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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/the-sideways-effect).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few bad words from Paul Giamatti. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 549 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

In Episode 547 we touched briefly on the Sideways effect. Basically, movies sometimes have a real-world impact, not just in culture but also politically and economically. We see the Black representation onscreen or depictions of nuclear power. Movies can make things seem cool or uncool or scary. As screenwriters, we want to be aware of the influence our writing can have.

The term Sideways effect comes from the 2004 film Sideways, written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from the Rex Pickett. Who better to ask about the Sideways effect than the writers themselves? Luckily, someone else just did, so I don’t have to. Today’s episode comes from the amazing Slate podcast Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin. It’s been one of my One Cool Things before, but this recent episode on the sideways effect was so good, I asked Willa if I could run it as a Scriptnotes episode. She said yes and agreed to have a chat afterwards with me about sideways and other cultural mysteries she’s investigated. Stick around after her episode for our conversation. For our Premium Members, Craig and I will chat about what he’s missed these last few weeks that he’s been gone. Enjoy.

**Willa Paskin:** In October 2004, the movie Sideways was released in theaters. It’s about two guys who go on a bachelors week to Wine Country. One of them is a cad who’s about to get married. The other, played by Paul Giamatti, is Miles, a hardcore wine-lover.

****Miles Raymond:**** We’re going to drink a lot of good wine. We’re going to play some golf. We’re going to eat some great food and enjoy the scenery, and we’re going to send you off in style, mon frere.

**Willa:** Sideways is a small, mellow movie, but it got big. It grossed $110 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations. It also upended the wine industry. Famously, it is said to have done this with one line of dialogue. It arrives about a third of the way in as the guy are preparing to meet up with two women.

**Jack Cole:** If they want to drink Merlot, we’re drinking Merlot.

**Miles Raymond:** No, if anybody orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!

**Willa:** At the time this line was first uttered, Merlot was a popular wine people were chugging down by the glass full. Legend has it that after this line, after, “I’m not drinking any fucking Merlot,” Merlot went ahead and tanked.

**Laura Lippman:** It’s like I’m RoboCop and that’s one of my directives now, no Merlot.

**Willa:** Laura Lippman is a crime novelist who saw Sideways when it first came out. Did you notice right away that it just put you off Merlot?

**Laura:** Yeah, right away. Right away. It was like a battle cry. I have literally tried to kind of overcome that, standing in neighborhood liquor stores and looking at what’s for sale. I can’t do it. I bet I would like Merlot. I think I did like Merlot. It’s so weird. It’s like I’m the most susceptible, suggestible person on the planet.

**Willa:** When it comes to Sideways, Merlot, and wine in general, she’s not the only one. I’m Willa Paskin and this is Decoder Ring. In the mid-2000s, the movie Sideways had an impact on the wine industry so notable that it has a name: the Sideways effect. In this episode we’re going to be looking closely at that effect and what it really is. Did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Did a monologue jumpstart demand for a whole other varietal? Did Paul Giamatti’s sad sack character change our relationship to yet another wine, one that was barely mentioned in the film? Today on Decoder Ring, all of these questions and this one. Is it long past time to start drinking some fucking Merlot?

The Sideways effect is not just one thing. There are a number of components to it. I’m going to begin with the best known part of the phenomenon, the one I started with, the theory that Sideways shanked Merlot sales. When Sideways arrived in theaters, Merlot was the trendiest red wine in America, but America had not always had a trendiest wine. The country had been largely indifferent to wine well into the mid 20th century. California whites caught on in the 1970s when one of them won a blind taste test against world-class French wines. Then in the early ‘90s, red wine got a boost when 60 Minutes aired a segment on the so-called French Paradox. The paradox was that French people ate very fatty foods but had much lower rates of heart disease than Americans. The 60 Minutes piece came to a definitive conclusion about what was going on.

**Morley Safer:** The answer to the riddle the explanation of the paradox may lie in this inviting glass.

**Willa:** Sales of red wine spiked, and none benefited more than Merlot, which by the end of the decade would become the most popular red wine in the country.

**Tim Farrell:** Merlot is a good candidate because couple of things.

**Willa:** Tim Farrell is a wine buyer for the wine store Brooklyn Wine Exchange.

**Tim:** This is not actually too simplifying to say. It’s an easy word to pronounce. The other part is that it’s fairly fruit-forward and the tannins aren’t very strong, and the acidities are fairly low, especially when it’s made in California. It’s like a very soft, easy-drinking kind of red wine.

**Willa:** Merlot is most famously grown in Bordeaux, France, largely as a blending grape, but the American boom was centered in California, where production of Merlot quadrupled in the 1990s. Merlot is a relatively easy grape to grow, adaptable to a range of climates and soils, but that doesn’t mean it should be grown everywhere.

**Tim:** Grapes are a funny fruit because the more grape vines has to struggle to ripen, the more flavorful the fruit is.

**Willa:** California’s cool coastal areas are good for Merlot, but during the Merlot boom, it also started being planted in California’s breadbasket, the hot, fertile Central Valley.

**Tim:** That’s where Driscoll’s strawberries come from. If Merlot grows too easy in the irrigated, flat, sunny Central Valley, you’re going to have really bad grapes. That’s where the really bad Merlot grapes were coming from.

**Willa:** The mediocre grapes led to a lot of thin, too sweet Merlot, and even the better stuff was often made to be an affordable, easy sipper, the kind of inoffensive fruit-forward gateway wine offered by the glass and sold in Franzia boxes, all of which made Merlot something of a joke to wine people.

**Rex Pickett:** It was uncool to drink Merlot.

**Willa:** In the 1990s, Rex Pickett was a struggling writer living in Santa Monica.

**Rex:** I’ll try to be brief. My life was shit and I made some films and parted company with my ex-wife, whatever. I started going to wine tastings up at a little wine store. There were doctors and lawyers and snobs and whatever. It was just generally conceded that if you liked Merlot, that you were either a wine philistine or an idiot.

**Willa:** Rex regularly went up to the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Los Angeles. As Wine Country goes, it’s nowhere near as famous as Sonoma or Napa, which are hundreds of miles north, closer to San Francisco. This region in Santa Barbara County was sleepy and underdeveloped, dotted with horse stables, golf courses, and vineyards.

**Rex:** There’s nobody up there. I’d go up midweek. I was broke. I’d go play golf for $25 on a grape course. I’d go wine tasting. It was free.

**Willa:** Rex poured these trips and his thoughts about wine into a book called Sideways. The main character, Miles, shared a lot with Rex. He was also a frustrated, divorced writer whose favorite wine was Pinot Noir, and who had the reflexive disdain for Merlot, of a 1990s oenophile. When Rex finished the book, it was rejected by dozens of publishers, but it ended up getting to Alexander Payne, the director of Election and About Schmidt.

**Alexander Payne:** I read the book actually on a flight from London to Los Angeles. When I’m reading something that I think could be a movie, I’m just praying, “Oh, please stay good until the end. Don’t come up with some gimmick or guns or violence or something. Keep it a good, sad, funny human story.”

**Willa:** When his plane landed, he called his agent and said he wanted to make Sideways into a movie. Payne is also into wine, and when he co-wrote the screenplay, he knew the no fucking Merlot line was a good one.

**Alexander:** People who knew about wine knew how much crappy Merlot there was. Then I think people who didn’t know about wine and always order Merlot were called out in an affectionate way. It had this kind of snowball effect. It was a good snowballing joke.

**Willa:** It seemed to roll right over Merlot’s reputation. What do you guys make?

**Jeff Bundschu:** We’ve been growing these Bordeaux varietals for as long as I’ve been around.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu is the sixth-generation owner of Gundlach Bundschu, a family vineyard in Sonoma that specializes in, among other things, Merlot.

**Jeff:** A good Merlot is pretty sexy, voluptuous, round, and intense, without the mouth-puckering tannins or austerity of an ageable cabernet.

**Willa:** Jeff agrees that in the 1990s a lot of Merlot on the market just wasn’t very good. When Sideways called this out, his Merlot, the high-quality stuff, got caught up in it.

**Jeff:** You’d have thought Spider-Man himself had swung in and tossed out Merlot.

**Willa:** Scores of newspapers chronicled Merlot’s troubles. Katie Couric, while hosting The Today Show, said she heard she wasn’t supposed to drink it anymore. People started coming into Jeff’s tasting room and saying they just did not drink Merlot. Pretty much every winemaker and seller has a similar anecdote. Steve Cuellar, a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, has heard plenty of them.

**Steve Cuellar:** It was literally just repeated over and over and over, tasting room after tasting room after tasting room, even to this day. I just figured, okay, let’s try to measure it. What is the effect?

**Willa:** In 2009, he co-authored a paper called The Sideways Effect: A Test for Changes in the Demand for Merlot and Pinot Noir Wines. It looked at wine sales in supermarkets in the four years after Sideways.

**Steve:** The movie was released in October 22, 2004. Prior to that, Merlot was experiencing a really strong growth rate. After that, sales really just collapsed. If we do a percentage growth rate, it literally goes from, I think, 13% growth rate before to almost 0 afterwards.

**Willa:** Steve was showing me a line graph as we were talking, and it’s the shape of a steep mountain that just abruptly flattens out.

**Steve:** When I first saw this, I’m like, holy cow, this is going to be a huge effect. At least I’ll be able to put some numbers on it and all that kind of good stuff.

**Willa:** First, he wanted to check Merlot’s sales against a control, to look at another wine to see what happened to its sales.

**Steve:** We figured, let’s choose something that isn’t mentioned in the movie. Let’s just avoid the red wine and we’ll choose Chardonnay. It’s got large sales. It should be equivalent to Merlot.

**Willa:** In fact, I think of Chardonnay as the Merlot of white wine.

**Steve:** Exactly. It is the big seller.

**Willa:** As big as Merlot was, Chardonnay was bigger. It was and is far and away the most popular wine in America. When Steve looked at the sales numbers for Chardonnay, he found something surprising. He pulled up the graph for me.

**Steve:** When you do that…

**Willa:** It looks the same. The graph of Chardonnay’s sales growth right after Sideways has the same shape as Merlot’s, a steep mountain that just abruptly tables off. After Sideways, in the sample he was looking at, Chardonnay sales had flat-lined too.

**Steve:** Which is just bizarre. This is really the gist of the paper. Yeah, Merlot did crash, but it probably wasn’t the result of the movie Sideways, because Chardonnay, which wasn’t featured anywhere in the movie, good or bad, really experienced the same crash.

**Willa:** Based on these findings, Steve feels strongly that we only think the Sideways effect is real and that there must be another explanation for what happened to Merlot, one that applies to Chardonnay too. In the decade-plus since this paper was published, Steve has asked dozens of people if they have such an explanation, and they don’t. There is a sense among wine insiders that Merlot sales were already cooling off, its low quality catching up with it. Nothing can stay trendy forever. There was no major event, no financial crash, no natural disaster, nothing of note to explain such a dramatic change except Sideways. What does Sideways have to do with Chardonnay? That’s not a rhetorical question. I think there’s an answer to it. Before we can get there, I want to turn to the next component of the Sideways effect. Let’s put a pin in Merlot and Chardonnay for now and talk about a wine that Paul Giamatti’s Miles actually likes.

**Miles:** Pinot’s a very thin-skinned grape that doesn’t like constant heat or humidity, very delicate.

**Willa:** If the first theory about Sideways is that it tanked Merlot sales, the second is that it boosted sales of Pinot Noir. Pinot, wine experts tell me, is a subtle wine that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment in which it is grown. Two Pinots from vineyards just a thousand yards apart can taste really different. This distinct expression is part of what geeks wine people out.

**Kathy Joseph:** Those of us in the wine world feel once you love Pinot Noir, you love Pinot Noir, and you explore Pinot Noir. It’s very sensual and it’s exciting and it’s delicious.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph is the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, a vineyard and winery in the Santa Ynez Valley. She makes a Sauvignon Blanc that was name-checked in the film, but she also makes a Pinot Noir, which she readily admits is tricky to grow.

**Kathy:** Probably more than any grape, Pinot Noir does demand a certain environment for it to excel. It needs a cool climate. It needs good drainage. It needs a place that isn’t too rich. What happens is that it’s all expensive.

