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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-fandom-menace).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 628 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Craig and I will discuss how things get cool, then hot, then terrible. We’ll have listener questions and a ton of follow-up, including about secret projects and alternative screenplay formats, something that Craig is always into talking about.

**Craig:** I’m into it.

**John:** In our bonus segment for premium members, we will look at various fandoms and do our best to absolutely enrage them.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Oh, no. That’s why we put it behind the paywall. If you want to be angry with you, you gotta pay us some money.

**Craig:** Pay $5 to watch us get beat into a pulp. Fun.

**John:** Craig, we missed you last week. Aline was on, and we discussed How Would This Be a Movie. We had some new topics for How Would This Be a Movies. Also, this week, I was looking through the chapter on picking which movie to write, for the Scriptnotes book. I mentioned, oh, a bunch of our previous How Would This Be a Movies have become movies. I had Drew get on the case to figure out how many of those that we discussed actually did become movies. The number is shocking. Drew’s going to help us out, talking through the things that became movies, the things that became documentaries, and the things that are in development right now. Drew.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Talk us through how many of these projects have actually been made since we discussed them.

**Drew Marquardt:** Twelve of these have actually been made as narrative feature films.

**Craig:** Jeez. Wow.

**Drew:** Or series.

**John:** Also, Craig, you start to realize, man, we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so some of them I knew, like The 15:17 to Paris, which is about those Americans who prevented the terrorist attack. That was a Clint Eastwood movie. I knew that happened. Zola we talked about at the Austin Film Festival. That became a movie. Do you remember The Hatton Garden Job, which was the old men-

**Craig:** The old guys, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, the heist. Two of those happened.

**Craig:** They made two of those?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that. You’re making the movie, and someone’s like, “We’ve gotta beat the other The Hatton Garden Job movie.” Oh, business.

**John:** Business, business. But Drew, talk us through some of the other things we had in How Would This Be a Movie.

**Drew:** There was also The Act, which was the Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard.

**John:** She just got out of prison, right? I didn’t really follow that story closely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Apparently, our daughters’ generation is obsessed with Gypsy-Rose and her impending freedom, or freedom. She’s become a cult hero among the children, because she murdered someone or whatever.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** There’s also The Mandela Effect, which was just the idea that we had talked about, but they made into a feature. There’s Stolen By My Mother: the Kamiyah Mobley Story, which was the young woman who discovered she was kidnapped as a baby by the woman she thought was her mom.

**Craig:** I don’t even remember that one.

**John:** I don’t remember that one at all.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Drew:** There’s the Danish series The Investigation, which is about Kim Wall’s murder.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It’s a submarine murder. That’s right.

**Drew:** Six Triple Eight, which is in post-production right now, but Tyler Perry directed it. It’s about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was the predominantly Black battalion of women during World War II in the Army Corps.

**John:** I do remember that. I remember thinking, “Is there enough of a story there?” It was a part of history I didn’t know existed. We’ll see if there’s a story there.

**Drew:** We have How to Murder Your Husband, which was about the woman who wrote the book How to Murder Your Husband and then murdered her husband.

**Craig:** Oh, murder lady. Come on.

**John:** It’s a great title, so that’s why it needed to happen.

**Craig:** How to murder your husband, step 1: don’t write a thing about how to murder your husband. Jeez.

**John:** It could actually go on endlessly, because if you make a movie called How to Murder Your Husband, everyone’s going to suspect you of murdering your husband. It’s perfect.

**Craig:** Now I’m rooting for that person to murder their husband. What else did we do?

**Drew:** Death Saved My Life they made into a Lifetime movie, which is the wife who showed up at her own funeral, because her husband had her killed but not well.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Death Saved My Life, I guess that’s a good title. It’s a good Lifetime title. It’s a good book title, so sure, I’ll get that.

**Craig:** I’m with them.

**Drew:** There’s Dumb Money, which came out last year.

**John:** We talked about that. It’s about the GameStop situation and story. Not at all surprised that happened.

**Craig:** No, considering that I personally received multiple calls from multiple companies about it.

**John:** As did I.

**Craig:** I was like, “Okay, apparently they’re making this thing.”

**John:** Craig, you and I should’ve both taken the job for different companies and just raced to see which one-

**Craig:** Wow. Just go head to head in the theaters.

**Drew:** Then finally, Holiday Road, which I think might’ve been a TV movie, but that was the 13 stranded strangers who all rent a van together when they can’t get a flight.

**Craig:** Here’s my question. Of all of these, how was our batting average on predicting whether or not they would be made?

**John:** That could be good follow-up for Drew, because I don’t think you went through and looked at that. Drew, maybe for next week, can you take a look at, of those movies, how many did we say, okay, that’s definitely going to happen?

**Drew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Similarly, were there any where we were like, “Never in a million years will anyone make this.”

**John:** That’s what I’m excited to see. We’ll put it on the blog so people can see which of these movies happened and which one didn’t. But you also found 10 things that are in development, including-

**Craig:** Jeez.

**John:** … one about Jim Obergefell, the Hulk Hogan Gawker lawsuit, Dr. James Barry, who was a gender-fluid Victorian doctor, which I remember we thought was really interesting, and apparently is Rachel Weisz. Feels like the perfect casting for that.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** There’s the PTA mom for drug dealing. You May Want to Marry My Husband. These Witchsy founders who formed a fake male co-founder.

**Drew:** Brie Larson got that one.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** McDonald’s Monopoly.

**Craig:** That one is a great one.

**John:** The Scottish hip-hop hoax. Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. There’s a bunch of those things. That was also a thing that came to me a couple times. There probably will be a Sam Bankman-Fried movie. I think it’s tough. I think the relative lack of success of Dumb Money is going to very much hurt the Sam Bankman-Fried movie, but we’ll see.

**Craig:** They’re going to make it anyway.

**John:** George Santos, there’s at least one movie. That’s right, we talked about that, the George Santos movie, the one that Frank Rich is doing.

**Craig:** All I need to know is Frank Rich. I’m in. That’s great. This is pretty remarkable. Similarly, I’m interested to see if any of these we thought were not even worthy of development. The conceited question is, hey, are people listening to us and then just rushing out to get this done? But I suspect not. I suspect there is an industry of assistants that are doing nothing but Buzzfeed-style collating whatever buzzy news item of the day is and putting it in front of people, and then there’s just a general race to get rights and make a thing. It is amazing how many of these are getting made.

**John:** I was just surprised at the total numbers here. We’ll also include in the blog post the ones that were made as documentaries, because I think a thing we often talked about is, is the best version of this a fictionalized version, or do we just want to see the documentary series that tracks that, which in some cases may be more compelling.

**Craig:** That’s very interesting. Good to know that we’re not just wildly off, at least with the things we’re considering. I root for all movies.

**John:** Root for movies and TV series. Some more follow-up. We talked two episodes ago about accurate but distracting, so things that, if you put them in your script, they might be actually accurate to what happens in real life, but would be distracting to the viewer or to the reader. We have some follow-up from that.

**Drew:** Richard in Boston writes, “There’s an example of this that historical fiction writers have to deal with called the Tiffany Problem. It was coined by fantasy writer Joe Walton. The Tiffany Problem describes the tension between historical fact and the average, everyday person’s idea of history. If you’re reading a book that takes place in medieval times, you’ll have trouble believing that a character’s name could be Tiffany, even though Tiffany is actually a medieval name that goes back to the 12th century. But in our modern perception of the medieval world, Tiffany just doesn’t fit. Even though authors might research carefully and want to include historically accurate information in their book, like a medieval character named Tiffany, a popular audience likely won’t buy it.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Totally tracks. I love that as a name for that phenomenon.

**Craig:** That really does track. I would absolutely be stopped in my tracks if there was a scene in a medieval story and Tiffany shows up. That would just seem anachronistic. That’s a great example. I guess in the end, it really doesn’t… There’s no victory in saying afterwards, “No no no, Tiffany was a name,” because people are like, “I guess now that I know, that’s interesting, but in the meantime, it screwed up my enjoyment of this story.” Tiffany. All right. I like that.

**John:** Now, I don’t want to get Drew’s mailbox overflowing with stuff, but if you are a listener who has another example of something that really does match the Tiffany Problem, which is basically something that is historically accurate or accurate to true life but is distracting if you were to encounter it, I’d love more examples of that, because it feels like Tiffany’s great, but I think we can find more ways that this manifests.

A thing I’ve talked about on the show a lot is that when I want a bedtime book, I love a book that is really interesting and completely forgettable, that you can read, and the minute you set the book down, you don’t think about it, so you can fall back asleep. I’ve been reading some books on counterfactual history, basically like, what if this thing happened in a certain way.

**Craig:** Alternative history, yeah.

**John:** Love it. One of the stories I wasn’t familiar with was Arminius, who’s also known as Hermann, who’s the German barbarian chief who drove back the Romans at a certain time. In reading this account of Arminius, “That’s a fascinating movie. I’m surprised no one has made a movie about that. Let me Google and see why no one has made a movie about it.” It turns out there’s two seasons of a Netflix show that is specifically about that. There’s just too much-

**Craig:** Netflix.

**John:** … Netflix.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** There’s just too much Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s almost like Netflix has become like Google, but instead of getting a search result, you get a series.

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**John:** I looked at the trailer. It looked great. I’m like, “Great. Someone has already made the thing I was thinking about making.” Congratulations. I will say I’ve not watched a frame of the actual series. They shot it in Latin and in German, which feels great.

**Craig:** Whoa. That’s impressive.

**John:** Kudos to them. Kudos to everybody involved in making Barbarians, which I may watch at some point, I may not watch at some point. But I know it’s out there, and I know that I, John August, don’t have to write it. That sometimes is the greatest relief.

**Craig:** Apparently, we don’t have to write anything, because Netflix did it.

**John:** Another thing I don’t have to write is the Harry Potter series.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Episode 623, I talked about a project. This is when we were talking about bake-offs. I talked about a project that had come into my orbit, and they asked, “Hey, would you want to adapt this very popular piece of IP.” I’m sure, Craig, you were guessing it was Harry Potter. We can now reveal it was Harry Potter. They’re doing a Harry Potter series for HBO Max or Max. Deadline posted a story about who the finalists were who are going through the process. I wish them all well. They did find people who have good, proper credits. I do wish them well. I do think it’s just a very hard road ahead for them.

**Craig:** I have no inside information on this. I work at HBO, but no one has ever talked to me about Harry Potter. I don’t know what it is. It seems like it’s about adapting the books. That was what I initially thought. But then they’re saying in this article, “We’ve heard that the group of writers were commissioned by Max.” First of all, that’s cool that they’re paying them.

**John:** Yeah, they’re paying somebody.

**Craig:** “To create pitches for a series reflecting their take on the IP.” Now, I guess my question is – and this is my dum-dum question – what take? I thought that the idea was, we’re going to take each book and adapt it fully over a season, because those books are big. When they were adapted into movies, very successfully, of course they had to do quite a bit of compacting. I guess maybe there’s more to it than that. I don’t know. I’m fascinated by this.

I would be terrified to be one of these people. They’re way braver than I am. There’s something very scary about knowing that there’s somebody somewhere else doing what you were doing, to try and do what you’re doing, and maybe will do what you do instead of you. It’s scary. But I do think on the plus side, they’re being paid, so that’s actually quite good. On the downside, I could also see where this becomes this cottage industry, where you’re paying people to do these pitches, but you’re not paying that much. The thing about pitching a season is you have to do quite a bit of work.

**John:** Oh god, so much.

**Craig:** That’s definitely an imposing prospect. I guess for something that is as huge as Harry Potter is – and it is – it’s almost as close as you can get to a guaranteed success, as far as I can tell. I can see why it is like this, because I assume also that these people will have to meet with JK Rowling and get along with her, because she’s always part of it.

**John:** If you look at the attempts to expand the franchise beyond those books, they’ve not succeeded. They’ve succeeded in physical spaces. I feel like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, tremendous success, those things, but the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have had diminishing returns. Hardcore Harry Potter fans are not as enamored with those as with the original books, of course. It looks like, based on this article – and we don’t know the inside truth here – is that some of these takes may be moving outside of the books, some of them may be more faithful adaptations of the books.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Those movies, I guess they did well enough for them to make more. They ran into some trouble, because Johnny Depp suddenly was in a situation. They may have not been the size of the original Harry Potter films, but I think they were doing okay. The Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is a phenomenon, our friend Jack Thorne being the primary playwright there. Well, the playwright. I guess, technically, Jack wrote the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an original story by him, JK Rowling, and John Tiffany. Tiffany. Then the Harry Potter video game was an enormous hit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** In the world of video games, there are some enormous hits. When they are enormous, they dwarf what we do. That was one of them.

**John:** I guess I should restate that they’ve had a hard time expanding it out as a filmed franchise, but this is maybe possible, going to happen. For folks who are looking at, oh, what is a popular book series that did not get a good treatment, Percy Jackson. The movies were not a big success. The new series on Disney Plus is terrific. For folks who are curious about that, really worth watching. I thought it was just a very smart adaptation, much more faithful to the books. My daughter, who grew up reading those books, loved it. They really are quite enjoyable. It was well cast. So difficult to get great performances from young actors, and this succeeded in it.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’d recommend it for people.

**Craig:** Great. We wish those folks the best of luck. I don’t know if they’ll want to do this, but when it’s all done and the winner of, what is it, the tri-cup wizard, the tri-wizard tournament, whoever wins the big cup that actually turns out to be a Horcrux or, no, a Portkey, it would be great to have them on our show, just to talk about the process, if they’re willing.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating to me. I get it, but also, it makes me nervous.

**John:** It does. Also, I think you have to look at are you going with people who are familiar with the movie series or new folks. That’s a challenging [crosstalk 16:09].

**Craig:** I could be wildly off here, but I suspect that the Harry Potter books are transgenerational, that people who read them as children are now reading them to their children, that they aren’t going anywhere ever.

**John:** I don’t know that to be the case. I feel like there’s been such a backlash against JK Rowling that I wonder if that’s still the case.

**Craig:** There is a backlash against JK Rowling on Twitter and social media, no question. I don’t think that that has translated into the actual audience and how they interact with the stories and the characters. I will cite the video game again, because when the video game came out, that was thick in the middle-

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** … of JK Rowling and her controversies. People were really angry about the game and angry at the game, and yet it sold a gazillion copies. There is a disconnect, I think, between… There’s a topic. One day we should probably jump on the third rail, John, and discuss the notion of separating the art from the artist, because this comes up all the time.

**John:** For sure. Noted for future discussion is how we separate those things. We’ll find some other good examples of what do you do with problematic people who also make art.

**Craig:** Roald Dahl.

**John:** Roald Dahl, Joss Whedon. It’s tough. There’s that tendency to retroactively discount the thing that they were able to make and do, because we now believe that they’re terrible people.

**Craig:** There’s also this weird phenomenon of feeling guilty about enjoying something. Roald Dahl said a lot of really antisemitic stuff. Not mildly. Very. I love Roald Dahl books. I do. I love them. I really enjoy the Wes Anderson Henry Sugar adaptation. I feel like I’m a little like, “Should I?” Then I’m like, “I really like the stories.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some UK writing credits. In 625, I think we were answering a listener question about UK credits, and we said we know they work differently. Tom wrote in with some follow-up about that.

**Drew:** Tom is the chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Film Committee, which is the WGGB. He writes, “Per the question from the British writer, I thought that you and indeed he would be interested to know that the WGGB and the Producers Alliance of Cinema and Television, or PACT, negotiated the screenwriting credits agreement way back in 1974. This agreement is referenced in the 1992 basic screenwriting agreement between our two organizations. Both these agreements are in the process of being updated, as we seek to bake in some of the gains secured in last year’s WGA strike, so thank you for that. We operate under a different labor framework in the UK, so these agreements are only advisory. Specific clauses can be negotiated out, though obviously we discourage that. Most screen credits are agreed in consultation between the producers and the writers in question. However, the Writers Guild of Great Britain does arbitrate on small number of credit disputes every year, following similar guidance to that used by the WGA.”

**John:** That’s great. It’s good to have some answers there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not surprising. The Writers Guild of America has a very legalistic system to arbitrate and assign credits. It is contractually the sole arbiter and sole authority of credit assignation. Other places, there’s that big bus-sized loophole that you can drive through, which is advisory or in consultation between producers and writers. It is not as strong of a system, presuming one agrees that the Writers Guild has the best interest of writers at heart, which I think it does. It’s just that when you are deciding what credits should be, there are sometimes winners and losers, and people that don’t get the credit are upset. But it’s good to know that there’s something. But I’m not surprised to see that it is not the ironclad structure that we have here in the U.S.

**John:** Absolutely. All these things come down to power. In the U.S., the Writers Guild has the power to basically force this system upon the makers of film and television. But the Producers Guild, for example, does not have that degree of power. But they have been able to negotiate and cajole and get people to take their PGA credits seriously, so that now when you see a PGA after a producer’s name, you can recognize, oh, that’s the person who did really more of the producing job, and it’s just not a person whose name showed up for various contractual reasons.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I am a member of the PGA. I don’t put the PGA thing after my name, only because it just feels a little bit like a odd degree I earned in college or something.

**John:** But if you were producing a feature film, you might be more inclined to use it, I suspect.

**Craig:** Ultimately, I don’t think people at home care, but what the PGA does do is leverage its agreement with the Academies to determine who is eligible to win awards. That is actually quite a bit of interesting power that they’ve garnered for themselves. I think ultimately serves as their most relevant function. When the Oscars are coming, and Best Picture is announced, producers will go up to accept the Best Picture. Those producers have been vetted by the PGA. This works for the Emmys as well. We get a questionnaire, and they ask me, “What did these people do? Just tell us what they did.” And I do, and then they make their decisions.

**John:** More follow-up in Episode 626. We talked about the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize, which I knew was a thing, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Matt wrote in with some more specificity here.

**Drew:** Matt says, “The Ig Nobel Prize already exists, and they celebrated their 33rd First Annual Ceremony in 2023, based on offbeat yet real science. The prizes are often presented by true Nobel laureates.” Matt says, “I personally appreciate their method of preventing long acceptance speeches, where an eight-year-old girl marches on stage to tell the recipients to, ‘Please stop. I’m bored,’ while the audience throws paper airplanes at the stage.”

**Craig:** That is very reminiscent of what happened at this year’s Emmys, where Anthony Anderson, the host, brought his mom. When people talked too long, they put a camera on his mom with a mic, and she just told the people to stop. I gotta tell you, it only really happened once. After that one time, I think everybody was terrified of Anthony Anderson’s mom.

I think she should be at all of these award shows. There’s really no excuse for it. They tell you very clearly you have 45 seconds, which is actually a lot of time. Some people go up there and just don’t seem to… They think, “Oh, but not really.” No, really. We’re in show business. We all understand that there’s timing. It’s remarkable to me that people just don’t do that. In any case, Anthony Anderson’s mom or an eight-year-old girl marching on stage, either way, yes, genius. Much better than the playoff music.

**John:** Craig, I did not watch any of the award shows so far this year. You attended many of them.

**Craig:** You missed it.

**John:** Give us a quick review.

**Craig:** I lost.

**John:** How was it for you?

**Craig:** I lost. I lost.

**John:** You lost and you lost and lost and lost and lost.

**Craig:** I lost. I lost. And then I lost.

**John:** But your show won many awards that were not part of the main telecast, which is great.

**Craig:** Yes, we did. We won eight Emmy Awards, which is one shy, I believe, of the record for most for a first-season show. That was terrific. I would have probably felt a bit more glum about constantly losing all the big awards, had it not been that I was losing to Jesse Armstrong and Succession. He is such a lovely, wonderful guy. Have we not had him on the show?

**John:** No, we’ve never had him on the show. We should get him on the show.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Let’s fix that. He’s wonderful and so smart and so deserving. Also, there’s a nice thing about certainty going into these awards shows, where you don’t really have to worry. I didn’t write speeches, for instance. You go and enjoy that, and it’s actually quite nice. I have a few friends there that are also up for other awards. Quinta Brunson, who we love, won an Emmy, which was wonderful to see. You do get to see a lot of people that you’ve come to like and enjoy.

I made a shorter night of all those things, just because the strikes had that weird impact of jamming four awards things into the course of 10 days. Oh, god, man, I walked out of one of those things. I’m like, “This thing was 4 hours long, and I feel more tired than I do shooting for 12 hours.” I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. It’s oddly exhausting.

**John:** Now, everything has got jammed up, tied together, but the alternative is it gets dragged out over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, which wouldn’t have been great either.

**Craig:** That would be worse. It was a way, at least, for people to go. Everybody’s schedules, once the strikes ended, everybody accelerated into work. Maybe not so much the actors, because there’s a bit of a lag time for them, but certainly writers and producers are working on things.

There will be awards shows coming up. We were very nicely nominated for the aforementioned PGA award. Going to be difficult for me to get down there and lose again, because I’m going to be shooting. I will have to lose in absentia. It was good to get it all done in this crazy pressure cooker 10 days, because it was Golden Globes, and then it was AFI, and then it was Critics Choice, and then it was Emmys, all boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and the Oscars are right around the corner.

**John:** Yeah, crazy. Last bit of follow-up is another Arlo Finch. Karen Finch wrote in and said, “Would you believe my dog is Arlo Finch? He’s nine, so technically, I named him first.” This dog is gorgeous.

**Craig:** Look at this little boy.

**John:** Oh my god, such a good dog.

**Craig:** What a cutie. He’s got his little toy.

**John:** His toy.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. My younger dog, Bonnie, she loves toys. But my older dog, Cookie, no interest in toys. Bonnie, when you come home, she sees you, and then she immediately runs away from you, gets a toy, and runs and brings it over to you, like, look, I have a toy. It always looks like this, just ripped up and gummy and dirty. Aw, look at this little boy, Arlo Finch.

**John:** It makes sense. Karen Finch, obviously her last name was already Finch. Arlo does feel like one of those names that probably starts in dogs and then goes to kids. Basically, it’s a fun name for an animal, and then you hear that name a lot and you start applying it to kids. It makes sense. Cooper was probably the same situation. I know there are a lot of Cooper dogs, and then you started having Cooper kids.

**Craig:** Cooper kids. Maybe Craig. It’s possible. Used to be a Scottish dog name. Craig!

**John:** You know that dog names tend to be two syllables, so you can yell out for them and they come back. Craig doesn’t work well as a dog name. Arlo does.

**Craig:** There’s Spike, Butch. I’m always thinking of the cartoon dogs. You’re right. Fido. Who names their dog Fido anymore?

**John:** It’s a good name though.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, a thing we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, probably from the very start, is that the screenplay format is well established. We’ve been used to it since the days of Casablanca. It’s 12-point Courier. The margins are a certain place. The dialog works a certain way. Character names are above stuff. As the Oscar nominations came out, we always try to make sure that we have all of the Oscar-nominated screenplays available on Weekend Read. That’s Drew’s responsibility, so Drew has been a hero to getting this all to make sure they look fantastic in Weekend Read.

We’ve got all of them except for one, which is Anatomy of a Fall, which is a fantastic script, a fantastic movie. It is not going to be possible to format that in Weekend Read, because it is bizarre. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how it looks. But I also pulled out some screenshots here.

It looks to be maybe in Times Roman, I’m guessing. It’s some sort of serif font. There are scene headers. It’s “8 – Chalet, Extérieur,” “Interior plus exterior/day.” We see that kind of stuff. It’s all in French, but you can totally tell what’s happening there. There are letters for A in parentheses, talking through the scene description. It is in the present tense, like the way we’d expect this to be. There are photos. There are photos of what the chalet looks like. Dialog is blocked over to the right in a way, with the character name above it but not centered. It’s just different. Craig, how are you feeling as you look at this?

**Craig:** I love it. I love this. This is going to start happening more and more. For screenplays that are speculative – and I don’t mean just spec screenplays that people are writing without money being paid; I mean even things in development, that are not necessarily automatically going to be produced – perhaps this would be too much or unnecessary.

But if you are writing for production, what I love about this is how many questions it answers for people, because, look, I’m in prep right now. People that work on movies, to produce the movies, all the department heads, they don’t read these scripts the way people that are gatekeeping at festivals or development executives read them. They’re reading them as instruction sets for what they’re supposed to do. The more information they can have, the clearer it becomes, and the fewer questions the filmmakers have to answer, because answering questions becomes the bane of your existence in prep. You have to do it. That’s sort of the point. But the fewer questions that are floating out there, the happier your day is.

This is brilliant looking at this. It answers so many things. It makes so many things clear. You’re going to end up drawing these things anyway. You’re going to end up taking photos of these things anyway. For a movie like Anatomy of a Fall, which is so specific about a space and what occurred in the space and the relative position of the window to the attic to the downstairs to the outside, this makes complete sense. It’s very easy to read. I have no problem with this whatsoever. None.

**John:** It does French things too, where they tend not to put extra blank lines between paragraphs, which is something I would choose to do. Looking on page 15, for example, there’s a sketch of how this attic space works and which windows open and which ones don’t. Just super helpful for anyone reading the script to get a sense of what the actual plan is here. We’ll try to get Justine on the podcast to talk through this, because I’m really curious-

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** … how early in the process did she know this was the house, this is how it’s all going to work. The other thing, which we always talk about, are alt lines and how you handle that. For this tidbit here, Sandra, in parentheses, “taking time to reflect or think about it,” she answers, “Not always, but often, yes, because of the wood dust.” And then, in parentheses beneath it, “Alt: often, yes, because of the wood dust. Alt: I think so, yes, because of the wood dust.” Here, those alts are there, already in the script there as a plan. Great. It feels very useful for production to know this is the situation, this is what we’re getting into, this is how we’re going to be doing it.

**Craig:** It’s a perfectly good thing to do. At some point, very early on, when you enter production, or let’s say you’ve been green-lit and now you’re in prep, as a writer you are confronted with how unromantic everyone is about creating it. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The makeup people see makeup. The hair people see hair. The clothing people see clothing. The production designer sees spaces, materials, construction. They aren’t necessarily plugged into your grand, romantic, artistic dream. They’re just trying to make it happen. It’s so practical. This kind of work is incredibly practical, including listing the alts, because then your actors are aware. You can have that discussion. You can decide on the day, “Do we want that other line? Which of these do you prefer?” It’s all very practical.

I’m in complete support of it. I think the screenplay format that we use is a perfectly fine format for people to read and decide, “Would I want to invest in this? Would I want to see this happen?” It is not a useful document for, “How do we make this happen?” It’s just not. This is very clever, very well done.

**John:** Also, if we do get her on the show, I want to talk about decisions of when to be in French, when to be in English, because if you’re reading this document, you basically have to be able to speak both French and English to parse it and understand what’s happening there. It’s a French script with just really mostly English dialog in it. It’s just such a fascinating hybrid form.

**Craig:** Yeah, which reflects the reality of the film, where it’s taking place in France, and yet one character is often answering questions that are posed in French in English.

**John:** It’s delightful. Here’s the other thing is, we talked about the Tiffany Problem, like it’s realistic, but would you believe it. As an American, you’re watching these courtroom sequences, you’re like, “Wait, there’s no possible way you’re allowed to do that.” Of course, but no, it’s France, and you can do things that way. The way that the prosecutor behaves, it’s like, “How is that possible? Is she always on the witness stand, and she can just stand up and talk whenever?” It’s wild.

**Craig:** It is wild. I think a lot of people have that natural, like, “Did they just invent this to make the courtrooms seem more interesting?” The answer is no. Then following that, there was quite a discourse of, “What is wrong with France?” The way they conduct a trial just feels bad. It feels bad.

**John:** It feels incredibly unfair to the defendant.

**Craig:** It really does. In a country where there is a history of just chopping people’s heads off for political expressions, it does seem a little like, oh, I don’t like this feeling. But then we know in, for instance, the case in Italy with Amanda Knox, the way other countries investigate, prosecute, pursue, charge, and judge is not like we do. It’s interesting.

**John:** I would love to hear from international listeners, because they must see so much of the American courtroom process, because it’s in all our movies, it’s in all of our TV shows. How much does that color their expectation about how stuff should work in their own legal systems? They must have some expectation it’s going to work similarly, and it clearly doesn’t.

