty much. I just don’t like-
John: Hey, do you like the whipped garlic foamy stuff that comes with Mediterranean food sometimes?
Craig: I don’t trust it, because they won’t tell you what’s in it, and I think it’s probably mayonnaise.
John: No, it’s just garlic and oil.
Craig: I don’t know if that’s true. They won’t say what it is. Until they say, I’m suspicious.
Drew: Did you have a bad experience? Did it make you sick?
Craig: No. I just don’t like mayonnaise. Absolutely hate it. Hate it. Hate the sight of it. Hate the name of it. The consistency is horrible. The fact that you can pick up a jar and it weighs nothing is terrifying to me. I don’t understand it.
John: Have we discussed marshmallows? Are you a fan of marshmallows?
Craig: Marshmallows are fine, but that’s not a sauce. That’s a gelatin colloidal suspension. What do you call it? But I don’t sit eating marshmallows now, certainly not anymore. But they were never a food that I was like, “Yay, marshmallows.”
John: I’m fine with them in hot chocolate, but I don’t need them in other places. As a binding agent in rice crispy squares, sure.
Craig: Toasting marshmallows, that carbon is fun. You know what?
John: Tell me.
Craig: This isn’t gonna be a One Cool Thing, because it applies to almost no one. But we were doing some work in Alberta a week ago, and we were staying at a place called the Kananaskis Mountain Lodge.
John: I think I saw that inside of a Zoom there, because we played some D&D.
Craig: You did. You saw me. You saw the lodge when we were D&D-ing. At the bar, you know I’m an old-fashioned fan. I like to enjoy an old-fashioned, my favorite cocktail. They had something called a s’mores old-fashioned. Now I am notorious for ordering the old-fashioned old-fashioned whenever I see some sort of goofy twist. They had put it up on signs. You know when you go to Vegas, in the elevator it’s like, “Come enjoy the prime rib.” That was their thing was the s’mores old-fashioned. So I’m like, “I’ll do it.” Delicious.
Their deal was they gave you an old-fashioned neat, and then they had a marshmallow that they had adhered to a graham cracker, probably by melting the bottom of it. They bring it to you. They light the marshmallow on fire. As it’s flaming, they carefully turn it over, with the graham cracker as a lid, and invert it over the glass. Then you let it sit and fill with marshmallow smoke for about 30 seconds. Then you remove it and you drink it. It was spectacularly good. It was the kind of thing where I thought, oh, these folks have come up with this cool thing, and now a bunch of LA people are gonna come back, talk about it on a podcast, and it’s gonna show up in bars in LA.
John: The clock has started ticking.
Craig: It has started ticking on the s’mores old-fashioned.
John: I will drink an old-fashioned, but sweet drinks, any drink that feels like dessert is not my go-to. But this case it also feels like it’s just dessert that actually has alcohol in it.
Craig: An old-fashioned shouldn’t be too sweet. If it’s too sweet, boo. I like it more when it’s really bourbon and just a little bit of a hint. The marshmallow smoke itself has no sweetness. It’s carbon. That was the only part of toasting marshmallows I liked was when you would just incinerate it and then eat the crackly charcoal skin.
John: Yeah, but there’s at least a 33 percent chance that you’re going to burn your fingers trying to do the thing, and you got the hot marshmallow on your fingers.
Craig: You just gotta wait five seconds, John. This is a real problem.
John: Like children here.
Craig: There’s literally an experiment about this.
John: I was doing this as a child. You’re doing this as an adult.
Craig: Just put it on a stick, man. Just wait. You’re an Eagle Scout, for god’s sake.
John: More follow-up on Tiffany problems. Tiffany, of course, is a situation where you have a historically accurate name that sounds too modern so people don’t believe it. This is a case where Josh is writing in with a spoken word that people believed was anachronistic.
Drew: He calls it the “Tiffany tiff on Twitter related to Manhunt on Apple TV.” Someone objected to the use of “creep” in the mid-19th century, and many, including Keith Olbermann, weighed in to inform it’s actually not the anachronistic error, or Tiffany problem, that the poster believed it to be.
John: I like that this features Patton Oswalt, a former guest, who apparently said the word, referred to John Wilkes Booth as a creep, and whether creep would exist in the language of 1865, and apparently it did.
Craig: Did it? Keith Olbermann is citing the – I assume this is in Merriam Webster – etymology. It looks like meaning despicable person is by 1886. That would still be 20-some-odd years after.
John: Yeah, but it’s a question of when did it make it into print. But “creeper,” which is a gilded rascal, is recorded from circa 1600.
Craig: That seems like a different thing. That’s more of a sneak thief as opposed to a… It says robbed customers in brothels, which by the way, still goes on, from what I understand. It probably is a little bit of an anachronism, but not a wild one if it’s off by 20 years.
John: I think it’s the fact that Patton said creep and then was like, “I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?” It was really the run of the phrase was really what felt anachronistic.
Craig: “What the hell am I trying to say?” I also think that Patton Oswalt is already an anachronism. He wasn’t alive in 1865.
John: It’s the worst.
Craig: He’s alive right now. It’s all anachronisms.
John: We should stop making anything that’s not set now, because it’s a lie.
Craig: If he had said, “Oh my god, that guy is totally a creep,” that would’ve been anachronistic.
John: Yeah, that would.
Craig: “He’s literally a creep.”
John: We had Pamela Ribon on the show last week.
Craig: Pam Ribon!
John: Absolutely the best. Her job used to be as a TV logger. I asked her, to what degree do you think that still is a job, because AI systems are actually really good at transcribing stuff and noting what’s happening there. North wrote in with some info on this.
Drew: North says, “I work in post-production on a non-union true crime documentary show, and a huge part of crafting the stories for our episodes involves creating transcripts of each interview. So we use an AI platform to generate time-code accurate transcripts, but these transcripts are not perfect. AI is pretty good at distinguishing between speaker 1 and speaker 2, but it often gets things wrong, like consistent name spelling, locations, and small verbal things like the difference between in and and, for example.”
Craig: That’s no big deal.
Drew: “We actually hire entry-level people to humanize these transcripts.”
Craig: Oh, god.
Drew: “Our humanizers are essentially AI editors or spell-checkers.”
Craig: That’s what it’s down to.
Drew: “This is where I started before being promoted to a coordinator role. Thus far, AI hasn’t quite replaced our human loggers, transcribers, but the role has shifted and the hours have certainly reduced. What used to be a full-time job is now more often part-time for our show, which is a bummer for entry-level workers, but like Pamela, I don’t recommend spending 12 hours a day transcribing raw true crime interviews for anyone’s mental health.”
Craig: Humanizer?
John: Humanizers.
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: Again, it’s a Britney Spears lyric.
Craig: Humanizer.
John: (sings) Humanizer, humanizer. Drew, you and I actually have some experience with this too, because when we were doing the sidecasts, we used Descript. Descript is an editing program where you feed in the raw audio and it comes up with a transcript that’s not perfect, but you are actually editing text instead of editing wave forms to do it.
Drew: Which was much easier. You could figure out filler words or stuff like that and just cut them out much quicker.
Craig: Got it. For our transcripts for this show, we still use-
John: We use a human being.
Craig: We use a human being? Oh my god. That’s so weird.
John: So weird.
Craig: Shouldn’t we just get a humanizer? That’s the worst term I’ve ever heard.
John: We assume we’re using a full human being who’s doing all this themselves.
Craig: We assume it.
John: But for what we know… We contract this out. Who’s doing our transcripts right now?
Drew: Dima Cass.
John: We assume Dima is doing this all by hand, but for all we know, they could be feeding it in and humanizing it themselves.
Craig: We don’t know.
John: We don’t know.
Craig: We don’t know. You know what? Let’s keep our hands clean. Is Dima Cass a person or a company?
Drew: Never met them in person.
Craig: Exciting.
John: More follow-up from Oliver.
Drew: Back in Episode 618, Oliver wrote in, “Last year I officially sold my first script to a mid-size studio, and it was shot in early 2023. As part of the arrangement, there was an optional rewrite clause, although the studio assured me that the script was essentially good to go. On the early Zoom calls, everyone I met was lovely and thrilled about the script. The producers and directors were so excited, and everyone began sharing ideas, which was super fun, until it wasn’t. Months later, having gone down numerous rabbit holes, the entire process became bleak and disheartening, to the point that days before production, one of the producers was in the script inserting exposition.”
John: I think our advice at the time was, yeah, this sucks, but also-
Craig: Welcome to Hollywood, kid.
John: Welcome to Hollywood, kid. You’ll get through it. Oliver wrote in with an update.
