The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/thats-a-good-question).
**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that this episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** Ow. My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 604 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Now, often on this podcast, we answer listener questions. Today, we are going to question questions themselves, exploring what’s really happening when characters in movies ask questions.
**Craig:** Are you high?
**John:** And crafty.
**Craig:** This is the closest we’ve ever come to being a weed-based podcast.
**John:** Absolutely. That does feel very high and very trippy.
**Craig:** What if we question, what is the questions about questions themselves?
**John:** Questions about questions, man. It did feel that way as I started outlining it, but then as I dug into it, it was like, you know what, our characters are asking questions all the time. Some of the most famous lines of dialog are questions. We’ll look into why characters ask questions, and as writers, what we should be thinking about when we put a question in a character’s mouth.
**Craig:** I’m down for that, which is good, because I have no choice.
**John:** You have no choice.
**Craig:** I have no choice.
**John:** You’re a passenger on this ride to some degree. Plus, let’s follow up on some earlier episodes and maybe answer some listener questions that have come in new this past week. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, I want to discuss the financial backgrounds of superheroes and supervillains and the strange patterns of inherited wealth, which I’m not sure I had considered before I read this article.
**Craig:** That’s fascinating. Lot of weird money.
**John:** Weird money.
**Craig:** Weird money, weird families of people with money.
**John:** With power.
**Craig:** With power.
**John:** Royalty.
**Craig:** Royalty. People love royalty.
**John:** Speaking of Premium members, Drew, you got an email from a listener who was talking about our Premium membership.
**Drew Marquardt:** Yeah. We’ll start it off with a question. Kate writes, “I wonder if you would be open to restarting the discount code for annual subscribers to Scriptnotes. I know it’s just $10, but like most folks, I’m economizing in every way I can until the Strike is over, and I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask, especially since a lot of other listeners are likely in even worse shape, as out-of-work assistants or what have you.”
**Craig:** Let’s increase the price. John.
**John:** Jacking up the price all the way to the stratosphere.
**Craig:** This is a chance for us to triple the price and finally turn this podcast into what it was always meant to be, an exclusive, sky-box-like experience for CEOs.
**John:** That’s what it is.
**Craig:** Or…
**John:** Or we could do what Kate suggests. Let’s bring back the discount code. Last time it was onion. This time let’s have it be summer. If you go to scriptnotes.net and you sign up for a Premium membership, use that promo code, summer, to save some money there.
**Craig:** That’s a fine idea. Just so people understand, this is if you buy all 12 months at once, as opposed to buying a month at a time? Is that the idea?
**John:** Exactly. People should buy all 12 months, because it’s just so much cheaper. We really encouraged people when we had Rian on, because we looked at our numbers. We’re like, why are people paying month after month? It actually is much cheaper and better for everybody, and it reduces turn. It makes things easier for everyone if you do the annual. You sign up for an annual membership, using the code summer will save you some money. We can keep this code running through the end of July, let’s say.
**Craig:** It says summer. Maybe August. How much money are we going to lose if we do this? Am I going to be in trouble?
**John:** You won’t be in trouble. At a certain point, a discount code becomes not even a discount code if it’s just the normal.
**Craig:** I hear what you’re saying. It’s gotta be special.
**John:** It’s gotta be special. At least through the end of July, we’ll be doing it. Honestly, you should do it now if you want to sign up for it, because that way you can save some money.
**Craig:** Let’s just say that once we hit the end of July, the price will be $100 a month.
**John:** Wow.
**Craig:** Get this over with.
**John:** Craig making big economic decisions here.
**Craig:** Get this over with, guys. Get in now.
**John:** Get in now.
**Craig:** While you can.
**John:** Cool. Craig, back in Episode 487 and Episode 489, we talked about the possibility of a GameStop movie.
**Craig:** Of course.
**John:** GameStop, of course, was the stalk that rose up so high, and based on nothing, people were making money on it, losing money on it. We talked about how would this be a movie, is there a GameStop movie to be made. I can report the answer is yes, because there’s now a trailer for the GameStop movie, which Sony is putting out. I liked the trailer a lot. Did you look at the trailer?
**Craig:** I haven’t looked at the trailer. Just refresh my memory. Did we agree that it was a movie? I can’t remember.
**John:** We agreed that there was some kind of movie here. We have a quote here from you, Craig. The bet is that, A, you’re going to have a story that ultimately turns out to be something that is a full story, B, will it still be relevant when the movie comes out, that it won’t feel dated or like yesterday’s news, and C, will it feature characters that are fascinating and feature actors and filmmakers that people connect with. That’s a pretty big gamble. This is based on a book by Ben Mezrich called The Antisocial Network. Ben Mezrich [MASS-ritch], I don’t know how to pronounce his last name.
**Craig:** MEZ-ritch.
**John:** How do you pronounce that?
**Craig:** I would say MEZ-ritch.
**John:** MEZ-ritch. It’s written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, directed by-
**Craig:** By the way, I love them. They’re so great.
**John:** How do you know them?
**Craig:** A few years ago, I was working with them. They had a project at HBO. It was halfway into something. It was on its way. It needed a little… No one was quite sure. HBO wasn’t quite sure. They put us together on a date to see if we liked each other, because I liked their writing, and I liked the project. We worked on it for a bit, and then it just fell apart because of various reasons, not because I’m a terrible person. Other reasons. Not because they’re bad writers. They’re fantastic. Lauren and Rebecca are wonderful.
I think it was Rebecca would always say… I’m very gentle. I think when I’m working with people, if I have thoughts, I don’t want to beat them over the head with them. I would get to a page and go, “Okay, this scene.” She would see my hesitance and say, “Craig, just so you know, our love language is abuse. Go ahead,” which weirdly made me even more gentle. They’re terrific. Now I know this is going to be fun. They’re great.
**John:** Directed by Craig Gillespie, who did I, Tonya and-
**Craig:** Good director.
**John:** … Cruella. It feels like a good combination of people here. You got some Seth Rogen in there. You got your boy Jason Bateman in there. I think it’s going to be a promising movie. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s always nice when we see a How Would This be a Movie that actually becomes a movie.
**Craig:** It is.
**John:** It’s all because of us.
**Craig:** I knew that was going to be a movie, because I remember just multiple people calling. There were multiple people calling me, going, “Okay, I got the rights to that.” I’m like, “That’s weird, because two hours ago, somebody else called with different rights.” There were a lot of people calling a lot of people. There was that moment. Then what’s interesting here is it crystallizes around a book, which I think is very smart. It is relevant. It is still relevant, because corporations and stocks and also the bizarre influence of the internet is still very much in play. I think there is relevance to it. I don’t know if it’s a full story or not. That’s the interesting part. Don’t know. They certainly have actors and filmmakers that people connect with. All told, stonks.
