The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/monsters-and-you).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 617 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, happy Halloween.
**Craig:** Yes, the spookiest day of spooky season has arrived.
**John:** Indeed.
**Craig:** Really, as we were saying earlier, this is the only spooky time you and I recognize, today, Halloween.
**John:** Today.
**Craig:** That’s it.
**John:** Today is the day.
**Craig:** That’s it.
**John:** I think it’s good we have a Halloween. I think we need a day of fear and merriment. I don’t know. I’m glad this has persisted into our increasingly Christian world.
**Craig:** All of our best holidays are pagan, including all the good Christian ones. For instance, Christmas is-
**John:** Christmas.
**Craig:** … definitely the winter solstice celebration, with its tree.
**John:** Indeed.
**Craig:** Easter is obviously the pagan spring fertility holiday with its bunny rabbits and eggs.
**John:** Obviously, it fit so naturally into the story of Christ’s resurrection.
**Craig:** Jesus would talk about rabbits all the time.
**John:** All the time.
**Craig:** Pagans really gave us all of our good stuff. Halloween is purely pagan. The Christians didn’t get around to Christianifying it. That’s why a bunch of, I don’t know, Southern Baptist churches are anti-Halloween. You know what? The only thing, as a language purist, that I would do to improve Halloween is popularizing the correct apostrophe between the two E’s, Hallowe’en.
**John:** We’en.
**Craig:** It’s not going to happen.
**John:** It’s never going to happen. It’d be fun to do it, but also it feels like you’re just one of those too-fancy people. It feels like you’re The New Yorker magazine type. You are The New Yorker when you’re putting the-
**Craig:** It’s a New Yorker thing to do. It is, yeah, to put the umlaut over the second O of corroborate.
**John:** The diaeresis mark, yeah, for sure.
**Craig:** I love it. I love it.
**John:** It’s so good. It’s good.
**Craig:** Oh, New Yorker.
**John:** Today on the show, what are monsters, really? We’ll discuss the functions they perform in film and TV and how they differ from traditional villains. Plus, we’ll talk about how the trappings of narrative, including good and evil, are applied to real life news. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, let’s journey back to the old internet and discuss what was lost and whether it matters. We’ll be going through a new internet archive that traces back to the early days of even before the web.
**Craig:** Oh, wow, pre-web stuff. Okay.
**John:** Pre-web stuff.
**Craig:** In my brain, I was thinking about that little man with the hard hat and the sign that said under “construction,” which every website used to be.
**John:** Yes, but before that we had ARPANET. We had Usenet groups. We had all those little things. We’ll talk a bit about that. It’s a whole little museum that we can click through some slides for.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Good, fun times. First, we have some follow-up. Back in Episode 615 we talked about aphantasia, which is where people do not have the ability to visualize. We speculated, what is it like to be a writer, specifically a screenwriter, if you don’t have that ability to visualize. Luckily, we have the best listeners in the entire universe, and two of them wrote in with their experiences having aphantasia and writing.
**Drew Marquardt:** Tim says, “Think of it as having a mind’s eye that works as code instead of rendered visuals. If I’m thinking of a room and the objects within it, I’m thinking about the concepts of those things, and with effort, my imagination holds them relative to each other in a virtual space, not just as a list. Spatial awareness of a story world is pretty essential, but from what my experience and what I’ve read, I don’t think this is something that aphantasia rules out. But seeing that world in crisp HD visuals or not having to consciously think of every detail and texture is part of your imaginary process, it probably is. Similarly, lacking an inner monologue doesn’t stop me imagining a conversation. That’s probably why I take pleasure in writing.”
**John:** It sounds like Tim has both aphantasia and the lack of an inner monologue, and he still gets writing done. He still seems to be able to create scenes. I think Tim’s expectation is that you and I, Craig, are seeing everything in full HD videos in our heads. That’s not my experience. I don’t know what it is for you.
**Craig:** No, it’s far more mushy than that. It does strike me that one of the quirks of our brains is that when we’re asked to talk about things our brains can’t do, we don’t really know. It’s kind of like asking somebody who is colorblind to talk about their relative ease or difficulty moving through the world. Sometimes you just don’t know.
There are things where it’s like, okay, it’s not that I can’t do something, but if I don’t see it, I don’t know what I’m missing. I think that that applies to everybody. Everybody’s brain operates under basic D and D point array rules. You get a certain amount of points to put in your six ability categories. We all have things where we have more points than others.
Funny, I was talking about this just yesterday with somebody that on the IQ tests where you would have to fold boxes, I’m terrible. I just really struggle with that. I never think about it as I go through life, because I don’t actually know what I’m missing. I am sure that people who have excellent ability to do things like that simply experience the world in a slightly richer way than I do. Doesn’t mean better. Just richer, meaning fuller, more detail, more information.
The fact is, Tim is absolutely right. You can get by. You can do these things. My guess is that there are probably some areas where his ability stats are higher than mine because points didn’t go into visual awareness or internal visual conception.
**John:** It’s interesting you bring up IQ tests, because I believe that one of the biggest criticisms of the classic IQ tests is that they over-reward certain, very specific pattern-matching and visual abilities, to the detriment of other things, like language or, obviously, emotional intelligence, other ways in which you measure intelligence, because as I do think back to the IQ-like tests that I took as a child, they were a lot of folding boxes or figuring out the next thing in a sequence, that were largely visual. I do wonder if that’s a thing.
I’m also struck by the fact that whenever we’re talking about what our brains are doing, we are talking about them, we are writing about them, we are using our language faculties to do it. That is, of course, an abstraction from what we’re actually really experiencing. The degree to which we use language as a proxy for all other aspects of consciousness is one of the real challenges in our inability to communicate what something is like other than with our words.
**Craig:** Yeah. It may be that language is consciousness, that the thing you’re describing as the conversion process is the process, that all of our consciousness is just a language-ified experience. This now wanders into areas beyond our expertise.
**John:** I think that’s safe to say, and sometimes beyond scientific expertise. I think you sometimes do wander into philosophical areas here, where they’re just not a good place to say here. We do have some more concrete examples from another listener, Matthew, who talks about his writing process with aphantasia.
**Drew:** Matthew says, “I start much as anyone else might, with a log line, then an outline. I will then create a visual outline of the movie, sort of like a lookbook. I’ll source all sorts of images that illustrate almost every scene of the movie. This helps me, pre script face, to really visualize the feeling and vibe I’m going for. I need to lay out all the visuals of the film to really get a sense of the whole thing, because it can be a little daunting starting a project and seeing nothing when you close your eyes.”
**Craig:** I get this, Matthew, completely. I think, first of all, it’s a very smart way of approaching it. What you do find when you get out of the world of just writing and into the world of writing for production, that very soon, everyone around you is going to start pulling these visuals out. Why? Because they’re trying to get in your head. They’ve read your script, they see what you’re describing as best as you could, and now they’re trying to create a common language with you. What you’re doing is you’re creating a common language to start with. It’s very helpful for other people.
I also know what you mean when you say it can be a little daunting starting a project and seeing nothing when you close your eyes, even though I see lots when I close my eyes when I’m starting writing.
What I have noticed – and this is all fresh and current to me now because I’m in prep – when it’s time to, say, storyboard a sequence, it’s very difficult for me to storyboard it in the abstract. But if I can go to where we are shooting it, if it’s a location, or sometimes I’ll have the art department tape it out on the floor of the stage – just tape it out, just so I can have, again, a D and D style overhead map kind of view – it really helps me then go from there into angles and ideas. For me, at least, I find it hard and also sometimes counterproductive, even, to just start pulling stuff out of my butt and putting it into storyboard. I get that feeling. I think this is a very smart way of approaching it.
**John:** We’re talking about the difference between abstract visualizations versus concrete and where you fall on that spectrum. It occurs to me, Craig, that over the time that we’ve played D and D, we’ve played in a whole range of levels in abstraction. We’ve played theater of the mind. We’re just like, okay, we’re all in this space. We’re not going to put figurines down on the tabletop. We know whose turn it is. We know roughly where people are.
