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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/what-if-hollywood-edition).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 634 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What if Alexander the Great had died at the Battle of Granicus River? What if Robert E. Lee hadn’t lost Special Order 191? Historians consider these questions as counterfactuals, exploring how major world outcomes sometimes hinge on relatively small moments that could’ve gone either way. Today on the show, we’ll explore a range of Hollywood counterfactuals, looking at some moments, people, and events that could’ve gone very differently. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, capitalism. Craig, is it good or bad?

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** We will definitively answer the question once and for all.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy. Craig, it’s so nice to have you back!

**Craig:** It’s so good to be back. I’m sorry that I was gone for so long. The small matter of directing the first episode of the second season of The Last of Us, which I’m almost done with – we have a few days still outstanding that we need to do in a different location. I’ve been monitoring things on the internet a little bit. People are very clever. They like to see where we’re shooting, and then they have all these brilliant theories about what it means.

**John:** Yeah, and they’re all right. 100 percent of them are correct, right?

**Craig:** I wish I could put my arm around each one of them and say, “No.”

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** No, most of the theories are incorrect. Some of them are halfways correct. Some of the conjecture is like 28 percent correct. But I do enjoy it all. I like the interest. It’s fun. But I’m mostly done with my directing stuff and very happily enjoying watching the second episode being done from the more traditional showrunner point of view, which is nice. I do like directing, but also, it’s the most exhausting thing ever. I miss it when it’s over, and then while it’s happening, I just keep asking myself why, why, why am I doing – why did I do-

**John:** Hey, Craig. Hey, Craig. I have friends who direct sitcoms, and let me tell you, one week they’re in and they’re out. If you could go back, why not make it a sitcom? Then you could direct as much as you wanted to direct, because it’s just a week of your time. James Burrows is not exhausted the way that you’re exhausted.

**Craig:** No. It sounds like you’re talking about a good old-fashioned three-camera.

**John:** Three-camera, oh yeah.

**Craig:** So you’re really just working on a stage play that three cameras are capturing. You don’t have to figure out angles and coverage and turning around. That sounds wonderful. Plus just a week. Yeah, so if there is some sort of box I failed to check to have James Burrows’s career and money… That sounds like a plan.

**John:** Did I tell you I finally met James Burrows? After all these years, I met him backstage at a play. And of course, as you could expect, the most lovely man.

**Craig:** I would hope so. If he were just unpleasant-

**John:** Yeah, a monster.

**Craig:** … what a weird choice to keep going back and back and back. Those days are kind of over though, aren’t they? The three-camera sitcom is sort of-

**John:** There are more this development season than in previous years.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** Yeah, I think there’s still some hope for it. There tend to be more of the half-hour single-camera things, which again though, are pretty short schedules. Modern Family apparently did a light shoot. They’d show up to the location, they’d shoot every scene a couple ways, and they were done.

**Craig:** Yeah, the classic network model of doing something like that, the standard is shoot a master and then hose it down, as they say, just simple coverage. If you’re shooting a couple cameras at the same time, the thing about a show like Modern Family is the coverage really doesn’t have to be particularly specific. It’s people talking, and what they’re saying and their faces are the most important things, whereas when you get into these big dramas – and the big dramas are like, each episode is kind of a movie.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Eesh. Oof.

**John:** Eesh. Yeah. I will say, the shows that are like The Office or like Modern Family, they do rely sometimes on the camera finding a joke, because the conceit, of course, is that it’s a documentary crew, so the camera’s finding the joke at times. Abbott Elementary has the same thing. But it is much more straightforward. It’s a very survivable life.

**Craig:** I don’t think it requires less skill. It simply is easier from a kind of how much stuff you have to do perspective. But the specific talent required to know where the camera ought to be – and also, editing those shows is very tricky. Editing comedy is incredibly specific.

**John:** Yeah, it is. Let’s get into some follow-up. This is mostly follow-up on things I think you were maybe not here for, but you could still weigh in. Drew, help us out with some follow-up here. Let’s start with the table reads bit.

**Drew Marquardt:** A few episodes ago, Jacob wrote in asking a question on whether you should send a script for a table read ahead of time or have everyone read it cold.

**John:** Craig, what’s your instinct on that? Let’s say you’re doing a table read with some friends. Do you think you should send the script ahead to those folks or have them come in cold to read it? What’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I’m not a huge table read fan. I think I’ve said that as much. But if I were to do one, I would do it cold.

**John:** That was Celine Song’s recommendation as well. Jacob wrote in with some follow-up here.

**Drew:** Jacob wrote, “Our table read was already scheduled for five days after the episode’s release date, so we ended up going with the dual method. Half of the attendees had the script ahead of time, and the other half read cold. And guess what? Celine was right. Our actor friends who had the script ahead of time put way too much energy in coming up with ways to play their characters, and bizarrely, even some had accents. We definitely preferred the read from those who did not have the script ahead of time, but it was still helpful to receive feedback from people who were able to discover the under-the-radar jokes that might’ve required a reread to enjoy.”

**John:** We talked about this with Celine Song. Mike Birbiglia does this thing where in his development process, he’ll have an interim draft. He’ll have a bunch of his friends, and they’ll have pizza and read through his script. That’s an important part of his process. But he really makes sure that they’re not auditioning for roles in that, that they’re there to read the script aloud. That feels like the right instinct here.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s especially the right instinct when you’re dealing with maybe actors who aren’t as experienced or at a particularly high level. So I don’t know where Jacob is in his life and I don’t know if his actor friends are well experienced or highly professional or quasi professional or aspiring. The more aspiring they are, the more important it is to not give them the script ahead of time, because they’re just going to do the thing. They’re just going to do it. They’re going to do the thing where they care way too much. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is, I assume in this case, for the writer to hear the words out loud, note the things that do seem to be working, note where it gets slow, note where it gets too fast, etc.

**John:** We’ve got differing opinion here from a guy who’s done it the opposite way. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Tom Harp says, “I’ve done reads both ways, with writers and with actors. But I wanted to offer my experience as a counter to what John and Celine said. In my own process, my trusted writer friends read early drafts and gave notes. But before I give it to my agents, I always do a read-through with actors.

“During the read, I’m listening to the pace and flow of the dialogue, but maybe the most important part is the Q and A I do afterwards. Actors have a different set of antenna than writers do, and their instincts have saved me several times. I’ve been told, ‘This feels false,’ or, ‘I don’t think my character would do or say this,’ when none of my writer friends noticed it, nor did I, because writers get why the story needs it. But down the line, an actor is going to call emotional bullshit on set, and then you’ve got your production’s boot on your neck as you try and solve it.”

**John:** Not quite on the same focus here. He’s saying that actors do bring something different to a read, because they’re bringing experience of how to sell a line, and they don’t know how to actually do a line.

**Craig:** I’m not going to disagree with Tom, because he’s obviously getting some use out of that. The only flag I would wave here is that casting is a thing. One of the reasons casting is important is because you’re trying to match an actor whose instincts match the instincts of the character you have created. When you have somebody show up because they’re available or they are your friend, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the right casting for that part.

And they may indeed think, “This feels false,” or, “I don’t think my character would say this.” A, it’s not their character yet. And B, they might not be right for the part, for that very reason. That’s not to say that there aren’t going to be things that almost every actor in that spot would go, “Oh, I don’t quite understand why I would say or do this here.” So that matters. That logic is important.

