The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/science-movies).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 539 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we ask the eternal question, how would this be a movie? This time focusing on stories and topics related to science. To help us out, we have two special guests joining us. First, Erin Macdonald is an astrophysicist PhD and a tattooed one-woman career panel for the field. She lives in Los Angeles, working as a writer and producer, and is currently the science consultant for the entire Star Trek franchise. Welcome, Erin.
**Erin Macdonald:** Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
**John:** I have so many questions about the science in the franchise, and specifically space science as it relates to Star Trek, which feels like it’s a long history there. Warp drives, we’ll get into all that stuff with you today hopefully.
**Erin:** Excellent.
**John:** Next up we have Leigh Whannell. He is an Australian screenwriter, actor, producer, and director, known for co-creating the Saw and Insidious franchises with James Wan. He made his directorial debut with Insidious: Chapter 3, and has since directed 2 more films, the widely acclaimed Upgrade, and The Invisible Man, which was the last movie I saw in theaters pre-pandemic. Leigh, welcome back to the show.
**Leigh Whannell:** Thanks for having me again.
**John:** You were on Episode 354, which was an episode that Craig recorded without me. Now we’re recording this episode without Craig. Essentially, we always have to keep one of us off the podcast when you’re there, because you’re just too dangerous.
**Leigh:** It would be too dangerous, like combining the wrong type of chemicals.
**John:** It’s all risky. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, speaking of risk, we are going to talk about Leigh’s proposal for a period shopping mall theme park experience. I’m strongly in favor of this happening, for the record, and so I want to really work through all of the possibilities for Leigh’s proposal to create a theme park experience period mall.
**Leigh:** Excellent.
**John:** We’ll do it. Before we get into sciencey stuff, we have a business question. Actually, it’s here from Megana. Megana, can you ask your question that I see here in the outline?
**Megana Rao:** I saw this tweet from Ed Solomon about the accounting for Men in Black. I spent an embarrassingly long time looking through these documents, and I feel so confused about what I’m looking at. I was hoping you guys could explain some of the movie accounting to me. He says, “Sadly, Men in Black lost over $5 million this period alone. Someone needs to call Sony and tell them to stop building sets. Seriously, does nobody know how to run a business?”
**John:** Ed Solomon is putting up links here to the profit definition, the profit statements from Men in Black, obviously a huge, huge hit, one that spawned many sequels. He’s one of the credited writers on it. He has a net profit participation in the movie. The movie is not into net profits, even having generated gazillion dollars. Leigh Whannell, you are a person who’s written movies that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Is this at all familiar to you?
**Leigh:** I did enter the film world through a different door. It wasn’t the front door. Obviously, Men in Black was a film that was made very much within the studio system. Big studio, big money, big movie stars. The first few films especially that I was involved in were definitely independent films. The first Saw film was actually financed by the producers. Two of the producers did what they say you should never do in Hollywood, which is spend your own money. They mortgaged their houses to pay for that movie. It’s a very different financial map. I guess it’s the old saying of betting on yourself. I think with those movies, by betting on ourselves, maybe we saw more backend and more profits.
What I hear about these big studio films, and maybe you can enlighten me, John, is that they always find some creative accounting to show why, “Oh, no no no, you see, the standees that we made in Malaysia mean that you don’t get your profit participation checks.” That’s what I hear from people who have worked more in the big budget studio system.
**John:** I’ve made many movies for Sony and for other places. I made Aladdin. I will guarantee you the movies will never turn a technical profit. The reason behind it is that setting out to make this movie, the studio takes a loan out to make the movie. They’re borrowing $150 million or whatever to make this film. Your film Invisible Man is probably similar sort of [unclear 00:04:20] because it was not that expensive, but it was still expensive enough that it will never turn a technical definition of profits.
These studios are taking out this big lump of money to make this film. They’re spending the money to make the film. They’re charging interest on that loan for the whole time. Even though they are both the bank and the person borrowing the money, they are essentially continuing to generate interest on that original loan, and that original loan will never pay down. They’re also throwing every conceivable expense against the film, including a distribution fee, which is money they’re paying themselves to distribute the film, basically all the other overhead and accounting they’re throwing at it. These films will never achieve technical profit, based on the definitions. Those definitions are laid out in the contracts that you and I have signed as writers when we are doing this. Even the attorneys who we’re paying good money for tell us never to expect to see real money in the backend on these things.
**Leigh:** You say the studios take out a loan, are you saying… This might prove my naivete on these matters. Are they taking out a loan from themselves? Don’t these studios have vaults full of cash that essentially when they finance movies, the money, it doesn’t come from a bank, it comes from those vaults? It comes from the studio coffers, right?
**John:** Yep. You would think that you could not loan yourself money in that way, but that is technically what they are doing. Each of these films, just like your Saw film or Insidious film, it is its own company that is formed and set up to do the thing. They’re loaning money to that production to do this. There’s many ways they could be structured. It could also be structured as an international situation. They are designing things in ways to maximize the amount of money that the studio gets back in without the film itself getting paid money.
**Leigh:** It is interesting to hear about things. I had a friend of mine who was directing a film for Universal, and he wanted to shoot some scenes on the studio back lot, in one of the studios. One of the producers was saying, “It’s too expensive.” My friend said, “This is a Universal film and we’re shooting on the Universal lot.” The producer said, “Yeah, you don’t get a discount for that. They will charge us.” I just found that an insane version of double dipping.
**John:** There might be circumstances where a studio will require a production to use its things, for certain good reasons, but they will still charge that full freight for using their own facilities. That’s just how it goes. This can be frustrating, but it’s also, I think, because it is unlikely that a writer will ever be paid these kind of net profits on things, that’s why you find other ways as a writer to get some backend participation. Obviously, residuals have nothing to do with the profitability of the film, and so we get paid residuals no matter how much it shows on this statement, which is great.
We might also ask for box office bonuses. If we know that our film is going to be theatrically released, which is never a given in 2022, we can say, “When the US theatrical box office on this film hits $50 million or $100 million, you have to write me a check for X.” That’s one way to get around these impossible net profit definitions. Megana, did we answer your question to any degree?
**Megana:** You did. Basically, it’s not supposed to make sense to me, but yeah.
**John:** When you’re back in the office, I can show you Aladdin statements or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory statements that show that they are similarly money-losing propositions on paper, even though they’ve made the studios good money.
**Megana:** Thank you very much.
**John:** We just played the role of business consultant here, explaining to Megana how this weird thing in accounting work. I’m only vaguely qualified to do that. I’m not qualified to talk about space or astrophysics. Luckily, Eric Macdonald is qualified to talk about this. Can you give us, Erin, a sense of your history studying astrophysics and how that segued into your working on the Star Trek franchise?
**Erin:** I’ve always been interested in film and television and the entertainment industry. I made that fork crossroads decision when I went to college, or university, to decide to study physics. As I went through there, I realized I didn’t quite like it as a career. I did research for many years, specifically in gravitational waves. I went through, did my PhD in Scotland, had a great experience, but when it came to the postdoc life of research, that wasn’t really for me.
When I left academia, I was looking for things that would scratch some of the things that I enjoyed doing in academia, one of which was teaching. I started going to sci-fi conventions to teach about the science behind things like Star Trek. I would go and give these science talks, and they were hugely popular. People just really lined out the door to see these talks. I started going to multiple conventions all around the country. I started to meet a lot of writers, creators. Then when I moved out to Los Angeles, a lot of them started to give me a call and start folding me in. I found my way in a very indirect route to now be a part of the entertainment industry, which I’m thrilled about.
**John:** Can you talk about those early calls you’re getting, asking for your advice, your input on a project? What are the kinds of things that, at a writing stage, they want to know from an actual scientist?