You had, at some point, backed a Kickstarter or something with this giant 3D models that you assembled on a tabletop, where we were moving stuff around. It was incredibly tactile. You could see exactly where we were at. You could measure with a ruler to see how close we were. Other times, we’ve done the grid, where we just have erasable markers to show the edges of boundaries of things.
Now, we’re increasingly doing this top-down view in Roll20. Some of the maps you’ve been using, especially in this last campaign, are incredibly detailed, with textures and pools of blood and all that stuff. I don’t know. It feels much more concrete, and it requires less work in all of our brains to imagine where we are in space.
Looking ahead to the upcoming things, it feels much that there are 3D systems coming up there. Baldur’s Gate is a D and D game that is incredibly detailed and 3D. I do wonder how that changes our experience of the game and how it changes how we’re approaching things, when it’s not just a collective improv. We’re all imagining we’re in a space together, but we are literally seeing the space together.
**Craig:** I’m always one to go for that. I like to go toward that, because I do think it fleshes the experience out. It makes it exciting. Of course, what happens is once the novelty wears off, everything turns back into the same thing.
Thinking about video games, they’re so much more detailed and beautiful now, but when you’re playing, it’s not like my dopamine levels are 400% higher than they were back when I was on a Nintendo 64. They’re not. The play ultimately reduces back into the joy of the play and not so much the joy of the enhancement of the visuals, but I do like those things. It’s actually why I don’t get grouchy about, “In my day, we used to have to use our imaginations.” We’re all using our imaginations anyway. It is all imaginative.
It’s just more exciting to see a fireball explode than to just have somebody go, “A fireball goes off,” and then we’re all like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. How much damage did I take?” At least now we get to see something go kaboom, which is fun.
**John:** When I was playing one of these recent games – it could’ve been the most recent Diablo – I was trucking through something, and at some point I felt kind of guilty, because these were gorgeous landscapes that I was running through, and I was not paying any attention to these gorgeous landscapes at all, because I was just tracking the little mini map or my quest.
That’s an experience in real life as well, where you don’t notice what’s outside your window, because you’re focusing on some other thing. There’s a trade-off to be made in terms of how we generalize past this real-world experience to play the game. Whether it’s literally a video game or how we’re getting through life, we don’t stop to appreciate how pretty things are outside.
**Craig:** Smell the roses.
**John:** Yeah. We have one last bit of follow-up here. Laya in Serbia wrote in about Aaron Sorkin.
**Drew:** Laya wrote in to share that, “Aaron Sorkin said on BBC’s This Cultural Life podcast that when he is writing, he can hear a scene perfectly, he can hear the dialog, but, quote, ‘It is at the expense of seeing the scene. I don’t think visually at all.'”
**Craig:** That’s not wildly surprising, given that Aaron Sorkin’s strength, the thing that sets him apart, is his wonderful dialog. If you were to say to me, name a writer that is known for their dialog, I would just say Aaron Sorkin. If you look at the famous courtroom confrontation in A Few Good Men, they’re in a wooden rectangle, and one of them’s standing. One of them’s sitting. The visuals are not relevant.
It’s one of the reasons why Fincher I thought was such a wonderful pairing with Sorkin for Social Network, because Fincher is so brilliantly visual. What I love about him as a director is, his visual sense, his cinematic sense is not showy. It’s not about, “Look at my crazy angles. Look at my cool stuff. Look at all my neato tricks.” It’s composition. It’s composition. It’s depth. It’s knowing where the camera ought to be in connection to relationship. He’s so good at that. The combination of his eye and Sorkin’s language in Social Network just elevated that. It’s such a great film.
**John:** I’m trying to think through Sorkin films or things that were for television where not just silence, but characters in a place, not talking were crucial story elements. Not a lot of them leap to mind. I think these are always characters, the joke is that they’re always walking circles, but they are always talking. I’m having a hard time remembering crucial moments in Sorkin’s stories that weren’t about the talking.
**Craig:** He populates his work with characters who express themselves verbally. If I think about Social Network, and I think about the characters in there, Mark Zuckerberg expresses himself verbally, Andrew Garfield’s character, the lawyers, the Winklvii, everyone. There’s a wonderful scene in Social Network where the Winklevoss twins go to see Larry Summers, the then-president of Harvard. That scene is – I hope you’re sitting down – rat-a-tat, incredibly intelligent dialog. It is two people sitting across from another person. Even Larry Summers’s assistant, who’s sitting at another desk, she seems brilliant.
Everybody is at an IQ of 180, and their verbal scores are 800 on that achievement test. Everyone is just witty and smart and fast. They think fast. They talk fast. Everyone’s sentences are complete. Is it mannered? I guess. But it’s entertaining. His intelligence is entertaining, and he’s witty, so it just works.
**John:** In Social Network, there is a sequence where the Winklevii are at the Regatta, and so the sequence of rowing, and that’s beautifully done. I also wonder how many times it was nearly cut, because it’s actually not especially relevant to the film. That’s a non-dialog sequence I can recall in that film, and it’s one of the very few.
**Craig:** It’s beautiful.
**John:** Beautiful.
**Craig:** I remember when I saw it. It uses that tilt-shift method where it makes things almost look like they’re in a diorama or something. I do remember in the theater thinking, this was certainly not written down like this. The combination of the music and the photographic style and the way it was working, it just felt very visual. That’s not to say that screenplays don’t normally have scenes like that. If I’m writing a movie, and I want a scene like that, I write it.
**John:** My scripts are full of those scenes.
**Craig:** Maybe I’m wrong, but I would be surprised if Aaron Sorkin wrote that in that way, because like he says, he can hear it, but he doesn’t think visually at all. I don’t know how you get to that if you don’t.
**John:** We have two bits of follow-up. We’ve talked about Craig’s diabetes. In Episode 615, we were talking about the degree to which a person who’s diabetic should tick a box for disabled and to what degree you need to bring it up. We had two listeners write in about that.
**Craig:** Great.
**Drew:** First is from Mick, who is a type 1 diabetic. He’s been working in production for over 20 years. He says, “When I first started working in the industry, I mostly didn’t tell anyone. It was just easier not to have to explain the intricacies of managing such a complex medical condition, and my goal was that I was not defined by it.
“Looking back, I can see how much easier it would’ve been if I let my employers know earlier, especially since diabetes management is built around consistent timing for meals and insulin and controlled output of energy and exercise. I eat pretty much the exact opposite of the chaotic nature of life on set. I experienced delayed insulin shots and low blood sugar levels due to production meetings that ran hours longer than scheduled, on-set catering that only included high-sugar foods or soft drinks, and shoot schedules that didn’t accommodate time to check blood glucose levels, or when the mealtimes are completely out of line with my dietary schedule.
“Now, I always let colleagues know in advance, but I also ensure that I have everything I need to self-manage. I found that people are always compassionate and genuinely keen to ensure that I am okay. There’s also the duty of disclosure to consider, should any diabetes-related health and safety situations arise on set.
“Fortunately, the tools available for diabetes management now, such as continuous glucose meters, have made everything easier as a TV professional. Writers’ rooms really shouldn’t be catered exclusively with candy and soda, for everyone’s benefit.”
**Craig:** Here here. Mick has been dealing with, we’ll call it proper, complicated type 1 diabetes for a long time. I’m dealing with non-complicated type 1 diabetes for a bit, and then eventually, it will be complicated. When it does, this will definitely be part of figuring things out. There are certain things that even now I know I have to make sure of. What I have to make sure of is that I do have high-protein, low-carb bars, things like that around. The people that work with me know that when it’s time for lunch, if everybody’s getting pasta, we’re going to have to find something else for me.
He’s right. Look, I’m the boss. I’m going to acknowledge this. Of course everyone’s super compassionate with me. They have to be. But it’s good to hear that when you’re not the boss, they’re also compassionate. I think people in general really do want to help people that have a health requirement like this. It is also important that people do know, because once you do start getting on the insulin train, there are times where your blood sugar can go too low. That is a very dangerous situation.
I don’t know, John. You and I don’t really spend much time in writers’ rooms, but I would be surprised if the modern day writers’ room really is just candy and soda. Everybody seems so health-conscious in LA.