**Willa:** All of this had made Pinot a kind of specialty grape in America, a fanatics grape, as someone put it to me, grown in small quantities and rarely offered by the glass. Then along came Sideways. See, Pinot Noir is Miles’s favorite wine. He gives a beautiful speech about it, in which it’s clear he’s not just describing a grape, he’s also describing himself.

**Miles:** It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. Only if somebody really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Oh, its flavors, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.

**Willa:** Upon hearing this ode to Pinot, Americans started buying it in droves.

**Kathy:** Absolutely. Yes, there was an uptick in immediate interest for Pinot Noir.

**Willa:** A Nielsen analysis found sales of Pinot spiked 16% in the months after the movie came out. Wine producers were caught off guard by Pinot’s overnight popularity, and there was a mad dash to plant more of it. In California, production of Pinot Noir has increased 75% in the years since. There was a lag at first, because it takes four to five years for a grapevine to bear usable fruit. There were other difficulties too, starting with the price. Tim Farrell, the wine buyer you heard from earlier, was working at a sports bar in Indianapolis in 2006 when a customer ordered a glass of Pinot.

**Tim:** I remember thinking, oh, we do have a Pinot Noir, and it’s $12 a glass. I thought, that’s insane. We have Bud Light for $2.50. Why would you ever want a $12 glass of wine?

**Willa:** Pinot grown correctly is expensive. It just takes a lot of care. After the movie came out, not only was there more demand for Pinot, there was more demand for Pinot from casual wine drinkers, the kind of folks who want an affordable Pinot. You start to see a version of what happened to Merlot happening to Pinot. Pinot is planted in places that it probably shouldn’t be and attended to less carefully, and that means less quality product makes it into bottles. Another paper, one from 2021, found that most of the frenzied Pinot plantings of the mid-2000s were in the Central Valley, the sunny, fertile, hot, strawberry-growing Central Valley that wasn’t even good for adaptable Merlot.

**Tim:** Then you have a flood of really bad Pinot Noir coming out by about 2008, 2009.

**Willa:** Even good Pinot Noir didn’t necessarily deliver what a casual wine drinker was looking for, like the person who ordered a $12 glass of Pinot at Tim Farrell’s sports bar.

**Tim:** They returned it. They said, “Oh, this is watery. I don’t like this at all.” I took it back. I didn’t know anything about wine at the time. The flavor profile and the texture and the body of Pinot Noir is not actually what people were expecting. They were Merlot drinkers, and so they were probably expecting a big, rich, full-bodied, powerful wine, and it’s exact opposite.

**Willa:** Wine producers needed to please these customers that wanted a Pinot that didn’t taste like a Pinot. Fortunately, there were a lot of other grapes around, because remember, growers hadn’t been expecting Pinot to be the next big thing.

**Tim:** The less scrupulous producers of Pinot Noir that just wanted to cheapen their production and make a more rich, smooth wine for this market that was sending watery glasses of Pinot Noir back at sports bars, was they started adding 25% Syrah to a lot of these wines.

**Willa:** Blending is a common and accepted practice in winemaking. Some of the very best French wines are blends. In America, the standards are a bit looser. You only need 75% of a wine to consist of the grape that’s named on the label. All of that extra Syrah, it made the Pinot go down easier.

**Tim:** They had to soften up and make Pinot Noir super accessible because real, unadulterated Pinot Noir, in addition to being very expensive, is not what the American consumer in 2006 really wanted. It even confused the market for what Pinot Noir should actually taste like.

**Willa:** I’m not saying Pinot Noirs all became phony baloney overnight, all got bad or all tasted like Syrah. In the long-term, the interest in Pinot probably did push American palates in a new direction. In the short-term and on the low end of the market, Pinot became a victim of its own success. While this made for a bunch of lousy Pinot, the irony is it made for better Merlot.

**Jeff:** What it did mean there for a minute, there was a ton of really good Merlot that was available for super cheap.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu, the Merlot maker at Gundlach Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** The red blends in the 10 years that came out after Sideways, that became red blends because no one would buy Merlot, were way effing better.

**Willa:** As you may have suspected, I know very little about wine. I’ve learned a bunch from working on this episode, but I can still barely tell when a wine has gone off. When someone asks me what I think about one, I often don’t know. I think the truth is that none of the wine tastes that good to me, but I feel like it could, if only I knew more, tasted more, tried harder, grew my palate. I honestly feel a little self-conscious about how little I know. I know this isn’t a universal feeling, but I don’t think it’s uncommon.

**Jeff:** Like you could ask somebody, “Do you like that movie? Do you like that peanut butter? Do you like that toothpaste?” They’re going to say, “I hate that movie. I love that peanut butter. I’m down with that toothpaste.” You ask them about a wine and they’re like, “I’m so sorry that I’m not a wine expert, but this kind of doesn’t taste very good to me.”

**Willa:** Why is just uniquely intimidating. I think that’s at least as important to the Sideways effect as whatever was in the script. It helps explain why a little movie that opened in four theaters could have such a big impact. People want guidance about wine, and we’ll take it from a waiter, a wine store clerk, a sommelier, a wine critic, or a movie character. Miles is a man who can barely affect change in his own life. He’s miserable, lonely, and a little insufferable. Listen to him.

**Miles:** Don’t be shy. Really get your nose right in there, really. A little citrus. Oh, there’s just the faintest soupcon of asparagus. There’s just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese.

**Willa:** He is not at all what you picture when you close your eyes and imagine an influencer, and yet he influenced the heck out of us, even though we weren’t using that word then. His high-strung, forceful, informed opinions make him a compelling authority. His strongest views are about Merlot and Pinot Noir, but maybe thinking his influence stops there is underestimating him, the movie he’s in, and how much hand-holding people want about wine. Maybe it’s all bigger. Maybe it’s even big enough to extend to Chardonnay.

We’re going to get back to that Merlot Chardonnay mystery I pinned back there. You remember the economist Steve Cuellar published a paper that showed both Merlot and Chardonnay sales plateaued, in an admittedly small, regionally specific sample, right after Sideways came out in 2004. No one had really been able to make sense of this. Then I mentioned it to Kathy Joseph, the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars. Should I tell you what the economist said?

**Kathy:** Yes, I’m very interested.

**Willa:** Kathy pointed out that in the 1990s there had been a rise in sales of wine by the glass at restaurants, and those glasses were mostly full of Merlot and Chardonnay.

**Kathy:** The reason, in my opinion, is because of their accessibility and also how they were made. Chardonnay was a little bit sweet. Merlot could be a little bit sweet. They were just like almost a transition wine. They were easy. People didn’t order white wine any more by the glass. They ordered Chardonnay.

**Willa:** Once Kathy flagged this connection for me, I realized she was not the only person who had talked about it. It came up a lot, including with Alexander Payne.

**Alexander:** Those were the two wines ordered by people who didn’t really know much about wine. People who knew wine would start saying, “I’m ABC, anything but Chardonnay.”

**Willa:** Rex Pickett had noted it too.

**Rex:** The waiter would say, “Red or white?” If you said white, it was going to be some really cheap, probably Chardonnay. If it was red, it was going to be Merlot.

**Willa:** Here are these twinned wines. Then Sideways comes along and curses one of them out and ever so slightly shades the other.

**Jack:** I thought you hated Chardonnay.

**Miles:** No, no, no. I like all varietals. I just don’t generally like the way they manipulate Chardonnay in California.

**Willa:** Maybe what happened to Chardonnay is just a minor version of what happened to Merlot. Audiences picked up that Chardonnay was the other uncool wine, and they backed away from it. If that feels a little overdetermined to you, another way to think about it is that Sideways made it very clear to casual wine drinkers our basic choices had been noticed and found wanting, but it also made it clear there was a whole wide world of wine out there. Walking out of the movie, you could think, I’ve got to stay away from Merlot, I’ve got to drink Pinot Noir. You could also walk out thinking, huh, I should learn some more about wine.

Steve Cuellar’s graphs of Merlot and Chardonnay in the wake of Sideways show consumers cutting back, but the wine market didn’t collapse. We just started drinking something else. This is certainly how the winemakers I spoke with saw it. They thought Sideways encouraged people way more than it shamed them. Jeff Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** I think that what happened in Sideways is Miles, who I can’t believe I know of by first name basis, was like, “This Merlot sucks.” He sort of just gave voice to an entire world of people that had been choking down what they think they should have been choking down instead of standing up for saying, “I don’t care. This isn’t very good.”

**Willa:** Do you really think that people were trusting their own palate or they were just like, “We trust Miles.”

**Jeff:** I see it more as permission, but I guess that’s because I’m an optimist. Everybody is like total sheep, like a permission to hate wine that they don’t like.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph use the exact same word, while being similarly optimistic.

**Kathy:** The movie gave people permission to explore beyond what they already were comfortable and familiar with.

**Willa:** This is based on her experiences in the years after Sideways, years in which the Santa Ynez Valley, where the movie was set, became a bustling tourist destination, when the wine market doubled and wine was diversified way beyond Merlot and Chardonnay. It all amounts to a third theory of the Sideways effect, that Sideways encouraged wine drinkers to branch out. As it turns out, there’s a speech in the movie that makes the case not for any one varietal, but for wine in general. It isn’t from Miles. It’s from Maya, the wine connoisseur and romantic interest played by Virginia Madsen.

**Maya Randall:** I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve. If I opened a bottle of wine today, it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive, and it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

**Willa:** Maya isn’t relaying rules about wine. She’s praising it for always changing. There’s a contrast between her and Miles, and the movie knows it. It’s why they make a good romantic pairing.

**Maya:** It tastes so fucking good.

**Willa:** Miles’s rigidity is set off against her flexibility, his instructions off her explorations, his acidity off her balance, two ways of appreciating wine and life.
Steve Cuellar’s paper about Merlot and Chardonnay sales only covered the four years following Sideways. Chardonnay sales bounced back. It’s still the most popular wine in America. Merlot production and prices stabilized too, but it’s now often used in America as it’s used in France, as a blending grape. The overall percentage of it, compared to all the grapes crushed in the country, has fallen.

**Jim:** A few years in, our Merlot sales were down and I’m like, “Dad, we got to get out of Merlot. We got to plant something else.” He was like, “Oh, it’s going to come back, Jim. It always come back,” for a decade, two decades. When’s it coming back? When’s it coming back?

**Willa:** This brings us to the final wrinkle in this story, that Miles, the guy that destroyed Merlot’s reputation, doesn’t even hate it.

**Maya:** What gems do you have in your collection?

**Miles:** Oh.

**Willa:** About halfway through the movie, Miles tells Maya that he’s been holding on to this one really good bottle of wine.

**Miles:** I’ve got things I’m saving, definitely. I guess the star would be a 1961 Cheval Blanc.

**Maya:** You’ve got a ’61 Cheval Blanc and it’s just sitting there?

**Miles:** Yes, I do.

**Maya:** Go get it. I’m serious, hurry.

**Willa:** A ’61 Cheval Blanc costs about $4,700. He tells Maya he’d been saving it for his 10th wedding anniversary, but is now just waiting for a special occasion.

**Maya:** The day you open a 61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.

**Willa:** In one of the final scenes, Miles finds out his ex-wife is pregnant with her new husband, and he decides to drink that wine. He takes it to a diner, orders a burger and onion rings, and drinks it out of a Styrofoam cup. As he sips it, he lets out an appreciative, “Hm.” Even in these degraded circumstances, the wine shines through.

This shining wine, this Cheval Blanc, as Alexander Payne knew, is made mostly out of Merlot. Some viewers spotted this contradiction instantly. You can read comment threads about how this makes Miles an idiot and a hypocrite. The meaning seems plainer to me. Miles really loves wine. He really knows wine. He doesn’t hate Merlot, one of wine’s essential, noble grapes. He just hates the bad version of it. This love hate thing is right at the heart of why this little movie had such unpredictable and outsized effects. It tapped into the dualities that exist in most of us, people who hate being uncool, but who also love to try new things. We’re sheeple and we don’t want to be told what to do. We’re easily led and we’re curious. We’re Miles and we’re Maya.

When I spoke to Laura Lippman, who rejected Merlot like RoboCop at the beginning of this episode, I told her about the twists and turns of this story and my sense that Miles himself would now have it in for some other trendy wine. The next time we talked, a few weeks later, she’d just gone to the wine store.

**Laura:** There was something going on where I was like, “I should get a really good bottle of red wine.” I was like, “What if I bought Merlot?”