**Erin:** Typically, it’ll just depend on when they find out that I exist, whatever the stage the project is in. Typically, it’ll be in that story development period, where they’re coming up with a high concept, especially for some hard sci-fi. They’re going to ask me questions about like, this is the method of faster-than-light travel we use, or this is the energy source that this population’s using, or here’s the inciting incident that is somehow science-based. Can you just give me a pass on it to see how it feels? I always say, all right, if I can read it and it doesn’t make me throw up in my mouth, that’s a good pass.
**Leigh:** Erin, I have to say, this is really strange kismet that you’re on this episode, because I recently in the last six months started writing a sci-fi, horrory type thingy and needed to talk to an astrophysicist because our film was about that. Everything you’re talking about is exactly what I’m basically sitting someone down and saying, okay, how ridiculous is this?
**Erin:** I love that, by the way. I try to take the approach with writers that I’m going to “yes and” your project. I’ve heard a lot of stories of people with very negative experiences with science consultants, where they have a friend or a friend of a friend who has a background in that story, and then they send them the idea, and the response is like, “Nope, that doesn’t work. Science doesn’t work like that.” I really try to take a more positive approach, like, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, let’s see how we can make this work and let’s see to what extent we need to explain it.” That’s sometimes a lot of what I do too is just say, “Yeah, you can do it. Just don’t try to explain it.”
**John:** Let’s think about the kinds of questions a writer might ask. A lot of times these are bigger conceptual questions. If it’s gravitational wave, faster-than-light travel, this is the means of faster-than-light travel I’m planning to use in my script, so great, and talking them through the options there. In some cases are you also talking about what the lingo is, what an actual astrophysicist would say in these moments? We had Zoanne Clack on the show, who was originally hired as a writer’s consultant on Grey’s Anatomy. She was there as a medical consultant, not just for like, this is the medical procedure, this is the disease, but also like, this is what a doctor would actually do or say in those moments. Do you get involved in this is what an astrophysicist would be like?
**Erin:** Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s where the direction of my career has gone. I still have those early concept conversations like you were talking about, Leigh, but now when I’m folded into a writer’s room or into a specific show, it can be all the way from story development and most of my days reading scripts. I will give little tweaks to the dialog here and there. Then like you talked about, maybe not necessarily getting the technological language right, but more the conceptual drive of what a scientist does. That’s something I’ve done for a number of episodes, where they have a scientific problem, and I’ll help the writer’s think through it as you would a scientist to build that story and to drive that forward.
**John:** We had a conversation two weeks ago with Mike Schur from The Good Place. He was talking about as it came time to do the moral philosophy on his show, he had done a lot of reading on moral philosophy, but he needed an expert who could really talk about this the way that a philosopher would talk about it. He enlisted Todd May and another philosopher on to do that. It sounds like you’re involved in a similar place where the writers may have a good sense of what they’re trying to do in general, and they’re coming to you for specific help and making this actual fit with everything else that’s around it. Is that right?
**Erin:** Yeah. What’s really interesting about my role now is I’m available to the whole Star Trek franchise. That’s five shows right now that are currently in development. They all use me very differently. Some of it is based on the fact that I’ve been with them for multiple seasons, and so that trust and that relationship has grown. I’ll be in from breaking season arcs all the way through to sitting in the writers room to reading scripts, but even be involved with the post-production aspects and help with graphics. Other shows, I’ll just get the script and I’ll just edit little dialog and just do a little wordsmithing here or there.
Any time I’m approached about a science-fiction project, I always like to ask, okay, science fiction is a huge spectrum of science to fiction, and tell me where you want to live, and we’ll tweak the science to fit that appropriately, because there’s a lot of different types of sci-fi out there.
**John:** Speaking of different types of sci-fi, Leigh, your film The Invisible Man involves a scientist who’s developed a means of invisibility, which is very different than in the original film. He’s really using optics to become invisible, and a suit that lets him do this. At what point in the development of the script were you really figuring out, oh, this is what is believable to me for how this invisibility technology works?
**Leigh:** It’s a good question, because Invisible Man and Upgrade were both films incorporating a lot of sci-fi elements. I am definitely not a science major. If you started quizzing me about the Periodic Table, I would draw a blank, but yet I have my imagination. It’s been strange to watch certain things that I’ve invented in my mind somehow create some link to the real world. In the case of The Invisible Man, I thought, what if you had a suit covered with cameras, and each camera was taking thousands of pictures and then simultaneously projecting a hologram, so it’s almost like this hologram suit.
We were well into pre-production in Sydney, Australia, when we went and talked to some scientists at the Sydney Institute of Technology. We were explaining to them that it would work. They were thinking, and they were like, “Yeah, that could work.” They said the technology’s not there yet, but if you had a camera that could render fast enough and take these images and project. It was almost like I was retroactively given the green light on what I was thinking, but by that point the ship had sailed. It is interesting, this meeting ground between your imagination and real science.
**John:** For our topic today on How Would This Be A Movie, it’s interesting, some of them actually are things that started out as science fiction and then crossed more into scientific discussion. There are ideas that were first broken in the pages of sci-fi, yet the underlying concepts were interesting enough that given enough time, real science could catch up to these ideas.
Let’s segue right into some How Would This Be A Movies. For this installment, I asked our listeners on Twitter for suggestions on articles, topics to explore, and as always, they delivered. We picked a mix of some astrophysics, social science, some biology. I want to dig into some of the reality of each topic, but then also, what are the fictional possibilities based on the topic. This first one is an example of something that we first see in science fiction and then explored more. This is the Dyson sphere. Erin, maybe you could help us explain what a Dyson sphere is and why we might be looking for those out in space.
**Erin:** Yeah, totally. I love Dyson spheres. I’m very excited about this. Dyson spheres are a theoretical construct, kind of a thought experiment that people have put together about trying to find advanced life out in other solar systems. Really quickly, we live in our solar system, which is a bunch of planets that orbit a star, and then there’s millions and millions of stars in our own galaxy, and then there’s a bunch of galaxies out there. Typically on this scale we’re just talking about within our galaxy, but outside of our solar system. The idea of a Dyson sphere is that you essentially build a giant sphere, sometimes starts as a ring, then that ring starts to grow, that goes all the way around the star, and it’s essentially solar panels, that you’re able to harvest all of the solar energy off of this star. It’s an insane amount. If your civilization is advanced enough to do that, then the idea is they’ll probably need that much energy anyway.
**John:** A Dyson sphere is a way of harnessing all the power of a star. The reason why we might notice those out there is if you’re actually collecting all this energy, astronomers here on Earth, using our space telescopes, might notice that something is weird about that star, and they might be able to see the effects of this Dyson sphere and that it’s collecting all this energy.
**Erin:** Yep, absolutely correct. When it comes to trying to find a Dyson sphere, the big thing is trying to find ways that astronomers can differentiate between an artificial object like a Dyson sphere versus any sort of naturally occurring objects. This actually happened. There was something called Tabby’s Star, where they discovered it had a weird signal to it, that it could be artificial, but upon further investigation, they think that it’s just a bunch of debris that’s around this star that was making its signal look weird. That’s the tricky part about astrophysics.
What I think makes it a great vessel for storytelling is we just have to take what the universe gives us. We really don’t know anything. We can’t create our universe in a lab. We get these puzzle pieces that we have to put together. Dyson spheres are a really exciting one to explore.
**John:** Let’s think about this in terms of a movie, because building a Dyson sphere would presumably take thousands of years, and so it’s not a thing that’s going to be happening in the course of one of our movies, most likely. It could be a character who is encountering a Dyson sphere that exists in the world, finding proof of an alien civilization, because they have one. Leigh, what’s jumping out to you in terms of a way that a Dyson sphere could appear in a film that you want to make?
