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

**Craig Mazin:** And my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 286 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, well, way back in Episode 37 we discussed dialogue. Today we’re doing a follow up on that. A part two on dialogue. The ways in which characters communicate with each other and let us know what’s inside their heads. Then we’ll be discussing two terms often applied to screenwriters and I will be urging people to stop using those terms.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great idea.

**John:** Plus, we’ll have a chance to answer some listener questions if we don’t run out of time, so we should probably get started. Craig, last week we asked How Would This Be a Movie, and several of our listeners wrote in to say that was already a TV show.

**Craig:** Yeah, who knew? So, this was the Alexis Manigo story. This was the girl who was stolen from her parents when she was born, from the hospital, and raised by an entirely different woman. And then comes to find out when she’s 17 or 18 what the truth is, and it was an interesting story. So, she was born Kamiyah Mobley and then was raised as Alexis Manigo, and I guess now she’s back to being Kamiyah Mobley. Regardless, many folks wrote in, including – do you remember this guy, Stuart Friedel? [laughs]

**John:** Vaguely. I think he was a producer early on on Scriptnotes. That’s maybe how we knew him, Stuart.

**Craig:** Only for the first 98% of the shows. Regardless, Stuart and others wrote in to direct our attention to an MTV series that was called Finding Carter. And that show was about – we’ll see if this sounds familiar- a teenage girl whose life is turned upside down when she discovers that the woman she thought was her mother had abducted when she was a child. That’s the exact same story. And it was created by a writer named Emily Silver. So, yeah, looks like I guess life has imitated art there?

**John:** Perhaps. Or Emily Silver was ahead of the game. Perhaps she traveled through time and she saw the story and went back in time so she could be the first one there with that story.

**Craig:** That’s the most likely explanation.

**John:** That is absolutely. Occam’s razor suggests time travel is clearly what was at work here. It’s a good idea for a story in general. So that was a fictional version of that story. I kind of remember a promo for it, because I don’t watch a lot on MTV, but I watch MTV’s The Challenge and I would see promos for Finding Carter back in those days.

**Craig:** I got to tell you, I have forgotten that MTV even exists. I mean, look, when we were kids MTV came out and it was the bomb. Right? We all loved MTV. The astronaut dancing around. Videos were this new thing. We were just thrilled.

**John:** We also said words like The Bomb.

**Craig:** Right. Like that’s how old we are. And then MTV stopped playing music videos and started doing other stuff. And we were like, meh, I don’t know. But then they had MTV’s The Real World. And that became the new hotness. Right?

**John:** I loved The Real World. I probably watched the first six seasons of The Real World.

**Craig:** I don’t know how long I stuck around. I think I probably checked out after San Francisco, which was kind of the height of drama. At least as far as I could tell. And then I stopped watching MTV. I don’t even know where to find it. I don’t know what’s on it. And I’m not sure that’s necessarily a function of me being an old dude. My son is 15. My daughter is 12. I don’t even know if they know that MTV is a thing.

**John:** I think MTV is still a thing, it’s just because channels have become much less important, networks have become less important, and programs have become more important. So, like Teen Wolf is a big MTV show.

**Craig:** Ah, OK.

**John:** And so that is a big scripted show. And so that is sort of what they do now. And Finding Carter was a series, like Teen Wolf, but it didn’t break out in the way that Teen Wolf broke out to become a phenomena.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Yeah. I think you can still make some sort of movie version of that story, but I kind of feel like we were – obviously we weren’t going to know about Finding Carter. We’re just not in that demographic. But I think a TV series is actually a really interesting way to go with that idea, because it’s an ongoing journey. It doesn’t have to be a one-time situation to discover that you’re kidnapped. There’s a lot of story that you can stretch out ahead there. And so a TV series is a good way to do that. Congratulations, Emily Silver, your time travel seems like a great opportunity for narrative.

**Craig:** Silver!

**John:** Silver! Next up, we talked about sea monkeys. And, again, there was a TV show. I have no idea there was a TV show. There was a television program that ran for 11 episodes in 1992 called The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. It starred Howie Mandel as the professor. The show was created by Howie Mandel, along with Stephen Charles and Edward Chiodo, who I looked up and they are like puppeteers. They are puppet makers. And so this was a live action show. The sea monkeys had sort of puppeted faced. I mean, they were like makeup faces. And so they were full size people.

I should probably just read the Wikipedia summary. “The plot revolved around the notion that the Professor had accidentally enlarged three sea monkeys to human-size, and plotlines followed their ensuing comical ineptness in the world. Each Sea Monkey displayed a certain odd character trait: Aquarius could not keep a secret, Bill was afraid of an Imperial, Dave would grow excited at the sound of polka music. They occasionally come into contact with their next door neighbors the ‘Brentwood’s, whose daughter Sheila becomes the Sea-Monkeys best friend.”

**Craig:** First of all, what is happening? I mean, we’ve talked a lot about what it means to build a character. This is a good example of what to not do. “Dave would grow excited at the sound of polka music” – not really a solid substitute for verisimilitude in a living creature. But, what the hell does “Bill was afraid of an Imperial” mean? What?

**John:** I don’t know. I feel like we shouldn’t entirely judge a show based on its Wikipedia summary.

**Craig:** The Wikipedia summary. Right.

**John:** But we will put a link in the show notes to the YouTube clip so people can watch it. I feel like if you were taking advantage of California’s new medical marijuana laws, this might be the thing to start watching, because it is surreal in the strangest ways.

**Craig:** Well, it is. I watched about, I don’t know, two minutes of it. And it is – “ensuring comical ineptness” – sounds correct. There was comical ineptness all around there. But I was struck by how, once again, John, how old we are, because this show looked honestly like it was – other than being in color, it could have been made in 1840. [laughs] And it was from 1992. I graduated college in 1992. I can’t believe that this was what was happening back then. Not good.

**John:** No. Not good. I will say that this falls into that gap of – I grew up watching Saturday morning shows. I think this was a Saturday morning show. I hope this was a Saturday morning show. But I grew up watching those. But then, of course, you turn to junior high and high school and you stop watching those shows. And so there’s a whole generation of those shows that you would not have caught.

So, Stuart Friedel, again, probably would have watched this show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you and I would not have watched this show.

**Craig:** I bet you Stuart still watches it occasionally.

**John:** Stuart is a huge fan of children’s television. And I guess sort of young adult television. That’s why he knows about Finding Carter. He can tell you what’s happening on the Thundermans. He’s very good at that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** And not in a weird way, by the way.

**John:** No, there’s nothing at all weird about Stuart Friedel. He’s as straight-forward as you could come.

**Craig:** He legitimately loves children’s–

**John:** He really does.

**Craig:** I had dinner with Stuart the other night.

**John:** Tell me about dinner with Stuart Friedel, or after the air if it’s too embarrassing.

**Craig:** No, it was – well, after dinner was what normally happens with me and Stuart. And, you know what, we’re good. We’re cool. It was delightful. It was delightful. He is a lovely person. And a very, very smart person. He’s doing quite well.

**John:** Yeah. And he’s married. Congratulations, Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** He’s married. Yes. One day our show may be produced by Jimmy Friedel, Stuart’s son.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, just named his kid for him. Why not?

**John:** So, if you’re curious about the sea monkeys, we will link to an episode called the Octapotomus, which is just fantastic.

**Craig:** People should know, by the way, that this episode is going to be wild, because normally we try and do this where it’s kind of mid-morning for me, and early evening for you because of our continental divide. But because of scheduling issues, it’s currently nearly midnight for me and crazy early in the morning for you. This is going to be wild.

**John:** It’s going to be wild.

All right, last bit of follow up here is the Sinbad genie movie. So, we talked last week about the Sinbad movie that never existed in which he plays a genie. And so as we were discussing it, in our show notes we were going to talk about the Mandela Effect. And there’s even a link in last week’s episode to the Mandela Effect because we were supposed to talk about it. We didn’t talk about it.

The Mandela Effect is a general term for situations like what’s happening with the Sinbad genie movie where people have a memory that is not actually true. There’s a collective memory that’s not true. And the Mandela Effect describes people’s memory of Nelson Mandela dying long before he died. Sort of a theory that there’s something weird and metaphysical happening there. So, we didn’t get into the Mandela Effect last week.

But, Craig, this past week you were describing a situation you had with David Kwong which sounds like a very similar kind of phenomenon.

**Craig:** Yeah, so the Mandela Effect I guess posits that there’s parallel universes and there’s like a glitch in either the computer simulation that we all live in, which I believe we do, or a glitch in parallel universes so that a lot of people are accessing some parallel alternate reality in which Sinbad did in fact play a genie in a movie called Shazam, which he did not.

So, David Kwong, our friend of the show, world famous magician, and now creator of a TV show. He’s got a new TV show that he’s doing. I was at dinner with him and the word dilemma came up, you know, just in use. And he said, “You know, up until three years ago,” and David Kwong for context, Harvard educated, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life. He said, “Up until a couple years ago, I was convinced that the word dilemma was spelled D-I-L-E-M-N-A.” As in “dilemna.” With the M sound sort of being like autumn, which of course ends with M-N.

And he said what prompted him to go down this rabbit hole was he saw a poster for the movie a few years ago called The Dilemma, and he thought, “Oh, that’s somehow they’ve done a pun or something. Because they’ve spelled dilemma wrong.” And he looked it up and realized, no, you spell dilemma with two Ms, not M-N.

So, he goes online and realizes that he is one of many, many people who not only were under the impression that the word dilemma was spelled D-I-L-E-M-N-A, but have very clearly memories of being instructed that this is the case in the way that we are instructed in school about words that we might think be spelled one way, but are in fact spelled another way.

You know, so in school I remember we learned that the word separate, there was a poster that said, “There’s a RAT in SEPARATE,” because people sometimes misspell it Sep-e-rate, and it’s Sep-a-rate. These people have clear memories of being instructed, even textbooks instructing them that it’s DILEMNA, and there’s a website dedicated to this called dilemna.info.

So, we’ll link to that one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you can read all about this bizarre glitch in the matrix.

**John:** Yes. So when you told me about David Kwong’s situation there, I have a memory, too, of having spelled dilemma with an N in it for some reason. And I don’t remember being specifically instructed, but I do remember thinking like, oh, that’s how you do it. And words like column or autumn have similar sort of patterns so it would kind of make sense. Also, dilemma is a word that you don’t use as a child. It becomes a middle school word at earliest. So, I can see sort of how that happens. I still think dilemma looks a little weird with two Ms. There’s something just really strange about the word dilemma. So, it’s not surprising to me that we have this weird situation around it.

Again, I don’t think it’s a metaphysical Mandela Effect necessarily. But, I get it. I get why people are a little bit creeped out by a false memory of having learned it a certain way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this idea that it was in your textbooks, well, we can’t find the textbooks that would actually have it printed the wrong way. We can’t find dictionaries that have it printed the wrong way. Yet, I could believe that teachers might have taught it the wrong way. And it’s not a recent phenomenon. Apparently it goes back 80 years. You see examples of people misspelling it in that specific way. So, something is going on there.

**Craig:** Right. And at the dilemna.info site you have – because the one theory was, well, if it’s people from a certain generation, maybe there was just like a bad textbook or something. But there’s a 90-year-old man who remembers this. There are 20 year olds who remember this. It’s a weird one for me because I always remembered how to spell dilemma because of Lemma. I don’t know if you remember the word “lemma” when you were doing geometry or not, but so it’s a Greek word. And dilemma is just two lemmas.

So, I – this is a weird one for me. I’m surprised. And, by the way, they do – they talk about how they remember it in textbooks, but no one can find them because, of course, they don’t exist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or do they?

**John:** Or do they? Hmm.

All right, let’s segue to our main topic today, which is words again. It’s dialogue. So, way back in Episode 37 we had Let’s Talk about Dialogue, was our first conversation about how we write dialogue for film and for television. And I wanted to sort of revisit that, because I’ve been thinking about that more over the last week. I’ve been doing some polishing. I’ve been doing some nips and tucks on a project. And it comes down to the dialogue for what I’m doing right now.

And I thought we’d start with sort of a history of what dialogue is, because obviously human beings who have been speaking for our entire existence – that’s one of the things that sort of makes us human. But dialogue is a very special case. And so I was thinking back to well what is the first example of dialogue. It would probably be reported speech. So, if I’m telling you a story and I’m using the speech as the characters in the story, or like I’m recapping something and saying like that he says, then she says, and it’s that situation where you’re modeling the behavior of what was said before. And so you can imagine sort of cavemen around the campfire doing that kind of reported speech would be the first kind of dialogue. Within a monologue, it’s the speech in that. Sort of like how an audio book works.