**Willa:** She did it. She took the bottle home, made a nice dinner, and poured herself a glass.

**Laura:** I thought it was terrific, actually. I was like, “I will do this again. I will drink Merlot again.”

**John:** I am thrilled to welcome Willa Paskin, who is the host of Decoder Ring podcast and Slate’s TV critic. Willa, congrats on another great episode of your show.
**Willa:** Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, John.

**John:** Recently we’ve been doing episodes on nuclear energy and climate change, looking at how stories we tell have an impact. The idea of the Sideways effect has come up multiple times. It was just amazing kismet that your episode this last week was on the Sideways effect. How did it come to be? How did you decide to do it for an episode for your show?

**Willa:** At the beginning of every season, I scratch around for ideas. I think I had asked on Twitter if anybody had any thoughts. It had come up. I had looked into it really perfunctorily. It seemed like the answer was really obvious. It seemed like everyone was like, “Yeah, it just tanked Merlot sales,” whatever. I was like, “That’s not interesting enough.” Then, luckily, a couple of weeks later, this other tweet started going around that was a graph of what had happened to Merlot after Sideways essentially. We just started talking about it in Slate’s internal messaging system. There was a wine guy on staff. He’s Jordan Weissmann. He writes about money and economics.

**John:** I know Jordan.

**Willa:** He’s entwined. We just started side chatting. He was my wine guy basically. He has a wine guy. His wine guy, who’s a wine seller in Brooklyn, had basically talked to him a lot about Sideways. It just suddenly became very clear, just from this brief chat on Slack, that oh no, there was enough there for it to be interesting. Had it really affected Merlot? Had maybe it actually affected Pinot? Then I started talking to people, and it turned into this nice little delectable rabbit hole, which is always super fun. I ended up, in the episode, speaking to an economist who had done a study about it.

One of the things that’s interesting and funny about something like the Sideways effect is we all know what it is and everyone talks about it, but of course, it’s not actually hard science or news, and so there have not actually been… Most people who are economists or who study stuff for a living have not actually been like, “Definitely, I need to look into the Sideways effect.” There actually haven’t been that many real papers about it. When I did speak to one of the guys who had done one of the papers about it, it ended up taking me places I was not expecting.

**John:** In the episode you frame three questions, which is did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Where do you stand, Willa? How strong do you think the Sideways effect was for what happened to Merlot?

**Willa:** I think the consensus about Merlot is twofold. One is that it did depress both Merlot sales and Merlot plantings. There was another study that just came out very recently, actually, about the long-term effect of it, but not dramatically. It affected it some. Wine, as an agricultural product, it’s interesting in the sense that it takes years to plant a grapevine and then for it to make grapes that are good enough. You just can’t act on information as quickly as you can on like, everybody wants a strawberry or everybody wants a pair of jeans. You have to wait. While you’re waiting, you’re not making any money. No one was ripping Merlot out, basically, because that’s just-

**John:** That’s suicide. It got blended into other wines, as you talked about.

**Willa:** Over time, it did not get replanted at the rate that it had. It does seem that Pinot really did get planted at a huge rate. That’s the first thing. I would say the second thing is much, much fuzzier. Just reputationally, absolutely, it really, really hurt Merlot. That doesn’t mean that it hurt it for everybody. That doesn’t mean that all consumers were suddenly paying attention to this movie. Madmen doesn’t have to be watched by that many people to have a really big footprint or to feel like it has a really big footprint. I think something like that is very similar.

**John:** I always think about Twitter, because not very many Americans are actually on Twitter, but Twitter has a huge impact on the national conversation. People didn’t need to necessarily see the movie to know that, oh, we’re not supposed to be drinking Merlot. It just had a stink to it because of the smart people who saw the movie said, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” It had an outsized impact.

**Willa:** I think similarly to Twitter, there’s tons of people that have no idea what’s happening on Twitter, are never affected by it all, but the people that are paid attention to by the media basically did.

**John:** It was a meme, basically. Don’t drink Merlot is a meme. It just got spread in a pre-internetty kind of time.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to… The Travis Lybbert paper that you mentioned is behind a paywall, but there’s another, Journal of Wine Economics, that shows the graph of the two things. You really see how Pinot Noir just really took off. You can also see that the prices fell for Merlot, which I think is also useful to see that supply and demand… There just wasn’t demand, and so the prices for Merlot fell.

**Willa:** I would say one of the things that was interesting from talking to wine people about it is this isn’t settled. I think if they looked into these papers, it would be, but it was not. Something happened and everyone has a ton of anecdotes, but a lot of the serious people were like, “It’s not clear that that’s really true,” which I was surprised by. I was like, “Oh, isn’t it obviously true?”

**John:** These can all be future episodes of Decoder Ring down the road if you want to. Around the office we were talking about other examples of things that are like the Sideways effect, where movies had had a weird impact in the real world. I wanted to bounce them off of you and see what your instinct is for these.

**Willa:** Is your first one Clark Gable and the undershirts?

**John:** Hey, it was my third one, but yes, let’s talk about Clark Gable and the undershirt, because it happened one night. He takes off his shirt, and he was not wearing an undershirt. Apparently, men realized, oh, I don’t have to wear an undershirt underneath a dress shirt. Snopes says it’s unclear whether that’s actually a real thing or not. What’s your ruling on Clark Gable and the undershirt?

**Willa:** I would love to believe that is true. How can we have any idea? It would be hard to follow that, track that information at the time.

**John:** If you were to do an episode on that, you’d probably need to talk to fashion historians and really figure out where we were at at that time and was the undershirt going away at that point.

**Willa:** If I was doing that, there’s a couple things. There’s immediately, I think, a number of things. One is I start to think about hats. It’s similar to-

**John:** What happened to hats?

**Willa:** What happened to hats? In a way that it’s like, you were going to do a couple stories from one episode. It’s like, what happened to hats, what happened to undershirts. I could imagine undershirts being the open. Then also undershirts, which we’re not allowed to call wife-beaters anymore, but what is the semiotics of the undershirt. I think there’s probably a bunch there.

**John:** It gets complicated.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Two other things that you actually can measure. Super Size Me. We had the documentary Super Size Me. Six weeks after the movie came out, McDonald’s dropped the term super size me from everything. They stopped using the term all together. That’s an impact.

**Willa:** Can I tell you my cocktail party chatter about Super Size Me?

**John:** I want to hear this.

**Willa:** This is truly basically the only thing I remember from Super Size Me. I remember the takeaway was McDonald’s is really bad for you. There’s in passing a graphic about how one bagel is equal to eight slices of bread. It’s a picture of the bagel. It’s a drawing. Then it equals eight slices in bread. I believe in carbs. I don’t have a problem with carbs. It has haunted me. It didn’t ruin McDonald’s. It just really gave me pause about bagels forever. That was my personal impact [inaudible 00:40:40].

**John:** That was your Super Size Me. Blackfish, the documentary about SeaWorld, the stock in SeaWorld fell 50%. That’s a pretty direct cause and effect there. I want to talk about the name Madison. What is your perception of where the name Madison came from?

**Willa:** Oh my god, I have no idea. I do just perceive it as being one of those on the top 20 girls’ names now.

**John:** It came from Splash.

**Willa:** Did it?

**John:** In the movie Splash, Tom Hanks is with Darryl Hannah. “What’s your name?” She looks at a sign for Madison Avenue, and she says, “Madison.” He says, “That’s not a name.” It wasn’t a name. It was the 216th most popular name for girls in 1990, but then it became 29th, and by 2000 it became number 3. It was not a name being used.

**Willa:** It does fit in with a ton of other name trends, which is the last name for first name trend, like Hudson. There’s a lot of names that sound like that, Lawson. It’s snugly right in there, and then also it’s upscale.

**John:** It does fit in with that trend. My very first TV show, there were these twins, a boy and girl twins. I named them Mason and Finley.

**Willa:** You nailed it.

**John:** I’d never seen anyone in the real world named Mason and Finley. I called that trend. They are now popular names.

**Willa:** I’m really impressed. That reminds in Baby Mama, the kids are named Banjo and… They didn’t call it, but they just made fun of it nicely. Those are perfect. You did it.

**John:** Finley and Mason. We also talk a lot about representation and how depictions of people on screen matter in terms of how people interact with people. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Sidney Poitier, hugely important, probably the face of a Black man on screen was helpful. Philadelphia, for just Tom Hanks playing a person with AIDS was important. We can have our faults with either of those movies, but they were important in their times. It’s always hard to remember what it was like before that movie came out.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Jaws and perceptions of sharks, perceptions of shark safety. We can’t go back to a time pre-Jaws.

**Willa:** No, we definitely can’t.

**John:** People weren’t worried about sharks. Now my daughter was scared to be in the pool because of sharks.

**Willa:** Sometimes when I’m just swimming out, I hear the song in my heart. You feel it. It’s coming for you. I think I talked about this in the episode pretty directly. A thing about Sideways that really tickled me and that I thought was really fun about this episode was we don’t imagine that someone like Miles would have an impact upon us. He just is not a poster child for that. That’s just not how things work. Sometimes it’s who you least expect. I like that. I like that it’s unpredictable in that way, because if it was just up to people who make decisions based on what you think is going to happen or what’s happened before, you’d never cast… You’d make Miles be totally different. You’d sand off his edges and you’d make him someone else.

**John:** We often talk on this podcast, what is the nature of a protagonist, what is a hero, what is a hero going through. Also, Miles feels like a sidekick character to somebody else, and yet he’s centered in this movie. He’s like a Shrek at the very center of this movie, who is grumpy and angry, and we learn to love him because he’s just center frame the whole time. One of the things that I really liked about your episode is that you bring up Maya, who is his antagonist, who’s this person who’s challenging all his beliefs and actually genuinely loves wine in a way that’s more approachable than maybe he does. She’s not strident. She’s embracing of like, let’s celebrate wine, rather than pit them against each other.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Which is fun. I want to talk just a moment about some of your other episodes.

**Willa:** Please.

**John:** It’s been a One Cool Thing repeatedly on the show for me. You have a two-part episode on the Jane Fonda workout, which was a really fascinating deep dive in terms of it’s so strongly associated with her and yet she’s really taking this work that someone else has done and repackaging it. You broker a conversation between the two women.

**Willa:** That’s one of my top two episodes we ever did. It was totally not what I was expecting to happen. I basically had decided that the Jane Fonda workout itself was fascinating and that Jane Fonda’s story is fascinating, because it is. When I started looking into it, the woman who actually created the workout is named Leni Cazden. Jane Fonda had cited her in a couple places and in her biography, but also she’d thanked her at some awards show. She was findable, essentially. It wasn’t a secret. Then a lot of things just fell into place that I didn’t have anything to do with it. My timing just happened to be really good. I got to speak to both of them and then got to follow up with Leni. I just felt this delicious psychological long-term relationship just fell into my lap. That doesn’t happen that often. That was super fun. Then we basically did the episode that I had been imagining second. Then we did this other fun one that I hadn’t been expecting first.

**John:** A lot of them are just one-offs that are just great and fun. The history of Gillette razors, let’s go to five blades, then the razor wars was just weird and how we got into that and the history of razors. It feels like there’s some, not necessarily a movie, but there’s some version of that absurd way we got to it. It feels like a Soderbergh movie, where it’s just like how we got to five blades eventually.

**Willa:** Some corporate espionage. The thing that I always want is there to be an actual idea, that’s not just the idea that the show purports to be about. It’s not just the topic. With that one, with the five blades one, the big idea was just like, oh my god, capitalism is so silly. Why do we keep doing this? It’s cool, a single-blade razor actually works pretty well. It lent itself to that. I usually find those things as I’m looking into them, but that one was very clean in that way.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the making of the show, because unlike Scriptnotes, which is exactly what we’re doing, which is just a conversation between two people, and there’s an outline I’m looking at, you are fully scripting the whole thing. It’s starting with research, and then you’re doing your interviews. You’re figuring out what parts of those interviews you can use. Then you’re having to write every word you’re saying to get that right and make it all fit. What is the process for you? You’re figuring out your ideas for the season, but what are you actually doing on a daily basis to get this stuff written?