**Leigh:** The first thought I had was of those two options. Are we building a Dyson sphere to save our universe or do we come across a Dyson sphere? I feel like you solved the first problem. It would take too long to really make a film about building one. Maybe this is a film about finding a Dyson sphere. It’s so funny, because the film I’m writing right now, I could really incorporate some of these elements. I would say coming across or seeing a Dyson sphere at a distance, and then where do we go from there?
**John:** It feels like it’s a setting, it’s an initial incident, but it’s not the actual thing itself. Erin, you can tell us… Obviously, there’s probably NDAs for future stuff, but have Dyson spheres already appeared in the Star Trek universe?
**Erin:** They have, actually, totally NDA-free. This was in The Next Generation. There was an episode where they discovered a Dyson sphere around a star system. It was a Next Generation episode, but they were able to bring back Scotty from the original series, that his ship has crashed into this Dyson sphere. That’s exactly what it was. It had a huge gravitational pull. That’s why his ship crashed, because it was just so massive. In this case it was a fully closed sphere, which it doesn’t need to be. The gravitational attraction of this is what caused the ship to crash. It’s been seen before.
**John:** We can’t talk about search for extraterrestrial life without maybe bringing up the Fermi Paradox, that sense of, there should be so many civilizations out there, given the time span of the universe, and there should be more things out there. It’s the question of why does it seem like we’re the only people, or at least we don’t see any other civilizations out there.
That paradox could be answered in a couple different ways. One of the possibilities is that no civilization actually gets up to the point where they would build a Dyson sphere that we could see them, they all collapse first, or there may be other reasons that we can’t understand why we’re the only ones who are visible. Maybe people are out there and they’re hiding because it’s a good idea to hide. There’s all sorts of interesting, provocative questions that are raised by the lack of evidence out there.
**Erin:** I love the Fermi Paradox. You touched on a couple good ones. Like you said, it’s this idea that it takes so long to create this advanced capability, whether that is a Dyson sphere or something like warp drive to be able to visit other star systems. A big one for me is not the philosophical aspect, but just the probability that your civilization is going to have an extinction event from space, like a gamma ray burst wiping you out, is much higher than you having enough time to build that. The analogy I use, it’ll take you 200 years to build a house, but you live in a 100-year floodplain. It’s going to wipe you out before you do it.
**John:** It’s all very dispiriting.
**Erin:** It is.
**John:** Leigh, let’s think about characters in this situation, because it feels like if we’re out in space doing things, we have such tropes about what space [unclear 00:21:38] are like, but is there any other way to get into the characters who would be in this story?
**Leigh:** I think if we’re talking about the human characters here, it sounds like a film about humans meeting obviously a much more advanced civilization. What’s interesting to me about a lot of these films is that a lot of sci-fi films that involve creatures from space or other civilizations still couch it in very human terms. A spaceship is a very graspable concept for human beings. It’s a flying car and the aliens look just like us except their skin is green or something. I find the mysteries of space so much more enticing, like the last 15 minutes of 2001, where what’s happening is so far beyond your comprehension. I do think Arrival was a recent film that, it made the aliens very mysterious. I thought their language was very provocative. For me, I see a movie about us primitive humans, the ants on the side of the freeway, meeting this super advanced civilization and learning about them, I guess.
**Erin:** I can throw out one fun science thing that you can maybe play with for the story, which is the fact that it takes light time to reach us from other stars. We might detect a Dyson sphere that’s, let’s say 100 light years away, but we saw them as they were 100 years ago. You can always factor that in in space exploration stories, especially about humanity, that can sometimes talk about the passage of time or the futility of existence, because hoping that they’re still there by the time you’re able to talk to them.
**John:** Or that they might be on their way to us. Can you give us a quick primer on warp drives, both the warp drives that exist in the Star Trek universe and what the other versions of warp drives we see in the Star Wars universe? What are the basic edges of faster-than-light travel in these different environments?
**Erin:** There’s typically about three flavors of faster-than-light travel. Warp drive is the one most people think of. That’s this idea that when you’re on the surface of space time, this bowling ball on the trampoline visual some people are familiar with, you cannot go faster than the speed of light. Once you have no mass, then you just coast in a straight line. Warp drive is saying, what if space time goes faster than the speed of light and you wrap that fabric of the trampoline around your ship and then that moves you faster than the speed of light. That’s essentially how warp drive works.
Other fun examples include things like wormholes, whether they’re artificial or naturally occurring, which is, again, thinking about that fabric, that trampoline, you take two points and you have a tunnel between them that’s actually shorter than the whole distance from traveling along the surface. We’ve seen a lot of those.
**John:** I think it’s Carl Sagan I first saw on Cosmos, who had the piece of paper bench and a pencil sticking through. That’s a very classic image of the hole through the plane.
**Erin:** Bingo. Exactly. That’s it. Again, wormholes are something similar to warp drive that mathematically our understanding of space time, they could exist. It’s just we’ve never seen one or we don’t have enough energy to create that. Then the final way to travel faster than the speed of light are things like we saw in Battlestar Galactica or Dark Matter, which were jump drives or blink drives, which is where you spool up. It’s as if you’re pulling that fabric toward you, using a ton of energy, and then you make a small jump, and then you let go and you get catapulted to where you were wanting to go. Also takes a ton of energy to do that.
You mentioned Star Wars, so I’ll just explain briefly. Star Wars is hybrid between a wormhole and a jump drive. It’s as if you’re building the wormhole as you’re traveling through that. Yes, I’ve tried to science Star Wars.
**John:** Let’s go from these big cosmological problems to really small, inside your DNA problems. We have a tradition of movies that explore science that goes too far. We have these human-animal hybrids, Island of Dr. Moreau. It turns out that hybridism is actually much more common than we would’ve guessed. Specifically chimerism, which is where a human has two different sets of DNA in themselves. We’ll put a link to a couple different articles about this. Oftentimes it’s from in the womb. You’ve absorbed your identical twin, and so both of your sets of DNA are in there. In real life, there are examples of a woman who was suspected of murder for her young children, and it turned out that she actually had a chimerism disease, disorder, that was causing these kids to be dying, or their DNA samples didn’t match who they should be, or they were not the father of their own children, weird situations that come up like this. Let’s think through some movie options, story options for chimerism. Leigh, is anything jumping to mind?
**Leigh:** I feel like my brain, it must be stuck in bad ’90s thriller mode or something, because the first thing that comes to my mind when you’re talking about this hybrid is it’s one bad twin, one good twin. They’re one human being, but it’s almost a Jekyll and Hyde situation with two personalities fighting each other and maybe one personality not remembering what the other person’s doing.
**John:** That’s literally the plot of Stephen King’s The Dark Half, which is that it’s an unborn twin.
**Leigh:** One of my favorite Stephen King books when I was a teenager. Underappreciated. That’s right, in that book he ingested his twin and it became his pen name. That’s where my brain first goes, but maybe that’s just the first piece [unclear 00:27:07] that you get out all the bad ideas before you get to the good one.
**John:** Erin, it seems like part of the issue, why we’re just discovering chimerism right now, is that there’s really no reason to check a person’s DNA unless there is a problem. It’s only in these weird fringe cases like a crime or a paternity thing that we would even notice that someone had two sets of DNA in them.
**Erin:** That seems to be the case. I think when you look up examples of chimerism, a lot that you see are aesthetic duality. You can play a lot with visuals there, where you have one half of the flower is one color, one half is another one, or a cat that’s half one type of cat and half the other type of cat, because it seems like… Again, I’m not a biologist, but it does seem like this DNA almost, it’s like they merge but they exist side by side as opposed to existing throughout the whole body. It’s really interesting.