**John:** In the time you were doing the first season of The Last of Us, I had a bunch of other showrunners on, and we were just talking through the writers’ rooms processes. They’re so different from show to show to show. Some of them are largely still virtual. Some are back in person. Some are trying to really limit the hours down. They start at 10:00, and they’re done by 4:00, and it’s really straightforward.
I think a consistent thing I’ve heard is that people are more mindful of what’s happening in that room. I think snacks are part of that, and so making sure that people have the right choices. Also, what Mick is saying, you also bring your own. It’s a combination of making sure that the room is set up properly, but also that people feel free to self-cater as they need to, to make sure they have what they need.
**Craig:** I will say one of the things that Mick is dead-on about is that continuous glucose monitoring really has changed so much, because you don’t have to wonder what’s going on.
**John:** Exactly.
**Craig:** You don’t have to go, “Oh, I don’t feel so good. Maybe I should stick a thing in my finger, put some blood on a thing, put it in the thing.” No. Your phone goes bleep bleep bleep, and it goes, “Hey, FYI, it’s going up. It’s going down.” It really does save you a lot of misery. It’s a great safety net.
**John:** Craig, just because I don’t know the terms properly, is complicated versus non-complicated, does that come down to whether you’re having to inject insulin?
**Craig:** That’s a Craig term. Yes, it really does come down to are you injecting insulin or do you have an insulin pump or not. For people who are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as adults, there often is a time period where you’re still heading towards that place, but you’re not there yet, but you get there. Once you’re dealing with insulin, it just is more complicated, although even now, there are these closed-loop systems where you have a pump, and the pump and the continuous glucose monitor talk to each other. The pump turns on when it feels like you need some, and it’s not on when you don’t. Now you’ve got a thing that you’re wearing that has a tube that goes into you with a little port. It’s a thing. It’s a thing.
**John:** Also in the episode, we were talking about whether you tick that box or feeling like you’re taking resources away from other people. Teresa wrote in with her opinion on that.
**Craig:** Great.
**Drew:** Teresa says, “To address taking resources away from those who really need it, that’s exactly why one should claim the disabled label regardless of what they personally do or don’t need themselves. It’s like the reason behind a Census. You count certain demographics, so you know what resources need to be allotted in which places. If people don’t count themselves as members of all their communities, those communities might not be allotted enough resources where they are. Inclusion isn’t about waiting for disabled people to show up to tell you what they need before you start thinking about it. It’s about creating environments that allow disabled people to see themselves there in the first place and want to be there. You don’t have to need an accommodation immediately for it to be good to have available. When you need it is usually too late to ask.”
**Craig:** That’s fair. I guess, Teresa, I should be a little more nuanced in my ticking the box thing, because you’re right, when it is a question of taking a Census and feeling out how many people of a certain category a larger group has, no question. For instance, when I apply for, let’s say, a membership into a large group, and there is a… I just did this the other day, and there was a section that just said do you have a disability. I checked yes, because there’s not a specific resource that they’re offering me that I might take. That is very much about census-taking and about establishing a broad base of need.
Where I struggle a bit is when there is specifically something that is being reserved for somebody with a disability. My understanding is there will be plenty of people applying for this, that there will be more applicants than resource. If there are more applicants than resource, and the resource is established, then I’m going to go ahead and not tick the box, because I don’t want to take that resource from somebody that needs it more than I do.
It is nuanced. I recognize your point. I think it’s an excellent point, Teresa. I try and tick the box when I feel like it’s about standing up and being counted, as you say. I try to not tick the box when it’s the equivalent of a scholarship for a disabled person. At that point, I don’t feel good about claiming that scholarship.
**John:** I think it’s worth noting that in many cases you are going to have the opportunity to individually mark what the disability is or what that condition is that is notable, so that if there is a situation where we are looking for… I’m thinking in the case of writers. There are situations where you’re looking specifically for blind writers who have that experience, because you’re working on a show where that could be very, very helpful. If you just had a broad category for disabled, then you’re going to have hard time finding who is the person who has the specific experience that I need to have in that writers’ room and who’s fantastic.
I agree with Craig in that sense of, if there’s a broad census of who in America has a disability, it’s going to be a very large percentage of Americans. That’s not necessarily taking resources away from anything. In many cases, it may just be increasing the awareness that we need to have resources available.
**Craig:** Here’s a question for you, John, and something I’ve been thinking about lately, and even in the census aspect of it. You get a sheet, and it says, hey, what’s your race, what’s this, what’s your sexuality, and you check off gay. Do you ever think to yourself, they’re going to be patting themselves on their back for getting a gay person in, but really, they haven’t actually done anything, that this is about them making themselves feel good? Because I had that feeling when I saw this disabled box. I’m like, you’re getting away with murder here, aren’t you? Do you know what I mean?
**John:** Yes, I do know what you mean. In my specific career, I’ve not felt like it’s ever been a huge asset or liability for me to be openly gay, which is fantastic and wonderful. I’m lucky to have come into the industry when I did.
I’m also acknowledging the fact I present very straight. I don’t present especially queer, in a way that makes it very easy for people to ignore it. I do have to consciously out myself early in working relationships at times, just so people know and so people don’t accidentally say something that feels really awkward for anybody.
**Craig:** Someone may accidentally say a bad thing they shouldn’t be saying.
**John:** Yes, that. Being married is really helpful, because I could say “my husband” and that does a lot of the work. Back to my earlier point that the specificity is really, really helpful, the fact that I’m a gay person doesn’t make me better qualified to tell a story of indigenous trans youth. It doesn’t make me better qualified for a lot of specific story scenarios in which you want to have somebody whose experience better matches what it is you’re trying to tell.
That’s why I like that even the WGA’s surveys and how you fill out your boxes in terms of what you identify as, it does get more granular than that, so people can actually look for characteristics that match what they need.
**Craig:** I guess all this is to say it’s tricky, because when you’re dealing with trying to improve inclusion and representation, when the groups themselves are not particularly native to the inclusion or the reproduction, you can sometimes feel like you’re being farmed. That’s a weird feeling. On the other hand, that needs to happen, or that group isn’t going to change. We all have to make our peace with the queasiness of some of these things, I think, in order to make sure that other people are helped.
The one thing that it’s nice to have this show, is that you and I can talk about these things, and in its own way, we do make people aware of these things. We do confront them, in a nice, passive way, because we’re not in the room with them. They can hear these things. For those people who are doing hiring or surveying or awarding limited resources, I think this is a nice, civil discussion to have. It doesn’t need to be fraught with emotion or drama. It just has to be looked at with open eyes.
There are quite a few programs in our business that are mentorship programs for writers of color, or in some of the development programs that they have at Warner Bros or Universal. I can’t remember quite the name of those. In some point it becomes a catchall for, it’s for not straight white people.
**John:** Under-represented groups is classically how you’d [crosstalk 00:29:25] those.
**Craig:** Not straight, white, able-bodied people. The resource management really does make these things sticky. I like talking about them. I think that we’re all a bit nervous sometimes to talk about these things, because the general tenor of discussion on the internet is a full-on shit show. It just doesn’t matter what you say or what you do. It devolves almost instantly. That’s a shame, but also good to remind each other that most productive conversations about anything do not happen on the internet, do not happen on social media at all. That is the equivalent of, it’s 1:00 a.m. in a crowded bar, and people have been talking about politics, and they’re just screaming drunkenly at each other.
Calmly, in other places, rational people can really open each other’s eyes about these things. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate Teresa writing in, because she’s making a really interesting point. I guess on my own path, I’ll have to figure it out.
**John:** This whole conversation we’ve been having about whether to mark the box for disabled or whether to mark the box for LGBT is really familiar and probably almost passe for… I have friends who were agonizing over, they are Latino, but they would not normally identify as Latino, and so the question of how Latino do you need to be in order to mark that box, as we talked about in my One Cool Thing last week, the whole notion of Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx is a shifting target. The exact same things we brought up, that Teresa brought up, in terms of it’s good to tick the box for census reasons, but also are you taking resources away, these are questions we’re always going to be grappling with.