**John:** I’m really excited.
**Craig:** Stonks.
**John:** Stonks.
**Craig:** Stonks.
**John:** Stonks.
**Craig:** Stonks. By the way, we talked about NFTs fairly early on, because you, of course, were right there on the bleeding edge of NFTs.
**John:** I remember my case for NFTs was I believed it was going to succeed. It was going to be something like Disney was going to have something like an NFT for digital collectibles. That never happened. I was wrong.
**Craig:** That didn’t happen. Some other super dumb shit happened instead, which was mind-blowing to me. I don’t know how I forgot that there was an entire feeding frenzy over digital images of apes, but there was. Anyway, all that fell apart. I know, I know, we’re all just shocked that a $800,000 image that anyone can also have on their computer wouldn’t hold its value. I know. I know. I know.
**John:** It’s wild.
**Craig:** I’m going to get that Beeple thing and put in my house. What is that, $68 million or something?
**John:** Do it.
**Craig:** No one can stop me.
**John:** Craig, your house is gorgeous, but I think it is lacking some Beeple art.
**Craig:** Lacking Beeple.
**John:** Lacking some Beeple.
**Craig:** I’m going to throw some Beeple on there. There is art to be made of other people buying Beeple. I want a painting-
**John:** That’s what it is.
**Craig:** … of somebody buying the Beeple art. Anyway, this is exciting. I’m going to check out that trailer almost entirely because of Lauren and Rebecca.
**John:** Love it. The next bit of follow-up comes from Hollins. Drew, what does Hollins write?
**Drew:** Hollins says, “I’ve been listening for seven or eight years, and this is the first time I’ve written in. I have no connection to the entertainment industry or screenwriting. I’m a statistician in the pharmaceutical industry. After listening to the outro for Episode 602, I felt compelled to send this note imploring you to request Jon Spurney to compose an extended version of that tune. I must’ve listened to it 20 times by now. The world needs a full three minutes of that bumping ’80s cop drama inspired theme.”
**Craig:** Hollins, I love that you love this. I am completely into Jon Spurney not only extending that song, but doing an entire album. It’s not so much ’80s cop drama as it is yacht rock.
**John:** Yeah, it’s a little of that too.
**Craig:** That is right down the… Chris Cross, that’s who Jon Spurney’s taking off here. Chris Cross, Christopher Cross, is right up there in the Hall and Oates of fame of yacht rock. Like all great yacht rock songs, and I mean all great yacht rock songs, Michael McDonald pops up somewhere. (sings) Excellent. Jon Spurney, not only would it be great for you to complete that, but yeah, let’s see, maybe you could (sings: down in Jamaica they got lots of pretty women). Yeah, do that one.
**John:** That’d be good.
**Craig:** (Sings: on and on, they just keep on podcasting.) Come on, Jon.
**John:** Cool. Great. We’ve assigned some work to Jon Spurney. Thank you, Jon Spurney. Here is further work assigned to you by us and by Hollins, which is really what we live to do.
**Craig:** Thank you, Hollins. Agreed.
**John:** Last bit of follow-up is on pitch decks. Help us out there.
**Drew:** Bruce writes, “In Episodes 599 and 601, the topic of pitch decks came up and how more and more often they’re becoming a required skill for screenwriters. You all are not alone. I’m not a screenwriter, but I am a scientist, working for a major consumer goods company. The old painfully naïve adage of good science should speak for itself hasn’t really been true for years. The most successful scientists are ones who can describe to the marketers what they’ve invented in a language that marketers speak, so using PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, or whatever, and show what language the marketers can use, basically doing a miniature version of their job for them, so they can see the potential more clearly. You’d think the marketers and scientists would work on all this together. Nope. We make pitch decks. As a result, many of us have gotten pretty damn good at making decks. I wonder if there’s a business opportunity there. Cheap deck help for those of us wanting to help out writers. Anyway, we can commiserate together. Decks are a pain but essential all over.”
**John:** The point here is that decks have become their own new form of communication. It’s not surprising that we have to use them as screenwriters to explain what we’re doing visually. People have come to expect them in all industries as an alternative to, here, I’m going to hand you a document for you to look at while I’m describing this thing. No. You have to have pictures in front of your eyes while I talk you through this process.
**Craig:** Pitch decks are just the PowerPoint-ized version of stuff that’s been around forever. When we were kids and we would watch a cartoon and there was a scene with a businessman, he would always be standing in front of a thing on an easel.
**John:** It’s very mathematic.
**Craig:** He would be whacking at it with this long stick. There would be a pie chart or a bar graph. We’ve always done it. My first job in LA, my first real job was at an advertising company. When we would go make a presentation, we would have all these things on foam core that had been put… It was just a non-electrified PowerPoint back then. I hate them. I hate them. My eyes get so heavy.
**John:** They can get really heavy. A couple years back, I was talking with some folks who were doing reality shows. I was curious, how do you pitch reality shows. It’s entirely a deck. A deck isn’t what you would think of, which is basically like, I’m going to talk you through this deck. Actually, the deck is the whole thing. Rather than sending it through a proposal in some other way, the deck has all the information, and it has a lot of text in it too. The idea is that person is going to be going through this side by side and reading the things. It’s really making the whole case for itself there. The deck could be shipped independently of somebody actually presenting the deck. I hope we don’t get there as screenwriters.
**Craig:** I’m sure we will.
**John:** We will.
**Craig:** I’m sure we will.
**John:** That becomes free work. That is a leave behind.
**Craig:** We shouldn’t. I’m sure we will. We, not me or you, but others, because people like to get jobs. If I were on the buying side of things, I would be suspicious of decks, because am I just getting decked? At some point, you’re supposed to be aiming towards the end of a very long process, and you have to project forward in your mind. Are you just, at this point, buying an impressive deck so you can show somebody look how good the deck is? It’s dangerous.
**John:** It’s like buying a sizzle reel that’s cut from other films. It’s like, yeah, that’s what this might feel like, but are you actually going to be able to make that thing?
**Craig:** Yeah. Like, “Cool sizzle reel. I guess we should hire the filmmakers that shot the things that you put in your sizzle reel.” By the way, I also don’t understand those. In my mind, it’s almost embarrassing to say, “Look, this is the kind of thing I want to make. Let me show you stuff other people have made.” It’s almost like an admission of a lack of originality. I don’t know. It’s all cringey to me, but then again, I’m old. I’m old. I’m old-
**John:** From a different time.
**Craig:** … and soon to be completely irrelevant. Not yet.
**John:** Not yet.
**Craig:** But soon.
**John:** You’re still making stuff.
**Craig:** I’m still in the game. I’m vital. I’m vital.
**John:** You’re vital. You’re essential.
**Craig:** I’m essential, for now.
**John:** For now.
**Craig:** But soon, you can all point and laugh at me and say, “Oh my god, that was the guy who did that thing that I can’t remember the name of.” Oh god, I can’t wait. Let’s discuss questions about questions.