**John:** It is. Let’s think about the kind of characters we would find in this story. Thrillers are natural, but maybe there’s options for comedies or other kinds of stories. It could be the main character is a chimera, actually has this double set of DNA. It could be like The Dark Half or it could be some other reason why they’re manifesting as two selves. It could be also the investigator who’s trying to find out how it’s possible this crime was committed by somebody who doesn’t match up to this thing or the DNA’s not matching. It could be a scientist exploring this. Leigh, any thoughts about who you’d want to see in this story?
**Leigh:** I like it from the point of view of the person living it, rather than the investigator, which turns it into a twist, like aha.
**John:** It feels like a Law and Order episode.
**Leigh:** Exactly, whereas I think a movie from the perspective of somebody who’s actually sharing their consciousness and their body with some other set of DNA, I think this could be really interesting, like a first-person. Maybe the two sides could be communicating with each other. You have these long blackouts where the other guy’s in charge. Then the two sides of the personality are communicating about what the other one’s doing. I think that’s a more interesting thing.
**John:** Erin, I’m thinking back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, or sorry, it was a later show. There’s the Dax character who has… It was a person who, they have another consciousness inside them. It feels like a trope that Star Trek has played with a bit.
**Erin:** Oh yeah, for sure. I think whether it’s a dual personality or whether it’s something that exists somewhat separately. Like you said, the Trill were these alien species that had a symbiont that would pass from a host to another. Instead of it being a chimerism thing, then you’re thinking it’s almost like two sentient entities. You’re talking a little bit more about a parasite symbiotic relationship, which is really fun. Then when I see chimerism, the first thing I think of is the original series episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, where you have the people who are white on one half and Black on the other. Black on the other half and white on the other half. It’s a not so deep metaphor.
**John:** I can’t imagine an analogy for anything.
**Erin:** They hate each other. Again, that’s more visual, whereas what you’re talking about is much more psychological, which I think would be a fun area of this to explore.
**John:** It’s also easier to envision a world in which chimerism was so common that people visually did look interesting. You could tell that they had multiple people in them at all times. We’ll put examples too. These people whose skin tones don’t match from side to side, but you can have more extreme examples than that. That doesn’t go quite to the black and white Star Trek, but it could be an interesting look for a character. If Craig were here, he’s always talking about hair, makeup, and wardrobe and how characters look. It could be an interesting detail for how a character looks. I like that.
When Craig was on the show, a couple weeks ago, we were talking in the Bonus Segment about population and how growing up I was always taught to fear population growth, that basically we’d run out of resources, that the world’s population was going to get too big, and now suddenly we’re facing, like, oh, populations are declining in a way that could be very detrimental, and population loss is a thing.
I want to talk about the scientific concepts behind sudden population loss. Asked on Twitter was, how much of the population do you have to lose where you go from a Leftovers situation, where they lost 3% of the population, it was sad, but life goes on, to Station 11, where they lose almost all of the population and you’re suddenly back in agrarian times. I’d love to talk through the math and science behind how much of the population you can lose before everything changes and everything falls apart.
**Erin:** When you think about population, there’s an interesting aspect, which is the exponential growth. I think I remember those messages sent from the past about how population growth is out of control. There is true to some extent, but when you really think about it, let’s imagine the blip, where half of life gets wiped out.
**John:** In the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
**Erin:** Yes, correct.
**John:** The Thanos snap.
**Erin:** I remember seeing something where people were like, if you just got rid of half the people now, our global population would be down to what it was in 1970.
**John:** Which doesn’t seem so bad at all.
**Erin:** Right, but half seems like a lot. That’s just our understanding of exponential growth, which I think we’ve also seen a lot this past year with how exponentially things can spread from one person to another. It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around sometimes. I’d probably err on going on the more extreme example of that.
**John:** It’s also this question of how quickly you lose all the people. If you lose 50% of your population in the snap of fingers, you’re also going to have a lot of collateral lost, based on the planes that were in the air and the people who are stranded and things falling apart. I think my question, which it’s hard to answer scientifically, but I think is good to grapple with as writers, is what other institutions of our civilization would just completely collapse if we didn’t have enough people to do them, that the human infrastructure behind things would be really challenging? Leigh, as you’re thinking through this space, we always talk about post-apocalyptic and we always think about, oh, there are zombies now or there’s some other problem, but honestly just having not enough people can be its own struggle.
**Leigh:** I was going to say, maybe the most interesting thing for me would be somewhere between the Leftovers and Station 11, whereas Leftovers was a chunk of the population and they were just dealing with the weirdness of it, and then Station 11 is everybody. What if it was like all of a sudden, there’s still a lot of people, but it’s half what was there before, and suddenly it’s like, wait, nobody knows how to make this anymore. We lost most of our scientists. It’d be interesting to suddenly see people having to grapple with minds that have been lost. A lot of people who were maybe working on things that were going to improve the planet are suddenly gone.
**Erin:** That’s so funny you say that, because I really feel… When I worked in engineering, and in academia, we had a lot of people that were like that, that had been in the industry for 30, 40 years, and make the morbid joke, like, man, he better not get hit by a bus. We’re in so much trouble.
**John:** Think back to the Y2K bug and all the problems that could’ve happened if we’d not been able to pull people out of retirement to fix the computer systems that were written in. Was it Coble?
**Erin:** Yeah.
**John:** They were the folks who actually knew how those things were built. If you lose certain people who know certain things, that’s going to be a huge impact, the folks who actually know how to run the nuclear power plants or know how to run our water systems. You look at the zombie shows, you look at The Walking Dead, and the zombies are terrifying, but not being able to use a sink is also terrifying.
**Leigh:** You think about time travel, I remember talking to a friend once and saying, “Yeah, I’d love to go back in time, 200 years. I would just rule the population by holding up my iPhone.” My friend was like, “Yeah, but could you explain to them how it works?” I was like, “No.” He was like, “What happens when it runs out of batteries? What would you do? Could you explain to them how a toaster works?” I was like, “No, but I could tell them what it was.” He was like, “You would very quickly be flayed and hung on the castle and you wouldn’t amount to anything because you can’t actually make anything or explain it.” He was very right about that.
**John:** That’s where I think it’s so interesting about sudden population loss, because it’s like time travel, where you’re having to revert back to an earlier time, even though you’re moving forward in time. It’s like certain things just can’t be done anymore because you don’t have those capabilities. As you think about this as a movie, let’s think about what characters we may want to see in this story, which also I guess depends on what time frame we want to tell our story in. Station 11, it’s both present day and jumping forward 20 years to what happens after that.
**Leigh:** What if it was a scientist character who was building something that maybe was going to some sort of climate technology that was maybe going to improve the world, and then suddenly he was part of the population that disappeared, and his teenage children or adult children are suddenly left with this thing that they don’t understand how it works, that their father was the mastermind of. He’s creating a tension there of we have all this stuff, but we don’t know how it works anymore.
**Erin:** Yeah, or even their colleagues or their people that they were mentoring or that are now having to piece together what they were working on.
**Leigh:** Exactly. There we go. Let’s [unclear 00:36:22].
**John:** In the second South Park movie about COVID, that actually is a plot point, where this one guy has built this thing that no one else can figure out how to do. It’s definitely an idea that’s out there, that sense of the person who’s created the situation is the only person who can solve it, and we can’t find the person who created the situation, which feels great. That person is probably not the central character. That’s the obstacle, the McGuffin we’re looking after. It’s either children of that person or someone else who is searching.