But then we have real plays. And so have the Greek dramas, the Greek comedies. If you think about the Greek dramas, a lot of Greek dramas are not people kind of talking back to each other. It sort of feels like I say something, then you say something, and there’s not a lot of interplay. But the Greek comedies, they do actually sort of talk to each other in ways that are meaningful. Of course, Shakespeare has plays in which characters are really communicating with each other. The thing I say influences the thing that you say back to me.

And then you have the Oscar Wilde comedies, which are all about sort of the craft of those words, and sort of like badminton where they’re just keeping the ball up in the air. It’s not a ball, but I’d say it’s a birdie.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I went through a period where I was reading some of the old Greek comedies, Aristophanes and so on, and I was stunned at how contemporary they felt in terms of the back and forth of dialogue. It was kind of remarkable. And they are plays – so you’re reading essentially a script. A thousand and thousand year-old script. And they had figured a lot. It’s actually insane how little has changed.

**John:** Yeah. But I think it’s important to distinguish the comedies from the dramas, because when I look at the old Greek dramas, there is back and forth, but it’s not the same kind of back and forth. And it ends up being sort of a lot more like I’m going to tell you this whole long thing, and the next person is going to tell you this whole long thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There’s less of that sort of back and forth.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s very declarative. The dramas are very much about speeches.

**John:** Yeah. But then you look at what happens next is as we get into radio plays, then it’s all dialogue. So, when you have stage plays, you can see the action happening in front of you. You have people there. But we get to radio plays, it’s just people talking. And so the words have to do so much more in order to communicate not only what’s being said, but sort of the world around what’s being said. And so it’s more naturalistic in some ways, but it also has to be sort of pushed in a way because it has to explain everything through just the dialogue.

Same time we were seeing radio come up, you have the silent movies. And so in silent movies, of course, you have characters in scenes together, but the dialogue, if there is dialogue is just title cards that are put there. So, you have characters emoting a lot and then we cut to a card that has a very shortened version of what they would say. That’s a strange form–

**Craig:** It’s very strange, because the cards – they don’t make conversation possible so even though people are talking together, they will choose a, I guess, some kind of representative line of dialogue for one person to sum up this entire exchange that these two people might be having. And, of course, that is probably why a lot of silent films also de-accentuate conversation. And it’s very much about one person making speeches, while another person listens.

**John:** Yep. Then, of course, we transition to the talkies, and then everything is changed, because in once you actually have dialogue and characters that are in a scene together, it changes the frame of reality around things. So you can’t just have a person emoting wildly and then you cut to a title card. They actually have to have a conversation. You have to keep that ball up in the air. And it’s a huge shift in sort of how the audience’s experience of a story and really the writer’s experience of how you’re going to communicate this information. You cannot expect the audience to just be watching and gleaning something. They are expecting to have a real conversation happening in front of them. And that changes everything.

**Craig:** It also famously changed the skill of acting. I mean, the school of acting prior to talkies was very much about being emotive and really more of a filmed version of what people would do on stage, which was very formalized.

And because their faces and movement had to stand in for so much, but once you shift to sound, we begin to see the birth of naturalistic acting which peaks with the method movement that leads to all – you know, famously some of our greatest American films of the ‘70s.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s an expectation that the performances are naturalistic, and therefore the dialogue is supposed to be more naturalistic. It’s not always that way, but the dialogue gets twisted towards naturalism quite heavily once you have real characters speaking to each other.

**Craig:** But then eventually you get to the sea monkeys, which that’s a different kind of–

**John:** That’s really the pinnacle. It’s sort of sad that we peaked in 1992, but at least we have YouTube so we can go back and look at sort of what the sea monkeys were able to do.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because they talk, their mouths are all – ugh.

**John:** It’s amazing. Television in general was a huge shift in dialogue as well. Because you think about how people watch television, you’re watching the screen, but sometimes you’re not really watching the screen. Sometimes TV is playing off in the background. So, there’s a midway quality between what our expectations are of film dialogue and radio dialogue. There’s a little bit of over-explaining that tends to happen in TV. I think less so now than, you know, 20 years ago. But TV dialogue could be a little bit more artificial because there was an expectation that you got to talk people through the process. Even procedural shows right now, there’s an unnatural quality which is sort of inherent to the genre where you are talking as if the other character doesn’t have that same information so you can get it out to the audience.

**Craig:** And prior to – a fairly recent revolution where so much of our television is streamed, commercial-free for instance, if you’re watching it on Netflix or Hulu. Network television which dominated all television was highly bifurcated/trifurcated/quadfurcated because of commercials. And there was an understanding that some people were just coming in, you know, they had missed it. Or, they went to the bathroom while stuff was going on. There was no TiVo. There was no pausing. So, people were constantly reiterating things so that folks wouldn’t get lost just because they went to go get a sandwich.

**John:** Yeah. As you were saying, in recapping what just happened.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s talk about what characters are doing in scenes and sort of what ideally you would love to have your dialogue be able to perform in the scenes you’re writing. So, the first thing we’re looking for is dialogue, which means characters talking to each other, with each other, and not just intersecting monologues. And one of the great frustrations I have in some of our Three Page Challenges is I feel like characters are just having a monologue that’s just occasionally interrupted. Or like two parallel monologues that don’t actually have anything to do with each other.

When dialogue is working well, it should feel kind of like Velcro. Those two pieces of conversation, they’re designed for each other. And so they can only exist together and they’re strong when they are together. But you couldn’t take those people’s lines independently. They would be sort of meaningless. They’re all informed by what the person just said before that.

**Craig:** That’s a very good way of describing a common rookie limitation – intersecting monologues. And it’s understandable because the complexity that is required to create dialogue that answers and is responsible to the reflection back from another character, it is logarithmically more complicated than one person saying something and then another person saying something. The listening is that, you know, they always say that silence is just as important in music as a note. And it’s the listening of dialogue and the reacting and the incorporation and the adjustment, that’s the swordsmanship. So, I think when we look at stuff where we have the intersecting monologue problem, it’s like we’re watching two fencers who are putting on an exhibition for us, and they’re showing us their fencing moves towards us.

But they’re not fencing each other, which is just a totally different thing.

**John:** It is. So let’s take a look at sort of how we indicate in the real world that we are listening to each other and how listening shapes the lines we’re going to say next. And so I want to talk about discourse markers, which is the general term for those words that function as parts of speech that are not quite nouns or adjectives or anything else. They’re basically just little markers that say, “Yes, I heard what you said. I’m acknowledging what you said. And here is my response to it. So, I’m talking about words like you know, actually, basically, like, I mean, OK, and so. Things like also, on the other hand, frankly, as a matter of fact. As I do very often, as you’re talking, I go, “Uh-huh.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s those small acknowledgments that I hear what you’re saying and keep going, or I’m about to respond back to you.

There’s an acronym which I found online for it called FANBOYS. So if you’re trying to remember those words it’s For And Nor But Or Yet or So. Basically it’s ways to take what has just been said and put your spin on the next thing that’s going to come out. And so let’s take a look at why you would use those discourse markers and as a screenwriter how to be aware of those things. Because I think so often we try to optimize our dialogue to the point where we’re getting rid of all the natural parts of speech. But without some of these little things to help you hook into the previous line, it can be hard to make your speech flow naturally.

So, here’s one function. It’s when you want to soften a blow, especially if it conflicts with what the person just said. So, it’s an example of like, “Well.” “Well, that’s not entirely true.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You could say, “That’s not entirely true,” but that’s a harder line. The well takes a little of the edge off that. And sort of connects like, “Yes, I heard what you just said, but I’m going to say the opposite.”

**Craig:** Yeah. So, these words are wonderful to indicate that the person who is starting their sentence with them has changed. Somehow what you said to me changed my brain. I’m not saying it changed my mind in that I have a new opinion. But it has changed my state of brain, which is exactly what goes on in conversation. So, as you’re talking to me, you’re changing my brain because I’m listening to you. Actors understand this. They’re taught very carefully and very rigorously how to listen. You can always tell a bad actor because they’re not listening. They’re just thinking about their next line.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Similarly, bad writers write characters who are just thinking about their next line. And so you lose these little things. And when we talk about, well, everyone is familiar with the phrase “an ear for dialogue.” A lot of what an ear for dialogue is is this. It’s really not so much an ear, it is a sense of human psychology and an understanding of how it feels to listen.

So, when you’re writing two people talking to each other, you have to schizophrenically – I use that in the wrong sense – you know, split-mindedly say something and then immediately throw yourself into the other person and hear it. And that is what will naturally lead to some of these very useful words.

**John:** Yep. So, you know, we talked about softening a blow. A lot of times you’re also comparing two ideas. And so an example would be, “So, it’s like Uber for golf carts.” And so you’re basically taking the idea that’s been given to you and synthesizing it and putting it back. You might want to add onto an idea. So, that’s, “What’s more, there’s no evidence he even read the book.” So that “what’s more,” you could take that off, but without it it doesn’t connect to the previous line of dialogue.

**Craig:** Right. It’s not an acknowledgement that you’ve heard that. You’re agreeing with it, tacitly. And now you’re adding. So much gets unsaid by a “what’s more.” But we hear it, and the audience hears it, and they know so much because of it. That’s amazing. I’ve never really thought about that. Interesting.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a way of like sort of underlining that previous point. Another example would be indicating that a point has already been conceded and that you’re kind of moving on. So, an example would be, “No, you’re right to be concerned.” And so essentially saying like, “You said to be concerned. I’m agreeing with you to be concerned. Let’s move on to the next point.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I also find so fascinating about that no is that’s an example of how no can mean yes in dialogue. And I hear myself doing it all the time, where I will say no when I mean yes. And it’s basically that no means I’m putting no argument up against you. I’m agreeing with you. I’m not denying you. It’s awkward that, and of course, it’s an example of no really meaning a yes. But it’s just the way that it works in our language.

**Craig:** Sometimes I think the – we’ll call it the affirmative no – sometimes when people use it, I feel like they’re actually responding to themselves. So you say something, I’m thinking a thing. You give me a different point of view. And I say, “No, yeah, I think that’s right,” as in, “No, stop thinking the thing you were thinking. This new thing is correct.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is fascinating how many words we elide as we go through. Yeah.

**John:** A lot of times you’re going to use one of these words to demonstrate a sense of logical sequence. So, “OK, once we disable the cameras, then we can start working on the vault.” Basically, I am going to now set forth a chain of events that describes what’s going to happen next. Or, we’re going to offer an illustration, an example. So, “And we all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.”

Again, you could take off that “and” and start and say, “We all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.”

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a–

**John:** But that “and” is really helpful because it means I’m adding on to the thing you just said. I’m giving you an example of the situation that we’re talking about. That “and” is incredibly helpful and without that “and” the sentence doesn’t mean the same thing.

**Craig:** I think sometimes when educational therapists, there’s a whole world of people who work with kids who have autism, or Asperger’s and they struggle with social interaction. Some of these things are the things that they’re actually instructing them, because for some people, that “and” is absolutely superfluous. And from an informational point of view, it’s close to being superfluous. But what they’re missing is that they’ve eliminated that social glue that says, “Just so you know, I listened to you, and I heard you.” When, of course, somebody who is very regimented and perhaps rigid in their thinking might think, “The fact that I am here staring at you is an indication that I heard what you said.”

And some people need to be taught these things.

**John:** When I was in Madrid last week for the screenwriter’s event, it was the first time I clocked that people say in Spanish say “Vaya” all the time. And Vaya is basically OK. It’s like it’s the uh-uh, it’s the acknowledgment. The equivalent would be d’accord in French. And a non-fluent speaker doesn’t know to say that. And so I don’t know to say that. And so therefore I seem kind of autistic in Spanish or in French because I don’t have the social cues to sort of like acknowledge that thing. So I can sort of nod and sort of say that I’m getting it, but the Vaya is that sense of like, “Yep, got it.”

**Craig:** That’s why you seem autistic in French? Really, John, that’s why? Not your autism? [laughs]

**John:** No, my robot programming.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a phrase that I picked up when I was taking Italian in college. We had a professor who was a native speaker and he would constantly say, you know, he was giving us a lesson and then he would pause and go [vediamo un po]. And [vediamo un po] means let’s see a little. I think that’s what it means. Yeah, vediamo un po. Let’s see a little. Which is like, okay, so it’s a version of that. And, yes, you’re right, it’s the kind of thing that makes you seem like you’re in the moment. And when you’re not a native speaker you just don’t have those little bits and bops.