**Craig:** Grapple we shall together, but good that we are grappling. It’s a positive sign. It used to be when you and I were kids that no one talked about any of this, and you were out of luck. These are good developments, believe it or not.
**John:** I think they are. Let’s move on to our main topic today, which is monsters. I thought about this because three of the projects I’m currently working on have monsters in them to some degree. We’ve talked on the show a lot about antagonists and villains, but I don’t recall us ever really getting into monsters per se, which means we probably need to describe what we mean by monsters.
In my head, I’m thinking basically non-human characters that, while they may have some intelligence, are not villains in the sense that they have classic motivations and who can interact with other characters around them the way that human characters can. I was grouping them into three big buckets. But I’m curious, before we get into that, if you have a definition of monster that might be different than that.
**Craig:** Monster to me is either a non-human or an altered human, a human that has been changed into something that is not human, that has both extraordinary ability compared to a human, and also presents danger to regular humans.
**John:** That feels fair. The kinds of monsters I’m talking about, I have three broad categories, and think we can think of more than that, but they’re primal monsters, which I would say are things that resemble our animals, our beasts, but just taken to a bigger extreme. Your sharks, your bears, your wolves could be monsters, any giant version of a normal animal. They tend to be predators. Werewolves in their werewolf form feel like a primal monster. The aliens in Alien feel like that kind of primal monster.
**Craig:** Dinosaurs.
**John:** Dinosaurs, absolutely. In D and D terms, we’d say that they are generally neutral. You can’t even really call them evil, because they’re just doing what they do. Evil requires some kind of calculation that they don’t have.
**Craig:** They’re instinctive. It’s the aliens in Alien I suppose. We’ll get some angry letters from Alien fans, but those creatures do seem like they are driven by such a pure Darwinism that it is no longer a question of morality. They are simply following their instinct to dominate.
**John:** We have another category I would say are the manmade monsters. These are killers robots, Frankenstein’s monster. Of course, that monster does have some motivation beyond its thing, but any sort of Gollum-y kind of creature. Some zombies I would say are manmade. It depends on what causes them to become those monsters. Craig, would you say that the creatures in The Last of Us, would you call them monsters?
**Craig:** They are altered humans, yes, but they’re monsters. There’s no question. Part of what we try and do is, when we can illicit some at least, if not sympathy, a reminder that they are not to blame. They’re sick. They are no longer in control of their bodies. They’re no longer in control of what they do. The fact is, no matter how hard we try and do that, they’re behaving monstrously. They are monsters. More importantly, when you look at their provenance from the video game, they look like monsters, and we want them to. There are more monsters coming.
**John:** Of course. I know. I’m excited to see more monsters.
**Craig:** More monsters.
**John:** The last bucket I would throw things into would be called the supernatural. There you have all the Lovecraftian creatures. There’s other kinds of zombies that are… It’s not human-made that created them. They’re shambling mounds of things. Your mummies, at least your mummies who are not speaking mummies, but the classic stumble forward mummies.
**Craig:** Muhhh mummy.
**John:** You got your gargoyles. You have some demons or devils, the ones that aren’t talking. It really does come down to, if they have the ability to use language that our characters can understand, I’m not throwing them in the monster bucket.
**Craig:** To me, a vampire is a monster.
**John:** It’s really a question though of agency. It’s so driven by its need to feed that it no longer has the inability to interact with the characters around it, because a lot of vampires are talking, and they are doing things. They can function much more like classic villains rather than monsters, as opposed to a werewolf, who we’re used to being just fully in beast mode.
**Craig:** That’s why vampires are so fascinating, I think, because they present as human. They can absolutely have a conversation with you. All the good ones do. Not only do they have conversations with you, they seduce you and they romance you. Then they also give in to this hunger that is feral and savage. They sometimes turn into bats or fog or a big swarm of rats, which is my favorite. They are certainly supernatural. They are nearly immortal. What I love about vampires is that they are a presentation of the monster within.
Jekyll and Hyde, Dr. Jekyll is a human, and Hyde is a monster, but they are the same person. That is fascinating, because then it starts getting into the whole point of monsters, I think, which is a reflection of our worst selves.
**John:** Absolutely. I think these characters that are on the boundaries between a villain who could choose to stop and a monster who could not choose to stop are sometimes the most fascinating antagonists we can put our characters up against. In some cases, we’re centering the story around them, so they are not the villain. They are actually the main character. Once upon a time I worked on Dark Shadows, and of course that has a vampire at its center who does monstrous things, but I think most people would not identify as being a monster.
**Craig:** There are all different ones. It’s funny, when you look at the traditional Dracula, the Bram Stoker original Dracula, and when you look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, they’re both literate. In particular, Frankenstein’s monster in the novel, I think he speaks two languages. I think he speaks English and French. He’s remarkably literate and thoughtful.
The reason Dracula is so dangerous is because he’s so smart. He slowly and carefully manages to eat most of the people aboard a ship that’s crossing to England without anybody noticing, because he’s really clever. It’s funny how we kept that with Dracula. We said, okay, Dracula, you’re the or vampire, and all the vampires after you, most of them are going to follow this method of, “My darling, I want to suck your blood.”
Frankenstein, I don’t know, somebody read that novel, like, “You know what? What if this monster doesn’t speak two languages? What if it speaks no languages, is six foot eight, and just groans a lot? That’s better. Let’s do that.”
**John:** “Let’s do that.” When we think about villains, we often talk about villain motivation. It’s worth thinking about monster motivation, because there’s going to be some overlap, but I think a lot of cases, these monsters function more like animals, more like beasts. You have to think about what does an animal want.
We talk about the four Fs, five Fs, in terms of those primal motivating factors: self-preservation, propagation, protection of an important asset – so they’re there to defend a thing – hunger or greed – classic – and revenge to a certain degree. I would say that the alien queen in Aliens, in the end she has a very specific focus and animus towards Ripley because of what Ripley did. It goes beyond just the need to propagate. She’s after her for a very specific reason.
**Craig:** That’s where it sometimes can get stupid. It doesn’t in that movie, but Jaws 3 I think famously, “This time it’s personal.” No, it’s not. It’s a fricking shark. It doesn’t know you. It’s just food. Obviously, the aliens in Aliens are quite clever. They are not merely savage and feral. You don’t expect that they’re sitting there doing math. They’re the forerunners of the way we portrayed velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The idea of the smart monster, maybe not as smart as a human in their general sense, but very smart predatorially, that’s really interesting to see that. But when it starts getting personal with a dumb monster, it can get really silly
**John:** Craig, what is your opinion on human monsters? I could think of Jason Voorhess in a slasher film. Is that a villain? Is that a monster? To what degree can we think of some of these human characters as monsters rather than classic villains?
**Craig:** I think they’re monsters. I think they’re monsters, because they wear masks. Jason Voorhees wears a hockey mask. Michael Myers in Halloween wears, I believe it’s a-
**John:** Captain Kirk mask.
**Craig:** … Captain Kirk mask, a William Shatner death mask, even though William Shatner’s still alive. Those masks are what make the monsters. Their humanity is gone. When you look at how they move… And obviously, look, let’s just say it: Jason Voorhees was just a ripoff of Michael Myers. That’s pretty obvious. They are a large, shambling, seemingly feelingless, numb creature that has way more strength than a normal human ever would. They don’t really run. They don’t need to. They represent your own mortality. It’s coming. There’s nothing you can do. That is a nightmarish feeling. In their way, they are large zombies. They don’t speak. They just kill. We don’t even really understand why they’re killing. Somebody eventually will explain it, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not like you can have a conversation with Jason Voorhees and say, “With some therapy, I think you’ll stop killing.” No. No no no. Jason will keep killing. I think of them as monsters, for sure.