**John:** Questions about questions. This idea came to me because, on Monday I was out on the picket lines at Netflix, and I got asked a bunch of questions, which always happens, because I have a little badge, and people ask me questions. Some of the questions I got were, “How long is the Strike going to last? What do you think of the proposed California tax credits? How’s it going out here?” and, “How many flashbacks can a movie have?” a very specific crafty question I got on the picket line, from a woman who asked a specific question, different from all the other questions.
**Craig:** Let’s start with the first one. You don’t have to give us down to the day, but I think a week should be fine. Just give a sense of how many more weeks we have to go.
**John:** Absolutely. Those are the kind of things which I have prepared answers for. It got me thinking about, okay, I understand why the person’s asking the question, and the person seems to think that there is an answer. They think it’s a closed question that actually has an answer. Instead, what I need to give them is a, here is the general framework for how we will know when the Strike is over, when there’s going to be a deal to be reached.
**Craig:** When it’s over, when the Strike is over, when someone says, “Hey everyone, the Strike is over.” That’s it. It’s a little disconcerting that people who vote for a Strike think that there is some sort of pre-programmed end terminus. We do love certainty. I will say that much. We crave it. We absolutely crave it. Right now, we don’t have much. I understand the anxiety.
**John:** It got me thinking about questions themselves and why we ask questions in the real world, but also how people ask questions in movies and TV and how crucial they are to dialog. We haven’t talked so much about this part of dialog in all of our 600-odd episodes. I thought we would really dig into it. This is different from… We’ve often talked about the central dramatic question, which is basically what is the question the film is trying to answer. These are questions that are asked within dialog, between characters, and why people are asking these questions and digging into how they can be useful as a tool. I thought, Craig, we might start with just some famous questions from previous films, maybe just take turns reading through these. For example, “Feel lucky, punk?”
**Craig:** “Are you trying to seduce me?”
**John:** “Would you like me to seduce you?”
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** “Would you like to play a game?”
**Craig:** “Why so serious?”
**John:** “You talking to me?”
**Craig:** You put a G on that. You’re not from New York at all.
**John:** That was a “talkin’.” I don’t think I said “talking.”
**Craig:** You did. You did.
**John:** Let’s check the tape.
**Craig:** I will say we will run the tape back. If you’re from Staten Island, like myself, that was a mile away. That was a mile away. If there’s a question from somebody from Colorado, you’re doing that one.
**John:** I don’t say the Ts in mountain, but putting on the Gs on things that don’t need Gs. It’s confusing.
**Craig:** “You talking to me? You talking to me?”
**John:** “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
**Craig:** “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
**John:** “Do you want to build a snowman?”
**Craig:** “What’s your favorite scary movie?”
**John:** “Funny how? Funny like a clown? Do I amuse you?”
**Craig:** That was bad.
**John:** That was really bad.
**Craig:** I was cringing because I thought-
**John:** Yeah, cringe.
**Craig:** … oh, it’s happening again. It was all right. It was all right. It was all right. It was all right. “Funny how? Funny like a clown?” See, it’s a whole thing. It’s a New York thing.
**John:** You’re also the person who does voices. I’m not the person who does voices.
**Craig:** I do some voices. I don’t even know this one. “Would you like us to assign someone to-”
**John:** I don’t know what that is.
**Drew:** It’s from Mean Girls.
**Craig:** We’re old men. Oh my god. I love that it just disappeared from the Workflowy. It’s gone. “Bueller? Bueller?”
**John:** “What’s in the box?”
**Craig:** “Are you not entertained?”
**John:** (Singing: tell me more, tell me more, was it love at first sight?)
**Craig:** “Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?”
**John:** “Have you checked the children?”
**Craig:** “Did we just become best friends?”
**John:** Oh, Stepbrothers.
**Craig:** Stepbrothers.
**John:** Questions are sometimes there to frame the next bit of dialog, but sometimes they are fundamental to the character and where we’re going to. Let’s think through some situations where you’re going to have a lot of questions being asked. Obviously, trials. Any classroom. It maybe has Socratic method in there, some dialog where the teacher’s asking questions of students and responding with questions. Interrogations are all questions. Journalists, press briefings. Within any relationship, questions between the two people.
**Craig:** True.
**John:** Deflecting, flirting, making small talk, keeping a ball in the air. Therapy. Therapy is a lot of questions. Sometimes we’re using it to get crucial pieces of exposition out there, like, “Are you still a journalist?” Sometimes we need to demonstrate active listening, that the characters are really paying attention to what the other character is saying, establishing want and motive.
Craig, as we think through questions, think through questions in stuff you’ve written, stuff that you’ve seen, and stuff you’ve loved, you’re not going to ask a question unless there’s a person you can ask the question of. To me, it forms a social contract between those two characters. You are a person who has information that I want or that I deem worthy of asking the question. Then there’s also a social hierarchy of like, are you even allowed to ask me a question. There’s an interesting balancing thing whenever a question comes into play.
**Craig:** I’ll throw one more other kind of question on that maybe skirts around the idea that you have information that I want, and that’s the manipulative question.
**John:** Of course.
**Craig:** I’m trapping you.
**John:** Give me an example.
**Craig:** I don’t know if you saw Moneyball.
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** There’s a scene where Brad Bitt, who’s playing Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland As, who’s trying desperately to put together a winning team out of no money, he’s got all of his scouts. They’re basically talking about how they’re going to replace Jason Giambi, their star first baseman who’s basically went into free agency off to the Yankees. They’re coming up with all these ways to do it. He basically says, “Let me ask you something. If there’s somebody else out there like Jason Giambi, can we afford them? Are we going to be able to get anybody that is going to add up to what he does, like him?” They say no. He goes, “Then what the fuck are you talking about, man?”
It’s sort of like, why are you following this course of action when we can’t do it? We can’t get there. We’re going to have to figure out some other bizarre way to fill the gap left behind by this baseball player. These guys are just not thinking outside of the box. Asking leading questions when you know the answer, and you need to have somebody look with eyes open and get out of their own head or face some uncomfortable truths, is another reason we ask questions.
**John:** Absolutely.
**Craig:** To trap people.
**John:** Yeah, to trap people or at least get them following your train of thought. Sometimes they’re leading questions. Sometimes they’re rhetorical questions, where you’re not actually asking a question to get an answer, you’re asking a question to move them to the next line of thought.
You talked a bit about, there’s the notion of open questions versus closed questions. Closed questions have a definitive answer, yes, no, true, false. There is an answer to a closed question. An open question, how are you feeling today? The person who’s asking the question doesn’t necessarily know the answer. Most importantly, the person answering the question could say anything. There’s a lot of latitude given there for what the answer is.
The point you raise is that, a lot of times a person who’s asking a question does know the answer, or at least knows the answer that they want to hear. They’re asking the question in a specific way to put that person on the spot either privately or publicly. That’s a crucial dynamic to be thinking about any time you’re choosing to put that question mark there.