**Craig:** The other interesting thing about the constant presentation of the American justice system is that typically, for the purposes of drama, the stories that we tell are of falsely accused people or people who are guilty in the letter of the law but not in the spirit of the law. That’s what’s exciting to us. But there are times where we do tell stories of people who are guilty. The question is are they guilty or not.

The aforementioned Jack Thorne wrote a terrific miniseries that was centered around an actor who was accused of sexually assaulting people. It became a courtroom drama where you were rooting for guilt. That’s an interesting concept we don’t often see. But even though a lot of American lawyers… If we had Ken White on, for instance, he would run down how inaccurate and stupid American courtroom dramas are. It does at least give you a sense of our process and form, which is way more rigorous than apparently France, which is like, this is a free-for-all. This is kind of exciting though.

**John:** For our main topic, I want to talk a little bit about fandom and the dynamics of fandom. The jumping-off point was a blog post I read, which turned out was all from 2015, so it’s a little dated there. But I really liked how he laid out how subcultures become fandoms become these bigger things and tend to ultimately implode or get warped. This is a post by David Chapman. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. He talks through that generally the dynamic you see is that there is a scene where you have some creators who are doing a new thing. It could be a musical new thing. It could be an artistic new thing. Some sort of cultural product that they’re making which feels new. That then attracts fanatics, who are people who are not making the things themselves, but are so into it and want to follow it and follow those creators. Both these creators and the fandoms are geeks, in the sense that they are deeply, deeply into it. This is more than just a weird hobby. It’s becoming an actual subculture.

Once that gets up to a certain critical mass, you have what he calls MOPs, members of the public, who are attracted to it and start to enjoy it, but they’re not on the inside. They get kind of geeky about it, but they’re not actual hardcore fans. They’re like tourists coming to the thing. Sometimes there’s in-grouping and out-grouping, where these new people you label as posers, because they’re not true believers, they’re not really part of it.

But what I found so fascinating is he also charts it through to generally you get a place where there are sociopaths who become attracted to this movement, this thing that’s more than a scene. It’s become a subculture. They adopt some aspects of it, and ultimately the drive either is for money or to do some other kind of nefarious purpose.

I thought it was just an interesting dynamic. It’s very easy to chart this to the rise of the hippie movement. It feels accurate to a lot of the ways we see things begin, blossom, grow, and fall apart.

**Craig:** This is an interesting dissection of the phenomenon of phenomena and how things catch fire and become a social exercise. There are certain presumptions baked into this that I think are worth questioning.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** For instance, is it better to be a fanatic than to be a casual enjoyer? One of the things I think about as a person that does create things is what do I want my audience to be. If I had a wish, how would I want them to be reacting and interacting with the work I make.

I don’t think I have a great desire for people to be fanatics, per se. What I want is for people to enjoy. I want them to take from it what I intended to give. The fandom itself is separate from what I want. I just want people to watch it and feel things that I hope they feel and think about things that I want them to consider. I am not doing this so that people tattoo it on themselves or go to every show and get signatures and autographs and things like that, but people do. I understand that, because I’ve tattooed myself, so I get that.

I do question the premise that one kind of fandom, there’s a pure, truer fandom than another. I wonder if most creators are really just trying to appeal to what this author refers to as MOPs, members of the public.

**John:** I think that’s a great distinction. Also, maybe we can talk about it both in the terms of the things we write and make, so Last of Us for you, or Chernobyl, versus what we’re doing right now, which is that we have fans of Scriptnotes, who are listening to this podcast that we’re making, and to what degree do we feel like we need to engage with that community that forms around, because we made a thing that the community is around it, or that we want to distance ourselves or not really think about and worry about that.

The answer is different for different things. I think with Scriptnotes, we do engage our community to a pretty significant degree, not a degree to which a YouTuber or a Vine star back in the day might’ve. But we’re answering their questions. We’re meeting them at live shows. Some of them are paying us $5 a month. There is a sense that we are attempting to service that community to some degree by also doing a thing that we want to do, which is different than what you’re doing with Last of Us, which is you’re trying to make the thing, and you recognize that there is a role to which you need to go out and promote the thing and go to Brazil to do a fan launch of the thing, and yet you’re still trying to maintain some boundaries around your exposure to that community.

**Craig:** Because the goal ultimately is the point. The goal of making things is hopefully for people to see it and appreciate it. When I say people, I mean as many as possible. I don’t think anyone makes a show or writes a book or writes a song so that very few people will listen to it.

There’s this thing that happens when something is new – this author refers to it as the new thing – where the first people to appreciate it feel a kind of ownership. They feel special, because they fought their way to it. They found it when it wasn’t promoted to them, when no one told them about it. They had a pure experience with it. Then other people don’t, in their minds. Other people are promoted to. Their friends tell them.

In reality, I’m not sure it matters, because let’s say I’ve never heard of a thing. I remember somebody… I think it was Shannon Woodward. Yeah, it was Shannon. I was having lunch with her or something. She’s like, “Have you seen Stranger Things?” I said, “No,” because you know me. I don’t watch stuff. She’s like, “There’s this girl who plays this little girl who’s just a phenomenal… She’s just doing this stuff that’s just mind-blowing to me as an actor.” I was like, “That’s a pretty good recommendation. I’ll check it out.” Then I watched it, and I was like, “Wow. Millie Bobby Brown is really good at this. The Duffer brothers are really good at this. This is great.” Is my appreciation less valuable because I was told, as opposed to somebody who’s just flipping through the 4,000 shows on Netflix, lands on something, and goes, “Yes, this. I have unearthed it.” I don’t know.

**John:** I think we often have the experience of being champions of a thing that we want other people to see. Our One Cool Things are like, “Hey, take a look at this thing that you may not have otherwise been aware of.” That signaling thing is important. We’re using some of our cache and our authority, to whatever degree we have it, to say this is a thing that is worth your attention. We sometimes seek out people who can recommend good things to us. A lot of the blogs I follow are basically like, I like that person’s taste, and so if they are recommending something to me, I will click through that link, because they don’t steer me wrong, which is absolutely great and true.

I think what’s different though is that the difference between a recommendation and something that becomes a fandom is a fandom requires some kind of organization. Interesting that a lot of times, fandom, it is self-organizing. It’s not the creator who’s going out there and creating that community and organizing that community. They’re just making their thing. That community is creating its own rules and its own structure around it. The relationship between that fan organization and that creator can be great. It can be toxic. It can be problematic. That’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. What this guy is describing is fandom protecting itself, which actually has nothing to do with the art. It’s only about the community that’s built around the art, which I understand. When you find a community, it’s important to you. As we all know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging is the most important of the non-fundamental needs like food, shelter. You find belonging, especially if you are someone who struggles with belonging. Let’s say you’re on the spectrum. You’re on the autism spectrum. It’s hard for you to find belonging in the real-world space, but you connect with other people who have a similar struggle, over your shared joy of this new thing. You get really deep into it. Then your community is now something different and important from the art itself.

What this is talking about is how to protect that, because what happens as things become more popular is a lot of people enter the community that maybe you don’t think have the same depth of connection to the work that you do, or some people – and in this article they’re described just fully on as sociopaths – enter the community for purely exploitative reasons, to sell things, to get attention for themselves. And then they can, quote unquote, ruin the culture, the subculture.

The truth is all of this analysis does matter to a lot of people, because most people are fans, not creators. But for those of us who make things, I think it’s important to appreciate fans, to appreciate early fans, rabid fans, passionate fans, and the community they build up, while also maintaining that what we do is meant for anyone who enjoys it. Anyone. There is nothing exclusive about what we do. There is, however, apparently something exclusive about the people that begin that first community.

**John:** This is a thing I was holding back for maybe a future How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually good to bring up right now. There’s an article by Sarah Viren which ran in the New York Times this past week. It’s looking at this woman whose sister was murdered when she was a kid. Fifty years have passed. It’s a cold case. But this woman said, “Listen, I feel a calling from God. I need to figure out who killed my sister in this brutal way 50 years ago.” She goes to a true-crime con thing and meets these podcasters who had done similar kinds of things, and starts working with them about, “How are we going to try to solve this? How are we going to group-source this?” The podcasters have a plan. They’re going to build up a Facebook group. They’re going to get people involved in working through this. They start putting together episodes. They’re making some progress. The police agree to reopen the case. Things are proceeding.

But ultimately, this woman starts to have frustrations with these podcasters, feeling like they violated some confidences that she had shared with them, and doesn’t go on this one Zoom. And essentially, this whole community turns against her, the actual person who is the instigator of all this, the one whose sister actually died. I found that to be fascinating too, because who’s the creator in this situation? Is it the podcasters who did organize this group, or is it her? And who is the victim in this situation?

True crime fandom is a thing. In this case, it’s a community that was formed around this one murder, and the only thing they have in common is that there’s a curiosity about this, but they’re not making the thing. They’re just contributing. The sense of online communities in particular can be incredibly toxic, because you’re not doing it to someone’s face.

**Craig:** It’s also a question of what is it that you are obsessed with. Here’s a woman who’s obsessed with who killed her sister. That is a fact, and that is a crime. That’s somebody that she loved and cared for. The fandom is obsessed with a podcast, so now they are interested in what is an act of creation. It’s a show.

If you care mostly about the show, I always think of this as the Skyler problem. Skyler White on Breaking Bad. Anna Gunn is an incredible actor and portrayed Walter White’s wife beautifully and had to carry the burden of a very difficult part. There was this thing where the Breaking Bad fandom just started to hate her, hate both Anna Gunn and Skyler White. Why? Because Skyler’s character was in direct opposite to Walter and his stuff. If she finds out what he is doing, she’s going to be angry and make him stop. When she does find out what he’s doing, she is upset. She becomes sort of a co-conspirator, and then eventually just no more. But her character was a threat to the existence of the show. If Skyler wins, Walter White stops making meth, and there’s no more show. What the audience cared about was that the show would keep going, and so they started to hate a character. I find that fascinating.

I think in this case, I could definitely see where if the woman whose sister was a victim became uncomfortable with the show and was threatening the continuation of the show, the community gets angry at her, because they don’t care about her and her justice. They care about the show. And that is where fandom gets a little squiggly, when you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t purely fictional, but rather a presentation of truth.

**John:** Absolutely. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to continue this conversation and talk about different fandoms and the degree to which it feels like the creators have some control over that and the degree to which the creators are being held captive to their fandoms, which I think is a challenging situation, which happens far too often. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, what you got for us?

**Drew:** Brent writes, “My understanding is that if a stage musical is adapted into a film, the songwriter retains copyright, and the songs are licensed to the film. But how does ownership and authorship work with original songs written for an original musical film? Are they considered separate from the screenplay? Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA? And how is that songwriter typically contracted?

**John:** Here’s a question I could actually answer, because I have-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … much experience with this. First, Brett’s assumption that a stage musical adapted into a film, yes, and so that the lyricist composer of the original Broadway or stage production, they own the copyright on those songs, and so those are licensed as part of the package to make the movie. The Mean Girls movie, Jeff Richmond, who wrote the songs for that – and I don’t remember who the lyricist was – those songs were licensed for the movie, pretty straightforward.

When you write an original song for a movie, and so if you’re Billie Eilish to do for Barbie, they come to you and they say, “Hey, would you write this song for this movie?” You write it. It’s phenomenal. There’s a separate contract for that. It is licensed to be in the movie. It’s relatively clean. It’s similar to how it would’ve worked the other way around, like if the song had previously existed.

What gets to be complicated is when you are writing stuff that is fundamentally integrated into the movie. For Corpse Bride or for Frankenweenie and for Big Fish, I wrote songs into the script that became part of the movie. Those, I was not contracted separately. They were just part of the script. They were folded into my writing fee for writing the movie. But those songs, which also Danny Elfman then did the music for, also exist separately, and so I am paid separately for those, for royalties and for all the other music-y things that songwriters get paid for. I get separate checks for each of those things. When it plays in Norway, I get 13 cents, and those checks accumulate separately, by different accounting systems, so ASCAP or BMI.

**Craig:** Yep, I’ve done the same. That’s how it works. You do retain authorship of those songs. I have the distinct honor of receiving checks from ASCAP every now and then for a song called Douchebag of the Year in Superhero Movie, which how many people can boast that, John? Very few.

**John:** It’s nice.

**Craig:** I wrote a rap song for Scary Movie 3, and I get royalties for writing the lyrics. Your outline is exactly correct. Authorship of lyrics and authorship of music will always generate royalties through ASCAP and BMI, and not only if they’re played just on their own, but also if they’re played in the movie. It is an interesting hybrid there, but generally speaking, you do retain more rights and more financial interest with songs than you do with, say, a work for hire as a script, because in that case, you’re really relying on the WGA formula for residuals and nothing else.

**John:** One other question embedded in here. Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Generally, no. It’s a thing we’ve talked about with Rachel Bloom a couple times is that writing the songs for things like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she’s often writing actual story material. She’s writing everything that happens in the song. It’s like she’s not just writing dialog, but she’s writing a whole sequence. You could imagine there could be scenarios in which the songs are so much of what the actual story is that it crosses into situations where it really should be considered literary material that goes into WGA arbitrations. Maybe that’s happened in the past, but classically, no, it’s not considered literary material in that same way.

**Craig:** Generally, no. If you’re dealing with something that is a recitative, where everything is sung, for instance, Les Mis, then certainly, I think the Writers Guild has the ability, through its pre-arbitration structure and participating writer investigations, to say, “Hey, look, even though this is in a lyric format, it is dialog. It is screenplay material. It is literary material.” We have the ability to be flexible on that front and to pose the questions and ask them. It’s another reason why the WGA’s sole authority is important, because it can, as an institution, allow for some flexibility and exclusions and exceptions. There are ways for it to actually account for unique properties like that.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Kaylan in Alaska writes, “Are there best practices to follow as to not break up scenes or dialog in an annoying way? I specifically mean when a scene begins at the bottom of a page, and only one line of scene description fits, or when dialog gets broken between two pages in a way that feels like it might break up the reading of the line. My brain really wants that soothing feeling of a scene starting at the top of a page.”

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what my brain wants, Kaylan. My brain is trying to anagram and Kaylan and Alaska together. There’s so many overlapping letters. I love it. Best practices are what you feel good with, what makes you happy. Most people reading, my opinion, don’t care. For me as a writer, I care so much. I don’t like splitting up dialog across pages. If I can mitigate that, I do, because, I don’t know, I don’t like it. It just feels bad. If you can avoid ending a scene with a single line of action that’s on the subsequent page and then start a new scene, yeah, do it. Avoid it. It’s actually not that hard to do. As long as you don’t get into a situation where you’re actually hurting things to make it look better on the page, you’re fine. My brain wants that soothing feeling as well, and there’s nothing wrong with a little self-soothing there as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Here’s one situation where screenwriting software, from Final Draft to Fade In to Highland, all the legitimate applications, are going to be doing some of this work for you. What they will all do is they will not let you start a scene at the very bottom of a page. They’ll push that scene header to the next page. If there’s a single line on the next page, they’ll pull stuff across, so that you don’t have a little orphan or a widow there happening. Some of that stuff happens automatically.

What Craig is describing is generally the last looks before you’re printing or turning in a script to somebody, is just going through it one last time and seeing are there any really weird breaks that I want to fix here, and seeing if there’s way you could pull stuff, push it down or pull it across, so you don’t get those weirdos there. I used to be much more of a freak about it. I just don’t let it stress me out too much. I will look for situations where that’s actually confusing because it broke that way.

The other thing you don’t appreciate until you actually have to build the software to do it, most of these apps will also break at the sentence, rather than breaking at the end of the line. If dialog has to break across a page, they will create the break, add a period, rather than just having the line taper off, which is just helpful. It just makes it much easier to read.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Drew:** Not Too Happy writes, “I wrote a script in 2014 that became my calling card for many years. It performed well on The Black List site, found producers, went to all the agencies, got offered to a bunch of different actresses and directors, and spent years almost getting made. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a Deadline announcement that a very famous actor is set to produce and star in a movie with the exact same plot. Normally, that would be an oh well, what are you going to do? But in this case, that actor was sent my script in 2015, along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead. This all went through their reps at the time, from reputable producers on my end, above board, blah blah blah. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of knowingly stealing anything, but I can’t help but feeling like I’m being ripped off. My manager offered a, ‘That sucks,’ and my lawyer advises a wait-and-see approach. I’d rather not. Do I have any recourse, and what would you do?”

**John:** Not Too Happy provided some context here which Craig and I can take a look at, but we’re not going to discuss on the show.

**Craig:** It is quite the context. It is certainly relevant. Not Too Happy, I get why you’re not too happy. Your manager actually here is giving you the proper answer, which is that sucks. Your lawyer advising a wait-and-see approach, that’s the lawyer’s version of, “We’re not doing anything.” Here’s why.

Unfortunately – and we’ve talked about this quite a few times on the show – premises, plots, these are not really intellectual property. They fall under the general heading of ideas. Let’s say I write a script, and it’s about two guys who discover that they’ve grown up separately, but actually, turns out that they’re brothers, and in fact, they’re weirdly twins. They’re fraternal twins. But one of them is really short, and one of them is tall and super strong. They don’t look anything alike. Okay. That’s Twins. That’s cool. What I just described, anyone can write a movie like that.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:58:50].

**Craig:** I could sit down, I could write another movie today with a different title that is the exact same plot, and it is not legally actionable, because unless you get into unique expression in fixed form, there’s no infringement there. If you get a copy of the script that this star is going to be making, and they have taken chunks of your action description or runs of dialog that are non-generic, okay, that’s just straight up copyright infringement. They won’t.

**John:** They won’t.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, this is one of those things where we can’t even say that the person went, “Oh, you know what? I love this idea, but I just don’t like the script. Can somebody else do this idea?” Maybe that’s what happened, which by the way, that’s not stealing either. Is it ethical? No. But is it criminal? No. You can’t steal something that isn’t property. And unfortunately, concepts and ideas and general plot lines, not property.

**John:** We don’t know the backstory on how this actor came to do this project, which is apparently moving forward. My hunch though is someone else had basically the same idea and wrote it up, and the actor said, “Oh yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something that’s in that space,” and said yes to that thing. I suspect that the second writer really did come up with that idea on their own, because it’s a good idea, but it’s also an idea that a lot of people could have, honestly. They wrote their own thing. This star attached themselves to it. If you cannot show that there is a connection between that second writer having exposure to your script and having decided, “I’m going to do this thing that’s basically the same premise,” there’s no case to be made here.

Your manager and your lawyer are saying the right thing. The lawyer saying, “Let’s wait and see,” is also saying you don’t know this thing’s ever even going to happen. If this thing actually goes in production and it clearly looks like there is an infringement case to be made here, that’s the time when she would raise her hand and do something.

**Craig:** There almost certainly won’t be. Let’s also dig in a little bit on Not Too Happy here. When you said, “That actor,” the one that’s now said to produce and star in the movie, “was sent my script in 2015,” so almost a decade ago, “along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead,” now, that sounds impressive. But the fact is, actors of a certain level are constantly getting stuff submitted with an official offer of whatever their quote is, or maybe their quote is less than that. They might not have even read it.

Listen. I get offered things where someone says, “Here’s something. We’ve bought a book, and we want you to write this,” and blah blah blah. I’m like, “No, I’m not interested.” I just tell my agent, “It doesn’t sound for me. No, thank you.” Then four years later, someone that I’m really fascinated by starts talking to me about that book or a different book on the same topic, and now suddenly I am interested, because there’s just a different context to it. Did I do something wrong? No. I changed my mind, or I wasn’t in the same place, or something was more attractive to me about this other version of it.

The point being, what I think you need to do is let yourself off the hook of feeling like you’ve been screwed, because that’s a terrible feeling to walk around with. I don’t think you’ve been legally screwed. If you were somewhat ethically screwed with, let’s look at the bright side. You had an idea that other people thought was worth making. Now, what you need to do for the next step, Not Too Happy, is to write a script of an idea that people like, that is so good they want to make that script. That’s ultimately what separates the steadily working writers from folks who are trying to be steadily working writers. Good idea and undeniable execution, as opposed to good idea, decent execution.

It’s not fun to hear. By the way, your script may have been amazing. But in this case, it sounds like, by your own admission, it went to all the agencies, lots of different actresses and directors, and it just ultimately wasn’t compelling in and of itself to get that next level going.

As John says, in this case, I’m looking at this article that talks about this. There are articles like this every five minutes. “So-and-so is attached to produce some blah da blah such and such,” and then it never happens. Who knows?

**John:** Who knows? Let’s try one more question, Drew. Let’s do Will here.

**Drew:** Will writes, “Before Christmas, I reached out to the representation of a character actor I had in mind for my script. Today they got back to me asking about financing. How do I answer them saying I don’t have financing without scaring them off?”

**John:** That’s going to be the first question you’re going to get back. It’s good we bring this up, because any time you’re reaching out to a specific actor, who’d be the character actor who’s exactly perfect for this, the reps are doing their job. They’re saying, “Okay, is there any money here?” The answer is, “There’s no money here. These are the producers that I want to approach. This is my plan going forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Look. Character actors really should be asking about this. Basically, what the reps are saying is, are you offering us a job, or are you asking us to attach a name? Will, you’re referring to an independent film. There’s a long, glorious tradition of independent films trying to get financing using the actor’s name to help them get financing. The financing is like, “Do you have an actor attached?” Everybody’s basically in a catch-22.

But attaching yourself to a script ultimately isn’t much of a commitment. No actor’s going to say, “Yes, I’m attaching myself to your unfinanced project, and also I’m clearing the decks for these months, and I will take no other jobs for those months.” That’s not a thing.

How do I answer them? Honestly. You answer them honestly. You say, “We are looking for financing. We honestly feel that we will have a much better chance of getting financing if we can say that this actor is attached and happy to play this part, should all of the other things that need to happen line up, like schedule, payment, etc.” If they’re like, “Yeah, no, we don’t actually want to attach ourselves to this without financing,” what you just heard is “no.” And that’s just life.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a future situation where somehow you’re able to find financing, and you come back to that actor, and suddenly they’re interested? Yes, that could happen too. Don’t bank on it, but that’s possible too. You’ve burned nothing to do this. Being honest is the right approach.

Whoever the reps are for this character actor, this is a chance for them to be more in a lead role. That’s exciting for them. There may be ways that you can spin this as helpful. They may also know people who are, relationships that that actor has with producers or something. There may be some way that it could be helpful. So be honest and open to what they’re saying next.

**Craig:** These reps, we don’t know, they may have been yelled at by their client two weeks earlier, saying, “Stop sending me stuff that isn’t financed and isn’t, quote unquote, ‘real.'” Because here’s the thing. They gotta read all this stuff. They gotta read all of it. They gotta get excited by it. And then they do, and someone’s like, “Great. We actually have no money. We’ll talk to you in a year.” Then they’re like, “Why did I go through all that?”

**John:** The same thing happens for writers, of course, is that you get approached, like, “There’s this book,” blah blah blah. It’s like, that’s fantastic. Some cases I’m willing to engage, and I’ll at least try to set this up someplace. Other places, no. If there’s actually a home for this, then I’ll talk about this, but I’m not going to spend three months of my life trying to get this thing set up.

**Craig:** Or, god forbid, help you get the rights, by saying, “I’ll adapt it.” Hell no.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Get your own rights. Otherwise, what do I need you for? Do you know what I mean? I’ll just go get the rights then.

**John:** Yoink. Cool. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I read over the Christmas holidays. For whatever reason, I plow through books during the holidays. I had three this time. One of them I really enjoyed was Going Zero by Anthony McCarten.

So the premise of this is – it’s fiction – there is a joint program between the CIA and a Facebook kind of organization. What they’re trying to do is to be able to track people who fall off the grid, who disappear, and to see how quickly we can find those people, prevent terrorist attacks and other nefarious things. To test this system, they are going to recruit, I believe it’s 10 people, and basically say, “We’re going to tell you one day that you have to go zero. You have to disappear, fall off the grid. If you can stay hidden for 30 days, we’ll give you $3 million.” It’s a good premise. The story’s alternating between the people who are trying to hide and the people who are looking for them. So that’s that cat-and-mouse game.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** Naturally, there are complications that ensue. I read this as a pure, clean, looking for a good read, and of course, as a person who makes film and television, I’m like, “I know how to adapt this.” But I deliberately did not look up the credits of the person who wrote the book until I was finished. I looked him up. Anthony McCarten is actually a very successful, very produced screenwriter, who I ended up emailing him, and he has his own plans for the book. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen next to it. But if you are into a fun, breezy thriller to read, I recommend Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. If you read it now, then you can also see what becomes of it. It’s sort of a how would this become a property down the road.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Good recommendation. My One Cool Thing is full-on nepo baby.

**John:** This is your incredibly successful father who gave you your career. That’s what you’re talking about. You are the nepo baby.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the nepo baby. My father was an incredibly successful social studies teacher in the New York City public school system.

**John:** Without him, you would not have been able to find Chernobyl.

**Craig:** He taught American history, so actually, I didn’t even have that. No. I speak of my youngest child, Jessica Mazin, who is currently attending school at Berklee College of Music in Boston. John’s daughter is also there in school in Boston. She is a budding songwriter and has written some really good songs. She’s written stuff that actually got…

There’s a song she wrote – talk about fandom – that was based on a book series on Wattpad, which I know you’re familiar with, because you also have a daughter. Wattpad’s basically a fanfiction conglomeration site, as far as I can tell. There was this incredibly popular series there. She wrote a song based on characters and things from the series, and it actually got, I don’t know, millions of listens on Spotify. It’s pretty remarkable. She got paid money. She got over a million listens to that. In a nepo daddy way, I also had her sing a cover of a Depeche Mode song for The Last of Us. But I did so because I think she’s awesome.

**John:** She’s really good.

**Craig:** I actually think she’s great. It’s an interesting thing of creating a person who creates things, and then I listen to the things they’ve created, and it’s like this weird echo of creation. She’s written a song called The Devil. She wrote the lyrics and the music, and she performs it, and then her friend Henry Dearborn, who’s an also very talented young guy, produced it and helped add instrumentation and mix and all that. I think it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. I listened to it.

**Craig:** That is a really good song. It’s super catchy. I think the lyrics are really intriguing. I’m making Jessica and her song The Devil my One Cool Thing. It is on Spotify. I think you’ll enjoy it. I actually think you’ll like it. It goes down easy, and it’s got a good chorus. She’s just very good. I actually think she’s really, really good.

**John:** We’ll start playing the song now. It’ll become our outro for this episode. One thing I think is so interesting about Spotify is there’s obviously so many criticisms with Spotify, but the fact that Jessica is on Spotify the same way that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are on Spotify, or Girl in Red, it equals things out in ways that are really fascinating and unprecedented, so that’s nice. The fact that people could discover her – my daughter discovers music all the time on Spotify – is exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is. I’m very proud of her. I’m proud of how independent she is from me. She doesn’t do what I do. She doesn’t ask me for help. She doesn’t ask my opinion. What happens is it just appears, and then I listen to it like anyone else. I think maybe that’s what I’m most proud of is that she doesn’t give a sweet damn what I think. I like it. I love it, actually, honestly, anyway.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Jessica Mazin. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Our list of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so we’d love some more outros coming in here. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and 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 creators and fandom. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. Continuing our conversation about fans and creators, I have a list here in the Workflowy of different kinds of fandoms. I want to think about what is the relationship between them and their creators and the people who own the underlying material behind this.

I’ll start with Formula One, because last year I went to my first Formula One race. I just didn’t realize what a giant community that is, just the money they mint doing that. It’s interesting, because I feel like with Formula One, they’d already had fans, but then the Netflix show really drew up a whole bunch of new fans, including my daughter, to it. Where’s the center of fandom for it? Is it the individual teams? Is it the organization that puts on the races? Is it the Netflix show? It feels like it’s one of those in-between things, and it’s hard to say who’s in control of it.

**Craig:** It’s a bit scary, actually, how fandom as a business can get larger than the core business. This satellite business that grows around it. It is remarkable. One thing that I think really big artists have become very good at is getting ahead of it. BTS, for instance, that group is also its own fandom industry. They got ahead of it. They control it. They run it. Yes, there are obviously a lot of independents that grow up around it, but they’ve created so much of it. It was baked in from the jump, whereas some of the boy bands that we remember from the ’90s, for instance, were just selling records and selling tour tickets and merch, which we used to call merchandise. Merch, it’s like IP. That was like backstage talk that was slightly cynical, and now it’s front stage talk for everyone.