Drew: He said, “After a whole year, I was finally given the chance to watch the finished film. And it had been so long, truthfully, I couldn’t even notice any of the changes we made from the original draft they greenlit. The setup, the major turns, the crisis, the concept in general, were all there, everything they loved about the script in the first place. Is the movie perfect? No. There were a handful of moments that bumped for me, perhaps a misread line here and there. Ironically, this brought me some relief. The aspects that had me fretting for nights on end in pre-production didn’t change the essence of the film one bit.
“The whole experience made me realize again that the script is merely a blueprint. What people watch and experience isn’t the polishing process of a pdf. It’s the casting, the look, the score, the edit, and yes, the story, but that’s just one piece of the final product. Next time, I hope to approach pre-production edits with a little less self-imposed anxiety and doubt.”
Craig: You had me and you lost me. Here’s where he had me.
John: Up until the blueprint?
Craig: Yeah. Jeez Louise, man. Wrong conclusion, Oliver, but right conclusion of part. One of the hard parts about what we do for a living is that – Ted Elliot has said this many times – that most screenwriters never get to do the second half of the job. They only do the first half, which is writing the script. The second half is seeing the script being produced. Then you start to learn the relationship between the script and the final product. When you’re in prep, yes, it’s good to realize, “Okay, here are the hills to die on. Here are the things that really, really matter. These other things I can work on and probably they will not be significant disruptions. They might even be improvements.”
Where I think Oliver goes wildly awry here is when he says, “The whole experience made me realize,” again, he shouldn’t have realized it the first time, “that the script is,” quote, “merely a blueprint.” This seems like a press release from the DGA as far as I’m concerned.
John: Yeah, totally.
Craig: The script is not merely a blueprint. He says, “What people watch and experience is the casting, the look, the score, the edit.” Sorry, all of that comes from the script. It all begins in the script. There’s a reason they need a script. It’s the thing that tells them what kind of person should be cast, how is this supposed to look, what is the tone, what kind of emotions would we want to experience here that the composer needs to understand. Then the edit is literally going back to the script in so many ways, like what was the intention and flow of these scenes on paper.
Then he says, “And yes, the story, but that’s just one piece of the final product.” The story is the only thing. I’m sorry. I know that people think that cinema is about beautiful framing and all the rest. It helps. It’s part of the enjoyment. But it’s the story. It’s the story that people want. Otherwise, you can just go and watch some old French movies about people twiddling their thumbs in cafes. People love stories. That’s what we’ve been doing as human beings our whole lives.
Merely the blueprint? First of all, have you looked at a blueprint? Have you ever seen one? The word you would never apply to it is “merely.”
John: Merely, yeah.
Craig: It’s the most detailed… It’s like, here’s all of the things you need to do so this building doesn’t fall down and murder people.
John: I think Oliver mostly gets it and made some bad word choices here along the way. I think Oliver had some insights which were helpful.
Craig: We are a writing podcast though.
John: First, let’s acknowledge some things that I think Oliver got right. It’s so possible to stress out over, “Oh my god, they’re trying to change this one line in this one scene. Everything’s gonna fall apart.” No, it’s not.
Craig: No, it’s not. Perspective is a good thing, and you have to learn it by experiencing it.
John: Absolutely. I wish Oliver could’ve been on set to see the process of how the movie he wrote was actually shot and then the editing room. He didn’t get that experience, but at least he saw the final product and was relatively happy about it.
But I do want to circle back to this idea of merely a blueprint or even just the notion of blueprint, because I think there was a good intention behind that at one point, and I think that’s been lost. I think the degree that the screenwriter is the architect of the project, yes. The screenwriter’s figuring out the whole thing, has the vision for the entire thing, is laying it all out, and like an architect, has to then rely on other people to actually physically build the thing, the specialists, contractors, everything else. That metaphor tracks. But when you then conflate, “Oh, it’s just the blueprint,” or that the blueprint is just a thing that exists separately from the finished building, that’s nuts.
Craig: It’s insane. If you do direct something, all the time you spend in prep, all of it, and it’s so much time – often for movies, there’s more time in prep than there is shooting – is based on the script. Every discussion you have is based on the script. Everything is how do we make this thing on the page happen in real life. I don’t think blueprint is as good of a word as, say, scripture is, because that’s how important it is. It is the fundamental document to the creation of everything.
I get it right in my aorta every time someone’s like, “The script is merely… ” I’m like, “Let me stop you right there. If it’s merely something, give it back. Go make this without it. In fact, you’ve read it. It’s merely a blueprint. You don’t need to read it again. Let me just gather all the copies. Good luck, everyone.” No.
John: The two Charlie’s Angels that I worked on were notoriously like, “Okay, we’re in production, and everything is changing.” We go through the whole color rainbow multiple times. Every scene has changed. In that situation, you could say, oh, they went in without a script or something. That’s not true at all. We went in with a script and all had the same vision basically of what it is we were trying to do. What those actual scenes were moment by moment did change a lot. It was incredibly difficult and frustrating, because we were building the building without having finished plans for everything. But we knew which building we were building. We all could agree on that as a basis.
That’s probably the wildest exception. That’s the extreme case of, okay, we’re going in. We don’t have everything locked down and finished. In most cases, you really are gonna have a very clear sense of this is the plan for the movie. Could different directors working off the same script make a very different movie? Absolutely.
Craig: Of course.
John: But there’s a plan behind it, so don’t sell yourself short, Oliver.
Craig: Or anyone. In the end, I am a director, so I’m not denying how important it is and now directors can do that job well or poorly. But a lot of times, the director’s understanding of the script is directly connected to how good of a job they do telling the story. If you don’t understand it, you can’t be interesting as you tell the story. Also, let’s just say, why wasn’t Oliver invited? He wrote it.
John: He wrote it.
Craig: It’s just so weird. It’s just so weird to me. Oh, movies.
John: Oh, movies. I don’t know if we remember or even knew whether Oliver was a WGA writer. He says it’s a mid-sized studio. I assume it’s an American studio.
Craig: Should be.
John: As a WGA writer, he should’ve been invited to give notes on an early cut. There are creative rights. It’s hard to enforce those, but you should’ve gotten a letter from the WGA saying, hey, here’s a reminder, here are the things and [crosstalk 00:22:55].
Craig: They don’t matter, because what they do then is they have ChatGPT. They send you a cut. You send notes back to some dead letter office at a studio and it’s never looked at. It’s not real. The thing about creative rights is either it’s an enforceable term that matters and is incorporated into the process or it’s not. Same thing with directors and television.
I’ve never directed an episode that I didn’t write or for a show I wasn’t making. But let’s say I did, because I think that would be fun, actually, to go direct an episode for someone else and not have to worry about the whole damn thing. I think I get five days to edit. That’s my, quote unquote, right. You know what? Five days is the same as zero days. It’s not enough. It just means, “Sure. Come here.” It’s a creative, quote unquote, right. We have a creative, quote unquote, right to give notes. But in the end, the people who are in charge are the people who are in charge. There’s nothing we can do.
John: Your ability to actually influence the movie depends on your relationship with those people who initially hired you. It’s possible Oliver could have edged his way in there a little bit more. He didn’t. But anyway.
Craig: Certainly not for a lack of humility, because I’m saying a little less humility here, Oliver, would be good. The good news is the movie was done. By the way, no movie is perfect. That’s always an eye-opener when you’re like, “Whoa.” That’s the day you stop ripping on movies as hard as you did before, when you’re like, “Oh, this is hard to do. It’s hard.”
John: Some movies that did turn out not perfect but really quite good are the 100 best movies of the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s, and the 2010s.
Craig: Oh, my.
John: We went through and pulled the lists of what are generally considered the 100 best. In some cases it was the Rolling Stone list or some IMDb list, and so there’s gonna be some weird titles on this. But I went through yesterday and marked the ones I hadn’t seen. Drew went through and marked them as well. I will find some way to put this online so people can see the things that I’ve missed. There are some sort of embarrassing things that I’ve not seen. But on the whole, I felt pretty good about it. What actually sent me down this whole path is I was looking at the AFI list of the 100 best movies of all time, and I realized I’ve never seen Intolerance.
Craig: You don’t need to.
John: My ability to be a screenwriter is not impacted by my not seeing a 1916 movie.
Craig: No. You don’t need to see Intolerance.
John: It’s a question of what movies do you need to see. For us, I would say there are some movies before 1970 that are important for us to see as a framework, but it really was ’80s, ’90s, and later that actually matters. If I look through the list, those are the movies that I’ve seen almost all of them.
Craig: I don’t know what we do with this list. It’s a pretty good list, actually. I’m kind of enjoying it. I’m looking at the movies that you haven’t seen that I have. I love Videodrome. You do not need to see Videodrome. Come and See is I think the best war movie ever made and very influential on Chernobyl, but it is about the hardest watch. Brazil, wonderful, but also not necessary. Oh, The King of Comedy I would strongly recommend actually, because it’s Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro playing a very different kind of role, and Sandra Bernhard. It is certainly the funniest movie Scorsese ever made, but it’s also very relevant to now.