But if you don’t pick up on it until the actor comes up to you after, so you listen to the whole thing, sounds good to you, and then they call, come over, and say, “I don’t think that this… ” Maybe it’s just that the actor is not the right actor for that part. That’s the only thing I would flag there. But if it works for Tom, it works for Tom.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s get to the meat of this episode, which is counterfactuals. Some setup here. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading this book called What If?, which is a series of essays edited by Robert Cowley, about military history. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this book. The important part is that it’s really talking through counterfactuals versus alternative history.

I want to spend a moment to describe the difference between counterfactuals and alternative history. A counterfactual is basically the outcome of this battle or event could’ve turned out different in a way that’s very possible. There’s a distinct moment that could’ve gone either way, a kind of a coin toss. And if it’d have gone the opposite direction, outcomes would’ve been very different.

Alternative history I’ll define as something happened in a very different way or in a different timeline, like what if Africa had industrialized first, or we discovered nuclear power in the 1800s? You’d still get to a place where the outcomes are very different, but it’s not hinging on one moment, one thing where it could’ve gone either way.

So we put out this call to our listeners, saying hey, what counterfactuals do you want us to talk through? Some of them were incredibly useful, but a lot of them were actually just alternative histories, where, like, oh, what if this had happened, or what if this had happened, but it wasn’t hinging on a specific event. It was just like, there’s a different version that came out of here.

Some of the alt histories that people proposed, like what if Zoetrope Studios had succeeded, sure, but it’s not based on one movie succeeding. What if Jacksonville, Florida had become the filmmaking capital of the world? It could’ve happened, because it was an alternative way things could’ve gone, but it wasn’t based on one moment that could’ve happened. Or the wars in Europe, like what if the wars in Europe hadn’t happened or had happened differently, and European film industry became the dominant one rather than American? Again, it’s not based on one event. I just wanted to make it clear that thank you for sending those through, but those are really alternative histories and not the counterfactuals I was looking for.

**Craig:** You were really looking for those fork in the road moments, where there’s definitely-

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** … two ways you can go. Things went left instead of right, but what if they had gone right instead of left?

**John:** Exactly. The first I want to talk through is Edison. Back in 1915, he’d already invented many incredible devices that we use today, electricity. How he was getting electricity and light bulbs and things out into the world were incredibly important. But he also had patents on the original motion picture camera and projection technology. Because he had this patent and was trying to enforce it very vigorously, a lot of people who were trying to avoid his sort of patent thugs were heading out to the West Coast. It’s one of the reasons why the Hollywood industry developed out in California was just to get away from this guy and his very ambitious enforcement of his trademark over things.

He lost a 1915 court case, which was crucial in his ability to constrain how people could use his devices and whether these things he was creating, these projectors, could only show his own creations. This feels like an important moment in terms of the evolution of the early film industry, so 1915.

**Craig:** 1915. You have this court case that basically allows an industry to exist. Prior to that court case, everybody had to go through Edison and his company, the Motion Picture Patents Company. I did not know this until – I’m looking at the article that you linked to in the Saturday Evening Post.

When you say “patent thugs,” you mean it. Edison famously occupied a space in New Jersey. There is an Edison Township, New Jersey. I believe that is named for him. But in West Orange, New Jersey, that’s where his base was. He would hire mobsters – and there sure were a lot of them up there on the East Coast – to literally beat up people, filmmakers that were using cameras and film. Edison’s argument basically was, I control the entire chain of creation of motion pictures, from film stock to projection. And anybody that tried to get around him and do whatever they wanted without getting his approval could even theoretically get physically assaulted.

The court case said no. Basically, the court said you can sue somebody for infringing, but you can’t use your patent as, quote, “a weapon to disable a rival contestant or to drive him from the field.”

This’ll tie into our capitalism versus anti-capitalism discussion later on. We used to be quite invested in busting trusts, monopolies in this country, particularly around then. Teddy Roosevelt was quite the pioneer in that effort to create a healthy form of capitalism. We seem to have lost our way. There are a number of companies, I look around now, who I think Teddy Roosevelt would be thrilled to break apart. But yes, if that goes the other way, then John, you and I are probably working in New Jersey.

**John:** Yeah, I think we’re working for the Edison company or some offshoot of the Edison company. It’s hard to find a perfect analogy for what this system would’ve been like, because it’s not quite like the app store, where everything has to be done through the app store. It’s not quite that. But it is like there’s just basically one funnel, and everything has to either license or be done by this one company. All motion pictures have to go through this one channel, which would be vastly different than what we’re expecting.

Do I think this would’ve lasted forever? No. I think there would’ve been other ways around this, other alternative technologies that didn’t infringe on the patent. There would’ve been ways to do it. But clearly, our early film industry would’ve been very different. What we do goes back to 100 years ago when this was all being figured out.

**Craig:** It’s almost certain that in order to get around this, a healthy motion picture industry would’ve sprouted outside of the bounds of the United States.

**John:** That’s a good point.

**Craig:** Where would that have taken place?

**John:** France?

**Craig:** Europe, certainly. But in terms of what we do, the Hollywood style, the very American style of creating things and making a huge business out of it, as opposed to thinking about it specifically in terms of art and cinema, which is a very European and certainly French way of approaching things.

I think about where I’m sitting right now in Vancouver. Canada would’ve been a wonderful place. The immigrants who founded Hollywood way, way back when, Warner Bros and so on, may have just headed up to Montreal or Toronto.

**John:** Mexico would’ve been another great choice. There’s other venues.

**Craig:** Lots of sunshine.

**John:** Again, we are not legal experts in here. This is really our first glimpse of the history here. But it looks like it’s the projection technology is the issue. Basically, if any projector sold in the U.S. could only project things that Edison had approved, that still would’ve been a challenge for American audiences. It’s not just where you film the things. It’s also how you’re showing the things. It would’ve gotten sorted out. There would be some way to do it, but it would’ve really limited the spread of Hollywood movies.

**Craig:** When you have something that people want, it will find a way to exist. It’s a little bit like Prohibition, which also fell apart a few years after this happened.

**John:** Rather than the manufacture of distribution of alcohol, manufacture and distribution of film.

**Craig:** People want it.

**John:** People want it.

**Craig:** If you really want to go down that other fork in the road, the movie business is run by cartels, and it is an entirely criminal enterprise.

**John:** That would’ve been great. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, because you can envision that. In some ways, the Man in the High Castle and the hidden films, the stolen films of the alternative history, how this all ties back together, is an example of that. There’s a currency for these films that show what happens in the other timeline.

**Craig:** Yeah, I would see that.

**John:** Our next one is actually similar. This is the Paramount consent decree, which we’ve talked about on the podcast several times. Again, this is a question of manufacture and distribution of film materials.

Prior to going into this, the very thumbnail version of this, the studios were allowed to also own movie theaters, and they could control the entire channel of, we’re making the movies, we’re showing them in our theaters, we’re constraining all of our product. The Paramount consent decree held that the studios cannot own exhibitors, and therefore films from other companies can be shown in theaters.

**Craig:** Had that not fallen apart, I think you would’ve seen a creative paralysis in the business. What happened immediately following the collapse of that was the breakdown of this incredibly formalized manner of presenting art to people.