**Willa:** The process is, I’m like, okay, what sounds like a good episode? As I said earlier, I start to dig around about a subject, just Google around about it. The ones that are right, they feel like, you know when there’s things hollow, like there’s a trick door or something, it’s going to spring back at you? It actually feels that way. You’re like, “Oh, this has a little give. There’s stuff here that I wasn’t expecting.” Once it starts to feel that way, there’s just… I just have to have one idea about it or just a sense that there’s a layer.

Then I just start to report. I do a lot of research. I’m also having a lot of conversations as I’m doing it. It’s not like a one and then two. They’re together. Then ideally, I would do all the reporting. I now report a couple of episodes at once, just because it’s just a better use of time. Then I essentially sit with all the stuff that I have, all the actualities, all the research, all the audio, all the interviews, and I write from the beginning. I listen back to the tapes and stuff, to the tracks. I’m trying to get somewhere, usually. I’m trying to make a point or explain some history.

It feels really written. It feels sculpturally written in a different way. It’s pretty that. Then I just spend a bunch of time writing it, however long it takes. It always takes longer. It’s the part that still hurts, as writing anything does. Ideally, that doesn’t take more than two weeks, but it’s been to. In some ways, it’s hard to track it. Then it still takes a pretty long time, because basically it’s-

**John:** It’s all the post process. You had this plan going into it. Then you’re listening to this thing. These episodes are scored. They have ins and outs. You have to figure out breaks.

**Willa:** A hundred percent. It’s all those things, but it’s not even that. It’s almost like when you turn in a first draft to an editor, they change it. They tell you all these notes. They give you all these thoughts. Weirdly, putting it on tape is the same thing. Suddenly, you just hear all these things that are wrong with it. You hear all the places it’s paced wrong. You hear the information that’s in the wrong order. You hear the beats that aren’t quite working right. Because a show is trying to build and often is about ideas…

Just with the Sideways episode, for example, there was a third sections that’s about… It’s after Pinot. It’s after the Merlot section. It’s after the Pinot section and trying to resolve what happened with Chardonnay. I knew where it was going. I knew what the end was. All that stuff was written. There was something about the pacing that was making that pay… It just wasn’t working. On paper, it was working fine, but it’s not working fine when you actually hear it. That takes a long time. I think that takes longer than it probably should. I think it takes longer than other people’s process. There’s a lot of iterations basically. The music comes in later. The breaks are written in. It’s a lot about making sure the arc works. I have found that that is not… It’s supposed to be written to be heard. When you’re just writing it, it’s not in the form it’s supposed to be at. Something really changes there.

**John:** The closest I’ve done to this is I did a podcast called Launch, which was a six-episode series about the creation and printing and release of my book series. It was great, but it was such a different experience. I was not prepared for how much time it was going to take and also just what a different workflow it was. We hadn’t transcribed everything, all the interviews, but then we missed out on stuff. Are you transcribing everything you do from all these people or are you just taking these are the bits we need?

**Willa:** This is a thing that I don’t know what would’ve happened in the past, but we use basically an automated transcription program. A computer does it. You get them back fast. There’s use cases that I don’t have, where you would need it to be really precise. It’s pretty good actually. Because I’m listening back to it no matter what, the transcript lies, you still have to hear. It sounds like it’s great, but then you listen in, they’re talking in a monotone. You still have to listen back to it. We do transcribe everybody, but that’s because it’s not what it was.

**John:** Once you’re writing it, is this in Google Docs? What program are you using when you’re writing?

**Willa:** I was a faithful Microsoft Worder for all my writings, and I still am. Google Docs, it’s just if other people have to get into it, which obviously the producer and editors do at some point. Then also, just when the drafts were just changing so much, after you’re going through, we basically listen and we make changes and then retrack. It just became so much easier to just have it all just in this one place. You just need the link, not to email the document every time it changes.

**John:** That’s brutal. The episode we listened to, how many hours of work on your side was that?

**Willa:** I couldn’t…

**John:** Is it three weeks?

**Willa:** I work really hard.

**John:** It was a ton of work.

**Willa:** That one I will say, it was a lot of work, but in a different way. The writing of that one was the smoothest, cleanest writing experience I’ve had in a long time. I think it took me, not counting the day that I just went back through all the audio that I had… I also didn’t over-report that story, so that helps a lot. I wrote that piece in four days, which never happens. Then I got stuck with it at different stages once it was whatever. It’s almost like I’m almost sad it happened. I’ll be like, “I can do it in four days.”

**John:** [inaudible 00:52:42] “Maybe I can do it in three days.”

**Willa:** It hasn’t happened in a long time that I’d done it that fast, and it’s not going to happen again. It was nice. That one was just very structurally, very clear in my mind as I was doing it. That’s not always the case.

**John:** Willa, so many of your episodes are just incredible fodder for our segment How Would This Be A Movie. In a future How Would This Be A Movie, would you mind coming back and talking us through some of these things?

**Willa:** I would love to. Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Willa, thank you so much.

**Willa:** Thank you.

**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on what Craig’s been up to. Now, let’s roll the credits for the original episode of Decoder Ring.

**Willa:** This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is written and produced by Willa Paskin. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano. Derek John is senior supervising producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our technical director. Thank you to Jim Taylor, Jordan Weissmann, Peta Work [ph], Lo and Lou, Josh Levine and Travis Lybbert. The 2021 paper Travis co-authored called A Sideways Supply Response in California Wine Grapes also corroborates the Sideways effect, and we’ll link to it on our show page.

If you’re a fan of Decoder Ring, please sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to this show without any ads, and they’re supporting the work we do to make Decoder Ring. Members will also get to hear a special behind-the-scenes episode with me at the end of the season. Please go to slate.com/decoderplus to sign up now. I really appreciate your support. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig is back. Craig has been gone for weeks and weeks and weeks. Now Megana, last week I asked you, “Hey, is anybody wondering where Craig’s been?” You are the person who’s responsible for the ask@johnaugust email account. I was wondering whether people were wondering where Craig has been.

**Megana:** Yes. We had one person who wrote in, curious about where Craig has been.

**Craig:** One person was wondering where I was.

**John:** By the time this Bonus Segment is out, I guess the news will be out. Craig, you were in space. You were the first screenwriter to fly on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceship. I guess my real first question is, what was it like to leave the bounds of Earth? What was that experience like? They always say to send a poet, but a screenwriter is the person to send.

**Craig:** Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact, it’s cold as hell. Anybody? Anyone?

**John:** I don’t know what that’s from.

**Craig:** That’s Elton John’s Rocket Man. It’s a popular song.

**John:** It’s a popular song. I’ve heard it once or twice.

**Craig:** 1970-something. God, this is just one kind of sadness upon another. One person cared, and neither one of you know Rocket Man. I think it’s going to be a long, long time until touchdown brings me around again-

**John:** That I do recognize.

**Craig:** I’m not the man they think I am at home.

**John:** You were not on Mars. You were instead in night shoots. You were in night shoots for your TV show, which is just a lot. Your schedule, which was difficult, became impossible.

**Craig:** I’ve been doing pretty well, I think, all things considered, by when you go into three weeks of nights, you’re no longer on the schedule that any other normal human being is on. It’s amazing actually how fast you can get used to it. Much easier to get out of it than to get into it. I would say that much at the very least.

**John:** While you were gone, you missed some episodes. I don’t think you had a chance to listen to the episodes. I thought we’d review what we learned and get your opinions on some things. The first episode, which I really missed you for, was on nuclear issues. We had two experts on to talk about nuclear war, nuclear arms, nuclear energy. You obviously have a background in this stuff. We were looking at what the current landscape was, and of course with the war in Ukraine, the growing escalation of possibilities of nuclear war. It was not a fun episode. I wouldn’t say it was joyful.

**Craig:** No, never joyful to talk about things like nuclear weapons. I don’t really know what the point is of talking about the possibilities. Either they will or will not occur, and if they occur, we’re all dead. That’s basically the deal.

**John:** I would say going into it, I was of the mindset that because of the reduction in number of nuclear arms that are out there in the world, nuclear war wouldn’t be as bad as what we grew up expecting. It’s still terrible.

**Craig:** Oh lord, yeah. The arms race that occurred, I’m sure you guys covered this, largely in the ‘80s, between the Soviet Union and the United States, led to a situation where both nations had this absurd surplus of nuclear warheads. We don’t need that many. We know that a single large nuclear weapon can destroy most of a city. There are only so many cities. Once you start lobbing them, the destruction that occurs is dramatic not only to the people that live there. Obviously it’s fatal. Then you have long-lasting effects around it. Economies are shredded. The environment is destroyed. It’s almost impossible to imagine a situation where one nuclear weapon is intentionally fired and set off and is not followed by a retaliatory strike. Essentially, nuclear weapons are unusable or usable all at once. It’s actually amazing that we have these here and have had them for our entire lives and they haven’t been used in our lifetime.

**John:** Let’s keep it that way.

**Craig:** That would be nice. Unfortunately, we are not in charge.

**John:** Craig, are you familiar with the story of Stanislav Petrov?

**Craig:** Was he the guy who said, “I’m not going to fire that nuclear weapon.” The Soviet said, “Fire nuclear weapon,” because they had misunderstood a test, and he was like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

**John:** Yep, it’s that guy. That was brought up as one of the potential stories that has not really been very well dramatically told. One of the things I brought up is that I think it’s sometimes really challenging to tell a story about a thing that didn’t happen. The guy who stands in the way of a bad thing happening is a little less dramatic than the guy who does the thing.

**Craig:** There’s one movie that I think does that very well is Crimson Tide, 1994’s Crimson Tide, which I think probably drew quite a bit from the Petrov incident and is very much based on that idea that a submarine receives orders to fire a nuclear weapon and then there’s another message coming in, but the radio’s damaged. They don’t get the rest of it. It might say, “Wait, actually don’t,” but they don’t know. There is essentially a debate and mutiny over whether or not they should fire those nuclear weapons. They made it very exciting. A fine Tony Scott film.

**John:** Agreed. Other episodes you missed. Episode 546 was Limited Series. We had Liz Meriwether on the show, finally…

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** …and Liz Hannah. They both recently had limited series out there. We had a talk about what that was like. You of course did a limited series for Chernobyl. One of the things I think was so key from their descriptions of why tell this story now was that feeling that in a limited series or a dramatic series versus a documentary series, you can tell that central character’s internal POV, that you just couldn’t if it’s strict documentary. They had a chance to really explore what was inside the character, rather than what just the facts were.

**Craig:** The difference between a limited… Any kind of fictionalization, doesn’t matter whether it’s a limited series or an ongoing series or a single movie, but any dramatization affords you a wildly different palette than you would have as a documentarian.

**John:** Lastly, the episode that we are going to be putting this Bonus Segment on, was about the Sideways effect. I think we’ve talked about the Sideways effect just between you and me, or maybe on the air as well. Of course, that’s the impact of the film Sideways on Merlot and Pinot Noir in America and around the world and how one character’s rant, or he rants twice, can have a measurable impact on popular culture and economics. We talked with Willa Paskin about that.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I remember seeing Sideways. I remember that happening. I didn’t know anything about wine then. I barely know anything about wine now. I know the kinds of wines I like. Interestingly, I don’t like Pinot Noir.

**John:** I’m not a fan.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, John. I like a huge, big, red, stupid wine. I like a dumb, big Cabernet. That’s what I like.

**John:** That’s what I say too. Whenever somebody’s coming over, “What kind of things you like?” I just say, “I like a big, dumb red.” I’m not apologizing for that. It’s just actually what my taste is.

**Craig:** I like to be hit in the face with a Cabernet bat. That’s me. That’s just what I like. Am I a cretin? Probably. I don’t care. I don’t like Pinot Noir. It’s thin. It’s like it’s not really there to me. Merlot, it’s not offensive to me. I don’t mind it. It’s fine. Actually, there are some fantastic wines that use Merlot as part of their blend.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** There are some great blended red wines out there. Sideways, I don’t know. By the way, I love that movie. It’s amazing. Why was it so obsessed with Pinot Noir? I don’t know.

**John:** Basically, Willa’s argument is that Pinot Noir was really just meant to be a stand-in for the Miles character himself, and that he’s difficult, but there’s actually something good underneath the surface, and you have to really come to appreciate what it’s trying to do and take it as what it actually is. He feels like he is a Pinot Noir that people are not appreciating properly.

