The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/why-now).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 561 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, why now? We’ll ask the question every development executive asks at your second meeting and why writers need to think about it in their own work. We’ll also talk about reversals and answer a bunch of follow-up.
**Craig:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss when to engage with stupid people and when to just ignore them.
**John:** That is crucial advice.
**Craig:** I have thoughts.
**John:** You have thoughts.
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** Also, our Premium Members, we should say we sometimes send out emails to Premium Members, and one of the emails that Premium Members will be getting pretty soon is about upcoming live shows.
**Craig:** Live shows are back.
**John:** If you would like that information about when those live shows are coming out and how to get those first tickets, it’d be great to be a Premium Member. Little tip there that those people are going to get the first notice. The venues are not huge, so they could sell out.
**Craig:** Just remind people, because it’s been a while. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts. We sell out stadiums. You people, take heed.
**John:** That’s so interesting, Craig, that now we are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, but we used to just be the Bon Jovi, like Bon Jovi the band. Now it’s come down to the singular-
**Craig:** I feel like people are showing up for Jon Bon Jovi. No offense to the other guys. We are the Jon Bon Jovi. I’m changing it. Hey listen, man, the pandemic happened.
**John:** It did.
**Craig:** Changes had to be made. Simple as that.
**John:** Our world shrunk a little bit during that time, and we really focused on the individual rather than the group. I get it.
**Craig:** We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.
**John:** Very nice. A much less fun topic to start off our show this week is abortion and abortion rights and abortion access. Two pieces of news to talk about as related to writers. First off, the WGA Health Plan announced this week that they will be covering travel for abortion-related expenses. If you are a person who is working, a WGA member who’s working in a state the restricts abortion, and you need to have an abortion or someone who’s on your health plan needs to have an abortion, the WGA Health Plan will reimburse the travel expenses for getting you to a state where you can have an abortion.
**Craig:** This is becoming fairly common for a number of businesses as well. What do we do? We can’t pat ourselves on the back for doing this, because we’re all soaking in the shame and stupidity of what has happened. At a minimum, our health plan is doing what they can. Personally, I think we got to get out of any place that is banning abortion, because it’s gross. You have to plant your flag somehow. We just can’t keep doing business with these places.
**John:** That’s a nice segue to the other thing that happened this last two weeks was that first a group of 400 mostly female showrunners signed a letter to the studio saying, “Hey, we are demanding answers for how you’re going to handle production in states that are outlawing abortion,” and asking for specific guidance on what they were going to do to address the problem. Another 600 or more showrunners, including you and I, signed onto a follow-up statement saying yes, we really do need these answers. As we record this, we don’t know what the individual plans are going to be for different studios. The WGA can talk about its members, but the writer is one or five people on a production. Productions have hundreds of people who are all facing the same problems. We need to have a bigger conversation about how we’re going to handle these situations when they occur on sets that are shooting in Georgia or some other state that could restrict abortion.
**Craig:** I think it’s probably best for us to say that while abortion immediately impacts people with a uterus, abortion fully impacts everyone.
**John:** Of course.
**Craig:** That’s why ultimately so much of what was happening… A lot of women in our business came together and raised a lot of money and did a lot of work on this behalf. Aline Brosh McKenna, the Joan Rivers of our podcast, was key in that, and then a lot of guys. They asked. They said, “Guys, step up, because this is about all of us.” It’s true. I don’t think anyone thinks that, for instance, breast cancer is a problem that guys don’t have to think about. I had to think about it quite a bit when my wife had it. It impacts everyone’s life. Prostate cancer impacts everyone’s life. This is something that is about our human nature and about the people that we are and the people we love.
I’m not comfortable going to a state where the legislature has decided to be cruel and stupid. You have to put your foot down somehow. You just do. This is crazy. We’ll keep raising money for abortion, by the way, not for choice, because I hate that word. For abortion, which is an excellent and necessary health procedure that saves lives and preserves the rights of individuals. We will try and do what we can as individuals in our business to advocate getting away from people who don’t see it that way.
**John:** Obviously, we’re going to continue to follow the story. We should have answers back from what the different studio’s plans are for this, not only in dealing with travel situations if those need to come up but also the privacy implications of this. It’s weird that you’re going to have to tell your employer specifically why you need to do X, Y, or Z. That just doesn’t feel right in the situation that we’re in right now. To be determined how it all sorts out.
**Craig:** Just crazy.
**John:** Let’s go to a less dire topic. Let’s talk about Netflix and Stranger Things. This was an article that was a nonevent. In the Stranger Things canon, I guess a character’s birthday had been set at one date, and years later they moved it to a different date. They went back and retroactively changed a line in an earlier episode to make it match, which has echoes of Lizzo changing a lyric or Beyonce changing a lyric, realizing that there was an ableist slur in there. That feels innocuous. At what point do we say no, this art is finished and we should just leave it as it is?
**Craig:** It is innocuous. I think it reflects the way that people absorb culture now, which is all as a piece. They like to pick it apart, especially things that they obsess over like Stranger Things. You mentioned the word canon. Canon used to be preserved for literary works and religion and classical music. Now it applies to television shows. It’s clear that people take all this very seriously.
I’ll give you an example that I was involved in. On Mythic Quest, I wrote the episode called Backstory, where we learn the backstory of F. Murray Abraham’s character. We go back in time. There is this big deal that had been made. In the first season he kept boasting about his Nebula Award. In the episode I wrote, we see how he came to get that Nebula Award. There was a photograph in the first season of him winning the Nebula Award. They just took a shot of young F. Murray and PhotoShopped it in. Josh Brener wonderfully played young F. Murray Abraham in Backstory. They went back and they changed the photo in the first season, which I thought was completely innocuous and fine. It just didn’t seem like somebody was making the smile on Mona Lisa a little bit bigger.
Little things like that for consistency I think are actually fan service and show a little bit of respect to people, because sometimes stuff happens. The last thing you want to do is say, “Oh my god, we can’t do this storyline, because some dumb picture was… ” It doesn’t work that way. We have to call it as we see it. Very famously, Spielberg took the guns out of ET.
**John:** ET, yeah.
**Craig:** Replaced them with walkie-talkies. I don’t agree with that. That feels like a very different kind of thing.
**John:** Let’s pull it apart, because I was also thinking about that. In both cases, it is the creator of the actual work itself going back and saying, “I think that the choice they made at that point wasn’t the right choice.” It feels like a Lizzo or Beyonce changing the lyric more than a studio coming in and sanitizing it. Tell me about why you think that’s a bigger change.
**Craig:** Beyonce and Lizzo were not aware that a particular word was offensive to a lot of people. The song came out, and people went, “Hey!” They were like, “Oh, okay, didn’t know. I’ll take the L, and I’ll go back in there, and I’ll change it.” It was immediate. It was essentially immediate feedback, which again is a modern cultural phenomenon.