The business now, I think, is such that creators are starting to get more of a handle on it. I would imagine Taylor Swift at some point woke up one day and said, “Why are other people making more money off of me than me?” Because that actually probably doesn’t feel great. It feels a little exploitative, and yet it’s all about the energy of people that are in love with what you do.

**John:** I’d be curious what Jessica’s relationship is like with her fans at this point, because she has enough people who are listening to her music, who are curious about her next thing that’s going to be happening, that they feel some investment in her. They’re rooting for her. They discovered her early on. Maybe Berklee School of Music is the perfect place for her to learn some of this. How should she be thinking about that? To what degree does she need to start thinking about her mailing list, how she’s communicating with the people who are her truest fans?

**Craig:** I think in a healthy way, like any young artist, she’s mostly concerned about getting better, about creating work, getting better, learning. She’s got some gigs now. Berklee’s amazing about how they facilitate this. She’s going to start getting paid to perform live. But she definitely does have the Generation Z TikTok conversation with people who like what she does.

I have a feeling that fandom is a hockey stick chart, where there’s a little bit, there’s a little bit, and then something happens, and then boom, it just explodes. Even in the article we were discussing where the guy was talking about the fanatics, the fanatics aren’t the first people in. There’s always other people that are in first, and then there’s that moment that happens where there’s a big upswing, and then it becomes a real thing. I think she’s got her head on in the right place. There are obviously a lot of people for whom the fandom is the point. Those people tend to head more off into the influencer zone as opposed to trying to create things.

Taylor Swift is a wonderful example of somebody that clearly was about creating art, and it became enormously popular, and now there is an industry. But she didn’t start for that. I’ve never read an interview with her or seen her talk and thought to myself, oh, this was all calculated. No, she’s just a really good artist that people love.

**John:** Yes. I will note Taylor Swift has her challenges with her community as well, like the Gaylor Swift, the people who are obsessed that she’s actually lesbian and that all these songs have coded meanings in them.

**Craig:** Gaylor Swift.

**John:** How does she both refute that without driving those people away in a way that makes them feel unseen and unheard? It’s so challenging, because she’s an artist trying to tell stories, and people, false stories, they’re going to derive their own meaning from them, which is exactly the point. And yet when there’s a community that is obsessed with picking everything apart to discover a secret, hidden meaning behind things, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It would be fascinating to talk with her about this, although we never will, because she now exists on Mount Olympus. But when we start out as artists, we are looking for the outliers, the people who will love what we do, because most people are going to ignore new things. We’re looking for somebody – ideally somebody with some influence –to love what we do. That one special person, even if they’re just 1% of the people that have been listening, helped spread the word, and now lots of people listen. But then, once it gets really big – and Taylor Swift operates on a massive scale – then what you’re dealing with are outlier problems.

Let’s say 99.9% of your fans are healthy people who just love your music, which I think is probably the case for Taylor. That .1% is the problem. They’re the people who are driving an enormous amount of discourse online, who are agitated, aggressive, angry, possessive, parasocial. Those are also the people that are showing up at your house, trying to climb over the wall, sending you weird messages, stalking. The outlier becomes the problem. I think sometimes in our culture, we mistake the outlier discussion for the mainstream discussion when it’s not.

Gaylor Swift is a fascinating concept. I suspect the great majority of Taylor Swift fans are just enjoying the music and are not at that level of, “I need you to like who I want you to like,” which is just I think part of an outlier behavior.

**John:** One of the other books I read over the holidays was Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online, which tracks creators and fandoms and the rise of internet creator culture. It goes back from vloggers and mommy bloggers and the rise and fall of those. But one of the most fascinating sections is on Vine, because Vine was never meant to be what Vine became. You had these young men, some women, but mostly young men, who became extremely famous for doing little Vines, but also just became famous for being famous, in the way that Paris Hilton’s famously famous for being famous. People need to figure out, how do we monetize that? How do we exploit that? They would have these mall tours where they’d put together these Vine stars to perform, kind of. There was teenage girls who were their fans. They really weren’t part of the community.

It was a strange fit, particularly because the platform that they were on, Vine, did not like them. It did not want them around. That tension between the space you’re in and what you’re trying to do can be a real factor as well. It’s a thing we see again and again with studios and their stars and filmmakers and the need to do press and publicity but also feel constrained by it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It is. It is an interesting concept, the notion of a platform that you intend the platform to be used one way, it ends up being used another way. OnlyFans comes to mind.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I don’t know, but I assume that OnlyFans began as a thing of like, hey, this is where people can talk to their fans, because they’re songwriters or they’re visual artists or whatever it is, and this is a way for them to get paid for what they do by the people that love them. From what I understand, John…

**John:** That’s not really where it is right now. I think OnlyFans may have known that sex work was going to be part of it from the start. But there’s wholesome versions of that as well that are just not as successful.

**Craig:** OnlyFans I guess was uncomfortable enough with the fact that it had become a platform for sex work that they said no more sex on OnlyFans, and everyone went, then what the hell are you for? It’s like if McDonald’s was like, “We didn’t mean to sell chicken nuggets. We were hamburgers. No more chicken nuggets,” and everyone lost their minds. Then OnlyFans was like, “Okay, I guess this is what we are now.”

**John:** Credit card processing with anything involving sex work is also incredibly complicated. Let’s wind back to Star Trek. We think of Star Trek was designed to be a delightful show about space travel, wagon to the stars. It did sell toys. It had its own stuff that it was doing, its own merch. But fan culture around Star Trek became its own industry. Suddenly, there’s actors who appeared on one episode now being booked for fan conventions. It’s self-sustained in a way that was important and made it possible ultimately for the renaissance of Star Trek and for the movies and for everything else to have happened after the fact. It was necessary for those fans to exist, and yet they’ve always been in a bit of a strange relationship with the owners and creators of Star Trek.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a pretty famous sketch on Saturday Night Live. William Shatner was the guest host. The sketch was him at a Star Trek convention where people are asking him questions, and he finally just broke down and told them all to get a life. This was very funny to the people in the audience there in the studio, whatever it is, 8A. But a lot of people in the fan community were upset. They were hurt.

Listen. A lot of people – and we’ve mentioned this before – who join these communities struggle to find other communities. Here was somebody basically making fun of them for that specific struggle. They weren’t just there as part of the Trekker community because of how much they love Star Trek. It’s because of also how much they loved and were loved by people who loved Star Trek, as opposed to everywhere else in their lives, where maybe they were being discounted or put down. For the objects, the center of the wheel to behave towards them the way that the jocks at high school behaved had to have been pretty hurtful.

There are certain genres that do tend to appeal more to people who do struggle with, we’ll call non-virtual communities. I think it’s important for people to be aware of that and to be kind, because I have another daughter, who’s on the autism spectrum, and we talk all the time about her special interests and the things that she’s super into and how she finds community with other people that love it, and it’s important to her.

**John:** A community that’s growing very quickly – I’d really be curious what the subculture’s like two or three years from now – is pickleball.

**Craig:** Pickleball.

**John:** The number of people who tried to recruit me to play pickleball is somewhat astonishing. It’s also interesting to watch the fights that are happening in communities about the conversion of normal tennis courts to pickleball courts and, of course, the noise that pickleball creates.

**Craig:** Fricking noise. Yeah, pickleball really came out of nowhere there. Wow. You’re absolutely right. Now, pickleball is an interesting one, because unlike most fandoms we discuss, which are driven by the young, pickleball is driven by the old. Old people – and I don’t say that with any stink on it, because I’m getting there, man. Let’s call them older people. Older people are tough. They’re organized. They have money. They know how systems work.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Fans of a new rap star who comes on the scene, fans of that rap star generally aren’t going to be also serving on city councils or know how hearings work, but the pickleball fans do. They’re lawyers. They’re doctors. They’re heads of the PTAs. Now it becomes interesting. Watch out for the pickleball people. They’ll get you.

**John:** It’s good stuff. The last thing I want to distinguish between is there’s fandom, and there’s also collectors. Watching what’s happening right now with Stanley cups. Have you been tracking that at all?

**Craig:** I sure have. I live in Canada now.

**John:** Just the obsession with these collectible cups. It’s great that you love them, but no one needs 30 of them. That’s the difference between, are you entering into it because you want to be part of a community that collects these novelty cups, or are you doing it because you see a market for it, and that sense of really what is the angle. Are you seeing this in a capitalist sense, like the crypto bros were? Crypto bros saw this as a way to make a bunch of money, but also they had that missionary zeal, like we’re going to convert the world over to this thing. We all know how Stanley cup collecting will end up. It’s going to end up with a bunch of these things in landfills.

**Craig:** This is the bust and boom of these things. When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I would go down to Point Pleasant in New Jersey, which is on the shore, and it had a big boardwalk. The boardwalk had rides and restaurants and lots of little stands that would sell things. Every summer, there was a stand that was selling the new hot ticket toy. It was different every summer. The rabidity was consistent. It was just the thing that people were obsessed with that changed.

When I was really young, my sister, like many young girls, was pulled into the Cabbage Patch doll craze. I have the distinct memory of being in a Toys R Us in Brooklyn, watching adults fighting, almost physically, as Toys R Us employees pulled out a large shipping box of Cabbage Patch dolls, because of the insanity of it.

Humans are not good at valuing things. We’re notoriously irrational about it. Forced scarcity or this belief that something is valuable will drive our behavior. I think Bill Maher once famously said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in LA, people will start lining up. There’s just something wrong with our brains.

I will say – and I’m not boasting here, this is just dumb luck of my brain – I don’t understand collecting. I’ve never collected anything. I don’t see the point of it. It just seems like a pointless accruing. I don’t quite know what it means. But I do recognize I’m alone, or, not alone; I’m rare, I guess.

**John:** I have some cool vintage typewriters, but I have them because they’re individually cool. But I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know anything about the community. It’s not part of anything. I guess what I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s people who collect and enter into a community about those collections, and it does enter into a fandom situation, and then there’s people who are just there to make a buck and don’t actually care about it, which I guess does tie into the whole poser issue of fandom is who are the true believers and who are the follow-ons who are trying to exploit it. It is a good moment for me to remind everybody to buy your Scriptnotes T-shirts on Cotton Bureau, especially the limited editions, which will only be sold for periods of time, because-

**Craig:** So rare.

**John:** When those drop, sometimes it’s only 100 of them that were done.

**Craig:** When they drop. If you’re a real Scriptnotes fan, not a poser, if you’re real. The ultimate posers are the people that sell stuff. Those are the posers. Hasbro.

**John:** There were times out on the picket line where I’d see a Scriptnotes shirt that I’d never seen out in the wild. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to photograph that, because that is a true fan who has that,” or has the Courier Prime shirt, which we only made for a short period of time.

**Craig:** Or maybe that was the brother of a true fan who stopped being a true fan and just left that T-shirt behind when they moved.

**John:** No, I don’t believe it.

**Craig:** I’m so much more cynical.

**John:** When I asked that person who was wearing that very distinct shirt, also, “How’d you get that so crisp?” he’s like, “Oh, I never put it in the dryer. I always hand-dry it.”

**Craig:** Wow. It gives me a little bit of anxiety.

**John:** It’s true fandom for me. Craig, I’ll always be a fan of yours.

**Craig:** Aw, John. I’m a fan of yours too. You know what? Let’s just do this podcast until one of us just drops dead on our desk.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** And hopefully during a podcast. It’ll make a great bonus segment.

**John:** You have to hear that thump.

**Craig:** Yeah, just a thump. And then like, “Oh, okay. That’s Scriptnotes for you.”

**John:** That’s why we turn the Zoom off, so you can’t see when one of us drops. You have to listen for it. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Tiffany Problem](https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/the-tiffany-problem/)
* [‘Harry Potter’ TV Series Zeroes In On Premise As Selected Writers Pitch Their Ideas To Max](https://deadline.com/2024/01/harry-potter-tv-series-premise-writers-set-max-1235798159/)
* [WGGB Screenwriting Credits Agreement](https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenwriting_credits_agreement.pdf)
* [Ig Nobel Prize – “Please stop, I’m Bored”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA)
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Screenplay](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Anatomy-Of-A-Fall-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/magazine/murder-podcast-debbie-williamson.html) by Sarah Viren for the New York Times
* [Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) by David Chapman
* [Going Zero by Anthony McCarten](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/going-zero-anthony-mccarten?variant=40641169686562)
* [The Devil by Jessica Mazin](https://open.spotify.com/track/6mgwrkmCQMfxRj810BOlvB?si=ed91e62ef4cc43e4) on Spotify
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* 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 Jessica Mazin ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/628standardV2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/unbelievably-agentic).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 627 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back the OG Scriptnotes guest host, writer, director, showrunner, producer, Aline Brosh McKenna. Welcome back, Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I’m so excited to be here. There are so many people I need to thank. Oh, wait. That’s not the right place to do it.

**John:** You have to comment on how surprisingly heavy the award is.

**Aline:** Oh, it’s so heavy. I’m going to put it down. I’m just going to put it down.

**John:** You put it down and then pull out your notes of people you need to thank.

**Aline:** It’s going to mess up the line of my dress.

**John:** Yeah, 100%. Today, I would like to talk about agency in the sense of characters and what characters are doing in our stories, but also in real-life people, about making choices about what they want to do next. Then you’ve seen in the Workflowy, we have another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we discuss stories in the news and thing about how we would adapt that into quality filmed entertainment. Aline, have you stretched? Are you ready for this?

**Aline:** I’m really ready. I’m ready for a word I’ve never heard before.

**John:** Yes, which is… How are you going to pronounce it?

**Aline:** Agentic?

**John:** Yeah, agentic. It’s a word I saw a ton that week, and so I thought we’d talk about that. It’s agency as applied to real people, kind of. It’s a word.

**Aline:** I plan to use and misuse this word liberally.

**John:** Yes. At the end of the day, it’s how you use catchphrases to fill things in. Do you remember “at the end of the day”? Do you remember when you first heard that? Because it was during our careers that that became a thing.

**Aline:** “At the end of the day” is an industry term?

**John:** I think it’s an industry term.

**Aline:** Interesting. There’s so many circling backs and touching of bases. I feel like the lingo and the jargon has gotten so much worse as the business has gotten more corporatized, because you used to go to meetings, and there could be a guy smoking a doobie, with his feet up on the couch, just talking about whatever and maybe telling you about his marriage. And now when you go in, everyone is so official. They have all of these bits of jargon that clearly came from a retreat. We once sat down with someone who, I was asking him about what they were looking for, and he said, “Regionality is something that we take into consideration when we look at our buckets.”

**John:** Oh, buckets is a thing, yeah.

**Aline:** Buckets.

**John:** Buckets is a big thing too.

**Aline:** Buckets is a big thing.

**John:** We’ll get into all of those choices that we make. Coming out of COVID, a lot of times where you’re meeting with executives, you’re still meeting with them on Zoom. The small talk is also different on Zoom, because there’s less of that getting in a room and getting comfortable. You’re still asking about what people did over the weekend or where they are, but you’re also in their homes, which is a different thing too.

**Aline:** It’s really weird. I try not to scan the background too extensively. At the beginning of the pandemic, how many bedrooms did you see?

**John:** So many.

**Aline:** So many. I was like, guys, just turn it around. Sit on the bed would be my thought, so I’m not looking at the bed. I saw a lot of beds, basements, guestrooms, pets.

**John:** Vacation homes.

**Aline:** Vacation homes, yeah.

**John:** A lot of people who moved to Colorado, never moved back, all those. In our bonus segment for premium members, Aline and I are going to talk about the experience of being empty nesters, because we have both sent our kids off to college, and so what we’re looking forward to, how we’re adjusting, how many more dogs we’re going to get, the process of becoming empty nesters.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** Now, Aline, we’re recording this on the day that Oscar nominations are due. Have you submitted your Oscar nominations already?

**Aline:** I have. I have, indeed.

**John:** For folks who are not voting in this, I thought we might just talk through what the process is, because it’s not what you would think. It’s no longer a form. It’s a website you go to. You and I are both members of the writers’ branch. Tell us about what you went through as you picked your entries.

**Aline:** It’s interesting. You vote for your branch and Best Picture. Then in the second round, you vote for everything. When you’re nominated, it really is your peers, because it’s your branch that’s choosing. I’ve heard people advocate for the technique of really listing all five or six. I think it’s five. But then some people will say that if you really love a movie and you think it doesn’t have a lot of chances of being nominated, that you just vote for one.

**John:** I would say that having filled it out earlier this afternoon, because you’re ranking them, I think that there’s much less of a problem with filling out the rest of the card. I don’t think it’s going to be as big of an issue. Fill out the rest of the card.

**Aline:** This was an extraordinarily good year.

**John:** I want to say the same thing too.

**Aline:** So many good movies. I don’t know what is the trend that resulted in this, but sometimes the awards movies can have a spinachy, homework vibe to them, and I felt like this year there were so many that were wildly enjoyable, like Holdovers and Poor Things, that were just packed with entertainment and fun. We stayed home over the break, and I really enjoyed watching all the movies that were out.

**John:** Yeah, I did too. There have been years where I feel like I’m scrounging to get those last, the fourth and fifth filled in there. No, I had multiple choices I could’ve put in as other really good movies to nominate. I’m really curious. By the time this episode comes out, people will have seen what the nominees are. There’s really good movies out there. I would just encourage people, if there’s movies that are nominated that you haven’t heard of yet, they really are good, and they really are worth seeking out.

**Aline:** I always vote for a straight-up comedy-

**John:** Same.

**Aline:** … because it’s such an under-represented genre, and as discussed many times on this show, it’s just as hard, if not harder, to write. I always find a couple of straight-up comedies that I like and throw them in there.

**John:** Comedies and also animation for me. It’s making sure that we’re recognizing the writing that goes into animation, because a lot of times, those animated films aren’t written under Guild contracts, so they’re not eligible for WGA awards, but they are eligible for other Oscars and stuff.

**Aline:** We are righting wrongs with our votes. We are really-

**John:** That’s what we’re doing.

**Aline:** … administering justice.

**John:** Another thing that happened this past week is I got an announcement for Final Draft 13. I make Highland, so of course, I don’t really use Final Draft. But you write in Final Draft, don’t you?

**Aline:** I do. I tried another program, but the people that I collaborate with revolted. It was like everybody had to get it or nobody. Nobody wanted to change. It’s the devil you know. I don’t know that I’m super up on every update. I got to say, I don’t know that I update until it becomes impossible-

**John:** Exactly.

**Aline:** … not to update. My general feeling about updates – and I’m not alone here – is I approach them with dread, as I almost always find it’s a worsening. Like this new iPhone update, where to get a GIF going, you got to go through several… I’m tapping a lot of stuff to get to my kittens with a ball of yarn.

**John:** Give Aline her kittens.

**Aline:** That’s right. I’m wondering, what does Final Draft have at this… The way I use it is so simple that-

**John:** You’re using it probably the same way you’ve used it for the last 15 years. You have a very set workflow way to do it. To the degree I sympathize with Final Draft is they are selling a product where they sell it once and then they have to convince you to keep buying the new version of it, so they have to keep adding new features to it. But the features, to my eyes, are not particularly rewarding. I would be curious if listeners write in and say, “Oh, I actually do use these new features.” Tell us about it. There are these ribbons and these cards and all these other things. Aline, you’re a person who uses this every day, but I suspect you’re not touching any of those things.

**Aline:** Ribbons, I don’t know what that is. Cards are those slug lines or slugs?

**John:** No. They actually look like little index cards. It takes your whole script and it breaks it down into little index cards.

**Aline:** Oh, right. Here’s the thing. I’ll mess that up. Whatever that is, I will change it to a point where I will then have to text my son and ask him how to undo things. You want a simple… Unless it could do stuff like tell you to get up and go for a walk or make your lunch for you, which would be amazing, because just the constant drumbeat of what’s your lunch… If Final Draft could assemble a turkey sandwich on focaccia, that is a-

**John:** Game changer.

**Aline:** … update I would pay for.

**John:** Absolutely. So many of the features that apps and Final Draft and other ones add, they feel like productive procrastination. It’s like, oh, it’s a different way to look at your thing, or it’s, oh, I’m filling out all this stuff. I’m just here to tell you that you and me and no other professional writers we know of really use all those things.

**Aline:** Are you still doing longhand?

**John:** I still write longhand for scenes, starting out, yeah.

**Aline:** You do? I know other people who do that. That’s so interesting. It’s the same if you’re doing it with a rock and a chisel. You just got to get stuff on paper, although I don’t mind things that get you in the mood. As you and I have discussed, the project of writing is a lot like getting into cold water, where you’re splashing little bits of it on your arm to acclimate yourself. What’s interesting to me is some people really, really use those features to really, really outline. For me – and I think you and I are the same – it will kind of kill my fun. I think it’s probably better for people who really love to have it all completely worked out.

**John:** Writing is one of those weird things where it’s the overall imagination to figure out what the shape of the story is, but it’s also what is literally at the cursor, what is the next letter in this word, what is the next word in this sentence. It’s that kind of work. I don’t see these tools helping you very much in doing that real, actual, granular writing work.

**Aline:** You can spend a lot of time without pages.

**John:** I guess my sympathy for Final Draft and these apps is that they’re not making any money unless they can convince you, Aline Brosh McKenna, to spend another $199 or whatever the upgrade fee is for Final Draft to buy it again. That’s a tough thing for them.

**Aline:** Don’t they do that by making the old versions unusable?

**John:** Eventually, they’ll stop updating them, so they won’t work with the new versions of Mac OS. Then you have folks who don’t upgrade their machines for forever. That’s also a challenge. It’s bad.

The main topic I wanted to get into today is actually kind of related, because it’s about taking control of your circumstances. We’ve talked before about main character energy. I think you actually had some follow-up conversations about main character energy, what protagonists in general want and what they’re doing. But usually, when you hear about agency, it’s usually about lacking agency. Aline, when someone says, “This character lacks agency,” or, “We need to see more agency out of this character,” what do they mean? What is the note behind that note?

**Aline:** An expression that I like is pulling levers, because I think that’s a very nice visual, where sometimes you’ll have a character who’s not affecting the outcome of the story enough, and so they’re serving more spice or frosting, as opposed to being the main course or being something which really moves the story forward.

Unfortunately, this happens a lot with female characters, especially in big, bombastic genre movies. You’ll sometimes find the woman who is the, quote unquote, scientist. All she does is sort of spit out a bunch of lingo. The poor lady was trying to memorize in her chair. But that’s not actually pulling the levers in the story. It’s really important.

It doesn’t mean you have to do it all the same way. Some characters can be moving a story forward by being absent or being passive in some way, although that’s probably higher degree of difficulty. But making sure that your characters are involved in every turn, so that the turns don’t happen without them, and if there is a coincidence or if there is a dropping into their lap of something, that it’s justified by what you set up before.

I don’t mind a happenstance. A lot of times when you tell your friend a great story, it’s like, “And then I turned the corner in Cost Plus and there was John August looking for a throw pillow.” Sometimes coincidences are fine, but if you find that your character is not the one controlling the puppet strings, then it’s something to look at. I’m really an advocate of making writers’ lives easier. The more active your character is in pushing things forward, the easier it’ll be.

**John:** Yeah. I think when I hear that note about, oh, it feels like the character lacks agency, it seems like they’re reacting rather than acting. They’re responding to things that other people are doing, rather than doing the things themselves. They feel like they’re corks floating along in the water and just being moved by the waves. We want to see them having the ability to make choices, and actually making those choices. We’re going to talk about the term “agentic” in just a second. Agency, I think to me, is the ability to make choices, and agentic is making those choices. You’re actually seeing the characters take that initiative, take those actions and do those things.

Before we dive into it, I do wonder whether our notions of agency tend to be a little bit gendered and culturally loaded. We have a sense of agency as the hero with the sword who runs and does the thing, whereas having agency in a story may look different for a female character in another cultural situation.

**Aline:** I think good storytelling requires protagonists who you’re engaged with, and you’re engaged with their decision tree. What’s interesting to me is sometimes we rename these things as main character energy or agentic or whatever. They’re all kind of the same thing. It goes back to our Final Draft discussion. These are elemental. You’re making bread; you need flour, water. There’s a few things you need. I think giving it another name… I’m looking forward to the first time I’m in a meeting and someone says “agentic.”

**John:** It’s going to happen.

**Aline:** I will text you instantly. I think that the reason that people will grab at certain bits of jargon like that is that you can have a shared conversation about what’s important in storytelling. The thing about main character energy is just our idea of what a main character is or does.

In Poor Things, for instance, she’s got diminished capabilities in certain ways, but she’s, I’m going to say, wildly agentic. She’s constantly going, “Oh, I want to go over there,” and it’s very disruptive to everyone around her, making big choices and big swings.

I think that’s part of what makes, to me, a story entertaining. I tend to be less entertained by movies where people are being buoyed by fate. But that’s a genre also. That’s a certain type of storytelling too. It just feels very different from what I do. I really like things that grab you with putting you on a story towrope right away.

**John:** Absolutely. This term “agentic,” I found it in a bunch of… I fell down a rabbit hole looking at these blog posts which were using this term and linking to each other talking about the term. It relates to grind and hustle culture and that sense of doing all the things to put yourself ahead and put yourself first, about taking risks professionally and socially. It also ties into that sense of seeing yourself as the protagonists in this story and not being afraid to take up space and demand attention.

**Aline:** Now, you’re talking about stories or life?

**John:** Both. As I was reading these blog posts, I was seeing people writing about themselves as characters, basically taking a look outside themselves and saying, “What should this person, who is me, do in this situation in order to achieve those goals?” Just like heroes have their “I want” songs. They’re basically giving themselves permission to sing their “I want” songs and actually pursue those things and not stop earlier in the process, not settle for mediocre or okay, but push themselves. I guess mostly, I want to talk for a little bit about real-life people, because I think our listeners are also heroes in their own stories. There’s pros and cons to acting more agentic themselves.

**Aline:** That’s where I think you do get into different sort of people feeling entitled to be more agentic than others. Something I think I’m quite annoying about when I work with women is reminding them that they just asked for permission to do something or they just apologized before they did something or they just apologized before they pitched something.

I’ll often find that men will use humor to cover very aggressive behavior. They’ll say, “I fired that agent.” They did something very aggressive, and they’re proud of it, and they think it’s funny. With women, not always, but it can be a very tortured path just toward saying what you want and going to get it. Obviously, it’s because there are social repercussions to that. It can be not a cute look.

I think you’ll find that women put a lot more exclamation points in their emails. I’m not the first person to say that. We were talking the other day about the devastatingness of when you’re texting someone and then they throw in an “xo.” I don’t know what that means to men, but for women that means I’m done now talking to you. This conversation is done. It’s an “xo.” It’s a firm hug and a kiss of farewell.

**John:** As you’re saying this, I’m thinking back to our text conversations, and how do you and I decide when that thread is done. It can be tough to know asynchronously. I don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what I’m doing, whether we have the moments to really engage in that. Finding a nice way to close a text conversation can be challenging. But I agree with you that it is often, there’s a gender and a power level aspect of that. You just don’t know, not even permission, but you don’t even know how it’s going to be received if you clearly state what it is you would like.

**Aline:** You have to be, I don’t know if aggressive is the right word, but you have to be forthright to get anything. You wouldn’t go up to the counter of In-N-Out and be like, “I was thinking, I don’t have to have it. It would be nice. I don’t totally have to have it. I could have something else. I do have a car, so I could go somewhere else, but it would be nice to have a burger. I would love cheese on that. If you don’t have cheese, we don’t need to do… ” That is something that women are taught, not directly take a class in that, but we’re definitely taught to lubricate our asks.

I do think that I modeled myself in certain respects on my father, my brother, and my mom is French. She does not need to lubricate her asks, for sure. I think I modeled myself on a lot more forthrightness. The combination of French and Israeli is two of the most forthright folks. But I do find that women, I’m often saying to them, you don’t need to ask for permission to specifically take up space.