**Leigh:** Perhaps the thing that caused the massive population loss could be what the scientist character was working on. Suddenly he’s one of the people that’s gone, and his children or his colleagues, as Erin said, have to figure out how it works before everybody’s gone. There’s this ticking clock of how do we figure out how this thing works before we all disappear and there’s not 50% of the people here, there’s 0%.
**John:** At least pointing out that we have to have continuous stakes. If it’s a onetime event where we lose half the population, that’s horrible and there’s repercussions, but what are the ongoing stakes? What’s the ongoing narrative tension that’s being built up through the situation? Something like it’s going to keep happening.
**Leigh:** Maybe if there’s a rip in the dimensional fabric. Now we’re getting into Marvel territory. If there’s some sort of cataclysmic event, cosmic event causing the population loss, and this machine or device that the scientist character, she or he has been working on and is suddenly gone, I think as that tear in the cosmic fabric gets bigger and bigger, you’re like, there’s something to work towards.
**Erin:** I really like the idea of it being a continuous event and that ticking bomb of like, all right, we have to make this as accessible and as understandable to anyone, because we don’t know who’s going to go next.
**John:** Let’s talk about accessibility and understandability, because our characters in the movie are trying to understand it, but also we as an audience have to understand it. I think back to, Leigh, your explanation of how the suit works in Invisible Man. It was really clear. You were showing it to us. We were seeing it happen. It’s like, oh, I get what it was, and there wasn’t anything more to it. Anything that’s involving a scientist concept, we have to think about what is the simplest, most logical way to explain what’s happening here without over-explaining it.
**Leigh:** I always love people explaining something to a child. It’s always helpful, because then again, I think it’s a way to dramatize exposition. I feel like one of the gold standards for this is the scene in Jurassic Park when they sit down and they get the kids animation that’s like, hey kids.
**Erin:** 1,000%.
**Leigh:** Here’s how dinosaur DNA works. I remember the 13-year-old watching that movie in theaters. Within 30 seconds, the writers and the filmmakers had completely explained this hugely complicated concept of extracting dinosaur DNA from mummified mosquitoes. All of a sudden I was like, “Great, got it,” and they can just move on with the monsters and the crashing and the bashing. It was beautiful. I feel like if you involve a child, and the child’s like, “I don’t understand,” and you just have a character saying, “Look, this McGuffin over here is going to fix all our problems,” I feel like that’s a good way to explain it to the audience.
**Erin:** It’s a classic trope we use in Star Trek all the time. It started with Spock over-explaining something and then Kirk giving a blank stare and getting a much more simple–
**Leigh:** [unclear 00:39:50].
**John:** Then you have McCoy saying, “No one could possibly understand this.”
**Leigh:** I’ve noticed a tic in screenwriting. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, John. I’ve noticed a tic with screenwriting, like in Marvel movies and stuff, not to keep calling them out, but they’ll have one of their characters… I’m just making this up on the spot. They’ll have one of their characters say something like… It has to sound creative scientific and very complicated. One of the characters will say, “No, listen, what we need to do is take the interlocker and connect it to the vectranon and then when we plug it twofolds back into what we would consider dimensional da da da, then we’ll be okay.” Then one of the other characters will say, “Time travel. You’re talking about time travel.” It’s like, oh my god, they do it every time. I look around the theater, and I’m like, is it only our screenwriters noticing this tic?
**John:** I do want to give a shout-out to Episode 419 of Scriptnotes with David Koepp, where we actually talk about the film strip inside of Jurassic Park that explains all.
**Leigh:** Can I ask you, John, is there an actual industry screenwriters nickname for that thing of saying, “Time travel.”
**John:** In some ways it’s like hanging a lantern on the exposition. Basically someone’s explaining jargony stuff, and they do have some character comment on the fact that you’re explaining jargony stuff. It’s a little bit hanging a lantern, but if a listener has a suggestion for, oh, that’s what we called this, we’re happy to popularize a term for that phenomenon that I’ve definitely noticed.
**Erin:** I have no problem with it, because it’s been my entry into the industry is to write them, is to write those scenes.
**Leigh:** You do the jargony part for the screenwriter, and then the screenwriter comes in and goes, “Flying. You’re talking about humans flying.”
**John:** I love it. This whole thing has been a thought experiment on different story topics. Our next one actually is a thought experiment. It originated on a rationalist message board. It’s called Roko’s Basilisk. Basically the greatly simplified version is that a future artificial intelligence might punish or otherwise take action against anyone who stood in its way, including those in the past. It gets a little hand wavey, but essentially, because for all we know, we’re living in a simulation, AI could torture us, or torture indistinguishable copies of us, and so therefore, we shouldn’t try to stand in the AI’s way.
**Leigh:** John, just in reading the article, I did have one point of confusion, which was just how does this hypothetical AI torture people in the past? Does it have time travel capabilities?
**John:** Basically, because it could create a simulation with us in it, that would be indistinguishable from us, it’s torturing a version of you, even if you, Leigh Whannell–
**Leigh:** Right, but I would not be affected by my simulation being tortured. My simulation wouldn’t be having a good time, but I myself would not be–
**John:** If you stick it in the framework under which all these other discussions are being had, if a version of you is being tortured, it is you being tortured, if that thing is indistinguishable. That’s my best understanding. Help me out, Erin.
**Erin:** As far as I understand it, and this is one of those things that does result in crying in the shower in the middle of the night, but the way I have thought about it is it’s… This is why they talk about it as a doing thought experiment.
**Leigh:** I love when the article says, “Be warned. Just reading this article may send you insane.”
**Erin:** What they’re trying to get across is, once you’ve learned this sentient, all-knowing artificial intelligence could exist in the future, you now have a decision if you’re going to be one to help that or to not help it. Your decisions as you make along the way could influence that one way or the other and it could eventually punish you. Again, as John mentioned, there are versions of this where it’s in a simulation or we’re living already in that simulation. Extrapolating the probabilities of your own behavior, like when we code NPCs in video games, non-player characters in video games, we’re assuming they’re going to make decisions based on what you do. It’s the same idea that this artificial intelligence will make a decision based on what we’re deciding to do. It’s very philosophical.
**Leigh:** Maybe the movie there, so as not to skirt too closely to the Matrix, although maybe it already is, maybe the movie there is that there is an anti-AI scientist, somebody who is a distinguished scientist who believes that AI is the wrong direction to go in, if we give it too much power, suddenly starts to find their life falling apart. Things are happening. Maybe people they know aren’t recognizing them anymore. Starts to work out that the AI that this scientist colleague invents in the future is now inflicting pain on a simulation, but somehow that simulated version of this main character is affecting her own life. Somehow the simulation is bleeding into her own life, and it becomes this almost Jacob’s Ladder version of what’s real, what’s not, how can a supercomputer in the future be tearing apart my current reality.
**Erin:** It brings up good things you can play with with free will. Am I going to choose this? I’ve been predetermined to choose this. Everything I’ve been exposed to in the past says I’m going to choose this, but now I know that it knows I’m going to choose that.
**Leigh:** Maybe the main character’s life starts falling apart so much that the AI in the future sends her a message somehow, be it through somebody else or whatever, but saying, “This can all stop if you get on board and help your colleague to make me what I am today.” She has this moral crossroads of do I stop this tearing apart of my life and help my colleague create this thing that is tearing apart my life, or do I keep on my current track of trying to stop something that I think is bad for humanity.
**Erin:** I got to say, this reminds me of a film, Superintelligence, with Melissa McCarthy. It was really similar to this.