**Craig:** Thus an entire industry was disrupted.

**John:** It was. Now, part of the reason we got into the Sideways effect is on Episode 547 we had Quinn… You know Quinn Emmett.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The other folks behind Good Energy were coming on to talk about how we talk about climate change in our films and TVs and how we can put messages out there that have an impact. We talk about how sometimes things really do have an impact, but in terms of representation, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner or other films along the way have that impact in terms of showing a different way of people interacting, dramatizing situations that people may not have thought of, and certainly for LGBT representation. There’s important films along the way like Philadelphia that get people to address their prejudices.

**Craig:** I don’t know how good of a tool movies are going to be for climate change, because the thing is most people recognize that it exists, most people are concerned about it, and most people, meaning almost everyone, feels that they have no direct impact upon it, and they’re right. It’s going to take large governmental action and sweeping changes globally to prevent this situation from getting worse. I think that’s not going to happen. I think the situation will get worse. I don’t know what it is. With something like climate change, where we can see it’s there and we’re just not sure how to deal with it, it very quickly can turn into lecturing or it can be parody or satirical. We can make fun of people for being stupid and ignoring climate change.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how you’re going to do, because the problem is you don’t see the end result. Philadelphia, you see a man change. You see the way he thinks about another human being change. You see how that human being’s death changes him so that theoretically, moving forward, he will be a better person. We can identify with him because he’s Denzel Washington and he’s a great actor. That’s impossible to do with climate change, because they’re not going to see it happen.

**John:** I would debate the premise that it’s impossible for it to be done with climate change. I think it’s a question of what are you trying to do. Are you trying to make a movie that is specifically about climate change or are you trying to normalize things that you wish people would normalize in their real lives? An example would be, if you have characters who are going onto the roof of their building, are there solar panels on that roof, and normalizing that expectation. Are you seeing people do small things like take public transportation rather than be in a car? Those are some small steps. Then there are also… We’ll put a link in the show notes again to the Good Energy playbook.

There are things that don’t feel like climate stories, but of course really are climate stories. Anything about disasters have a climate element to it. One of the points they try to make is that in anything we’re doing in film or television, if you’re not addressing climate change, you’re making science fiction, because a reality of the world is climate change. To not address it is science fiction.

**Craig:** Sure, unless you’re telling a story that really doesn’t have anything to do with outside. Even if it does have something to do with outside on any given day, you’re not going to be experiencing this specific aspect of climate change. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I love Quinn, and I get what he’s doing, and I appreciate how devoted he is to this. To me, honestly, the thing that we could do, the thing that I could do, I try to do this, is talk all the time about how positive nuclear energy is.

I feel like I have a somewhat privileged position in that regard because I made a show about a nuclear disaster. I’m saying nuclear energy is a good thing. In fact, if the United States invested heavier in nuclear energy, and I know that Quinn and I agree on this, that would matter more than anything else. That would matter more than solar panels. That would matter more than wind turbines. Just putting us back on a nuclear grid would change everything. I try and talk about that. It’s hard to put that into… Maybe I’ll have a character yammer about it in a show. I can do that, I suppose.

**John:** Talk about your show, because your show’s going to have some connection to climate change, just by necessity. There’s fewer people on this planet.

**Craig:** Climate change stops. Once we stop driving cars and pumping coal carbon into the air and burning fossil fuels like oil and gas, then climate change essentially gets reversed. I think it’s fair to say, without giving too much away, that climate change is not irrelevant to what happens. That’s as far as I’ll go.

**John:** That’s as far as you’ll go. Craig, it is wonderful to have you back on the show. Next week we’ll have you back for a full episode. Anyway, congratulations on surviving your night shoots.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m looking forward to having you back on the show and back in Los Angeles before too long.

**Craig:** I’m almost home.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* [Decoder Ring](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring) and the [Sideways Effect Episode](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2022/05/sideways-the-movie-had-lasting-effects-on-the-wine-industry-and-casual-wine-drinkers)
* [Sideways Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/)
* Willa Paskin [on Slate](https://slate.com/author/willa-paskin) and [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/willapaskin)
* [A “Sideways” Supply Response in California Winegrapes](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/sideways-supply-response-in-california-winegrapes/FE14CECD927047BD0582207D77F1B09E) by Travis Lybbert for the Journal of Wine Economics
* [Snopes on Clark Gable and Undershirts](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-shirt-off-his-back/) and [Madison Name from the Movie Splash](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bp/splash-joke-lead-madison-baby-name-boom-190720175.html)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/549standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/the-nuclear-episode).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 545 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll be discussing nuclear energy, nuclear safety, and nuclear war, both the realities and how these issues are portrayed in Hollywood. Obviously, Craig Mazin would seem to be a great person to dive into these topics, since he made a show called Chernobyl, but he is off making his new show this week. Luckily, we have two bona fide experts joining us today.

Joan Rohlfing is President and COO of Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit, nonpartisan security organization focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity. NTI also produced the docu-drama Last Best Chance that premiered on HBO. She’s held senior positions in the US Department of Energy and worked as an advisor to the US Ambassador to India in the wake of nuclear tests in India and Pakistan. Earlier in her career she oversaw nuclear weapons policy and acquisition programs for the Department of Defense and the Armed Services Committee at the US House of Representatives. Joan, thank you so much for being with us.

**Joan Rohlfing:** John, thank you so much for the invitation.

**John:** Now, my first question for you, Joan, is one of the questions that always comes up as we’re trying to pitch projects in Hollywood, is why now? What is it about this particular moment that makes this story relevant to be told on a big screen or on a small screen? Can you tell us why in April 2022 we should be paying attention to nuclear issues?

**Joan:** I think we’re at a moment where the danger is extremely high. In fact, I would argue it’s one of the highest points in the history of the nuclear era, rivaled perhaps only by the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. A lot of people who think nuclear weapons went away at the end of the Cold War are now realizing with this Ukraine crisis that nuclear weapons are still around. The nuclear threat is real. We have seen a major nuclear power, Russia, do nuclear saber-rattling and make both implicit and I would say rather explicit threats of nuclear use. We’ve seen conflict around nuclear reactor facilities in Ukraine. This is a moment where we are feeling these dangers palpably. Many people are frightened. What I hope we can talk about today is not only what’s frightening about the situation, but what can we do to help prevent a nuclear catastrophe from happening.

**John:** Great. We can talk about this as our responsibilities as citizens but also as storytellers and making sure we’re telling the stories that can get people thinking about this. Often on the show we’re doing a segment called How Would This Be A Movie, where Craig and I discuss a starting point of a story that comes up in the news. I want to introduce our second guest for that news angle.

David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor to the Washington Post. He’s worked as a diplomatic correspondent and the newspaper’s bureau chief in Jerusalem and Moscow, and also assistant managing editor for foreign news. He’s the author of several books, including The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. David, welcome to the show.

**David E. Hoffman:** Thanks for having me.

**John:** Now, you’ve covered these stories and probably assigned them. You’ve reported them yourself but also assigned them out to other writers. I’m curious what you think. Are these stories that are being under-reported or should be higher in the attention in the news media for us to be looking at in nuclear issues or nuclear safety?

**David:** We have a war going on, so I’d like to address nuclear weapons. I don’t know if people noticed, but just the other week, a missile fired by Russia, a cruise missile, landed within 15 kilometers of the border with Poland, a NATO nation. Had it hit inside Poland, the United States and all of NATO allies would’ve been committed to defend Poland. Meanwhile, a week or two after that, helicopters from Ukraine crossed the border into Russia and destroyed an oil depot in a place called Belgorod. When I see missiles and helicopters crossing this kind of border between East and West in the middle of a war, I am reminded that all the nuclear missiles, the intercontinental ballistic missiles of Russia and the United States are on launch-ready alert today.

People think that the Cold War’s over and we got rid of all of the hair trigger alert stuff, but those missiles, in the case of the United States, land-based missiles and submarine-based missiles, are ready to launch within minutes of the President of the United States giving an authorized order. In the case of land-based missiles, maybe 10 minutes. In the case of submarines, maybe 12 minutes.

We have this system, and I think the Russians still have it too, because during the Cold War we had a standoff. We had a cocked pistols standoff. It was called mutual assured destruction. It’s still there. It’s a recipe for mistake, for disaster, for catastrophe. We’ve never been able to remedy it. People have tried. Presidents have tried. They keep promising, we’ll set up a joint early warning, we’ll have a hotline. All of those efforts basically failed. At a time when both sides are really facing off in Ukraine, the idea that we still have the hair trigger alert, you don’t read about it in the headlines, but that’s what really worries me.

**John:** Let’s set the table for what we want to talk about on this episode. It sounds like when you talk about the escalating tensions between two nuclear powers, which seems like an old idea, it seems like the Russians were always our enemies in old movies or old TV shows and they disappeared off of that, but the conflict is hot now.

You talked about nuclear weapons, the possibilities of nuclear war, but I also want to talk about nuclear energy and safety, which those two things overlap, to a degree, because even just this past week we’re seeing stories as Russia pulled out of the Chernobyl region, the Russian soldiers, they were doing really dangerous things in that space. When you have military people interacting with nuclear areas, that’s a concern as well. We’ll try to have a conversation about the realities and the Hollywood portrayals of these things and what we need to do in terms of thinking about these portrayals in the next months and the next years going forward about nuclear issues. ‘’

Maybe let’s start with nuclear weapons and nuclear war, which is just an incredibly disappointing and frustrating thing to start with. Joan, can you give us a sense of how many nuclear weapons are in the world right now? Do we have a count? Do we have a sense of how many there are out there?

**Joan:** There are estimated to be some 13-15,000 nuclear weapons in the world, which is an excessive number of weapons when you think about the power of each individual weapon. A modern nuclear weapon is roughly 20 times the firepower of the nuclear weapons used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That having been said, there is a positive message in here, which is that the number of weapons in the world today is just a fraction of how many we had several decades ago. The estimate is that at the high point there about 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, the majority of those held by the United States and Russia. That’s still true today. The US and Russia together have about 90% of the remaining nuclear weapons in the world. Progress has been made to bring those numbers down, but the dangers are still there, greater than ever, a lot of complexity in the system, increasing the risk of use, and more players, and some of them have growing arsenals, so a dangerous moment.

**John:** I want to talk about the players, but first let’s focus on that story of dropping from 70,000 nuclear weapons down to 13-15,000. What happened? I wasn’t aware that it had dropped so much. What changed? What were the policies? What were the programs that actually got us down that low?

**Joan:** The short answer is arms control. During the Cold War and at the height of the Cold War, the US and Russia, at the time Soviet Union, both understood that we had a mutual interest, an existential common interest in trying to limit the dangers of nuclear weapons and prevent a nuclear exchange. Even though we were adversaries and had competing systems, we worked hard and diligently to reduce numbers to put limits around our arsenals and to do that in a way that was verifiable and relatively transparent. The verification provisions that we negotiated allowed a high degree of intrusiveness and inspections and regular reporting on our arsenals. It was quite extraordinary.

Unfortunately, many of the agreements we put in place, both around nuclear weapons and limitations around our conventional stockpiles, those agreements have come apart, fallen apart. Both the US and Russia have walked away from quite a few of those agreements. It leaves us in a much more dangerous place today.

**John:** David, can you give us some sense from the Russian perspective in terms of the number of weapons that are out there in the world and the reduction, but they still have a force there. What’s your reporting, what’s your experience like with the Russian side of this?

**David:** The real reason that we are at a lower level today, as Joan said, with these negotiations… You have to understand that behind this is a story of people and a story of political will. The reason we are where we are today are two men, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. For separate reasons, they both came to the conclusion that the world was headed to an abyss, and they wanted to do something about it. When they finally had a chance to do something about it in the late 1980s, it had a big impact. When we talk often about the warheads and the numbers and the treaties and the verification, people just shouldn’t forget, these are always stories of human will and willpower.

I covered Reagan for a long time. It wasn’t until 1986 on a cold evening in Reykjavik that I realized, six years into his presidency, seven years after I started covering him, that he was a nuclear abolitionist. I think Gorbachev too kept his desires secret, because he was rising and became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He couldn’t have announced right away what his intentions were. He did some extraordinarily courageous things that were not about building. You won’t get any statues in Russia or the former Soviet Union for what he did, because a lot of what he did was to prevent things from happening. Gorbachev prevented an arms race in space, personally. When the Soviet guys, the rocket men, brought him plans to match Reagan’s Star Wars and to have a nuclear arms race in space, Gorbachev put those plans in his bottom drawer and never said another word, and it didn’t happen.