Even though there are incredible movies that were made in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, there were also very clearly rigid constrictions. Because it seems like a long time ago, it’s hard for us to see how fast things changed and how dramatically they changed, because it was before our time. But let’s say you were born in the ’30s. You’re used to watching movies of a certain sort. By the time you get into the ’60s, you now have nudity and graphic sexuality being shown on screen. You couldn’t even show people kissing with tongue, and now there’s sex. It’s kind of incredible how fast it changed, because if the studios don’t control the screens, other people can make movies to put on the screens. That’s the big difference. The other people didn’t have to follow along this rigid formality.

**John:** It’s important to understand this both from a producer and a supplier point of view, because this allowed theaters that were not affiliated with studios to compete for titles they wanted. So it allowed for more independent theaters, but also allowed for filmmaking that took place outside of the studio system. Those are the ones that you first see nudity and moving past the Hays Code and really pushing what cinema could be.

Obviously, this had a huge business transformation on Hollywood, but also had a huge creative impact. If the Paramount consent decree hadn’t happened, we would be in a different place. The irony, of course, is that the Paramount consent decree was overturned in the past 5 years, 10 years. How long have we been doing this podcast? In theory, now studios can own movie theaters. We haven’t seen a huge change in that. They haven’t come in and bought out the AMCs in the world.

**Craig:** Probably because it’s not a great business to be in.

**John:** It’s not an amazing business.

**Craig:** It’s funny, the Paramount decree fell apart right around the time it was no longer necessary, because studios found a new bunch of screens they could control via streaming. However, because of that window from the 1950s through let’s say up to 10 years ago, where the screens were so important, the proliferation of different kinds of content occurred. That toothpaste cannot go back in the tube. We’ve all grown up with and have become used to a certain kind of entertainment.

Ironically, when you look at the movies Paramount itself was making in the ’70s, starting with The Godfather, and onward and the kind of filmmakers they were supporting, they themselves benefited more almost than anyone from this, because they were allowed to make new kinds of things.

The companies do now control their own screens via streaming, but people want what they want. It’s one thing to say, “I want some things that I haven’t seen, but I would imagine I’d like them,” and it’s another to say, “I have seen the things I like. You can’t take them away.”

**John:** Before we move on, I think it’s worth looking at; both the Edison case and the Paramount consent decree, at the time these things were being decided, the justices and everyone else involved couldn’t have anticipated what the long-term effects are. They could only really look at what is this date right now, because they really couldn’t know what was going to come 10 years, 20 years down the road. I guarantee you that there was not an awareness of like, this will change the type of movies that get made if this gets overturned. They were just looking at it in terms of, this is a law, this is restrain of trade, this is anti-competitive, and therefore-

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** … we’re going to knock these things down.

**Craig:** If they had taken the other path, I think we would still to this day have a much more restrained kind of content. People look at the ’70s, the freewheeling ’70s, and the rise of the auteurist and all the rest of it as some sort of product of the cultural revolution in this country. And I would argue that no, that is not the case, that in fact, those things happened because of this court case.

I would point directly at network television as proof, because network television is the control of screens. And when you look at what was allowed on network television and is to this day allowed on network television, it is so much more constrained than what is allowed in movies. It’s not even close. Language, nudity, content. There’s just limits. People lost their minds when, in the ’90s, NYPD Blue showed a butt. A butt. They’re still not allowed to drop F-bombs and so on and so forth. I would just say that’s what movies would be like. Movies would be like network television. You’d be constrained.

**John:** And of course, European cinema, Asian cinema could’ve made different choices. But the problem is, if there’s no way to exhibit those films here, it’s moot.

**Craig:** That’s right. Absolutely. That was always the case. In the ’40s or the ’30s, people referred to – my grandfather referred to French films. Those were sort of early Blue Movies with nudity. Sure. But mostly, it would have operated the way network television still operates, under those constraints, which some people argue are positive on some levels. Creative restraint does force certain kinds of creative creativity. But you would not have the things that we have in movies if this had not gone that way.

**John:** Yeah. Simpler what ifs. What if George Lucas had died in his car accident?

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is June 12th, 1962.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** “As Lucas made a left turn, a Chevy Impala came flying from the opposite direction and broadsided him. The racing belt snapped, and Lucas was flung onto the pavement just before the car slammed into a giant walnut tree. Unconscious, Lucas turned blue and began vomiting blood as he was rushed off to the hospital.”

This is George Lucas, who at this time is a promising young film student. I guess he’s made some stuff at this point, but he had not made Star Wars. He had not made Raiders of the Lost Ark. How different would it be if we did not have George Lucas as a filmmaker? What are the knock-on effects of this?

**Craig:** For starters, I just want to say as an unlicensed doctor, if you turn blue and start vomiting, it’s not good. That’s really bad. There’s two ways of looking at this. One way is – let’s go the obvious way – George Lucas doesn’t create Star Wars. He doesn’t bring about the era of the blockbuster. Movies stay a bit smaller. Special effects and visual effects do not advance as far as they did and as fast as they did. The hyper-merchandization of films and the creation of so-called franchises does not occur.

However, a couple of counter-arguments to that. One is that somebody else probably would have done something of the size that would’ve created that anyway. George Lucas was really important, as we’ve discussed, in the creation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I do feel like there’s going to be a – Steven Spielberg was making his own blockbusters, Jaws.

**John:** He’s making Jaws. He’s still making blockbusters.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think there’s going to be blockbusters. But just as importantly, it seems like George Lucas’s brush with fate here was actually quite informative to him as a filmmaker. He sits there in the hospital and starts thinking about what saved his life in that car, and eventually, I think that sort of turns into American Graffiti. There’s this world where it’s like, if he doesn’t get into the – he needs to get into the car accident, I think.

What happens? If he dies in his car accident, we don’t get these movies. If he doesn’t die in the car accident, we do get these movies. We definitely wouldn’t have Star Wars. There would be no Star Wars. That’s for sure.

**John:** A world without Star Wars is different. Beyond the business things you’ve laid out, how it popularized a kind of space opera, children’s stories but for all ages, it did a very specific thing. We already had Star Trek. Star Trek would still exist without Star Wars, but I feel like we kind of need both of those things for in order for us to have-

**Craig:** Sort of. Star Trek is a network television show that gets canceled after, I think it was three seasons. Then Star Wars happens, and shortly after that, Star Trek the movie happens. Star Trek the movie does not happen if Star Wars doesn’t happen. There’s just no chance.

**John:** Very good point. Very good point.

**Craig:** Similarly, all the movies that were inspired by Star Wars sort of happen. The movie that’s coming to mind actually is Dune, because Dune was really the only thing that could’ve been Star Wars, because it preexisted Star Wars as a novel. Maybe the Dune that gets made doesn’t get made. I don’t think the Lynch Dune gets made without Star Wars.

**John:** And the Jodorowsky Dune doesn’t get made either.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s not going to get made either. But at some point, somebody, let’s say it’s Spielberg, in the absence of a huge-

**John:** Or Coppola or somebody.

**Craig:** Or Coppola or somebody. Somebody figures out how to make Dune and gives us the Denis Villeneuve standard type Dune earlier, and that leads – because there’s obviously great interest in those large-scale science fiction fantasies.