**John:** It’s like they had an edit tweet button. They could just go through.
**Craig:** Basically. It’s the cultural version of the seven-second delay where you get an oopsie. We never had that kind of feedback loop before, so this is a new phenomenon. In the case of ET, decades, I think, after ET came out, Spielberg made the choice to say, “You know what? My opinion about things has changed. I’m going to go back in and do this.” The issue is it had been out there for so long in that way, and it’d been seen so many times in that way that it felt a little pointless, because ET is beloved. If nobody cared about ET, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was beloved. It was studied. That change was not to do fan service. That change was not to coordinate the canon. That change was simply because he had an opinion about something. It just didn’t feel very good or reasonable. Similarly, the decades later, “Oh, now I have the money to do that the way I really wanted to do it,” Lucas style adjustments. I just find you could it, it’s your movie, but I don’t think anybody was applauding it. Anyone.
**John:** In both these cases, with ET and with Star Wars, the question of ownership becomes a little bit more forefront, because at a certain point, yes, they are the creators of the original work, but they feel like they’re owned by culture in general. We all own Star Wars. We all own ET. It feels like a bigger violation to make a change to a thing we feel like, “Oh no, I already have this in my house. This is a thing I own, and you now are changing it.” Maybe that’s what it comes down to.
**Craig:** This, by the way, is why I’m not a huge fan of director’s cuts or other things like that, because even though on occasion the director’s cut is vastly better than the movie that existed otherwise, usually when the studio has chopped it up completely, and so you never really did see the movie at all, but most of the time it’s like, “Oh, we threw back in a bunch of crap that we cut out.” There’s stuff that we cut out of Chernobyl that I really liked, but it just didn’t ultimately fit. We were better off without it. I’m not putting that stuff out there as an extended edition or any of that stuff, because the show that I did is the show I did. That’s the one people watch. That’s it. You get one show.
**John:** Last bit of news to talk through, this is happening right as we’re recording, so we don’t know all the details. Batgirl, which was a $70 million Warner Bros movie, was announced it is never going to come out to be released.
**Craig:** Ever.
**John:** It’s not going to release on HBO Max. It’s not going to release in theaters. I cannot think of another example of a movie with that kind of budget that has just been killed in post-production. It’s already shot. It’s already done. It’s a big move to not release it.
**Craig:** It’s pretty crazy. Obviously, people can take a look at the way movies are made and make an argument that we’ve spent, let’s say, I don’t know, what have they spent on this thing?
**John:** 70 they said.
**Craig:** $70 million has been spent. It’s easy to say, oh my god, just put it on fricking HBO Max and forget about it, but do get something out of it. The issue is it’s probably not done. There’s probably more work to be done. Then there’s marketing. Obviously, if they wanted to put it on streaming, they wouldn’t have to deal with the expense of a theatrical release. It seems like there’s this weird financial thing going on based on the merger and stuff before August 15th. Do you know I know less about accounting than basically anything else?
**John:** Thank you for saying that, because I really don’t understand accounting.
**Craig:** Nothing.
**John:** Or cost-based accounting or depreciation. Right over my head. I can do a lot of mathy kind of stuff, but I don’t get that.
**Craig:** The term write-off, I’m 80% on it. I think it means that they just say it’s a business expense that we can then, as a loss, discount from the taxable income or something. When they say these things like the books, like when they talk in movies like, “Oh, there were two sets of books,” I’m like, what does that mean? I really don’t know what… Megana, are you better at accounting than we are? I hope you are, because we don’t know anything.
**Megana Rao:** Oh my god, I tried to do math in the office, and we left it on the whiteboard for a while.
**Craig:** The whiteboard of shame?
**Megana:** Yeah, so absolutely not.
**Craig:** Wow. No one should be hiring the Scriptnotes gang to do their books. I don’t even understand what a book is. All I can say is this is pretty nuts. I don’t recall anything like this in all my time in Hollywood, where an entire… By the way, John, you and I both, I know this for a fact, have been asked to work on movies that are in post-production that are so bad that I have said at least three different times on films that have come out that they should not have come out. I have said three different times, “Don’t pay me. Don’t hire me to do anything. Take this and just put it away.” They didn’t. They spent more money, and they put it out there. In each of those cases, they would’ve been far better off financially by putting it away. I guess in this case, this feels more like a merger thing. I just don’t understand it.
**John:** We don’t know if the film is good or bad. We just know that they’ve decided not to release it. It could have relations to other things in the DC universe. We don’t know. I feel bad for the writers, directors, everyone who worked on that movie for a year, because yes, you got paid for working on a movie, which is great, but to not have the movie come out… We’ve talked about this before on the show, is that some of your pay is generally based on the movie actually coming out, so delivery of the finished negative or a box office bonus. When it’s released theatrically, if it hits $100 million, you get this bonus, residuals. None of that’s going to happen.
**Craig:** That’s right. The director’s almost certainly fulfilled their obligations by delivering a cut, and they will be paid. You’re correct, whatever residuals have become will obviously no longer be a factor. It’s an interesting question for the screenwriter. Almost always there is a bonus for screenplay credit. The credit may have been determined for this movie, but may not have been, because the credit is determined by a process that begins with the studio submitting a notice of tentative writing credit. If the studio hasn’t submitted that, there is no writing credit for this, and then there is no bonus. This is a really weird one. I have to just hope that this is a weird eclipse shooting star moment here that won’t happen again.
**John:** I will say though it’s unprecedented for this to happen in movies or television. I guess there have been some TV series that have shot and never aired. The pilot process is a form of this, where we shoot a pilot, and most pilots never air. Other industries, they will just do research and development. Apple will spend a billion dollars developing a car and say, “We’re not going to do a car.”
**Craig:** That’s right. The difference is that the car would need to still be manufactured over and over and over. They’ve manufactured the single car that is then required to show people. That’s the business we’re in. We build one thing, and everybody comes, stands around, and looks at it. To not put it out there is a very surprising decision, but I think this is one of those stories that’s tailor made for the phrase “above my pay grade,” because I don’t understand this stuff.
**John:** Let’s do some follow-up here. Last week we talked about IMDb. I was complaining about the new IMDb redesigned. We agreed that the redesign was terrible. You said, “John, why don’t you just scrape IMDb and make your own website?”
**Craig:** Scrape it.
**John:** I said that was completely impossible and that copyright law would prohibit that. A bunch of people wrote to us who know more about this than we do. We’ll start off with Cory Doctorow, who is an author and online person who said that I was… He’s an online person.
**Craig:** He’s an online personality.
**John:** He’s an online personality.
**Craig:** He’s very online, as Aline would say.
**John:** Who’s very strongly said that I was wrong. He pointed to court cases that would indicate that you could get by with scraping IMDb. Chris Reed, who’s an actual copyright attorney, wrote in and explained why that’s true and also there’s other complications along the way. Craig, where are we standing now with your fantasy of scraping IMDb? Where do you think we’re at now?
**Craig:** I think that we’re in a decent place. I think that you have to be careful when you’re scraping IMDb to not scrape up the wrong stuff. Basically, if you work at IMDb and you create anything for that site that isn’t just a fact that you scraped yourself from credits of a film, that may be protected. In fact, it likely is. Basically, IMDb is a service that already scraped another service. It scraped all the credits from all the movies. I think a re-scraping feels like you’d be on solid ground.
**John:** Chris, the copyright attorney, says that, “John is correct that there is copyright protection available for compilations of data and databases, but Craig is correct the facts are not generally copyrightable.” It goes down back to the phone book. The information in the phone book is not copyrightable. The argument would be is the organization of facts in IMDb and how it’s put together and is there essential stuff in it that is copyrightable that is not just the facts themselves. That would be the live court case.