**John:** One of the projects I’m working on, I’m grappling with the issues of what this monstrous character actually wants, what the endgame is. I keep coming back to the Lovecraftian, there is no answer. There’s only the void. There’s that sense of sometimes the most terrifying thing is actually that there is no answer, that the universe is unfeeling, and they just want to smash it and destroy it. It’s challenging, because without a character who can actually say that, without a way to put that out there, the monster themselves can’t communicate that. As I’m outlining this, I’m recognizing that that’s going to be a thing that we need to be able to expose to the audience in a way that the creature themselves can’t.
**Craig:** That is a challenge. It is certainly easy enough for the pursued characters to ruminate and speculate as to why this thing is doing what it wants to do. That will just remain what it is, which is speculation. The whole point of speculation is we’ll never know. Yes, it is hard to figure out how to get that motivation across when it’s nonverbal and non-planning. The case of Aliens, you can just tell, they’re predators. They are doing what the apex predator’s supposed to do: win. They just want to win.
**John:** Of course, as we look at Predator, the question of whether you call that a monster or a villain, the motivation behind the Predator we learn very early on is they are trophy hunters. Literally, they are just to bag some other creatures, because that’s what they do. It’s not entirely clear whether it’s just rich people of that species doing a thing or if it’s an important rite of passage. Are they on safari?
**Craig:** I love the idea is on Predator planet, they have social media. Everybody has normal jobs. Some people are accountants or whatever. Some people work at the Predator McDonald’s. Jerk Predators go to other planets to bag trophies. They then put a picture up of like, “Look at Jesse Ventura’s head.” Then other people online are like, “You’re sick. You’re sick. There’s something wrong with you that you feel the need to go these places and kill these beautiful animals.”
**John:** Absolutely. For all we know, it’s like Donald Trump Jr.-
**Craig:** Exactly.
**John:** … is the equivalent of a [indiscernible 00:44:20] scene in these Predator movies. Someone who obviously has a familiarity with the whole canon – and I’m not sure how established the canon really is – can maybe tell us what the true answer is here. But my feeling has always been that this wasn’t a necessary cultural function, that they were doing this thing, that they were doing it because they wanted to.
**Craig:** It was hunting.
**John:** It’s hunting.
**Craig:** It was pointless hunting. In that case, they really are villains. That’s like a mute villain, because the Predator is very much calculating, thinking, planning, prioritizing. He doesn’t speak because he doesn’t speak our language, not because he doesn’t speak. If we understood the clicky bits, then we would know that he was saying stuff.
**John:** I’ll wrap this up with, it’s important sometimes to think about how we must seem to other creatures in our world right now. Think if you’re an ant or an ant colony, and an eight-year-old boy comes along. That is a monster. It has no understanding of you. It has no feeling for you. That eight-year-old boy is just a T-rex, and you have to run from it. You’re not looking at that as a villain. That is truly, fully a monster. Sometimes reversing that can get you some insight into what it must feel like to be encountering these kind of creatures.
**Craig:** There’s a certain godlike quality to them when they are that much more powerful than we are. It’s why superhero movies have escalated their own internal arms race to intergalactic proportions, because it’s not enough for people to be beset by godlike monster-humans. At some point, you need them to be fought with by good monster-humans. Then it just goes from there. When you’re creating some sort of grounded thing, you’re absolutely right, the notion that what’s pursuing… And Predator actually did this very well.
**John:** Agreed.
**Craig:** It’s a good movie.
**John:** It’s a good movie. Agreed. I really liked Prey as well, the most recent version of it.
**Craig:** You get the sense that the people in it are impressed. They start to realize that this guy is better than them in every way. The only way you’re going to beat it is if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger, aka better than all of us. It’s a pretty apt comparison.
**John:** That’s some thinking about monsters. Let’s talk for a few minutes about this question that Boots Riley, he wrote in. Friend of the show Boots Riley wrote in to ask-
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** … “You guys should do a show about how certain screenwriting cliches, good and evil, are used by news media narratives. What details are left out because it takes away from the characterization they want to make? Whose POV? Where do you start the story?” Obviously, we’re recording this in 2023, October.
**Craig:** There seems to be some arguments going online about things.
**John:** Gaza is the most recent phenomenon that we can see this in, but that’s always been the case. Looking back to 9/11 or looking back to any moment at which we’ve had big upheavals in the news, you end up picking heroes and villains. You end up picking good and evil. You end up just having things on two different sides. It’s hard to then see the subtlety in what’s actually happening here.
**Craig:** Boots, we have talked about this quite a bit. It was something that also was running through Chernobyl, the notion of the danger of narrativizing history, even as history’s unfolding. Boots says, “Where do you start the story?” That word’s the problem. The problem is we actually doing know how to convey stories… Sorry, I just did it. We don’t know how to convey information to each other in a way that is compelling and attention-grabbing if it’s not in the form of a story. That is what stories are. Stories are the natural, instinctive, human way to relay information to other people so that the other people pay attention and listen. That’s where it all comes from.
The news media narrative, a lot of times people will be like, “It’s the problem. News media is feeding you a narrative.” They’re not hiding that. What else are they going to feed you? A ticker tape of facts? You can get those if you want. You’re not going to. Nobody is, because our brains don’t function like that. We don’t know how to collect that information and make sense of it in raw formats. Raw data, we cannot process it. We need it in the form of a story.
Then the problem is, yeah, you got a lot of bad screenwriters out there. You can narrativize in a way that I think is done in good faith. You can narrativize in a way that is not. What we see online, it’s fascinating. What used to happen was a narrative was dealt, and people heard it and therefore never knew this entirely different way of looking at it, this other narrative. Then later, there would be revisionist history. There’s an entire term for this, where revisionist, new vision, new movie, new story about the same thing, for us to go, “Oh, we did not think of it from that point of view.”
The entire approach to telling stories of Native Americans in this country is a revisionism of the way we used to do it, where they were savages who stole our kids, and we had to kill them. Now we don’t do that. Now we are telling this other narrative.
Online, what’s happening is, everybody is immediately questioning every narrative. Everything is revised in steady, real time to the point where people are completely fire-hosed with conflicting narratives, and their minds go into a kind of lock. The only people that are blithely going about their day online are people who blindly believe in one narrative. No other narrative is getting in. They’re happy as a clam to push that point of view because they have clarity, which is comforting.
For most of the rest of us, the fact is we are capable of holding two competing narratives in our head at the same time. Even though we’re capable of it, the hard part is sitting with the discomfort that there is no easy story here that makes a good movie. There is just a lot of misery, and there is a disappointment in human behavior, and shock and confusion. It changes on a day-to-day basis. You may find yourself thinking one way, then thinking the other, and thinking this way and thinking that way. That is pretty much normal, given the way we’re being bombarded.
**John:** I went through journalism school. Before I was a screenwriter, I had my training in journalism. Your first journalism class is they’re teaching you the basics of writing a news story, so the who, what, when, where, and how, and the why if you can find a why behind things. That why is often where the moral values kick in at times.
Listen. Those things I’m describing, the whos are the characters, and so you are picking characters for these things. The wheres are the settings. The whens are also the settings. You’re trying to provide context for the story for the person who’s reading it.
Of course, in news stories, you have this thing called a pyramid style, where you can theoretically cut it off at any point. Back in the days, where newspaper articles could only be so long, we would have to jump to other pages. It was a different time. But there’s always going to be limitations of space and how much context you can fill in.
It’s understandable that any journalist who’s writing about a subject is going to have an approach from some POV, some way of explaining this story that makes sense in the moment. If it’s about an explosion at a building, you’re going to need to focus on the people who would actually help you tell that story. Whether you’re trying to tell it in a very flat, newsy style or in a way that focuses on one family who escaped the collapsing building, you’re going to find some way to do that. That is a story. That’s going to create an emotional reaction in people that will hopefully cause them to better understand the purpose of why you’re telling the story. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using some of the techniques of narrative of the kind of storytelling we do in movies and TV to do that. It’s just you’ve got to be aware that you are doing it.
I think one of the things that Boots may be responding to is that we have whole networks that are set up to tell stories, create stories, to market stories that are not actually true or really have the slimmest relationship to truth. That’s why if you are watching CNN and you switch over to Fox News, the cast of characters is completely different. None of the same people are showing up on the same thing. Not the news anchors, but really what the stories are about, who the stories are about is so completely different. They have these ongoing storylines that they’re choosing to market and emphasize.