**John:** Because it’s crucial to understand there was a huge science fiction community before Star Wars. It popularized it in a way that was important. I think you don’t have the volume of science fiction fandom until you have Star Wars.

**Craig:** Star Wars, it was like giving a very loud and passionate fan base the world’s biggest megaphone, because everybody sort of flooded into the tent. It’s a really interesting thing, a world without Star Wars.

A fun thing I do like to think about when we’re talking about these counterfactuals is that we are currently living in counterfactuals, meaning in our world, Melissa Suzanne – the worst fake name ever – Melissa Suzanne does die in a car accident, doesn’t make blah da bloo, which is the biggest fricking thing of all time in that, and we’re living in the counterfactual where it didn’t happen. We don’t know what we don’t have.

**John:** Exactly. Yeah, we don’t. Let’s talk about another movie that it would be different if it hadn’t existed, which is Titanic. You and I were both in Hollywood as Titanic was happening. Some backstory for folks who don’t know. Filming was supposed to last six months. It stretched to eight months. The budget doubled from a reported $110 million, making it even costlier than Water World’s $200 million price tag. Another counterfactual would be like, what if Water World were a hit? But it was not a hit.

Titanic was incredibly expensive. Craig and I will both testify to the fact that there was real discussion about, “Oh my god, this movie could be a disaster. It could completely tank.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And sink both Fox and Paramount, who were both putting up the money for it. That didn’t happen. It became a giant hit and changed exhibition. It just kept running and running forever, despite its long running time. What happens, Craig, if Titanic had tanked, sunk?

**Craig:** The thing is, we do live in the world where these enormous movies tanked and sunk. That one might’ve killed Paramount. Paramount I believe was the initial production company. And it got so bad that they had to go to their competitor, Fox, and say, would you basically put in all the money we put in, on top of the money we put in, and we’ll give you all of the international, I think is how it worked out. That’s unheard of. I don’t even think it’s happened since on that scale. I think in part it hasn’t happened since on that scale because Titanic did become a huge hit. And the only thing that scares these companies more than a massive bomb is missing out on all of the money of a massive hit.

**John:** Of a hit, yeah.

**Craig:** But I think we would still unfortunately be in a world where some massive films just tank because people take these big swings. The weird thing about Titanic succeeding is that it probably has created more flops in its wake, because everyone goes, “What if it’s Titanic?” Then someone’s like, “We’ve done research, and it’s projected to only make… ” I think Titanic its opening weekend made – $28.6 million is what it made, which is really good for 1997.

**John:** Really good.

**Craig:** Very good opening weekend.

**John:** For a four-hour movie, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, but if it followed what normally happens, which is then the following weekend would be, let’s say-

**John:** Drops 50 percent, 40 percent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s say the following weekend’s like 15 million, and then it goes to 7 and 3 and 2.

**John:** Disaster.

**Craig:** Oh my god. But in fact, it made more. It went up. I just remember how it just kept making somewhere in the 20s every single weekend forever. There’s never been anything quite like it, box office wise.

**John:** My husband, Mike, was running the AMC Theatres in Burbank at that point. He had 30 screens. And Titanic nearly killed him, because they’d add screenings and those would sell out. So they’d add 9:00 in the morning screenings and not even advertise them, and they would sell out. It was crazy. Yes, it’s really good money for the exhibitors, because they’re getting a cut of that, but it was just so hard on everybody, just staffing those endless screenings.

**Craig:** The creation of that movie was incredibly difficult to do. It is certainly no fun to be making something that massive while the people that are paying for it are freaking out and basically telling you, “We’re screwed.” Making things is hard enough. When you are confidence shaken, it’s really hard, because you already want to curl up and die just from the exhaustion of doing it. And Titanic was an incredibly exhausting thing to make. To think, while you’re making it, that also everyone’s miserable and it’s going to fail, oh my god, how do you even wake up in the morning?

**John:** But you do.

**Craig:** They did, and so people just keep pointing back at this and saying, “Look.” The one thing I think that would be different is maybe there would be fewer flops.

**John:** There’d be fewer big swings. I think there would’ve been someone going like, “No, we absolutely cannot do this thing.” One thing that is different about our current moment is we have some places that have so much money, and they don’t actually need the box office, but they can just spend a ton. Apple, on Killers of the Flower Moon. In any normal situation, that would be a disaster. But it’s not a disaster for them, because they kind of don’t really care about the money. And so they can make a very long, very expensive movie that doesn’t perform at the box office, because that’s not really what they care about.

**Craig:** Yeah, and similarly, Netflix doesn’t – I don’t know what their metrics – I don’t know how any of it works. I work for a company that is oddly old-fashioned in the sense that even though there’s a big streaming service for Max, a lot of people still watch HBO through cable or satellite, and those are subscriber fees that get paid in, and there’s ratings for that stuff. But yeah, Netflix makes these enormous things and go, it kind of doesn’t matter. I don’t understand any of it.

But certainly in the case of Amazon and Apple, those companies are so enormous. Their production wings are such a small piece of what they do, that they can easily absorb any of these things. No problem. The world of Titanic, it was back – I don’t know, who owned Paramount back then? Was it Gulf Western?

**John:** It could’ve still been Gulf Western.

**Craig:** That was a big oil company. If you read about the history of The Godfather, for instance, they were all freaking out when they were making The Godfather, because they were going to lose – they couldn’t stand the notion of losing money.

**John:** There was a history of disastrous films costing studios so much they had to change, like Cleopatra and Fox. We have Century City in part because Fox had to sell off some of that lot to actually earn money, and that became Century City.

**Craig:** Exactly. There’s Heaven’s Gate, which basically destroyed a studio. There’s been movies that were so big and so massive and so horrifying in terms of their costs that just entire companies fell apart.

**John:** A movie that did not cost the company but was a big swing and a big miss was John Carter. John Carter of Mars was a film that Disney made. We’ll link to an article by Richard Newby for The Hollywood Reporter, called John Carter Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped. Based on the numbers, John Carter earned $284 million on a $306 million budget. That sounds like, oh, it was close, but of course, there’s hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing on top of that.

Newby argues that Disney realized, like, “Okay, we were trying to create Star Wars. Maybe we should just buy Star Wars.” They might not have reached for Lucasfilm at that moment if John Carter had worked. Possibly. They also were coming off other challenges, like The Lone Ranger, which was another expensive flop. And Newby argues that because of back-to-back misses, Disney got very conservative and were just banking on sure bets.

**Craig:** I’ll push back a little bit on this one.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** It seems like Mr. Newby’s hanging a little too much around the neck of John Carter. Yes, it was a flop, but it wasn’t a studio-destroying flop. $284 million against $306 is not good, obviously, because that doesn’t include the, let’s say, $100 million of marketing. And then, of course, they don’t actually get all the money from the ticket sales, but there was video and all the rest. I’m not sure that that’s why they said, “We need Star Wars.” I think anybody who has the chance to get Star Wars and has the capital to do it and also the brand that would convince Lucas to allow it-

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** … which in this case was Disney and no one else, unless there wasn’t an old existing Paramount that wasn’t there anymore, of the way that he was familiar, yeah, I think anybody would buy Star Wars. I don’t think that you can put too much around the neck of John Carter. The fact is he cites Lone Ranger as an example of how it didn’t help matters. But that’s proof that John Carter wasn’t enough of a cage rattler, because they did make Lone Ranger, so I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s rephrase this though. Let’s refrain it. Rather than saying what if John Carter hadn’t bombed, what if John Carter was a huge, huge, huge hit? What if it were kind of Star Wars level? That I think would’ve been a bit of a game changer, because then it would be validating, like, yes, let’s spend a lot of money, take really big swings on pieces of IP that are kind of known but not hugely known. I would say John Carter of Mars is more in the level of a Narnia book, in the sense of people kind of know what it is, but they’re not necessarily directly familiar with it. That could’ve changed some things. If it were a giant hit, would they still have bought Lucasfilm? Probably, because they would just have so much money.