Fast-forward to today, we’re 30 years beyond the end of the Soviet Union. We had a period in Russia, about 10 years, from 1991 to 2001, of a democratic market free period. It was the longest period of freedom in 1,000 years of Russian history. It was pretty chaotic and raucous. I lived there. During that time, Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton also decided that they didn’t need as many nuclear weapons. Things continued on a pretty good trajectory toward cooperation and reducing the risks. When Putin came in in 2000, handpicked by Yeltsin, he also was very, very cautious and didn’t really reveal his hand. As the time went by, in 2007 he gave a very hawkish speech, in 2011 he was faced with huge protests in Moscow, 2012. Putin gradually decided to reassert Russia’s aggressive posture toward the rest of the world. In my book in 2009 I wrote that Russia could sometimes be prickly but was not necessarily the enemy of the United States. Things have changed.

What we see now with this war in Ukraine, this war of aggression, a war without a cause, Russia has become a very, very determined adversary, and Putin is using nuclear weapons as a signal. He’s threatening them. He’s making all kinds of statements that are very worrisome. I’m not sure how he thinks about the consequences of actually using a nuclear weapon in combat, which hasn’t been used since Hiroshima. I’m very worried that this kind of bravado and theatrical signaling is going to create confusion and uncertainty. He’s been doing it. He started doing it very early in this conflict.

**John:** I want to highlight a thing you said there, because you talked about how the story of our nuclear arsenals being depleted and the decisions to back away from these things and Gorbachev or Reagan deciding they did not want to have an arms race in space, those are compelling ideas or compelling stories. It’s very hard to tell stories about things that didn’t happen. It’s hard to write about the space race that never was. We can do alternate scenarios for things like if there had been this race in space, but it’s hard for us to create popular entertainment that talks about things that did not happen. One thing we do talk about a lot though is the idea of things that could have happened or could be out there. We talk about nuclear disarmament and all these warheads being taken down.

Joan, can you tell us what actually happens when a nuclear weapon is taken offline? Is there any danger that those weapons are going to get loose, that that material is going to be out there, that warhead is going to be falling in the hands of somebody who should not have it?

**Joan:** When a weapon is dismantled, and I’ll talk about the US system, it’s broken down into its constituent components. You have metals and electronics. I would say the most important part of a nuclear weapon is the nuclear fuel, the fissile material that can produce a chain reaction and a great release of energy when the bomb is detonated. That’s a combination typically of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. Those materials are really important to safeguard. When they’re withdrawn from a weapon, they need to be stored in a very high-security facility. Obviously, the material coming out of weapons needs to be secured properly.

Even aside from weapons, there are pretty significant global stockpiles of these materials. Around the world, a big part of our global effort has been ensuring that those materials are secured to the highest possible standards so that they cannot be stolen by terrorist organizations to be put together again in a weapon form and detonated in a city around the world.

**John:** As recently as a year ago, when the word nuclear was brought up in terms of weapons, the concern was proliferation. The concern was that other nations around the world would have their own nuclear weapons. They were concerned about Iran. They were concerned about North Korea. Where are we at now with proliferation? Do we know how many nations have nuclear weapons? You say that 90% are probably still controlled by the US and Russia, but where are the rest of those weapons?

**Joan:** There are nine nuclear weapons states today. We continue to worry that other states may join the ranks in terms of the nine. In addition to the United States in Russia, you have the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and although Israel does not publicly acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons, it is believed to have nuclear weapons. Those comprise the current nuclear weapon states, as all of us who read the news understand. We’re very worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons. They already know how to make the fissile material. We’ve heard states say, for example, Saudi Arabia, that if Iran becomes nuclear, they will also acquire nuclear weapons. We could imagine a cascade within the Middle East.

We have to worry about other countries in the future as well. There are other states that have the capacity to build nuclear weapons, they have the scientific know-how to build nuclear weapons. Some of them already have the capabilities to make the materials. What we do have are treaties that provide a pretty good set of brakes to further proliferation, but the political will to maintain those treaties needs to be maintained. That’s really essential. There are stories of hope though. Let me just offer that–

**John:** Please.

**Joan:** While there’s all this material in the world, highly enriched uranium and plutonium, we’re doing a better job of trying to quantify where it is, the quantities that exist around the world. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was an agreement struck for many of the weapons that were being dismantled in Russia in particular to take some of the highly enriched uranium out of those weapons and convert it into a non-weapons usable form, a lower form of enrichment, which was sold to the United States to be used and burned in our power plants, so producing energy, a wonderful Swords to Plowshares story that was called the Megatons to Megawatts Program. We know how to do a lot of things that dramatically reduce the risk.

I also wanted to just pick up on David’s comment earlier about how important people are to the process of disarmament. He mentioned Reagan and Gorbachev and Putin giving very different examples of behavior. I would say the public at large plays an important role here. Public pressure played a role in President Reagan’s understanding. There was political pressure created around nuclear weapons. There was a palpable understanding of the nuclear threat at that time. We’re coming up on a 40-year anniversary in a couple of months of one of the largest anti-nuclear protests ever, certainly in the United States. About a million people gathered in Central Park to protest nuclear weapons. It’s hard to imagine today that kind of gathering, because nuclear weapons have so fallen off of the public’s radar screen.

I would say one of the very large storylines about nuclear weapons is frankly how undemocratic they are. When you look at the small number of states in the world that have weapons, vast majority of states have signed a treaty to never develop nuclear weapons in exchange for extracting a promise from the nuclear weapon states that they would eventually give up their nuclear weapons. That’s a 50-year-old treaty that’s under a lot of pressure right now.

The other way in which it’s undemocratic is we see the authority to use these weapons vested in a very small numbers of hands around the world. I’m really struck by, with the current crisis in Ukraine, the power of a single individual, in this case Putin, to use his nuclear weapons as a shield for absolutely egregious, illegal, aggressive, destructive behavior. If that’s not undemocratic, I don’t know what is.

**John:** David, I want to keep talking about the people involved in these stories, because I think as we’re looking forward to how we tell stories in this space, we adapt characters we can focus on. We say Gorbachev and Reagan, but who are the characters we might be looking at now who are going to be involved in this situation? Can you give us a sense of what a journalist working in this space would be doing and how they would be able to report on this when so much stuff would have to be top secret? Do you have a sense of what the roles of people working inside the government, the US government, or through other agencies would be doing to try to stop proliferation to intervene and keep a nuclear war from breaking out? Who are some of the people that you think are interesting for us to be following in this situation, the kinds of people?

**David:** John, before I answer that, I just want to go back to something about Gorbachev. I don’t think that it’s easy to just say nothing happened. I think that Gorbachev’s story is immensely important and is a hell of a drama. How does a guy rise in a dictatorship? How does he become the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, keeping his ambitions to himself about wanting to end the Cold War and the arms race? It was an amazing struggle. He really saw the horrible weaknesses of the system and thought, I have to change it. He said, “We can’t go on living like this.” I haven’t seen that yet brought, that bravery and courage inside, not an open society, but a closed one. I haven’t seen anybody do that yet. I think it’s pretty amazing.

I would point out to you that there is a way to make stories out of things that don’t happen. Take just a look at Project Sapphire, which was this incredible effort by the United States to airlift a large amount of highly enriched uranium out of Kazakhstan. Uranium could’ve laid around there. The Iranians were sniffing around. They were hoping maybe to get that fissile material to build a bomb. Very, very bright and small group of Americans figured it out, flew some C-5As into there, loaded that stuff onto the planes, and they flew the longest flight in the history of a C-5A carrying highly enriched uranium back to the United States, so that it couldn’t be grabbed by Iran. I think that that storyline, Project Sapphire, that amazing secret operation, yeah, something didn’t happen. The Iranians didn’t get it, but it still was pretty amazing.

In all the cases of arms racing, it’s to me just as incredible to see an arms race in reverse or going downhill, people trying to stop this braking locomotive as it is to see the actual threat of things getting worse. I think we’re actually in a situation like that now. We see now the Chinese are very actively building silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit the United States or anyplace else in the world, hundreds of these silos. What are they thinking? They had 100 or 200 missiles. Now they seem to be aiming for more than 300. They had a system before where they did not use the hair trigger alert of the United States and Russia and now they’re edging more toward putting missiles on alert. What are we thinking?

If we now have three of our powers all racing to build a hypersonic glide vehicle that can evade the fences and be maneuverable at very low altitudes at high speeds, carrying a nuclear warhead, I don’t think we should take for granted the idea that all arms racing going forward is great. We ought to think about how to we break these things, how do we reverse the course. As drama too, I think actually being up against the machine is a pretty good narrative arc.

**John:** Let’s talk about then who the characters are, who would be up against this machine, and who would be breaking the progress of us going towards more nuclear conflict. Talk to me about a journalist who was investigating this. How challenging is it to report in this space?

**David:** It’s actually amazingly become easier. Certainly when I was the White House correspondent in the 1980s covering Reagan, almost everything was secret. We had to do a lot of what we called access journalism, meaning building up sources and getting people to leak stuff to us.

Now flash forward to today. This thing, for example, that I just mentioned about the Chinese building these silos, how did that become public? Two different, very smart experts in two separate organizations, not working for the government, use commercially available satellite imagery to discover these missile fields being built in China. They wrote reports and made it public. Open-source intelligence has become a very powerful tool in spawning dangers and warning us of trends. That kind of tool didn’t exist in the Cold War, but even people using their phones to spot military equipment rolling through Ukraine, the use of satellites is really advanced to the point where essentially people not in government can deploy intrusive measures of satellite photography to see what’s going on on the ground and alert us to what’s really happening.

**Joan:** John, can I build on that? David is absolutely right in highlighting people on the outside of the system. You were asking earlier about who are the people inside of the government who are going to save us from unclear wear, and a caveat here, I have the highest respect for colleagues in the government. I spend a good part of my career in the government. These are good people doing very hard jobs.

That being said, one of the reasons we have this spring-loaded, incredibly dangerous system in place, the one David was describing, with large numbers of forces on high alert, that there are many ways in which the system can fail and we could end up in a nuclear war, and worse yet, blundering into a nuclear war accidentally that nobody intended. There’s a really important question that we should all be asking ourselves, which is, why is it, after 75-plus years since the advent of nuclear weapons and some 60-plus years since we developed this operating system called nuclear deterrence. Three years since the end of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, why do we still have this really dangerous system in place? What is holding it in place? I think we need to look at the bureaucratic inertia and the vested interests, both financial and political, and power interests vested in the existing system.

I think there’s a really interesting story that can be told about people on the outside who are trying to disrupt those vested interests in order to enable the system to adapt to meet today’s threats and keep us safe from nuclear use, from a nuclear catastrophe. There are definitely stories about the people doing work to expose nuclear proliferation in other parts the world. There are people who are trying to build public pressure to bring about a different result. There are also brave voices who are working inside of the system, who are trying to push the change agenda. I think there are historical examples of that too, where people stood up and defied authority to prevent a launch from happening. The

he Soviet Union at the time, there are two Russian officers who are described as saviors of mankind during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a really interesting story about a guy named Vasili Arkhipov, who was on a Soviet submarine around Cuba and basically stood in the way of a launch order by the captain of the ship. By the way, that was turned into a movie that flipped roles called Crimson Tide.

**John:** I was going to ask if that was Crimson Tide.

**Joan:** Yeah, that was Crimson Tide, only Crimson Tide was obviously abut an American crew, same story. Another Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, who prevented launch essentially when Russians had some faulty early warnings suggesting there were incoming US missiles. He was able to recognize that that was a mistake, an error of the system, and basically prevented that information from getting relayed up the chain where someone would take action on it. There are fascinating internal stories, but I think we should also be looking at stories in and around the system, at people willing to challenge it.

**John:** You brought up Crimson Tide. I want to do a quick segment on our portrayals of nuclear war in our movies and what’s realistic and what has changed in 2022 versus these movies from the ’80s and ’90s. I definitely grew up on the Day After Tomorrow, Terminator 2. We had this vision of oblivion basically in the event of a nuclear war. Joan, what would the reality of a nuclear war between the US and Russia look like now? Is it world-ending? What happens?