**John:** You don’t. But talk us through sort of then the modes of dialogue. What are the tones of dialogue? What you’re trying to do in basic structures of dialogue.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was thinking about this question of the kinds of ways that we – we meaning humans or characters – speak. And if they could be divided up into categories. And I don’t know if these are all of them, but these are certainly many of the ones that you’ll see and use as a writer all the time.

The first one is the easiest and most obvious, which I just call neutral. And that’s sort of the way we talk throughout the day. It is – it’s how we’re talking right now. It’s low stakes. It’s even-tempered. It’s not particularly loud or soft. It can be inquisitive, or informative, or social. It’s two people chatting at lunch. And in movies sometimes that’s what’s going on, but it’s important to match the neutral mode to the actual circumstances. You don’t want to have people speaking neutrally when perhaps it might be more interesting or dramatic or appropriate for them to be speaking a different way.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Then there’s emotional. And that’s what we probably think of when we think about Oscar movies and so forth. But emotional dialogue is in every movie, of all kinds. And that is dialogue where the character is revealing some part of their inner emotional state. It is typically well controlled speech. It can often be uneven because we understand that it is an expression of the lizard brain, our flight or fight type of instinct. Very often this kind of dialogue is irrational. It can be contradictory. It can be very loud. It is rarely well-articulated – and this we’ve seen a lot in Three Page Challenges. People speak in this remarkably well articulated, even – well, I won’t say even-tempered, but very well-articulated way when in fact in the moment they should have an emotional mode which is clumsy and often truncated or weird.

**John:** There was a screener I was watching this last week, a movie that I genuinely loved, but there was a moment in there where a character has a huge emotional moment and I was frustrated that the character was far too articulate in that moment. They actually dialed up the sophistication of the dialogue in that incredibly emotional moment. And the actor was talented enough to pull it off, basically. And, yet, it didn’t actually track. It didn’t actually make sense. Like the moment should have been less coherent and more emotionally clear. And it was sort of too precisely, too finely written for where that character was supposed to be at emotionally.

**Craig:** Well, it sounds like perhaps the writer fell into a fairly common trap where when you should be emotional, you opt for something that I’ll call declarative. This is the mode of speaking when you are intentionally getting across some kind of meaningful insight or important news or dramatic revelation. Declarative, the most obvious example would be a lawyer giving a final argument. There’s that moment in – what was that movie called, A Time to Kill, where Matthew McConaughey delivers this impassioned speech about what happens. And then he says, “Now, imagine she’s white,” which is a very declarative, insightful, there’s a wisdom to it. And actors and writers love these moments because they are so remarkable.

You know, Yoda is always declarative. These very – but when you are emotional, you should not be declarative. That would make the emotion seem fake and it would make you and the character and scene feel inauthentic.

**John:** Yep. It’s the reason why the lawyer can’t give that passionate closing argument after having just found out that his wife died.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s a mismatch of sort of what’s going on in his mental state to be able to do that. And it’s a very controlled thing for him to do that remarkable speech.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, by the way, that example that you just gave, oh and interesting, I just used “by the way” which is another great signifier to indicate that I heard you and it’s triggered something else. Sometimes you’ll see these notes come up where somebody will say there’s a mismatch in the way this moment with how they feel and without putting their finger on it what they’re saying is you’re using the wrong mode of dialogue for what would be the mental state of this person.

Interestingly, there’s this other mode that I’ll call manipulative, which makes it sound Machiavellian, but I’m using it more as an over-arching term. And manipulative dialogue is anything where you’re trying to either convince somebody or calm somebody down or inspire somebody or avoid their questions. You’re using dialogue purposefully to achieve an effect in this other person. And if you think about our example of the lawyer, that’s the difference between a lawyer who is trying to get one over on a jury, and a lawyer who fervently believes what he’s telling them. One person will be manipulative, and the other one will be declarative.

**John:** Absolutely. So, what I find so fascinating about everything we talked about with dialogue in this segment was it’s all about the emotional state and the emotional content of dialogue. So, in no ways are we trying to talk about dialogue as a mechanism for conveying story, at least story in terms of plot. We’re really talking about like how do you convey characters’ emotional states and how are you going to let them try to change the emotional state of the other characters in the scene.

That’s really what dialogue is supposed to be doing as it functions now. Not like how it functioned historically, but what we do now when we write dialogue is to be able to provide insight to the audience about what’s going on inside the character but also let the characters try to change the emotional state of the characters around them.

It’s part of the reason why the example of neutral modes of dialogue, that’s why those scenes are generally not so exciting because there’s not going to be a conflict there. There’s not a challenge for the character there. There’s nothing they’re trying to do to the other characters in the scene. There’s no inherent drama there.

**Craig:** Precisely. And this is one of the great challenges of writing a scene is that you have to be – let’s just say – we’ll limit it to two people talking. Forget three or four. You have to be three different people at once. You have to be the architect of the story, who understands in an intellectual way that something must be achieved in terms of plot and character to advance this narrative.

Then you have to be both people, who do not know that, and don’t have access to that, and are reacting and living in the moment. Reacting to the world around them. Reacting to the feelings inside of them. And most importantly, reacting to what the other person is saying. So, that is very difficult for a lot of people. When we talk about talent in writing, sometimes I think that’s what it is. Those are three different people at once and the best writers are the ones that are talented at being all three of those people. The writer, and then the two people in the scene. And one of the ways I think I immediately am aware of quality in these moments is when there’s a mismatch of mode between two characters. Maybe one character is being neutral, and the other one is being manipulative. Or the other one is being emotional, and the other one is being declarative.

You know, Luke is very upset and Yoda is very calm and wise. Or, somebody is very emotional and the other person is calming them down. So, whenever possible you do want that mismatch because that is creating conflict or resolution. When two people are emotional, it’s just two people yelling and absorbed in their own minds. And when two people are being wise and informative, you’re wondering why they’re both telling each other these incredibly wonderful fortune cookie insights.

Mismatching these modes is a huge help when you’re navigating your way through a scene.

**John:** Absolutely. You want to be able to give the characters someone to play against. And if they’re trying to play the same melody, it’s not going to be nearly as exciting as if there’s a conflict between what they’re trying to do and sort of where they’re at in the mode of the scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But, talking about the skill of the writer here and sort of good writing versus bad writing is a great segue to our next big topic which is two terms you hear thrown about about screenwriters, specifically the quality of screenwriters, and I’m going to urge people to stop using these terms because people don’t really use these terms. And whenever I hear them, the hairs on the back of my neck go up.

And so I want to talk about and hacks.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s talk about script doctors, Craig. Do you ever hear people in Hollywood use the term script doctor?

**Craig:** The only people I ever hear use that term are insecure writers trying to convince other people that they’re important. That’s it. And thankfully there are not too many of them. But every time some on the bubble or low self-esteem writer announces that they’re doing some script doctoring, everybody else puckers up, clenches their buttholes, and gets very awkward. Because it’s atrocious.

**John:** It’s atrocious. And so I heard this term a couple times the last months. When Carrie Fisher passed away, some of the articles talked about her “script doctoring,” always in quotes, and then when I was in Madrid someone asked what is it like to be a script doctor. And I had to say like, “First off, no one uses that term.” And truly, honestly, the only people who use that term are people who are like outside of Hollywood who have seen that term in a magazine and thought it was a term that was being used.

So let’s describe what they’re trying to talk about here and the real words we use for that work. So, I think by script doctoring they’re meaning a writer who comes in to do a short bit of work on a specific project, usually a movie that’s about to go into production. Usually in a sort of high stakes situation. There’s actors involved, directors involved, lots of money is on the line. And that writer is coming in to do specific work to fix, change, alter something in the script to make people happier. That is the function of what these writers are doing in those situations. But we don’t call them script doctors. And we shouldn’t call them script doctors because doctors are like – Doc McStuffins’ mom is a doctor. These are just screenwriters.

And Craig and I both do this kind of work, but we would never call ourselves script doctors.

**Craig:** No. And you put your finger on why it’s so gross. It’s a forced romanticization of what we do. Oh no, the movie is in trouble, we’re two weeks away – what do we do? Call the doctor! That’s ridiculous. And then I’ll come in with my eyepatch and I’ll say, “Everybody, get out of my way. I need a computer, a glass of water, a window.” [laughs] I don’t know, it’s ridiculous.

It’s not how it works.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** At all. What you’re doing is you sit down and you’re like, OK, I read the script, here’s what I think. What do you guys think? What are you trying to achieve? Got it. OK. Here’s what I think I can do in the time I have. Let me talk to the director. Let me talk to the producer. Let me talk to the actor. OK. Here’s my proposal of what I should do. Does that sound good? Great. Let me start writing it. I’ll start sending you pages.

And then hard days ensue where you’re too tired. You’re not some – they might as well call it Script Hitman, or – do you know what I mean? Like Script Assassin. Script Savior. It’s ridiculous.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Script doctor.

**John:** I don’t know where the term first originated. I remember the first time I heard a Hollywood person use it, I think, was an interview with Spielberg where he was talking about Steve Zaillian coming in and doing something. And I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember saying like, “Oh, we call him the doctor because he comes in and can solve these problems.”

Steve Zaillian is Steve Zaillian. He’s a remarkably talented writer. So, as a metaphor to say that he was a doctor who was helping out on something, fantastic. But it’s not a term that’s used in daily life here. No development executive is going to say like, “Oh, we need to get a script doctor in here to work on this.” Just doesn’t happen. And so when I hear people outside the business say that term, I think of like – it’s like me describing an NFL kicker as a “field goaler.”

It reflects what’s actually be done, but no one would actually use it. And when they hear me say it, they think, “Well, he’s an idiot.” And so I would just urge people to stop saying it.

**Craig:** Right. When Ted Cruz was in Indiana and referred to a basketball hoop as a basketball ring. [laughs] What an idiot!

**John:** Yeah. Remember Ted Cruz? Remember that life?

**Craig:** Don’t worry. He’ll be back.

**John:** He’ll be back.

**Craig:** He’ll be back. No, you’re absolutely right. It’s grating. It sets your teeth on edge because it’s so goofy. And, yes, sometimes in conversations when we’re doing this work we might say, “Look, we’ve got a sick patient here.” You may do that – internally, you may talk about things like that. “Or like, no, there’s definitely a pulse here.” But you would never describe yourself as a – that’s just like a silly metaphor. You’re not a script doctor. That’s ridiculous.

**John:** It’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** And I guess, more to the point, if Steven Spielberg wants to call you a script doctor, great. But god knows you should never refer to yourself as one. That is just goofy.

**John:** That is goofy. So, if script doctor is the glorious term applied to the very high level writers who are doing this work, hack is the opposite of that. Hack is a pejorative, reductive term. Because it’s pejorative, you know, sometimes it’s used on yourself, sort of self-mockingly, like I feel like such a hack for that scene. Or, this line of dialogue feels so hacky. So, it’s one of those things I will hear writers refer to themselves that way. But I don’t hear writers refer to other writers as hacks. Or if they do, I throw some major side eye there, because it’s not cool at all.

**Craig:** I know. Again, it’s clunky. If you want to go after some writer and, you know, look, I never do that publicly. Like you and I never do that on this show. Not once in all these episodes, nor do we ever do it on Twitter. But in a private conversation, you may say, “Look, I don’t understand why everybody loves this person. I think they stink.” You know? And you might say, “I just feel like they’re kind of a fraud. I don’t know, they just seem hacky to me, or whatever.”

But that’s private. You know? Where I’m shocked is when people use that word seriously and you’re like, what are you, from 1930? “You’re a hack, kid.” It’s a dumb word because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s taking the place of what you should be saying which is, “I don’t like their work,” which is completely fair. That’s your opinion. And the work is meant to be absorbed by other people. Naturally, some will like it and some will not. But if the purpose of the term is to denote somebody who doesn’t care about their creative work, which is I think what that word means, somebody that literally doesn’t care about the quality or the writing, the passion, nothing. They’re just doing it for a check. That person doesn’t really exist, as far as I can tell. Or exists very briefly. [laughs] And is never hired again.

I mean, do you know anybody who consistently just writes whatever they need to write so someone gives them a check without any care, love, passion, concern?

**John:** You know, I have encountered some writers who at a certain point in their career seems like they stopped caring. They would literally just take any note and just do that note and not sort of worry about. And seemingly not lose sleep over it. And so that’s, I think, what we are pointing towards when we talk about hack. Who is doing the lowest common denominator version of any joke, of any scene. You sort of feel like a robot could write those things.