**Craig:** I think it’s still probably presuming too much logic on the part of the folks that make these things, because there’s always been this strange gravitation towards, quote unquote, IP that I think most people would look at and go, “Okay. If you think that that matters.” When they made – what was the one with Billy Zane? Was it The Phantom?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The Phantom, that was something-

**John:** In Europe, yeah.

**Craig:** My dad was into that, barely, as a child. It was not relevant anymore. But it seemed like, oh, that thing. Now, in the age of algorithm-driven companies, I think the computers, as much as we hate them, probably would’ve said, “Please do not make The Phantom.” But you still see what I would call attempts to recreate other people’s large successes. And they sort of work, or sometimes they don’t work.

Amazon and Netflix, without naming names, have certainly tried to reproduce their – “We want our Game of Thrones. Where’s our Game of Thrones?” Then they go looking for IP that people are sort of interested in or maybe not that interested in. Some of it works great; some of it doesn’t. It’s hard to predict sometimes. There are book series that people love but just don’t want to watch adapted. There are other things that people don’t really care that much about, but when they get adapted, catch on. It’s not as logical as all that.

I think if John Carter had been a hit, I don’t even think it would’ve stopped Disney from buying Star Wars. The only thing that would change: a lot more John Carter movies and then a whole lot more movies that are sort of John Carter-ish that don’t work.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** When I was a kid, my dad said, “You’re going to love these books. When I was a kid, I read them. Doc Savage.” You know the Doc Savage books?

**John:** I recognize the title. I don’t know anything about them.

**Craig:** I think they were, I want to say 1930s era.

**John:** They were pulp fiction.

**Craig:** Pulp fiction, adventure stories, largely for boys, about a group of courageous people that go on to the far-flung reaches. Doc Savage was definitely an inspiration for Indiana Jones and even James Bond to some extent. Every now and then, somebody would bring it up in Hollywood as I was coming up. Now I’m like, that’s so old. Maybe there’d be a bunch of Doc Savage – or a Doc Savage movie would’ve been at a large scale and failed. But I don’t know if the world would’ve changed that much if John Carter had succeeded.

**John:** But Craig, what if Iron Man had bombed?

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** I think we’ve talked on this podcast before – I carried a football on Iron Man for just a couple weeks. I love everybody involved. I got to go to the premier. I remember going to the premier and the after-party at the Roosevelt Hotel across the street and saying, “Wow, that was really effing good. That’s going to be a giant hit.” But I will tell you that there was no guarantee that movie was going to be a giant hit.

You look at the folks involved, like Favreau, so smart, so great, had done some movies, but there was no guarantee that he could direct this movie. There was no guarantee that Robert Downey Jr was a good choice or even a rational choice for this, because he was not in the best place in his career. There were a lot of things that could’ve really derailed this movie, and yet it was a giant hit and started a franchise, which has made billions of dollars for the companies involved.

**Craig:** Billions and billions and billions and changed the shape of multinational mega-corporations.

**John:** It’s important to acknowledge that there were multiple movies before that that had not worked, and we’ve still got the Marvel Universe. But I would argue that if Iron Man had flopped, you doing have the Kevin Feige Marvel Cinematic Universe.

**Craig:** Without question. Without question. You could even go further back and say what if the X-Men movies flopped? Because superhero movies – other than Batman always seemed to work, Superman worked for-

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** … two movies. But the other movies that they tried to do, the other things they tried, it all just, eh. Spider-Man also is another one where if that had not worked right…

There were preexisting superhero films that had done well, but those were not controlled by Marvel per se. X-Men was controlled by Fox. Spider-Man was controlled by Sony. Batman was controlled by Warner Bros. Here’s Marvel as a company suddenly finding a partner to make Iron Man with and do it well, and that directly leads into the entire Avengers thing. It also created all the feeder ones, Thor. Obviously, you never get to Guardians of the Galaxy or any of that stuff.

**John:** No, none of that stuff.

**Craig:** Ever, ever, ever.

**John:** I will acknowledge that if you had Iron Man but didn’t have a good follow-up with that first Captain America movie, it would’ve been much more difficult. But you have to have Iron Man first. But the whole choice to center this whole thread on Iron Man was a weird one too, because he wasn’t the biggest available hero there.

**Craig:** No. I loved Iron Man comics when I was a kid, because the suit’s awesome. But the actual Iron Man stories got kind of morose. He was an alcoholic. The comics went into a whole story about alcoholism.

Also, you would not have the superhero saturation and the way that superhero films… There’s going to be some amazing books written 10 years from now about it. The transformation of our culture by that movie and everything that came beyond it is remarkable. What it did to our business, for better or worse – and in a lot of cases worse – is remarkable. What it did to the visual effects industry but also technology is remarkable.

And then here’s this question: does any of this work without Iron Man? Does any of this work without Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr, or does it just begin to fall apart? Obviously, Marvel has created this incredible system with phases.

**John:** We’re in a struggling phase right now. I think it’s not hard to see. We don’t know what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** I think on our next episode, we’ll talk a little about when you hire stars, how careful you have to be, because they are going to be the face of your entity. In the case of Jonathan Majors, that did not work out well. In the case of Robert Downey Jr, it worked out great. But if you were to look at those two people at the start, I would’ve bet on Jonathan Majors.

**Craig:** I don’t know what was known, but here’s what was definitely known about Robert Downey Jr prior to Iron Man. He had gone through a very long period of substance abuse problems. He had gone through a very long period where he was highly unreliable. He was considered to be mercurial and brilliant but uncontrollable. He had had issues with the law. There was an infamous story where he just woke up in somebody’s bed in a house, because he broke in, because he was completely out of his mind on whatever he was – I don’t know what substances he was abusing. There was this sense that the last person in the world you put an enormous thing on top of would be Robert Downey Jr, and they just went for it.

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** This is the weird thing about trying to game or predict. You want the real hero here. If I can point to one person that is the reason why our culture is full of superhero movies and why Marvel is worth as much as it is and has had as much success, Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr’s wife and producing partner, who is the stabilizing force in his life, who clearly got him back on track and got him sober and focused. If Hollywood could give a Nobel Prize, it should go to Susan Downey. She’s remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, Marvel should write her a check for a billion dollars.

**John:** Let’s do a very short version on this. We’ve talked about fin-syn before. Fin-syn limited the degree to which networks could own the production entities. It’s like Paramount consent decrees in the sense of it’s about how much vertical integration you could have over the course of production. It was abolished in 1993 by a decision. It counts as a counterfactual, because the decision could’ve gone the other way. In a short version, if in 1993 fin-syn hadn’t been eradicated, how would Hollywood look different today?