**Joan:** I’m sorry to report, it hasn’t changed since the time you and I were growing up. It would be absolutely catastrophic. If there was an exchange of weapons at any kind of scale, given the size of our arsenals, where we each have more than 1,000 incredibly powerful nuclear weapons deployed, it would be catastrophic not just for our countries, but for the globe, because we know that there are secondary effects.

For example, the potential for something called nuclear winter. All of the soot that would be lofted up into the atmosphere would create a darkening of the skies for a projected period of time. Some people have estimated up to a decade. It would affect agriculture and the ability to grow crops. It would cool the climate. We would expect to see mass starvation as a result of that prolonged global cooling.

One thing we don’t fully understand, because nobody has yet done the research to really study the impacts on critical infrastructures, power infrastructures, banking, health infrastructures, how would all those things… For example, if we lost power, and you might imagine that if there’s a major attack that we would lose power and then all of the systems that require power for their operation would cascade to failure. How can we imagine that we have any kind of governmental integrity in the face of that, where people are starving, where there’s no power, there’s no heat, there’s no water?

Not to sound too dire, but I actually think nuclear war is as bad as it’s ever been depicted in the worst of films from decades ago. What we’re missing, I would say though, in the filmmaking, that I think is really important, is a film that can give people some understanding that it doesn’t have to be this way. Many people are just despairing because they understand and are very frightened by nuclear threats, but they don’t see a way out. It would be great if we could begin to portray a world where we’ve somehow crossed the Rubicon to a safer set of practices for controlling nuclear technology that does not threaten the future of humanity.

**John:** David, in the reporting on Ukraine, I’ve seen the term tactical nuke brought up a lot. Can you talk to us about the idea of a tactical nuke and the difference from what we think about with nuclear weapons, intercontinental weapons?

**David:** An intercontinental ballistic missile flies across the oceans in 30 minutes. It’s a big rock. It goes into outer space, so there’s no air resistance. It can move 20 times the speed of sound and hit the target on the other side of the world in literally half an hour. Those were the weapons that terrified us in the Cold War. Also, the Cold War was partly a standoff in Europe. In Europe, both sides created smaller essentially battlefield nuclear weapons. We’re not talking about flying through space but flying through the atmosphere. There were even nuclear weapons that could be launched in an artillery piece, although it was called the Davy Crockett. It was a large recoiling rifle that would just shoot the nuclear bomb maybe a mile or two. It had a nickname. It was called an IQ test in a tube, because the chances that the soldiers that fired that thing would experience the blow-back of blast and radiation were pretty great.

It was never used, but the idea being that if the Soviet Bloc invaded NATO with a huge conventional advantage, which they had, the West would have to resort maybe to nuclear weapons to hold it off. It was a doctrine called flexible response. This kind of potential conflict caused both sides to create small nuclear weapons, bombs, artillery pieces, and so, for the European theater. When the Cold War ended, the United States withdrew a bunch of those tactical nuclear weapons. We left 100 in 5 bases in Europe. The Soviet Union and then Russia took its weapons, which were far greater in number, there are about 2,000 of them, and moved them to warehouses inside Russia where they are today. The concern about these weapons is that in some ways because they don’t involve that globe-spanning, terrifying ICBM, that it might be easier to use them on a battlefield or that they might tempt an angry leader who has been backed into a corner, with no recourse to use them.

Also, there’s been progress, if you could call it that, there’s been change in the way these nuclear weapons are engineered. The Russians and the United States have now created smaller nuclear weapons that are smaller in terms of yield. In other words the actual explosion is smaller, so that there are small weapons that would take out half an airfield with a nuclear bomb. The concern about this is that, is there really a way to do anything in a nuclear weapons explosion that’s small? How long could you expect the battle to go on if one side used even the smallest nuclear weapon? I think the ladder of escalation is just absolutely horribly rapid, and that there’s no time to think about the size. For that matter, if you’re on the receiving end of one of those two, for example, one side or the other started to roll tactical nuclear weapons into an active battlefield, do you think the other side would think, oh, no problem, they’re just little small tactical weapons? Of course not.

Unfortunately, the United States has also given in a little bit to this. The Trump administration built a lower-yield nuclear warhead, trying to match something that Russia had done. It’s arms arcing. I think it’s dangerous. Even more dangerous, there’s talk now about putting this lower-yield warhead on a cruise missile which flies under radar, which can be used for surprise attack, a naval cruise missile could be put on a boat somewhere, and just like those cruise missiles that hit Lviv in Ukraine a couple weeks ago, just 15 kilometers from the Polish border, you could put a nuclear warhead on one of those. I think we’re entering territory that is dangerous and worrisome. When it comes to nuclear warheads, they’re small, they’re big, they’re all very, very dangerous.

**John:** Now Joan, up until this Ukraine confrontation, we had wars between major powers. Instead, last 15, 20 years have all been about the concern of terrorists. One of the things that kept coming up was the idea of a dirty bomb. You don’t need actually a bomb that explodes in a nuclear way, but a bomb that has nuclear material in it that could be incredibly dangerous and poisonous to people around it. Where are we at now with dirty bombs? I don’t see that being reported in the news anymore. Have we just forgotten about it? Was it not really a huge worry? Tell us about dirty bombs.

**Joan:** It was and is a worry. Let me explain that when we talk about nuclear terrorism, there are two kinds of nuclear terrorism, at least two kinds, and I think we just discovered a third kind with the threats to the nuclear reactor facilities. There is a so-called dirty bomb. You’re right. You described it accurately. It’s basically conventional explosive wrapped around radioactive material. It does not produce a nuclear yield. There’s no mushroom cloud. There’s just a distribution of radioactive material. Depending on what kind of radioactive material one uses, it can have a pretty enormous economic impact if you were to detonate one in the heart of a city somewhere. It’s unlikely to kill any more people than the conventional explosive itself could, but it could render multi-square-block area uninhabitable due to the radiation for an extremely long period of time. It’d be very expensive to clean up and remediate.

We also still worry about nuclear terrorism using a real nuclear bomb, one that does produce nuclear yield, even if it’s a smaller yield, as opposed to highly sophisticated bomb from a major power. It could still devastate instead of a several-square-block area, an entire city. We have a model of what that looks like in looking at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because I think it’s possible for a well-resourced terrorist group, and we know terrorist groups have said they’re trying to acquire nuclear capability, if they get the nuclear materials, the plutonium or highly enriched uranium, if they steal them, acquire them illicitly somehow, you have to worry about them putting together a crude nuclear device.

Nuclear terrorism is still very real. It’s something we’re going to have to worry about indefinitely. This is not a threat that we say, okay, we’re done, it’s gone away. It requires us to put in place and maintain indefinitely a really strong system of nuclear security around the facilities that have the capacity to make that material or that store that material. That’s true of any kind of radiation device that a dirty bomb could be crafted of as well.

**John:** Joan, you brought up the concern about terrorism around nuclear facilities. Obviously, this last week we saw that as Russians pulled out of the Chernobyl region, Russians were not being careful in that place. They were digging trenches and doing things they should not have been doing. It raised a concern about how vulnerable are nuclear power plants and to what degree do we need to be worrying about them in times of wars and also not in times of war, because so often we see nuclear power in our film and TV. We’re seeing Chernobyl. We’re seeing Silkwood. We’re seeing stories of things going horribly wrong.

Maybe we can segue into talking about what is the state of nuclear energy right now around the world, because I know I used to live in France, and France largely uses nuclear power and seems to do so quite successfully, yet in the rest of the world we’re trying to get rid of nuclear power plants. What is the state right now of nuclear energy around the world?

**Joan:** Nuclear energy around the world on balance is growing. It’s considered to be a key component in combatting climate change because it’s carbon-free energy. You rightly mentioned some states have decided to get out of that business. Japan obviously retrenched pretty significantly in terms of its draw on nuclear power. China is significantly growing its nuclear power. France many decades ago took a decision that it doesn’t have a lot of indigenous assets for energy production, and so they decided to embark pretty significantly. About 70% of their electricity comes from nuclear power. We do have these examples with Chernobyl, a pretty catastrophic disaster. That was really a safety incident. The world learned a lot about how to build reactors that are much, much safer. The kind of accident that happened at Chernobyl could not happen today. A lot of structures have been put in place.

What we’re seeing in real time, however, is a new set of challenges. We’re in uncharted territory here. It’s the first time we’ve ever experienced nuclear power plants in a conflict zone. That’s presenting some real challenges. We don’t yet globally have norms in place, certainly not norms that the combatant Russia is willing to live by in terms of not physically assaulting the facilities, making sure that the operators can operate the facility unimpeded, that continuous power supply which is critical for maintaining the cooling system for the reactor itself, as well as for the spent fuel ponds where used nuclear fuel is stored and needs to be kept cool so that it won’t burn and create a radioactive fire.

I just want to give credit to, and this would be an interesting story, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the UN watchdog responsible for overseeing the peaceful applications of nuclear power. He went to Ukraine the week before last, in order to try and negotiate some norms around those facilities, a set of basic common sense, what Russian troops should and should not be doing around nuclear power plants.

I would argue that all of Europe, including Russia, has an interest in preventing a catastrophic accident at a nuclear power plant. As I imagine, there has got to be a breakdown in the command system, because it’s completely irrational, the behaviors we’ve been seeing around the power plants. I think the jury is still out on the extent to which Russian troops themselves may have been irradiated at significant levels while they were occupying the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. We heard reports of soldiers with radiation sickness, acute radiation sickness, potentially even one death. Let’s see what we learn in coming days and weeks about that.

**John:** David, as we wrap up here, the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s invasion also has a nuclear energy component to it as well, because of course Germany is relying on energy from Russia, and at the same time Germany is closing down its own nuclear reactors, its own nuclear power plants. How do you see the story of nuclear energy being affected by the crisis of energy policy we’re going to be having over the next couple of years?

**David:** I’m not an expert on this, John, but I think you can just do the simple math that if Europe has to wean itself off of Russian oil and gas, it’s going to need substitutions. The transition to sustainable energy takes time. People are looking very hard at how quickly to get to sustainable energy, but it’s not going to happen, so nuclear’s going to have to fill part of that gap.

**John:** Joan, because you’re an expert here, I can ask you, is nuclear fusion always 10 years away? I would love nuclear fusion. Can you get it to us a little sooner?

**Joan:** I’m not an expert on nuclear fusion. I’m an expert on nuclear weapons, less so power. With that having been said, so with that caveat, I do know a number of people who are engaged with the fusion community and they believe we’re getting much closer and that there’s a shot at it in the relatively near future. No, it is not always going to be 10 years away. That is the good news.

**John:** That’s great. I want to thank both of you for both the information, but also helping us highlight some stories along the way. Some things I wrote down here, Project Sapphire feels like it’s an obvious choice for an adaptation. A Gorbachev biopic or a Gorbachev miniseries that’s focusing on that moment or how he rises as a hero within the system to challenge the bureaucracy and challenge the expectations of what Russia should be doing next. Vasili Alapov, what’s the name of the–

**Joan:** Archipov.

**John:** Archipov. That’s the one that’s not the Crimson Tide situation, but a different–

**Joan:** He is the Crimson Tide.

**John:** He’s Crimson Tide.

**Joan:** The other gentleman is Stanislav Petrov.

**David:** You can read about Petrov in The Dead Hand. It’s the opening of the book.

**John:** Fantastic. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your book so we can see that. The other thing you were really emphasizing, both of you, is that the stories that we tell about this, we think about them as centering on the people in power and the decisions they’re making, but so often it’s the people who are doing the investigation, doing the reporting, doing the activism to stop bad things from happening or to move us to a better place may be the more interesting stories for us to be following. As we look to try to tell stories in nuclear space over the next couple years, we don’t have to just focus on the people who are sitting in positions of power. It’s often the people who are not in power who are the most interesting to follow.

**David:** Go find Jeffrey Lewis and Hans Kristensen, two guys in non-governmental organizations who exposed these Chinese missile fields. That’d be a great example.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Joan:** Agree with that. Go take a look at Beatrice Fihn, who won the Nobel Prize for helping to bring about the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons through her work with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

**John:** I love it. This is the time in the show where we do a One Cool Thing where we make some recommendation for our listeners about something they need to check out. Do either of you have a recommendation for something you would like them to be looking at?