But I’m not going to call those people out as hacks, because I don’t know sort of what their real situation is. And a lot of times I think the people who are pointed at as being hacks, they’re trying to do something very specific and very true. And they’re actually killing themselves to do it. It’s just not working out especially well. So, it’s such an ad hominem to attack the person rather than to look at the work that they’re actually doing.

**Craig:** I think hack is the definition of ad hominem, right? You’re saying I know why you wrote something I don’t like. No you don’t. It’s OK to just not like it. But to presume that you don’t – I mean, reviewers will use the word “lazy” all the time, like, what? Were you there? What? Lazy? How do you know? [laughs]

I mean, that’s lazy, right, to just decide that somebody was lazy because, you know. A lot of times when people look at something and they go, “Oh my god, I saw that movie. That guy is such a hack.” They don’t understand that that guy or that woman showed up to try and make something good and it was destroyed by the process, or by other people, or maybe that person showed up and something was bad and they just did everything they could to make it a little bit better.

Nobody knows why these things happen because they’re not there. And Hollywood is really good at concealing its process from everybody else. They are a restaurant where you cannot see into the kitchen. The more you see into the kitchen, the less interesting the food is. It’s an illusion business.

So, while there is somewhat ironically this enormous industry that professes to know what’s going on behind the scenes and what’s going on inside people’s minds and their hearts and why they do things, the truth is most of the time not only are those implications of hackery or motivation wrong, most of the time as far as I can tell they’re nearly completely wrong.

**John:** Yeah. It’s so maddening. So, I think we are casting major aspersions on anybody who uses the term script doctor on themselves positively, or calls any other writer a hack. Because they’re unacceptable. And so if you see this being done on Twitter, please mock them and CC us. @ reply us so we can join in on the call for these two words to not be used.

**Craig:** It will be a nice break from the current Twitter stream I have from Nazis. [laughs] Oh my god. John, there are so many Nazis on Twitter. Like legitimate Nazis.

**John:** Why are Nazis a thing again? It frustrates me so greatly that like, you know, I like them as a historical and fictional adversary. Not actual adversaries who show up in our lives.

**Craig:** It’s so strange. My wife was like, “Does this upset you?” Because some people are using terrible slurs and talking about putting me in an oven and so on and so forth. And I just thought, no, I actually feel great. This is kind of remarkable. I don’t know why it put me in such a good mood. Something is really wrong with me.

**John:** Something is really wrong with you. Not a shock. Not a surprise.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Also not a surprise is that we completely ran out of time for our questions. Sorry Jessica and Alyssa and Telly Archer. We will get to your questions. We promise.

**Craig:** We’ll get there.

**John:** But it is now time for our One Cool Things. And this actually ties in very well with your Twitter escapades. This is a great article I read this last week written by Mirah Curzer called How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind. And so what she’s describing is how – it sort of goes back to right after the election you and I had that horrible short episode in which we talked about like not that everything will be OK, but this feeling will end.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you described I think in very good psychological terms why you cannot stay at this level of peak paranoia and fear, because your body just will just it down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, what she’s looking at is how do you stay outraged, how do you stay fresh to what’s going without just completely falling apart. And as I was reading it, I was nodding a lot, but I was also recognizing that a lot of what she’s describing is not just about our current US situation. It’s really about any sort of like long term conflict, like which is making a TV show, or a long shoot on a movie. It’s how do you sort of keep fresh on something when it’s just so hard day after day.

So, the four things she sort of focuses on that you need to look away in order stay fresh. To see clearly, you have to be able to look at something else. And that’s something I’ve really found while filming or trying to run a TV show, you have to not be thinking about it for certain hours of the day, otherwise you cannot even see what you’re doing. You have to be able to focus on something in the distance so you can come back and take a look at it.

If we’re in the editing room, doing a cut, if the editor is working on the cut, I will deliberately put my gaze someplace else so that I cannot see what he’s doing. And then I can look back with fresh eyes. And you have to do the same with in a bigger scale for sort of world events.

She stresses you can’t do everything, so you have to pick what you’re going to focus on and let others pick what they’re going to focus on. And that’s a thing I really learned as a director is that I can have an overall vision for how the things are I want to do, but I have to let people who are specialists in different fields really focus on those things. And so I can look at the things that are most important to me, but I’ve got to let other people worry about those things because I can’t do everything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have to make it fun. You have to have some enjoyment in your days. You have to look forward to going to the set. You have to look forward to being part of that. You have to find some moment of joy in your day, or else it’s just going to be horrible.

And then, finally, you have to focus on staying healthy. And people who are on TV shows a lot of times, like they will not go to the doctor or the dentist for the entire run of filming, and then in the two months of hiatus they’ll have to do all that stuff. You can’t do that. You got to go to the gym. You got to sleep. You got to get your appointments. You cannot, you know, put aside your entire life just for this one thing. You got to do all the other stuff to stay healthy.

So, I thought it was a great article both for sort of how to address the current conflict in the world, but also how to look at the long term conflicts that a person is going to encounter in their life.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really smart. I wonder if – I don’t know if this is in there, but I would my own little fifth thing to that, which is don’t respond to or take seriously anybody who tells you that these things aren’t right. Because there are people who are like, “Why are you talking about this when this is going on? And how can you laugh at a time like this? And why are you spending your time blah-blah-blah when you seem to care about…”

Just ignore all of that. Ignore all of that. There are people who will demand that you express your outrage purely and perfectly. But you can’t. So, don’t.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And don’t bother defending yourself either. Just ignore them. Man, I find that I have become an ignoring addict. I love it.

**John:** On Twitter, you just ignore it? Oh yeah, I love it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s so many things where like, you know, there are phases of it. I think the first phase is people say things and you respond and you’re in fights. That’s like the first run of your life online. And then the second run is you start to respond to them and you go, no, I’m deleting this. Then you get to the enlightened place which is, well, that’s stupid. Ignore. [laughs] It’s gone. It’s literally gone. And the funny thing is that the people who are poking at you, they’ve forgotten about you and the thing they said the second they’re done typing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So why not give them the gift of that in return?

**John:** I was talking with a friend who was describing – she got this long email and she was going to respond to it. And then she’s like, “You know what? I’m not going to respond to it.” And she just deleted it.

And so this person wrote back this long response. And we talk about the joy of deleting without reading. To know that somebody spent half an hour writing this thing and you’re like–

**Craig:** I know!

**John:** It did not even hit my inbox. It’s just gone. You’ve wasted your time.

**Craig:** Talking about declarative modes of dialogue, when my wife first started getting really active in PTA and she was the president of the school PTA, and then there was this older woman who was the president of the council, which is the Over PTA for all the schools. And Melissa was talking to her and saying, “I’m getting these – I got a couple of wacky parents, a couple of wacky moms in particular, who keep emailing me these long things and I don’t know how to respond to them because I think they’re crazy.”

And this older woman just looks at her and went, “Delete.” [laughs] I thought that was the best advice ever. Just delete. That’s it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you’d think like, but they’re going to keep writing me and demand why I haven’t written back. No they don’t. They don’t. Because they have 12 other letters they have to write to people. And whomever responds, that’s the winner of the day for them. And they just keep going with them.

Well, speaking of staying outraged, my One Cool Thing, John, is women.

**John:** Women are great.

**Craig:** Women are spectacular. And I say this today that seems perhaps a little general. A little too wide of a category. But specifically I’m saying women because the Women’s March was remarkable. Not only was it massive. I think the largest protest in history in our country? I think. I think.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah, probably.

**Craig:** But it was the most peaceful protest I think we’ve ever had in this country. Not just in Washington, DC, but in New York, and Los Angeles, in Boston, in Chicago. In every major city and every minor city it seemed. There were women that were marching in Alaska and Antarctica, all across the world. And everywhere it was perfectly peaceful. No violence. No ugliness. It was the utopian ideal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of what a civil protest should be. And it could have only been that way because it was women. Because if you throw – like once you hit, I don’t know what the tipping point is, probably 15% men, you have fist fights. Fist fights. Molotov cocktails. And people getting punched in the face.

So, fantastic job, women. Outstanding. What a great example. And also great proof of, I think, hope for us all. And for humanity as it goes through this challenging time.

**John:** I had a delightful time with the Women’s March in Paris. I was there with my family, with my daughter, with a friend’s family. And it was just remarkable seeing everyone gathered together. We marched from Trocadero down past the Eiffel Tower, and to the Ecole Militaire. And it was remarkably well put together and run. Every sign was great. Some were in French. Some were in English. But just to see everybody coming together to do this was great.

It was also wonderful because of time zones, again, we were ahead of the US marches, and so this went really well. And so fingers crossed that the American marches are going to go great. And, of course, they were nutso and fantastic. And the Los Angeles march was off the charts great. So, I’m so proud of everyone who did it. And also inspired by sort of what can happen next given this energy. So, more hope.

**Craig:** It was great. I saw they were talking to a cop in New York. And he seemed stunned. They were asking him about the march and were there any problems. And he said, “No. Nothing. I’ve never seen anything like this.” Actually, he seemed a little scared. Because he’s just like this isn’t the way this goes.

It was just great. So, congratulations and thank you, women. Outstanding job.

**John:** I would also like to single out Carrie Fisher as the Princess Leia’s character was featured in many, many signs, sort of a woman’s place is in the revolution. It was wonderful to see. I think she would have been delighted to see her place in the memes of this march and I think what’s going to be coming forward.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Puddles Pity Party.

**Craig:** Oh, of course it does. [laughs]

**John:** So, I’ll put a link to the video, because you’ll see that he’s actually a clown who sings. But he’s singing the Mary Tyler Moore theme, because Mary Tyler Moore passed away this past week. That show was a huge inspiration for me growing up. It is so well constructed. It is a character on a journey. It was an amazing show. She was an amazing talent. And, weirdly, the Mary Tyler Moore theme song is kind of close, melodically, to the Scriptnotes theme. So I’m going to call an audible there and say it’s sort of like the Scriptnotes theme.

**Craig:** That’s what they were thinking at the time.

**John:** That’s what they were thinking.

**Craig:** It’s certainly not that our theme is a little bit like the Mary Tyler Moore theme, because that would be ridiculous.

**John:** No, come on, Mandela Effect. You know, they traveled through time. Somehow it all bled over. So, I’ll let you listen to this.

If you have an outro, you can send it to us at ask@johnaugust.com. A link is fantastic for those. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we neglect to answer. But for short questions, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We’re on Facebook as well. Look for Scriptnotes podcast. Also iTunes. That’s where you’ll find us. Leave us a review. That helps people find our show on iTunes.

We have an app that lets you get to all the back episodes. It’s through the app store for Apple and for Google Play. You can find us there. Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up for all the back episodes.

We used to have USB drives. We no longer have USB drives for the back episodes, so right now the only way to get to those back episodes is through the service, through Scriptnotes.net.

You can find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you so much for staying up late.

**Craig:** Thank you for waking up early.

**John:** All right, and we’ll talk to you next week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Episode 37: [Let’s talk about dialogue](http://johnaugust.com/2012/dialogue)
* [Finding Carter Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS9Th9Drujg)
* [The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7yF-F1IVWw)
* [The Mandela Effect](http://www.snopes.com/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/)
* [David Kwong and Dilemma](http://dilemna.info)
* [Discourse Marker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_marker)
* [How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind](https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/how-to-stayoutraged-without-losing-your-mind-fc0c41aa68f3)
* [Women](https://www.womensmarch.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 285 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, oh, it’s another episode of How Would This Be a Movie where we take a look at stories in the news, or things we just kind of came across, and try to make sense of them the only way we know how – which is to try to squeeze them into a two-hour block of big screen entertainment.

So this week we’ve got Sinbad, we’ve got sea monkeys, we’ve got kidnapping and Nazis. We’ve got metaphysical paradoxes. We’ve got a possible Nicole Perlman situation. I think it’s going to be a good round of the How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** I’ve got to tell you, I think there’s a great movie where you jam all of that together.

**John:** Oh, 100 percent.

**Craig:** And I think the title of it is Possible Nicole Perlman situation. And it’s Sinbad, it’s sea monkeys, it’s kidnapping, it’s Nazis, it’s metaphysical paradoxes. I mean, I’d see that. I’m not sure if I’d see any individual one of those.

**John:** Yeah, but all together?

**Craig:** All together.

**John:** This could be one of those rare situations, because we’ve had so much success in How Would This Be a Movie before, where we talked about the bank robberies, and we talked about sort of the weird Southern California people trying to frame each other. But this one, it’s going to be tough to make each one of these individual movies, but I think they need to gang up together. You need to get all the rights, put them together, put them in the blender, hit puree, and then you’ve got a movie.