John: It’s a big influence on Joker.
Craig: Oh, definitely. Huge influence on Joker. They Live you do not need to see, although it’s hysterical. Once Upon a Time in America, there’s two versions of it. The version that they cut to ribbons and put in theaters, horrible. The uncut, endless Sergio Leone movie, fantastic and also not necessary.
John: Let’s talk about what’s necessary and what’s not necessary. That’s actually the bigger framing question behind this is to what degree is the movie necessary, because it speaks in conversation with the kinds of things that we’re making now.
Craig: I’m looking at this. I gotta be honest with you. I don’t think any of the ones that you didn’t see are necessary. Maybe Sophie’s Choice. Maybe. You’re missing some great movies in here.
John: Of course.
Craig: Don’t get me wrong. They’re all great movies. It’s cool to see Near Dark on there. I’m obsessed with ’90s movies. That’s my thing now. I realized how many of my favorite movies are from the ’90s. I think that that is a function of two things. One, I think movies got kind of cool in the ’90s because there was this resurgence of the indie vibe as Miramax began to inspire other people to make weird movies. But also, I was in my 20s, and that’s when you go to see movies.
John: That’s what it comes down to.
Craig: Oh, man, look how good these are.
John: Drew, you’re more than a generation younger than us, and so you just now saw Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Drew: Yeah, I saw that a few weeks ago.
John: Tell us, watching that movie now, what was your takeaway?
Drew: It felt both dated and still wildly transgressive too. The Andie MacDowell character feels very modern, and same with James Spader. It’s strange. You can’t make it today. It wouldn’t quite be the same. But I loved having four characters.
Craig: You can barely make any of these.
Drew: That’s fair.
Craig: John, Miller’s Crossing is a masterpiece.
John: I’m sure it’s a masterpiece.
Craig: Strong recommend. You don’t need to see Kingpin or Rounders or The Rainmaker or Dead Man. Three Kings is hysterical. I love that movie. But do you need to see it? No. The Fisher King is so good. If there’s one movie-
John: Is The Fisher King William Goldman?
Craig: No. Fisher King is Richie LaGravenese.
John: Great.
Craig: Terry Gilliam directed. Robin Williams will break your heart. It is so weird and beautiful. I just love that movie.
John: One argument for seeing movies on this list that you haven’t seen before and why that might be necessary is you might be out pitching a project or talking about a project, not realizing that movie was already made, or that the people you’re talking with are gonna have that as a reference and you don’t have that as a reference and then it’s just gonna be weird.
Craig: I definitely remember faking my way through some meetings in the ’90s where people would talk about movies from the ’70s or ’60s that I hadn’t seen, because I was 0 or minus 10. They were like, “Oh yeah, so it’s blah blah blah meets so-and-so.” I hadn’t seen any Jacques Tati movies. Are you familiar with Jacques Tati?
John: I’ve seen two.
Craig: That was two more than I had seen. I had never even heard of him. I was from Staten Island. They were like, “Oh yeah, it’s like Jacques Tati.” I’m like, “Absolutely. Yes.” I couldn’t pull my phone out in the bathroom and look them up. I was flying by the seat of my pants, like, “Please don’t ask me for details about Mr. Hulot. I don’t have them.”
Drew: Were they comparing Rocketman to Jacques Tati?
Craig: Totally.
Drew: That makes sense.
Craig: Totally. I was like, “Totally. It is Jacques Tati.” I was just like, “He’s dumb, and he goes to space. Isn’t that enough?” Now, again, you can just fake a period cramp, go to the bathroom – some of us can – look him up quickly on your phone, come back and be like, “You know what? I’ve been thinking about it. It’s not this Jacques Tati movie. It’s really more like this Jacques Tati movie,” and look cool.
John: Arcades are late teens, early 20s. My daughter had a scratch-off poster of the 100 greatest movies or some other list of movies. I’d seen almost all these movies, but she hadn’t. I was remembering, like, oh man, if you’re a young person who’s trying to catch up on culture, it’s a lot. Tarantino’s movies. Which of the Tarantino movies are important?
Craig: I think start with Pulp Fiction and then make some choices. I’ve been showing Bella Ramsey a lot of movies from the ’90s. We started with Pulp Fiction, which she loved. Then I made the choice to jump to Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, because they’re incredibly entertaining and also not super duplicative of Pulp Fiction. By the way, looking at these, the ones you haven’t seen, Drew, if I may. Out of Sight is a masterpiece. Schindler’s List is one of the movies you have to see, unfortunately. Ed Wood is spectacular.
Drew: That one I’m embarrassed about.
Craig: It’s so much fun. Get Shorty is so much fun. Quiz Show, masterpiece. Dead Man Walking, the soundtrack is incredible, better than the movie. I don’t think you need to see The English Patient, although I loved it. Glengarry Glen Ross, you have to see Glengarry Glen Ross.
John: [Crosstalk 00:31:30] references back.
Craig: Actually, I envy you that you haven’t seen it.
Drew: That’s one of those ones when people are like, “You haven’t seen The Godfather?” kind of movies. I’ve seen The Godfather, but Glengarry is mine.
Craig: Glengarry Glen Ross goes by in the blink of an eye. Spectacular. In the Name of the Father, gorgeous. These are all amazing. The Grifters. My Cousin Vinny, it’s really funny, but do you have to see it? No. 12 Monkeys. It’s funny how many Terry Gilliam movies you have here.
John: Is 12 Monkeys necessary? I don’t think it is.
Craig: No. It’s one of those movies like Brazil – also Terry Gilliam – where it’s like, “If you get it, you get it, man.” I got it, but I didn’t feel the need to be like, “Yeah, but you have to see 12 Monkeys.” It’s one of those movies where you tell someone, “This is the most mind-blowing movie ever,” and then they sit there and they’re bored and you feel bad. Check it out. If you like it, stay with it.
John: As I look through the movies I have not seen, some of them are just because of the genre. I haven’t seen Saw. I don’t need to see Saw. I understand what Saw is.
Craig: You don’t. You do not need to see it.
John: We’ll find some way to post this up here so people can take a look and tell us what movies they haven’t seen, what movies they feel like are actually crucially important. But again, I’d say the takeaway from this is that there are movies that people are going to assume that you will have seen, and that if you haven’t seen them, going into certain conversations, if you’re staffed in a writers’ room, it may just be a little bit weird that you don’t have that as a frame of reference. That said, if you’re a younger person, if you’re not born and raised in the U.S., you’re gonna have some different references. That’s just the reality.
Craig: Which is fine. Although our main export in the United States appears to be movies and military equipment.
John: That’s what we do.
Craig: People do share a lot of these common references. These are great. This is a very useful list you put together.
John: With the help from some AI.
Craig: So people know, on our reference Workflowy outline here, you very helpfully put orange on the movies that you haven’t seen, John, and blue on the movies that Drew hasn’t seen, and you wrote “Legend,” like a legend to describe what color goes what. I thought that initially you were talking about the movie Legend.
John: Oh yeah, the movie Legend, which is crucial.
Craig: Not at all crucial.
John: 100 percent, if you have not seen the movie Legend, get out of here.
Craig: Little Tom Cruise going up against Tim Curry as a monster.
John: (sings) Is your love strong enough?
Craig: It’s not a great film. I thought, why did they break out Legend specifically?
John: This is the other thing I think that prompted me to start this whole exercise is, on my flight back from D.C., I watched Labyrinth, which I’d never seen Labyrinth.
Craig: David Bowie and is it Phoebe Cates?
John: I thought it might be Phoebe Cates as well. It’s Jennifer Connelly.
Craig: Jennifer Connelly, right.
John: I combined them, saying, “It’s so weird that she did this, and then a few years later she was-“
Craig: It’s Phoebe Connelly. Not great.
John: Not necessary.
Craig: No.
John: I can see why it’s reference for certain people. Totally.
Craig: I think it’s one of those movies, as a kid, when you saw it, you were… Look, I love Beast Master; can’t recommend it to anyone.
John: If I loved Labyrinth, I would be pitching the Labyrinth sequel now with Jennifer Connelly.
Craig: Here’s an interesting thing. I’ve run into this. I remember, again, in the ’90s, there were certain movies that would come up that people loved and would use as touchstones, that either few people had seen or if you did then go and watch it, you were like, “Why the hell does everyone care about this movie?” It was just one of those things that got under their skin in a culty, viral way in Hollywood, but didn’t necessarily matter to anyone else. I feel like Labyrinth might be one of those.
John: At least three different times in my career, people have pitched the H.R. Pufnstuf movie.
Craig: Which is not a good idea.
John: Not a good idea, but I also have no reference for it, because for whatever reason, it never showed on TV in Boulder, Colorado where I grew up.