Interestingly, there is a case that’s similar to it, which is that LinkedIn sued a company called HiQ. HiQ was scraping LinkedIn. It went through a bunch of iterations, made it to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court kicked it back down. HiQ won or has been winning this live challenge for its ability to scrape LinkedIn to get information off of public-facing pages for that. That seems relevant, except that HiQ is not a direct competitor of LinkedIn, which is Craig’s service. Craig movie database would directly compete with it, which feels like that could be another live issue there.
**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know why. Basically, whether I’m competing or not, either what they have is ownable or not ownable. I do think that if you were scraping IMDb and then your website looked a whole lot like IMDb, you’d be in trouble.
**John:** There’d probably be trademark and trade dress and all those kind of problems too.
**Craig:** Even the general design and layout of tabs and things, these are trademarkable but also copyrightable I think is more important. The layout itself is probably protected. I’m just talking about the raw data. I’ll just come back to IMDb itself is a scraping service. You point out here in our notes that IMDb has a term of service, which says, “Robots and screen scraping. You may not using data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on this site except with our express written consent as noted below.” Lol. Lmao. Unenforceable. I don’t believe that. What does that even mean? You violated their terms of service. Who cares? What are they going to do, kick you off? It’s free. That’s the thing. It’s not like terms of service are a law where you go to prison. They’re just saying you’re not allowed to use their service if you do this. I did it, and I guess I won’t use your service anymore.
**John:** What Chris points out though is that by violating the terms of service, they might be go after you criminally for, it’s called CAFA, computer abuse and fraud, that you’re using their service, that you’re potentially stealing. That’s a stretch, but that’s what they would try to do.
**Craig:** Sure, they could try to do it, and they would lose, because you’re not doing what that law was intended to do. Generally speaking, it’s not all technicalities. Everybody understands what the intention was. You’re not breaking into their website. For instance, one of the terms of service might be you can’t violate our security layers to steal the information of other users. If you do that, it’s not just a violation of the terms of service. I could see where that goes into CAFA. This, I’m just copying stuff that’s on the screen. Anyway, we’re armchair lawyers, but I’m pro-scrape. I think our service should be called scrapey.scrape. I think people would love it.
**John:** To clarify for our listeners and for Amazon’s lawyers, we are not actually planning on building anything here. This is never going to happen.
**Craig:** John has already built it. He’s already built an Amazon. It’s in his backyard, getting ready to launch.
**John:** It got me thinking about… Craig, you’re of course familiar with the Fermi Paradox, which is basically it feels like there should be other alien civilizations out there, and why have we not seen alien civilizations. I think there’s a similar thing that you can think about with a movie service that is like IMDb, is that if it were simple and easy to do just by scraping, someone else would’ve done it, which leads me to think that there’s probably some reasons why there’s not a big competitor to IMDb. The fear of litigation, that it’s actually technically harder to do, to actually run the site than you think, that there’s no way to make it profitable might be factors.
**Craig:** That’s the big one, I think. I think that IMDb is a decent platform for advertising, but it is not a business that… They try, but it’s not really an expandable business. It’s more of a public servicey kind of thing.
**John:** That’s probably why my frustration is so pointed towards the UI changes they’re making to it. It’s because I think they’re trying to make more money off of it, and by making it actually worse for people who need to use it.
**Craig:** They’re like, “What are we doing here with this thing?” Really, IMDb or whatever its eventual competitor or new form would be should probably be more of a public utility like Wikipedia is.
**John:** I want that to happen too. Let’s talk about the alternatives that are out there, because we didn’t talk about this last week. The one that you and I both agree is probably the closest to what we’d like to make is a TMDB.
**Craig:** It’s nice. TMDB. I don’t know where they got all their information from.
**John:** They say it’s user supplied. It feels like it’s a little bit more homegrown. It felt accurate.
**Craig:** I assume they have the same kind of publishing structure that Wikipedia folks have. They have regular contributors. Then they have editors, and they have uber-editors and people above them. These things sometimes, they just grow and grow and become amazing. I find that there is often this weird cultural moment. I remember the cultural moment where Google was a thing, because prior to Google, most people were using Yahoo or Alta Vista or Lycos. Then I started using Excite.
**John:** I remember Excite.
**Craig:** Excite was way better. There was a brief Excite moment. Then people started talking about this Google thing. The moment you used it, you were like, “This is so much better.”
**John:** “This is so much better.”
**Craig:** Then it just happened. It happened so fast. Until it happened, there was no Google. It was just a stupid, silly word. That may happen with… Who knows? Maybe this is the beginning of TMDB’s moment.
**John:** It could totally be there. I’ll also point out that Studio System, which is their other credits thing, they pay money for it. It’s a paid service. Variety has Variety Insight, which is a paid service. There are alternatives there. Realistically, everyone you and I know is using IMDb and begrudgingly going through it.
**Craig:** Yes, and IMDbPro, which I subscribe to, which has some interesting information at times.
**John:** It does, but not-
**Craig:** It’s not worth it.
**John:** It’s not worth it. It’s not as good as it should be.
**Craig:** No, I’m passively subscribing to it at this point. I wouldn’t suggest anybody actively subscribe to it.
**John:** Really the reason why I think we subscribed to it in the first place, to fix mistakes in our own listings or friends’ listings.
**Craig:** I don’t do a ton of that. What I use it for mostly is when we’re having casting discussions. They do have a decent searchable actory thing that then organizes people by their stupid star meter, which is not a reflection of anything at all. If I say I’m looking for an actor between 45 and 65 who is between this height and this height, whatever I put in, it’s a decent spit back for me. Maybe TMDB will offer that as well.
**John:** That’d be nice. Hey Megana, can you give us some follow-up on dating your writing partner?
**Megana:** Dangerous wrote in to us with an update. She said, “I wanted to say thanks so much for discussing my letter and all the thoughtful advice. I was genuinely touched. I have a darkly funny updated. While I still haven’t decided what to do on a personal level with this complicated situation, though I’m leaning towards Megana’s none of the above advice, I did pitch this idea to a producer dressed up as a sexy rom-com, and they loved it. I’m now getting some development money. While my therapist probably wouldn’t approve of how this is being handled, at least I can sort out some of my crazy emotions through art, and hey, that’s something, right?”
**Craig:** That is something.
**John:** That is something.
**Craig:** That is the most screenwriter resolution ever. “I’m in a terrible spot. How can I turn this into a movie and get a lot of money?” That’s a thrilling update.
**John:** Craig, you don’t listen to other podcasts, but on The Writing Life podcast, they talk about using the drama in your own life to channel your writing and use your daily writing to sort through your problems. It feels like Dangerous has taken that advice, in addition to our advice, and made gold out of this.
**Craig:** I never would’ve recommended you do this on purpose, but you did it, and I’m so happy you did. Congrats. I hope that this all works out well for you, both for the movie that you’re writing and also however you wish your relationship to go.
**John:** Let’s do one more piece of follow-up here from Annie. This is about Rodney Stotts, which is one of the How Would This Be a Movies.
**Megana:** Annie wrote in and said, “I’m Annie Kaempfer Brooklyn, New York. I just listened to your new episode, big fan, and was so excited to hear about Rodney Stotts in How Would This Be a Movie, because I recently made the feature documentary, and yes, there’s a bird trapping scene.”