**Joan:** Thanks for the questions. Atomic Veterans. There’s a filmmaker who’s done some interesting, very short videos with Atomic Veterans. Last name is Knibbe. He’s a Dutch filmmaker. A lot of people don’t realize this, but we tested nuclear weapons on thousands and thousands of human subjects who were soldiers right after the second World War ended. This gentleman, Morgan Knibbe has been really actively trying to interview the remaining survivors who were subjects of those tests, both in Great Britain and the United States. Some of the documentary work is just riveting. When you listen to these now-old men talk about these experiences, they are so vivid. It gives you a sense of the power of these weapons.

**John:** Fantastic. David, do you have a recommendation for our listeners?

**David:** John, I mentioned the story potential of one man up against the system. I’ve got a new book out in eight weeks. The title is Give Me Liberty. It’s about one man up against a dictatorship. He paid with his life for it. My suggestion is totally self-serving. Take a look at my new book, Give Me Liberty. It’s about a dissident in Cuba who fought Fidel Castro, fought him with no weapons, just pen and paper and an old wheezing Xerox machine. He got 35,000 Cubans to stand behind him and sign a petition for democracy against Castro’s dictatorship.

**John:** That sounds great. My One Cool Thing is, just to stick on the nuclear theme, is a couple years ago I got the chance to visit Hiroshima, which I’d always seen portrayed as being this bombed-out wreckage of a place. Then you go to visit Hiroshima, it’s actually beautiful. I was there over spring break. Cherry blossoms everywhere. It is remarkable combination of a vibrant city that has at its center this park that really shows what happened in the bombing. The museum behind it is fantastic. It both lets you not forget how horrifying the results are of a nuclear attack, but also it gives hope for the ability to rebuild after it. If you’re in Japan anyway and you’re wondering, “Should we go to Hiroshima? Is it going to be depressing?” It’s not going to be depressing. It’s going to be inspiring. I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to go visit Hiroshima.

David and Joan, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I want to thank Hollywood Health and Society for putting this today. This is our third collaboration. You can go back and listen to Episode 412 on addiction and mental health and Episode 440 on incarceration.

Scriptnotes is produced, as always, by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Joan and David, are you on Twitter? Are you reachable by social medias or not?

**Joan:** @joanrohlfing.

**John:** Fantastic.

**David:** I’m @thedeadhandbook.

**John:** That’s great. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find links to thinks we talked about. You’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one Megana and I are about to record about behind the scenes of the last two weeks, am I getting COVID or getting over COVID. I’m fine. Everything turned out fine. Joan and David, thank you so much for joining us. It’s absolutely a pleasure to get to talk with some experts on these subjects. Thank you so much for being with us.

**David:** Thanks.

**Joan:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, I’m back talking with you. I’m no longer prerecorded. This is back happening live. We just finished recording the nuclear episode, which was not fun, but enlightening, and hopefully helpful.

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, terrifying.

**John:** I liked that they had specific examples of like, these are stories that have not been told that someone could tell. That’s great. We always like How Would This Be A Movies, How Would This Be A Series, and it looks like there’s some really good options there.

**Megana:** Yeah, super useful to hear from the expert side of things versus just the writer interpreting that information.

**John:** While I was gone, I got to listen to you and Craig talk about 20 questions in the longest episode of Scriptnotes I think that’s ever been recorded. It was so long. I’m not actually finished with it. I haven’t gotten to the Bonus Segment where you and Craig discuss and solve all generational issues. I’m looking forward to that. I have it saved for me.

**Megana:** Oh gosh, I think the Bonus Segment itself is 30 minutes and the raw audio of what we recorded is 2 and a half hours.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Megana:** I know. I got in a lot of trouble with Bo for that.

**John:** Bo of course is the person who controls Craig’s calendar and schedule, and so therefore you took two and a half hours out of his HBO show to talk about Scriptnotes stuff.

**Megana:** Oh god, now HBO’s going to hate me too.

**John:** You’re on the do not hire list for HBO. Absolutely do not hire her.

**Megana:** When I approached Bo, I was like, “Oh, I need less than an hour. This is going to be so quick.”

**John:** Oh, no.

**Megana:** Then in passing, because her birthday was the next week, I was talking to her on her birthday, and I was like, “Yeah, I have to cut 45 minutes out of this 2-and-a-half-hour episode.” She was like, “What are you talking about? You told me that that was going to be 45 minutes max.” I was like, “Oh, god.”

**John:** One of the things I’m always struck by when I hear Craig talking if I’m not part of the conversation is that Craig really does talk in complete sentences. I’m looking forward to the transcripts for it, because I feel like you could actually just take his answers to things and it would feel like he just wrote them. He actually speaks very much the way other people write.

**Megana:** I think that that’s true. He has really fully formed thoughts right out of the gate, and it’s so impressive.

**John:** Yeah, because he didn’t prepare at all.

**Megana:** Absolutely not.

**John:** He had no sense of what those questions were before you asked those questions.

**Megana:** I didn’t even think he knew that you weren’t going to be there. He just entered the Zoom in his —

**John:** He thinks he’s on this episode. He has no idea that we recorded an episode about nuclear stuff. One of the things that we talked about in the episode was this guy who was talking about whether to drop out of film school. He was having some success. He was like, “Should I stick around for the next two years of film school or should I not?” It was interesting hearing you and Craig have different opinions on this. Even before you said sunk cost fallacy, I was shouting to no one, “Sunk cost fallacy!” because that’s what it really felt like to me is that you’ve gone through this much of your higher education, why would you stop and leave it unfinished there. I totally understand the notion of finishing a thing. Yet I was on Team Craig where I would say, at least for now I think it’s time to step away and pursue this writing career that looks like it’s kind of started.

**Megana:** I’m surprised to hear you say that. I wonder if finishing this degree is going to be helpful to Please Help Me Drop Out of Film School make connections and have some sort of credibility. I don’t really know. Once people are passing your script around, nobody’s looking at your transcript or your resume. It’s a relationship-based industry where they’re like, “I vouch for this guy,” and because your friend vouches for this person, you’re going to read that script. In order to make those connections and get people to take you seriously, I wonder if having the completed degree helps.

**John:** I don’t honestly think it does much, because that person who has a finished film degree, certainly what I learned in the Stark Program at USC was tremendously valuable. The actual degree I got has not been valuable, because no one’s ever asked to see it. I would have those same relationships with my classmates if I’d finished or not finished, to some degree, not entirely. Going through an extra two years with those classmates would’ve been great and I would’ve definitely learned some things, but I don’t think the actual degree is useful in a way that a lottery is necessarily useful in an architecture degree, where you have to actually prove that you know how to do this thing. No employer is ever going to ask for that degree.

I think there’s a pride aspect of it though too is that the pride in finishing a thing can feel great. Making your parents proud, that they can see, “Oh, my son got this degree,” would be great. The compromised solution that you and Craig arrived at is maybe take a gap, take some time off, and be able to go back to it, if that’s possible. That makes sense to me.

**Megana:** We had some interesting follow-up that an added cost to taking time off and going back is that you do lose the momentum, you lose the routine, you lose living close to a college campus. I thought that that was an interesting thing to also take into mind, into that equation. I had another question I wanted to ask you.

**John:** Please.

**Megana:** Someone wrote in and asked, this big win that Please Convince Me To Drop Out of Film School was hanging their hat on was that when the script was sent to Paramount, Paramount had said that they wanted to recommend it to their team. What does that feedback mean to you? I didn’t think that that was necessarily as big of a win as this listener seemed to think it was, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

**John:** It sounds like he got good coverage or got a recommend from somebody at Paramount, which is great. It’s not nothing, but it’s not a lot. It’s not going to be a guaranteed next step. I think the most you can hope out of that is that they’re going to want to take a meeting with you, which is again another good step, but isn’t a guarantee of any success. Still, take those little wins when they come. It is good news. It’s encouraging that people are reading stuff that you’re writing and liking it to the degree they want other people around them to like it. The folks who have been in your job before you, who have all gone to have writing careers, a common thread I’ve noticed is when their stuff gets passed around without them knowing it’s getting passed around, that’s when things are starting to sizzle and that things are getting started there. Please Convince Me doesn’t sound like he’s quite there yet, but maybe he’s going to get there. Be happy for what you have there.

**Megana:** My other worry is that he’s getting all of this information from this director who has a vested interest in selling a certain narrative to the writer versus an agent who you would expect to act in your best interest or something.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. The gatekeeper function there of that director is worth noting. I would also say that if this guy does decide to drop out of film school, it shouldn’t mean that he should stop all networking and all other ways of meeting people. This might be a good opportunity then to take that improv class, join that other group, find some other writers, get in a couple different writing groups. Just make sure that you are still actively doing all the other things if film school is not where you’re spending most of your time and your money, so making sure you’re still out there doing the other kinds of things that help you learn about the job you’re trying to do.

**Megana:** If you, John August, were what, 21, just graduated from Drake, what would your next steps be in the industry?

**John:** I would’ve moved to Los Angeles, just because that’s where the center of things is. LA’s a city I always want to live in. It’s much easier to move when you’re 21 than it is when you’re 25 or when you’re 29. I would’ve moved here. I probably still would’ve applied to film school, because I just didn’t know anything coming into this business. Again, 21-year-old me now with the internet would be much better connected. I would listen to all of Scriptnotes. I would’ve had a better sense of what Craig and whoever the equivalent of me would be, the alternate reality John.

**Megana:** Alternate reality, yeah.

**John:** I would’ve moved here. I would’ve gotten started. I would’ve taken the improv classes. I would’ve taken some writing classes just to be with other writers. I would’ve been doing all those things and getting a job that was interesting but not so overwhelmingly active that I still would have time to write. I think that’s what that theoretical John August would be doing.

The idea of coming out of undergrad is particularly relevant, because I was just on a college tour. As you know, Mike and Amy and I went to do a college tour of the East Coast. We got to see college towns. We started in Montreal, went to Boston. Then the plan was to go on to see Ann Arbor and Chicago and other places. Of course, as you know, I promptly got COVID, whole family got COVID, and so we ended up spending nine days in a hotel room in Boston getting over COVID, which sucked, but was not deadly, was not dangerous, because vaccines, thank god. It all sorted out okay, but definitely got me thinking about Boston as a college town. You went to college there. Man, what a great place to go to school.

**Megana:** I know. It’s the perfect place to live when you are that age and going to college and you’re just surrounded by all of these other young people or academics. It’s just a really invigorating, thrilling place to be.

**John:** While we’re in our quarantining, we watched The Social Network, which is a movie I generally love, which is also, of course, set in Boston. It was weird to see that movie now and watch it with my daughter watching it and her eyes on how she perceives Facebook, how she perceives these characters. She said afterwards, “I’ve never been so non-consensually mansplained to by a movie.”

**Megana:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Then I wanted to talk to her about the history of Aaron Sorkin. She’s like, “No, you’re mansplaining right now.” There was no stopping it. As a man, you cannot say anything, because it will actually be mansplaining to explain why he has a history of mansplaining in his films and TV shows.

**Megana:** Oh my god, as someone who was a teenage daughter at some point, I know that it was very difficult for my parents during that period, but it seems particularly difficult to raise a Gen Z teenage daughter. Oh my gosh. I would just be canceled all of the time.

**John:** We’re always on eggshells. That’s what we’re going to do. Megana, thank you for holding down the fort while I was gone.

**Megana:** Of course. Glad to have you back.

**John:** Just for our listeners, should know going forward, Craig’s availability is really tight because of the show he’s shooting right now, so we’re not sure which episodes he’s going to be with us for the next couple weeks, but we’ll still have Scriptnotes and we’ll find a way to make it enjoyable and entertaining and do some different things while we figure this all out. Thanks.

**Megana:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Joan Rohlfing and the Nuclear Threat Initiative](https://www.nti.org/about/people/joan-rohlfing/) and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JoanRohlfing)
* [David E. Hoffman](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/david-e-hoffman/) and his [books, including Pulitzer winner The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/81268/the-dead-hand-by-david–e-hoffman/)
* [Dall-E-2](https://openai.com/dall-e-2/)
* [MidJourney](https://www.readthepresentage.com/p/midjourney-ai-art-tool?s=r)
* [Atomic Veterans](https://www.naav.com/)
* Book [Give Me Liberty by David E. Hoffman](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Give-Me-Liberty/David-E-Hoffman/9781982191191)
* [Reykjavík summit of 1986 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Reykjavik-summit-of-1986)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/545standard.mp3).