**Craig:** Sometimes it’s better to use questions to help a character disguise fear. You can ask a question, a very small kind of question, and somebody can say, “We have much, much bigger problems.” Then the person asking the question could say, “I know. I’m just trying to do something. Just tell me, how do I open the door?” We use questions all the time for reasons beyond the obvious.
**John:** Absolutely.
**Craig:** Really, when you’re writing, sometimes the useful, I guess, the instructive advice would be, is there something somebody could say that would be better posed as a strange question that somebody else could question, because now you’re going to pull something out of somebody, as opposed to somebody just announcing something.
**John:** Absolutely. The simplest way to be thinking about it is, would somebody actually just say this next thing, or is this a way for this to be summoned, evoked by a question that comes out of it. The danger is that the really hacky way is that you just have a character in scene whose whole job is just to ask the question that lets the other person answer the question. That could feel repetitive and junky. If someone’s always setting the ball so the person can spike it, that’s not going to be fun.
Well-done questions can move the train of thought along and get you in a place that the audience is trying to answer the question with them. It’s provoking a chain of thought within the audience.
**Craig:** As you go through your day, there’s an exercise you can do where you say to somebody that you’re with, “Every time I ask a question, just go, ‘You asked a question,'” and then write it down, because you won’t remember, and you won’t even realize you’re asking the questions when you ask them. It goes by that fast. Somebody is going to hold you accountable. You are going to write down all the questions that you ask.
You’re going to realize how many of them are not doing the thing you think questions normally do. They’re doing other things. If you can figure out how to plug into those strange sideways questions that are helping you avoid things, helping you minimize things, helping you advance what you want to be true, then you start to find things.
Of course, there are times where somebody’s just interested, where somebody really does want to know something. When characters are dealing with the hardware of a plot, of course, you may say, “All right, how do we deal with this?” A bunch of Chernobyl is people going, “What do we do?” It’s a very simple question, what do we do? They really wanted to know, what do we do?
Sometimes the questions are different. Sometimes the questions are about self-protection, manipulation, self-delusion, seduction, all sorts of things that we can do where we choose to put something in the form of a question, to imply that the other person has a full choice in answering, when in fact, we don’t always.
**John:** Absolutely. You’re giving them a very limited set of options to choose between. A thing that is very useful in the real world, which I’m sure you can absolutely use for dramatic purposes, but I think you should be careful using it for dramatic purposes, is that often we will ask questions to distract from the thing we don’t want to be talking about. You’ll use it as a way of changing topics, to go on to another thing. That could be a very valid strategy in the real world. It can often be used in comedies and dramas.
Just be mindful of the fact that in scenes, you’re trying to get to a point. If a character’s going to use a question to distract off of a thing, make sure that we’re going to someplace that’s going to be interesting dramatically, and we’re not just lessening the tension within the scene.
**Craig:** Imagine yourself in the audience. If the audience is going to realize that that question is designed to dodge or duck, then probably the character in the scene that’s hearing the question would also be smart enough to realize that, at which point it now becomes a game of, am I going to confront what just happened here, or am I going to go along and answer it, knowing full well what’s going on, in which case I’m the one in charge now. That is why questions are interesting. They give people choices, more than anything else.
**John:** They do.
**Craig:** If you make a statement, there is no choice for another person to make. If you put it in the form of a question, now that character has a choice. Now they have to figure out what they want to do. Questions are, I think, more fun.
**John:** They are. We’re talking about questions generally as a dyad, so there’s a questioner and the person answering the question. Sometimes questions are actually in a group situation. That also changes the dynamics. If I ask a question of a group of people, the social pressure of who is going to answer the question, who is going to step up first to risk the humiliation of answering the question wrong, or will leap into it with opinion and take control of the conversation. Be thinking about questions not just as two people talking. It can be a part of a group dynamic.
Of course, there’s times where a question is part of a larger speech, where it’s given to a bigger group of people. Rhetorical questions that you’re not expecting people to answer in that moment, but really you’re helping to frame your argument by asking a question that people are answering in their minds but not saying aloud.
**Craig:** You make an interesting point about a group, even if you’re not on stage. Let’s say it’s a scene, it’s a party, and there are six people just chatting. One person says, “Hold on, I have a question for everybody.” That person has shifted the focus of that conversation to them. They are now in charge. They have created a framework of the conversation that other people will now participate in. It’s understood that there’s a reason they’re asking that question, that it’s not just a random question, but rather they have a stronger opinion about it than you probably do, or they’ve thought about it more than you do, or they’re about to challenge your answer. Either way, that is a focus shifter and a focus focuser, which is interesting.
**John:** They’re declaring a social status that they are entitled to ask this question, because if they were lower ranking in the group, they shouldn’t be able to take the talking stick and ask the question of the whole group. That does change things. It’s a risk for them to be taking that role, which is exciting for a scene.
**Craig:** It is an expression of confidence. Even if everybody’s roughly on the same level of things, it’s a way of saying, actually, I am now slightly elevated above you all. Whether you realized it or not, I became the leader of everything that is going to be said from here forward, because I frame things through a question. We fall for this in real life all the time. All the time, people just start, “I have a question for everybody.” Everybody suddenly is a child in a classroom. You don’t even know how it happened. It just does.
**John:** We all remember situations where someone has tried to do that, and no, no, no, no, no, you don’t get to do that. That’s the risk of trying to take that role.
**Craig:** “Shut up, idiot. No one cares, idiot.” That could happen, theoretically. You don’t want to… You gotta pick your moments.
**John:** I bought a new car recently.
**Craig:** Congrats.
**John:** I just hate buying cars. Everyone hates buying cars. I liked filling out a form and getting a Tesla. That was a good experience. Every other experience of buying a car is just like, “How are you doing today? What are you looking for?” and the constant series of questions that is designed to lead you down a funnel to get you to say yes to buying a car on that day.
**Craig:** John, you haven’t thought about using a car broker?
**John:** You know what? I had a car broker before, and that car broker quit the business. I couldn’t find a good car broker. I think I did ask you about a car broker. Maybe I forgot to ask you about a car broker.
**Craig:** You forgot to ask me, because I got a good one.
**John:** You got one?
**Craig:** I got one. I got one. You somehow end up spending less, and you don’t have to do any of that miserable stuff.
**John:** It was a good reminder of, oh, that’s right, there is this whole process. It’s the game that is being played. You’re filling out the form, but in a social interaction to get you through there.
**Craig:** Salesmen in particular are masters of that sort of thing, because so much of what they do is organized manipulation, practiced manipulation. Same thing with magicians, by the way.
**John:** Of course.
**Craig:** Note how many questions they ask. They are getting you to think about what they want you to think about, while they’re doing other stuff. Then of course, religious leaders do this all the time. They’re always asking questions. Why is it that so and so and so and so? Everybody leans forward. “Why?” Then he answers the question for you. Oh my gosh.