**Craig:** There you go.
**Megana:** “Your discussion was so interesting and spot on. I especially appreciated the point that this could easily become a paint by numbers story we’ve all seen a million times before. It was a lesson I learned the hard way, cutting the film down from full length to make it a one-hour TV version. It made me realize my story arc/Rodney’s life story was in a lot of ways the least interesting part of the film. The parts you lean into were the portrait film scenes, Rodney’s stance on parenting, why he’s not interested in romantic relationships, his poetry, etc, anywhere where he’s just being himself and talking about his views on the world, because he really is an amazing character.” Then we’ll link in the show notes to the film and the trailer.
**John:** The film is out on Amazon right now. People can see it if they want to see it. Watching through the trailer, one of the questions you and I had, Craig, was what is his voice like, what does he actually sound like. His speaking voice is cool. His accent is interesting. He carries himself with a cool energy, which I think is going to be great.
**Craig:** I’m excited. I have to say this is very gratifying, because I think you and I wanted to see a version of this, and it turns out it already existed, which is great. We maybe need to go back and ET style rename that segment How Would This Have Been a Movie.
**John:** You definitely wanted the documentary for this. Someone who’s curious about making this movie obviously as a feature, as a narrative feature, you’ll look at the documentary to get a sense of who that is as a character. I think you’re casting Mahershala Ali in that role. I think you’ve got a winner if you’re going to make this movie. I’m excited to see the documentary first.
**Craig:** Fantastic.
**John:** Let’s get on to our marquee topic. This comes from a question from Matt. Maybe Megana could read us the question and set up the issue of why now.
**Megana:** Matt wrote in and said, “I could be wrong, but I don’t recall you guys discussing the question of why now. I’ve been pitching new TV ideas for the last few years and often struggle working out what my characters and story are saying about the world we live in and why this show needs to exist beyond its entertainment value and my enthusiasm and need to work. How much does why now inform your choices and development of new ideas? Did Craig have discussions about why the Chernobyl story needed a TV show in 2019? If yes, at what point in the show’s development was it considered? Developing/discovering a why now feels different to a theme or central dramatic argument, which has universality without necessarily commenting on the world in 2022.”
**John:** What a smart question.
**Craig:** Yeah, although I must admit I’m a bit confused, because this is not what I think of when I think of the why now question.
**John:** Tell me what you think of with the why now question.
**Craig:** For me at least, typically the why now question is never about why are we making this show or movie now for the public. The question is why are these things happening to this character now. What is the relevance inside of the story? I would rephrase this as why should we make this.
**John:** I see that. Let’s talk about this why now in terms of the development is a question of-
**Craig:** Why should we make this?
**John:** Why should we make this now? Also, you could think about it from the writer’s perspective, like why is this a story that I’m drawn to telling now?
**Craig:** Which is very valid.
**John:** I think we’ve talked in other episodes a lot about why does the story start now, why is it starting for this character right now, why is this change happening right now, why are we starting it.
**Craig:** This would be why should we make this now.
**John:** Why is this worth my time and energy to be making this? Let’s think about it from the development side, because this is coming up a lot, this stuff around, that I’m involved with, is something else just happened, some other movie just happened that was a huge success, and so therefore looking around, saying, oh, so another movie in the same genre or the same basic idea feels right and relevant. If there’s a bunch of zombie movies that are hits, okay, this feels like a good time for a zombie movie, or if suddenly two Westerns hit, then we’re making some more Westerns.
**Craig:** I think we have cautioned writers before to not try and time the marketplace this way, because you’ll probably be late. By the time you hear about it, it’s too late. Often what happens is a studio will be well aware that let’s say a Top Gun: Maverick is going to be huge. Other studios immediately start moving into position, because they’ve heard and buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz. The movie comes out. It confirms it. Then they go, “Great, these 300 other things that we have that we’ve copied,” and obviously that’s an exaggeration, “let’s start moving them forward.” By the time it filters to you at home, it’s too late. They’ve already shut the door on the Top Gun: Maverick kind of things. This is why they will occasionally do this, but it’s not necessarily going to be information that’s useful for us as writers.
**John:** I would say the lesson people are taking from Top Gun: Maverick of the summer is not like, oh, we need to make more movies with fighter jets. It’s that, oh, maybe it’s a good idea to make Legally Blonde 3, because we’d be curious to catch up with that character now 20 years later to see what’s up in her life. There’s still that nostalgia, but a new chapter of it can feel right. You can take the same lesson from Creed or other movies like that.
**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s a bit of a revision of the way we used to do things where we would just remake stuff. When you and I were starting out in the ’90s, they would come to us and say we want to remake blah blah blah from a movie, or a television show into a movie. That’s when they were trying to do things like My Favorite Martian into a movie. You’re like, “Who remembers this?”
**John:** I remember pitching My Three Sons.
**Craig:** There you go. My Three Sons, Flubber, and all that. Now they’re like, “You know what? Let’s not remake these things. Let’s just bring back that person but older and see what it’s like now.”
**John:** Extend, yeah.
**Craig:** Exactly. It’s the same vibe.
**John:** Another reason for a why now would be it’s related to a current cultural moment. I was thinking about Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the idea of good white people and the sense of oh, they couldn’t be bad white people, because they voted for Obama. That felt like a very specific moment to make that movie, that you couldn’t have made that movie 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier. It was specific to that moment. There was a thing going on in culture that is like, “Okay, this is the right time to make this kind of movie or this kind of perspective on this kind of movie.”
**Craig:** I will probably repeat this a few times as we have this conversation. That’s not a cultural moment that studios tend to recognize as existing until a movie like Get Out comes out and surprises them all. Nobody behind Get Out, other than Jordan Peele and the filmmakers that were doing it understood quite what was going to happen, because they just didn’t. I’m not surprised. Sometimes in the best way, movies announce that there is a cultural moment.
**John:** Absolutely agreed. Another reason for why now is just there’s a notable filmmaker who wants to make it. There’s really no reason other than that person wants to do it, so therefore we’ll do it. I’m thinking back to one of the streamers came to me with a book that they wanted to make into a movie for their service. They had this director attached. I read the book. I’m like, “Oh.” I was pretty candid on the phone call with them. I was like, “I don’t understand what it is about this book that you want to make.” It’s like, “Oh, she wants to direct it.” Like, “Oh, okay, that’s the whole reason.” This wasn’t the movie that needed to happen right now. There wasn’t anything about this relevance to this, particularly time. It was just simply, oh, this is a thing that she wants to make, so therefore we want to make it.
**Craig:** There are definitely things that come into existence because of ego, whether there is a big star attached, or sometimes it’s just the pet project of the person who runs the studio. I will not say what the movie is. I will not say what the studio is or the name of the studio executive. I will tell you a little story.
**John:** Please.
**Craig:** There was a film that had been in development for over 20 years. It had been green lit. It was a month away from shooting. The person who ran the studio asked me to work on it and to do a lot of work on it, because it needed a lot of work, and to do it fast. I said I could not, and in that discussion, just said, “Hey, why are you still making this a month from now if you know the script needs to be completely rewritten?” This person said, “Sometimes the best way to make a movie is to just start making a movie.” I never forgot that, because I actually understand it. It wasn’t like I went, “You idiot.” I get it, but also, oh no, and spoiler alert, it didn’t turn out well. Generally, it doesn’t. That said, sometimes it does.