**Craig:** Oh, boy. You can argue in a lot of different directions here. The deal with fin-syn is it created a system where the only people who could afford to produce television good enough to be on networks were companies that could afford to operate under a system called deficit financing. The only way you could make money making a television show, because the networks couldn’t make them – therefore the networks made money off of licensing, so the networks pay you money to license the show you produced. They run it on the air, and then they sell ads. The amount of ads that they sell hopefully is way more than the licensing fee they’re paying you. But how do you make money? You don’t, because the licensing fee doesn’t even come close to paying you back.

**John:** To covering your costs.

**Craig:** Doesn’t even come close. The only you make money-

**John:** You’re relying on syndication.

**Craig:** Exactly. Basically, you need a hit. If the show makes it to, 100 episodes was considered the classic number to hit, then it could be syndicated, meaning it could then go into reruns. At that point, it just starts to spin off insane amounts of money through licensing fees forever. The game was, right, we’re going to lose a whole lot of money to make a whole lot of money. The only people that can afford to do that are very large companies; in this case, movie studios, basically. Those were the ones doing it.

**John:** If fin-syn hadn’t gotten shut down, you can imagine somehow more capital would’ve flown in to create more things that were like the Carsey-Werners and that stuff. The experienced producers would somehow be able to raise enough money to be able to make the shows they’re going to be able to make. But it would still be dicier. Those people would be very wealthy in hits, but these companies would also go bankrupt more often. Generally, you want to strike down vertical integration where you see it, because it is anti-competitive. It can drive down wages for people, because there’s fewer places you can sell your thing.

But it would’ve greatly changed how we’re doing stuff. It’s hard to know what would this look like in today’s streaming world, because there are companies that bring their own money to do stuff today. Those things still exist. It’s just different. You have the Legendaries. You have the Fifth Seasons. You have the companies that actually are coming in with their own money to do stuff. It would look a lot different. I can’t even suss out what the real changes would’ve been.

**Craig:** I think that you would probably have had much larger productions. We can look at companies that are not impacted by fin-syn. Fin-syn fell apart. But when you look at Netflix, for example, Netflix produces and distributes their own material. They are not beholden to these rules. The reason that fin-syn was a thing is because it applied to broadcast television. Broadcast television used the public airwaves to send their signals out, so the government therefore had the ability to get in the way and create regulations. There’s no regulations on an end-to-end agreement like Netflix, where they’re not using public airwaves whatsoever.

**John:** The FTC or the Justice Department could still come in there, but without the broadcast aspect of it, it’s much harder to enforce anything like that. It’d be much harder for them to win the judgment they would have to win.

**Craig:** Yes. The government has a clear, established interest in the rules regarding the use of public airwaves, going all the way back to the age of radio and so forth. But with internet carriers, it’s different. Netflix and companies, Amazon, etc., they’ve never operated under anything like this. They’ve always been able to make their own stuff and exhibit their own stuff. And what you see are massive productions, because there is no arrangement where you deficit finance in the hopes for syndication, and meanwhile the exhibitor is making money off of the sale of ads. In fact, Netflix and Amazon don’t have ads, although now they’re starting to. But even then, they’re starting to just put more money in their pockets.

I don’t know how the finances of these companies work, but you could argue that for Amazon, for instance, it’s possible that their production wing is really a loss leader, and it is a deficit financing, just to drive customers to their other aspect, which is buying toilet paper and pencils. I don’t know. But it does seem like if there had not been fin-syn and the networks could’ve reaped the benefits of their own syndication, that probably you would’ve seen some larger productions happening.

**John:** Last bit of counterfactual. Remember when Netflix was red envelopes you got in the mail?

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually do.

**John:** What if Netflix had stuck with their DVD model, that they were a company that sends you DVDs?

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

**John:** They never started a whole streaming business. How would the world be different if Netflix hadn’t started the streaming revolution?

**Craig:** I’m going to contradict myself a little bit here. Most of what I’ve been saying is when the world wants something, it finds a way to get it. In this case, I suspect that if Netflix hadn’t done what they did, nobody would’ve done it. The reason why nobody would’ve done it is because I’m not sure it, meaning the streaming model, actually makes sense. We watched this happen. Netflix did this. They churned through an enormous amount of money to build the business out of nothing, a little bit the way Amazon did with their larger business.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Then everybody else said, oh my god, we have to do it too. Then they all looked at each other and went, “How do you make money doing this exactly?” That makes me suspect nobody would’ve done it, because it doesn’t make sense. A lot of what we all went through with our convulsions in the labor movement in Hollywood was trying to make Hollywood confront the fact that they had blown up a system that worked fairly well for them and fairly well for us. They had blown it up chasing something that wasn’t like them and something that they could never be like. I think the world would be enormously different if Netflix had just stuck to the red envelopes.

**John:** Counterfactual to your counterfactual. I would say that internet video is going to want to happen. The fact that YouTube exists, there was a market for – people wanted to watch things through video. Even before we had Netflix, we did have webisodes of your favorite shows. The idea that we were going to be getting our TV or TV-like things over the internet I think is kind of inevitable.

The business model behind that could’ve gone many, many different ways. But I do think you would’ve ultimately seen things that looked like Netflix that were using money they got from investors to create shows and put them on the internet. And some of those would’ve grown into things that are maybe not the size or scale of what Netflix became, but it would’ve been big enough that even the other studios would’ve developed their own wings that were doing that kind of stuff. We would’ve gotten to something that looked like what we’re doing now, but just not with the full scale.

**Craig:** I think you’re right that in terms of a distribution platform, places like YouTube would’ve absolutely worked, and they kind of were. If you think back to what we were arguing about in our penultimate strike, the big concern was that the companies were going to use the internet to run our content and have ads run in it, just like it would on any syndicated channel, but because it was the internet as opposed to Channel 5 in New York, that somehow residuals wouldn’t apply.

I think YouTube did and continues to have a very robust system where they run ads. Yes, I think they would’ve struck deals with the companies to rebroadcast stuff. I think the whole thing of like, “YouTube is going to make its own stuff,” they sure tried. It didn’t work. What was it, YouTube Red? That was sort of a thing. Is it still a thing? I don’t even know if it’s a thing.

**John:** They got rid of YouTube Red.

**Craig:** They got rid of it. They got rid of it. Quibi. Good lord.

**John:** If it weren’t for Netflix, then we would’ve never had Quibi.

**Craig:** We would’ve never had the 4 million easy jokes about Quibi. The idea that these independent internet companies would… Remember Amazon Studios? Remember us discussing that whole baloney nonsense?

**John:** Yeah. They were always looking to do a thing. But again, Amazon still, with all their money, they probably would’ve tried to develop something that – again, it’s not Netflix, but they would’ve developed their own-

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** … video streaming service.

**Craig:** Maybe, or maybe they would have just said, “We are happy to be in the business where we pay you a licensing fee to rebroadcast your stuff on our platform,” just like Walmart pays for the DVDs that they then resell. And then Amazon, just like anything, will collect the ad money, and that’ll be that.

**John:** They probably would’ve looked at YouTube and said, “We want to be in the YouTube business,” and the revolution of that.