**John:** A classic tenet of this, being agentic, is asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Basically, assume a yes, and also don’t be afraid of hearing no. If you hear no, welcome the rejections, basically. One of the guys here talks about having a Google Doc basically, like, “Here’s all the people who’ve said no to me,” and here’s the rejections you’ve gotten, and taking those as a mark of like, then you actually asked. You actually did. You went up, put yourself out there to ask those questions.

**Aline:** There’s something I’m fascinated with, which is, I think, a spin on agentic, which is I know several people – and they’re men – who are powerful by virtue of not engaging, so they won’t answer the text or they won’t answer the email or they’ll let it slide. I think one time somebody said to me, “Aline, you don’t have to hit every tennis ball back over the net. You’re making yourself very tired doing that.”

I do think if you’re following up with everything, if you’re answering every email, there is a low status to that in a funny way. If you’re just saying, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “I’m not interested in that,” I feel like you can be too forthright and add an extra level of communication. I’ve been working on letting things slide a little bit more and not responding to absolutely everything and being a little less scrupulous about that. I think there’s a funny way where that is agentic in a way.

**John:** It is.

**Aline:** You don’t have to. I shared an office with a male writer who was really helpful with me. One time I called somebody, and I thought maybe I hadn’t said the right thing. Then I was like, “I’m going to call him back and say, ‘I didn’t mean this, but I could mean that. I’m sorry I said this, but really,'” da da da blah and da da da. He was like, “Just stop. There’s a lot of power in just stopping.” It’s interesting. I think it’s more about knowing what your goal is and what the steps are to get it, as opposed to resolving to just talk all the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about strategy here. You and I both have assistants. Part of the reason why we’re not responding to every email is because we have assistants who filter stuff down to us. As something becomes important, Drew will tell me, “Oh, this is a thing we actually need to pay attention to.” But I’m not worried about every bit of schedule and the 19 times to reset a meeting. The time when Drew was off on his honeymoon, and I suddenly had to do a bunch of that stuff, I was like, “Oh, wow, this is actually really annoying.” I’m glad to have Drew there.

What I do see some of these people who are pitching agentic talking about is, really think about how to be a good assistant to yourself. If you had a great assistant, what would that assistant be doing for you? How would they be filtering stuff down? Amy, my daughter, was just home over the Christmas holiday, and she needed to call and cancel this appointment she had, and she’s like, “Daddy, can you just do it?”

**Aline:** Yeah, it stresses her out.

**John:** It stresses her out. She doesn’t want to do that. She’s like, “It’s weird. I could totally do it for a friend, but I can’t do it for myself.” That’s I think the skill you have to learn is just pretend you are your own assistant and just do the thing.

**Aline:** Man, my assistant, the wonderful Kari O’Hara, happens to be here with me, sitting next to Drew. Big plug for Kari. What’s up? High five. One thing I do is, when I tell assistants that I may not be flowery in my responses, because I do think they’re accustomed to women who are like… If she’s saying, “Do you want to do coffee or lunch?” I think they’re accustomed to women saying, “Oh, thank you so much for asking. Coffee would be great,” blah blah blah. Sometimes I’ll just text back, “No lunch?” or, “Lunch?” or, “No coffee?” One time we ordered lunch in the writers’ room and someone’s lunch was missing. I was in the middle of running the room and talking, so the only words I managed to squeak out were, “Phoebe no lunch.” Then we called the group text Phoebe No Lunch.

One of the things is to try not to lard up all your communications with… Again, I’m back to lubricant. I don’t know what’s happening this morning. Just to be able to find people that you can communicate with directly and simply and that they don’t need everything to be sprayed with cologne before they receive it. I think for women, that’s…

As you get older as a woman and you start to drift towards battleax, which is a wonderful place that I hope to be eventually, where you feel like after a certain age… This is where women, I think, beat men. A really old woman. My mom’s 93. She can say and do whatever she wants. She can ask however she wants. We’re all drifting past that, whereas I think men are going to fall into cranky old man waving a cane.

But I think one of the things about growing up as a lady is learning to get what you want and using softer tactics if you need to, but then also finding people to work with who are comfortable with your directness, so that you’re not always apologizing to the furniture.

**John:** Absolutely. I cherry-picked a bunch of little strategies, different blog posts I’ve listed here. Evie Cottrell has a bunch of them. We’ll put a link in the show notes to them. One of them is, put a big premium on doing something now rather than later, so don’t leave enough time for motivation to fade, which seems like smart advice for writers, but also for anybody who just needs to get some stuff done. My One Cool Thing actually has a little bit more about that. That sense of, “Oh, there’s going to be a better place or time. I’m not ready for it yet.” Waiting is generally not helpful for almost anybody.

**Aline:** My husband has a thing, and I’m sure he got it from a business book or something. But there’s a principle called now, soon, later. It’s things you need to do right away, things you can do soon, and things you can do later. It sounds so simple. But sometimes, breaking that into like, “Hey, if I want to make a hair appointment for Thursday, I got to do that now. Then I need to call the upholsterer. I could do that later.” Just really breaking those down in your brain.

I do think there’s a value sometimes in taking a second and making sure. I’m the king of the random text, of the random reach-out. If anything, I’ve tried to take a breath before I do that and make sure it’s an important communication, especially if I’m reaching out to someone really busy. Then my other thing is, I really used to send people a lot of TikToks, and I’ve lately decided that I’m just sending them homework, unless I write below it. Can’t send a naked TikTok anymore. You have to say, “John, I’m sending you this because it’s about the word agentic.” Don’t just send me a cold TikTok.

**John:** Context.

**Aline:** I’m the worst offender with those, but I’ve just realized that you’re going to… If you’re going to send me a reel, which is obviously a TikTok that was from four weeks ago, you got to tell me why you’re sending it to me.

**John:** That’s fair, because you’ve been on the receiving end of those reels/TikToks. You got pulled out of whatever thought train you were in, because Aline’s texting me, there must be something important. And no. It’s a very cute chihuahua, but it’s not relevant.

Reaching out to people is actually part of the set of advice, which is figuring out what you need and figuring out who can help you get it and then asking for it. Those are things that are challenging to do, that you feel like there’s power imbalances. These agentic people will tell you, just get over your fear of doing that, because you can get no answer, you can get a no, but you’re actually not going to be burning things as much as you suspect you will.

**Aline:** I would say, because we’re almost all communicating now electronically – a lot of people are still in letter-writing age – I think it’s okay to send an email that goes, “Hey John, so-and-so is in town and wants to know if you want to have dinner,” bloop. People still send things with lots and lots of words in it. I always think of Craig’s thing of like, the return key is your friend. Also, I think because of texts, when people get to emails, they really roll out the folderol.

**John:** Short emails are fine. Love them.

**Aline:** Delightful.

**John:** Delightful.

**Aline:** Don’t need a greeting.

**John:** “Hey.”

**Aline:** “Yo.”

**John:** Cut the first two paragraphs. Go right into the heart of it. As I said before about thriving on rejection, so writing down those rejections. Apply for jobs you don’t think you’ll get, because at least you’ll actually have experience of what it is like to interview for those places. Rejections are evidence that you’re actually exploring and trying things.

We’ve talked a lot on the show about luck. The way this blog post was phrasing it was to, “increase your surface area for serendipity,” which is putting more places out there where people can find you and recognize, like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. This is a smart writer.” We talk about how you’ve written that script that’s fantastic. No one is going to read that script unless you put that out there in the world for people to read. The same applies for any other profession you’re doing. If you’re a coder, an artist, whatever, you have to put stuff out there so people can see, and see, oh, this is a person who knows what they’re doing.

**Aline:** For certain. You have to eat some embarrassment. My older son is in the workplace. I think sending a cold email or a cold call or reaching out to someone you don’t know that well, that might be a help. I think that’s really hard when you’re young, because it feels like you don’t have the portfolio. You’re not standing in the right shoes. I remember that being the hardest thing. When you get more experienced and people are like, “I know who John August is, so if he’s emailing me about this thing… ” You’re going to be treated with certain respect. It’s eating the embarrassment of someone going, “Who is this?” or, “Don’t send this to me.”

One time early on in my career, really early on, my agent was someone that I had been friends with, and I didn’t really understand the lines between friend and work friend. Those can be hard to figure out. I had found a piece of material that I thought was really interesting, and I called him on the weekend. Again, it was someone that I was friends with, so I thought that was okay. I called him on the weekend, and I said, “Hey, I have this idea. What do you think?” He was really angry. He was really angry. He said, “How dare you call me on the weekend when I’m home with my family and talk to me about work?”

You know when something embarrassing happens, your body floods with adrenaline, your brain starts printing Polaroids? I can remember where I was sitting in my kitchen, at the table that I had bought at the flea market, the Pasadena City College Flea Market, and painted myself. I can remember where I was sitting. I was so deeply humiliated that I had disrupted him and that I didn’t know what rule.

What I did and what I do a lot with uncomfortable work things is I convert it into something funny. I tend to save those things up as little stories to then tell other people. That is the way that I pop the pimple on my embarrassment.

You’re going to do that when you’re young. You’re going to go somewhere. That’s why every time, when you’re a young person, it’s like, “We’re going to be networking,” then you just have a clenching of the sphincter, because it just sounds like it’s going to be awful. You will have awful interactions, but you might meet your best friend after something where you tried to pitch yourself to someone.

I had, when I was young, a couple things where someone thought I was someone else. I just recently told her this story. I once met with a producer. We were walking in, and the executive said, “Are you ready for this meeting?” The gentleman said, “I’m always ready for a meeting with my favorite writer, Jenny Bicks.” Then we all stood there, frozen. Then the poor executive had to say, “This is actually not Jenny Bicks.” I then had to have a meeting with someone who very clearly didn’t really know who I was, probably hadn’t read my stuff. Again, got to eat embarrassment and just go. It’s like, “You know what? This is still an opportunity. This is still a great producer. Maybe something will come from it.” My second meeting with that gentleman, by the way, he was wearing a wet bathing suit. Continue.

**John:** Oh, good lord. Talk about lines being transgressed. He felt no shame.

**Aline:** None.

**John:** You felt shame about your moment there. Going back to your story of you called the executive on the weekend and realized, oh, I crossed a boundary there that I shouldn’t have crossed, yes, you hold onto those moments, not because you want to fixate and ruminate them, because as a writer, you actually can use them. While it did not directly lead to any scene in Devil Wears Prada-

**Aline:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** … that experience is something that carries through to her character.

**Aline:** Prada was so resonant for me, because I had completely failed as a magazine writer. I remember calling New York Woman with my then-partner. I was trying to leave a message, a query message, but it kept beeping and beeping and cutting us off. It was like, “Hi, we’re so-and-so and so-and-so, and we’re really excited to write for New York Woman, because we think,” beep.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Aline:** It’s like, do you call back? Do you call back? And if you call back, are you starting from scratch? What do you do? Are you starting from scratch, or are you saying, “Sorry, I think I got cut off. I’m Aline, and I wanted to,” and then I got cut off again.

**John:** You’re in the swinger state at this point.

**Aline:** I then wanted to abandon ship, but I thought that’s worse.

**John:** She changed her name so they could never track her down again.

**Aline:** This editor from New York Woman, wherever you are, I’m really sorry for the six half-tries that I left on your machine. But again, trying to laugh about the rejections. I think even if you’re taking a more serious tact to it, yeah, it’s at bats, man. The best baseball player… What’s a great baseball average? 380. Oh, wow, John’s even worse than I am. You guys? What’s good? Oh, wow. We’re in a show biz room. There’s not a person in here.

**John:** As established in last episode, baseball is not my thing. I will guess basketball.

**Aline:** I think high 300s is a good baseball, which is you failed over 70% of the time.

**John:** We’ll wrap up this topic with-

**Aline:** 60%. Keep going.

**John:** Wrap up on a… I love a good metaphor. This was called the moat of low status. Cate Hall has a blog post about it. She says when learning a new skillset, it requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time in which you are actually bad at a thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people. It’s a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side, but also because it gives anybody who can cross it a real advantage. Sometimes, these really awkward moments, it’s recognizing, this is the moat, I’m in the moat. It’s going to suck, and you’re going to be floundering and half drowning. When you get to the other side, you’re like, oh, you actually did cross over. In some ways, I feel like we always talk about the wall around Hollywood or breaking in, but really it’s swimming across that moat is really I think a better way of thinking about what it’s like to enter into this industry.

**Aline:** That’s where relationships really are helpful. When you and I met, I think I was pregnant or I just had a baby. It was 20 years ago. You are definitely ahead of me in terms of getting rewrites and talking to people about those things. I can remember conversations. That was not that long before the strike. I can remember I was having conversations where I would say to you, “How do you do this?” or, “How do you initiate that?” I do that for people too. I always encourage them to call me, because sometimes it’s learning how to make that approach or how to dig yourself out of whatever hole. That’s why I think it’s still important to live here, honestly, more than anything else, is just not to meet…

Young people often think they’re here to meet the important folks. You’re not. You’re there to meet your peers, Drew and Kari sitting on a couch later when we ask them for jobs. It’s important to create those things, so that you can call people who are on and about your level. A step below, a step above are the most helpful people, because they’ll also remember what that was like, getting an agent, taking meetings with agents, what was a good meeting, what wasn’t, is this person good or not. To me, the little floats across the moat are these relationships. I treasure those peer relationships that I had when I was a young person so much.

**John:** It’s also important to remember that we swam across the moat in a different era, and the moat has changed. That’s why it’s important to have people who are in the same struggle that you’re in.

**Aline:** That’s right. What I do now when young people come to town, they want to talk to me, is I get the assistants together in my office and their friends to talk to them, because if you want to know how to break in in 1991, I can really help you if you got a time travel machine, but it’s so, so different now. It’s much more useful for young people to find other young people than to talk to me, because I just have different moats. The moats never end. I think it’s also important to say that the moats never end.

I was talking to someone who has a movie in contention in the awards season. What always happens is it coalesces around a couple things. It’s like the Oppenheimer bulldozer is coming, and so for other movies, even though they’re in this amazing conversation and they’re doing panels and events, walking through those things knowing you’re not going to win anything is dispiriting. I was trying to say to this person, “You’re doing great,” but they were feeling bad. They were feeling like they were in a moat, because they were now going to go to 20 events where they were going to watch the same people win over and over. Not all moats are the same, but we all have them.

**John:** Let’s go on to our other marquee topic, How Would This Be a Movie, one of our favorite things we’ve added over the years. This first article comes from Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris writing for Slate. It’s called Never Use Alone. It’s about Jessie Blanchard. She’s an operator and education director for Never Use Alone. It’s this hotline designed to reduce the risk of overdose for drug users who are alone. Basically, you call this hotline when you’re about to use drugs, heroin or whatever. She stays on the line with you. Before you actually use, she’s like, “Unlock the door. Tell me where your address is.” Then if she hears you overdosing, she will call for emergency services.

The story follows one specific call with Kimber King, who’s recently out of rehab, and highlighting post-rehab life there, and also gets in a bit of Blanchard’s personal journey there into harm reduction. Aline, what did you make of this article? Is there a movie there? Is there a character there? What do you think is the story here?

**Aline:** I don’t know if that’s a whole thing, but it’s a really good kick-off, I thought, for a thriller or a murder mystery or something. Again, I don’t want to minimize the important life-or-death work that these folks are doing. It’s a great idea. I’m really always in favor of things that treat people as they are and not as we hope they should be. But I do think it’s because it’s over the phone, because there’s someone silently listening, it almost made me think of Blow Out, the De Palma movie with Travolta on the bridge. It seems like you could stumble into some sort of mystery, criminal conspiracy by listening through on the phone. I don’t know if it’s about drugs and people who traffic drugs.

PJ Vogt has a new podcast. Have you listened to Search Engine? He has an episode about why fentanyl is in everything. It seems like it could be a good jumping-off point for a story about that world of drugs and availability, but also could kick you into maybe a genre piece that had a mystery or a thriller.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s always that issue of, if it’s a two-hour movie, it’s a one-time story, there has to be something remarkable about this out of all the things. This is the happenstance that kicks into this specific story, that’s not a thing that happens all the time. I think she’s potentially a really interesting character, because her background is a nurse, her own family lost to addiction, and trying to walk this line of wanting to help people, but realizing that in helping people, she may be prolonging their addiction. That is really interesting. But I agree that there has to be some inciting incidence beyond just what’s usual.

**Aline:** For sure. The other thing is it could be someone’s job inside of a thing, where let’s say you have an emergency response team and they do suicide intervention, if you wanted to do something with several people. It could be a job that someone has, because there’s this aspect of silent witness and overhearing. Those are good Hitchcocky-feeling things.

**John:** Another possibility would be to actually just do the origin story of how she came to do this, so it’s the first time she’s doing this thing. Basically, after a loss in the family, she’s doing this for the first time, because she doesn’t want this thing to happen.

**Aline:** It’s going to have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to go someplace.

**Aline:** It would have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to be. Who are the obstacles? Who are the people who are telling her no? What is she overcoming? What is the journey that she’s going through?

**Aline:** She somehow gets connected to her cheating ex-husband and doesn’t call 911 when she should.

**John:** Maybe.

**Aline:** That’s not this exact woman, but that could be a different character.

**John:** Second up, we have an article by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times. This one is looking at cases of silicosis, which is an incurable lung disease that’s happening among California workers, particularly those who are cutting and polishing engineered stone, silicon kitchen countertops. It’s affecting workers at much younger ages. People in their 20s and 30s are getting a fatal, incurable lung condition. The story follows particularly Leobardo Segura Meza, a 27-year-old father diagnosed with silicosis. This is a California story for this one, mostly Los Angeles County, and the questions of what controls or safeties things we’re going to put here.

**Aline:** Man, that was distressing.

**John:** Yeah, it was distressing. My first thought is it’s an Erin Brockovichy thing. Whenever bad things are happening to people and no one’s paying attention, that it’s an Erin Brockovichy kind of story, where you have somebody coming in to recognize the situation and fight for them and to help them. That’s one option. But I’m also wondering if there’s a way to have the people that are being affected be more the drivers of the story.

**Aline:** It’s so funny, I had the exact same thought, which is those “someone from the outside is the savior” stories apart from occasionally feeling inauthentic, I think have been done so much. Could it be a story about people who have to organize, who have never organized before? I was really distressed to hear that there are interventions with water and other equipment that they could use to make it better, but they won’t.

I don’t know that this one jumped out at me as anything other than a background piece. It feels like there’s a lot of businesses which can be shady, based on how they’re implemented, not inherently shady, but how they’re implemented. To me, this just made me think of how really venally consumerist and bottom-line-based our economy has become, that the idea that you would protect workers and that you would have those things in place to protect them is just not a first thought. I just think we’ve gotten increasingly like, if you make a buck, then that’s all that matters. Getting the water probably costs money, and getting the right equipment probably costs money.

I would see it more as like, if you were doing a movie like The Big Short or something, and one of the businesses that you stumble across is someone who’s just rampantly killing people when he could be doing something else. But it didn’t jump out at me as its own piece.

**John:** I didn’t get the sense that the countertop manufacturers were… They could be negligent, but they weren’t evil. Sometimes it was just the ignorance, that they didn’t know what was happening there, and sometimes it was people who were just not trained to do this thing or that weren’t aware of what the actual problems and dangers are, because apparently, it’s different than cutting other stone. If you’re cutting granite, you’re not going to have the same issues as you are these special things.

**Aline:** Yeah, it’s those composites. A friend of mine’s mother called her and said, “I’m thinking of having my counters replaced, because we have this stuff that’s harmful.” We were saying, “It’s already in there.”

**John:** It’s the cut.

**Aline:** When you cut it up to get it out, you might be creating the very thing that you’re protesting.

**John:** It’s not a problem existing there in a space. Like you, I’m not sure there’s a full movie here. It felt like this is the context background for a Law and Order episode. It’s a thing that’s happening, and we’re meeting a bunch of people because of that situation, but it doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily driving the whole thing.

The other way you could get into this is that it’s a story about this family, and the patriarch of the family, the young father of the family is going to be dying at a young age because of this thing. That’s an interesting story that I haven’t seen before.

**Aline:** He learns how to represent himself as a lawyer, and he takes the case.

**John:** Even if the court case is in foreground or the sense of what is it like to be a young father who knows he’s going to die of an incurable thing, like an old man’s disease, that could be an interesting story, whether he’s the central character or he’s the father of the protagonist.

**Aline:** One of the things that’s happened – this happens also when people send me books – is that Hollywood swings back and forth between doing things that require special handling in the sausage factory. It has swung back and forth many times since you and I have been doing this. TV and movies like to take turns doing this. In the word of Super Mario Bros being the most successful movie, I don’t know that this is commercial. Again, that’s why I tend towards genrefying these, because if there’s a murder or an extortion or a way to make it Night Agent, because otherwise, we’re not really engaging with how commercial things are. But right now, there’s such an emphasis on things that are super commercial. I look back on things like Erin Brockovich, just wondering who would make that.

**John:** I still think you can make Erin Brockovich, but it has to be a more seasoned movie.

**Aline:** With a big star.

**John:** With a big star. You wouldn’t put it out in the summer. You’d put it out in December, to get a bunch of awards. That would be driving it.

This might be more commercial. This is called Loyalty Testers. It is Gina Cherelus writing for the New York Times. It looks at this service called Loyalty Test, where they hire these, quote unquote, “Testers” to flirt with people’s partners online and assess their loyalty. It tracks Caden Redmond, who’s a college student who charges $100 per test, which involves starting a conversation on TikTok or Instagram and gauging their response to those romantic advances and then reporting back to the person who hired them whether they got something out of it. There’s people who do it freelance, but this service has recruited a bunch of Testers and about 1,000 customers, and they’re going on through it. Aline, this feels like it’s in a relationship space. I can see a rom-com version of this. What are your instincts with Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** There’s always some rom-com version of this floating around, whether you go on dates and you try and do this. Now, it’s sort of catfishingy online things. This is a TikTok genre. There’s a couple people who do this on TikTok, and they’ll show you the texts. It has an unpleasantness to it that I think as a romantic comedy, I think if it was sharper, more edgy, more like Bottoms or something, where it was a little bit more irreverent and anarchic, because you’re dealing with shitty behavior from both the person who’s fishing and the person who’s been fished, although I don’t know that this always means that people want to cheat or if people are excited to have been flirted with. It is kind of shocking in those TikToks how fast particularly men go to, “Yeah, I’m going to be in Phoenix next week, so what are you doing? I’d love to get a drink.” I don’t know. It depressed me.

**John:** I wonder if it’s the jumping-off place. You have a person who is a Tester, who has become so jaded and cynical about love, and they’re the person who has to be finally won over that there are actually goodhearted people that cannot be tempted or pulled away. That’s probably the best way in there. There’s a non-rom-com version of this as well, of course, which is that you think you’re doing one thing, but it actually spirals way out of control, and someone’s life is put in danger because of this flirting.

**Aline:** Or it’s Bill Clinton, or somebody says, “I want you to test this person,” but what you don’t realize is it’s Putin. I guess you could play with that a little bit. No Hard Feelings, which I really enjoy, had an aspect of somebody’s hired to do… Somebody’s hired to do a something is a genre on its own. I wrote one of those. That’s Three to Tango. Someone hires someone to do a something, and it leads to unintended consequences is a genre of which I thought Bottoms did a fun job of. It turned into about four different movies along the way. I thought that that contributed to the fun, anarchic spirit of it, that they have a very tiny germ of an idea, and then it leads them hither and thither. If you’re going to do something with a satirical edge in the way that this has a satirical edge… Pain Hustlers is the movie I think of recently. It’s scammy people. Then it feels like it’s got a satiric aspect to it.

**John:** Don’t sleep on No Hard Feelings. If you’ve missed it in theaters, it’s worth a watch. It’s really well done.

**Aline:** The funniest scene of the year.

**John:** The fight on the beach?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. I love it. It’s so good. Next up, we have Zachary Crockett writing for The Hustle. This is about a man who won the lottery 14 times. Stefan Mandel, who is a Romanian mathematician, exploited loopholes in various lotto systems to buy every possible combination. If you have to guess six numbers, there’s only a certain number of variations, and you can actually just buy them all up. The formula basically works out. If it’s worth it, if it’s three times the amount of money you’re going to spend, you should absolutely do it, because it can pay off. The challenge, of course, is that logistically, it’s absolutely a nightmare to buy all those tickets. But you can do it. He won the Virginia Lottery and some other ones, got quite rich off the Virginia Lottery. Ultimately, the story continues, went through bankruptcy. There were lawsuits and other things. He’s now living a quiet life in Vanuatu. A lottery movie, is there a thing to do here?

**Aline:** The one thing that jumped out at me was, you know when you’re watching a heist and they’re putting together a group of guys? It felt like one of the group of guys has retired to Vanuatu, and this is his claim to fame, and so they’re putting together… They need someone who crunches the numbers, and it’s this guy. I would pitch the guy from this season of Fargo who plays the hitman. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

**John:** I haven’t seen it.

**Aline:** I will find out what the name of that actor is. But someone really enigmatic and interesting, with a foreign accent, who made a killing doing something abstrusely mathy like this, and then retired to an island, but they have to bring him back for this heist on a casino. That’s what I pictured. That’s not a whole movie, but it’s a really fun backstory for somebody.

**John:** It’s good you bring up heists, because this thing has a heist feeling, because they’re not breaking the law, but logistically, it’s just so challenging to do what they’re doing. They have to convince so many people. The social engineering of it all was a huge factor as well. There’s just mechanics of doing this thing, but there needs to be a larger purpose. That’s why I think you going to they’re pulling somebody in to do this one extra job makes more sense, because if it’s just like, “We want to make a bunch of money,” nobody cares. That’s not actual real stakes. You have to do it for… There’s something that he’s actually really going for here. Originally, he’s doing it so he can escape from Romania. That feels a very great purpose.

**Aline:** Did you see BlackBerry?

**John:** I loved BlackBerry, yeah.

**Aline:** It kills. What I loved about it is everyone is there for a different reason. Glenn’s character really does not care about what they’re doing or why.

**John:** He just wants a hockey team.

**Aline:** He just wants a hockey team. What I loved about that character piece was that he was such a jerk, but then he was so good at being the exact guy they needed in that exact moment, and then somehow it’s a version of the Peter principle. It itched some part of his brain which caused him to completely take his eye off the ball and just grind on the hockey thing, which was so funny. That single-mindedness, the character who’s single-minded to the point of being socially inept, it feels like one of these. I bet Noah Hawley could do something with… I could see a season of Fargo where they do something like this.

**John:** Glenn’s character in BlackBerry is agentic.

**Aline:** He’s the most agentic.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Aline:** He and Emma Stone in Poor Things, quite agentic. I would say that Barbie’s pretty agentic.

**John:** Barbie’s agentic too, yeah. None of them are afraid to make fools of themselves. They’re happy to pick up the phone to get an answer. They know what they don’t know, and they’re not letting that get in their way. Let’s look back through these things and see which of these might actually be movies. Also, we should talk about which of these things do we need to get those specific rights, or is it just the general story space. Never Use Alone, is there anything here?

**Aline:** I don’t know how widespread that is. If it’s just this one lady, then it’s different from if that’s been adopted as a widespread practice. There are many movies about suicide hotlines, and this is a zhuzh on this. It’s very topical, and it’s a thing people are interested in. What do you think?

**John:** I think it’s an interesting space. I could see the indie film version. I could see the Sundance movie that’s in this space.

**Aline:** You would then get her life rights?

**John:** Maybe, because then it’s nice to be able to have her as a person, as not just a resource, but also as part of the, you want to say market of the movie.

**Aline:** The narrative around a movie. That’s a really good point, John, in that for the smaller movies, the narrative around the movies is sometimes just as important.

**John:** I think that could be helpful. Her goals, in terms of keeping people from dying alone of overdoses, would be served by this movie existing.

**Aline:** That too.

**John:** Countertop cancer? We don’t think there’s a movie here.

**Aline:** No, not really. It seems like it’s an element of something.

**John:** Absolutely. The article’s interesting. You don’t need to buy that article. I think it’s a backdrop for something, but there’s nothing here specifically you want to hold on to. The Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** It’s been around for a long time. Those ideas of “I test your spouse’s fidelity” twas ever thus. Just finding a new spin on it, I-

**John:** I feel like there’s probably a Cary Grant movie.

**Aline:** Here’s the issue though. Some of the funniest things that happen in your life now happen with your hand out, and you looking like you’re telling people a hilarious story. The visual is you lying in bed just looking at your phone. We have so many virtual interactions now, and this type of thing is quite a virtual experience.