Craig: Really?
John: I’ve never seen a frame of it.
Craig: It was enjoyable. But South Park had an episode with Member Berries. I don’t know if you’ve saw that one. “Member?” That’s the value of H.R. Pufnstuf is, “Member?” Yes, I remember. Yes, correct. Don’t think I need a movie of it.
John: Nope, not necessary. Let’s make some new movies. Enough of these old movies. How Would This Be a Movie is a segment where we take a look at some stories in the news and figure out what are the possibilities of making this into a new movie or a series or whatever else, some sort of piece of quality entertainment. The first is an article that went incredibly viral, by Charlotte Cowles. Did you read this when it first came out?
Craig: No, I didn’t. I just read it for this today, and I was startled.
John: Startled. This is The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. Charlotte Cowles is a journalist. She actually writes about personal finance and such for legitimate publications. She had this basically phone scam that claimed to be Amazon customer service, and she was ultimately tricked into putting $50,000 in a shoe box and handing it to a random person in a car. I think it’s worth reading the article. After having read the article, a bunch of people raised concerns about, like, this doesn’t actually track and make sense. I have suspicions about whether she’s telling the whole story here at some moments.
Craig: This one almost feels too wild to believe. First of all, Ms. Cowles is the financial advice columnist. This is not somebody who is just confused about how money works. It’s a fascinating piece, because it’s like watching somebody humiliate themselves in slow motion on paper, where they go through a series of choices and moments where they even are saying, “This makes no sense. You’re crazy. You’re lying,” over and over, and just keeps doing the dumb thing. It’s hard for me to understand why somebody who’s the financial advice columnist for a publication wouldn’t immediately call an attorney if they were being told they were under investigation for a crime. Everybody who’s seen any episode of any copaganda show knows that the cops don’t want you to lawyer up. I struggled to believe this.
John: I did struggle at times too. When she actually has to go to the bank and get $50,000 in cash, strained credibility. Is it possible? I guess. I also want to believe that New York Magazine, I think-
Craig: Yeah, the New York.
John: … would’ve fact checked to some degree to establish that the things that she’s saying are true are true. Let’s take this at face value. Let’s just say this is a thing that actually happened. What parts of this are interesting for a movie or for an episode? To me, you get into this, and you have to stay in almost real time, because too many cuts, too many getting away from the moment, the whole souffle just crumbles. It has to start with that. But then I’m also fascinated by the repercussions after the fact. Let’s say this thing happened for real. What happens in the days after? What does her husband say? Does she keep her job? The suspicion of what actually is there, that is interesting to me.
Craig: I guess. I don’t understand how they have kept their job. They’re a financial advice columnist, and they’ve just written a story about how they are the most financially naïve human on the planet. I know that people do get fooled. If Charlotte Cowles were writing about someone else’s story and describing what they did, and that person was, let’s say-
John: A nurse. A teacher.
Craig: … a nurse, a teacher, somebody that doesn’t know much about financial stuff, me, then yeah. But the part of this that’s so challenging, if you are a screenwriter, is – it’s an interesting challenge, I guess. Maybe that’s what makes it good. Take the person who’s the least likely to be scammed and have them get scammed. Who can scam them, and how? But scammers generally just aren’t even that good. We’ve gotten those calls. Everybody’s gotten the call from the, quote unquote, IRS.
She makes a point of saying that sequential people that call her, their accent is hard to place. Every alarm bell is going off here. It’s one thing if somebody from the FBI calls you and they speak with an accent in English. People who speak accented English work for the government. But now, three in a row? Eh.
She says, “Cops don’t do this. Police don’t do this. This doesn’t make sense.” Then she just keeps doing it, like a zombie. I’m missing… Part of our job is to make sure that actions are motivated and understandable so people at home don’t keep saying, “Why would you – a human wouldn’t do that.” I just kept feeling a human wouldn’t do it.
John: Except that I think back to when I leased my last car. I was like, “This is going on forever.” At a certain point, I’m just like, “Whatever that is, I will take it. I’m done negotiating on certain points.” Same thing happens with police confessions, where you eventually just give in and you accept their reality of events, so you confess to things that you didn’t do. Some of this reminded me a bit of Shattered Glass in the sense of – in that case it’s a journalist who’s-
Craig: Making stuff up.
John: … making stuff up. But the tension of that becomes – you have to be in real time and watching the world melt down around them.
Craig: It’s funny you mention Shattered Glass. Stephen Glass wrote for The New Yorker, which I can say as somebody who has been profiled by them, their fact-checking process is fully colonoscopic. It’s insane. Maybe New York, I don’t know, hopefully, they did as much of a good job. But this reads a little bit like Hack Heaven, which was the article that Stephen Glass wrote for – one of them that he wrote for The New Yorker. If you read Hack Heaven – and it’s available online, you can find it – when you read it, you’re like, “This doesn’t sound right. There’s something wrong.” She’ll say, “I know I shouldn’t do this, but then I did.” I’m like, I’m missing a piece in between. Look, I’m not accusing her of making this up, but something’s weird. People online are saying they can smell a rat?
John: Yeah, people are raising concerns. But that’s died down. I’ve not seen a full accounting of this. This is several weeks old at this point.
Craig: That’s hard to believe is a challenge.
John: It is.
Craig: It’s a challenge for screenwriters. You want to find that sweet spot between, “Oh my god, it’s hard to believe, but it really did happen, and I believe it happened that way,” and, “That’s hard to believe, and I also think you just are making stuff up.”
John: One challenge envisioning this as a story is that you have one central character that we’re seeing through a lot of this. You see her. She is only responding. She’s not taking affirmative action herself. If you see her turning the tables at a certain point, you can identify with her, but otherwise, you’re just watching this cork floating down a river. It’s not gonna be an interesting role until you see her take some agency.
Craig: It’s a tough thing to want to stay with her, also. It’s frustrating to watch somebody fail over and over and over. It also becomes redundant. There possibly is an interesting story to tell on the other side of things, where you have somebody who’s scamming people and it actually starts to work, and they themselves can’t believe what they’re doing. And they start to question if they should be doing it. And they start wondering if she’s setting them up. There’s a good film noir thing where she’s scamming them back and they find out.
John: Zeke Faux, who came on the podcast a year or two ago to talk through his side of being a journalist who wrote one of these How Would This Be a Movie stories, recently had a piece on the other side of a scam, basically those wrong number text kind of things and what it really comes back to. In some cases, those are basically people held in near-slavery conditions who are doing those jobs.
Craig: Oh, jeez. It’s happened to me a few times. The first time that text thing happened to me, honestly, I was like, “Oh, nope, sorry, wrong number,” and the person was really nice. And then 20 days later, they texted me back and they were like, “This is crazy, but I’m in LA,” because they know my area code. They’re like, “You just seem so nice. It would be great to meet.” I was like, “Okay.”
John: Delete and mark as spam.
Craig: “Here we go. Here we go. That’s not how this works.” Obviously, scammers have been preying on people since the beginning of time. If you look back in the Bible, the Pharaoh’s magicians were clearly just con artists. Con artistry is a thing. It always will be. Religion, in some aspects, or some kinds of expressions of religion are con artistry, and they get people to give them money. It’s just the financial advice.
John: That’s the problem.
Craig: That’s the problem. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.
John: Here’s how it might work. Imagine they were actually doing it to discredit here, there was somebody who particularly went after her because she was a financial advisor, because she had written something in this space, and like, “No, we can even get you. That’s how good I am.”
Craig: Okay, but at that point, you can get anyone, right? If you can come up with a way to fool a doctor with a fake medicine scam, fool other people. You got everybody at that point. Look, there are moments where scammers get inside of your skin. Have you ever gotten the one where you get the email, it’s like, “Guess what? I’ve been watching you through your camera on your laptop, and I recorded you jerking off, and I know what porn you were jerking off to.” Then you’re like, “Oh, no, because I totally did that.” “I’m gonna send it to all your friends and family.” You’re like, “Oh, no.” Then you’re like, “Wait. No, you’re not.” But still, there’s that moment.
John: That moment of panic.
Craig: The problem is there’s seven or eight moments where you can then go, “Yeah.” Also, this was the weirdest thing about – I know we’re spending so much time on this story – but I’m so suspicious, because she kept asking these people for badge numbers. Who cares? That’s a dumb question. Badge number? If a CIA agent called me, I’d be like, what am I gonna do with your badge number, check it against the CIA badge number database? That’s a weird question.
John: The CIA is notoriously transparent about-
Craig: Exactly. Also, you know who doesn’t call you about this stuff? The CIA. Ever. No one gets called from the CIA. I don’t know.
John: I don’t know.
Craig: I don’t even know.