We talked about certainty earlier. Somebody said to you, “Hey, how much more longer is this strike going to go?” What they want is the certainty and comfort of an answer. Asking questions that you can then answer for people is creating a synthetic comfort. It’s not real. It’s not rooted in anything true. It’s a way to create comfort.
Especially when you’re dealing with characters who are smart and want things, questions are a great way to go about stuff. They also can be very intimidating too. There’s that weird thing that happens when somebody asks you a question that you weren’t expecting at all, and they’re very strangely calm about it. You think, this is not going to go anywhere good at all. At all.
**John:** Like, “Do you think these locks are strong enough to keep somebody out of this house?”
**Craig:** That’s definitely a huge red flag. There’s also just the strange, “Let me ask you something. Have you ever seen a dead dog?” I don’t know where this is going. It’s not anywhere good.
**John:** You’re not leaning into that conversation. You’re taking a little step back there.
**Craig:** “No.” “Interesting, because… ” I’m like, uh. Very powerful to use the question mark. Question mark appears in the stuff I write, constantly. You know what almost never appears?
**John:** Exclamation point?
**Craig:** Bingo.
**John:** I’ll use an exclamation point when someone truly is shouting.
**Craig:** Shouting. Literally shouting.
**John:** Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions. I see two or three here. Drew, do you want to start us off with M?
**Drew:** “In 2016, I wrote a spec feature script that got some attention, Nicholl semifinalist, Hollywood blacklist, etc. It was eventually optioned by Amazon, where it was in development for five years or so. Various people came and went. Some people got fired. Some people lost interest. Whatever. It fell apart. Classic development hell. After the film option expired, I tried to reimagine it as a limited series for streaming. I spent about a year re-tooling, wrote the pilot, series bible, and mapped out seven episodes in some detail, but alas, I could not interest my reps to send it out. I was told, ‘Very hard for a first-time writer to break in with a TV pilot. You need to be a person already working in TV with some credits.’ As you can probably tell, I’m having a hard time letting go with this story, so currently I’m writing it as a novel. I figure if I can publish it, at least that way I will have some closure. My very long-winded question is, have you ever seen or heard of a situation where somebody successfully turns a screenplay into a book, and would you have any advice for me on that?”
**John:** My instinct here is that M probably needs to focus his attention on writing something else, because I’m a little concerned that it’s going to be that you got your one thing, and too much of your identity is wrapped up in this one thing. I do know some examples of people who have written books on things. Craig, what are you thinking?
**Craig:** I agree. By the way, when your reps say, “Very hard for a first-time writer to break in with a TV pilot. You need to be a person already working in TV with some credits,” what they’re really saying is, this isn’t good enough, dude, because believe me, if it were awesome, they would not be saying that. That is one of those thousands of ways people can say no.
You are having a hard time letting go of this story. I understand why. My guess is this was the first thing you wrote that gave you that feeling of legitimacy. There was even an option from a company and some money and there was development. Point is, it legitimized you, because I’m not seeing anything else in your question that implies other sales or other things. When you have something that legitimizes you, it’s hard to let it go. It feels like you’re being maybe stupid or something. You’re going to have to write another thing. You’re going to have to write another thing.
By the way, that spec feature script, it hasn’t disintegrated. It’s still there. You never know. It was optioned, so it’d come back to you, I presume. It wasn’t bought. Somebody else might like it. In the meantime, yeah, you could write it as a novel, but I’m starting to get concerned that you don’t have the confidence to write a different thing.
What I would suggest, M, is write something else first. Then come back around and consider turning your spec feature script, the first one, into a novel. Give yourself the forced opportunity to prove to yourself that you are more than a one-story writer.
**John:** I 100% agree. Thinking back to writers who’ve done the opposite of adaptation, where they’ve taken a screenplay and gone to a book, our own Aline Brosh McKenna has her graphic novel, Jane. It’s based on a screenplay that she’d written. That’s a reverse adaptation example.
I also want to go back to, you wrote a pilot, series bible, and mapped out seven episodes in some detail for that series. If your reps had been excited or if your reps had been invested in the idea, that next would’ve been to, “Great, I see a lot of potential here. You are not a TV showrunner. You have no experience with that. Let’s see if we can find somebody who is a TV showrunner who’s really excited about this idea, and partner you guys up so you could actually do this as a show and take this out to sell.” That’s the kind of thing that could work. I’m a little disappointed that your reps didn’t see that as a possibility.
**Craig:** Oh, I think they saw.
**John:** I think that’s also fair too, is that they didn’t think that what they were reading there was going to attract the kind of showrunner to make this possible to take out on the town. I’m sorry, M, but that’s the reality of it.
**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the deal. If you had your representatives a pilot, a bible, and the bible is thorough enough to map out seven episodes, they have enough information. It doesn’t cost them much, other than reputation, to pick up the phone, call somebody else, and say, “Hey, you should take a look at this. It’s pretty awesome.” That’s all they ever do is just-
**John:** That’s all they do.
**Craig:** … is just say, “Hey, you should take a look at this. This is a hot writer,” and blah blah blah blah blah. They didn’t, and it’s because they just don’t think people are going to say yes. They don’t want people to call them back and say, “Why would you send me this?” It’s not there. It’s just not there. It’s fine. Write another thing. Then who knows?
**John:** You know you can write. You got attention of the Nicholl’s. You got the blacklist. It got optioned. You know you can write a thing. Don’t think about it being like… That was not about this one piece of material. It’s about you actually were able to write it. Write something else.
**Craig:** Write something else. Write something else. At this point, I think, John, you and I have written so much stuff that there are absolutely at least three things, at least three things we’ve written at length, that we have completely forgotten we’ve done.
**John:** Oh, no idea that I wrote them, yeah.
**Craig:** Gone. That’s what you’re aiming for. You’re aiming for writing so many things that you won’t even remember this spec feature script. Now, it may be that somebody one day goes, “Hey, you know what we’re looking for is a blank.” You’re like, “Guess what I’ve got in my drawer. Now, we’re going to have to polish it a little bit.” It may be that that happens. In the meantime, write different and write more.
**John:** Agreed. Let’s do one more question here.
**Drew:** CJ in Australia writes, “I work for a small production company here in Sydney. We produce a show for a TV network probably akin to NBC. I’ve been given the role as an assistant editor and as a PA on the TV show. However, I’m concerned about my position in the industry at this job. The production office I work is very small. There’s only four of us. I’m worried that using this opportunity might stifle my future career plans and limit me in the long run. I want to leave. However, I’m constantly told by my boss that I do not possess the skills to go anywhere else and I should be more grateful for my opportunity where I am. I am, however, very grateful for the position. He knows this. I haven’t finished my university degree yet. I’ve been at the business for a year and a half. I hear from others that he thinks my work is great. Is he manipulating me? Is he being toxic, or is he correct? I understand that I can’t give all the details here, but I’m looking for some advice from people in the position I want to be.”