**Craig:** Where the internet was before Netflix decided to go bananas was this… You and I got yelled at a lot, as I recall, for decrying the concept of the democratization of entertainment creation. There are certainly a lot of people making money as influencers and all the rest of that, but that’s its own category.

There was this moment, and we were podcasting through it, where these companies were like, “The only reason that everybody doesn’t have great television to make is because of the gatekeepers, and if we just allow everybody to … ” No. The answer to that is no. None of that would’ve happened. None of that ever will happen. That’s not a thing. It doesn’t happen. It’s hard to do what we do. There are not a lot of people who do it.

It’s sort of like saying, “We’re going to democratize Major League Baseball. Everybody can show up and play.” Nope, actually, we still just want Juan Soto, which as you know, Juan is going to take the Yankees to the World Series this year. I know that you’ve been thinking it.

**John:** I basically stay awake at night really thinking about all the scenarios that gets him to the World Series.

**Craig:** Soto and then Judge, that number 3, number 4 lineup punch. We’ve talked about it a lot. It’s a big deal.

**John:** There are so many scenarios that it’s why I can’t sleep.

**Craig:** There’s really only the one scenario.

**John:** But you never know. The counterfactual is that, what if he gets hit by a bus, and therefore-

**Craig:** I’ll tell you, if Juan Soto gets hit by a bus, the Yankees will have another season like they did last year, which is really bad. David Benioff, John Gatins, and I have a little three-person group chat that is just nothing but us complaining about the Yankees. That’s all we do. It is just a constant ruing. This season hopefully will be different.

But in any case, I really think that what Netflix did was so improbable and so risky and so crazy. I’m still waiting for gravity to kick in.

**John:** It has basically worked for Netflix. It has not worked for everybody else. Netflix now actually makes a profit. But it was a wild, wild gamble. And they were able to use cheat money to do it. The circumstances worked out the way they worked out.

**Craig:** The circumstances worked out the way they worked out. I think the proof is in the pudding. Even as Netflix started to be successful, the legacy companies still weren’t like, “Oh god, we gotta … ” No, they were like, “Great. Keep licensing our stuff. Here. Friends. Give us money. You can run Friends.” It really wasn’t until they felt that there was an existential threat to their existence, and I think that was a miscalculation, by the way.

**John:** Here’s a question for you. Let’s say streaming never happens. Netflix doesn’t happen, and streaming never happens. Do the cable companies get even more powerful? Because they were the people not making the shows, but controlling access to people’s TVs.

**Craig:** Cable and satellite become more powerful. It is possible that a company like YouTube, which has successfully replaced a lot of cables and satellite dishes, would have become the other new dominant delivery system, but they would’ve been a delivery system. They wouldn’t have been a creation/delivery system. That’s the difference.

**John:** I agree. Let’s wrap up our big counterfactuals segment here talking through why I think it’s useful. It’s because when you look at the coin tosses, the ways things could’ve gone one way or the other way, you recognize that, as you said before, Craig, we are in a counterfactual. We’re in somebody else’s counterfactual. Things worked out the way they worked out, but they were not inevitable. We have to be mindful that the choices we make now will have repercussions down the road that we can’t always anticipate. I think it’s always nice looking at this ecosystem we find ourselves in was not the only possible version of this.

**Craig:** No. It is an either distressing or comforting notion to think that we are in the alternate reality, and in our version of the sim that we all live in, yeah, we’re missing some awesome things or we dodged massive bullets.

**John:** For sure. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We haven’t done a One Cool Thing together for a while.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Mine is on post-quantum cryptography, which is a mouthful but actually makes a lot of sense. I’ll link to an Apple Security blog post they did about it. The idea of post-quantum cryptography is – obviously, cryptography is so important for securing our communications. It’s making sure that the things we want to say private stay private, and messaging, all that stuff. Right now, we are using cryptography which is so strong that computers could spend 1,000 years trying to break the codes behind stuff, and they wouldn’t be able to open these messages. The problem is, at some point we’re going to get to quantum computers that are so powerful and so fast that this cryptography will fall apart. It will not be useful.

And so a thing that is happening is very well-resourced companies or nations can just say, “Okay, we’re going to suck up all this data. We can’t actually process it now. We can’t actually break the codes. But we know that in a couple years, we will be able to.” This becomes like, then how do you prevent that?

This paper goes through these plans for and these actual new algorithms to figure it out, for living in a post-quantum cryptography world, so basically, how do you encode things now so that as quantum computers come online, you still can’t open those messages.

The good news is there’s math that can get you there, so that it’s still going to be incredibly difficult for these super-super-super-computers to open those messages. There are things you can turn on now or soon in these messaging platforms that will keep stuff locked down whenever these quantum computers come online. Interesting. I like that it’s both dealing with problems now and problems 10, 20 years from now.

**Craig:** That’s smart. Phew. There is a problem I hadn’t thought of. Thanks. Now I’ll be awake at night. My One Cool Thing is a bit sweeter, pun intended, but also a bit sad, and somehow one of the most gripping articles I’ve ever read about marshmallows.

**John:** I love marshmallows.

**Craig:** John, have you ever had a Smashmallow?

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Neither did I. Drew, Smashmallow?

**Drew:** I’ve never had a Smashmallow.

**Craig:** Apparently, these were a bit popular a bit ago. There’s this guy, Jon Sebastiani. This is an article in Business Insider. Jon Sebastiani is a scion of a big wine company in Sonoma. He created the company Krave, with a K, which makes fancy beef jerky and so forth. He got into this new area of creating fancy marshmallows, fancy handmade marshmallows that were delicious and had lots of different flavors, and they were hand-cut. And people really dug them.

Then he decided, “It’s time to upscale this business. Let’s go big.” What ensued was an incredible collision of desire and reality, on an engineering level, because as it turns out, making marshmallows to scale is enormously hard. The marshmallows that we all know, Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Kraft marshmallow type marshmallows, the reason they are the way they are and they just all vaguely suck is because that’s as good as they can do. Even the shape is necessary. Those are cylinders. Smashmallows were handmade. They would make these big slabs and cut them in squares, and people really liked the squares. Making squares at scale, making cubes, really, really hard.

What happens and how this whole thing falls apart is actually fascinating from a chemical, physical, and business level. And of course, it all comes tumbling down. There are lawsuits. And Smashmallow is no more.

**John:** It’s great. As I’m skimming through this article, it’s the Theranos of marshmallows.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? It really is. When you read it, you’re like… People were lying. He’s looking for this company that can build new machines to make the Smashmallows at scale. This company, I think it’s in the Netherlands, says, “We can do it. We can do it. We’re going to send you a sample of what we made to show you.” He was like, “Oh my god, you did it.” The big secret was they didn’t make that sample with a machine at all.

**John:** It was handcut.

**Craig:** They just lied.

**John:** They lied.

**Craig:** They just lied.

**John:** They lied.

**Craig:** Just lied.

**John:** This past week, I had to go in for a blood test, and I remember coming back and telling Mike, “Man, I was there, and it just seems really inefficient. I felt like there’s a way you could have a machine that could just do this for you.” I’m like, “Oh shoot, I’m pitching Theranos, aren’t I? I’m going to stop right now. I am pitching Theranos.”