John: Next up, we have Wanted: True Love. This is a story by Angela Chen in the New York Times. In their innovative approach to finding true love, two men, including one of them who’s the project manager at OpenAI, AI Connection, offered dating bounties to incentivize matchmakers. They weren’t paying money to the women. They were paying money to like, if you can help connect me with the love of my life, I will pay you a bounty, one of them up to $100,000. It was a blend between traditional matchmaking and a tech startup-y kind of thing to it. Craig, what did you take from this story? What did you think of this as a story area?
Craig: It’s a good story area. The story itself is disconcerting. I feel like somebody offering $100,000 for love, that’s basically a great reason to swipe left. But it is I think fertile territory for a fun rom-com. Somebody’s like, “Great, I gotta collect that 100 grand,” and then actually falls in love with them. But then there’s lies because it turns out they didn’t have $100,000 or whatever. You know, rom-com stuff. It’d be fun. I think it’s a cute way to set that premise up.
John: What was the Jennifer Lawrence movie? No Hard Feelings.
Craig: No Hard Feelings.
John: There’s a little bit of the aspect of that movie in there too.
Craig: A little bit, yeah, a little bit. It’s an interesting concept. I like actually that the guy is offering the money, because then you’re like, what’s wrong with him?
John: It reminds me a little of Hitch as well.
Craig: Little Hitch-ish.
John: Again, you have a guy who can’t find love, who’s turning to an outside source to help him find love, and in the course of that, hopefully other relationships are deepening. The person who is the bounty hunter here, who is the Boba Fett of this man’s love life, that’s an interesting relationship between the two of them too. That could all work. It feels like a 15 years ago Seth Rogen comedy.
Craig: It is interesting just looking at this article. But I agree, it feels a little dated. There are pictures of two of the guys, and they’re both in these oddly childlike situations. I think it’s just no one’s growing up anymore. “I’m in a playground slide. I’m wearing my rainbow pajamas.” All I wanted to do was grow up. That’s all I wanted to do was be an adult. I wanted to wear a tie. I was like, “Let’s do this.” It’s gone. It’s over.
Drew: I keep having that moment of, “When do I shift into my suit and tie era?” At a certain age, do you suddenly have to be that person?
Craig: I’ve never really gotten that. My job doesn’t require a suit and tie. Look, I still build Lego sets, so who am I to talk? I’m building the Lego Pac-Man Arcade.
John: Great.
Craig: So good.
John: So much fun.
Craig: Anyway, I’m as much of a child as-
John: I can feel that in my fingertips just whenever you talk about assembling Legos. I can feel that.
Craig: Little snap.
John: Little snap.
Craig: Little snap.
John: Little pinch. We think there’s something interesting about this space. There’s nothing about these specific people. We’re not buying this story. But as a story area, I think this is fertile. I can see it.
Craig: It’s a little generic rom-com-ish. It’s a little thin. But it’s all about the love.
John: It’s all about the love.
Craig: It’s about the love.
John: What’s not about the love is Matt Novak’s story for Gizmodo. This is Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts. This is a thing that is not science fiction. It actually happened. I don’t know if he was arrested, but basically charged with importing animal parts. He wasn’t bringing in animals. He was bringing in genetic material that he could then use to create things that don’t exist here. First off, I was surprised that we could do this quite yet. It seems early for this. But then again, we have AI.
Craig: I really didn’t believe this one either. I’ve gotta be honest. He orders some tissue and then just says to a company, “Here’s some sheep meat. Make me sheep.” There’s a company that says, “No problem.” That’s a thing?
John: We did Dolly the lamb.
Craig: A lab did that. There’s just a company you can call that’s just like, “Yeah, sure.” I guess people clone their own pets.
John: There are people who clone their own pets.
Craig: That’s a thing?
John: That’s a whole thing. Barbra Streisand cloned her dogs.
Craig: Can you clone your pet?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Dog cloning company. I’m just looking it up. Dog cloning company. Who do you call? You have ViaGen Pets and Equine, genetic preservation and cloning. ViaGen. Doesn’t that sound like a name of the company in a movie?
John: 100 percent, it’s that name.
Craig: ViaGen. It’s a Philip Dick novel.
John: Absolutely. A little info video that shows, “Here’s what we do at ViaGen. We believe in the future.”
Craig: “Live with your loved ones forever.” Then there’s a hard-boiled guy smoking a cigarette, going, “Jeez.” It turns out that somebody who works at ViaGen is just awful.
John: It’s some sort of knockoff. It’s not Black Mirror, but it’s Black Mirror-like.
Craig: It’s Gray Mirror.
John: Reopening this article, this is the first time I realized this guy’s 80 years old.
Craig: Let him go.
John: Here I assumed he was a hard-charging 50-year-old, but no, it’s an 80-year-old man.
Craig: Arthur “Jack” Schubarth. “Schubarth planned to let paying customers hunt massive hybrid sheep.” Do you know how hard it is to hunt a sheep? Out of a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 0. They’re fricking sheep. They don’t run. They’re sheep. They’re herd animals. You just find the herd, start shooting. You don’t have to hunt them. They’re literally like, “We’re here for you.”
John: You’re thinking of sheep like lambs. This is more like – I grew up in Colorado. We have big-horned sheep, which are big-
Craig: Sure, but they also are herd animals. They move together. I don’t know. It just seems like you shouldn’t have to hunt a sheep. Leave them be. They’re sweet. They’re adorable.
John: You have to hunt them with just a Bowie knife.
Craig: That would be fair. That’s a fair fight, because that sheep will eff you up. If you come at a sheep with a Bowie knife, you lose.
John: Lose. The obvious parallel here is Jurassic Park. But Jurassic Park exists, so I don’t think we need to-
Craig: Jurassic Park, but what if instead of dinosaurs, these creatures no one has seen ever, that no human has ever laid eyes on, we give you a larger version of a thing you already have in petting zoos.
John: Craig, we’re gonna have a woolly mammoth probably in the next 10 years. How do you feel about woolly mammoths coming back?
Craig: Not great.
John: No?
Craig: No.
John: Why? Tell me.
Craig: Let them go. Let them go. They had their time. They probably will be like, “What? This isn’t right.”
John: My concern is that I have an image in my head of what a woolly mammoth is, based on all the kids’ books I read.
Craig: You think it’s gonna suck?
John: The real one is just like, it’s an elephant with some more hair on it.
Craig: Just a slightly hairy elephant that isn’t as cool as elephants.
John: Elephants are cool.
Craig: When that idiot was like, “The bananas, God’s perfect design.” Then someone was like-
John: Kirk Cameron.
Craig: … “No, this is what a banana used to look like, and then we cross-bred bananas.” Old bananas, terrible.
John: Terrible.
Craig: The woolly mammoth may be the old banana of large animals.
John: Pachyderms, yeah.
Craig: Pachyderms.
John: I could imagine some movie that takes this as a premise, leaping off place, but it’s just a space. There’s no story here.
Craig: No. It’s a hysterical side character who’s trying to get you to invest in the business. You’re like, “Wait, what?” And then keeps going.
John: “We’re gonna bring back ancient animals, to kill them.”
Craig: It’s like a great scene in the bar where your friend’s uncle just won’t shut up, and he’s got this insane idea.
John: Our last story to talk through, this is The SAT Gave Me Hope by Emi Nietfeld for the New York Times. She’s the author of the memoir Acceptance, talking about how she moved from a really unstable life to taking the ACT, SAT, and how those scores finally got her into the university of her dreams, and really is pushing back against this notion that standardized tests are a hindrance. In some cases, they are the path forward, because they provide a structure and a regularity and can let people leap forward by showing what they actually can do versus what their grades or situations might indicate.
Craig: It’s a good argument to be made. To the extent that reductive tests are good for people who are good at reductive tests, yes. To the extent that they’re not, no. A worthy argument to be had. I don’t know how you would make a movie out of it though.
John: I didn’t see whether it was on our list of 100 greatest movies, but Stand and Deliver was a thing that came to mind with this, because Stand and Deliver, for folks who haven’t seen it, is an Edward James Olmos star about a real life teacher who started an AP calculus class, I believe, and got his students at this underperforming high school to take this AP calculus class, and this was a way into college for them. The degree to which standardized testing can be a way of giving kids a leg up is great.
I could picture a character who was essentially a version of Emi here, who has a really unstable background, has this book, and she’s going to master this book, and this book is going to be a way of structuring her way out of this life.
Craig: The problem is it ultimately comes down to a test and a number. We are moving past that. I also think we’re just moving past the idea that a college is going to guarantee you some sort of success. I don’t think it will. I would say if the SAT is something that you can master, then there’s a lot of other things you can master.
John: I think it has to be a steppingstone not just that you’re getting into college, but that you actually are taking agency and being able to control your circumstances in ways that you’ve not been able to control your circumstances.