Romantic comedies are one of the genres where using electronics… I’m not sure, but I feel like one of the reasons Holdovers was set in 1971 was so that… It’s an awfully short movie if someone can just call an Uber. I think sometimes technology can make these things a little dry. There’s literally not much to look at.

I would rather do a movie about somebody who hires themselves out to go to Rome and find out if the King of Denmark will cheat on the Queen before they get… The Queen of Denmark hires you to go and flirt with him and see if he will… That idea of testing fidelity is a better, almost Shakespearean idea than the specifics of how you’re doing it now.

**John:** I think if you are going to try to do something like this, you have to look at Zola or other movies that are-

**Aline:** Oh, god, I love Zola. Yes, you’re right.

**John:** Really good at-

**Aline:** Great.

**John:** … finding ways to manifest what that online conversation looks like.

**Aline:** Great call. Great call. They did that really well there. But the other thing is people get in trouble a lot with Instagram messages. People are messaging people they’re not supposed to on Instagram after a stranger reaches out to them. It just goes to show that human desire for connection or lust or whatever it is really overrides the logic button.

**John:** I have friends who are absolute strangers who met on Instagram and are dating for years.

**Aline:** Through the DMs.

**John:** Through the DMs.

**Aline:** Slid into the-

**John:** Slid in the DMs.

**Aline:** I don’t like the expression “slid into the DMs.”

**John:** It does feel filthy.

**Aline:** Back to our lubricant conversation.

**John:** Finally, the lottery winner. Is there a lottery winner movie?

**Aline:** Not per se, I don’t think.

**John:** Yeah. I like your notion of taking a piece of that, an idea of that character and bringing it into something else. I think if you’re going to do the story, I think you’re going to probably want something to back this up on. If there’s really good original reporting on this stuff and somebody who has the real scoop on all this stuff, great, but I’m not sure that you necessarily need it. Obviously, if Craig were here, he would say, if it’s all true facts, nobody owns history.

**Aline:** If it’s reported, for sure, if that’s been reported. That’s different from whether you’re going to do a first-person story about what it feels like to live in Romania and how you find these things, as opposed to using that and that math and those statistical things for a different character.

**John:** Do any of these movies get made?

**Aline:** I don’t see you following up on this batch, but really interesting to think about. One of the reasons I really like that you do this is because people struggle to find ideas. I remember one of my early writing teachers was like, “Take the New York Times and put it in front of you, and there’s 100 movies in there.” That really is true. I think what’s harder to do, and which you do your whole career, is figure out why does this speak to me, and what do I really want to talk about here.

It’s interesting how much an idea or a book or something will resonate with you, and you don’t really know why. An example is my most memed of movies, We Bought A Zoo. I really wanted to write that. I really resonated to it. I really had to have it. I really had a clear vision of it. It wasn’t until well into writing it that I realized my dad, who’s an Israeli guy, an engineer, we moved to a house in New Jersey that had nine horses and a bunch of ducks and chickens, and so here’s this guy who’s an engineer and really just works with his brain all of a sudden having to muck out stalls. But I didn’t even think of that when I grabbed that story.

Similarly, sometimes people submit me things, and they’re perfectly great, but they don’t light up the little light board in the brain that you need to follow your interest through the project.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Aline, what do you have for us this week?

**Aline:** Sometimes I just do really not useful ditties, but this time… I have a thing that many, many women have, called melasma, which is when… Look at John’s [crosstalk 00:56:54]. You get discolorations on your face. They’re hormonal. I used to have it really bad after I had babies. It’s just subject to hormones. Your face will have these brown patches. They’re usually on your cheeks or over your lip. They’re also enhanced by sun.

I’ve tried to treat it for a really long time. I’ve done lasers and various creams. Then I was influenced by Instagram. Was it Instagram or TikTok? One of those. But there’s a company called Musely, M-U-S-E-L-Y. You get on the website, and you describe what your skin looks like, and then you send them a picture, and you show them where it is on your face. They concoct a thing for you that has bleaching agents and tretinoins and different things. I’m sure that none of what I said was right, but something like that. They put a cocktail of skin stuff. First, they send you a peel, depending on what you need. They sent me this thing called the Spot Peel. You walk around for 12 hours with what looks like toothpaste on your face. Then you wash that off, and then you follow it up with a cream. I was highly skeptical, but it really worked.

**John:** That’s good.

**Aline:** My right side of my face is really almost totally cleared up. My left side, which is the driving side, which is where the sun damage always is, still has a patch here. You know what? They have really good customer service. It comes right away. They tell you when it’s coming. They make the refill process really good. Sometimes people have a good idea for a business, but the interface is not… I’m not breaking any news here, but the interface is not good. The interface of Musely is really good. You get communications from them, and they explain to you why they’re sending you this thing. The instructions are good. Is it a scam? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it except that it worked for me.

**John:** Good. You had a good customer experience there.

**Aline:** I had a good customer experience and good results.

**John:** Love it. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Adam Mastroianni called “So you wanna de-bog yourself.” It kind of ties into some of the things we talked about in terms of being agentic. He’s talking about those situations where you just feel like you’re stuck in a bog, and you just never can get out. You’re just trapped in the mud. I always love a good metaphor for things. He has a lot of really good metaphors for the stories you tell yourself about why you can’t get out or the frustrations you feel. Gutterballing, which is basically you’re moving the right direction, but you’re already in the gutter.

**Aline:** I thought that was really funny.

**John:** No matter what you do, you’re still not going to strike. Waiting for the jackpot, when someone says, “Here’s a solution.” It’s like, yes, but that doesn’t solve all of my problems. It’s not magical. The mediocrity trap, stroking the problem. Some really good-

**Aline:** Stroking the problem felt NSFW [unintelligible 00:59:37].

**John:** It does. It does. That’s basically where you’re acknowledging the problem and you’re talking about the problem and you’re poring into the problem without actually trying to solve the problem.

**Aline:** John, I’m going to pitch an alt to agentic.

**John:** Please.

**Aline:** Pageantic. I’m just going to act like I’m in a beauty pageant all the time.

**John:** You’re going to do that elbow, elbow, wave, wave?

**Aline:** The elbow, elbow, wave, wave. I’m going to divide every meeting into a swimsuit, interview, talent. Pageantic.

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** What do you guys think of pageantic? They love it. No, I’m just telling you.

**John:** Applause all around.

**Aline:** It’s just a different way of doing-

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** Big hair and a sash.

**John:** 2024, my word is pageantic. 100%.

**Aline:** I would love John coming in with a sash, just a sash that says Mr. Hancock Park.

**John:** One of your One Cool Things originally was a sling for your iPhone. If that was a sash rather than a sling, two things killed at once.

**Aline:** Can you still believe they didn’t send me one free bandolier?

**John:** Come on.

**Aline:** Come on, guys.

**John:** You started that whole trend. We all know it started here.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** I love it all. The last bit of this blog post I thought was really smart was the difference between diploma problems and toothbrushing problems.

**Aline:** Oh god, yes.

**John:** A diploma is something you get once, and then you’re done. A toothbrushing is basically, you got to do it every day. Some people confuse the two things.

**Aline:** I hate that. I hate the eating and the sleeping and the thing that you have to do all… Especially, you know what’s the worst is working out. Let me just work out for an entire day once a month, instead of the… It’s the constant drumbeat. Anything that’s a constant drumbeat. I’m not a routinized person. My husband really is, and I’m really not. The constant drumbeat of the feeding the dog, the brushing the teeth, things that have to be done every day, don’t like it.

**John:** You have three dogs now. Are you brushing your dogs’ teeth?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, of course. That was a 100% honest yes. Everyone will know that she of course-

**Aline:** Everyone who knows me knows that Jimmy the dog, you can’t even put a leash on him, so the idea that you’re brushing his teeth… I’ve got one of those little adorable snarl balls, a little chihuahua. There’s many popular ones on TikTok. He’s just basically a little dust of snarl most of the time, interrupted with some kisses and cuddles.

We put some stuff in their water, and then we have a treat that we give them, but I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good… Then every once in a while, we have a lady come over and wrestle them to the ground. Swear to god, because I don’t want to anesthetize them, because I know someone whose dog died being anesthetized for dental. I would really feel bad. We found somebody who will just wrestle your dog to the ground with a bunch of towels and non-consensually brush their teeth.

**John:** Lambert luckily is a very happy tooth-brusher. You just open up his mouth and just go to it.

**Aline:** That’s a really August thing to be, like a very, “Yeah, I got to do this. It needs to get done.” I’m still laughing about the day that Mike broke all his habits, because he had like 60 things, where he was on Duolingo and his running app. He had like 50 things where he was competing for these fake electronic rings of success. I feel like having a dog that… Your dog probably has an app where after you brush its teeth, it logs it.

**John:** It doesn’t yet. I’ve definitely wanted to get those little buttons that dogs can push.

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** “Toothbrush.” But then I feel like-

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** … they’re just training me to do stuff, so no. “Treat. Treat. Play.”

**Aline:** “Get another dog.”

**John:** No. No more dogs. That’s our show for this week.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Very exciting. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech.

**Aline:** Woohoo.

**John:** If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Inneresting exists because of Aline Brosh McKenna making fun of how I don’t put the T in “interesting.”

**Aline:** Me, make fun of someone? I would never.

**John:** Never, ever. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Aline keeps pitching-

**Aline:** Guys, I want to make a workout set. If we make a Scriptnotes workout set, it doesn’t even need to be a Lycra one. It can be a T-shirt and leggings. Something for the ladies. Something specifically for the ladies.

**John:** The legs is basically an overlooked thing. The challenge is Cotton Bureau doesn’t make sweatpants or leggings. We’re looking for a vendor. We have pretty high standards.

**Aline:** I know. Your stuff is good. I know. I looked into it, and I couldn’t find anything, but I feel like a viewer will have-

**John:** Maybe our incredible listeners-

**Aline:** Also, I’d wear a Scriptnotes onesie.

**John:** Sure, 100%. Love it. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like me and Aline talking about being empty nesters. Aline, it’s never an empty nest when you’re here with me.

**Aline:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. It’s just so nice chatting with you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This is our bonus segment for our premium members. We love our premium members. Aline, you’re a premium member.

**Aline:** I am. Of course I’m a premium member. I love having all the episodes at my fingertips. I recommend them to people frequently.

**John:** Thank you very much. I just put my daughter on a plane back to school. She was here on Christmas break. I’m once again an empty nester. You’ve had this experience for a little bit longer. How are you feeling about your life without children in your house?

**Aline:** It’s been a really interesting transition. My first guy left, and then I had another kid at home. They’re three years apart. When Charlie went to college, Leo was 15, 16, so we still had a lot to do with college and a ton of friends. Then during the pandemic, I was incarcerated with them, which was wonderful and every parent’s dream, despite the horribleness of it. But you’re raising them to send them into the world, to be independent, happy people. That’s what you’re doing. I comfort myself with that. But man, I really miss them. We really miss them. This weekend, Will wanted to go see Beekeeper, which I’m obviously not the biggest audience for.

**John:** You’re not a Jason Statham completist?

**Aline:** He’s a Statham completist, as are my kids. He really turned to me and said, “Man, I wish Charlie could go see Beekeeper with me this weekend.” Then Leo, my younger son, is a Scrabble player. When he’s home, we play Scrabble every day. Do I want them to be at home with their mother playing Scrabble and going to Beekeeper? No. They need to be out in the world.

When Leo left, he went to college in September, and two months later I was shooting a movie. I was so busy during that time that I actually felt relief, because I would’ve been letting him down. I wouldn’t have been very available, so I’m glad it didn’t happen in his senior year.

Then when that wore off, we’ve had to become more entertaining to each other. When you notice that’s happening, you start to look at your partner and say, “We should make a list of shows and things.” Will’s gotten really into cooking, and so that’s been really nice. There’s a freedom there to be able to go and pop off and do whatever you want and go take a trip. I try and value that.

There’s this oft cited statistic that you see your kids for 18 years, and then the rest of your life you’ll see them for a year cumulatively. That’s a scary thing. But we talk to them all the time. The really lucky thing for our generation is texting, because nobody really wants to call their parents. I remember really avoiding that myself, just because it’s a big energy shift to be on the phone with your parents. But texting, the ability to send the TikTok or send the funny article or fam chat. Our text thread was ablaze with what happened with Sweet Lady Jane. It’s fun to have those conversations keep going as a whole family or individually. You learn to have the relationship evolve in the next phase.

That said, I have many sad moments. I remember once, one of our mutual friends said that somebody was complaining about taking their kid to a birthday party in kindergarten, and she said, “I would run someone over with my car to be at a kindergarten birthday party with my son just one more time.”

There’s definitely a lot of things that I miss, but I try and think like, they’re where they should be. You don’t want them to be dependent on you. You want them to be independent in the world. But John, they’ll never really appreciate how much you love them until they have their own kids. I didn’t appreciate how much my parents loved me until I had my own kids. It’s their job to live in a blissful feeling that you’re there for them but you don’t have excessive needs.

**John:** I’m going to stop you there, because there are so many things stacked up for me to respond to. For listeners outside of Los Angeles, or listeners in Los Angeles who aren’t aware of it, Sweet Lady Jane is a fantastic bakery you always got your fancy cakes from. It was default, like, “Oh, we need a fancy cake. We’ll get one from Sweet Lady Jane.” They spontaneously closed. It looked like they were going to expand, and they suddenly closed. I don’t think we know why they closed.

**Aline:** It turns out they were being sued for wage exploitation.

**John:** That’s not good. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, Sweet Lady Jane, the secret story of Sweet Lady Jane. Your earlier point about you’re trying to raise them to be successful adults, Mike will often say, “You’re not trying to raise a child. You’re trying to raise an adult.” The fact that they’re off in college now, doing their own thing, it’s like you successfully raised an adult. Congratulations. They’re out there.

But it also just means that all the time that you spent hands-on parenting them is now free, and you have to figure out other ways to do that. A productive way to do that is to really think about, what is it that you used to do as a couple or you’d want to do as a couple that you couldn’t before. I mentioned on the podcast last time, Mike and I have our 24 for ’24, 24 things we want to get done in 2024, which means seeing the shows and committing to game nights and bar trivia and just making sure we’re getting out there doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing. You’re heading to New York to see four shows.

**Aline:** Yes, I’m seeing a bunch of plays.

**John:** That’s a thing you do.

**Aline:** It was a spur of the moment thing. Charlie’s actually going to come down from Boston and meet me for a couple of those. Also, I think they don’t owe you. They didn’t ask to be born. They don’t owe you. I think people get into a thing of… It’s so funny, because moms will say to me, “How often does your son call you?” I call them. They’re incoming. They’re in the incoming. When I’m elderly, I’ll be in the incoming. But right now, they’re building their lives, so I don’t wait for them to reach out to me. I reach out to them. I try not to guilt them.

Also, I’m always marketing Will and I. “We got sushi. We can pay for sushi. We might be able to take you skiing.” We try and make it appealing and attractive and interesting to spend time with your parents, as opposed to it feeling like homework and obligation. I always said when they were little, you’re not there to be their friend, but when they’re out of the house, you are.

There’s this study that shows the only thing you can really control about kids is how much they like you. If Amy’s coming home to fun game nights and dinners and, in my case, a dog and a half – as soon as anyone leaves, I get another dog and a half – it sounds fun, as opposed to coming home to people who are staring at you and trying to suck your blood, trying to vampire your life.

**John:** What was interesting over this Christmas break was recognizing and figuring out the boundaries between, okay, you’re a college student doing college student things, but you’re also under our roof now, and what that balance is and what is a fair expectation of you being home.

**Aline:** That means we have dinner with the dads, and then we take the car, and we’re out until 1:00 seeing our other friends. That’s what that means.

**John:** That is what it means. Are we going to bed not knowing where they are, which in college-

**Aline:** You don’t know where she is.

**John:** In college, you don’t know.

**Aline:** I know. I know. Isn’t that a funny thing?

**John:** It’s a strange thing. I definitely appreciated that growing up with my mom. I was like, “It’s so frustrating that you have these concerns when I’m thousands of miles away.”

**Aline:** My god, in college, your poor mother had to call you on a phone that was like beep, boop, beep, boop, ring, ring, ring. When would she get you? She was not sending you a little text that said, “Hey, our neighbors got divorced.” We’re lucky because we can communicate with them.

**John:** We are both very lucky. Aline, I’m always lucky to have you come back on the podcast.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Thank you.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [How to be More Agentic](https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic) by Cate Hall
* [What’s Stopping You?](https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/44-agency) by Neel Nanda
* [Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tnpp3cyEHMGthjGAf/seven-ways-to-become-unstoppably-agentic) by Evie Cottrell
* [“Agency” needs nuance](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/acyfmFTN3cNgwnYw6/agency-needs-nuance) by Evie Cottrell
* [The Woman on the Line](https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/overdose-drugs-fentanyl-opioid-never-use-alone.html) by Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris for Slate
* [California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosis-countertop-workers-engineered-stone) by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times
* [Would Your Partner Cheat? These ‘Testers’ Will Give You an Answer](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/style/loyalty-test-infidelity-cheating.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) by Gina Cherelus for the New York Times
* [The man who won the lottery 14 times](https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times/) by Zachary Crockett for The Hustle
* [Musely](https://www.musely.com/)
* [So you wanna de-bog yourself](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/so-you-wanna-de-bog-yourself?publication_id=656797&post_id=140270094&isFreemail=true&r=3dw6x) by Adam Mastroianni
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aline_Brosh_McKenna)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* 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 Larry Douziech ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/627standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-one-with-christopher-nolan).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 622 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Our guest today is the writer-director of the acclaimed indie films Following and Memento. He’s gone on to make movies including The Prestige, Insomnia, Interstellar, Inception, Tenet, and The Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film is Oppenheimer. Welcome to the podcast, Christopher Nolan.

**Christopher Nolan:** Thank you very much.

**John:** We’re so excited to have you here. It’s great to finally meet you, because I’ve known your brother Jonah for a long time. He’s been on the show two or three times, but I’ve never met you.

**Christopher:** Very nice to meet. He speaks very highly of you.

**John:** Usually, when Jonah’s on with Lisa, we’re talking television, because they are mostly making television stuff. Today I only want to talk about big screen movie stuff and just stuff that’s on giant screens, stories that tell themselves in two hours or a little bit more than two hours.

**Christopher:** It’s a while since I hit two hours.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Christopher:** But yes.

**John:** But also, stories that are a onetime journey, where it’s not about coming back for next week.

**Christopher:** Absolutely. No, a very different shape to things.

**John:** I want to get into that. I want to get into your history with cinema, how you think about movies, your work as a screenwriter who is going to be directing your own movies. Then we’ll look at some scenes from Oppenheimer and really look at how those scenes work on the page.

**Christopher:** Great.

**John:** Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I’d love to ask you a listener question. They wrote in with a general question, but you’re the perfect person to answer it, because they asked about dreams in movies and how dreams in movies function. You’re a person who has some experience with dreams in movies.

**Christopher:** I do, yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about that and trying to make that work, so yeah, happy to talk about it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get into it. You are five days older than me, but have a very different history going into it. When I look through the stories of Christopher Nolan as a young child, he picked up his father’s Super 8 camera and started shooting films. Is that accurate, or is that just a story that people tell? That’s how it really started?

**Christopher:** No, it’s accurate. I mean, look, at our age that was the thing. The Super 8 camera was the go-to mechanism for recording family images back then if your family was lucky enough to have one. My dad had one he was very pleased with and proud of. He lent it to us as kids, which now as a parent, I don’t know what he was thinking. We did wind up destroying it eventually. In later years, I strapped it to the bottom of a car and broke it. He was very upset with me. But that was some years later. For my whole childhood, I was always filming things and putting images together, trying to cut images together on the old Moviola, Super 8’s wonderful format.

**John:** We had to do it in film school. We had to use Super 8s. You’re literally just taping little pieces of film to the wall as you’re trying to put stuff together. It’s so barbaric and primitive.

**Christopher:** It is, but I just unboxed the brand new Kodak Super 8 camera that they’ve been promising for years to make. It’s finally a real thing.

**John:** It’s great.

**Christopher:** It keeps coming back. It’s a wonderful format.

**John:** Now, you had the technology to shoot little films, but did you have a sense of what cinematic storytelling was? Because it’s one thing to have a camera. You’ve seen movies. But when did you have a sense that there was a script before there was a movie? In trying to make those early experiments, were you writing anything, or were you just going out and shooting stuff?

**Christopher:** No, we were just going out and shooting things. I really was seven years old, eight years old, getting together with friends and doing riffs on Star Wars that had just come out. The interesting part about that as it relates to narrative is that it’s different for different writers, but for me as a filmmaker first and foremost, writing came to me over time as a way of formalizing my instinctive process of putting one image after another to create some kind of sensation of narrative. We’re talking silent Super 8 films. As these things become longer, as you move into 16 mil and you start making things that you need more structure to, need more form to, then you start writing.

That to me is always something I’ve tried to bear in mind about my own process is that when you embrace the screenplay form, as I have over the years, and come to really love it, you always have to remind yourself that the initial impulse, and therefore the thing that people are watching films for, is that string of images telling a visual narrative when we’re talking about cinema. It’s nice to have that recollection, to have that physicality of holding images in my hand, taping them together. It stays with me just as a sort of guiding principle as I’m getting lost in the words.

**John:** You talk about moving from the Super 8’s images, a series of images, to having to figure out a bigger plan for it. It reminds me of actually the history of film cinemas. The initial things, the original screenplays were just a list of shots, and eventually had to figure out like, “Oh no, it’s a little bit more like a play. We have characters interacting with each other. We actually need to find ways to portray that.”

**Christopher:** Yeah. It’s very interesting, I think, to try and analyze how screenwriting fits in with editing. As a writer-director, I do a lot of editing on the page. I very much enjoy the technology we have with word processing. It’s technology that’s been around a long time. But I wrote my first screenplay on a manual typewriter, so to me it’s still a bit of an innovation.

I love overwriting and then editing the same way I edit the images and, indeed, the dialogue and stuff when we get in the edit suite. I think the relationship between the two is very interesting, because editing is a key feature of cinema that’s not shared in other media. Eisenstein, he summarized it, “Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C.”

In the case of Oppenheimer, for example, this came into play in a very major way when I went to the Institute of Advanced Study, which is where Oppenheimer is the director. We filmed there eventually. I met the current – or he was then the director of the IAS, Robert Dijkgraaf, very brilliant string theorist, brilliant scientist. I was talking about what I was doing in the film and how I was going to try and show the thought process of a quantum physicist thinking about atoms, thinking about molecules. He said this terrifying thing to me. He said, “Of course, a lot of the scientists at the time in the 1920s were alienated by the fact that you could no longer visualize the atom.” As a filmmaker, you’re going, “Hang on. That’s the job I’m going to have to do.”

I’d written this into the script as indications of types of images and tried to do it in a relatively free form, poetic way, just to suggest to everybody what it might be. But in talking to Dijkgraaf, I started to realize that what we can do with imagery, with editing, is we can take Image A, Image B, make Thought C. If you’re dealing with, for example, the duality of waves and particles when you talk about light, to be able to show waves, show particles, have the audience combine them in their minds. I was dealing with that at script stage, but also thinking ahead technically to where that’s going to be.

I think that one of the things that I try to do in my writing at a certain point – it’s not usually with the first draft – or maybe in one area of the script or something, I’ll try to start thinking like an editor as I’m writing, and how the juxtaposition of images is going to be something more. I don’t know. I would be interested to get your thoughts. It’s intriguing to speculate, does the screenplay form sufficiently communicate the editing process, can it sufficiently communicate the editing process? I try to game the system by – in Oppenheimer I put all the black-and-white scenes into italics, for example – trying to find ways to give the reader the feeling of editing.

**John:** Greta Gerwig was in your seat a couple years ago talking through Little Women. That was a story that also jumped back and forth between a present timeline and a past timeline. For her script, all the scenes that were in the past were in red. Rather than in italics, they were in red. We talked through that as a process.

For folks who haven’t seen the Oppenheimer screenplay, if you’ve seen the movie, you know that there’s two concurrently running stories. There’s Fission and Fusion. Fission is Oppenheimer’s story more directly. It’s in color. That’s him telling his story. It’s the “I, narrator” part of that. Then there’s the story of Fusion, which is the investigation after the fact. It’s all done in black and white. In the screenplay version of it, all those black-and-white scenes are in black and white. How early on in the process of putting this together did you realize you were going to tell those two stories that way, that those were going to be in black and white, and that on a page you would delineate them differently?

**Christopher:** Really before I wrote anything, other than notes. My process has tended to be more and more one of spending months thinking about the film, thinking about the script, what it’s going to be, and almost not letting myself write until I feel like really I’m ready to go, like I really need to. Structure to me is part of that.

My first film, a film called Following, which is shot 16 mil, black and white, has a nonlinear structure. I came up with the structure before I wrote the script. That’s what I generally do. It’s three braided timelines. I decided the way I want to write the script, I’m going to write it chronologically, so that everything makes sense, and I know that it all works, base rules, and then I’m going to cut it up. In fact, then I was probably physically cutting up. Actually, I think I had a word processor for my second draft. But for the first draft, where I wrote it chronologically, I was typing it out and then cutting and pasting it to the structure. That didn’t work very well, because what I found is you then had to rewrite endlessly to try and create the flow.

**John:** Because the experience of the reader, the experience of the viewer is going to be start to finish.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** They’re not jumping that same way that you are.

**Christopher:** They’re not jumping that same way. What I had uncovered is the reason why applying an editorial structure to a project that didn’t have it baked into the script never works. The studios will go to that sometimes. It’s sort of, “How do we say this thing?” But you always feel it, because it has to be part of the script.

Now, with Following, it was written to the structure. In my mind, I’d figured it out, but I thought that I would cleverly write it chronologically, rearrange it. The amount of rewriting involved in that was such that I’ve never done that since. I’ve always now written, whatever the structure is, I write from page 1 through to page 123 or whatever, or in the case of Oppenheimer, 180.

That way, when you’re doing a film like Memento, for example, which has an inverted chronology… I say nonlinear because – it’s actually very linear – it’s very connected, but it is inverted. If you analyze that screenplay, I wrote it from the first image that the audience would see to the last, so it has a conventional three-act structure underneath, or underpinning the more elaborate temporal construction of it. I think that’s an important reason why the film worked for an audience.

**John:** When you’re writing a script, be it Following or be it Oppenheimer, who is your intended reader? Who do you visualize reading the script, or do you visualize a person who’s sitting there reading through the script, and that you are whispering in their ear to them the story?

**Christopher:** I think it depends on what mood I’m in. I think sometimes it’s the person at the studio who’s going to read it, literally, because you’re thinking about you’re selling something that you already know is worthwhile, if you like. But at other times, it’s very much for myself or for a perceived audience.

I always try to view the screenplay first and foremost as a movie that I’m watching. I’m seeing it as a series of images. I’m imagining watching it with an audience. Then I think before I ever show it to anyone, there’s a pass where I’m imagining the studio reading it. What do we actually have on the page? What works?

One of the big differences I’ve found in terms of nonlinear construction – I think right back to Following, every project I’ve done – when I’ve got into the edit suite, I have found the need to combine the first two sections of any nonlinear, segmented timeline. I did it with Following. I did it with Memento, definitely. I did it with Batman Begins, I remember. Oppenheimer, we did that.

What I’ve come to realize over the years is, because when you show someone a screenplay with a nonlinear structure, you have to teach the readers the structure right away. But movie audiences don’t respond to that. If you’re jumping around too much at the beginning of a movie, the audience just lets it wash over them, and they wait for the movie to start. They wait to find their feet. With every project, I’ve simplified the structure at the front-end so that the audience can connect with the characters and can connect with the type of narrative it is, and then you start jumping around.