**John:** Sometimes it does.
**Craig:** When you watch Heart of Darkness, the documentary-
**John:** Chaos.
**Craig:** … about Apocalypse Now, you can’t believe that they ever agreed to do it in the first place. They just started making a movie and ended up with something incredible.
**John:** Last reason I’ll give for a why now is that there’s a chance to change formats. Look at Lord of the Rings. We’ve done those as movie trilogies. Now you can do Tolkien as a series. Changing the format feels like, oh, there’s a really new way to explore this material by going to a different format. I think a lot of times the why now is just because there’s a new place for us to do this thing and to do it differently. That could be a valid reason.
**Craig:** Primarily, I would say to Matt, this why now thing is not our problem, because most of the things we’re talking about are justifications that executives will have to give to each other and to the person above them, because they often do need a why should we be making this, because they’re the ones that are spending all the money. What we do ultimately is probably best when there isn’t an obvious why now, but rather people tell you the why now. They appreciate it for what it is. Quality itself is the best justification for existence. We probably should just work on that and be less concerned about the why now, because it changed constantly anyway.
**John:** There’s the why now of who’s going to make this movie and why are they going to make it. I think there still is a valid why now question for a writer to ask before they’re even sitting down to start working on a project or to really think through a project is to ask themselves… Matt was talking about theme and dramatic purpose and dramatic question.
I think it’s worth asking yourself just for your own purposes what is it about this film that speaks to me in this current moment or this America right now or the world right now that would be different than if I were to do this 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Is there something that feels relevant and interesting to me about setting the story right now that this film can comment on? Those are valid questions to ask. Are there cinematic techniques that are going to be different and interesting because they are modern cinematic techniques? How are the female characters used? How are you looking at race and gender overall in your film? What’s your perspective in this film on policing and authority? Are there 2022 issues that are interesting to you in this film that you think you can expose? That’s worth asking. It’s not the same kind of why now question, but it’s really asking what is the current relevance for the story you’re thinking about telling.
**Craig:** A lot of stories, movies, and television shows demand a discussion of relevance. If you’re going to adapt X-Men for instance, X-Men is just an obvious allegory for racism and genocide and all that. Then it got even more obvious as it went on. You can’t really ignore that. You need to have that kind of commentary. There are also stories that are simply about universal relationships and experiences that are not about relevance. In fact, they transcend the why now because the answer is because always. For instance, death, love, betrayal, greed, all the good Bible stuff, that’s always why now.
**John:** Timeless.
**Craig:** It’s always why now. The question is really not why now, but what will be different about this. How will this connect to us in a different way? What will be teaching us something about ourselves in a way that we didn’t have before. Then there are other shows, where you’re like, yeah, of course you have to think about why now.
**John:** When I first got pushed to do Aladdin, I asked myself, is it a really good idea? Is there anything to do that is important to do that will be than the animated film, because I love the animated film. What else we came down to is there were a couple things I felt like were contemporary things that could be different and would be better served doing this movie in 2018, 2019. Giving Jasmine agency, because in the animated film, she doesn’t talk to anyone other than her tiger and her father and Aladdin when he finally shows up. Giving her some control over the story, so that decision that she is going to become the sultan and therefore wants to learn how the world works, because she’s been so cloistered, and giving her someone else to talk with. Changing Genie from being the crazy cocaine uncle to a bro, and what that dynamic would shift, and what it’s like to be at fraternal levels. How you position a fantasy world within existing cultural frameworks, because that’s a tricky thing to do. How you land this Agrabah in a place that feels like you could see the connections to existing cultural things, but you’re not stepping on landmines. Those were the things that were interesting to me before I even went in to pitch to Disney what we were going to do with the film.
**Craig:** Honestly, I would put those under how now as opposed to why now-
**John:** That’s a smart framing.
**Craig:** … because if you look at what you have there, that you were saying, “Hey look, this needs to change,” those are actually arguments against why now. Then you provide a how now, and you can see the method in front of you. How now is probably the more important question for adaptations and remakes, I would imagine, because the world has changed dramatically, and generally for the better. You do have to ask these difficult questions that back when you were pitching My Three Sons probably didn’t have to worry about.
**John:** For sure. Let’s get to some reversal. This comes from a question that Leah Saint Marie, or Leah Welch, asked you on Twitter. You said, “Oh.” You flagged me, like, “Let’s talk about reversals on a podcast.”
**Craig:** She said, “Is there anywhere regarding Scriptnotes,” 403 how do you write a movie, “Is there anywhere you specifically walk through the scene-by-scene thesis to antithesis to synthesis creation process, and how these sub-theses generate from the overall theme and then cascade towards the protagonist’s embodiment of that theme?” That’s a good question. I thought, “No, there isn’t. I guess maybe we should do that.” The easiest way for me to do it is to do it with something I’ve written, because I can say this is how that worked.
**John:** We’re going to take a look at two related scenes from Chernobyl. This is Episode 3, I think.
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** Talk us through what happens in these scenes, because we were going to try to pull audio, and the audio was going to actually be more confusing than just talking through the scene. Tell us what’s happening in these scenes.
**Craig:** In this first one, Legasov is with Schcherbina, the Soviet bureaucrat. They have a problem. They need to have miners dig under this nuclear power plant that is burning and install a heat exchanger so that it doesn’t get too hot and doesn’t boil down, melt down into the groundwater. The problem is they need miners to do it. They have to ask the head of the miners to do this without having him go, “No,” because they already have gotten information that these miners are tough and have no problem saying no.
**John:** Let’s talk about the reversals, what you’re setting up and what you’re reversing in the scene. There’s a payoff scene later on that’s a traditional reversal to it. What are the dynamics going into this that need to get flipped?
**Craig:** In the context of what Leah’s asking about, the big theme is about lying. It’s about lies and truth. Legasov is self-professed, says right at the beginning, “I’m not good at lying.” The implication is, “I’m going to need to, because there’s no way we’re going to get this guy to do what we’re asking him to do without lying to him.” Shcherbina is cautioning him that that’s not going to work. He says, “Have you ever spent time with miners?” Legasov says, “No.” He says, “My advice, tell the truth. These men work in the dark. They see everything.” There’s the warning shot. Legasov is warned. He is going to attempt to lie in a different way. He’s going to fire that bullet. “I’m going to lie somehow.”
This guy walks in, Glukhov, tough guy. The first thing he says without saying hello or anything is, he holds up this gas mask and says, “Do these work?” Legasov says, “To an extent.” The lying has begun. The problem that Legasov is going to find is that this guy keeps hitting him back. He hits him back by saying nothing, weirdly, but just asking for a cigarette. When Legasov offers him one cigarette, Glukhov takes the entire pack, which is him saying, basically, “I’m actually tougher than you even thought. Go ahead, keep lying to me, buddy. Let’s see how that works for you.” He asks him what the job is. Legasov explains it without telling him why it’s a problem. He just says, “We have to do this. We can’t approach it from the interior. We have to come in it from underground.” Once again, he is lying with a scent of omission. Glukhov questions him, “What’s above the pad?” Shcherbina says, “Tell him the truth.” Legasov tries a different tact, which is to tell him the truth.