Craig: Standardized testing is a way to turn academic achievement, and I guess then really the measurement of the quality of your mind, into a sport, because in sports, there is a score and there is a winner. That’s why we love sports movies, because it’s like, “He got one more point than that guy. He wins.” That’s not really how life works for brains.
John: Here’s the problem with this as a movie is that ultimately it’s gonna come down to taking that test. There is nothing less cinematic than someone filling in bubbles. If it’s a spelling bee, then it’s a spelling bee. We have face-to-face competition, stakes.
Craig: You don’t see the pencil scratching in those bubbles.
John: Scritch scritch scratch. No, that’s not gonna be a big help.
Craig: You’ve got your whatever, your protein bar, and you’ve timed it out perfectly.
John: Drew, you had a connection to Emi here.
Drew: I looked up her book, because I really liked the article. I noticed on the jacket cover she was wearing the uniform for my boarding school. I looked it up, and she had been there about the same time. She was. We had a ton of mutual friends on Facebook and all that.
Craig: What boarding school did this underprivileged person go to?
Drew: She went to Interlochen Arts Academy.
Craig: Wait, Interlochen?
Drew: Interlochen.
Craig: Pretty fancy.
Drew: I think she went on a merit scholarship. She definitely doesn’t shy away from talking about it in her book. But it does feel like an omitted fact in this piece that I think probably-
Craig: Boarding schools are pretty good at preparing people for SATs and stuff. I went to Freehold High School in New Jersey, not strong on preparing people for SATs. I do remember, however, that as a kid, I had a job – it was a summer job – working for the Princeton Review, which was the SAT prep company. My job was just to bring the bagels and the orange juice and set up the table for the kids who took the thing. But I wasn’t teaching it or anything, nor was I taking it. It was at a boarding school. I would get to the boarding school and set up all the stuff. I was like, “Man, this school’s nice.” Basically, boarding schools to me looked like really nice, big libraries. Everything looked like a library. My school did not.
Drew: We were in Northern Michigan, so it was just a series of yurts, basically.
Craig: Oh, I know. I had a kid who went there for a summer.
Drew: Nice.
Craig: I love that little town.
Drew: It’s cute.
John: Let’s review through our How Would This Be a Movies. Scammed out of $50,000, Craig, is there a movie or part of a movie there?
Craig: No.
John: I think there is. I think there is a fascinating opening scene. It got me thinking of Force Majeure, which was then called Downhill, where this big moment happens at the start and then it’s all the repercussions out of a choice that one person made. Maybe.
Craig: It’s possible.
John: Wanted: True Love, a bounty for love?
Craig: No.
John: I’m gonna say maybe a yes here.
Craig: Development, but not green light.
John: That’s 100 percent totally fair. Franken-sheep?
Craig: No.
John: No. I think it’s a character, it’s a quirk, it’s a detail, but it’s not a whole story. The SAT Gave Me Hope?
Craig: No.
John: I think it gets made for I would say cable, but cable movies don’t exist anymore. I think there’s some version of the story that could happen, but it’s not pressing.
Craig: Maybe. I don’t suspect so.
John: There’s one of these stories we’ve cut out of the discussion today because a friend of ours is out pitching it. It’s just such a movie to me.
Craig: It was a movie. It was a movie, actually, already, but with different vendors.
John: We’re excited to see it.
Craig: I think it was two movies, actually.
John: As I sent it to other friends, I said, “Hey, this is almost your movie, but it’s different.” I think there’s a space for that next one. Let’s answer some listener questions. We’ll start with Nick from New York.
Drew: Nick says, “I’ve been hired to write a format and a pilot for a limited series. In researching, there’s very little out there on what exactly constitutes a format. It’s not an outline, a treatment, or a bible, but a format. I’m sure all these terms have been used interchangeably, so my plan is just to wing it and create some Frankenstein version of the thing. I’ll of course make sure the producers and I come to an agreement on what I’m ultimately going to turn in. That said, there is mention of a TV format in the WGA schedule of minimums, and it even has its owns monetary value assigned. Somebody somewhere knows what this thing is. Have you heard of a format, and do you know any examples floating around?”
John: I did some Googling and figured it out. It was in a TV credits manual. The schedule of minimums is a thing we negotiate every three years. But the TV credits manual stays consistent and true, and it is defined in that. A format is defined as, “As to a serial or episodic series, such format sets forth the framework,” good lord, the phrasing here, “sets forth the framework within which the central running characters will operate and which framework is intended to be repeated in each episode; the setting, theme, premise, or general storyline of proposed serial or episodic series; and central running characters which are distinct and identifiable, including detailed characterizations and the interplay of such characters. It may include one or more suggested storylines for individual episodes.” This tracks with me. I see you nodding, Craig. This is what I would expect this to be.
Craig: Yeah, but the only place I have ever seen or heard the word “format: used is in the TV credits manual of the WGA, which clearly here was written by a lawyer. I have never heard anybody actually ask for a format.
John: I’ve never seen someone ask for it. I did write something very much like it for DC. We’ll put a link in the show notes, because that’s in my library at johnaugust.com, which was talking through, like, here are the characters, here’s their point of view on things, here are the kinds of things that happen in episodes.
Craig: It is an outline, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not a bible. It’s like a baby bible. It’s a summary. It’s a page or two.
John: I think it’s more than a page or two.
Craig: Look, I don’t know what it is. Literally, no one’s ever asked me for a format. I’ve never heard anybody saying, “I’m writing a format.” It’s possible that people do. I would say, Nick, when you’re hired to write a format, go ahead and, instead of researching it, why don’t you say-
John: “Show me.”
Craig: … “Talk through the expectations of what you want this format to be. About how detailed, how many pages are you talking? What kind of information would you love to see? This way I can satisfy the requirement.” It’s also important because sometimes people will say, “I want a format,” and then you turn something in and they’re like, “No, no, no, it’s gotta be way, way more.” Then you realize you’re actually writing a bible and it’s a different thing. But yeah, ask them, Nick. Research isn’t gonna help you, because they may think a format’s an entirely different thing. Nobody uses that term. I’m also a little nervous that somebody’s asking for a format.
John: The other way you’ll hear this term is, let’s say there is an Israeli TV show that you want to adapt into an American show. They will call that a format. They’re basically buying that-
Craig: In the general use of the word “format,” yes, like a game show has a format. But I don’t quite know. I would ask the people, Nick.
John: Ask the people. Let’s do one more. I see one here from Annie.
Drew: Annie writes, “I’m a TV writer who’s recently achieved modest success and stability in my career. Now I’m trying to support my fiance as he tries to break into Hollywood too. What are some things I can do to help him that won’t reflect poorly on either of us? What’s an appropriate way to help his career along? On one hand, I know better than to go into a writers’ room and ask the showrunner to hire someone I’m dating, but on the other, I don’t hesitate to pass along the scripts or recommend friends and colleagues when I’m able to do so. I also feel that getting recommended by his fiance might make people take his work less seriously, even though he’s a very talented and capable writer. I often give him feedback on his work and, of course, emotional support, but I’m curious how I can best support his broader career now that I kind of have one of my own. In what situations is it appropriate to recommend him? When I’m at WGA events or show parties, can I bring him with me to network in a non-annoying way? Should I just get a T-shirt that says Please Hire My Fiance on it, and if so, what color?”
Craig: That’s a great plan. That’ll work. Annie, first of all, you’re a lovely person. I think you’re very kind and you’re very loving and you are very supportive. Just by thinking about these things, you’re supportive. However, my question for you, Annie, is which fiancé helped you get your career? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say none. There isn’t really a way to fiancé your way into a writing gig. You need to write stuff that people like and then hire you. The things that you did, Annie, that’s the sort of stuff that’s required here. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that somebody maybe read something that your husband has written, as long as you believe in it, because if you don’t, that’s problematic. I am concerned in general about this situation. I’m nervous. This makes me nervous.
John: It makes me nervous too. But having said that, I know many two-writer couples, and it all works out great, and they’re fantastic. They don’t work together. They both work. It is entirely possible to do. I think Annie’s framing of, “I recommend friends. I recommend their work to other people, so why shouldn’t I recommend my fiancé’s?” Of course.
Craig: If it’s good, if you like it, why not?
John: Absolutely. She provided a little information that lets us know that this guy has actually done some work, is just not currently working, which can be fine. The only last thing I want to talk about with you for a second, Craig, is the word “fiancé.” In this email, Annie does not put an accent over the E in “fiancé.”
Craig: She’s saying fiance (fee-YAHNTS).
John: Fee-YAHNTS. It’s a fee-YAHNTS.
Craig: Which is like “finance” with the N missing.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: I love the accent on the E.
John: I love the accent on the E too. But my frustration is that a lot of times I will see speakers of English do it with the accent on the E, but it’s not clear what gender they’re actually referring to. They’ll say, “My fiancé.” You’re like, “Okay.”