**Craig:** Hit puree. That’s the tag line for the movie.

**John:** Absolutely. It was so delightful listening to this past week’s episode with you and Derek Haas. So, Derek is a good friend in Los Angeles. I realize that I hadn’t heard his voice since I moved to Paris, and it’s because I don’t call people on the telephone. Like, I don’t call friends and talk on the telephone because who does that anymore? It’s all emails. And so I’ve emailed with him, but to hear his voice was just lovely.

**Craig:** Aw. That’s nice. It’s true. The phone call is essentially dead. It’s only used for business at this point. My kids never, ever – they will – when they talk to each other – sorry, when they talk to their friends, they use FaceTime.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** But the idea of just an audio-only call. No one does that. Ever. They just text or they FaceTime. That middle zone is gone.

**John:** So, I’ve emailed Kelly Marcel many times, but the only time I’ve spoken to her since I’ve been here was for the podcast.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That’s crazy.

**Craig:** See that?

**John:** Yeah. But it was delightful. Thank you for bringing Derek on and answering a whole bunch of listener questions. We have three more listener questions we’ll try to get to today.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But you guys did that episode without me because I was in Madrid last week, and it was so much fun, and I want to talk about that. So, I was a guest for ALMA, which is the Spanish Writers Guild, and it was a two-day thing. I spoke at a university and then I did a master class on a Saturday where I spoke for six hours, which is madness, which I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.

**Craig:** Six hours?

**John:** Six hours. It was basically just me. And so I went through two–

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Sort of like slide show presentations. I did some audience Q&A. I had a little interview section. But it was just tremendously fun. It was also my first time doing live translation, so where I would talk and people would have headsets and sort of like at the UN they’d be translating in real time. And my translator was phenomenal. Stella, thank you very much for what you did. But it was so much fun. And I really enjoyed it. I had great, smart questions.

If you are curious what I spoke about, two guys wrote up the whole experience, and so I’m going to link to the blog posts they did. So it’s Àlvar López and Carlos Muñoz Gadea and on Bloguionistas they wrote up sort of what I talked about. And if you don’t speak Spanish, you can probably Google Translate it and get most of it. But it was a really good fun conversation.

**Craig:** You know, have we talked about Google Translate? Was that my One Cool Thing, how they’ve had that crazy huge leap? Have we discussed that?

**John:** I’m not sure we have. But let’s have that conversation now, because it’s gotten so much better. And you’ve read the articles about why it got so much better, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. So they completely changed their entire way of approaching it. It used to be a very formal kind of thing of this word goes to this word, and here are grammar rules. And they switched over to an entirely different thing which is essentially a kind of a neural net learning process. And it’s fascinating.

So, they turn this thing on and just let it start learning kind of. And they have made this enormous leap forward in their ability to translate things. And I did sort of check it out. I wanted to go see like, okay, let’s see how good this is. It’s really good. And the way you can tell it’s really good is because you can take something – I mean, the test they always say is take something in the language you know, have the translation turn it to a different language, and then have that translation turn it back to your language and see how close it is. And it was like really good.

They have taken this huge leap forward and they’ve also – there’s this interesting thing, I don’t know if you read about this, where it seems that what the Google Translate software is doing is creating what they call – I can’t remember quite the name – it’s like an intermediate language–

**John:** It’s like an Esperanto, like a machine language Esperanto.

**Craig:** In a weird way. Like it’s kind of having this weird midpoint. It’s not like it’s invented its own language. It hasn’t. But it’s doing this thing that actual translators do, which is that there’s this weird middle language in between the two languages that they’re moving things back and forward through. It’s kind of amazing.

**John:** Yeah. The process of translation is phenomenal. And to see Stella do this work in real time, so she has to be able to pay attention to what I’m saying and still keep the translation going. I was looking over her notepad and she had sort of a shorthand she kept for like what I was saying. But it wasn’t in words. It was all in symbols. And so she would have like a circle to, with an arrow out, and it was all just a way of keeping track of what I was saying so that she could do it. It was really a remarkable skill.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** And to have to do that for six hours is just nuts.

**Craig:** Six hours. My god.

**John:** So, the other thing which was fascinating going to Madrid is I had not been to Spain since high school. And I had liked it in high school, but I had never been back. And so I thought, you know what, my Spanish is actually probably pretty good. I mean, it’s probably a little bit messed up because of my French. My Spanish was actually like really surprisingly pretty good. And so at the start when I was doing press interviews on the Friday before, she was doing translation. Like they’d ask a question and she did a translation. And by the third interview I was like, you know what, I kind of got this. And so I was able to hear the question in Spanish, answer back in English, and it was just delightful to actually be able to hit the ball back over the net, which I still don’t feel I do very well in French.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. I would not have done that. I look at myself as just I try and be an expert in English. [laughs] But that’s my thing.

**John:** You do pretty well in English, Craig. You really do.

**Craig:** I’m really trying my best. You know, we have a new president now. And he has set a very high bar for English proficiency.

**John:** Mastery.

**Craig:** Mastery.

**John:** He’s using the best words.

**Craig:** He’s all the best words.

**John:** So important to have. The last thing I want to point out about going to Spain, so I was talking with this Writers Guild of Spain. It was called ALMA. And only this year did I start to realize like, oh you know what, there really are Writers Guilds in all the different countries, but they’re not like our Writers Guild. So, Howard Rodman came over to Paris in the fall and he was talking to all the European Writers Guilds. And so Spain has one, France has one, UK has one. And in the US, our WGA is a genuine union. We are actually a labor organization. In most of these countries, they’re not. They don’t have the same sort of negotiating power that we do. And you would think, well, in some ways that’s great. They’re not going to go on strike and do crazy things. But they don’t have the leverage that we do.

In fact, some of the Spanish people were telling us you can’t, even on their website, give like recommended minimums for how much you should charge for a draft. That is considered restraint of trade. And so it’s so weird to enter into a system where everyone is just a free agent and when everyone is a free agent, prices do not do well.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the strange unintended consequence of what at least at first blush is a very pro-writer policy. And that is that in the rest of the world there is Droit Moral, the author’s right, and so what they don’t have in Europe, certainly not in Spain, is work for hire, which we have here in the United States. Work for hire in the United States means that when we’re hired to write things, the employer can retain copyright. So that seems not as good for writers as would be the case in Spain, where no one can take their copyright. They always have copyright. But what it does for us is it makes us employees. And as employees, we can unionize.

So, we do have things here in the United States that they just simply can’t get over there, because they’re not employees. And that is where you run into things like restraint of trade because they are not employees, they’re not unionizing, they’re independent people that are essentially colluding to try and fix prices in an open market.

And so also the other things that come with being an employee, like pensions, healthcare, and all that other stuff aren’t there. In the United States, we have our system, when we talk about residuals that is essentially our attempt to mimic royalties, which obviously copyright holders do get.

So, yeah, it’s kind of a – it’s not even a double-edged sword. I think it’s a one-edged sword. I think our system is actually better for writers, at least in screen.

**John:** I think it’s better for writers to make a continuous living, and that’s really I think what most writers want to do in film and television. I’m starting to recognize that it is an artifact of sort of when Hollywood came to be is that we came up in a time when there were strong unions. And I have a hard time imagining that if today movies were invented, we’d be able to organize. And I mean it’s the same reason why video game companies have a hard time organizing those employees. We’re not in a labor time these days.

**Craig:** I completely agree. And you can see the impact of that on animation. Let’s just say, we’ll call it computer animation, CGI animation, which didn’t exist really until the ‘90s in any meaningful way. In the feature business, that is not a union business. So the people that write any of these movies, well, any animation period. But all the Pixar movies, not one of those writers, not one of those directors has ever gotten a penny in residuals. And that’s not great.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** I completely agree with you. If we had not built our industry in a time of enormous unionization, we would not be unionized.

**John:** Yes. It’s true. All right. Let’s move onto our big feature topic today, which is How Would This Be a Movie. And so we’re going to take a look at three stories in the news, or things that fell over the transom, and talk about them in their possibility of moviedom.

So, let’s start with the story from the New York Times this past week. It was written by Frances Robles. Abduct at Birth and found 18 Years Later. It tells the story of Alexis Manigo, who at 18 finds out that she’s been kidnapped as a newborn from a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. Authorities tell her her real name is Kamiyah Mobley. And Gloria Williams, the woman she thinks of as her mother, actually abducted her when she was a baby.

So, Alexis says, “I never had any ID or driver’s license, but other than that, everything was totally normal.” She did acknowledge stymied a few months ago when she applied for work at a Shoney’s, but lack the Social Security she needed to get the job. And when she was kidnapped from the hospital, there was this large financial settlement that her birth family got from the hospital for basically mismanaging her, or basically for letting her be kidnapped. And now she’s 18 and it’s really unclear where that money goes.

So, this is the framework. Craig, what’s the movie here?

**Craig:** Well, so you have somewhat of a Lifetime movie-ish kind of thing. Baby stolen, raised by another woman, family never gives up. 18 years later, they find her and get her back. OK.

But here’s what’s fascinating about this. This is a quote from Ms. Manigo, who is the young woman who was kidnapped talking about Gloria Williams, the woman who is alleged but it seems quite clearly did it, the woman he kidnapped her. She said, “She took care of everything I ever needed. I never wanted for anything. I always trusted her with it.” She said that Ms. Williams, her kidnapper, was not mentally ill and that she had not been overprotective. “She was a very smart woman.” Ms. Williams worked at a navy yard, handling medical records, and was set to receive her Master’s Degree this year.

So, what’s remarkable is that this perverts everything that we would think would be the case about a criminal, because it’s a criminal act. And remarkably what this young woman says in response to being raised by this woman, Gloria Williams, the kidnapper, is “I feel like I was blessed. I never had a reason to question. A blessing like that. Someone loving you so much.” Fascinating.

I mean, what do you – to me, that’s where you begin. Right?

**John:** I think it is. I think there’s obvious movies trace back to sort of we talk about the Lifetime movie version of this, which is sort of the sensationalistic. And I don’t want to sort of dis all Lifetime movies. I think there’s a reason why that genre of movie exists. But I think there’s a bigger feature version that we’re sort of hoping for for this.

You look at Room. And Room is a story of, of course kidnapping, but that’s an incredibly bleak story of survival and escape and what you do afterwards. And here she’s not trying to escape anything. It’s basically her whole life has been upended. It’s more like you’re not the person you thought you were. How do you find a new identity?

It also reminds me of this most recent year’s movie, Lion, where you have a guy who is like on a quest to figure out who he really is and who is family was. So, there’s templates for it, but what I also find so unique about this template is, so, she’s African American. Everybody in this story is basically African American. If you look at the picture of her in the New York Times article, she looks like an Obama daughter. So, it’s not the classic sort of pretty white blond girl being kidnapped.

And l love, though, what you’ve singled out about what she’s saying. That doesn’t even feel like Stockholm syndrome. She actually had a pretty normal life. And she had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong until pretty recently.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, to me, what the movie is about is about an 18-year-old, through whom we can all identify, and we should, coming to grips with a couple of strange things about life. Namely, somebody can do something very bad to you. That is a harm to you. To steal you from your own parents. And, yet, be a good person to you. And maybe even be a good person for you. That is a very complicated thing.

And then, of course, there’s the notion of finding a relationship with these people that now you come from. And struggling with the fact, I mean, I think there’s a wonderful scene here. Sometimes you think about these movies and you think what’s the great scene. And the great scene is after the hullabaloo of being found and returned and all the rest, and recriminations, and how could this woman have done this, and all the rest. And I thought I knew her, and I don’t. Being in the home that you were supposed to be in with the people you’re supposed to be in. And wanting to go back.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** To the only mother you know, who never treated you wrongly, except for this thing that was in fact terribly wrong. That, to me, that’s an interesting movie. That’s pretty deep stuff. And I’m fascinated by it because it feels real.

Lifetime movies, some of them are very good. I completely agree with you. When we say Lifetime movie, it’s a little bit unfair to Lifetime. Really what we’re talking about is a soap opera-ized movie. Which is kind of an overwrought thing where everything is pushed out dramatically. And here, I think it’s the opposite. Here I think we’re asking these really tricky questions about what it means to love somebody and care for somebody and even the nature of parenthood. Because I think a lot of people who adopt children will say quite eagerly, you know, obviously they’re not stealing somebody. Right? They don’t commit a crime. But they love somebody that they did not give birth to. And that person loves them.

We know that love is real. What do you do when that love is real, but it’s predicated on a crime? That’s fascinating to me.

**John:** Absolutely. And, you know, this is the maternal love. But we’ve seen those sort of love stories where like it’s a relationship that was based on a fundamental lie, and yet 30 years later they find out the truth behind things. Sort of like what is the statute of limitations on that truth? And when does that misdeed become forgiven?