**Leigh:** Oh wow.
**Erin:** Really weirdly similar to this.
**John:** Let’s pull back a little bit and look at the article in context, because the headline is, are there basically ideas that are too dangerous to think. That reminds me of The Ring. Once you’ve seen the videotape in The Ring, you are cursed and you are going to die in seven days. I think there’s some aspect of once you’ve been exposed to a thing, you can’t ever get away from it, feels like an evergreen topic. Everything we’ve been describing feels like a horror film [unclear 00:46:23] in some ways. That knowledge could be a curse that you carry with you.
This also reminds me of, there’s a book that Megan McDonald and I both like a lot, called There is No Antimemetics Division, which has a sense of ideas that you can’t actually see or think, because they are anti-memes. They’re memes that are so powerful that they worm their way into your head. There’s something that feels scary about this, but also not necessarily super cinematic. I’m having a hard time picturing a thing that a camera would be pointed at.
**Erin:** I could picture it being a very heady hard sci-fi, psychological sci-fi horror about how do you forget you learned something, truly forget it.
**Leigh:** Also, if you have an AI in the future that’s torturing you, I almost see it as a science fiction Jacob’s Ladder where the character’s life is falling apart in really eerie and scary ways because this entity in the future is messing with her reality somehow. I can see things to point the camera at.
**John:** You’re quire a director. I’m also thinking early Darren Aronofsky. I’m thinking Aronofsky around Pi and that sense of people who get so obsessed with ideas that it takes over their life. [unclear 00:47:40].
**Leigh:** I want to pitch what I’m working on right now, because every time you guys are talking about seeing things in space that don’t make sense or a character becoming so obsessed with an idea, I’m like, I just want to pitch it, but [unclear 00:47:53] so I can’t.
**John:** Let’s go back out to very, very wide and things we can’t point a camera at, which would be solar storms. I’d love to talk about the reality and dramatic potential of solar storms, which are basically… The surface of our sun sometimes puts off these giant plumes of fire and radiation that can mess up life on Earth. We have records of these things that happened. There have been telegraph lines becoming charged and paper catching fire. That was before we had all the modern technology. If we were to be hit by one of these right now, it would be really, really bad. Erin, can you give us a sense of what a solar flare or solar storm could be like? You’d mentioned gamma ray bursts earlier on. There are things out there that are just really bad if they hit the Earth.
**Erin:** Yeah, space will kill us. I love that you brought this up. The big bad solar storms are called coronal mass ejections or CMEs. Actually, we wrote this into an episode of Season Three of Star Trek: Discovery, where the engineer referred to it as a star burp. We will simplify it to that. Like you said, it unleashes a huge amount of radiation, a huge amount of heat. Now you’ll survive the Earth getting hit by a CME. A gamma ray burst is such high radiation, you’re just going to fry. A solar storm isn’t going to necessarily hurt you, but what it does do, as you said, is it takes down technology. It’s a huge electromagnetic pulse.
You mentioned the telegraphs and the papers catching on fire. That was from an event in 1859 called the Carrington Event. That was when Earth got hit by a CME right at the early stages of this industrial era. It was so powerful, it took down transformers. It blew out all the telegraph lines. People who were using telegraphs, it set their paper on fire. They got shocked by it. It’s crazy. It’s come close to happening these days. I think in 2012 we discovered a couple years later we only missed one by a couple weeks. It can happen, and the implications are numerous and delightful and catastrophic.
**John:** It’s not hard to envision the big catastrophe movie of this, which would be everything gets taken down. Let’s set a moment to think about the period film of this. If we actually were to make a movie about the Carrington Event and what that would be like, in some ways it could be charming. It would be a disruption and things could happen, but it’d be a good parable for losing this technology we counted on and having to do things the old way or something like you can’t send a message out and so you’re isolated. There’s something charming about that image.
**Leigh:** Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I actually think just that concept, it almost is by the by now when you talk about the solar storms. It’s like a movie based on what would happen to us all if none of our devices worked anymore, if suddenly everyone teenager’s TikTok in the world was not available to them. I think I can see an interesting dramedy about that.
**John:** As we went through this pandemic, it was bad. Everyone agrees, it sucked, but we still had our technology. Without our technology, it would’ve been much, much, much worse. Our ability to get things and communicate with people, if we didn’t have Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls, it’s hard to even imagine how much worse this would’ve been. Scaling back up to the modern day catastrophe movie, it would be horrible. It would be one of those pre-apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic kind of scenarios. We could get our way back, but it would be really, really hard.
**Erin:** I think it’s fun to explore. I’ve tried playing around with different stories with this too. We could be sitting here having this conversation, a CME could hit us, and it’d just all be gone. All the cell towers are gone. None of the electricity works. All the power lines are down. What do you do in that situation?
**John:** A question for you. I’m envisioning the Earth turning in space. Does it only hit half of us or does it hit the whole planet? Do we know what would happen?
**Erin:** Good question. That’s why we’ve dodged them in the past is because it’s just lined up with Earth’s orbit or not. Yes, if a CME hits us, it will affect the whole Earth, because of Earth’s magnetic field. These are all charged particles. If you think about iron filaments in a magnet, they’re all going to align with that. Certainly the side that’s hit direct will be affected by it, but the magnetic field of Earth will carry that throughout. There are some nuances to it, but it would definitely be a global event.
**John:** We talked through these different scenarios and different story ideas. Obviously, we’re overlapping so much with what Leigh’s already writing that he’s really angry at us now.
**Leigh:** No, I’m not angry at all. I’m desperate to almost chat it over with you so you guys can shoot holes in it and talk about it with me, but maybe to do that publicly wouldn’t be wise.
**John:** Maybe we’ll do that offline.
**Erin:** We’ll take it offline.
**John:** Yeah, we’ll do that. Thank you for talking us through the science behind all these things. If a studio were developing one of these ideas, how would they enlist your help in doing this? How early do you come in in a process? Do you come in when there’s a script done and the director’s figuring out some stuff? What is the best way to involve a scientific professional like you on this?
**Erin:** I’m naturally moving into the writer space. Other science consultants have done the same. Naren Shankar and Andre Bormanis both got their starts as science consultants on Star Trek. It’s very easy now for me to see how that transitions into a writing career, but what I’ve found with other writers is the earlier the better, because we can brainstorm fun ideas. We can break story. We can add layers that you might not have thought of, that have this backbone of science. Then we also don’t have to undo anything, just because it doesn’t quite fit. It’s not that I would never not let you do something, but it just means that we can make it stronger by getting ahead of stuff.
**John:** Erin, if somebody were working on a thing like the chimeras in a story, obviously they can do a lot of research themselves, but what would be your recommendation for finding experts or finding people in the field who they could actually bounce ideas off of? Do you have any guidance on that?
**Erin:** Yeah, there’s a few resources. The Science and Entertainment Exchange is one in LA that is available to writers. I know the WGA has some connections as well, that you’re able to reach out to them. I’m hired as a science consultant, and sometimes I do get asked biology questions. My role for that predominantly is to reach out to experts I know and whom I trust, but also that I have that research background to filter through a lot of the BS, to not waste anyone’s time, and that I can translate that in a way that helps your story. There’s lots of resources. Twitter’s also a great way to reach out to science communicators and people who are good at translating stuff for you.
**John:** Fantastic. We have one question here Megana’s put on Workflowy. Do you want to ask that for us?
**Megana:** Greta asks, “I’m writing a sci-fi horror project about an experimental medical procedure. I’ve gotten really caught up researching the science and mechanics of drug trials, etc, but when I watch other movies in the genre, they don’t seem to spend much time explaining or justifying the premise. My question is, how do I get out of the way of my own backstory?”
**John:** That’s a good question. We talked a little bit about that in the great explainer in Jurassic Park, which is such an efficient talking it through, like this is how this is all going to work. As I think through, so many of my favorite movies that are in a scientific space don’t spend a lot of time on the science. It’s just part of the premise itself. Leigh, with both Invisible Man and Upgrade, you have scientists in those movies, but they’re not sciencing that much.