Then Glukhov asks for the dimensions and eventually gets to this question, “How deep do you want the tunnel.” Legasov says, “12.” Glukhov says, “12 meters. Why?” Legasov says, “For your protection. At that depth, you will be shielded from much of the radiation.” Legasov things again that his… He’s gotten to a place where he lied. The guy called him on the lie. He told the truth. We’re in a new place where now we’re okay. He’s gotten where he’s like, “Okay, I’m able to tell you enough truth, but I can still leave stuff out.” It doesn’t work. He tries it, and it doesn’t work. This guy fires more at him. “The entrance to the tunnel won’t be 12 meters down.” Very smart. “No.” “We’re not 12 meters down right now.” “No.” Aha. There we go. Glukhov stands up, says he’s going to do it, but he knows what the truth is. He knows that Legasov was lying to him.
Then the final thing that he says, which is the final synthesis, is he looks at the gas mask and said, “If these worked, you’d be wearing them.” He goes all the way back to the beginning, the very first thing he asked when he walked in, which was, “Do these work?” He might as well have been saying, “Are you a liar or not?” At the end he says, “Aha. Through batting this thing back and forth, we have now established you’re a liar.” That’s how he leaves him. It is a little battle over what the truth is and how to get somebody to do something. In a way Glukhov essentially says, “I would’ve done it anyway if you had just told me the truth, but you didn’t. I don’t respect you.”
**John:** Craig, great scene. We’ll applaud the scene.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** It fits very well into the overall theme of the series. The dynamics within the scene itself are terrific. Obviously, this is not the most efficient version of the scene. The most efficient version of the scene is like, “We need you to do this thing.” He says, “I don’t want to do it, but I’ll do it,” and then he walks out the door. There’s a two-eighths or three-eighths of a page version of the scene that does the same plot purpose. It doesn’t do the actual dramatic purpose, which is to move our story along and to create rhythms within scenes that feel like they are part of the DNA of the whole series. Talk to us about in writing the scene and figuring out the flip within this, how did you approach the scene?
**Craig:** I thought about how frustrating it is to talk to somebody who doesn’t need you, who doesn’t need anything from you. We had created this character and already established that he was completely immune to the normal Soviet stuff. He couldn’t be bullied. He couldn’t be threatened. Furthermore, what he did and what his men were capable of doing was essential work no one else could do. He’s got you. Now what do you do to get that guy to do what you want? To me, everything should always be about the main character in one way or another. Legasov is meant to learn a lesson at the end of the scene that Shcherbina already knows, because Shcherbina’s been around these guys. He knows the deal. Legasov is an academician, an academic. What’s the difference between academic and academician? I don’t know.
**John:** A couple letters, but I don’t actually think it makes a difference.
**Craig:** He’s from the academy. He is struggling with his own need to be a truth teller and also to get things done. He is learning how difficult it is to move through the world telling the truth, that there is always a cost to telling the truth, and so there is fear of telling the truth. In the end, that’s exactly what he conquers, his fear of telling the truth. In the eventual ending of the whole thing, he’s there in a courtroom, his life or his freedom is at stake, and he makes the bold decision to tell the truth. In this moment, which is pretty much smack dab right in the middle of the five-episode run of this show, he is not yet capable of doing it. He gets a little glimpse of how it could’ve gone otherwise if he had. He’s meeting a guy who embodies the truth. Glukhov is literally incapable of lying or he’s guileless. He just wants the information.
**John:** Now we often talk about what rights you need and what rights you don’t need and using real people, using not real people. Of the people who are in this scene, who’s real, and how much of the situation is as it happened? I’m guessing that the miners actually did that work, but no real life moment happened which is the scene.
**Craig:** No. Shcherbina was a real person. Legasov was a real person. This is entirely a dramatic invention that I made. I have no idea if they ever even met with any miners. It’s a work of historical fiction. This task that they were given is correct and is true. Furthermore, the fact that most of them did not understand how dangerous it was was true. The fact that a bunch of them understood it was dangerous but they were still doing it is also true.
I thought it was just fascinating that, this is a very Soviet thing, they did have to dig the tunnel deeper to protect themselves from the radiation that they would experience the second they walked out of the tunnel. Very Soviet. Very strange. A weird kind of denial. If you’re mostly at 12 meters, then maybe it won’t matter that you’re not going to be at 12 meters a lot. All that stuff is correct. Also, the attitude of the miners was something that I took from research, that in the Soviet system the coal miners were incredibly tough, knew that they were essential to the operation of the Soviet state, and in fact gave Gorbachev massive problems with strikes and things like that. They were not afraid at all.
**John:** Obviously, all of the Chernobyl scripts are available at the library, so just johnaugust.com/library. You can read all of them. We’ll put a little pdf snippet of this scene and also the corollary scene, which is 335, which is the payoff of what the miners actually did at the moment, and a funny payoff to that. If people want to see those scenes, there’s a link in the show notes for that.
**Craig:** Hopefully, that helped you understand how I do these things, Leah. It’s always different from scene to scene and moment to moment and show or movie to show or movie. That’s the general idea, watching somebody confront their basic fear and failing at it, but maybe making some incremental gains or learning a lesson or seeing somebody else be truer than they are and learning and finding a new place at the end of it.
**John:** Love it. It’s come time for our One Cool Things.
**Craig:** Woo.
**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing to share?
**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing to share. You know I love The Room, the games, The Room games. There hasn’t been a new one in a bit, although I’m aware that probably to the people who make them, they’re like, “Oh my god, we just made the VR one. We’re working on it.” Work faster. There is this other game called House of Da Vinci.
**John:** I’ve played that.
**Craig:** There’s been House of Da Vinci 1 and House of Da Vinci 2. They are shameless copies of The Room, and yet also I have to give them credit for being good. You can make a copy of something that just isn’t very good. It’s just a bad knockoff. If you make a copy of something and you clearly put a lot of time, thought, energy, and care into it, then I have to say, enjoyable. House of Da Vinci 3 has just come out, last week I believe. I am currently playing it. It’s tough, but it’s good. Again, it has a lot of those Room elements that I love, great sound design, interesting puzzles, and very simple but satisfying UI. If you are a fan of The Room games or if you’ve played the House of Da Vinci games, give House of Da Vinci 3 a shot.
**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is an article by Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. It’s about antlers. It’s about why deer grow antlers, and elk also grow antlers.
**Craig:** Of course.
**John:** Are you aware of antlers and what their deal is and why they grow?
**Craig:** I’m going to give you a huge no on that one, John.
**John:** I grew up in Colorado, so I’ve been around deer and elk and giant antlers all this time. They grow every spring. They are bone. They are bone. They’re not just like keratin. They’re not just like fingernail stuff. They can grow one inch per day, which is incredibly fast. That’s faster than any other bone can grow in your body. It’s faster than cancers can grow. What the article makes clear is that the male deer and elk are spending a tremendous amount of energy, of bodily resources, to create these giant racks to fight other men for breeding and dominance. It seems to wasteful evolutionary-wise, and yet it persists. Scientists don’t quite know why it happens. They don’t quite know why the racks are shed at the end of the season, because some animals don’t shed them. It is fascinating.