I think her motivation, Gloria’s motivation, is also really fascinating here, because obviously we’re going to see this from the point of view – the story is going to tell us from the point of view of this girl and her family who was searching for her for all these years. But what was the inciting incident that happened with Gloria that made her hold this baby and say like, “You know what? I’m going to take this baby with me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And was it a spontaneous decision? Was it something about this family? Was it something she read about this couple and their daughter made her think like either I could take this, or I should take this baby, because this baby is not safe with them? And I know nothing about the actual biological family here. I’m hoping they’re lovely and wonderful.

But there’s definitely a version of this story where Gloria perceives herself to be the hero, saving this kid from a bad life. And to some degree, she has some vindication because it looks like she gave her a pretty good life. And she seems like an organized stable woman who managed to get a Master’s Degree, which is, again, not the stereotype, the prototype we think of for a kidnapper.

**Craig:** No. It’s true. And we do know at least one fact that at the time of this, let’s see, her name again – well, she has so many different names. Alexis Manigo, whose real name is in fact Kamiyah Mobley, that when she was born the mother, I think, was 16 years old. I think that’s what the article says. So, yes, it’s possible that this woman though, “Oh, I’ll be rescuing this girl from a bad situation.” It’s still a crime, of course. It’s not her call.

There is another interesting way in on this. So, Kamiyah/Alexis’s real parents, her birth parents I should say, are Craig Aiken and Shanara Mobley. The fact that her real name is Kamiyah Mobley, I suspect maybe Craig Aiken and Shanara Mobley are not still married. I don’t think they indicate – or were ever married. I don’t think that was ever an issue.

But there is another way in which is Shanara Mobley. So, this is a young girl, a 16-year-old girl, I believe from the article, who gives birth to a baby. The baby is stolen. She never gives up believing that that baby is still out there somewhere. And she is fighting a system, trying to find this kid. And nobody seems to be able to help.

And then she finally gets her back. And she now has to try and become a mother. And the interesting thing is she never actually had the chance to. She was supposed to be a mother and all of this time goes by and now she is one. But she’s not a mother of a baby. She’s the mother of an 18-year-old young woman. And adult. Who has been raised by somebody else entirely. The feelings that she has towards this girl – is this girl a stranger to her? Even though she has her face?

And what does she feel about this other woman, who she must hate on the one hand, and on the other hand in a weird way has to kind of – she owes her something for keeping this child alive and raising her so well. So, that’s another way in, is the mother.

**John:** Yeah. In that version of the story, we have other prototypes for the birth mother who gave up for adoption and then the adoptive mother and sort of what the tension is between those two. This is just heightened in such a strange degree because it’s not an adoption situation. It is – there’s a crime underneath all of this. And I think that makes it potentially fascinating.

I’m curious whether this specific story is worth pursuing for a movie. Like whether it’s worth it to try and get the rights to this specific case and this specific situation, or do you do it like Room where you are just – you’re taking a general sense of these kinds of situations and building a fictional story out of it.

I can see both sides. My hunch is that you’re not going to get a lot of specific value out of these individual people. And that you might be better off looking for a fictional situation to build around this kind of story. What do you think?

**Craig:** I agree with you. I totally agree. I think it’s actually important that you not use their story, because I’m not sure how much more road there is dramatically to drive here. I think we may have gotten it. And you need to be able to create your own circumstances to tell a dramatic story here with a point and a resolution. And so I don’t think you want the life rights here.

I think you just want an idea, which is a baby is stolen and raised beautifully, apparently, by this criminal. And then it is exposed. And that’s probably the end of act one, or something like that. And then what happens after? And you have the story also of parents that never gave up, and so on and so forth. And I think that actually could be a terrific movie.

I think it’s a small movie. It doesn’t need to be a lot of money.

**John:** No, it doesn’t at all.

**Craig:** I don’t see any call for a large budget here. I love the fact that it’s African American, because I think we tend to see these kids of – I think you pointed at this. We tend to see these kinds of dramas, like what was that movie, the Michelle Pfeiffer movie, The Deep End of the Ocean. I think Steven Schiff wrote that.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** They tend to be white families mourning the loss of white children. And there’s something good and valuable about representing these kinds of stories with African American families that aren’t about the kind of tropes of drugs, and shootings, and gangs, and all the rest of it. But, just a regular family drama. Which I think is really interesting. So, I do think this could be a terrific movie.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to sort of how you structure it, I think what you described is probably the most natural structure for it, where early in the film you discover something is wrong. Probably by the first act break, that’s when Gloria is arrested and now you’re going back and you’re having to sort of meet this new family. And things proceed from there. So it’s sort of like the second half of Room, where you’re trying to reintegrate into a life.

But I think there’s also potentially a version of this that slices up time in interesting ways. So that we get the reveal of like this is your real family, and then we go back and time to see it from Gloria’s point of view, or you basically get the kaleidoscope version of what this is. And that in the round version of this you see multiple points of view and really understand that it’s much more complicated. You’re navigating through a minefield. And you don’t try to focus on just the one protagonist, but you just sort of see a kaleidoscopic view of this weird situation, and what it means to – thematically that sense of motherhood and sort of what that is like and how it can drive a person to make some big choices.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. You don’t have to be chained to any kind of traditional narrative with something like this. You only want to chain yourself to the version that lets you get the most emotional resonance out of it. When you look at movies like this, one way to think of them – think of them as disaster movies. Like Titanic is a disaster movie with a romance in it, right? And in Titanic, because it was based on a real thing and everybody knew the story of the Titanic, they didn’t bother surprising you with the fact that the Titanic hit an iceberg. If anything, they begin by showing an old lady in a movie saying, “This is how it worked,” and then she goes, “Nah, it was actually a little bit more interesting than that.”

So, you have a disaster here which is a woman steals a baby. And you could work backwards to that. You could begin with it, it could happen in the middle. It could be a memory. It could be a dream. It could be any – there’s all different ways to do this. The key is to find that core thing that you’re really trying to hammer home to people. And for me, it’s that strange love. And the existence of that strange love. And maybe even the notion that love can be bad. There’s no such thing as pure love. That there is something maybe dark on the other side of all love. That’s fascinating to me.

So, somebody brilliant – this is an ambitious thing though, if you’re going to do it. As they say in the movie business, John, it’s execution-dependent.

**John:** It is. It does not sell itself. You have to really write this one. And you have to make this one. And it has to sort of just work. You have to stick the landing on this, or you don’t got a movie.

**Craig:** Do you worry that when we do these that 5,000 people then turn around and attempt to write – and suddenly the market is flooded with versions of this story next year?

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, it would be better than some of the other kinds of tropes that get trotted out.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But if Franklin Leonard at the Black List gets overwhelmed with these, he’ll tell us.

**Craig:** He’ll let us know. It’s our fault. Sorry.

**John:** Sorry. All right next up, we have something potentially light and fun. We’ll see.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** So, sea monkeys. And so when I put this on the outline I’m like, oh, well everybody knows what sea monkeys are. And then I realized, you know what, they might not, because we have international listeners. And sea monkeys I perceive as being a largely American phenomenon, because they were a phenomena we grew up with. They were big in comic books. Can you talk us through just the quick version of what sea monkeys are, in case people have no idea what we’re talking about?

**Craig:** Sure. So for you and I, kids who were growing up in the ’60s and ‘70s, every comic book you got had ads in it, pages where they were selling novelty items. Things that were meant for kids, like prank bubble gum that would turn your mouth black. Or, you know, sneezing powder.

**John:** X-ray specs.

**Craig:** Yeah, which were not X-ray specs. But the biggest ad was always for sea monkeys. Sea monkeys were these remarkable creatures, and the cartoon portrayed them as a family. A nuclear family. A father. A mother. And two lovely children.

**John:** A teenage daughter and like a younger brother.

**Craig:** That’s right. Exactly. It was a little bit like the Jetsons in that regard. And they were these sort of pink creatures with weird sort of projections on their head that looked like little crowns to me. And they lived in a fishbowl, with a little castle, and they were just having the best time. And they were sea monkeys. And you could buy them.

And you would send a dollar in, and what you’d get back were these packets and what the ad promised was that you would put the packets into a regular fishbowl of water and lo and behold within seconds these sea monkeys would come to life. And they were trainable. And they would do acts for you and put on shows. [laughs] And, you know, even as an impressionable child who probably still thought that there was a Santa Claus and all of that, I knew – no.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, it turns out that sea monkeys are in fact brine shrimp. And brine shrimp have this strange property where when they lay eggs, the eggs can stay dormant and essentially dehydrated and dormant for a long time. And if you put them in water, they will then reconstitute and hatch and out will come brine shrimp, which look nothing like the cartoon of sea monkeys. They’re just tiny little bait shrimp.

**John:** Absolutely. They’re tiny little specs of sand that are kind of floating around and do not even look that cool. So, I remember getting sea monkeys with my brother, and we put the conditioner pack in the water and waited the 24 hours you have to wait. And we put the little sea monkeys, the second packet, and put that in. And you look at them and you’re like, well that’s interesting for about 20 seconds. And then what do you do? And then eventually the water dries up and you just toss the whole thing away. Because there’s not even a pet. It’s like even a hermit crab. It could kind of move around a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This was not even that.

**Craig:** No. No. It was a terrible thing. It was essentially a scam. One of the remarkable things about those packets is the first packet is special water purifier. And so you had to pour that in the water. And for 24 hours it would purify the water. And then the second packet would be the sea monkey eggs. And they would immediately come to life. Well, as it turns out the first packet are the eggs. It takes them 24 hours. And the second packet was a blue dye to make it so that you could actually see the damn things.

And, yet, there is this story lurking behind it that’s kind of remarkable.

**John:** Before we get to the story behind it, let’s say that someone approached you with just the story of sea monkeys. We have the rights to the name sea monkeys. So let’s talk about this version of this, because we’ve all encountered these things. And we make fun of the Slinky movie, but like there are bits of IP especially based on toys that they’ll be shopped around as like, “Hey, we’re going to try to make this movie.”

And so when we encounter those things, sometimes they are like, well, we got this piece of property. Come in and pitch us your take on how you would do this thing. And so team after team of writers comes in pitches them like how they would make this movie. More increasingly what happens is they’ll get together a writers room of some experienced writers, some newer writers, and they’ll spend four weeks breaking possibilities for stories for sea monkeys in the room. And Nicole Perlman, our friend, who is a twice guest on the show, she runs a lot of these rooms. She’s really good at this, apparently, at sort of talking people through how we’re going to do this. And running that team that’s figuring out how we’re going to take this piece of intellectual property – in this case sea monkeys – and make them into a movie.

So, what would those sea monkey pitches be like? What do you think, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, if somebody put a gun in my mouth – it would have to be in my mouth, by the way. If the gun is to my head, I’m going to take my chances that it maybe ricochets off my skull. But if it’s in my mouth, I would say, well, you could do a story where the guy who originally – the mysterious man who is selling sea monkeys insisted until his dying day that he saw real sea monkeys. He did. And that it wasn’t a lie. And that one day people will see. And that these things – one of them, it’s going to happen to him, because he did it himself. And they were real sea monkeys. And he swears.

But, you know, he’s been dead for a while, and nobody believes that. But they’re still selling sea monkeys. And this kid, who is very lonely and maybe, you know, usual thing. Mom died. Dad died. Divorce. You know, one of those things. He’s lonely and he wants sea monkeys. And they’re like, “You’re stupid. Sea monkeys are baloney.” And he gets the packet of sea monkeys. He puts it in and it’s just, yeah, there they are, the little dots of brine shrimp, and it’s lame.

And he goes to bed. And then there’s like a meteor or something and aliens who were the original sea monkeys. The guy was telling the truth. They get into his water and he has real sea monkeys. And they need his help to get home, or something. That’s probably… – And then hopefully the gun would come out of my mouth. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] They’re like, OK, that was just good enough to get the gun out of your mouth.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. Or, at that point I’d feel so bad I’d pull the trigger myself.

**John:** I should stipulate that in Frankenweenie, there actually is sort of the equivalent of sea monkeys. I’m sure we don’t call them sea monkeys. But that same idea where everyone is trying to resurrect their dead pets. And so this guy like dumps all the sea monkeys in the pool and they become giant live things. So they become like one of the big monster threats of Frankenweenie, these things that are like sea monkeys.