**Craig:** Boy.
**John:** Boy. I’m looking through this question. I can’t figure out how long CJ’s been in this specific job, which I think would be really helpful information to know.
**Craig:** Still in college.
**John:** Still in college.
**Craig:** How long has he been, or she?
**John:** It couldn’t be more than four years. You’ve been at the business for a year and a half, so I guess maybe it’s been in this one job for a year and a half. Within a year and a half, at a starting level place like this, where you came in at the ground floor, if this boss is telling you you don’t have the skills to go anywhere else, I think you gotta question that. I think you need to find some people outside of this firm to talk to and figure out, do I know what I’m doing, am I employable someplace else, because you very well could be. I think this boss may be holding onto you because you’re liable, you’re probably not too expensive, and he doesn’t really want to replace you. That’s my first instincts. Craig, what are you thinking?
**Craig:** Let’s look at it from another point of view. CJ has a job. CJ is in college. CJ, while in college, gets a job that college kids generally get. In fact, it’s a little bit better. Assistant editor and a PA on a TV show, which a lot of people want to do when they’re in college. CJ is concerned about their position in the industry at this job.
Let me start out by saying, CJ, you’re not old enough to be concerned about your position in an industry at that job. You’re still in college. What do you mean you’re concerned about it? You’re starting where you start, at the beginning. The production office you work for is very small, and you’re worried that using this opportunity might stifle your future career plans. Detail how that will happen. I want to know how working as a PA when you’re in college is going to stifle future career plans.
Also, and this is another red flag for me, you are “constantly told my boss that you do not possess the skills to go anywhere else,” which by the way, I believe, you’re in college, “and you should be more grateful for my opportunity,” which I also believe, because you seem to be questioning whether or not you’re too big for this gig. What I don’t understand is, he’s saying you should be more grateful for your opportunity, and you’re saying, “I am, and he knows this.” It doesn’t sound like he does. I don’t know. He’s saying, “I hear from others that he thinks my work is great.” I didn’t see anything in your question that implied that he didn’t think your work was great. Your work as a PA is great.
“Is he manipulating me? Is he being toxic, or is he correct?” I don’t know, but I would say I’m concerned about the level of entitlement implied in the questions. You are in college, and you are working in the exact job a college student should be working at. You’re getting paid. There are college students who are getting stuck in these terrible unpaid internships. You’re getting paid, and you’re in college. This is about where you ought to be. Even if you don’t like it, I don’t see how it could possibly stifle future career plans or limit you in the long run.
**John:** I question your assumption that CJ is still currently in college, because if we look at the sentence here, “I am, however, very grateful for the position. He knows this. I haven’t finished my university degree yet.” CJ could’ve started a university degree, stopped, now is working in this place. We don’t know that CJ is early 20s. CJ could be older than this. CJ may feel like without a university degree, I’m not going to be able to get a better position, even after working there for a year and a half. I don’t know that we know that CJ is currently in college.
**Craig:** If CJ dropped out of college… It doesn’t say that CJ left college and isn’t going back. It just says, “I haven’t finished it yet,” which implies… It really doesn’t matter how old you are. If you are at the level that somebody who is in college is at, then that’s the level you’re at. If you are entering the business with zero experience, it doesn’t matter if you’re 20 or 60. You have zero experience. This is where you start.
I’m a bit befuddled by the over-thinking and calculation here, when what I’m hearing is, “I am new to the business. I am in an entry level job, because I’m entry level, and I don’t think it’s good enough, or I don’t think I belong here, or I’m worried it’s not where I should be, and it’s going to hurt… ” When he or she says “might stifle my future career plans,” that’s what I’m getting really hung up on. I just don’t know how that’s possible. What future career plan can you imagine that would be stifled by working an entry level job when you’re an entry level individual?
**John:** I get that. My best advice for CJ though is that they need to find people who are around their level, who are not working for this firm, and just get a baseline check of where I’m at, what’s going on here, because CJ’s writing to us, two screenwriters living in Los Angeles, who don’t know the specifics of what this job is, what their environment is, what their level of education is. Talk to some people who are doing what you’re doing. If you’re in a film program right now, talk to the other people who are doing these jobs right now, and figure out what’s going on there. Find some other people who are working basically at your level, but for different places, and just get a baseline check there, because that will be a much more useful metric than what we think.
**Craig:** Sure.
**John:** Craig disagrees a little bit.
**Craig:** I do. I’m very confused by this question, CJ. I think you’re over-thinking it. I think your ambition is perhaps outstripping where you are. Do your job. Do it well. If you can get a better job, get it. If you can’t, keep doing this one well. What else can you do? If you do it really, really well, you’ll get promoted, or somebody else will snap you up. That’s the way it worse.
**John:** No one else is going to snap you up unless they know who you are and what you’re working on. Maybe that’s wise. You need to talk to some people outside of your firm. That’s my guess, because there’s only four people in this office. That’s very, very small.
Maybe I have flashbacks. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this on the show. During college, I worked for this tiny company that was trying to develop nursing staffing software. There were four of us in the office. The guy who ran the company, he was nice, but it really was a bad, toxic environment. I did need to leave. I think I’m just feeling for CJ in this situation, where it’s like, “It’s kind of cool that I’m getting paid, and I guess I’m learning some things, but I also don’t think this is good. I’m feeling a little trapped here.” I want to validate that feeling that is causing CJ to actually write in to us about this, and not negate that feeling.
**Craig:** I can understand that. If the office situation is bad, and you feel bad working there every day, yeah, quit. He says, “I’m constantly told by my boss that I do not possess the skills to go anywhere else.” Why would your boss say that to you if you weren’t also then saying, “I think I should go somewhere else.” What do you expect your boss to say? “Yep, go.” If your boss says, “Do it. Go,” that means you’re not doing a very good job. That’s bad. That’s a bad sign.
If your boss is like, “You can’t get those jobs,” then there’s only two answers. Either he’s right, or he’s wrong, and go get one of those jobs. There’s nothing stopping you from trying to get another job. If you think that you can get one, get one. If you can’t, stay, or-
**John:** Stay.
**Craig:** … quit, because you don’t like it there anyway, and do something else. That’s my feeling. Anyway, CJ, I don’t mean to be hard on you. I love Australia, and I love Australians.
**John:** Before we get to our One Cool Things, I actually have something to ask listeners, because somebody who’s listening to this podcast may actually have the right solution to this or be the person who can provide a solution to this.
In addition to the podcast, we have the Scriptnotes book in progress. Drew and Halley and Chris have been really busy on that. I also have a separate company that makes Highland and Weekend Read, Writer Emergency Pack. We have various Facebook and Instagram accounts for these different things. They’re all cobbled together and in a big clump that’s 10 years old. They’re absolute disasters. I feel like I probably need to nuke them all and start over and build up new accounts that are specific to individual projects that keep stuff separate, keep stuff clean.