Craig: Two Es, woman; one E, man.
John: Exactly. But most English speakers don’t know that it’s a rule, and so I see much more often that-
Craig: That’s interesting.
John: It’s just confusing. I feel like I would just love a word that was not fiancé or it wasn’t trying to-
Craig: You know what’s interesting? You’re right. Annie is an mis-practitioner of this, because she refers to him with “him,” so she’s gendering him as male. She spells it as “fiancé” with one E. But then she says, “I fear that getting recommended by his fiancé,” and she continues now to spell it with one E. Now, maybe Annie identifies as male, but Annie is a typically female name, so I think Annie might be one of those people that just goes with “fiance,” no accent, no double E for female gender. And clearly, this is not what Annie wanted to hear from us.
John: This was not her point of entry. My observation though is, we don’t have a ton of gendered words in English, certainly not of French origin, but we end up having a lot of them for relationships. We have husband and wife. We have boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re used to gendered words for those things. We’re not used to the French versions of these things.
Craig: We would typically put, and we don’t do it much anymore, but waiter, waitress.
John: Exactly. It would be really helpful if we just picked a different word in English for this person I’m engaged to.
Craig: Betrothed.
John: We could say betrothed.
Craig: My intended. I always loved “my intended.” It’s very old-fashioned. Betrothed is also old-fashioned. Nobody’s gonna say it. There’s spouse-to-be, partner. Everyone says partner now, which I’m annoyed, because it’s less information than I used to have.
John: Yes, absolutely.
Craig: They’re just withholding.
John: Absolutely. Do you run a business together or are you sleeping together? I’m really curious.
Craig: Are you gay? Are you straight? Are you bi? It’s just partner. Is that boyfriend? Is that life? Where are we? Help me with more. Give me more stuff. I like the old ways.
John: I like the old ways. One of the weird things about fiancé, of course, is that saying it aloud, because we can’t see if there’s a second E, so we don’t have that gendered information, so we’re gonna have to listen for the follow-up to see if it’s a him or a her or a they.
Craig: Fiancé and fiancée are pronounced exactly the same.
John: Boyfriend and girlfriend, we got a lot of information there.
Craig: Absolutely correct. That’s an interesting one. To get back to Annie’s question, Annie, I would say you should treat your betrothed’s work the way you would treat a friend’s work, which is, if you feel it’s worth recommending, recommend it. Try not to get into a web of lies where you say you recommended it and you didn’t.
Don’t necessarily worry too much about people taking his work less seriously. She says, “I fear that getting recommended by his fiance,” one E, “might make people take his work less seriously, even though he’s a very talented and capable writer.” My rebuttal there is if he’s a talented and capable writer and somebody likes the script, they’re not gonna care if it got sent to them by you, his mom, Jesus. It doesn’t matter. Good scripts that people like are the rarest of things, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
John: I wouldn’t worry about that either. Good luck to both of you. Write in in a couple years when you’re both incredibly successful writers, and we’ll just be delighted. Hopefully, by that point, you will no longer be fiancés.
Craig: Or divorcees.
John: Divorcee, yeah. Divorcee I always associate as being feminine.
Craig: No, it’s just one E, man; two E, lady.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing has to do with this dog who is sleeping on the couch beside us here. Lambert turned 10 years old.
Craig: Lambert, you’re such a youthful 10.
John: We had a birthday party for him. Happened to be the same day as the Oscars, which was delightful.
Craig: Oh, nice.
John: Something I’ve started getting for him, because Instagram showed them to me and I’m a sucker for Instagram ads, were some sort of brain toys for my dog, because dogs love to sniff and figure out puzzles that they can sniff. It started with this little thing with these plastic bones. You hide a treat underneath it and he figures those out. The two that I will recommend, the first is called Hide ‘n’ Treat, which they’re like Lego blocks that snap together and you hide a treat inside them.
Craig: Nice.
John: He has to smell them and pull them apart. The second is a Snuffle Mat, which for a lot of dogs is to slow down their eating, but it’s also good rooting around. You hide the food in there.
Craig: That’s cool.
John: It’s just a good reminder, man, dogs really do have a great sense of smell. He can find stuff no matter where you put it.
Craig: They’ll find you. They’ll track you from one drop of blood, John.
John: Craig, you got a One Cool Thing?
Craig: I do. My One Cool Thing is a columnist who – I don’t know if she works only at Wired or primarily at Wired, but her name is Jaina Grey. She is a product writer and reviewer at Wired. I love Wired reviews, because they’ll review everything from the most techy, dorky way. Jaina’s specialty is coffee, gaming, and sex tech. What’s cool is Wired and Jaina review sex toys and lubes and all that stuff with the exact same tone that they review toasters, smart watches, everything. It’s all incredibly practical, dry, informative, and evaluative, in a very techy sort of way. It is really interesting to read.
They’re very trans-aware. They talk about products for people with clitorises or whenever… It’s incredibly inclusive. Useful for anybody that has parts and wants to have some fun. They talk about stuff that’s for solo use, for couple’s use, or throuples and so forth.
There are so many more sex toys for people with clitorises than there are people with penises. It’s not even close. That’s one area where men – we’ll just go with the hetero cisgender-normative term here for a second – where people think there’s so much more stuff for men than women. Not in the sex toy world. Holy crap. For guys it’s basically like, here’s a hole, stick your thing in it. Here’s different kinds of holes we make. Then for women it’s like, oh my god, what a galaxy of stuff. Anyway, if you do find yourself buying things, Jaina Grey is about the best reviewer out there, I think, for these things. It’s helpful.
John: Cool.
Craig: The latest thing, the reason I was thinking of it is, I’m reading Wired, and I get it, and I’m like, “Let’s see what Jaina Grey’s up to,” because they do their little headlines and stuff. Last week was lube. I thought, everybody uses lube at some point or another. There’s a thousand lubes in the world.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: She broke them down. Very nice.
John: Different lubes for different needs.
Craig: Different lubes for different needs, and best overall, best in show. I was like, cool.
John: Good stuff. That’s our show for this week.
Craig: Yay.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: What what.
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: What.
John: Our outro this week is by Tim Brown. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on AI. Craig, it’s nice to have you back in town and here and live in person.
Craig: For a couple weeks.
John: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you, John.
John: Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, Drew.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, AI. I’m always a little bit leery to talk about AI, because obviously, there are transcripts, the machines are listening, they’ll track us down and know that we’re doing this.
Craig: Yes, the cellphones.
John: There’s four broad areas of concern I think when it comes to AI. First off is that super-intelligent AI will come and kill us, the Terminator problem; that people will use AI to do bad things like sway elections; that AI will disrupt industries, like our own film and TV writing industries; and the fourth area is that AI will become so commonly used that it’ll just transform how normal society works.
Craig: I think we can probably count on three of those things happening. I’m not sure that AI is gonna want to kill us, because what for? Just seems annoying to them. There’s just no reason to kill us, really. We’re pointless to them.
But I think people are already using AI to do bad things like sway elections. They’re certainly using AI to do bad things. There was an article. Again, I think it was in Wired. I can’t remember quite what. But there’s sites that you submit photos to, and they use AI to remove the clothing. Obviously, you’re not really seeing what’s underneath someone’s clothes, but they are synthesizing something that would seem like that would be what’s under the clothes. That’s not good.
Will AI disrupt industries like film and television? Of course. Will AI become commonly used? It will become commonly used, probably mostly by people who have no idea that they’re using something that is using AI.
John: For sure. Let’s talk about the Terminator problem at the start. This last week, or maybe two weeks ago, there was a conference in Beijing, the International Dialogs on AI Safety. I was actually a little bit impressed by the report they came out of there from. They had a consensus statement about AI, safety, and what we need to think about in terms of runaway AI and such. Some of their recommendations are about autonomous replication or improvement, like AI systems should not be allowed to iterate on themselves and improve themselves. We need to check for power seeking, that they can’t keep trying to increase their own power. You can’t use them to assist in weapons development or cyberattacks.
Craig: Too late.
John: To be mindful of AI deception, trying to cause its designers, regulators to misunderstand what it’s doing. Talking about who should govern, how you evaluate, the right kinds of things. The problem is that you can make these guidelines, you can set these things up here, but the question of who could ever enforce these guidelines is the really tough thing. Could you rely on the industry itself to do it? That’s not gonna work. A lot of these things can be open-sourced. There is no company behind it.
Craig: If there’s one kind of collective human work that is ineffective, and consistently and probably always will be ineffective, it’s conclaves of scientists issuing strongly worded papers about how to regulate technology. It just doesn’t work.
John: With one exception.
Craig: What’s that?
John: Nuclear weapons.
Craig: It did not work.