I think a great example recently is the war in Ukraine and how in those first couple weeks, everyone was like, “Oh shit, this is a real, huge crisis.” It was pretty clear that we were on Ukraine’s side, and we’re not on Russia’s side. Fox and other people are trying to recontextualize this. You can feel the gears grinding and having to find new ways to tell that story.
**Craig:** There is storytelling for the purpose of informing, and then there is storytelling for the purpose of comforting. I guess the meta-purpose would be, “Keep watching, and watch our ads, and put money in our pocket.” Stories for comfort are dangerous, because they are not done in good faith. To comfort people, you need to hit on this deep need for the world to make sense. The universe, existence, this all must make sense, because if it doesn’t, I’m going to panic.
Anybody that can be a certainty merchant is going to do well. Certainty is the orange chicken of rhetoric. People love orange chicken. They just do. They do. In the early days of Panda Express, the orange chicken was in the same size bin as every other food.
**John:** That’s madness, Craig, because most people want orange chicken.
**Craig:** Exactly. One day you went to the mall, and the orange chicken bin was twice as big as the other ones, because Panda Express was finally like, “We get it. You want the orange chicken.” That’s what certainty is. It’s orange chicken. It’s delicious, and it’s comforting, and it’s bad for you. You’re familiar with Godwin’s law. I assume you’re familiar with Godwin’s law.
**John:** Yeah. Oh wait, no, I’m confusing it with Betteridge’s law of headlines. Godwin’s law, tell me.
**Craig:** Godwin’s law says that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability that somebody will mention the Nazis or Hitler goes to one, basically. The reason that this happens is because there are so few things in our history that are unrevisable. The Nazis are one of them. Nobody has managed to successfully do revisionist history of the Nazis and go, “Wait a second, guys. Hold on. Let’s look at it from their point of view. This is the story behind… ” No. Anyone who’s done that is generally just wildly racist, and everybody can smell it coming from a mile away. There’s no legitimate other way to look at that. It was just wrong with a capital W. It is one of the few things everybody can point out and go, “Capital W wrong, we all agree.” Ah, certainty. This is why it gets injected into all of these arguments.
When Boots says screenwriting cliches of good and evil are used by news media narratives, that’s certainty peddling, because the one thing I know in my heart, in my bones, about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and what has happened is that the vast majority of people living in Israel and Gaza are not deciding political policy for either government, not deciding military policy or operations for either side, not pulling triggers, not stabbing, not cutting, not raping, not killing. That’s the vast majority of people. All of those people are currently being pushed into bins defined by the other ones. It sounds like it would be the opposite of comfort peddling, but unfortunately, this is the sick side and the toxic side of narrativization.
**John:** Splitting into good and evil is really one of the fundamental traps here, because ways you say somebody’s good is like, “Oh, they’re fantastic. They’re wonderful. They are doing the right thing. They are noble.” You have all these characteristics of what a good person is. If there’s one aspect that’s not so good, like, oh no, you’re cracking my image of that, so we will ignore that thing that’s not so good.
Once you label somebody as evil, it’s very hard then to look at the subtlety of why they’re doing the things that they’re doing. This show is about monsters and villains. Once you say that this person is evil, you stop looking for reasons. You stop looking for what their actual motivation and purposes are, and you stop paying attention to them as humans at all.
I think Boots is hitting on one of the real dangers and one of the cliches is that in a movie, it’s okay for our villain to be just a full-on villain. We can enjoy that. We want to see that villain punished, and then we can come to the end of this. In real life, it’s not so simple as just like, we got to kill the villain. That’s not actually how this works in real life.
**Craig:** No, and it ties back to our conversation about monsters, because when we do say this person is evil, we are excusing them from an accountability to humanity. We’re also essentially saying we don’t know how they got there. Evil just is. We can’t unwind it, and we can’t prevent it.
This is what Hannah Arendt talked about when she talked about the banality of evil in analyzing Eichmann on trial and the world attempting to come to grips with what the Nazis had done after World War II. She was one of the first people to say, “Don’t you get it? They’re not monsters. They’re just people. What they did, they did in a very mundane, all-too-human way, meaning it could happen again. People would do this again.” That’s important to resist the monsterization, because it makes it easy at that point. There is no solution. There is no solution to monsters. Nuke it from orbit, I guess. Game over, man. Game over.
**John:** Game over, man. I want to squeeze in one listener question, because it’s been too long since we’ve answered listener questions.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** We have one here from Scott.
**Drew:** Scott writes, “I have a screenplay idea that revolves around cosplay. None of the characters would be presented as actual anime, superheros, or whatever, but I’d like to reference them in the context of regular people dressed as their favorite character at cosplay events. For example, Batman, a regular person, is seen walking by at a cosplay event, and one of my characters says something about Batman. I use the word Batman in the script. Should I avoid any type of presence, either visual or verbal, of copyrighted characters in the screenplay? I’m concerned about legal repercussions.”
**John:** If you have Batman walking by in the background of your shot, and especially if they’re referencing it, you’re going to hear from Warner’s legal. That’s a thing that’s going to happen. You may have some good defense on that, but just know that that’s a thing that’s going to happen. Your producers and other folks who are putting in money may wonder, “Oh crap, is this going to be a problem.” It could be a problem. If you’re setting a story in a world in which a lot of copyrighted characters are going to have to participate, that’s going to influence how you make your movie.
**Craig:** You can parody existing characters, but that doesn’t sound like what you’re talking about. You can do documentary, where people are walking around and wearing intellectual property. They’re in a public place, and that’s fine as well. What you’re talking about here, you would have to take an extra, put them in a Batman costume, and have them walk around. What is that Batman costume? It’s something you’re going to either make, or it’s something you’re going to buy. Either way, it doesn’t work like that. I don’t think you’re going to be on steady ground there. That’s a tricky one.
I think John is right. You can talk about Batman all you want. That’s not a problem. Batman exists in the world. That character is a fact in the world, so you can talk about that character until the cows come home. Showing the bat suit, which has been copyrighted up the wazoo, that’s going to be a much trickier thing to do.
**John:** Scott, a thing that you might consider is creating your own universe of fandom within your space of your film, so that your characters are obsessed with a thing that does not actually exist in the real world but possibly could exist, because I don’t know most anime stuff. If you told me that there was a whole universe of these characters that people were obsessed with, I would believe you if you established that as being true in your world. That may be a good solution for you is that you have characters who are obsessed with a very specific thing, like Galaxy Quest. It has its own very specific fandom. That may be a way to explore the themes you want to explore without having to deal with all the real-world copyright issues.
**Craig:** It sounds like that’s what Scott’s doing. It says, “None of the characters would be presented as actual anime characters, superheros, etc., but I’d like to reference them.” I would say referencing them verbally, fine. Referencing them visually, on shaky ground, and like John says, probably going to get you some letters.
What it comes down to is, if somebody buys the script, one of that company’s lawyers is going to have to look at this and make a decision. If that lawyer says, “I don’t have a problem with this,” guess what? You’re off the hook, dude, because there’s this wonderful thing called indemnification, which says that if the studio says this is fine legally, and it turns out it’s not, and you get sued, the studio is going to cover all of that, because they did it.
**John:** Indemnification doesn’t necessarily mean that your movie gets released into the world. There have been things where those kind of concerns have kept things from being released for a while. That’s its own huge problem.
**Craig:** You don’t want that. By and large, this is not going to be an area where the studio’s going to try and push the boundaries of IP law. They are generally risk-averse, so unlikely that you’re going to be allowed to do something that will put the movie in legal jeopardy.
**John:** Agreed. It’s time for our One Cool Things.
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** My One Cool Thing is another podcast. It is by Josh Barro and Ken White. It’s called Serious Trouble. What they do is every week they talk through the major court cases that are happening around the country, sometimes the world, but really mostly domestic U.S. Ken White, he’s Popehat on Twitter. He’s now on Bluesky. We play D and D with him. He’s a very, very smart defense lawyer. Josh Barro’s a journalist who writes about these kind of issues.