We need someone to come in and do that rebuilding, not just the social media happy little post things, but also the back-end stuff, like the advertising stuff. This is not a long-term gig. This is a few weeks, a contract job. If you are that person, you’ve actually done this job, or you know the person who I should be talking to, or even the title of the kind of person I should be hiring, just email Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, because I feel like somebody listening to this podcast knows, like, “Oh, I used to do this exact job for XYZ, and I know what it is you’d need.” Right now, all the accounts are just a complete clusterfuck, and it needs to get fixed. Somebody out there, if you can help, help.
**Craig:** I’ll do it.
**John:** He’ll do it. He’ll do it.
**Craig:** I’ll do it. I’m not on Facebook, but I’ll do it.
**John:** I’m not on Facebook either. That’s actually one of my frustrations is that in order to do any of the administration of the stuff that we have right now, I’d have to keep my frigging Facebook account so I can log in, because it’ll only let you do it if you can log in and prove you’re in the US on your Facebook app. It’s so frustrating.
**Craig:** What happens if you don’t have it, just out of curiosity? Is it really bad?
**John:** If you don’t have it… Here’s what is actually useful. It’s nice to be able to post things on Instagram. Instagram is great. Instagram ads have been really helpful for Writer Emergency Packs. When we go into Christmas sale time, we do put ads there, and they are useful and helpful. Because we do it so infrequently, everything gets messed up every time. It’s because these accounts are so Jurassic and built under three different systems. We just need someone to come in and Marie Condo all the stuff and set it up right.
**Craig:** I’ll do it.
**John:** He’ll do it.
**Craig:** I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I know you’re asking me to do it. I’ll do it.
**John:** Really, Craig, I’m begging you to do this.
**Craig:** I said I would. I’m not doing it.
**John:** Craig, I bet you have a One Cool Thing.
**Craig:** I do. I do.
**John:** What is it?
**Craig:** Been waiting on this one. I just wanted to finish it first. Every now and again, somebody will say, “You gotta go check out this Kickstarter. There’s somebody that’s doing something with puzzles.” I always do it. I do it every time. I buy puzzle boxes to make nine years to make and then eventually show up one day. There was one I did that I was excited about, because I figured I’ll actually get this one in a reasonable amount of time, and I did. It’s from a puzzle creator named Spencer Beebe. I believe that’s how you pronounce his name. It’s B-E-E-B-E. That feels like Beebe [beeb].
**John:** Beeb or BEE-bee.
**Craig:** BEE-bee would be… What a weird way. How about Spencer beh-BEH? He has created a puzzle game called Lost in the Shuffle. It is a deck of cards, four suits, couple of jokers. Each card has a puzzle. Some cards combine with other cards to make other puzzles. There are 52 puzzles all in all. This is a fun interactive site where you’re entering your answers. If you can solve all 52, you unlock Puzzle 53, which was a very satisfying finish.
**John:** Oh, nice.
**Craig:** It was really well done. The puzzles are good. They range in difficulty. This is not something that I think you would buy for a casual person that likes the occasional crossword. You have to be into this stuff. If you are into puzzles, Lost in the Shuffle is available for purchase. It is 24.99. It will keep you entertained for quite some time. There’s a lot of puzzles. It’s very cute. It’s very cute. It’s very smart. It’s very well done. For all those amount of puzzles, I have to say, I only say no like three times, because you do a lot of puzzles like I do, you get cranky about the ones that aren’t quite right. There were very few of those. It was really well done.
**John:** That’s great. I like it. I have two One Cool Things. They’re both Japanese related. First is a restaurant, Craig, that is close to you and your new house. You should absolutely go there if you’ve not been there, which is Tonchin. Have you been to Tonchin?
**Craig:** That’s a great question. Have I been to Tonchin?
**John:** Larchmont at Melrose. Basically, if you go all the way up Larchmont until it dead-ends at Melrose-
**Craig:** Oh, it’s ramen.
**John:** … it’s right there. It’s ramen.
**Craig:** I think I have had this, yes. I have.
**John:** It’s really, really good. It’s a high-end ramen restaurant, but they also have other Japanese things. Just delicious. High on my list of recommendations if you’re in the Larchmont area.
Second thing was a video about the production of rebar in a Japanese factory. You see in the Workflowy there I put a still image of this big kettle being loaded in. It feels like it’s from a video game. It feels like a sci-fi video game. I’m going to link to a YouTube video of the process of making rebar. It’s all great and so fascinating. It’s all in Japanese, but there’s really no talking. You’re just seeing here are old machines just being ripped apart by these teeth to just get the steel out of them. Then eventually it becomes, after a 20-minute process, becomes rebar. It’s just really cool. I just love process videos.
**Craig:** I love it.
**John:** This is a really well done one.
**Craig:** Sometimes you get on a little jag where you just start watching these. I like things that I would normally never, ever, ever think about, like rebar, or I watched one on batteries, just how are batteries made. It’s really cool. Or how are hot dogs made. Terrifying, but also cool. It’s fun. Man, the automation of these things is just so smart.
**John:** Yeah, so smart. It’s like, oh my god, you had to built this giant, giant thing to do this one process. Did you know it was going to work? It’s just so [crosstalk 00:54:11].
**Craig:** That whole field of just process engineering and creating these, it’s like real life Rube Goldberg devices. They work. They work at high speed. It’s cool.
**John:** What hadn’t occurred to me as I started watching the video was, oh, that’s right, rebar is going to be magnetic the whole time through. You can use electromagnets to pull big stacks of things off and around. It’s very useful that it is magnetic. It was cool to see how often magnets are used to do stuff in the process of it.
**Craig:** Magnets. How do they work?
**John:** How do they work? Ending with a question. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** [Indiscernible 00:54:47].
**John:** Our intern is Halley Lamberson.
**Craig:** Fine.
**John:** Outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including the new Scriptnotes 600 episode, which looks like the CBS Special Presentation.
You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Remember to use the discount code summer, to save money on your annual subscription. Craig, thank you for a fun show.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Craig, this topic came from a recent issue of Inneresting. Chris Csont, our editor, had found this article by Julian Sanchez about CEOs in Comics: Villains Earn, Heroes Inherit. It’s putting forth the case that if you think about many of these superheroes in our stories who are incredibly rich, they are being portrayed as CEOs of large companies that they basically inherited from their families. You got Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, Ted Kord, Oliver Queen. They’re rich. They’re CEOs, and they inherited it all.
Meanwhile, the supervillains are generally self-made men, so Lex Luthor, Kingpin, Veidt, Ozymandias, or Norman Osborn in Green Goblin. They are people who rose from nothing and built something out of their own intellectual power. That seems weird. It seems like it should be the other way around, and yet that’s the pattern.