I was thinking more on the order of Smurfs, where you basically just take the name and then you sort of create what is their life like. And so it’s an animated movie where you are following the adventures of these sea monkeys and you establish whatever rules. And you really sort of go by what they sort of look like on the package. So, it’s, you know, it’s the Jetsons under water kind of to some degree. I don’t think that’s a movie you make, but I bet it’s a movie that would get developed. If the right producer with the right hustle and like ended up at the right studio that was appropriately desperate, you could go through a couple of development cycles on Sea Monkeys.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s a great way of saying – if you had the exact perfect mix of people, you would get to go through a couple of development cycles. You know, the thing about sea monkeys–

**John:** Well, Craig–

**Craig:** Yeah?

**John:** Craig, we did make the movie Monster Trucks.

**Craig:** We did. Well, we didn’t.

**John:** Yeah, but as Hollywood, together, we all basically made Monster Trucks.

**Craig:** But, you know what, let me say something about Monster Trucks.

**John:** Let’s talk about Monster Trucks.

**Craig:** Let’s talk about Monster Trucks. So, this movie came and crashed and burned. And it was very, very expensive. And any time this happens, people go bananas in our town. And, you know, look, you see the trailer for Monster Trucks and you think, well, this does not look particularly good. It’s kind of corny. It feels very old-fashioned, sort of like Herbie the Love Bug, expect instead of the Volkswagen being alive, there’s an incredibly expensive CGI creature that’s making the truck move.

And it looked very paint by numbers, you know, guy finds a friend and his buddy. And even the design of the creature borrowed from other movies like How to Train Your Dragon, and so forth. But, you know what? They weren’t building it on an existing title. They were trying to make something new. So, for that alone, you know, I tip my hat. Maybe it didn’t work out. OK. And maybe it wasn’t a good bet and it cost too much damn money. But they were at least trying to do something new.

I mean, the problem with things like sea monkeys is what happens is – as you know – people just sit in offices making lists of names of things people know and then backing movies into those things.

**John:** I would argue Monster Trucks is exactly the same situation, Craig. Because we both know it was a title. They had sort of no idea what that was going to be, but it was a title. And then basically a title. It’s like Cars, but they’re trucks. That’s really what it is. So, I’m not going to give you a pass on the like, “Oh, no, it’s a brilliant original idea.”

**Craig:** I didn’t say brilliant. I didn’t say brilliant.

**John:** OK. This was not The Matrix, Craig.

**Craig:** All right. I’ll give you that.

**John:** And so I really don’t mean to hate on that movie, but I would say that like you shouldn’t compare against the worst possible example of something, but I feel like there’s a movie – the Lego Movie, like sea monkeys at least have faces. I mean, they have a thing to them. They’re not as popular as Lego, but like the Lego Movie is a really good movie. And so I think there probably is a really good movie you could make out of sea monkeys, but you have to have the equivalent of those guys to do it.

**Craig:** Well, sure, but also, no, because the thing is Legos are an experience that multi-generations have. And they are an experience connected through creativity. And there’s an enormous amount of Lego stuff, of varying types, for different ages. And, of course, you’re not able to do the Lego Movie, I don’t think, if you don’t have the existence of all the encompassed brands that Lego has.

**John:** That is true.

**Craig:** Sea monkeys are one thing. That’s it. And they’re not interactive. And they’re not multi-generational. My child today, I mean, I don’t think either one of my kids would have any clue what a sea monkey is. None.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** You would have to play on the nostalgia somehow and – but it’s not like the Smurfs even. You know, the Smurfs are also a global brand. I don’t think sea monkeys are a global brand.

**John:** The Smurfs are Les Schtroumpfs here.

**Craig:** They’re Les Schtroumpfs. I think the way – it’s funny, because you listed a few movies down here. And before you listed those movies, in my mind I’m like, the real story here is the John Lee Hancock version of the man who invented sea monkeys. That’s the real story.

**John:** Yeah, so the man behind this, we’re going to link to a really good film by Penny Lee that is like a short documentary that she made for CNN Films that talks about the guy who created sea monkeys. And so essentially he wasn’t an inventor. He was really a really good marketer. And he figured out, like, I want to sell the bait. I want to sell these sea monkeys, these little brine shrimp, but I’m going to call them – he came up with the name sea monkeys. He came up with the artistic concept. Advertising them in the back of comic books. And he built this whole thing.

So his name was Harold von Braunhut. He died in 2003. So he also made X-ray specs. You know, and so you could look at this as like, well, congratulations to this guy. He was able to find value in this thing. He sort of brought joy to kids’ lives for like the 20 seconds that these sea monkeys stayed alive.

But he could trigger that thing in the imagination, which was great. And so you could see like that’s a very American story. But, he’s also, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, he is also – was also a virulent racist who supported the KKK and a number of white supremacist groups. This is a guy that they actually have on film saying, “Heil Hitler.” And talking about blacks and Jews using words that are not black and Jew. Just a horrendous person, and, yet, oddly, was born Jewish.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So, what? [laughs]

**John:** You got a lot there. You got a whole thing. And so I find that that’s so fascinating. Because, well, you naturally kind of want him to be the protagonist of the story, because he’s the main guy. He’s the guy who comes up with the idea. He goes through struggles and adversities. He sees the ups and downs. But then you’re like, but it’s also like a KKK person. So he can’t be the hero of your story. I mean, not the hero in the sense that you’re actually genuinely rooting for him. So it makes it very uncomfortable, which is why I think it circles so nicely John Lee Hancock’s movie because you have The Founder and like I saw his movie this last week and Michael Keaton is phenomenal–

**Craig:** He’s great.

**John:** And his performances are great, but John Lee Hancock does not, you know, he’s making a story about a guy who was ultimately not the guy you kind of want to be rooting for. And he’s not a Nazi, but it’s like, I mean, you can’t sort of compare with the KKK.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But it gets to a really uncomfortable place, which I was surprised by, because I was thinking, oh, it’s going to be an inspiring story about the guy who created McDonald’s.

**Craig:** No, not at all.

**John:** No. No it’s not. And so I’m curious whether you think like the sea monkey movie but Braunhut could be a movie-movie, it is an HBO movie? If you make this, where do you make this movie for?

**Craig:** Definitely not for theatrical release. Because, you know, even The Founder is kind of a limited target audience. I think it’s opening this weekend – by the way, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, because I believe it’s opening a few days before this airs, do see The Founder. It’s terrific. But, you know, it’s platformed and it’s meant for a narrow audience. But, that’s about McDonalds, which is one of the truly well-known global brands. Sea monkeys, not at all. It does feel like maybe an interesting hour-long thing for HBO or something like that. Maybe even it might actually be a better documentary in a weird way to sort of expand on this video that we’re linking to into more of a – I think it’s about an 18-minute video or something like that. Maybe it could be a 45-minute kind of thing.

There is something that struck me when I was reading about Harold von Braunhut, the Jewish anti-Semite and racist, and that was when I was a kid and I saw the sea monkey ads, one of the things that struck me was how mainstream and kind of aspirationally American the sea monkey family was. Even though they’re sea monkeys, they’re clearly white. They have very Caucasian features. Very WASPY features. They have that kind of perfect American family thing. They weren’t six Jews crammed in too-small house, screaming at each other, like my family.

Although they were in a fishbowl, it seemed like a much nicer place to live than Staten Island. There’s an interesting angle there that this guy had this weird self-hatred. And this worship of an idealized life that he thought he was robbed of being a part of. And even with these stupid things, he understood that this was something people would want. Joe Orlando, who was – I don’t know if he still is – a major guy at DC Comics, he was the guy that drew the illustrations. And it was something that obviously struck a chord with kids.

It’s not just the copy about – it’s the pictures. You wanted that perfect family in a fishbowl. Like is your family terrible? Would you like a perfect family, in a fishbowl? You can have one with sea monkeys.

**John:** Yeah. That classic thing of like the utopian ideal, which is really destruction. Basically like you want to erase the part of yourself that you hate, and so therefore you portray this idealized version of how things could be or should be. And so you don’t want to make Hitler comparisons, but this guy was the Hitler of brine shrimp.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He was selling this vision of not Aryans, but sort of aquatic Aryans.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Where everything was better in the little bowl. He’s like the reverse Little Mermaid. He wants to go back into the water.

**Craig:** Exactly. Well, and you know–

**John:** Because it’s happier there.

**Craig:** There’s certain parallels to Disney. You know, Disney always sold a perfected view of white America. And you can see it now, too, with the Make America Great Again. The question is, well OK, that means it was once great. When do you think it was great? There’s some interesting videos where they go and ask Trump supporters, “OK, when was America great?” And they give a lot of fascinating answers that seem pretty unaware of things like slavery, and war, and disease.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** But when you look at Disneyworld, for instance, or Disneyland, and you walk down Main Street, it’s like 1910, early 1920s Americana. So right before the Great Depression. Right before we became an international country, really. You know, we were still just America, despite our doughboys sort of kind of participating in WWI. And before everything fell apart. And you get a similar kind of vibe here. It’s a castle, by the way. The sea monkeys have a castle.

**John:** Of course, because they have a little crown, so of course they have castles. They’re royalty.

**Craig:** They’re royalty. There is something really interesting about the creepiness underneath all of it. But to me, probably better served by a documentary than a movie.

**John:** I agree with you. But I would not be surprised if within the next five years we see somebody buying that title as an idea for an animated something. I just feel like Nicole Perlman is going to get a phone call and she’s going to decide, do I do this? And maybe she does it because she’s so good at it.

**Craig:** Well, listen, the thing is they’re not just going to say, “We want to make a sea monkey movie.” They’re going to say, “We want to break a three-movie sea monkey arc.”

**John:** That’s what it is. It has to be. Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Five seasons and a movie. Finally, a unique case where we’re not talking How Would This Be a Movie, but we’re talking about a movie itself. And so most of us are probably familiar with Sinbad. I shouldn’t say most of us. Many of us are probably familiar with Sinbad. He was the standup comic and actor. Made a lot of movies in the ‘90s. But then over the Christmas holiday, you Craig, you emailed me about this movie. And I was like, oh wow, that’s actually so fascinating.

So I was sitting across from my husband, Mike, and we were at the hotel bar downstairs. So, I’m going to play some audio and you’re going to hear the chatter in the background, but bear with it because I was asking Mike about his experience with the Sinbad movie where Sinbad plays a genie, and he had a very specific memory of it. So, let’s play the audio and then talk about our experience.

[Audio begins]

**John:** So there’s a movie where Sinbad played a genie, did you see it, or was it at your theater? What was it?

Mike: When I was working on Woodland Hills, managing that location, I think the movie was out then and Sinbad lived nearby. And so I remember him sort of coming in maybe around the time of the movie being in theaters.

**John:** What was the name of the movie?

Mike: Shazaam.

**John:** And it was about the DC Comics character? How was it spelled?

Mike: I think so.

**John:** Great. So you would say ’95?

Mike: No, it would have been, if I was working in Woodland Hills it would have been between ’97 and ’99.

**John:** OK. And just him. Do you remember anybody else being in it, or any trailer or anything?

Mike: No. I vaguely remember – I can vaguely picture the poster. And I think there might be two kids in it, which makes me think that somehow he might be like the family maid, or like manny or something like that. And he’s a genie/he’s a nanny, or something.

**John:** All right. Can you think of any reason why I would be bringing this up or asking questions about it?

Mike: Other than you’re having another Shazaam movie.

**John:** OK. Craig just sent through an article about it and about the movie and a whole Reddit thread about the movie. So, everyone has essentially your memory of the movie, but the movie never existed. So, what’s strange is a lot of people have exactly your memory of Sinbad in a movie–

Mike: Well, and Sinbad lived in Woodland Hills and he still used to come into our theater.

**John:** Do you believe that? Or do you think it’s a hoax, someone is pretended it never existed?

[Audio ends]

**John:** So, Craig, talk us off this weird metaphysical ledge. Is it a hoax? What is the deal with the Sinbad genie movie?

**Craig:** Well, it’s not a hoax, because I think far too many people have far too strong of a personally held belief that they remember this movie existing. So, some facts. The movie did not exist. At all. We know this because it’s impossible to hide a movie in 2017. And Sinbad himself is absolutely mystified by this whole thing. [laughs] You’d think he would remember. It’s also not something that would have any reason to be covered up, or hidden, or buried, or squirreled away.

So, what you have is a failure of memory in the precise way, in the precise same way across lots of people. Now, there are explanations for this. Why people have the same faulty memory. And, of course, it’s easy to think, oh, there must be some kind of – let’s call it a metaphysical reason.