What I love about it is, so much of what’s happening in the news these days does revolve around court cases, like all the cases that are against Trump right now, the weird SBF trial, lots of other just esoteric, strange cases. It’s nice to have just a weekly check-in on what’s actually happening in all these things, and a smart conversation between two people who know what they’re talking about, which is familiar to folks who hopefully are listening to Scriptnotes. Serious Trouble. It’s just serioustrouble.show. You’ll find a link to their Substack, which has all of their episodes you can listen to.
**Craig:** Talking about narratives on both sides of things, Ken White formerly was a federal prosecutor, and he sees it from both sides. It’s really interesting to hear him talk about these things. My One Cool Thing is not new, but it’s been fun and new for me. Lego Titanic.
**John:** Love it.
**Craig:** It is exactly what it sounds like. Normally, when I tackle a Lego project, I’m looking for something that’s going to occupy me for a long time. This one certainly fits the bill. Over 9,000 pieces. Over 9,000! It’s divided up into three sections. I just finished the first section, first third. I think the deal, based on what I’m building – I hope this is the deal – is that the three pieces will be linked together but not snapped together, so you could pull them apart, and people can see inside, because there’s all this cool stuff inside.
**John:** Love it.
**Craig:** It’s a beast. It’s a heavy beast, but it’s quite beautiful. I am enjoying it. It is expensive. I’m not going to lie. It is expensive. Also, Lego, dear Lego, why so many boxes? John, it came in a box, a shipping box. You open the shipping box, and inside is a smaller box. When I say smaller, I mean one millimeter smaller, so really hard to get out of the first box. You get that box out, that’s also a shipping box. You then open that box. Inside there is another box. This is now the box with the Legos. You then open that box, and inside that box, three boxes, each for one third of the set.
**John:** That division I can understand, because they don’t want the little envelopes to get confused.
**Craig:** Just do one box with three boxes in it. That’s a lot of boxes.
**John:** That’s a lot of boxes. Craig, we’ve talked a lot about people’s ability to visualize or to hear things, but I can definitely feel Lego pieces snapping together as you were talking. I can feel the indentations on my fingertips from the Lego as you’re talking about that. It’s such a distinct, tactile thing that happens there.
**Craig:** Yep, or in the bottom of your foot as you step on it.
**John:** Yes. Good lord. It’s going to happen.
**Craig:** Sharp.
**John:** I’m excited to see it. You have done I know Lego Death Star?
**Craig:** Yep, Death Star and Lego Millennium Falcon.
**John:** Now, Craig, you recently moved. Did these giant Legos move with you to your new house?
**Craig:** Oh, no. Those big sets were demolished years ago by my kids, and happily so. I don’t know. There’s something about like, “Look at my Death Star,” that feels really dorky, whereas, “Look at my Titanic,” feels like, oh, someone’s entered the History Channel phase of his life. It’s slightly more dignified, so I think I will be able to display the Lego Titanic.
**John:** Fantastic. I’ll be looking forward to photos once you get it all finished.
**Craig:** Of course.
**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** … with help from Chris Csont.
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli-
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** … who also did our outro this week. Thank you, Matthew.
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s 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 hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the old internet. Craig, thank you for a good conversation on monsters, and happy Halloween.
**Craig:** Happy Hallowe’en, John.
**John:** Love it. Get that apostrophe in there.
[Bonus Segment]
**Craig:** You’ve got mail.
**John:** Craig, did it take you back?
**Craig:** Yeah. That is the sound of the early web, I guess. It wasn’t really the web.
**John:** It was the web. It was pre-web. It was early internet. It was how most of us first got a sense of what the internet was going to be. This whole Bonus Segment is inspired by this new website that’s come up at neal.fun. Neal Agarwal put up this Internet Artifacts collection, this museum of the old internet. It’s really nicely done.
**Craig:** It’s beautiful. It does bring me back. This is generational narcissism, but I don’t care. We’re the coolest. Gen X is the coolest. We have all the context. We have all the context, but we also still know how to do stuff, because we’re not grandpa yet. We’re not like, “How does my phone work?” No, we know how the phone works. Also, we were there when it was Usenet. We were there when it was dial-up modems, even the put your phone on a weird rubber cradle modem.
**John:** Oh yeah, went through all that.
**Craig:** We were there when email began. We were there for all of it. We saw it all. Usenet, oh my goodness.
**John:** This site begins at 1977 with ARPANET. My dad was an engineer at Bell Labs, and so he was actually on these very early versions of this.
**Craig:** Wow.
**John:** I remember him talking about he emailed with my cousin Tim, who was I think then going to MIT. The email might take a day or two to get through, which is just so crazy to think about. It did seem just like magic. We had the kind of modem where you had to manually dial the phone and stick in the little cradle. I was on bulletin board systems, BBSs, quite early on. It was so magical just to be talking with other people through text, even though only one or two users could be on at a time. You had to send saved messages, and there were forums. It was just a very early version of everything we have now.
**Craig:** BBS, bulletin board system, that’s how we used to do things, by figuring out how to analogize them to physical objects around us. It was like, “Imagine a bulletin board where you could post a note, and then somebody could come by and post a note next to your note about your note.” “Okay, I get it, it’s a bulletin board system.” That’s how it began. You would dial-up, and you would do this stuff.
I used to get – I can’t even remember what the magazine was – Byte. Maybe it was Byte. In the ads in the back, there would be ads for these things, where you’d be calling up. It was exhilarating. My parents were not engineers. They had no idea what I was doing. It was so early. It was all innocent and very, very, very dorky.
**John:** It was.
**Craig:** Social media is for people that are social. This was for people that were not, and it helped them be social.
**John:** Obviously, you can’t have the internet without computers. We had computers for a long time before there was internet. I think that may be a hard thing for our kids to understand is that we had computers that just sat by themselves and couldn’t talk to anybody else. They were appliances. They were just a thing that could do that stuff. There was no ability to move beyond the walls of your computer.
Now, of course, it’s hard to think about a computer that doesn’t connect to the internet. You could go into airplane mode, but it’s not really the same. Our computers are designed to talk to other computers. Our phones are as well. There’s not a great use for a lot of our machines unless they have the ability to connect to an internet. An internet is not just other people, but it’s sources of information. It is video. It is all these things, which was just unimaginable in those very early days.
**Craig:** Nowadays, I suppose if a computer is completely disconnected from the internet, we view it as some sort of cool spy machine that is off the grid. That was everything.
**John:** Exactly.
**Craig:** Until modems came along, that was it. My friend Eric and I were doing this early programming. We just had to sit together, next to each other to do it. That’s how it was. I had to get on my bike and go to his house to work on something together. This is why so much of what we take for granted of modern internet culture really does come from those early days of nerds. The reason spam is called spam is because of the Monty Python sketch, “Spam spam spam spam spam, wonderful spam.” If there’s one thing nerds love, it’s Monty Python. God, do they love Monty Python.
**John:** They love it so much.
**Craig:** Sorry. God, do we love Monty Python. That’s why it’s called spam. All these wonderfully cool people say spam all the time and don’t know why.
**John:** They have no idea why.
**Craig:** Nerds.
**John:** I’ve not really thought about the fact that when my friend Ethan wanted to show me something new, like a new program he had, I had to literally go to his house to see it. There was no way for him to… You obviously couldn’t share a screen. He couldn’t send me the thing. I was there. If I wanted a copy of it, I would have to bring my floppy disks and put it on. I started college in that same situation, where only by my senior year did we have kind of the ability to go online. That was really just to go onto the main computer. It was not the same. The real internet was not there yet, the real internet that we think about.
**Craig:** That’s right. It wasn’t like I was a hacker, but I was pretty well versed in the early days of networking. When I started working at Disney in 1994, all the Macs were connected in the office through an ethernet cable.
**John:** Was it ethernet or was it Apple Talk? There was a protocol before that.
**Craig:** Sorry. It was Apple Talk. You’re right. It was Apple Talk. The only purpose of that really was to access I think a printer that was on Apple Talk.