**Craig:** Here’s something interesting to consider. I don’t know if this is relevant or not, but it comes to mind. Many of the people that were creating these characters and writing these stories were Jewish. One thing I know about Jewish people, because I am one, is that for those of us… Maybe it’s not so true anymore, but for those of us who were growing up earlier, and certainly for Jews who were growing up and watching the world convulsing and murdering them, there is quite a serious amount of internalized antisemitism.
It’s one of the reasons, for instance, Hollywood, which was started in so many ways by Jewish immigrants, featured almost all very handsome-looking not-Jewish people. Comedians could be Jewish. That was funny, so Charlie Chaplin or the Marx brothers or the Three Stooges. When you looked at the heroes, they were very classically Aryan. Even when the Nazis were doing what they were doing in celebration of eugenics, weirdly, a lot of Jewish writers or Jewish directors were casting people that looked blond and blue-eyed or just very Irish.
You have this thing that has a weird internalized admiration for nobility and let’s call it blue blood. The people that were writing about Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark or Ted Kord or Oliver Queen, these are people that probably couldn’t get into country clubs or Stanford, but they’re writing about people who can and do, people to the manner born, whereas the villains are people who perhaps violate the natural order of things through ambition and will and intelligence. That is fascinating to me. I wonder if that’s part of it.
**John:** I think that is part of it. These strivers are ambitious, and they are trying to upset the natural order of things. They’re rising up. It’s like ambition is a bad thing when it comes to comic books, because it goes to these to the manner born, these rich characters, they have a sense of duty and obligation. Because of their status, they have this obligation, which really ties into this sense of nobility. You look at Princess Diane in Wonder Woman or T’Challa, Black Panther, they have a sense of duty from their position. They are incredibly powerful because of their position. They feel this sense of duty and obligation to their people.
**Craig:** Whether it’s T’Challa or it’s Bruce Wayne, they have noblesse oblige. Because they have an endless source of money, and always had an endless source of money, their job is to protect the weak and the innocent and the defenseless, not give them money, by the way. No, no, no. They still maintain their billions of dollars. Their job merely is to save them from thugs, whereas the people who make their way up in the world, like Lex Luthor or Norman Osborn, they want power.
They’re always portrayed as almost pointlessly aspiring to power, when in fact, the only human I’ve ever met who pointlessly aspired to power was Ted Cruz. That is a weird condemnation of ambition itself, as if to say creation and innovation is not a reward in and of itself. There’s no value there to it. The only reason you would want to grow an empire would be to take over the world. What you ought to do is just let the world be run by who has always run it, nobles showering their largesse at will upon their lessers.
**John:** Right now, I can hear a bunch of listeners-
**Craig:** Screaming.
**John:** “What about this character? What about this character?” I’m sure there are counter-examples to all these things. We’re talking about the very broad strokes here. Craig, I want to circle back to your Jewish writers and internalized antisemitism and to what degree this can be a factor here. Are you making the case that these Jewish writers might see that striving to get to a higher social class, they hated themselves doing?
**Craig:** It’s not quite that overt. It’s really more that the values of the society you grow up in admire and laud a certain kind of person. There’s this gentility of the person who grows up with money. They’re not striving. They’re not grabbing. They’re not trying. They’re not sweating. Because their source of money is endless, endless, there’s no end to their theoretical generosity either.
Listen. Jewish people grow up in an America where most people are Christian. Most Christians believe that Jesus looked exactly like some sort of very pretty Englishman, when in fact, he was a Jew that looked like us. That’s the weird thing. That’s the culture we absorb. When we look at villains in movies, particularly villains in the early movies, we’re seeing Nosferatu. Did you ever see March of the Wooden Soldiers?
**John:** Never saw it.
**Craig:** It was a Laurel and Hardy movie where they live in this fairytale land. There’s a bad guy. He’s a landowner, John. He’s telling Mother Hubbard that he’s going to foreclose on her and kick all of her kids out of the shoe that she lives in, because he owns the deed on it, and she hasn’t paid her rent, unless she lets him marry her oldest daughter, who is just right out of the Nazi playbook of just blonde-haired, blue-eyed pretty lady.
I don’t have to tell you what this guy looks like. Imagine what you think he looks like. You got it. It’s not like they hired an actor who actually looked like that already. It’s the same thing they did in the Wizard of Oz or any of these things. They make the nose even bigger and more hooked, and it’s more stooped, and the pointed chin and the rubbing of the hands and greed, greed, greed.
These are the things that we grew up with, and so it’s just natural that you imagine, these are the heroes, that’s what heroes are. I’m sure you can identify with this from your own angle. You just grow up in a certain… It’s the air you breathe around you, and it gets into your marrow.
**John:** The image you were describing of that character reminds me of the prospector discussion. I had a complete mental image in my head, never having seen the thing you’re specifically describing. I know exactly that type. I know exactly what that… It’s Shylock in different incarnations. It’s terrible racist trope, and yet I completely picture it.
**Craig:** His name is Silas Barnaby. He was played by an actor named Henry Kleinbach. Jewish. Henry Kleinbach, as a 22-year-old, is being made up to look like an old man. If you Google Silas Barnaby, that was the villain’s name, Silas Barnaby, Google it and take a look at that. I watched that as a kid. That’s what I had. If you look at what Little Bo-Peep-
**John:** Oh god, yeah. I’m Googling this now. It’s like a Scrooge.
**Craig:** Scrooge.
**John:** A cross between Scrooge and a leprechaun.
**Craig:** Exactly. If you look at Little Bo-Peep, who’s played by this actress named Charlotte Henry, you’ll see what I mean there.
**John:** Oh god, yeah.
**Craig:** You can’t get more Aryan than that. It’s just hysterical. That movie, interestingly, came out in 1934, which is maybe a half a year after Hitler takes power in Germany. One of the main themes of the Nazi Party leading up to 1933, but certainly continuing through into the war, is that Jews were there to spoil Aryan women. Here we are making a comedy over here in 1934 that is literally that. Listen. We’ve found an interesting thing, what this conversation has become. I wonder if that’s part of it. It may not be. It may not be.
**John:** You look at the origin of these characters. You look at the origin of Batman, for example. That is a product of that time, for sure.
**Craig:** Oh, yes yes yes. Look at the way heroes look. Do a study of the faces of comic book heroes, and find me a face that you think doesn’t adhere to a very rigid standard of what beautiful is. You will be hard fought to find one.
**John:** It’s true. Thanks for the discussion.
**Craig:** Thanks, John.
Links:
* [DUMB MONEY Trailer](https://youtu.be/bmr8YmwnZ3w)
* [Lost in the Shuffle: A Double-Dealing Puzzle Game](https://www.spencerispuzzling.com/product-page/lost-in-the-shuffle-a-double-dealing-puzzle-game) by Spencer Beebe
* [Mass production of rebar in a Japanese factory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqmxvc2YgjM)
* [CEOs in Comics: Villains Earn, Heroes Inherit](http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/09/21/ceos-in-comics-villains-earn-heroes-inherit/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) by Julian Sanchez
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
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