**John:** A glitch in the matrix.

**Craig:** A glitch in the matrix.

**John:** Or like a parallel universe and things crossed over, things disappeared.

**Craig:** But in my mind, it’s as simple as this. And perhaps I’m being reductive here. But Sinbad, the comedian, his real name is not Sinbad. He took the name Sinbad, I’m not sure why, but Sinbad himself, that’s a fictional character from Arabian folklore. There have been movies where Sinbad has appeared, the character of Sinbad, who generally wears a turban and comes from the same culture and the same stories that included genies. And so I think people in their minds there’s an unconscious dot-dot-dot between Sinbad and genies. And I think for a lot of – I’d be interested in seeing the racial statistics on people who remember Sinbad being in a genie movie called Shazaam, because Shaquille O’Neal, the basketball player, was in a genie movie called Kazaam.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And I wonder if a lot of this is white people just confusing two black actors, who are roughly the same age, playing genies, at roughly the same time. But beyond that–

**John:** I think there’s clearly more than just that. So, the Shazaam/Kazaam thing was sort of my first go to. It’s like, oh, they’re just confusing that, and because they’re both black people. And I agree with you that the Sinbad name carries with it that whole Arabian folklore thing. So those little parts of your brain sort of connect. But what’s so interesting is when you dig down into these threads and you talk to people who were not preconditioned to have a certain response, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I remember Kazaam. That’s a different movie. And I remember not seeing Kazaam because I thought it was just a remake of the Sinbad movie.”

**Craig:** A rip-off of Shazaam.

**John:** It was a rip-off of Shazaam. And so people have very distinct memories of the whole plot of it. And so, again, I’m not saying that this thing actually happened, but I think it’s actually more interesting and more subtly confusing, sort of the way that the dress that looked two different colors based on when you looked at it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s the narrative version of that. Like there’s a version of your memory where that actually did happen. And I think it’s so interesting that we think of our memories as being written down someplace, but they’re actually just rehearsed. So this one memory can sort of feel like it really happened, but it’s just this little loop that’s rehearsing and creating a fictitious memory there. And it’s fascinating that for so many people it’s essentially the same memory.

**Craig:** That’s right. I remember in college I took a class on cognitive psychology, which is a fascinating field, because this is all it really concerns itself with. Essentially the flaws of cognition. And one of the theories that they had at the time, I don’t know if it’s still the case, is that the experience of déjà vu, which is universal, and which in the Matrix was in fact explained as a glitch in the Matrix, that déjà vu occurs because there is a neurological routine that serves to give us the sense of familiarity. When we see something that is familiar to us, we feel it is familiar because our brain goes, “Hit the familiar button on this.”

And déjà vu is essentially a hiccup of that. It’s when the brain hits the familiar button on something that isn’t familiar. But we can’t tell the difference. All we know is familiar is familiar. And if it’s familiar, it’s familiar. And so part of this may just be that this thing is naturally tweaking. There’s something about the combination of these elements that is naturally tweaking the familiarity button in people.

In the end, we’re left grasping for straws here because we just – there’s no really cogent, convincing explanation of this. This does go into the “we don’t know what’s going on box.”

**John:** I think why this is so appropriate for this segment because I think it is the How Would This Be a Movie mechanism is kicking in and I feel like we see the combination of Sinbad, a genie, what would that movie be like? And I think we would all chart basically the same kind of movie. Like you imagine, oh, these kids find a genie in a bottle and he does these things. You can sort of imagine the things that would happen in that Sinbad/genie movie really easily. And you can sort of picture the time that it’s happening.

So when I drilled deeper with Mike about what do you think was actually really going on in your head there, how do you think you got this confused, and he’s like, “You know what,” so he was looking through IMDb, like other Sinbad movies. “You know, what? I think I was taking the poster for First Kid, which is a Sinbad, and sort of combining it with Kazaam.” He could sort of see like what he was doing.

It was a strange situation though where he was literally working in the theater where Sinbad was coming in all the time, so it felt so specific that he was thinking like, oh, this movie that must have come out between this year and this year because he knows what movies come out what year because he worked in a theater. It is just a strange thing where like sort of like The Dress, it just hits those buttons in your brain and makes you think, oh, this must be – it’s a narrative optical illusion.

**Craig:** It’s a narrative optical illusion. I think that’s a great way of putting it. And it’s funny, we know that optical illusions fool us. And we don’t question whether or not they’re real. We don’t. Even the ones that are really, really good, like the one with the grey squares and the white squares, which is amazing.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** We just accept, OK, our eyes and our brain are bad at this. But we don’t accept it with memory. And we don’t accept it – so, a lot of what cognitive psychology was about was investigating things like the reliability of eye witness testimony, which is terribly unreliable. For these reasons. And, by the way, this is why we do what we do and why people want to see the things that writers do. Because our brains are narrative. It’s also what gets us into trouble as we can see around us right now.

Politics. Everything. Everybody has figured this out. Every marketer, every politician, every lawyer in a courtroom. Everyone has figured out that the way to make the most effective impression on another person’s mind is to do so through narrative. Because our brains are wired narratively.

**John:** I think the only remaining question is do you make the Sinbad/genie movie now? Just should you take advantage of this weird moment and just go back and retroactively make the movie? And you should make it like it was in the ‘90s and just like actually make it and blow everyone’s brains. Just like, oh, now it exists. This thing that you always wanted to exist, now it’s there.

**Craig:** Or, you do a meta thing where it’s like you find Sinbad, because you’re like I know that this actually happened. And I think you are a genie. I think you got rid of it because you’re a genie and you don’t want people to know. And I get why, you know, it’s like because people were bothering you because you’re really a genie, but I know you’re a genie and I need your help. And Sinbad is like, you’re crazy, you’re out of your mind. And then it’s like, OK, yeah, it’s true. I’m a genie. What do you need?

**John:** [laughs] I made the wish to make the movie go away because it was bad.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, one of the things I’m sad that I’m missing that’s happening in Los Angeles right now that I’m hoping you get a chance to go see. You know the Jerry Maguire Video Store?

**Craig:** I’ve read about this. The crazy pop up Jerry Maguire Video Store that only sells I think thousands of copies of Jerry Maguire.

**John:** On VHS.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** So it’s like an art installation that you can visit, but it’s a video store that just sells Jerry Maguire. And I find it fascinating. And it feels like it’s related to this whole sense of like this movie that doesn’t really exist that everybody remembers. It’s all of a piece. There’s something magical happening there. So, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Craig, we have these three questions. We don’t have time for these questions. They’re going to get punted back for another week because we got busy talking about Nazis and Nicole Perlman.

**Craig:** Yep. Nazis and Nicole Perlman. That’ll keep us busy.

**John:** I don’t regret a bit of that. But I have a really good One Cool Thing. So, this is the video for Wyclef Jean by Young Thug. So it’s directed by Pop and Clout, which I think is just the director’s name for Ryan Staake. So, the video is terrible. It’s just awful. And the reason why you should watch it is the director basically explains what went wrong in the course of the making of the video. So, they spent $100,000 to shoot this rap video for Young Thug. And Young Thug never showed up. And so he was like ten hours late and then never got out of his car. And so Young Thug had very specific instructions about things he wanted in the video. So they started shooting just like B-roll footage for what that stuff was, but then he never actually showed up to be part of it.

And so if you watch this video, it will show the footage, but then it will just be these insert title cards from the director explaining what was supposed to be happening here. And it’s one of my favorite videos of the year. It’s just delightful.

**Craig:** And that’s the video, by the way.

**John:** Yeah. It is the video. The real video is the director’s video.

**Craig:** That’s the real video. So it includes like, “Audio of Young Thug explaining what he wants which is incoherent and insane.” And then this guy doing it and just remarking on the stupidity of it all. And it’s the video. [laughs] That’s the thing. And I guess either Young Thug never watched it, or was just like this is dope. Let’s put it out.

It’s great. It’s the video of the year.

**John:** So I want to thank Matt Jebson in my Twitter feed for recommending it. It really is just terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. My One Cool Thing is, it’s a little dark. A little dark today.

**John:** Man, so I just expanded the little tab to see what it was, and my heart got palpitating, because I know what this is for, and I’m not happy to see this. It’s not a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Sorry, it’s not.

**John:** It could save a person’s life, I guess. But oh no, Craig.

**Craig:** It’s a One Scary Thing. Well, listen, I’ve been working on this – I haven’t talked about this HBO thing. And I don’t want to yet until it’s like real. We’re close on this. But it is a miniseries that involves – the topic of radiation comes up.

**John:** It’s Silkwood 2, but yeah.

**Craig:** What’s that?

**John:** It’s Silkwood 2.

**Craig:** It’s Silkwood 2. It’s Silkwood meets the Sea Monkeys. But I’ve been doing a lot of research and we live in an uncertain time. It seems to have gotten a bit more uncertain. And I’m not suggesting that we are on the verge of nuclear war. I don’t believe we are at all. But we are currently threatened, all of us, by at least the proliferation of nuclear material and terrorism and the possibility of dirty bombs and so forth.

And so there’s an item that I think everybody should have just as a matter of course, like a standard first aid item, just the way you would protect against earthquakes if you live in an earthquake zone, and things like that. And it’s potassium iodide. And you can get potassium iodide pills quite easily. They’re over the counter. You can get them on Amazon or local store. And the reason you should have them is simply this: if there is any kind of radioactive disaster, or accident, one of the most dangerous isotopes, radioactive isotopes, is the radioactive isotype of iodine. And your thyroid gland is really good at absorbing iodine. And so we see that one of the first impacts of any kind of radioactive disaster is an increase in thyroid cancer. Sometimes a dramatic increase in thyroid cancer, which can kill you.

So what they suggest, if something like this should happen, is that you take potassium iodide, only by the way when this happens. Do not take it normally. That is not good for you. But, if there is some kind of problem, you take potassium iodide which is a stable form of iodine. The thyroid will essentially uptake that and be flooded with it and not want to take any more iodine. And so if radioactive isotypes of iodine then waft over to you, you will not be up-taking and absorbing them. It’s very cheap and it’s just a good thing to have around. Sorry to be a downer.

**John:** Man, we should have reversed the order of our One Cool Things. But, yes, I agree it’s a necessary thing. It’s a thing that I was already planning to get, have in our first aid kid, and in our survival things. So, yes.

**Craig:** Sorry about that, guys.

**John:** That’s all right. That’s our show for this week. As always, it was produced by Godwin Jabangwe and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a Matthew Chilelli classic. So, thank you, Matthew, for making such great music.

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 like the ones we meant to answer today. For short questions, we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re also on Facebook. Look for Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you’ll find the Scriptnotes App. We also are now in Google Play Store.

**Craig:** What? That’s a thing?

**John:** No, actually I think we’re the Google Music. People wanted us to be accessible through this Google thing, and so we sent them a URL. And now magically our podcast shows up there.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** If you’re in any of those places and want to leave us a comment, we really will read those. And maybe we’ll read them on the air at some point, because those are always fun to do.

Show notes for this episode, and all episodes, are at johnaugust.com. So that’s where you’ll see the article links for the stuff we talked about today and for buying potassium iodide for impending nuclear winter.

**Craig:** [laughs] Sorry.

**John:** And we’ll also have transcripts to read. So, you know, while the lights are out, you can maybe print them or something and remember what Scriptnotes used to be in the days before the big flash and bang.

**Craig:** Kaboom.

**John:** And thank you to everybody who subscribes at Scriptnotes.net. That’s where you get all the back episodes. So, we have no more USB drives, but if you want all those back episodes, including episodes with John Lee Hancock talking about The Founder, Kelly Marcel, Nicole Perlman, who has been on the show twice when she’s not running writers rooms–

**Craig:** For sea monkeys.

**John:** When she’s not surrounded by sea monkeys and Nazis. She is on previous episodes and is phenomenal. So, you can find those at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month.

And that is all the boilerplate I have to offer. Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Talk to you soon.

**John:** All right. Talk to you soon. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [John’s Madrid Talk](https://bloguionistas.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/john-august-1/)
* [John’s Madrid Talk II](https://bloguionistas.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/john-august-ii/)
* [Abducted at Birth and Found 18 Years Later](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/alexis-anigo-kamiyah-mobley-kidnapping.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&_r=0)
* [The Real Story of Sea Monkeys](http://boingboing.net/2016/12/28/the-real-story-of-sea-monkeys.html)
* [Sinbad in the Genie Movie](http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2016/12/movie-doesn-t-exist-and-redditors-who-think-it-does)
* [The Mandela Effect](http://www.snopes.com/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/)
* [Young Thug – Wyclef Jean](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9L3j-lVLwk)
* [Potassium Iodide](https://emergency.cdc.gov/radiation/ki.asp)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_285.mp3).