Again, this is not a How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s interesting to see that biologically, giant, wasteful male displays have always been there. It happens to peacocks. It happens with these running deer. I thought it was just a cool looking sort of thing, the biology behind it, but also the questions that still remain about why these giant things are possible.
**Craig:** Animal behavior is fascinating to me. That’s a really interesting concept of how much energy is required to create these things just so they could fight each other. I guess the point is that toxic masculinity is very much a part of our existence. It’s weird, I hear this and I actually feel slightly better about being a human man, because even though I have a lot of man things in me, violence… I don’t go around punching people, but I feel violent at times. I’ve punched a wall or nine. My general ability to manage the innate toxic nightmare inside that testosterone creates is pretty decent. I’ve done a decent job. I definitely behave better in real life than I do in, for instance, Cyberpunk 2077.
**John:** For sure. One of the points that she makes is that it’s possible that wasting all this energy on these giant antlers actually does serve a purpose because it proves your dominance over other people. It proves, look how much energy I can afford to waste, that I am so powerful and so much bigger than everyone else. Don’t even try to fight me. It may be good for the herd overall to be doing this crazy stuff. I just thought it was fascinating.
**Craig:** Women dig antlers.
**John:** They do. That’s what it comes down to.
**Craig:** I’m going to grow antlers.
**John:** For my Bambi remake, it’s all about antlers.
**Craig:** Oh my god, that would be great. Bambo. He’s just a guy.
**John:** Bambo.
**Craig:** He’s just an angry man. The rabbit comes in and just is instantly gored by Bambo.
**John:** Love it. Good stuff.
**Craig:** Dark.
**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
**Craig:** That’s right.
**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** Indeed.
**John:** The outro this week is by Nico Mansy. 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 shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments and emails about when we’re going to do our live shows. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun episode.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**Megana:** Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Our bonus topic here is about when to deal with really annoying, stupid people. Maybe set us up with a question, Megana. We got this in from a guy.
**Megana:** Bald at an Early Age asks-
**Craig:** Love him already.
**John:** That’s me.
**Megana:** “I work as a manager at a running shoe store. Today I got a customer who came in, and I literally don’t know how the topic came up, but he started talking about how all of the bombing in Afghanistan has shifted the axis of the earth, resulting in mass tornadoes and environmental hell, specifically north of Kansas. I’m not sure how that detail helped his case, but I like the specificity. All the while, my soul was melting out of my ears. Of course I wanted to say, ‘That’s not how physics works.’ However, I felt like I was about to poke a bear. He was fairly large, and I’m also certain he was chewing tobacco in the store. Not to mention he was a customer. All I could manage was a silent smile. My question is, how do you both deal with stupidity in the workplace? To be sure, this example is mostly humorous, but I’ve had more serious examples with employers as well.”
**John:** I think one of the things that he’s helping set up for us is that the relative power balance thing can be a real factor here in terms of how you deal with these people. If this person is outranking you or if there’s a structural reason why you have to be polite to this person, you may not say something, as opposed to another customer in the store could more easily say, “That actually doesn’t make sense. That’s not actually possible, what you’re describing.”
**Craig:** Bald at an Early Age, you have probably a good, innate amount of disagreeability, which sounds like a bad thing, but I think it’s a good thing. It’s basically defined as your willingness to disagree in situations where other people might simply go along to get along. I think it’s important to be disagreeable to an extent. Otherwise, things go unchecked. We love the guy in the movie who stands up like Henry Fonda and says, “No, I’m not going to vote guilty.” Very disagreeable and ultimately is correct. That’s it. Disagreeability only functions when you’re dealing with somebody whose mind can be changed or who’s at least sane or arguing in good faith or has the intellectual capacity to understand reason.
Now, if someone talks about how the bombing in Afghanistan has shifted the axis of the earth, you can rest assured you are not dealing with somebody whose mind you can change. There are things going on in there far beyond your capability. Therefore, you should relax. Relax your body. Relax yourself. Just imagine that you’re watching a video of somebody else dealing with this person, because when you watch videos of other people dealing with this, you laugh. When you’re in the middle of it, of course you can get very frustrated. You have to just give yourself the pass. There is no point in correcting this person. It’s not going to work. Wait them out patiently until they leave. That’s all you can do in that situation.
**John:** I largely agree with you. The thing I do want to point out though is that sometimes it’s not just those two people. It’s also other observers. If someone is saying idiotic things or racist things or homophobic things, and you don’t call them out or acknowledge that they are doing that or call them on their behavior, other observers, may be sensing it’s okay to do that or it’s not okay for me to… I am not safe in this situation.
You also have to be mindful of who else is in the environment and it’s not saying something actually hurting other people around you. As the kid who’s heard homophobic things around me a lot of my life, that no one was challenging those things kept me in the closet longer. That’s just a reality. I think you have to be mindful of what the kind of content is and who else could be listening, because if it’s just you and this guy, it doesn’t matter. If there’s someone else there who could be influenced by the thing that guy’s saying, sometimes you do have more responsibility in my opinion just to speak up.
**Craig:** That’s a good way of delineating a difference here, because if somebody is saying stuff that’s just stupid and ultimately pointless, you let it go. If somebody’s saying something that is hurting somebody else, then you don’t. Now I will say that as a guy with antlers, who occasionally runs into other guys with antlers, that anybody, any boy I think probably has some sort of built-in mechanism that says this is probably going to go poorly. You have to make some judgments in the moment, including this difficult judgment, how willing am I to be beaten up, because as I like to point out, 100% of men have been physically assaulted by a man. 100%. We know what it feels like to lose an antler battle. It can be very dangerous. It is a very uncomfortable, miserable calculation to make.
I know that on the other side of the gender coin, women are making very uncomfortable, difficult decisions to make about men to trust, whether they should or shouldn’t, because your physical safety is at risk. You do have to also protect yourself physically. If you get the sense that this is an incredibly volatile person, then sometimes deescalation and getting them out and away is the best thing to do. Then turn to the person who’s been hurt by what they said and talk them through that and listen to them. Getting your ass kicked is probably not going to make anybody feel better.
**John:** I want to turn back to the simpler version of this, when someone’s just an idiot. When do you call them on their idiocy versus letting it roll by? This is a good example. This happened a couple years ago. An agent that’s not my current agent, who was never my current agent, but an agent at this agency, we were talking at dinner, and basically this probability question came up. It’s like, let’s say you flip a coin. You flipped a coin nine times, and it’s come up heads every time. What are the odds that the 10th flip is heads?
**Craig:** 50%.
**John:** I think he said, “I would bet all my money on it, because it’s absolutely due for heads and [inaudible 01:03:34] tails.”
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** I said to him, “It’s 50/50, or the other alternative you could say is it’s more likely to be heads because something is really goofy about the flipping that it’s happening 9 times in a row.” He could not understand that. I was like, “He should not be making my deals.”
**Craig:** Probability is a concept that eludes so many people.
**John:** It’s true.
**Craig:** It’s a little bit like an optical illusion. It’s an intellectual illusion. We really struggle with it. Not only do regular folks struggle with it, but even very smart people struggle with it. There’s a very famous Marilyn vos Savant case of the Let’s Make A Deal. We talked about this, right?