I’m fascinated by these things. It’s an area where you see the inadequacy of the screenplay formatting. A lot of filmmakers have chafed at this. Stanley Kubrick famously would swap around the margins and have the dialogue run to the outside margins and the stage directions in the middle. Everyone’s struggling against, “Okay, how do I make a film on the page?” I’m fascinated by that. I don’t mind it. I enjoy the screenplay format very much. I could never write a novel. I wouldn’t know how to find an authorial voice in that way. I love the screenplay form, because it’s stripped down, bare bones. You’re writing things as if they were facts, things that happened. For me, it’s a really fun way to write, but there are these endless conundrums. Do you portray the intentionality of the character? Do you portray a character opens a drawer looking for a corkscrew?

**John:** That’s information that’s not necessarily in evidence, but-

**Christopher:** Unless they pull the corkscrew out-

**John:** Absolutely.

**Christopher:** … how is anyone ever going to know that? I started off in my early scripts being very, very rigid. I wouldn’t even use a character name until somebody had called the character by name. That was very useful for me as a screenwriter but also as a director, a writer-director, because it meant that I was always aware of the fact of have I communicated the information about who this character is or haven’t I.

The problem is you have to show the script to a lot of people who aren’t reading your screenplay as a movie. They’re reading it as a screenplay. They’re reading it for information about what character they’re playing or what costumes are going to be in the film or whatever that is. Over the years, it varied project to project, but you try to find a middle ground where you’re giving people the information they need, but you’re not violating what you consider your basic principles as a writer.

With Oppenheimer, I decided to write the script in the first person. In doing that, I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t cheating, because the temptation if you start writing the first-person, start writing the, “I went into the room. I sat down at the desk,” all the rest, I love the effect that had on the writing and the relationship with the reader to the film, but I didn’t want to cheat. And so what I did is I wrote quite a few scenes at the beginning, maybe almost the whole first act in the third-person, conventionally, so that I knew that everything worked technically the way it needed to for a screenplay. Then I put it into first-person without changing anything other than the… That worked beautifully for me. That hooked me right in. I knew I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t describing thoughts that no one would be able to convey, that kind of thing.

**John:** For listeners who haven’t read through these pages yet, it’s a little shocking at first, when you first come across the “I” on the page. You’re reminded that screenplays are traditionally written in either the third-person or the second-person plural, “we hears,” “we sees,” as if you’re an audience member staring up at the screen. In your screenplay, I still feel like I’m an audience member watching, but the “I” in this is Oppenheimer. In all the places where you would’ve had to type Robert or Oppenheimer, you’re typing “I,” and there’s “mes” and there’s some “wes.” The first time you catch a “we,” you realize, oh, it’s not we as the audience, it’s Oppenheimer and another character, which is exciting and thrilling. But it does anchor us into his point of view through that whole sequence, that he is always the person driving that scene. He’s our POV character in all those moments.

**Christopher:** It was a big breakthrough for me. I knew the structure I wanted. I knew that I wanted to tell the story subjectively. But I knew that I didn’t want to use voiceover. The thing about voiceover, it’s seductive when you’re looking for a subjective storyteller, because of that first-person. I was actually stuck.

My brother Jonah and I, we were quarantining in a house together. I was writing downstairs. He was writing upstairs. Came up with this idea, and I thought, I’m not going to say anything to him. I’m just going to rewrite what I’ve done and then show him the first act, just say, “Look, just gut check, what do you think?” without drawing any attention to it, because I was very excited by it. It freed me up from feeling the need for voiceover, because I felt that the script was giving me the subjectivity in a different way. He read it and was like, “Yep, don’t know why no one’s done that before, but that works.” What he said to me made me laugh. But for years and years, I’ve written scripts where you have to read the stage directions. I’ve never found any way to get anybody to read the stage directions.

**John:** Of course.

**Christopher:** He said to me, “You finally found a way to get people to read the stage directions,” because when you put them in the first-person, people value them as information, so they read all of them. Indeed, with this script, people really did read the stage directions in a way that they never have in my other scripts.

**John:** Since we’re on medium, would you mind reading, on page 1 of the script, it’s scene 2. Basically, we’ve opened the film with this imagery that you talk about, this poetic imagery, “A vast sphere of fire, the fire of a thousand suns, slowly eats the night-time desert.” There’s two quotes. But then rather than moving into a location, we’re landing on a face. Would you mind reading us that?

**Christopher:** Yeah, Scene 2. “A face. Gaunt, tense, eyes tightly shut. The face shudders- the sound ceases as my eyes open, staring into camera: Peer into my soul- J. Robert Oppenheimer, aged 50, close-cropped graying hair. The gentle sounds of bureaucracy… Super title: ‘1. Fission.'” That’s the one time where we have Fission, and then we have Fusion.

**John:** How early on in the process did you decide to start in this moment? Through a lot of this movie, we’re inter-cutting between two hearings or two moments, two events. One is this room, 2022, this Atomic Energy Commission interview. There’s also a Senate hearing. How early in the process did you know that those were going to be keystone, anchoring moments for the story?

**Christopher:** I had to know that before I started writing the script. I can only start writing when I have the structure in place. I was adapting American Prometheus, wonderful book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, I think. It took 25 years of research and writing for these guys to produce this book. It’s this incredible resource, but it’s 700-and-something pages. It’s a massive tome. My approach was to read it, not take notes, nothing, read it again. I read it a couple of times and then just spent a lot of time thinking about what had struck me about it, about what I was interested in, what I would tell somebody about this story. Based on those notes, I started to feel out what were the things that were going to give me the structure I wanted. I knew I wanted subjectivity. In a way, to do that, I felt like I also needed objectivity crosscut with that. I needed two timelines braided together.

There’s a reference about two-thirds of the way through American Prometheus. There’s a reference to the Senate confirmation hearings that Lewis Strauss, ultimately the antagonist, we’ll reveal to be the antagonist in the story, was subjected to. As a writer, immediately grabbed that and went, oh, there’s a really interesting relationship between what happened to him in five years – I think it was five years later, ’59 and ’53 – what he had done to Oppenheimer and then what was done to him. Very, very similar. As a writer, you’re always looking for those kind of poetic echoes, those kind of rhyming relationships in narrative. I chased that down.

I went to the Senate congressional record of those hearings, went through the testimony and found some incredible things in there, and then started to create in my mind this timeline of, okay, if we keep coming back to this, we keep coming back to the greenroom, him preparing for his testimony, and then eventually we go in and we see the testimony. We see those things based on the transcript, when scientists came and testified against him in this very public way. I got really interested in the parallelism with the security clearance hearings of Oppenheimer, which were done in exactly the opposite way.

What happened to Strauss was very, very public, and it was in a very grand setting, in Washington. What he had put in place, orchestrated for Oppenheimer, was more or less a broom closet. It was the most, deny him all of the limelight, sweep it all under the rug. The contrast of the two things, that, I started to get excited about. There are all kinds of interesting parallels of what happened to him.

For example, I started to realize, while reading the objections in the Oppenheimer transcript, which is also about a thousand pages – and I made it all the way through that one, because it’s so compelling – I found things like Oppenheimer strongly and his lawyers strongly objecting to the fact they had no list of witnesses. Strauss in the congressional testimony is making the same complaint, that they’re not giving him a list of witnesses. Things like that, that as a writer, you’re like, “This is such a gift.”

Then of course, you have the fun of going into these written transcripts that have no indication of tone, of voice. They’re not giving you any information. They’re very dry in terms of the format. In a funny sort of way, not to sound massively pretentious, but you have to interpret them. It felt a bit like what my friend Ken Branagh must do when he does a Shakespeare film, where he’s having to… Yeah, the words are there, but what are you going to do with them?

That was really a fun thing, but it also felt I’ve got a responsibility, actually, because you’re taking Edward Teller’s exact words that he said about whether Oppenheimer should be given the security clearance, and then you’re editing them, presenting them to the actor, presenting them dramatically in the screenplay, saying, what did that mean? I’m pretty sure I knew what it meant, but you don’t actually get to hear them say it, because there are no recordings.

**John:** You have the book. You have your original research in two different areas, all this stuff. But we skipped over the part of why you were curious about it in the first place. This is a book that existed, that was acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning. But when did it enter into your orbit, and what made you read it the first time and the second time and the third time? When did you decide, “This is a story I want to tell. This is a movie I want to make.”

**Christopher:** Something of a long story. Oppenheimer first came into my consciousness when I was a teenager growing up in United Kingdom. The threat of nuclear weaponry was very much in the news. It was very much in the zeitgeist at the time. It was something we were all very, very concerned about.

**John:** We’re the same age. That very much was that experience. That was our anxiety source at all times.

**Christopher:** You remember the pop culture at the time, things like The Day After and Threads and these movies, When the Wind Blows, Sting’s song Russians, where he refers to Oppenheimer’s deadly toys. I think that’s probably the first time I encountered the name. Over the years, he’s a personage, I didn’t know a lot about him, but things about him would pop into my conscious, probably a lot from my brother, actually, who was very interested in these kind of things. But at some point, I got a hold of the bizarre fact that in the buildup to the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists could not completely eliminate the possibility of a chain reaction that would destroy the world, and yet went ahead and pushed that button.

I included that in my previous film, Tenet, in the screenplay, because I needed a strong and understandable analogy for a very complex science fiction conceit. I think it was one of those moments of the screenplay, it always felt like it would probably come out of the finished film, because it’d be too much, too much dialogue, whatever. But when we would screen it for people, they grabbed a hold of the Oppenheimer name. It was something they knew a little bit about. Even if they’d never heard that story, they knew it was a real thing. So we kept it in the film, and it was important to us in the film.

As a wrap gift, Robert Pattinson, who’s in Tenet, he gave me a book of Oppenheimer’s published speeches from the 1950s, where he’s speaking to the issue of how to control what to do about this new technology they’ve unleashed on the world. It’s terrifying reading this stuff, reading these brilliant minds discussing how to stop the world being destroyed. It brought it all back to me, really.

Then Emma and I – Emma Thomas, my producer and my wife – we spent a weekend with our old friend Chuck Roven, who produced The Dark Knight trilogy with us. He suggested that I read American Prometheus. He knew the rights-holders. It was something he’d been trying to push forward. I read it, and it was that wonderful feeling you get where you’ve been interested in something, you’ve been trying to explore it in different ways, but not quite knowing what to do with it, and then you read this book that’s so definitive.

As a writer, when you’re working, particularly when you write on spec, because I always write on spec – I write the screenplay, and then I try to write a home for it – and so you don’t have a legal department. You’re on your own. It’s like, okay, I need authority. I need an authoritative source that I can contain myself to, just look at that, get my facts from there, and know that I’m playing in the world of credible, call it journalism, credible writing that’s been vetted over the years, so I’m dealing with the truth as best people can understand it. The different points of view are presented fairly, as they are in the book. It’s a very good book. That gave me the confidence to want to start telling the story. It started to show me what the shape of it could be. By dealing with J. Robert Oppenheimer as an individual, as a person, with all his human flaws, with all of his brilliance and all of that, how the entire history of nuclear weapons, the way in which the world had shifted and pivoted on its axis, it gives you a very accessible point of contact with that.

**John:** Yes. That’s great. Now, looking at your produced credits, this seems to be your first adaptation, or first real-life story, but you’ve gone through this process before. This wasn’t your first time tackling a historic subject to do this, right?

**Christopher:** For British people, Dunkirk is a very well-known, a very important piece of national history, or even mythology, really. As I approached it and I looked at and I researched it, I realized that to tell the story the way I felt it needed to be told, I couldn’t do that with real-life people. I needed to invent characters to take you through. It’s a slightly strange comparison, but it’s not unlike Titanic, what Cameron’s doing there, where he needs fictional characters to be able to move them through the event in such a way that you get a full understanding of the geography of it or the fact of it.

The thing about Dunkirk is it’s a story of collective endeavor. It’s a story about massive numbers of people and movements of people and how that works. There’s a tricky thing with how you approach that. A lot of filmmakers, a lot of writers have done it in very different ways. I think if you were writing it for television, it would be one approach. I think for a feature, what I felt would work – and it seemed to work well for audiences – was to create fictional characters with no backstories, no conventional character treatment.

The script was a very, very experimental document. It was very short. It was a 90-page script. The characters were really just their actions. That’s what these characters were. Some people you would show that to would get it. Some actors you show it to would be confused by that. Others would get it. But I felt that was the way to take you through that very large event and have an understanding of the geography of it, the politics of it, the thing of it. It was very minimalist dialogue. It was, as I say, no backstories for characters, things like that. It was very stripped down.

Coming to Oppenheimer, it’s a similarly important story. Dunkirk is sacred ground for British people. I think the Manhattan Project, the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, these things are unbelievably important to the world as a whole, and particularly to America and Japan. You’re then looking at, okay, how do you take on something that’s so much bigger than what a movie can be, in a way, and taking the real-life person, taking the opposite approach to Dunkirk and saying, okay, this is actually his experience, and we’re going to lock into his point of view on everything.

Then the other thread, the more objective thread comes in, in order to give you the necessary exposition about what happens to him later in life, about the politics, about how his actions then interact with the establishment, and introduces this character of Lewis Strauss that I became very, very obsessed with – and Robert Downey Jr ultimately played him in the film – and their relationship. I looked at it from almost the Salieri-Mozart view from Amadeus, which is a wonderful, wonderful play and then film, about rivalry and the weirdly trivial personal interactions that can drive a very destructive rivalry.

**John:** How early in the process did you have a sense of thematically… You knew that you were talking about Oppenheimer. You had a sense that Strauss would be the other central character. But was it during the writing process that you found those thematic things that tied together? You talked about rhymes that happen. Compartmentalization as a theme, the way that you try to hold different parts of your life separate, the question of who wants to justify their whole life, which is asked twice in the course of the story, when did you know that those were going to be some of the central questions and how things would thread together? You say you hold off writing as long as you can, then you sit down to do it. But how much discovery is actually happening while you’re typing?

**Christopher:** Enormous amounts. All the things you mentioned were discoveries of actually writing. What I try to come up with is the parameters. The structure’s very important, but the parameters, what the film’s going to be, what the three-act structure’s going to be. But you have to leave room to play. I love to overwrite, as I was saying earlier.

**John:** When you say overwrite, are you writing scenes that just go on too long or scenes that you don’t need at all?

**Christopher:** I tend to not write scenes that I don’t need at all. It’s more within the scene, particularly with the dialogue, I’ll tend to overwrite. It’s almost like stream of consciousness, monologues kind of thing, that you can then winnow away, find what’s in there that’s the thing you’re trying to express.

I think with thematic connections and ideas, I’ll write notes on those, but some of those ultimately prove too self-conscious. You don’t want to get caught doing it. I’ll write a lot of those, write a lot of notes. I don’t use the outline. I don’t use the notes. I’ll write the script. If I get stuck, I’ll then go back through pages and pages of notes, to see did I miss something, was this something. Sometimes you pick things up, and you put them back in. With those kind of elements, the elements you’re talking about are the things that sit outside the narrative in a way. They comment on the narrative. They’re the meta things. They’re very tricky.

**John:** They’re tricky unless characters are introducing them in ways that are germane to the scenes that they’re in. Compartmentalization is-

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** … incredibly important within the context.

**Christopher:** It naturally starts to become a reflection or an irony that the person must oppose to compartmentalization, as Oppenheimer, and ultimately that’s what makes… It almost defines him by the end of the film. But I wasn’t too self-conscious about that. When I say tricky, I don’t mean… It’s exactly as you say. It has to be germane to the story, or it has to be absolutely necessary so you do it anyway.

There’s a line in Dunkirk that always causes me a certain amount of, I don’t know, guilt or whatever, because I have a soldier late on talk about survival and define survival. I think the line is he says, “Survival is shit. Fear and greed squeeze through the bowels of men.” That’s the thing. I always knew that that’s not a valid line to have a soldier say in the middle of a situation. It’s a very retrospective sentiment. We all have these things. The joy of being a writer-director is you do get the ultimate say onto whether or not it stays. That’s one where it’s like, it’s wrong, but I’m glad it’s in the movie, and I kept it. Luckily, nobody ever demanded I take it out.

I read, years ago, an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson where he talked about things that you write into a script, and you’re like, “Oh, I’ll fix that later.” Quite often, they become things. Quite often, it’s the things that don’t work or the mistakes or the things that don’t quite fit the pattern that you wind up actually valuing, that give the thing its idiosyncrasy. For my process, as I write, I’ve done a lot of thinking, I’ve done a lot of notes about those kind of elements, and then I want to forget them and try and write from the point of view of character and story and what’s really going on in the narrative, what feels necessary.

**John:** Let’s talk about what’s actually on the page, because your writing style is relatively spare. You talk about you don’t want to intrude and reveal inner character thoughts when the audience wouldn’t necessarily be able to see those. You’re not describing sets much. We’re in these places often, but you’re not giving a lot of set decoration. You’re not talking a lot about wardrobe or props, unless they are used within the moment. Has that always been your style? Has your screenwriting style changed over the last 20, 30 years?

**Christopher:** I think for me, it’s been a continual journey to try and strip it down. I enjoy that style of writing anyway, but frankly, as scripts have gotten longer and the films have gotten longer and I’m trying to stuff more and more into the sausage, you really do try to strip it down. I try to write scripts that really will be a page a minute, which if you tend to over-describe things or describe things in too literary a way, the scripts are going to get very long. Then is anyone going to trust that you’re actually… I like to be able to look at the bones of it and know when I’m describing that stained glass window that’s behind you right now, that doesn’t take any screen time. I try to write in a way that reflects screen time, that reflects the kinetic energy. Then you strip down to just the necessary beats. Has it changed for me over the years? I think I got better at it. But different films require different approaches as well.

The funny thing is when you’re in it, when you’re writing – I’m sure this is the same for you – these things seem so important and unquestionable. I remember being at a party when I was writing Dunkirk. I was talking to a fellow writer, who writes TV. I said, “I’m doing this thing, and I’ve decided I want to write it with no dialogue,” whatever, and this, that, and the other, and said a few things. Then he said, “Why?” Of course, I had no answer. It was so clear to me that that would be a good thing to do, that that would be inherently somehow positive to strip away dialogue and just go with action for this cinematic thing.

You become very, very convinced – and I think you need to become very convinced – that you’re doing it the only way that it’s possible, the only way that would ever make a good film. Of course, it’s not true, and there are a million different ways to approach things. You try and get the right approach for the film you’re going to make.

**John:** You talk about kinetic on the page. You definitely sense the editor on the page. You have a tremendous number of pre-laps and post-laps that make it really feel like this is the experience of watching the movie, that the dialogue is going to anticipate the cut, that we’re going to continue on a little bit after the cut. Things are going to braid themselves together well. Someone who didn’t know might just assume, oh, it’s the editor who moved that stuff around, but it’s very deliberate and clear on the page. You get out of scenes with energy leaning forward that tumbles you into the next scene. That’s why the movie can be the length and the size that it is, and it still feels fast and still feels like it’s moving really quickly.

**Christopher:** There’s something that’s always been very important to me. Dunkirk actually was the extreme of that, because I came up with a structure based on a musical concept of the Shepard Tone, which is this audio illusion of continually rising pitches. I’ve always been interested. I’ve used it in scores for a lot of my films, actually, and for sound effects. The sound of the bat pod in The Dark Knight is a Shepard progression. I figured out that I could apply it to screenwriting, that in that instance of Dunkirk where I’m looking for this incredibly tense experience, I could braid the storylines together in such a way that one of them is always hitting a moment of crisis. There’s no relief in the film whatsoever, which is why the film had to be short, because there’s no time to catch your breath, which is the point of it. It was very important that that work on the page.

When I talked about the script for Dunkirk, I remember I literally said to Emma at some point, “What if we did it without a script? What if we just [indiscernible 39:33]?” She quite sensibly was like, “No, you need to go write the script.” What I was aiming at is looking for a way that the script could become transparent in a way, that it could be the guide for the kinetics of the cinematic action and just show you. I knew what I needed to film in terms of the physics of what was going on and which ships were sinking and what was going on with the mole or whatever. I was trying to look at it as a real-life event and staging it and shooting it. The screenplay was all about the points and moments of energy.

In a way, it’s not that I ever could’ve made the film without the script. I don’t think you can make any good film without a script. But the script was a map for how to edit the footage together, more than any other script I’ve ever written. That was really the whole point of it. It was a map for Lee Smith, my editor on that film, to sit down and go, “Okay, this is how this all works,” and to tell us how to shoot it in a way that would accommodate that.

With Oppenheimer, it’s a more conventional approach, more traditional approach, but always, that same element is important to me, of trying to incorporate editing into the craft of writing, not because you’re trying to jump ahead, because you know where you want [indiscernible 40:47] because that’s what a screenplay needs to do, because you’re writing it for a medium that enjoys this great privilege of Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C. One filmmaker I showed Oppenheimer to early on said a really wonderful thing to me. You talked about how the film is all montage. What this filmmaker liked about that was that’s what movies do. That’s what’s unique to the medium.

**John:** That’s why you didn’t make a play. You could’ve made a play.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** Your sense of those two storylines happening, you could’ve done it as a play, but it’s not a movie. It’s very different structure, very different idea.

**Christopher:** Exactly. That leads you to this, I don’t know what you want to call it, guiding principle, whatever, impulse, that says that the document of the screenplay has to embrace editing. For me, that has to be part of my writing process, or I’m not using the screenplay for what it can do fully. It’s like tying a hand behind your back. When I talk about overwriting, I’m really talking about within a scene and then all the script as a whole and then trying to winnow it down and just really use editing in a very surgical way, to strip things down, but be able to explore a lot of different ideas at the same time.

**John:** What is your writing process? When do you like to write? How much are you trying to get done in the course of a day? When you actually sat down to write Oppenheimer, what was your workflow like?

**Christopher:** I think, like a lot of writers, I like to write about five minutes before I actually start writing, and then I like to write about 10 minutes after I’m finished. I think writing’s very hard and very lonely. Like all writers, I try to find my way to trick myself into it, into whatever. I’ve learned a few things over the years.

When I went to university, I went to a lecture by Julian Barnes, a novelist, and he said a thing that stuck with me and I’ve used myself, which is, at the end of an evening or a day’s work, he’ll try to finish halfway through something, because then when he comes back the next day, he knows where he’s going, and he can get started. That’s something I’ve definitely tried to do. I try to be reasonably disciplined and then write office hours for most of it, and then not do all-nighters or crazy hours until you absolutely have to, until you’re on the case of something.

The thing that I’ve learned, that every writer needs to learn, the thing that I know absolutely, is that feeling you have that you can write something, when you know, “Okay, I’ve got it now,” you have to write exactly then and get it on the page, because that feeling will disappear like a fart in the wind. It’ll be gone. You’ll come back to the desk, and you’ll be like, “What was it?” You can write notes. That’s not going to help. You just have to sit down and write it.

With Oppenheimer, I knew what the end of the film was going to be. That was important to me. It’s always important to know where you’re going with the end, with any movie. But I woke up in the middle of the night with the whole last three or four scenes figured out. I got up in my underpants, went down, crossed the garden into my office, sat and just wrote it. I think I didn’t get my computer. I think I wrote it on a legal pad. But I wrote it as foreseen, and it never changed.

I’ve learned that over the years. It’s a really important thing for everybody to know, because the feeling is so convincing that you’ll always be able to write it. It’s like being drunk, then sobering up, or vice versa. You’re a different person the next day, and you don’t have it anymore, and then you’ve got to think your way back into it.

I also like to use music a lot. What I’ve found is if I use music repetitively in my writing process, that’s another way, it’s another shortcut to getting back into the mindset that you were in a couple days ago, an emotional mindset.

**John:** At the start of a project, I’ll generally make myself a playlist of like, this is the music that reminds me of what this movie is.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** Then I can play that and like, “Oh, okay.” So if I have to come back to something six months later, “Oh, that’s right, that’s the John who was writing that,” and I can remember what that-

**Christopher:** Yeah. It’s a huge emotional connection, emotional cue. I find I’m unable to make a playlist in advance. I have to feel it out as I go try different bits of music, try to see what connects me to my excitement about the project. It’s a great shortcut for putting yourself back in a particular emotional state, because I think writing’s a very emotional process. People always view it as an intellectual process, but I actually think the actual writing is emotional. It speaks to that, when I was saying that those elements are tricky, those elements that are about or reflect on the narrative or create connections. Those are the intellectual things. They’re the things we like to discuss. But they have to be emotional. If they’re emotional in the story, then they work.

For me, I think a lot of my note-taking process and a lot of my thinking about what I’m going to do when I write, that is intellectual. I do a lot of diagrams. Big fan of Venn diagrams for different narratives or whatever. When I go to write, then I have to be in an emotional state, and I have to write from an emotional perspective.

**John:** Absolutely. You said those last scenes you wrote, they didn’t change at all, but looking through the script, I do see blue revisions, pink revisions, yellow revisions, so some stuff changed along the way. I asked because I’m working on the Scriptnotes book right now, which is due January 5th. Oh, god. The chapter I just went through was on script revision. Can you talk about what changed from the first draft to later drafts? Were they things you didn’t need, new stuff you decided to add? What was the process of changing stuff?

**Christopher:** When you’re into the color pages and you’re looking at those production revisions, that’s a complicated issue, because I’m a writer-director, so I will literally sometimes… I remember sitting on LaSalle Street in Chicago filming The Dark Knight. We flipped the [indiscernible 46:48]. I sat down on my laptop, and I wrote a scene and handed it to Gary Oldman or whatever. You’re often creating production revisions under different circumstances than they would normally track if you were in a writers’ room, for example, or if you weren’t on set. Quite often, the changes are weird little… We can’t shoot it in the barn; we’ve got to shoot it in the bar or whatever. You just change that. Then there are fundamental things.

For me, I think what changed in Oppenheimer, there weren’t enormous changes, but things evolved. This is why I very much enjoy directing my own material, being a writer-director, because things like the raindrops as an image, that wasn’t in the draft originally. That came. It’s not on page 1 of the script, because I didn’t want to put it in after the fact and pretend that it was being written that way. It was something that was indicated later in the script. Then as I came to think about it in logistic terms, it’s like, “Okay, that can play as a coda. It could play at the front. There’s things we can do with that.” It has more prominent placement in the finished film. With Jen Lame, my editor, her input, we’re saying, “Let’s try this right up front and really lead with it.”

But over the course of making the film, we started to make the correspondence between this image of the ripples and raindrops and then what he might see when he looks at a map, the circles of fire. I was getting Andrew Jackson, my visual effects supervisor, to make these things up on the spot, say, “Let’s take that raindrop footage, let’s re-project it somewhere, and let’s play around with it.” You’re developing these thematic visual ideas.

I try to use the script as an evolving document, and I try to keep it up to date, because for my own thinking, you can have a clever idea or an idea you think is good, based on what you’re shooting or what’s going on on set. But if it doesn’t work in the screenplay format, it’s probably not as good as you think, actually. I do try to keep the script up to date. I’m not trying to be mysterious with the crew and with my collaborators about how I’m going to use images. I’m trying to keep everybody up to date.

**John:** That’s great. It’s come time in our podcast where we do One Cool Things, where we recommend things to our listeners that they might want to check out. You have a book recommendation, apparently.

**Christopher:** I do. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. It was recommended to me by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It’s a fabulous book that deals with a lot of the things that Oppenheimer deals with. It deals with these brilliant minds and all sorts of extraordinary things in history. Very readable. I highly recommend it.

**John:** Excellent. Great. We’ll put that in the notes. My One Cool Thing is called Infinite Mac. It’s this emulator that just runs in your browser. You go to the site, and suddenly it’s like you’re in a time machine. You can fire up any old Macintosh. It just gave me such a rush of nostalgia for like, “Oh, I remember what that was like.” Suddenly, you’re on the desktop of a very old Mac SE running system 5.2 or whatever. You forget how stuff used to work. You forget just how floppy disks used to work and all the apps that were so important to me in the time, that are now all gone.

**Christopher:** I don’t. I’m still using them.

**John:** It’ll be all new stuff for you.

**Christopher:** It’d be brand new.

**John:** Time travel for me.

**Christopher:** Yes, it’s time looping back on itself. I remember very clearly. I’ve always used ScriptThing, which then became Movie Magic. I remember when it went to Windows, and it slowed down tremendously. I was like, “Can you run it on DOS?” You could run it on DOS. It has a DOS emulator within Windows.

**John:** Wild.

**Christopher:** I am the ultimate Luddite. I still go back to my Royal manual typewriter and do the odd scene on that just to reconnect with it.