**Leigh:** I feel like I remember reading an interview with a guitarist once who was playing really experimental, seemingly crazy music. He’s like, “Yeah, but you have to know the rules to do this. You got to learn the rules and then forget them.” I feel like one thing for me is just to know what the science is. In the case of The Invisible Man, I had my theory and had written out how I thought the suit worked, but I didn’t feel the need necessarily to have a scene where somebody explains that in detail.
I feel like sometimes you knowing how the science in your film works can filter through your screenplay in more of a drip feed fashion than this exposition dump. I do feel like audiences pick up on a lot. John, you said before, “I saw the suit and I felt like I knew how it worked,” but I didn’t really have anybody explaining it in the movie. I did have a couple of people say, “You didn’t even explain how the suit worked.” I guess you’ll never please everybody. My policy is just to know it yourself, but not necessarily force that knowledge on the audience in a heavy-handed way.
**Megana:** Do you find yourself ever going through in a pass and taking out some of the science if you’ve overwritten it?
**Leigh:** Sometimes, yeah, because I guess when you get into editing you realize that the essential bone marrow of the film is just the story, and anything that’s not pushing it forward is window dressing. What I actually love is one thing that you’ve talked about, Erin, that you do, is giving people technical terminology. There’s this thing that I love where it’s like when you’re watching a film and you feel like you’re in the hand of authority. If I’m watching a scene with neurosurgeons and somebody’s like, “Hand me the excavator,” is like, “Three milliliters of da da da da,” I don’t need to know what that stuff is. What I do need to know is that the people on screen know what it is.
It works very well in spy movies when somebody sits down and is using terminology that I don’t understand. If somebody sits down, some CIA guy, and is like, “This whole thing’s a blackout. I’m going to need a two-day wash-up on this,” I don’t know to know what those nicknames are. I’m like, “Oh, wash-up, that sounds important.” The scene would be bad if the character sat down and said, “Oh, this whole thing’s a blackout,” and the character they were talking to said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’m pretty new here at the CIA. What’s a blackout again?” and the guy was like, “A blackout is when an operation goes totally south and we have to pretend it didn’t exist.” If I was watching that movie, I’d be like, “Oh my god, you had me at blackout. What are you doing?”
The script I’m working on right now, just to give you guys… I’ve been talking to someone about telescopes, super duper powerful telescopes. This guy from Cal Tech was giving me all these terms that they use that I’ve been dropping in the script, like, “Check the baffles.” I wouldn’t explain to anybody what baffles are or anything. By the way, if I’m remembering correctly, it’s the black sheeting that keeps light away from the telescope.
**Erin:** Very nice.
**Leigh:** What I would do in the script is have someone on screen say, “Check the baffles,” and then somebody else would be like, “Baffles are all good.” I really don’t think the audience would be sitting there going, “Wait a minute, what about baffles? I’m lost.” All they need to know is that these guys are scientists who know their shit. That’s the most important thing.
**Erin:** The counterpoint too is that it gives a lot of good credibility when you do have that one astronomer or that one neurosurgeon who’s watching it, and they’re like, “Yeah, they used the right word.” [Unclear 00:59:15].
**Leigh:** On Upgrade I got a lot of comments, or I saw a lot of comments on Twitter from hacker types who would say, “He used the right terminology for that hack.”
**Erin:** Makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I’d still caution people to throw the techno babble in, as I like to call it, but making sure that it is right. You don’t have to explain it, but make sure what you’ve got is at least as close to possible.
**Leigh:** It’s not important for the audience to know how the science works. It’s just important that they believe the people on the screen know how the science works.
**John:** Exactly the point. You have to believe that the characters know what they’re doing and are doing things properly. The case with Star Trek, Erin, I will say that there’s techno jargon, but it’s also very Star Trek-specific techno jargon, because you want to make sure that you’re referring to the same things in the same way, episode to episode, series by series, that it’s consistent.
**Erin:** That’s a lot of the reason they brought me on to be available to the whole franchise was to maintain that consistency, because that’s five shows. Once shows are off and running, they’re operating pretty independently. Having someone double checking how one show’s talking about transporters or talking about warp drives or imposing any numbers or star dates, all that stuff is in my purview to make sure that that all stays consistent, and consistent with the last 55 years of Star Trek. No pressure.
**John:** I bet we have some listeners who are so envious of your job. It does sound remarkable.
**Erin:** Thank you.
**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Annie Rauwerda for Input. She’s talking about the love story behind… In Wikipedia, if you look up High Five, there are these four photos of this man and this woman doing high five, down low, too slow, showing what those actual things are. They’re the public main photos for those things. It’s tracking down who were those people in those photos and what is their deal, because they look to be like they’re in college. It’s not clear, are they a couple? What’s going on? The spoiler for it is they are actually a couple. They are actually married. They have two kids now. It was lovely to see a thing that’s been on the internet forever and tracking through who those people are now. It’s a lovely story that has nothing to do with science whatsoever, but made me happy as I was reading it.
**Leigh:** Very good.
**John:** Leigh, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?
**Leigh:** My thing would be, I’ve been reading these short story collections by an author named Brian Evenson lately. I’m really loving his short stories. He writes these, I wouldn’t call them horror stories necessarily, but they are somehow infused with existential dread. Literary horror I guess would maybe be the term. He’s written a few collections of short stories. I just read one called A Collapse of Horses. He has another one that I’m just about to start reading called The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell. Actually, each story is related to somehow, going by the back blurb, each story is related to what we are doing to our environment and our planet. I guess he’s building these stories of eerie dread out of the way our planet’s going. His stories, some of them are very short. They’re just amazing little bite-size chunks to read before bed or whenever, just because we don’t have enough existential dread in society right now. Things are going just fine, and you want to feel more uneasy.
**John:** We love it. Erin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?
**Erin:** Yeah. I’m taking the opposite approach to Leigh in terms of existential dread and confronting it or running away from it. I have gotten really back into comic books and comic book stories and that lighthearted, fun, skirting around sci-fi fantasy world. I’m reading a book right now called We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen. It is a delightfully fun book about two characters. One has woken up with no memory, but he’s able to erase other people’s memories, so now he becomes a super villain. He holds up banks in order to buy coffee and books. Then another character is also looking for her past. She can’t remember, but she can go really fast, and so she deliveries fast food. They meet in a memory loss support group and then they team up. I haven’t finished it, but it is an absolute delight to read. It’s We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen.
**John:** That sounds absolutely great. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Contra Entropy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Leigh, where are you on Twitter?
**Leigh:** @lwhannell.
**John:** Great. Erin, where can people find you on Twitter?
**Erin:** @drerinmac. That’s D-R E-R-I-N M-A-C.
**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where we’ll have links to articles and topics that we discuss today on the show. You’ll also find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, 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. 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 Leigh’s fantasy mall. For now, Erin and Leigh, it was an absolute pleasure. Leigh, thank you for coming back on the show. Erin, you’re welcome back on the show any time. This was a delight having you here.
**Erin:** Thank you. I had a great time.
**Leigh:** Thanks, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Leigh, on Twitter one night I saw you pitch this idea of like, would anyone go to a period shopping mall where basically you were in the ‘80s or the ‘90s and everything inside this shopping mall, presumably a dead mall that you’d resurrected for the thing, would be of that time period. Am I explaining your concept properly?