**John:** I was just going to bring up the Monty Hall problem.
**Craig:** The Monty Hall problem. Megana, are you familiar with the Monty Hall problem?
**Megana:** I’m not.
**Craig:** It works a little bit like this. In Let’s Make A Deal, a game show from 90 years before you were born-
**John:** It’s still on the air.
**Craig:** It’s still on the air. Fantastic. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but the basic idea is there are three doors. Behind one of the doors is a brand new car, and behind the other two doors, useless goats. For whatever reason, the goat was the loser prize. You didn’t actually get the goat. Basically, behind one door is a car, and behind two doors, nothing. Door one, two, and three. Go ahead and pick a door, Megana, one, two, or three.
**Megana:** Two.
**Craig:** You’ve picked door number two. I’m going to show you that behind door number one is a goat. Now do you want to stick with door number two, or would you like to switch to door number three? What do you think the probability is that’s influencing your decision?
**Megana:** I want to stick with door number two.
**Craig:** What’s the probability there, do you think?
**Megana:** I have a 50% chance.
**Craig:** That is what so many people think, and in fact what a lot of incredibly smart people thought. They got into big fights with Marilyn vos Savant. It turns out Marilyn vos Savant is correct. You want to switch to number three. The reason why is because while we think we have a 50/50 chance, in fact when you picked door number 2, you had a 1 in 3 chance of being correct. Showing you what was behind door number one didn’t change that at all. Because you had a one in three chance of being correct when you picked door number two, there’s a two in three chance that you will be correct in picking door number three, because he’s showing you information you didn’t have when you made your choice. This is very hard to understand. If you just think about it as the only way that sticking makes sense is if you think you got it right, and the only way you could get it right is 1 out of 3 times, then suddenly you start to understand, I should switch, and that in fact the probability is now 66/33.
**Megana:** We already established that I’m not very good at math.
**Craig:** I think you are.
**Megana:** This is making my head hurt.
**John:** You aced AP Calculus.
**Craig:** You’re doing great.
**John:** You’re doing great. It doesn’t feel intuitively right.
**Craig:** No, it feels wrong.
**John:** We’ll look up whether it’s actually two out of three things. I know you absolutely change it. I’m not sure it actually works out to two thirds, one third.
**Craig:** It has to be. It has to be, because your odds are one in three when you pick it, and that never changes.
**Megana:** Now I have two options left. One is going to have nothing, and one’s going to have a car. Whether I pick door two again, how is that…
**Craig:** When you pick door two, you’re choosing between two options. When you picked door one, you were choosing between three options. The fewer options you have, the higher the chance is that you’ll be picking the car. If you run this every time, you think about it, if I never showed you that first door, if you just picked door number 2, and you did this over and over and over and over and over, then basically 33% of the time you’d get the car. If I remove that door number one and ask you whether you want to stay or switch, if you switch, you will be right therefore two out of three times, over and over and over. I know.
**John:** It’s only when you do a zillion simulations of it that you see it’s going to work out to be this way. It’s like doing the bell curves of it all. It works that way.
**Craig:** It’s really mind-bending.
**John:** Part of the reason why it doesn’t feel right to us is that we have all been in lines at the grocery store and like, “Oh, should I switch to this line which seems to be faster [inaudible 01:08:00]?” We always suffer for it. It feels like I should just stay put always feels like the right answer. Mathematically, with the Monty Hall problem, it doesn’t happen. I’ve seen versions of the Monty Hall problem in a lot of other game shows and other contests where you get those choices and that the right choice is to switch, although people who don’t switch and get the right answer makes it feel like I shouldn’t have switched. It’s still gambling.
**Craig:** People get frustrated with this stuff. I guess to tie it back into the idea of talking to people who are stupid, there are people who get incredibly frustrated with me when I challenge them on their belief in ghosts or homeopathy, which is a big one.
**John:** Astrology.
**Craig:** Oh my god.
**John:** People who believe in science and astrology.
**Craig:** I think that those people really can’t possibly actually believe in astrology. I think it’s more like a fun game. It has to be, because come on, although I run into them all the time.
**John:** Yeah, you do.
**Craig:** With astrology conversations, I just go along with a grin, because it’s so patently and obviously ridiculous. Homeopathy is dressed up as real science. That’s what makes me crazy about it. It also makes me frustrating for people when they say, “It works. That’s all I can tell you is I took it and it worked.” All I can say to them is, “No, it didn’t. It’s placebo.” To the extent that placebo works, yes. To the extent that you’re spending money on a tiny sugar pill that should cost one penny, you’re a sucker. Homeopathy is a bad thing that keeps people from actual effective treatments. People get very frustrated with me, but I make my choices. If there’s somebody who has a very large rack of antlers, I’m probably not going to get really mouthy about it, because I don’t want to get my ass kicked. It’s a tricky one.
To even these conversations up in terms of gender, all women should be allowed to be pointing a gun at a man during all conversations. It would just make things go more equitably, I think. Just as a law. As you start talking, the woman goes, “Oh wait, I’m so, so sorry, give me one second,” and opens up her purse, pulls out a small handgun, points it at you and goes, “Okay, go on.”
**John:** “Make your point.”
**Craig:** “Make your point.” I think then guys would be as gentle and careful with women as they are with men with large racks of antlers.
**John:** It all pays off.
**Craig:** I don’t know. Megana, do you like my idea? Do you like my idea of arming all women in conversations?
**Megana:** I carry pepper spray, so I feel like that does help even things out for me a little bit. Yeah, I think some sort of-
**John:** Maybe every 10 days, you actually take out the pepper spray and aim it at me while we’re having a conversation. Most of the time it’s just a tacit threat that it’s there.
**Craig:** I feel like, Megana, you need to have the pepper spray out and aimed from the start of the conversation or in meetings with people.
**John:** Absolutely.
**Megana:** Most of our meetings are via Zoom.
**Craig:** In real life, I’m just saying if a guy starts talking over you, again, just wiggle the pepper spray, just to remind him it’s in your hand.
**Megana:** I do love that.
**John:** A little bear spray could really speed up development.
**Craig:** Just trying to bring some equity to these situations.
**John:** Thank you guys so much.
**Megana:** Thank you.
**Craig:** Thank you.
Links:
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* [WGA Health Plan covers travel for abortion-related expenses](https://www.wgaplans.org/info/health/forms/TravelExpensesNotification.pdf)
* [More Than 400 TV Showrunners Demand Netflix, Disney and More Offer Safety Protocols in Anti-Abortion States](https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/tv-writers-demand-safety-protocols-abortion-bans-1235327815/)
* [Batgirl Shelved](https://deadline.com/2022/08/warner-bros-batgirl-1235083809/)
* [Netflix Retroactively Editing Stranger Things](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/stranger-things-netflix-retroactively-editing)
* [The Falconer](http://www.thefalconerfilm.com/) by Annie Kaempfer, [watch here!](https://www.amazon.com/Falconer-Rodney-Stotts/dp/B09RTSQSND/)
* Follow along with this discussion on reversals – [Chernobyl scene here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/CHERNOBYL_561_Reversals_Scene.pdf), full script [here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Chernobyl_Episode-3Open-Wide-O-Earth.pdf).
* [Antlers Do What No Other Bones Can](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/deer-elk-shed-antlers-hunting/671021/) by Katherine J. Wu for The Atlantic
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