**John:** Yeah, a shared laser writer.
**Craig:** Exactly, the good ole shared laser writer. What a lot of people didn’t realize is that they had changed settings on their computer and shared a whole bunch of stuff. I would go on. Okay, I’m looking for the shared laser writer. Suddenly, I’m like, “Why can I see everything in Brenda’s computer? If I want to go read her divorce agreement, I can. This is not good. Somebody needs to tell these… “ But there wasn’t even IT. There wasn’t even anyone telling people, “Oh, by the way, here’s this rudimentary security concept. Don’t share things you don’t want to share.” They didn’t even know they were sharing them. That’s the clunky old beginnings of all this stuff.
**John:** Absolutely. What we think about in terms of the internet probably really begins with the web. The first web browsers we used were Netscape Navigator. There was Internet Explorer early on. In 1996 they show the Apple computer homepage. It’s just so unbelievable to see how ugly it is. It’s like this fake 3D kind of thing, these buttons that stand out, that look like buttons you push. Just the aesthetics, the style of the time were so different from where we’ve gotten to.
**Craig:** The general aesthetic of things has improved dramatically. It was so ugly back then. It was blocky, pixelated. The windows, they made them into windows. Do you know what I mean? They looked like windows instead of just what they are now. You can certainly see that when you look at the early days of the internet. Everything was being designed, of course, for limited resources and low transmission rates. There were the bones of things that exist still. When you are learning html now, and you’re designing things, there are fields. Fields are things where you enter stuff. Yep, that’s been there since the start. A lot of this stuff is just hyperlinks, like the whole concept of hyperlinks. Do you remember HyperDeck?
**John:** I don’t remember HyperDeck. I remember HyperCard.
**Craig:** Oh, sorry, HyperCard. That’s what I’m thinking of, HyperCard.
**John:** I loved HyperCard. Loved it so much.
**Craig:** It was the best. HyperCard was Apple’s… It was this amazing thing. Imagine having a bunch of cards. Each card is an index card. You could write anything you want on it. Then you can link one card to another. If you clicked on this thing, it would send you to this other card. In its own way, it became a little bit of a programming platform. That’s all the internet is is HyperCard. It’s just links, linking back pages or cards. It’s all HyperCard.
**John:** The very original version of my website is like that. It’s a bunch of static, single pages, and you can link between them, and I’m linking to other things out there on the web. Recently, I pulled together a version of… I think I’ll put a link in the show notes to the old version of the site, which we have up someplace, so people can click through it. It is so primitive, and yet it was revolutionary at the time. Coming off of that, we then made it to the Myspace, the Geocities, the sense that you now have a home on the internet. I want to bring in Drew here. Drew, what is your first memory of the internet. Were you in grade school?
**Drew:** I was in grade school. My babysitter in the summer of 1997 got the internet in her house. We just looked at the computer and were like, “Where do we go?” The only thing we could come up with was gap.com. We just went to Gap and looked around that.
**Craig:** gap.com. That’s awesome.
**John:** That’s incredible.
**Drew:** That was it.
**John:** When you say that she had the internet, you have to understand, that meant that she had a special, dedicated, probably phone line, maybe DSL line. What was the predecessor to DSL?
**Drew:** I think it was phone, for sure.
**John:** Then she could do these things. I remember at my apartment off of Melrose was the first time I had a dedicated line that was not actually just a modem line. I didn’t have to dial into a thing. I basically was always connected. It was amazing. It was just so great. Now, this piece would be laughable, but at the time it felt like just magic that things would just show up.
**Craig:** I’m looking at the 1996 Pepsi World page at pepsi.com. I’m having full PTSD here. “If you have the Shockwave plugin, click here.” No! Shockwave, the worst thing ever.
**John:** Shockwave. It’s important to understand that we had to have all these interim protocols for how we were doing things like video and more complicated sound stuff. We had Shockwave. We had RealPlayer. We had all these different ways which you would get video that was really compressed and blocky and low quality, but it did again feel like magic to do that. Now that’s assumed that all that stuff can happen.
**Craig:** All built into the browsers, as opposed to browsers not knowing what to do with that stuff.
**John:** Drew, did you have a Myspace page? What was the order of social media things for you?
**Drew:** LiveJournal was first. That was 2004.
**John:** That’s right.
**Drew:** God, I hope that’s scrubbed from the internet, because that’s bad. Then Myspace, and then quickly, I think I was Facebook in 2005 or 2006. That seemed to come in pretty hot and fast.
**John:** Because I had my own website, I never really did the Myspace as much or the Geocities, any of the online bloggy things that were not my own stuff.
**Drew:** I miss Geocities.
**Craig:** Oh, really? You miss Geocities?
**Drew:** A little bit.
**John:** Tell us about Geocities. Sell us on Geocities.
**Drew:** Geocities, it was just people with passions and the ability to make a website about that passion, but there wasn’t quite the community aspect to it necessarily. It was just shouting passions into the void and hoping you stumbled upon it. A lot of time at sleepovers growing up was spent finding these weird websites. I can’t even think of any off the top of my head. You would just find all these things. There wasn’t necessarily a dialog to it. There was a little bit of comment sections, but for the most part, it was just someone going on and on about how much they love Cloris Leachman or something, just something very strange.
**Craig:** Wow. That is specific.
**John:** Now, looking through this archive, this one stops at the introduction of the iPhone, which I think is a useful demarcation from the original internet to now this internet is in your pocket. I’d also say I don’t perceive the aesthetics having changed nearly as much in the last 10 years. I think you’re looking at a website from five years ago, seven years ago, it’s not going to seem that different to me. Maybe it’s just blindness to the things that I can’t see, and 10 years from now we’ll say, “Oh my god, can you believe what these things looked like at the time?”
**Craig:** What’s happened, and this is probably true across all sorts of modalities for human design, when it began it was garish and tacky. The internet, when you look at the way things were designed, it was just so tacky, because everybody was like, “Oh my god, look. I can design stuff.” What you got was what normal people do when they design things, which is garbage, because most people aren’t artists. Most people aren’t designers. They think, “Cool, I can make the letters spin.” Yeah, but it’s tacky and dumb.
Over time, as the internet became something that could generate massive amounts of money for large corporations, no surprise, the design was professionalized by professionals. Everybody sort of, kind of then copied that. What we have now, and what we’ve had for a while, is a little bit of a homogenized design that is probably over-regulated and too conservative and restrictive, but it’s certainly not tacky.
When you look at some of these things, it’s like when you look at pictures of yourself. John, you probably have some from when you were a kid in the ‘70s and you’re wearing some sort of plaid pants and a mustard-colored turtleneck.
**John:** Some white corduroys.
**Craig:** You’re like, “Mom, why?” You get this cringe of tackiness. That’s the way it used to be, but not so much anymore.
**John:** I do wonder, I’m thinking, what is the next thing to come along that we’re going to have to design for. Obviously, the VR systems are in their infancy. They’ve gone through some iterations. Apple will come out with their headset. If we end up using headsets more and have a UI for those, those are going to evolve and change. I feel like the main players in this are already coming in there with a sense of style and taste that I doubt will be as tacky, but it will still have to iterate.
**Craig:** I agree. We need to go through these convulsions, but the presence of money has changed everything, no question. The internet was built by the equivalent of the people that go to Joann’s Fabrics and make their own clothes. It was just really clunky and goofy but sweet.
**John:** That sort of hacker-y, “we’re going to figure it out ourselves” attitude is lovely and can lead to some great things. Of course, how we learn how to make movies and online video, all of that has progressed so much, but it started with people who were just experimenting. We applaud them for building these things that now look so dated and ugly, but at the time really were exciting. Cool. Craig, Drew, thank you so much.
**Craig:** Thanks, guys.
**Drew:** Thanks.
**Craig:** Bye.
Links:
* [Aaron Sorkin on This Cultural Life](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00161mc) from BBC Radio 4
* [Serious Trouble podcast](https://www.serioustrouble.show/podcast) from Josh Barro and Ken White
* [LEGO Titanic](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-titanic-10294)
* [Internet Artifacts](https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/)
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* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
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