**John:** That’s fantastic. Then I’ll send you another One Cool Thing. Someone sent through, the app that we make called Highland, it’s a guy who types on a manual typewriter, but then you basically take a photo of the page, and it scans it in, and it makes it an editable document. It’s if you want to write on a real typewriter, and then it scans it in, so therefore then it can be an editable document [crosstalk 51:12].

**Christopher:** That, I need.

**John:** Just for you, we’ll send you that link.

**Christopher:** Please do. That sounds fantastic.

**John:** That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies that are great. You can 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 dreams. Christopher Nolan, an absolute pleasure to get to talk to you about screenwriting.

**Christopher:** I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.

**John:** Cool.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Jamie in San Francisco, he wrote in to ask, “I wonder if you could talk a bit about the use of dreams in screenplays. John describes dreams as the brain doing laundry or taking out the trash. Craig attributes no meaning or significance to his own dreams. But in movies, it seems the opposite is almost always the case. More often than not, they show us the past or the future or some deeper meaning to the present. Are they a crutch? Are they overused? Are they tropey? Talk to us about dreams.” You made a whole movie where dreams play a giant role. What is your actual belief about dreams for human beings, but also dreams in movies?

**Christopher:** Dreams in movies, it’s very complicated. It took me many, many years to crack Inception, because dreams in movies don’t work, basically. They feel like a cheap… They tend to shortchange the audience. The audience has a very sophisticated mechanism for constructing the reality of a film, that when you then invalidate something, your brain discounts it from the narrative enormously. It’s something that I think studios very often don’t understand about scale and how you achieve scale in a movie. You can have crazy, exotic, wild imagery that might look good in the trailer, whatever, but if it’s subverted in the narrative by being, for example, a dream, it gets written off.

It took me a long time to crack it. I thought a lot about why are dreams problematic in movies. I think it’s because movies are already dreams. I think the way we process films is very similar to the way we process dreams. They are collective dreams in a way. When you write dreams, it’s a hat on a hat. It becomes self-canceling if not handled in the right way.

I think with Inception, I think the way I managed that was to keep dreams extremely grounded and make a big point of the fact that you don’t know you’re in a dream when you’re dreaming it, those kind of things, and constantly remind and involve the audience in the mechanics of the technology that’s using the dreams. The film rarely allows itself to become too metaphysical, too poetic, in the way that dreams often are in films. I think they’re very tricky.

As far as in real life, what are they, that’s hard to answer really. I think they’re our way of processing our lives in a different way, looking at them from a different angle. I think they’re a very healthy and necessary process. I also think, as I say, that films have a wonderful relationship with dreaming and with dreams, and they are our way of connecting. We remember films very much the way we remember dreams.

I had a very interesting experience many years ago. I watched David Lynch’s Lost Highway. I had a peculiar experience. I think I was watching it on VHS at home. I did not connect with the film. I found it impenetrable. I found it boring. I almost didn’t finish watching it, because I was watching it on VHS. Put it to one side, whatever. I’d watched it on my own. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it, wasn’t particularly interested to talk about it. Then about two weeks later, I found myself remembering Lost Highway as if I were remembering one of my own dreams. I realized that however he’d done it, Lynch had found a way… I’m trying to remember which way around it. It is like a tesseract, is a projection of a hypercube, three dimensions.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Christopher:** He found a way of un-peeling the way a dream works in our brain, feeding it to us as a narrative, so that it lives in your brain as a dream. I think it’s one of the strongest examples of that connection between the way we process sights and sounds and motion pictures and the way we feel about our own memories and dreams and those confusions.

**John:** You talking about Memento leads me to another answer to Jamie’s question, is that I think so often dreams don’t work in movies because there are no stakes. There’s no consequence.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** Just characters within that. What you do with Inception so well is that there are huge consequences. The whole thing is about the consequences and the plan for why this dream is happening. We as an audience know why this dream is important, why it matters, and what is at stake for the characters. Nightmare on Elm Street, we know that those dream sequences actually matter, because the character is going to die in a dream.

**Christopher:** Exactly, or The Matrix. The Matrix, it’s dreaming. It’s induced by the machines, but that simple thing of your mind makes it real and the blood coming out somebody’s nose, and you know, okay, yeah, there are stakes. Very similar to William Gibson novels like Neuromancer, where you have that concept of how you can be hurt. Is it Black Ice? I can’t remember. The internet becoming a thing that can actually hurt you, cyberspace becoming a thing that can actually hurt you. Then yeah, the stakes are there.

But the truth is, I think with dreams in particular, even introducing stakes, there’s still a real danger with the imagery of them, with the fanciful nature of the imagery, and what it buys you and what it doesn’t buy you, how it integrates into the film. You want everything you put in the film to be owned by the narrative. You want it to feel solid and valid as something you’ve paid your $15 for, bought your popcorn. Otherwise, you feel cheated.

In a weird way, it’s a little off topic, but when I showed Ken Branagh the script for Oppenheimer, he did ask me, as a fellow filmmaker – this is why it’s great to work with other filmmakers, even if they’re just acting in a film – but he said to me, “You’re never cutting away to World War II or to the War Room.”

I thought about it. It’s like, okay, I’ve seen a lot of films do that. Particularly in a CG era, those images, they tend to sit as if they’re not in the film. They actually make the film feel smaller. They’re always in there as an attempt to make the film feel bigger, but they actually shrink the world of the film, because they don’t feel valid. They don’t feel earned. As I say, in a CG era, the texture of them will be completely different to the main unit photography. I think the treatment of dreams in films, the other thing it’s like is voiceover. It can be amazing. It can be incredibly useful.

**John:** It has to be fundamental to the structure of the story.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** It has to be part of the social contract at the very start of the film.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** Clueless doesn’t work without the voiceover, but if you try to put that in after the fact, disaster.

**Christopher:** Yes, and giving voiceover a bad name, because most often when you see it, somebody slapped it on at the end to try to make it work. But done right, planned, put into the script, that’s when it works.

**John:** Jamie did not know he was going to get you answering his question about dreams. I think Jamie’s probably very excited that you weighed in here. Christopher Nolan, thank you again.

**Christopher:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Oppenheimer – The First Three Pages](https://www.experienceoppenheimer.com/words)
* [Christopher Nolan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Nolan) on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/).
* [American Prometheus](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/13787/american-prometheus-by-kai-bird-and-martin-sherwin/) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
* [The Open Mind](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2776777) by J. Robert Oppenheimer
* [The Shepard Tone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0)
* [When We Cease to Understand the World](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62069739-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world) by Benjamín Labatut
* [Infinite Mac](https://infinitemac.org/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* 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 and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/622standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/how-would-this-be-a-bio-pic).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** It is Episode 621 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

The past few weeks have offered up a lot of big personalities in the news, with some of these individuals dying or being fired or removed from Congress. Today on the show, we ask the most important question, of course: how would this be a biopic?

**Craig:** Thank you for saying BAI-oh-pik and not bai-AH-pik.

**John:** A film that is a biographic is a BAI-oh-pik, but sometimes it’s written out as without a hyphen, and it becomes bai-AH-pik. That’s not a thing.

**Craig:** That’s not a thing. I think people are confusing it with myopic, which is understandable, but also not understandable, because it’s not like we refer to people’s bios as bai-AHs.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So BAI-oh-pik, everyone.

**John:** BAI-oh-pik.

**Craig:** BAI-oh-pik.

**John:** We’re making a strong stand here for that.

**Craig:** Damn right.

**John:** We also have some follow-up on AI and inner monologues. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, I want to pontificate about which event in history has had the biggest negative impact on human civilization.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah, so some college stoner talk here.

**Craig:** Woo! Okay.

**John:** Maybe think about some alt histories there. We also have some news. We have a live show coming up, this Sunday, December 17th, at 4:00 p.m. The show’s going to be sold out by the time you’re listening to this.

**Craig:** Of course. We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.

**John:** It’s going to be at Dynasty Typewriter again. There will be some streaming tickets available. If you’re listening to this on the Tuesday that the episode drops, check the link in the show notes for our live show at Dynasty Typewriter. We’re going to have some great guests. It’s our holiday show. It came together kind of last minute, but we’re very excited to do it.

**Craig:** Who is it benefiting this time?

**John:** This time it’s benefiting the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** Fantastic, which does excellent work supporting veterans and the writing community in general. Just so people know, it’s not the Writers Guild. It is the charitable nonprofit arm of the Writers Guild, vaguely associated.

**John:** We’ve done a lot of shows with them, for them over the years. It’s nice to be back doing one for them. Now, before we get into the work follow-up here, apparently there’s an important bit of Melissa follow-up about Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** We are recording this on December 3rd. It is Melissa’s birthday, by the way. Happy birthday, Melissa.

**John:** Happy birthday, Melissa.

**Craig:** She said, “I have follow-up for you.”

**John:** We should say that Melissa Mazin is your wife.

**Craig:** She is my wife, and has been for quite some time. She said, “In your last show about Thanksgiving, you said that the women,” meaning her and our friend Beth, “were not allowed to cook,” that Josh and I were the only ones who were allowed to cook. She said, “That’s not accurate. We chose not to cook.” Now, I’m going to say, in follow-up to that follow-up, we haven’t ever gotten to the place where we would need to say to her, “You’re not allowed to cook.” If she chose to cook, there would have to be a discussion. But she wanted it to be clear that she didn’t need permission. She simply wasn’t interested.

**John:** That’s a fair distinction there. I think many cases in life, you can see, was that actually a choice, did she actually have the ability to choose to cook, and was that denied from her.

**Craig:** She feels she had the choice. There’ll be follow-up to this one on a subsequent podcast.

**John:** Apparently so. It’s nice to know that Melissa does listen to the show.

**Craig:** Religiously.

**John:** That’s great. By religiously, you mean that she listens with votive candles burning around her.

**Craig:** With my face on them. Absolutely.

**John:** Let’s get to some less controversial follow-up. We’ll start with David. This is back to Episode 620. We were talking about visual effects and digital doubles and AI. David writes, “The bad crowd work mentioned in Prom Pact, that was meme-ified as, quote, ‘Disney put AI people into this crowd.’ That wasn’t AI. That was just cheap VFX, likely done at the last second.”

**Craig:** That sounds right. In looking at it again, they did seem like were sort of the kinds of people we see in previs stuff. We used to just have storyboards, and now for complicated sequences, we can do previs, where you do get these horror-looking humans. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not meant to be seen by anybody except for you, for planning purposes. I think David’s probably right there.

**John:** I would also say that the differentiation between this is AI versus VFX is increasingly irrelevant. A lot of visual effects are going to have AI components built into them. The fact that it looks terrible doesn’t… Whether it was done with visual effects or AI, it’s not actually so important. It’s the fact that they put something on screen that look like human beings, that were not human beings. That’s the concern.

**Craig:** If we get used to it, if we normalize it, as the kids say, we’re in trouble. Reasonable distinction to make.

**John:** You want to take Alana here?

**Craig:** We’ve got some follow-up from Alana. She is commenting on Episode 611, where I apparently mentioned a screenwriting format that’s divided into two columns, one for what you see and one for what you hear, and that it might make more sense for screenwriting than the current standardized format. “In Mexican telenovelas, the two-column format has been used for decades as the standard screenwriting format, though apparently in recent years, people have turned to the standard format that’s used in most places.” I wonder if perhaps the folks writing the Mexican telenovelas may have gone backwards here, because I think that makes sense. I think it makes sense.

**John:** I was trying to find an example of Mexican telenovelas in the two-column format, because I’m familiar with two-column format, which is often used in commercials.

**Craig:** Commercials.

**John:** Other things, you see it there. Left-hand side is the visuals. The audio, and including the dialogue, is on the right-hand side. Yes, it does kind of make sense overall. I think our current screenplay format, which it’s all one big flow, it reads really well. You can actually read and get a sense of what’s happening very cleanly and smoothly in our current version. There’s trade-offs to doing that two-column format.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think maybe the two-column format might be best used by production. There are times where it’s hard to create simultaneity. We can do it in dialogue, with double dialogue, which I just sort of hate doing anyway, because it just sends the actors into a shouting over each other tizzy. But what’s almost impossible to do is simultaneous action and dialogue. You can do a little bit of it. But even then, if you put it in parentheses, it’s still like there’s a temporal thing. It’s a bit linear. The two-column format does allow for something that’s simultaneous. But I agree with you. It is easier to read. Maybe not as useful for production, but more useful for reading.

**John:** Going back to simultaneity, even in dialogue, when Greta Gerwig was on the show, she was talking about how in her dual dialogue, she had very specific points where she wanted the actors to be overlapping and how things fit together. She put these little slashes in to indicate where these things are supposed to fall. That is the kind of micro-control you would love to be able to have. You’re always going to bump up against the hard limits of how you can portray speech on page.

**Craig:** At some point, you are going to have to explain it to the actors and make sure they understand that this is a technical thing you’re aiming for. I find that actors in general appreciate it if you put it in that context. If you say this is actually going to be a bit technical, then they get it. If you try and convince them that this is about art, then I think reasonably, they’re like, “No. This is not how I would do it. Humans wouldn’t normally do this.” But if you put it in technical terms…

**John:** Follow-up from Joe in New Zealand talking about Episode 615, called The Mind’s Eye. He says, “The discussion about inner monologues hit home for me, because my lovely wife has a primarily outer monologue.”

**Craig:** What?

**John:** “She goes about her days speaking aloud near constantly-”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “… whether she’s in the room alone or in a room with me.”

**Craig:** Oh, Joe, no.

**John:** “Early in our relationship, it caused confusion, because she’s mostly unaware of it. To her, it feels like going from silence to talking when she addresses me, but my attention filter doesn’t always pick up on it. I thought of it as a singular quirk until we visited her family. I found myself in the living room with her, her brother, her father, and her mother, four adults all wandering around, playing with a dog, going about their business, talking constantly.”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “Not to each other, not engaging, not questioning or responding, just a stream of conscious thought flowing out of each of them. It was so funny and so charming in the moment, but I definitely lied about why I was smiling and chuckling. It’s still a minor source of confusion 18 years later, but ever since then, the music of her chatter from the other side of the house is simply one of the many joys of our home.”

**Craig:** This is the most kiwi thing I’ve ever read in my life. Joe, the good news is that your wife, who I will refer to as Mrs. Joe, found the best possible husband. The fact that you consider it a joy is why you are still married 18 years later. I would go insane. I love a quiet house. I don’t know about you.

**John:** I like a quiet house too. It’s nice.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful. I will admit that there are times where I have an outer monologue, and those times are very specifically when I’m working on puzzles. I will start to talk. Melissa will say, “You’re sitting there saying things like, ‘But what is that about? Why would that be there? Oh, okay, so this is absolutely this kind of… Okay, so if I do that…'” I just do it because I’m working weirdly. But if I were to do that constantly-

**John:** You’d be divorced?

**Craig:** No, I’d probably be the victim of a accident.

**John:** This is reminding me of some interview I saw with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They’re talking about their producing partner who apparently had a bit of this, and if they were driving someplace, would have to read aloud every sign that they saw, that they passed. It’s a thing. They have to externalize that stuff.

**Craig:** Just going to have to just bear with them, I guess.

**John:** To some degree, I am talking. I definitely talk to my dog a lot if it’s just me and Lambert.

**Craig:** Everyone talks to their dog.

**John:** Because they’re such good boys.

**Craig:** Lambert is such a good boy. We got some follow-up from Greenhorn from back in 615. Greenhorn says, “My thanks to John and Craig for their helpful advice.” Oh, I remember this. This was the second unit director who was trying to claim co-writer credit.

Greenhorn says, “The pushy second unit director backed down in trying to claim co-writer credit. He said a production company wanted to see a script. I said that I’d need to be paid to write a draft, and then that would also clear up any confusion over our roles. I am the writer, writing a project for you to direct. He accepted this. In his trying to squeeze writer credit, either he as a second unit director thus far was just ignorant of what was fair, as Craig suggested, or he was trying his luck. If the latter, that does not bode well for a working relationship, but I’m so keen to get my break that I’m kind of taking the view that if swimming with sharks is what it takes, so be it, so long as I can protect myself.

“Now, the director said he relayed my response, which is, ‘Pay me for a draft then,’ to the production company, and they replied that they didn’t have a development budget. This company makes $100 million movies, so it’s hard to believe that they can’t afford to pay a writer to write up a script for a project they’re interested in, or is this standard practice in the US?

“I’m a London-based British writer, and happily, I’ve started to get paid to write outlines and scripts, but only today I’ve had a reputable US producer put a writing brief to me. I’ve offered a take on it, which he likes, but he says he’d need a spec, not an outline. I said, ‘I’m being paid to write scripts now, so I’m not looking to write on spec.’ The UK producer I’m speaking with on other projects gladly seem to get this, but this guy just repeated that he’d need a script. It feels wrong and, frankly, insulting that he’s expecting me to give weeks or months of work without any kind of pay or commitment, or is that something that US producers can get away with when a writer hasn’t broken in yet and indeed join the WGA?” Oh, there are some facts we can lay out here, John.

**John:** Yes, there are. Greenhorn, it’s good that you are being paid to write stuff in the UK. You should be paid to write stuff everywhere. Writing something on spec for somebody in a situation you don’t control is not a good practice to get into. For, certainly, a US-based producer, someone who’s a WGA signatory, they should not be doing that at all.

**Craig:** It is a violation of our contract, very specifically, a violation of our minimum basic agreement, our collective bargaining agreement. It also is a violation of the WGA working rules. You are not allowed to write anything on spec for a signatory. You can pitch stuff, but you can’t write. Now, of course, Greenhorn is British. Greenhorn is not in the WGA. This US producer is fully aware of what the deal is. Can they get away with asking a British person to do this? Sure, but it’s wrong. I’m not sure that I would use the word reputable in front of this US producer’s name. If you’re reputable, you don’t ask for this, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** As a reminder, when we talk about writing on spec, this is a thing where you as the writer are choosing to write a project. Ideally, it’s something you own and control. It’s entirely your thing. Now, there could be situations where a producer comes, is like, “I really want to do a movie set at McDonald’s in space.” It’s like, great. You could go off and write that movie, and that person could be interested in your thing, but you control this fully. You cannot do that situation where that producer somehow owns this thing without having paid you money to write it.

**Craig:** That’s right. If you hear an idea and think, “That sounds amazing. I really want to write this,” the deal is that producer is going to attach themselves and maybe just be a dead weight on it. But it’s yours. You own it. They don’t own the copyright. You wrote it. By the way, you shouldn’t write an outline either. You should write nothing unless you have an employment agreement.

Now, that’s how we do it here with WGA writers in our business. The British system is not as protective as ours, which is odd, because they don’t have work for hire. And yet, as we’ve said many times, in exchange for giving up copyright, we get all the protections a union can afford, and it’s clear that they don’t quite have that in the UK.

**John:** Let’s get to our main topic this week, which is how would this be a biopic.

**Craig:** It’s not bai-AH-pik.

**John:** Not bai-AH-pik. It’s a BAI-oh-pik. We had a whole series of deaths happen recently. People who live long lives are just fantastic. We love people living a long time.

**Craig:** Rosalynn Carter.

**John:** I thought we’d start with Sandra Day O’Connor. Sandra Day O’Connor, for folks who are younger or not American, she was our first female Supreme Court justice. She died recently at 93 due to complications related to advanced dementia. She’d been public about the fact that she had dementia coming on.

**Craig:** Yes, so she has not been-

**John:** In public life.

**Craig:** … in the public eye for many, many years.

**John:** She obviously was an inspiration to a generation of female lawyers, as this pioneer there. She grew up in Arizona. She was a graduate of Stanford, went to Stanford Law School. She was dating William Rehnquist while she was there.

**Craig:** So hot.

**John:** So hot. A belated chief justice. But then she went on to marry another classmate, John O’Connor.

**Craig:** Well done. It has to have been an upgrade.

**John:** When she graduated from Stanford Law School, she was turned down by law firms, because she was a woman. She had to start her own firm with her husband. She was an Arizona state senator, first female majority leader. She became a judge through the Arizona system and then was appointed by Reagan to the Supreme Court. She was a deciding vote in a lot of crucial cases. She was a conservative, but she also voted with liberal majority on other situations, in controversial cases.

Probably the thing she’s most noted for is Planned Parenthood versus Casey, about a woman’s right to abortion and the term “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion. Undue burden felt like a good phrase to hang around a story told about her. Craig, how would this be a movie? Is there a movie? What are some comps that you’re thinking in your head?

**Craig:** I think there is a movie. They made a movie about Ruth Ginsburg.

**John:** Yeah, On the Basis of Sex.

**Craig:** Correct. I actually think there may be a more interesting movie to be made about Sandra Day O’Connor. The reason why is, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a progressive firebrand who served faithfully and brilliantly for many, many years, doing exactly what she said she would do. It was one of those stories where somebody is principled, and they stay principled. They face people, obstacles and things in their way. They surmount, and they thrive. Sandra Day O’Connor was far more sneaky. She’s an interesting case of somebody who came up through what you and I knew to be Republicans. That party’s no longer in existence. Might as well call it a different name.

The party of Reagan. In the “only Nixon can go to China” thing, Ronald Reagan, being the first president to appoint a female Supreme Court justice, did so under the aegis of, “This isn’t about women’s lib stuff, of course. She’s a good, staunch conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold.” Like many Supreme Court justices, including some that we have today, she began to surprise people, because while many people disagree with the lifetime appointment clause, what it does is it lets people just do what they want.

**John:** It’s like tenure.

**Craig:** It’s tenure. Sandra Day O’Connor showed an evolution and a wisdom and began to change the way the court was thinking. I love the fact that she dated William Rehnquist. That’s really cool, because then they’re on the court together. That’s fun. There’s cool moments and scenes like that, and also ,somebody wrestling with their own conscience and wrestling with their own principles. The fact that she had to take her husband on just to get a law firm, it’s…You can see somebody compromising until they didn’t have to anymore. That’s really interesting.

**John:** The question of any biopic we’re going to wrestle with a lot-

**Craig:** BAI-oh-pik.

**John:** BAI-oh-pik, gotta say BAI-oh-pik. The question is always where are the edges of this, where do you start the story, where do you end the story. There’s that temptation to do cradle to grave, which I think is generally a mistake. Those are not going to be the most interesting moments of a life. Once you do decide what the more limited window is, do you stay within it, or do you jump out to trace other things? You’re trying to thematically fold this all together.

I can imagine a Sandra Day O’Connor movie that is essentially just about the decision to appoint her and her going in through this moment and surviving that little crucible. I don’t recall her nomination process.

**Craig:** Very smooth.

**John:** So probably not that.

**Craig:** Ronald Reagan had full control.

**John:** He had control of everything.

**Craig:** The Republican Party was a corporation back then and ran like one. The thing I would need is actually information about her marriage, because at the heart of it, you do want that relationship. You want some sort of love story. Same thing that happened with the Ginsburg story. I think also there is something brutal about the greatest minds succumbing to dementia and fading away and what that means for the person who loves her and loved her all that time. That I think is valuable, but it’s also a story of legacy, and that’s really interesting to me. There is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg without Sandra Day O’Connor.

**John:** Absolutely. Depending on where the edges are of the story you’re telling, she was the first, but then Ginsburg is the second woman, I think, on the court.

**Craig:** That sounds right.

**John:** That sounds right. After she’s broken this through, what is it like to have a second woman, once you’ve actually been through there, and how do you-

**Craig:** A woman who’s from, quote unquote, the other side. That’s where it gets interesting. The Supreme Court is notable for very odd bedfellows, weird friendships that form. Kavanaugh, fascinatingly, has become a slightly weird swing vote at times. No one can seem to predict what happens when people get on the court.

**John:** Yeah, because important to recognize that you are appointed because they believe you’re going to have one set of facts, basically that you’re going to be the same person. But of course, people do change over time. That’s why stories are interesting.

**Craig:** Absolutely. When you watch Supreme Court hearings, they are a study in political non-commitment. Everyone knows what’s going on. The job is to be slippery without seeming like you’re slippery, until we all vote yes, and then you’re going to do whatever you want.

**John:** Next up, not controversial at all, Henry Kissinger died recently at 100 years of age.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think this is going to be too… Yeah.

**John:** 100 years old. Actually, you listened to audio this last week of just him at events, coherent and talking at 100 years old, which is great. Statesman, war criminal. Movies have to make choices about how they’re going to portray the complexity of a man’s life.

**Craig:** Kissinger is going to be a movie. That will be a movie.

**John:** 100%. A movie or a mini series. That’s worth talking about.

**Craig:** Movie or a mini series.

**John:** I feel like Sandra Day O’Connor is a movie.

**Craig:** Movie. Kissinger probably you could do a mini series. I’m sure it’s in development already. He falls into the category of monumentous people, for better or worse. He was just this fascinating character, working for a president that openly detested Jews. Here was Henry Kissinger, the most Jewish of Jews.

**John:** Born in Germany. Born Jewish in Germany, fled-

**Craig:** Fled.

**John:** … with his family to New York.

**Craig:** But notably, never lost the accent. He was always an immigrant. For Jewish people, there are levels of assimilation, like there are for any ethnicity in the United States. Having that accent, it’s just remarkable to me. That Nixon-Kissinger relationship is fascinating. There are moments, I think, where Kissinger probably did good, in the way that Lindsey Graham, in his bootlicky way, probably kept Trump from doing some terrible, terrible things. I think Kissinger probably did halt some horrible things. There were some things where he didn’t let Nixon get on the phone because he was drunk. Having somebody that is such an outsider be so inside is fascinating, from a dramatic point of view.

**John:** Absolutely. I was going through the incredibly long Wikipedia article on him, pulling out some little moments. He became a US citizen after he joined the Army to fight in the war. There was a moment which he was just a private during the American advance into Germany and was put in charge of administration of the city of Krefeld, because he was the guy who could speak German, and actually, apparently, did a really good job. It’s just those weird moments of, oh, now we’re fighting the Germans, and you speak German, and that is the moment where you can pick up and shine. That feels like the kind of thing that is in the longer version of this, which is probably the mini series. I don’t know that this fits into the movie.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s why you do want it to be a mini series, because for somebody like Kissinger, you want to walk away… It’s a little bit like the way Sorkin ended Social Network. You feel like you’ve known the spirit of somebody, but you also pity them and loathe them all at the same time. There’s just a core of something that’s sad there. But you can’t make a mini series merely to say, “Bad. This person bad.” That’s not the goal, I don’t think.

**John:** We have some insight into his character, obviously. He gave a lot of interviews. This one interview I wanted to pull out was with an Italian journalist. He writes, “The cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into town and does everything by himself. This amazing romantic character suits me precisely, because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like it, my technique, together with independence. It’s very important for me, and conviction. I’ve always been convinced I had to do whatever I’ve done.”

**Craig:** Yes, which a lot of terrible people also have. Certainly, Kissinger did not lack any conviction. But I would suggest that that is bravado, in that everybody has a dark midnight.

**John:** What does he fear? That’s a thing I don’t think we have a sense of yet, but what the movie or mini series would have to get into.

**Craig:** Given the decisions he was making and the lives that he destroyed, particularly in Cambodia, but all over Southeast Asia, there had to have been moments of doubt, had to, because ultimately, it didn’t work.

**John:** Thinking about the edges of this mini series – it’s going to be a mini series – I think you have to pick an exit point, because he ended up staying in governmental life and policy life up until months ago. He was always an advisor to people. But I don’t think that’s going to be interesting. I don’t think that’s relevant.

**Craig:** Agreed. The meat of it ends with the fall of Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Then I think you jump ahead to him much, much later in life and see him trying to rehabilitate or defend or whatever, and yet still, again, there is that last moment where you have to ask, where is the humanity of this person, and what happened? How does it feel?

**John:** So question of how many actors. Where do you break up his life? Is it three actors? Is there a 20-something, is there a 40-something, and then an old man version? Where are the splits?