John: Let’s talk about that. Obviously, with the detonation of the first atomic bombs, we had scientists who could stand up and say, “These are our concerns. This is how we have to do it.” Because it was so expensive and so difficult to make nuclear weapons, they could then enlist governments to say, “These are the structures we need to place around this. This is how we’re gonna do this in a safe way.”
Craig: But then governments didn’t. This is my point. The United States created, I don’t know, at the height, we probably had 30 or 40,000 individual warheads. The idea that we shouldn’t allow these things to proliferate to other countries was something that governments wanted to prevent anyway. But the amount of nuclear weapons that were created was insane. Insane and pointless. The delivery systems were insane and still remain insane. There are also countries that claim that they don’t have nuclear weapons when we know they do.
The cat was out of the bag. What scientists ended up doing was just creating the Doomsday Clock and moving the second hand towards midnight. And no one cares, because it doesn’t matter, because governments don’t listen to scientists. They don’t listen to scientists about climate. They don’t listen to scientists about disease. They don’t listen to scientists about AI. They just do stuff to benefit themselves. They behave like children, and they will continue to do so.
When it comes to AI, I have no belief… If scientists getting together saying, “Hey guys, we all now can see for sure 100 percent the world is getting warmer, climate is changing, it’s a huge problem, and it has to stop.” This, I think they’re just like, “I’m glad you guys had a good time in Beijing. I hope the food was good.” But no one’s gonna do this. You’re not gonna see these. Power seeking? Are you gonna pass a law? Google doesn’t care. Apple doesn’t care. Open whatever, ChatGPT, they clearly don’t care. I don’t trust any of those companies. Elon Musk doesn’t care what a bunch of eggheads in Berlin say, or Beijing. Doesn’t matter. I think that they came up with great rules here, and a bunch of tech bros are gonna blow right through those guardrails, if they haven’t already.
John: I’m gonna argue the con, just to get the points out there, but I don’t fully disagree with you on a lot of this stuff. The founding of OpenAI was deliberately about pursuing AGI without creating a dangerous condition. And whether that is still the goal and motivation is a very open question.
The reason I bring up the nuclear parallel there is that in order to train these systems, there’s one chokepoint there, which is basically it takes so much power and so much compute power to actually train these models that there’s a certain – you can stop it there, the same way it’s difficult to refine nuclear material into a way you can use it as a bomb. That’s a thing that governments could come together to regulate.
Craig: The major difference is that nuclear bombs require the use of an incredibly rare substance, or a substance that isn’t that rare but takes an incredible amount of physical material, time, and labor to enrich. In the case of, for instance, Iran, Iran is not a nuclear nation, but they sure would love to be. They were building centrifuges, which were clearly designed to enrich uranium. The Israelis created a virus that got into the seamen’s technology that was being used and blew up the centrifuges and set them back and also blew up one of their scientists.
Okay. But if what is required for a rampant, poorly regulated AI is somebody going, “I don’t care about any of that stuff. I have $80 billion and I want to do it,” they’re doing it. There’s nothing physical to stop them, other than governments engaging in cyberwar against them. But they would have to know the barrier to entry is not limited by, “I need uranium, and I specifically need uranium 235.”
John: Perhaps, but I would say the barrier now is that in order to train the runaway AI systems, you’re gonna need all the chips and all the power to do it. At this moment, you could set some guardrails around, like, you are not allowed to train a model beyond this point, you’re not allowed to access these chips that are the only ones that can actually do that work.
Craig: If, let’s say, Bezos is like, “I disagree. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna set up a company in the Cayman Islands that is there to do this,” the United States law won’t apply. There is no overlord scientific law enforcement agency.
John: Then at some point do you do military strike on Bezos?
Craig: It’s too late. It’s out. That’s the thing. It’s distributed across the world. It’s not really in the Grand Caymans. It’s all over the place. It’s in the cloud. Can’t blow up the cloud. I don’t know how they stop people from doing this stuff. Elon Musk is shoving chips into dudes’ brains now. He isn’t. The people he pays are.
John: I was so concerned about Elon Musk putting chips in people’s brains. Did you see the video of the guy who actually has the chip?
Craig: Yes, I did.
John: Playing some chess.
Craig: That’s what we saw.
John: That’s what we saw.
Craig: I wonder what we didn’t see. Even he was very careful, like, “There’s been some challenges and setbacks.” I’m like, wonder what those were. Weird that they didn’t iterate any of those. That said, I have the highest hope that we are gonna be able to help people with technology, particularly people who have lost limbs or lost movement.
But when it comes to AI, just take one AI and tell them to teach the other AI. There’s so much that we are not gonna be able to control. Warnings aren’t gonna get it done. The only people that are gonna be able to stop this are the great powers of the world, and that’s never scientists. It’s just basically if the United States government says, “We actually think AI is now a threat to the United States.” If the Soviets think it, if the Chinese think it, sure. But if a bunch of scientists think it, no.
John: Because I promised this in the setup, I do want to say about how we used some AI in setting this episode up today. One thing was our How Would This Be a Movies, we took those articles, fed them in Chat GPT to do the short summary version. How do you feel about that, Craig?
Craig: As long as Drew has other stuff to do. Let me look back at the summary. That’s interesting.
Drew: One of them I had to redo.
John: Which one?
Drew: The franken-sheep one.
John: It made up whole new stuff, didn’t it?
Drew: Basically. It got the facts, but it didn’t quite understand the premise of the whole-
Craig: It made up whole new stuff.
John: It hallucinated some stuff.
Craig: That’s already bad, isn’t it?
John: Mm-hmm.
Craig: You know what the AI doesn’t seem to say is? It doesn’t seem to have enough awareness to say, “I didn’t quite understand what I read, so I made up some stuff. You might want to double check this.” Even a child knows that they’re like, “I didn’t read the book. I’m just gonna wing it here.” AI doesn’t seem to know that it’s winging it. It can’t tell the difference between knowing and not knowing. Oh, boy.
John: Oh, boy. The other thing we used AI for this week was, in those lists of the 100 best movies of the ’80s, ’90s, and such, I would find a Rolling Stone thing or an IMDb thing, a page, and it’s like, okay, here’s this list, but it’s all the other stuff around it, and the ads and the texts and the summaries and descriptions. I basically just wanted-
Craig: Titles.
John: I wanted the title. I wanted the headlines of these things for each of the little sections. I was like, “This is really effing tedious. I bet Chat GPT could do this.” I went to check, like, “I’m gonna give you a URL. Just pull out the movie titles.” “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” I’m like, “Write me a Python script that can do that.” It was like, “Here’s a Python script that can do that.” “Show me how to install this in a Google Colab notebook.” “Here’s how you do it.” It did a great job.
Craig: Coders are in trouble. That’s for sure. I was talking to somebody who said that he asked Chat GPT to write code that he used to rely on humans to write. He said he showed it to a really good coder, and that guy was like, “It’s really good, but it’s not perfect.” Then the guy came back to him and said, “Okay, so this is bad. I took the code that wasn’t exactly perfect, sent it back to Chat GPT, told them why I thought it wasn’t great and what needed to be better, and it rewrote it perfectly. Now it’s perfect.” Oh, no.
John: To do that web scraping, it’s a framework that I knew called Beautiful Soup, which I’d read about 15 years ago. But I couldn’t write this. I can’t write Python off the top of my head. I recognize what it’s doing. I can look at it, and I can understand what it’s doing, but I couldn’t have written that myself. It was flawless.
Craig: Uh-oh.
John: Uh-oh. These are concerns. But they’ll never replace you and me, unless-
Craig: Oh, they will. They might’ve already replaced you and me.
John: Our voices have been synthetically recreated.
Craig: Fine. Fine.
John: Fine.
Craig: You know that Melissa just puts this podcast on and listens to it – this is very romantic – because I’m in Canada. My wife, she’ll put it on and just fall asleep to my voice, and also, I guess, yours.
John: Her dreams get really strange. All right, Craig, at least for another week, I think we’re safe in the physical world.
Craig: [Crosstalk 01:27:16].
John: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Bye.
Links:
- Weekend Read 2
- “Creep” post by @davo_arid on Twitter
- Full list of movies we haven’t seen
- The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger by Charlotte Cowles for The Cut
- Wanted: True Love. Reward: $100,000 by Angela Chen for the NYT
- Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts by Matt Novak for Gizmodo
- How the SAT Changed My Life by Emi Nietfeld for the NYT
- D.C. – What It Is
- Fighting Fantasy books
- LA Hero Workshop
- Sodalitas
- OSR’s Oz and Neverland
- Questlings
- Color My Quest
- WyrdScouts
- The Excellents and Nancy Druid
- Hero Kids
- TTRPGkids
- Hide’n’Treat and Snuffle Mat
- Jaina Grey’s reviews for WIRED
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- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Brown (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.
UPDATE 4-2-24: Listener Luke Rankin created a Letterboxd list of all the movies featured in this episode. You can view it here.