**Leigh:** Yeah, pretty much. It was interesting. This idea of mine lives in the gray area somewhere between an actual business plan and a stoned 2 a.m. thought. It’s somewhere in the middle there. I just sent up this tweet. It got a lot of attention, maybe more so than my usual tweets. Once you get the attention of the internet, that can be a bad thing. The 17 Scandinavian Saw fans that usually respond to my every tweet are nothing but positive. All of a sudden the darkest tentacles of the internet were like… If we had to think of the internet as a creature unto itself and not millions of individual people, I’m always astounded at the anger of it.
In that tweet that you’re referring to, I said, “Would anyone want to come and visit this period ‘80s themed mall with movie theaters, but if you had to give up your phone to keep up the illusion of it being the ‘80s, would you do it?” It was astounding, the number of people who were like, “You can take my phone when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.” I was like, whoa, calm down, random guy, not really posing this. I was also astounded by the number of people who would quote tweet it and write, “So…a mall,” or like, “Hey, what if I took a mall and turned it into a mall?”
No, random people. I will use this podcast as an opportunity to say, basically what it would be is a little nostalgia theme park, that you take a dead mall and you make it all very period, so the cinema just shows ‘80s films. The arcade there just has vintage games that were around in this era of the mid ‘80s, the food, everything about it. Basically it’s essentially a Stranger Things theme park. You’re walking around. I just know that if someone did do this, I would want to be there every day. I would want to drink it in. It is something I’ve thought about a lot over the past year.
**John:** Now Erin, would you visit Leigh’s mall?
**Erin:** I would. Depends how long, but again, I spend a lot of time in malls. I don’t know if I have a ton of nostalgia for it.
**Leigh:** What I think the idea is, it’s not so much a mall, like hey, you’re here in a mall to go shopping. It takes the shape of a mall, but it’s really an adult theme park. I went to this place in Portland, Oregon a few years ago with my friends. It was called the Kennedy School.
**John:** The Kennedy School’s great. Describe it, because it really is a very unique place.
**Leigh:** Incredible, especially for someone who lives in LA, which is a city that I don’t think has great entrepreneurial bar and entertainment options that are happening, new ones. Basically, the Kennedy School, this company has bought this old elementary school, which I think was called something something Kennedy School. They bought it and they’ve converted it into this entertainment complex for adults. It has movie theaters in there, a bowling alley, several different bars. It’s a one-stop shop that you can go to. Instead of doing a bar crawl down a street, you go to the Kennedy School, and you walk in and there’s one little bar here, and then there’s a movie theater, and you can plan a night around it. I just remember being blown away. I don’t know how you felt, John.
**John:** I went there for a lunch. It was cool that it was clearly a public school and everything looked like a public school, but it had just been turned into a bar and restaurant, movie theater. I think there was even a hotel.
**Erin:** That sounds awesome.
**Leigh:** I loved it. Dammit, see, Erin’s loving this Kennedy School idea way more than my mall idea. The great thing about it is you’re walking down the corridor, and it was like an elementary school corridor with the little hooks for the coats and everything. I guess my mall would be like that. It’s not a mall in the sense that you can shop there. It’s restaurants and bars and entertainment options would be the only… There would be a movie theater, a bowling alley, an arcade, three or four different food courts, and different bars. It would all be housed in the shape of a mall. Maybe there would be some performance art. Maybe somebody is doing 80s style robot dancing or something. You could really build this little insular world.
I like this world building thing that’s happening with theme parks. I went to the Stars Wars World at Disneyland recently. I loved the all-encompassing nature of it, that when you walked in, it’s like you’d left this planet and you were now interacting with Storm Troopers.
**Erin:** I love that.
**Leigh:** I guess this would be the ‘80s nostalgia version of that Star Wars theme park. Maybe there’s a video store there or something.
**John:** We need to ask Megana Rao, who’s too young to have ‘80s nostalgia, would you visit Leigh’s ‘80s nostalgia mall.
**Megana:** Yeah. I like arcade games and bowling and things. I miss mall food courts. Would you have that there?
**Leigh:** Absolutely. Absolutely.
**Megana:** Yeah, I’m in.
**Leigh:** It would be good food. You would gussy it up a bit. It would have the look of an ‘80s style mall food court, but the food would be a little bit better.
**John:** Let’s talk about how we manifest this vision of yours, because I would like to visit this mall too. Who builds this? How much control do you want over this? Do you just want it to exist and be able to visit it or do you want to have some role in making it exist?
**Leigh:** It’s one of those things where a lot of people say if nobody’s doing it, you should do it. I’ve read a lot of interviews with people that have opened restaurants or whatever, and they’ve said, “I decided to open this restaurant because it didn’t exist.” If I’m to take that approach, I have no hospitality experience, so I guess I would have to get in touch with someone who is some sort of venture capitalist or had some experience in experiential… I do know there was a guy at Blumhouse who I’ve worked with a few times who was in charge of their maze experiences or anything that was real.
**John:** Escape rooms, that kind of stuff.
**Leigh:** Exactly. Maybe someone in that field who could… Maybe you could tie it in with… For all I know, you could go into Netflix and say, hey, this could be Stranger–
**John:** Stranger Things. If you are a Scriptnotes listener who is probably wealthy, but also has experience in hospitality, that could be great. I think about my friend Ryan Reynolds has a gin company. Ryan Reynolds doesn’t know anything about gin. He didn’t go into this knowing anything about gin. He wasn’t a gin expert. He had an appreciation for it, and he built this company and sold it for a gazillion dollars. I just want this to be your gin, Leigh. I want this to be your Aviation Gin.
**Leigh:** I feel like with your encouragement this might exist one day.
**John:** We’ll hope so. We’ll have you back on the show for that.
**Leigh:** Excellent.
**John:** We’ll do live Scriptnotes from your mall. I promise you that when the mall opens, Craig and I, we’ll commit Craig to doing a live Scriptnotes at your mall.
**Leigh:** Thank you. Excellent. I’ve got two guaranteed customers.
**John:** Leigh, Erin, thank you so much.
**Leigh:** Thanks, guys.
Links:
* [Ed Solomon’s Tweet on MIB Movie Accounting](https://twitter.com/ed_solomon/status/1495249600428523522)
* [What is a Dyson sphere?](https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-a-dyson-sphere/) and [Dyson spheres on Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)
* [What is a Human Chimera?](https://www.insider.com/what-is-a-human-chimera-and-how-does-it-happen-2017-11) and [Becoming Two People At Once](https://interestingengineering.com/becoming-two-people-at-once-human-chimerism)
* Stephen King’s [The Dark Half](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Half)
* [The Science Behind the Endgame Snap](https://www.fandom.com/articles/avengers-endgame-science-snap) and [Minimum Viable Population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population)
* [Rokos Basilisk: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time](https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experiment-of-all-time.html)
* [There is No Antimemetics Division](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FHHQRM2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by qntm
* [Are Solar Storms Dangerous to Us?](https://earthsky.org/space/are-solar-storms-dangerous-to-us/) and [How We’ll Safeguard Earth From a Solar Storm Catastrophe](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/space/how-we-ll-safeguard-earth-solar-storm-catastrophe-n760021)
* [The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos](https://www.inputmag.com/culture/wikipedia-high-five-too-slow-photos-mystery-couple-solved) by Annie Rauwerda for Input
* [A Collapse of Horses](https://theamericanreader.com/a-collapse-of-horses/) a short story collection by Bryan Evanston
* [We Could be Heroes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087JJ5G5K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Mike Chen
* [Leigh Whannell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1191481/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lwhannell?lang=en) and Leigh’s [80’s mall tweet](https://twitter.com/LWhannell/status/1490133853607919616)
* [Erin Macdonald](https://www.erinpmacdonald.com/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/drerinmac?lang=en)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Contra Entropy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/539standard.mp3).