**Craig:** If I were doing it, I would probably want just one actor, if I could. If he’s very young in the war – I don’t know how old he was when he was in World War II – then it’s hard. Then you want two. But if he’s a full adult, then I think… Because also, you’re going to need to do some prosthetic work and makeup on somebody to play Kissinger. Nobody’s just walking in the room looking like him. You don’t necessarily want to drift into the whole Saturday Night Live, “Look, I look exactly like the guy.” We had to deal with this with Mikhail Gorbachev in Chernobyl. It was a tricky thing. I feel like you could probably get away with one really, really good actor, because the great bulk of the work is going to be-

**John:** The Nixon era.

**Craig:** … 60s and 70s.

**John:** I’m surprised there’s not a movie out there yet. There’s a documentary Alex Gibney did, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The comps I was thinking about for this, it’s obviously Oppenheimer, a recent version, which was focused though on one moment in his life. I think we’re expanding beyond just the one focal point. It also made me think of, there’s a Michael Jackson biopic coming out. It reminded of just like, wow, you are walking into a minefield there. Talk about someone who’s a hero and a villain.

**Craig:** Yes, and you have to go in knowing that people are going to be critiquing this heavily no matter what you do. There’s no way that you put this out and everybody goes, “Yeah.”

**John:** “Yeah, that’s good.”

**Craig:** “We all agree.” It’s not as simple as something like Frost/Nixon, for instance, where Nixon’s clearly the villain, and really the hero journey there is, will David Frost get this guy to spill it or not. This is different. It’s also different than, the other thing I was thinking about was the John Adams mini series, Paul Giamatti. The point of that was that John Adams, crusty and grouchy and miserable as he was, was perhaps the most important Founding Father. That’s not the case here. This is something else.

**John:** Simpler story perhaps, Rosalynn Carter passed away recently, also in her 90s. She was the First Lady when her husband, Jimmy Carter, was the president. Born in Plains, Georgia, married Jimmy Carter, was politically active during her husband’s entire governorship and presidency. She was very involved as a First Lady. She was in cabinet meetings in ways that was controversial at the time, although there’s precedent for that before then, of course. Active with the Equal Rights Amendments. One of the first modern feminists who was in the White House there. Portrayed as a Steel Magnolia, sweet and loving but spine of steel.

**Craig:** Tough.

**John:** Tough. Criticized for lack of attention paid to fashion, which I think is an interesting thing, the sexism that goes in there. Hard to point to achievements in and of herself. It’s hard to imagine the Rosalynn Carter story that isn’t largely about Jimmy Carter, although I would say a comp for me would be Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, which is looking at the wife of Elvis, rather than that whole story.

**Craig:** But even there in Priscilla, the point is she was a child, that we have forgotten that Elvis essentially was a pedophile, I guess, by modern standards.

**John:** Yeah, by modern standards.

**Craig:** It’s funny. Melissa went to the Stevie Nicks concert last night. Apparently, Stevie’s still crushing it in her 70s. I was like, “Did she play Edge of Seventeen?” “Oh yeah, of course.” I’m like, “That’s about a boy who’s 16, so I guess technically it’s still pedophilia by today’s standards.”

In the case of Rosalynn Carter, to me the story is probably about the relationship between Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter. It’s a little bit more like Johnny Cash. I don’t know. It just feels like on her own… By the way, in a weird way, on Jimmy Carter’s own, even though he was president, I’m not sure there would be enough there. But their relationship was fascinating, so long-lived and so beautiful and decent, and the way that they both just walked the walk. Also, the two of them defined a kind of Christianity that is what I would think of as actual Christianity.

**John:** When you look at the Habitat for Humanity work that Carter was doing later on in his years, it’s literally building houses for people, just like, be a carpenter.

**Craig:** Following the teachings of Jesus and giving and giving and giving. You’d like to think that, in part, that’s why they both made it so far in life. They were fulfilled with each other and by life and their good works, which is in stark contrast to some of the people that we now deal with, these social media-baiting idiots. It’s almost like a different species of person. The sadness of her death to me was more in the context of end of an era.

**John:** I worry about lack of conflict. I don’t know where the source of the conflict is. The conflict doesn’t feel like it’s between the two of them. Who is the antagonist here, and how is she growing and changing? I don’t have a sense of that yet. Any movie is going to need to figure out what that is, because right now, it’s almost Hallmarky in the sense it’s just smooth sailing.

**Craig:** One of the things that drama struggles with is to portray decency, steady, reliable decency, because it’s not interesting. We simply aren’t entertained by it. Neither one of them seemed interested in interesting anyone. They just wanted to do good things. I do think a Rosalynn Carter biopic would be a challenge. Jimmy Carter, you know that he was involved in this insane nuclear accident?

**John:** No, I don’t know anything about that.

**Craig:** Not that he caused it, but he was a nuclear engineer. He worked on nuclear submarines. There was an accident at a reactor. Jimmy Carter and his team was sent in to clean it up, and they did. It was Chernobyl-ish in the fact that they were exposed to quite a bit of radiation and all the rest of it. He was an heroic guy, and I think more than any other president, has received a little bit of historical rehabilitation, at least any other from my lifetime.

**John:** Going back to the whole issues of conflict and where is the conflict in this story, I am aware that we on Scriptnotes are always talking about the hero’s journey, the sense of, oh, this is the character who grows up in a place, leaves the place, is transformed, goes through these trials. That’s not the only way stories can work mythologically. There’s things called the heroine’s journey and other alternative ways of thinking about what a central character’s journey might be. We’re trying to put together an episode talking through these alternate ways of thinking about that.

**Craig:** Listen. Anything that interests people, I think, is the goal. It doesn’t have to be from one perspective or another. What’s fascinating to me is that, as varied as world cultures are, storytelling and mythologizing are incredibly similar. The Hero’s Journey ultimately really was just saying that. The word hero was applied to all genders. It is kind of incredible. It makes me wonder if this way we think about storytelling, it’s just imprinted in the brain. It’s not necessarily cultural. The brain has a way of organizing drama. But that said, I’m open to anything. If it makes people sit forward and engages them, yes.

**John:** I think some of the overlooked stories in mythology would be Demeter’s story, or the kidnapped woman who has to adapt and survive in a place, Medea as a woman who is not a classic protagonist story, yet is a part of foundational.

**Craig:** Great story there.

**John:** It’s a great story though.

**Craig:** Those kids die.

**John:** They do.

**Craig:** She’s angry.

**John:** She’s very angry.

**Craig:** Oh, man, does she get angry.

**John:** You know who else is angry?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** George Santos.

**Craig:** The Pope, George Santos?

**John:** Pope George Santos. For folks who are listening to this years after we recorded it and are going, “Who is George Santos?”

**Craig:** “Who is George Santos?” George Santos, I believe he was the Pope. He was a Jewish, not-Jewish, astronaut, physicist, professor. I think he was the president and also none of those, just a liar.

**John:** George Anthony Devolder Santos we believe is his full name.

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** Spent his early life in Jackson Heights and also in Brazil. He was elected as a US Representative from New York City as a Republican, openly gay. Everything that basically he ended up saying turned out to be a lie.

**Craig:** Lie.

**John:** This was all revealed after he was elected. The New York Times reported how much of his life was misrepresented. There was really a sense of failure of journalism to have not investigated any of this stuff earlier on. He was the sixth person ever kicked out of Congress.

**Craig:** Congress is enormous. 535, I think, people. Over the course of 200 and whatever many years, he’s number six. He not only was a serial fabulist, who for instance eventually would say, “I’m Jew-ish.” He also was a fraud. He was misusing campaign funds to buy fabulous things. We’re talking about him like he’s dead. He’s still alive. He is fascinating.

**John:** Yes. I think he’s a great character.

**Craig:** He is. I love listening to him, because it’s like somebody coming out and saying, “And now, the dumpster fire show.” It’s weirdly funny.

**John:** It’s funny because you recognize he actually has no power. With Trump, it’s terrifying, because like, oh shit, people are actually going to vote for him. Everyone recognizes this is absurd.

**Craig:** It is a remarkable clown show. You’re right. He does feel vaguely innocuous. He did misuse campaign funds, and that’s a crime.

**John:** That’s a crime. He’s indicted. He will probably go to jail.

**Craig:** He will go to prison, as well he should. I hope he does. But he’s also kind of ridiculous. Even when Saturday Night Live would make fun of him, it seemed like they were enjoying it.

**John:** Absolutely. Bowen Yang’s portrayal of him was delightful and funny. You’d worry, oh, it’s softening him too much, but not really. It’s not like the thing you worry about with Trump, where you’re making him likable. You’re not making him likable, because he’s absurd.

**Craig:** He’s absurd and he was ejected from a Republican-controlled Congress, and he was a Republican. He is now starting to accuse other people of things. He’s like, “Okay. If you kick me out, I’m going to say that one’s gay and that one did this and that one beat his wife.” There’s a great exchange where he accused a guy of beating his wife. The problem with George Santos is he’s like the kid who cried wolf times a thousand. Who knows what anything coming out of his mouth-

**John:** You can’t believe anything, I think-

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** … which is part of the fun. Looking for comps with this, Shattered Glass, in terms of a fabulist, is just watching it all come crashing down. What’s so weird though is, in the movie Shattered Glass – Billy Ray wrote and directed that – it’s over the course of one day, it just all comes crashing down. Here, the story comes out, but it just keeps going and going and going.

**Craig:** It just keeps going.

**John:** It reminded me a little more of Tiger King, where it’s just like, you’re an absurd character here, and somehow the world has to go around.

**Craig:** Great comp. That’s a great comp. That’s why a documentary that would follow, if it had followed George Santos around-

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** … and picked up his reaction and his bizarre lies and then showing how he was lying with a simple edit from what he says to what is real would’ve been amazing. Shattered Glass, Billy portrays Stephen Glass as a tragic figure who wants applause and love and can’t get it. Peter Sarsgaard does such a beautiful job of playing somebody who beats himself up for getting suckered.

Everybody knows. There’s no conflict. Everybody knows. He knows. He knows he’s lying when he’s lying. He’s basically saying, “I’m lying.” There’s a great clip from Fox News where someone asks him something, and he gives an answer, and she goes, “You just can’t tell the truth.” That is literally on Fox News. No one ever believed anything he said, and then that’s it. Then he got kicked out.

**John:** There is a movie in development.

**Craig:** You’re kidding me.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**John:** It’s HBO. It could be really fun.

**Craig:** It’s on HBO? Who’s doing it?

**John:** It’s written by Mike Makowsky, who came on Scriptnotes. He’s the guy who did-

**Craig:** Oh, I remember.

**John:** … Bad Education.

**Craig:** He’s a good writer.

**John:** Good writer. Episode 448, he was on for that. Here’s the write-up that we have so far. “The film tells the story of a seemingly minor local race that wound up a battle for the soul of Long Island and unexpectedly carved the path to the world’s most famous and now disgraced Congressman. It follows the Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on the truth, and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American dream.”

**Craig:** I wish Mike all the luck. I don’t know how I would do… I also don’t know how to do a lot of things. Then I see them and I’m like, “Oh, that’s how you do it.”

**John:** It feels like the HBO movie is the right way to go. It’s Frank Rich who-

**Craig:** It’s a movie?

**John:** Yeah, a movie.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It looks like it’s a movie.

**Craig:** You said Frank Rich?

**John:** Frank Rich. Veep and-

**Craig:** Now I’m in.

**John:** … Succession.

**Craig:** No offense to Mike. He’s a really good writer. But Frank Rich just simply to me, he doesn’t just signify quality, he creates quality. I can’t imagine that anything involving Frank Rich will be anything less than excellent.

**John:** Now you’re excited.

**Craig:** Now I’m sitting full-

**John:** Now you’re on board.

**Craig:** I’m going to watch this.

**John:** The last one is Sam Altman and OpenAI. The short version of this, we’re recording this the 3rd of December, 2023. Who knows what the next-

**Craig:** Week or two will bring.

**John:** New stuff always happens. Essentially, Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, which is one of the big AI companies as of 2023. His rise to this position, at 19 he founded Loopt, which is a location-based social networking mobile application, raised $30 million in venture capital, ultimately sold it for $43 million. Was president of Y Combinator, the big venture startup, and then OpenAI, which was founded by him, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, other folks in there.

**Craig:** Veritable rogues gallery.

**John:** Absolutely. You’ve got some really fascinating personalities in there. Then of course, the big thing that happened recently for us was that OpenAI’s board, which is a nonprofit, which is really confusing, voted to oust him. His employees rose up and said, “No, you can’t get rid of him,” and so he came back in.

**Craig:** Now, in the traditional version of this story, what happens is the evil board decides to push AI into dangerous territory to make more money, and the courageous CEO, backed by his faithful workers, rebel. It is the opposite of what has happened here. What appears to have happened is the board was worried that things were getting pushed too far, and Sam was like, “No.”

**John:** We don’t honestly know. One of the things that’s so fascinating about this moment we’re in right now is that we don’t know they actually fired him, because they’ve been so, so vague.

**Craig:** I guess maybe I’m saying a rumor.

**John:** You’re saying a rumor. It’s been so, so vague. The best explanation I’ve heard most recently is the board realized they couldn’t control him. It wasn’t about a worry of a specific thing. They just figured out, “Oh, we have three votes. We could oust him.” They just did it without thinking through stuff.

I think my question is, when a version of this story is told, which I think probably will be told, again, where are the edges of this? Do you just really focus on those few days and all of the drama around it? It’s a really tight thing, like Margin Call, which is really a tight, little story, or do you go bigger and broader? Because we’re still in the middle of it, we don’t know what is actually going to happen with OpenAI. I think that’s probably a mistake. I think you do need to put some edges on it.

**Craig:** We should ask ChatGPT what it thinks.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I feel like it’s a sequence in a movie. I don’t think in and of itself, a board ousting somebody and then putting them back in feels… I wouldn’t tune in.

**John:** It feels like part of an episode of Succession. It doesn’t feel like enough of a story in itself.

**Craig:** In fact, it’s part of seven episodes of Succession.

**John:** It’s happened a few times on Succession.

**Craig:** Just a few. The board voting and getting rid of somebody and not getting rid of somebody, we’ve definitely seen that. It does work as a dramatic device in fiction. In reality, in some of the Apple movies, they’ve said, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of Steve Jobs. Oh, we’re going to put Steve Jobs back in.” But it’s never the focus of the movie.

**John:** The other comps obviously are Social Network, Blackberry, which I really enjoyed.

**Craig:** I want to see Blackberry. I haven’t seen it.

**John:** Blackberry’s fun. It’s like, “Oh wow, we’ve built this amazing thing.” Then the iPhone comes out, and everything comes crashing down in ways that are delightful.

**Craig:** Yeah, and they’re Canadian.

**John:** They’re Canadian. It’s a thoroughly Canadian movie.

**Craig:** So Canadian. I love that.

**John:** It’s so good. The appealing thing about trying to do this movie is it gives you a chance to also include a bunch of other famous people. Peter Thiel and Elon, Satya Nadella. There’s lots of people you can stick in there.

**Craig:** So many people that will sue you.

**John:** Let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** Thiel’s going to sue you, for sure.

**John:** Thiel, he’s already sued-

**Craig:** He may sue us for even talking about him.

**John:** Absolutely. We have no criticism of Peter Thiel on this podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** But I will say, let’s talk about who can sue you of the people we’ve talked about’s things. The nice thing about the dead people is they can’t sue you.

**Craig:** Dead people can’t sue you.

**John:** Santos is going to have a hard time suing you.

**Craig:** Santos, he could try, but he doesn’t have the money anymore, and he’s going to go to prison probably. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk can sue you in the blink of an eye, and in doing so, wreck you if you fight back, because obviously, they have essentially unlimited resources. That’s terrifying. It is one of the reasons why we need an independent, free, and thriving press in this country, because the press really is protected in ways that individuals aren’t. I’m sure that any company making something like this would be a little concerned. Elon and Peter certainly have been litigious before.

**John:** Of the biopics we talked through today, which ones do we think are going to actually happen? You were pretty thumbs up on Sandra Day O’Connor.

**Craig:** Yes. I think that Sandra Day O’Connor feels like it could be a decent movie.

**John:** Henry Kissinger?

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** 100%. Multiple versions of it probably.

**Craig:** Yes. That’d be a good HBO mini series, I would imagine. Limited series, I should say.

**John:** Rosalynn Carter?

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** I don’t think so either. I think you’d have to find a very specific way into it. George Santos is actually already happening.

**Craig:** It’s happening.

**John:** It’s happening.

**Craig:** Frank Rich.

**John:** Frank Rich.

**Craig:** Mike Makowsky.

**John:** Sam Altman, I don’t think yet.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** People are trying to do it. I know there’s people milling around.

**Craig:** He’s also just now emerged as a name people know because of this. Prior to that, he wasn’t TV famous.

**John:** He’s also young. There’s a lot of runway ahead for him.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I assume that he, like all of the Silicon people, uses a blood boy to refresh his blood.

**John:** A thing I didn’t talk about is, in addition to OpenAI, he has that service that’s scanning people’s eyeballs for identity and cryptocurrency.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t wait to-

**John:** Can’t wait for that.

**Craig:** … see what’s coming on the horizon.

**John:** Nothing ominous about that.

**Craig:** Nope. Going to hide in my house.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which I’m now learning, because I’ve never learned it. The IPA is a way of describing all the sounds in human languages. It’s a very distinct system for how you write that down. I’ve always seen it, and I’ve never been able to interpret it or understand it. I’m writing my flashcards, and I’m just learning how to do it.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It is really clever and cool. You recognize the similarities and differences between languages and between dialects and accents, because the same word in English, based on different accents, would have very different written versions in IPA.

**Craig:** Notations.

**John:** Notations in IPA.

**Craig:** I just did a puzzle recently where part of the deal was you had to use one of the IPA diacritics, a single dot, two dots, or a line, to change the pronunciation of a word-

**John:** Oh, neat.

**Craig:** … in the clue to be able to solve the answer. Then later, when you looked at all of those things, the dots and the dashes form Morse code letters.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** It was fun to sit with the IPA notation there and do that. It’s very cool for nerds.

**John:** For nerds. For nerds.

**Craig:** For uncool people like us.

**John:** But also, those are homonyms. What’s one-

**Craig:** Homophone?

**John:** When a word has two different pronunciations, but it’s written the same way, that’s a homonym?

**Craig:** That is a homonym, right.

**John:** Homonym.

**Craig:** Homophones are the ones that sound the same but mean different things.

**John:** Present versus present. They track those differently. It’s not just where the emphasis is. Literally, the vowel sounds have changed.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. I’m with you. I support your One Cool Thing. I think it is cool.

**John:** Every January 1st, I try to have an area of interest for the new year.

**Craig:** That’s very John August of you.

**John:** IPA is going to be my area of interest.

**Craig:** I did a variety writers thing a few days ago, and Nathan Fielder was one of the other writers on the panel. He listens to our show.

**John:** As does Bowen Yang, who played George Santos.

**Craig:** Bowen listens to our show?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s a genius. I’m obsessed all the way back to his lip syncing videos. You’ve seen those, right?

**John:** Oh, 100%.

**Craig:** They’re amazing.

**John:** That’s where I first became aware of him.

**Craig:** He’s amazing. Okay, so Bowen, hi. Come on our show. You’re awesome. Nathan wanted me to pass along hello to you. He also said, in his Nathan, he’s like, “I feel like John August is a very organized guy.” Then he said, “I don’t mean to say that you’re not organized. I just feel like, you know.” I was like, “No, you nailed it. He’s a very organized guy.” You’ve organized your new topic for 2024.

**John:** Yeah. I’m prepared.

**Craig:** Well done. My One Cool Thing is a trailer for a television series that just came out, I believe two days ago, as of this recording. It is for the show Fallout.

**John:** I’m excited to see Fallout. Our friends have made that show.

**Craig:** Fallout is executive produced by Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, who have been on our show before. Jonah, I believe, directed the first couple of episodes. I don’t think they’re the showrunners. I just know them. I’m so sorry to the showrunners. We’ll get you in the show notes, I promise. After The Last of Us, there seemed to be this, I don’t know, epidemic of sudden development of video games into shows and movies and things. I suspect quite a few of them are not going to work very well.

What I loved about the trailer for Fallout was the vibe, which I think is different than tone. Tone is sort of like, what kind of comedy, what kind of drama, is it melodramatic, is it realistic. Vibe is this other stuff. It’s just like, did you capture the soul of something. As a Fallout fan, I watch that trailer, and I’m like, “Yeah, they got the vibe.”

Now, I can’t say anything yet about the story they’re telling. They have to create a central character, because when you play, it’s just you. You don’t have a name, and you don’t talk. We’ll see how that works. The vibe, that retro futuristic thing, and how they smartly knew to say, “Okay, the power suits have to look exactly like that, but the ghouls don’t have to look like the ghouls in the game. We want to maintain Walter Goggins’s face so that he can act.” These are the decisions you have to make when you’re adapting video games. So far, from what I’ve seen, looking awesome.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** That’s on Amazon.

**John:** Feels like Amazon. We’re guessing. It’s on a streamer.

**Craig:** Amazon? It’s Fallout. Whatever. It’s Fallout.

**John:** I’m excited to see it.

**Craig:** Yeah, very much so.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from James Llonch. It features Craig Mazin ranting about his least favorite screenwriting app.

**Craig:** Which one? Oh, yes, that one.

**John:** That one. If you have an outro, you could send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We always love to hear your outros. That’s also the place where you can send questions and follow-up. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. They ship in time for Christmas, so get those.

**Craig:** Great Christmas gift-

**John:** Great Christmas gift.

**Craig:** … for the dork in your family.

**John:** Also, Christmas gift, Arlo Finches are still out there for the kids out there.

**Craig:** I don’t know if Finches is… I want to make it different. I want to give you a different pluralization.

**John:** Arlos Finch?

**Craig:** Arlo Finchae.

**John:** Finchae?

**Craig:** I like Arlo Finchae.

**John:** All right. They’re good. You can get them signed. There’s a link in the show notes for those. Writer Emergency Pack, they sell really big on Amazon. Craig-

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s weird making a seasonal product, because literally, our chart is just like a straight line up. It’s like a hockey stick. It’s a gift. People give it.

**Craig:** I don’t think people who don’t sell things understand what Christmas is really about.

**John:** It is crazy.

**Craig:** Christmas is an economic phenomenon.

**John:** 80% of the money we make on Writer Emergency Pack is holidays.

**Craig:** You are hardly the only business that does.

**John:** You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net. Also, a good gift, you could get somebody a Scriptnotes gift. At scriptnotes.net, you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on which event in history had the most negative impact on civilization.

**Craig:** Heavy.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This Bonus Segment topic I’m stealing from Electoral Vote, which is a website I read every day about what’s happening in US government. It’s a good site for that. Their question was, which single event at any time in history has had the biggest negative impact on civilization? They had good suggestions from their own listeners, but I wanted to hear from you, what you were thinking about. We also have to discuss, what is a single event? Is this a thing that happens in the course of a day, or can it be over a couple years? Is World War I an event?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, sure.

**Craig:** Sure. You could, if you wanted to, just squish it down to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which kicked it off.

**John:** Yeah, but there would still probably have been a World War I. It was going to happen.

**Craig:** It was a pile of gasoline-soaked rags.

**John:** I’m saying the African slave trade is not an event. That to me is too broad of a thing.

**Craig:** It is not an event. We’re looking for an event. That’s a tough one. It also eliminates things like disease, which has had a greater impact on us than anything.

**John:** The Black Death.

**Craig:** Bubonic plague, smallpox, all of these things. The adoption of Christianity by the Romans and the transformation of this-

**John:** Theodosius, I think, was the-

**Craig:** It was Constantine. I believe it was Constantine.

**John:** The Romans, they were taking this, what essentially was a kind of obscure cult, and making it the state religion.

**Craig:** Just made it the state. I thought it was Constantine, but I could be wrong. Either way, whoever did it suddenly turned this cult of sacrificial, the worship of the poor, and made it imperial. The Holy Roman Empire then spread and essentially took over all of Europe and went to war with the Ottoman Empire, and also imparted what the Americans called manifest destiny, a religious aspect to the concept of domination, dominating other cultures because they were not appropriately religious. The Holy Wars were incredibly costly. Then the sectarianism, where the church had a schism, and that created wars, all the way through to what was happening in Ireland. That, I think, as an event, it’s… Listen. There’s another way of looking at it, which is if the Romans hadn’t done that, and they spread the Roman mythology across, that it still turns out terrible.

**John:** There’s plenty of alt histories, which is basically like, what if they hadn’t done that? We’re living under a more standard Roman mythology of stuff. That would be weird as well.

**Craig:** We worship Jupiter.

**John:** Exactly. Along the thread of conquering the world, you also have Genghis Khan and say his birth or his rise out of that place. You look at the transformation of Asia and the fact that some astonishing number of percentage of people have Genghis Khan’s DNA because of what happened there.

**Craig:** You could point to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In terms of hard-to-comprehend numbers of deaths, maybe 20 million people. Numbers that we really can’t get our arms around.

**John:** Columbus visiting America. Would Europeans have gotten to America at some other point? Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But Columbus’s arrival and then subsequent voyages and having the Crown behind him and the resources to really annihilate indigenous peoples.

**Craig:** Annihilate them largely through disease, although I would still trace that back to the notion of we must spread Christian values to the world of nonbelievers and pagans.

**John:** I don’t have a good sense, honestly, of when the missionaries actually became part of it, because I perceive it as being a gold rush at the start.

**Craig:** Yeah, the missionaries were right there. The conquistadors. Everybody went under the banner of Christ. Everybody was there to spread the word. Justin Marks, we’ve had Justin on the show.

**John:** I think so. He was on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s got Shogun coming out, which also looks fantastic. I love Shogun, by the way. One of my favorite novels. The Jesuits were there in Japan in the 1800s. They go everywhere. The missionaries find themselves all over the world. That was the tip of the spear of colonialism and the slave trade and all sorts of terrible things. Oh, man, one event.

**John:** The burning of the Library at Alexandria.

**Craig:** Brutal.

**John:** Brutal, brutal loss. It’s a little unclear how much those were the only copies of those documents and how much other stuff could be found.

**Craig:** Why didn’t they back it up in the Cloud?

**John:** Come on. Cloud storage, man.

**Craig:** Guys, it’s Cloud storage. It’s free.

**John:** Absolutely. Dropbox.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t it have been cool to go back and say, “You guys can back this up in the Cloud.” They just look up.

**John:** Let’s talk about inventions. The steam engine, obviously, as an instrument of war. A lot of these things, you could see there’s the pro and the con. The printing press allowed for misinformation and the Bible, but it also allowed for literacy and development of culture.

**Craig:** One of the great events that transformed the world, I think again, probably for good and for bad in equal measures, was industrialization, the concept of the assembly line. In the Revolutionary War, Americans kind of invented assembly lines to create arms, to create armaments. It was one of the reasons we won. You could certainly point to gunpowder as being a huge problem.

**John:** Or the first mass-produced revolver was 1836. That’s a huge change. Before then, you’re making a gun one at a time.

**Craig:** Exactly, and you’re firing one shot at a time and loading in your things. Yes, all absolutely true. Then there’s the open question of nuclear weapons.

**John:** Is Hiroshima the event?

**Craig:** There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the invasion of Japan and even more Japanese deaths and more American deaths. There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the Soviet invasion of Japan, and then the Stalinist oppression of that country. Then of course, there are people who say, “Sorry, you just murdered tens and tens and thousands and thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with this war. They were just civilians.” But also, notable, we haven’t had a world war since the invention of nuclear weapons, because it seems untenable.

**John:** Maybe some future topic we’ll talk about the good things, the single best things that have happened, because I can think of a couple off the top of my head. The contraceptive pill changed society for the best.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Just the ability for women to head to the workforce and have control over their fertility.

**Craig:** Vaccination.

**John:** Vaccination.

**Craig:** Vaccination on its own is a miracle. A miracle. So of course, idiots have to blame it for things. It’s unbelievable.

**John:** It’s the worst. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Sandra Day O’Connor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Day_O%27Connor)
* [Henry Kissinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger)
* [Rosalynn Carter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalynn_Carter)
* [George Santos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos)
* [Sam Altman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman)
* [What happened at OpenAI? The Sam Altman saga, explained](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/20/openai-sam-altman-ceo-oust/) by Rachel Lehman for The Washington Post
* [International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)](https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/)
* [Fallout – Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kQ8i2FpRDk)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* 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 James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/621standard.mp3).