**Craig:** Just to tie back to our counterfactual, was her machine called the Edison?

**John:** Maybe so. A counterfactual is, what if she’d actually been able to make that machine? In theory, it’s a really good idea. But apparently, it’s like the Smashmallow. Yes, you think you should be able to make that thing, when it turns out you can’t.

**Craig:** I think if she had been able to make that machine, somebody would’ve made that machine already. When she was like, “We’re going to take a drop of blood and do all of your blood tests from a drop of blood,” I remember her mentor at Stanford, this wonderful professor, just said to her, “No. That is literally physically impossible on a molecular level.” But there was maybe slightly more of a chance that the marshmallow thing could’ve worked.

**John:** I’m sure that professor would’ve told Thomas Edison that he couldn’t make a motion picture projector, and look at him, he did.

**Craig:** Definitely a better chance of that than the-

**Drew:** Theranos machine ever working.

**John:** Theranos machines. Craig, a pleasure talking with you again.

**Craig:** Great to be back.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Hooray!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Zach Lo. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We love when good outros come through. Reminder that outros involve some version of (sings). You can hide it in there, but I’m always listening for it. Sometimes we’ll get these outros that are like, that is musically beautiful, but it’s not a Scriptnotes outro. You gotta get that in there. We gotta hear that.

Ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The one this past week was really good. It’s about oases and the moments in a story where characters find a bit of respite and escape from the plot and how important those are in stories. Inneresting.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on capitalism.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Yay.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, it’s so nice to have you back.

**Craig:** Great to be back, John.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, capitalism.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It is the water we are swimming in. It is the system of finance and economics that we’ve grown up in. At the same time, when I see people complain about things in the world or about technology or about AI or other things, I’m like, yeah, but that is actually just capitalism you’re concerned about. That’s just how things are. Craig, I’m curious, when were you aware of capitalism?

**Craig:** Early age. Social studies class. You learn about different forms of economy. Certainly, we learned about the alternatives. In the ’80s, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of capitalism as a problem.

**John:** Yeah, because we had capitalism versus Communists. It was us versus the Russians.

**Craig:** There was the middle ground of socialism. But I think there was also a less angry discussion over it. Deregulation began in earnest under Ronald Reagan in the ’80s. But prior to that, we had and still have things like Social Security, which has the world “social” in it, which people that hate socialism are really angry about if you say that you would take it away. We have Medicare, and we have Medicaid, and we have Workman’s Comp, and we have Disability, and we have taxes. The thing is, we do live in a socialist system. I don’t know how you can’t, other than some sort of Ayn Rand fantasy-ville.

Capitalism was never seen as some sort of pure thing, but rather it was a negotiating thing. Tying back to what we were talking about earlier with Edison, one of the things we learned about quite a bit was how capitalism unchecked became a real problem around the turn of the century in the United States, the turn of the 20th century, and Sinclair Lewis and child labor, the meatpacking industry, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, labor movement, and all that leading into the busting of monopolies, robber barons, etc. There was a time when in our country, capitalism got out of hand, and the government stepped in and put it in check, and it hasn’t done so again effectively since.

Where I’m sitting here, I agree with you. When people are complaining, what they are complaining about is capitalism. But from my point of view, I would say what they’re really, really, really complaining about is the dysregulated capitalism.

**John:** We were alive during the time of Reagan and, “We’re going to take away all these rules about stuff that are holding us back.” And it’s hard to remember that there was a time before then, when there were more controls over what people could do, what companies could do and the size and scale of what they’re able to do.

I remember my dad worked for AT&T, or Bell Labs, and when the phone monopoly got broken up, I was like, “Oh my god, what are they doing? That’s crazy.” But it was the right choice, in retrospect. It was a dumb system we were living in. The innovation that was possible afterwards was important.

Let’s talk for a moment about definitions of what capitalism is, because there’s things that are in capitalism that are also common in other systems too. But important distinctions: the idea of a competitive market, that you want to have multiple companies competing for buyers, and buyers can choose between places they want to buy from; the sense of price finding, that there’s not a set price, but the price will find its right balance based on supply and demand; the idea of private property, property rights recognition, which includes patents and trademarks and copyright; the idea of wage labor, which seems so basic, but obviously in a lot of other economic systems, you don’t get paid wages for things.

You could argue, was America set up under a capitalism system? Kind of. The term wasn’t really used. But we also had slavery, so you can’t say that we were under any true wage system.

**Craig:** We certainly were not.

**John:** No. It’s complicated, but I think we have this fundamental belief and understanding that America has always been this capitalist nation. It’s like, not really.

**Craig:** No, we were more akin to a feudal nation. I think our economy was somewhat feudal. Obviously, there were two economies in the early United States. But one economy was victorious in the end, and that was industry. The growth of industry and the Industrial Revolution created what we consider capitalism today, I do believe. That was also what Marx was reacting to, and Hegel and the rest of them.

What industry did was create a both tremendous energy of creation and freedom and wealth, and also terrible exploitation and destruction. On one hand, industry – which we have in our brains converted into technology, but if we lived in China, we would understand is also industry, where everything is manufactured still – has led to longer lives, has led to tremendous advances in technology that liberates and connects. The creation of simple things like washing machines was essential to the liberation of women, who were traditionally stuck washing clothes literally all day.

But without regulation, almost every single time, what ends up happening is terrible pollution, the abuse of children, the underpayment of labor, extremist slavery, and then monopolization, which undoes what you call price seeking and freedom and actually begins to destroy creativity, and it kills itself. Capitalism is like bacteria that works well in our body until it runs rampant and then it can kill us.

**John:** A term I hear used a lot is late-stage capitalism. I wasn’t even quite clear what people are trying to refer to with it. It’s basically this moment that we’re in right now that has not just giant corporations, but multinational corporations, where you can’t even point to a center of them. They’re harder to control and regulate because they exist beyond national boundaries.

A thing that we’re both agreeing on here is that capitalism relies on a government system to enforce contracts and do certain things, and yet as individuals, we rely on the government to protect us from the worst abuses that these companies are going to enforce upon us. That is a real challenge when companies exist beyond all conceivable boundaries. It requires multinational government agreement on how to deal with these corporations. That’s not a thing that we really have a good structure for at this moment.

**Craig:** No. The closest we have is the United States government, which is being held hostage by one political party that at this point seems to only have, “We don’t like government,” as a purpose. And then there is the European economic community, which does represent itself fairly well as a large corporation of companies. It is in fact Europe that seems to be doing the only holding companies to accountability action. Now, they are not a particularly efficient group. Government is notorious for being inefficient. It’s why capitalism is also necessary. If government is in charge of creation, production, and payment, in general, you end up with a bureaucratic sludge.

Capitalism, to me, is really just the expression of human nature in economic form. But just like human nature, we need law. What we do see is Europe, representing a very large market, can say to, for instance, Google or Amazon, “No, you can’t do that anymore. We don’t like that anymore. Stop it.” The United States used to do that. It’s been quite some time, and these companies seem to be just flouting all of the rules. But the United States still represents an enormous marketplace. If the United States, for instance, said to Amazon or Netflix, “You can’t do these things anymore,” then it would have to stop.

That said, some of the things that Europe has done, particularly vis a vis technology to try and curb late-stage capitalistic companies, just is ineffectual nuisance. For instance, the constant asking me if I want to accept the cookies. Okay. Sure.

**John:** Yeah, or like, you must use USB-C. Sure, great. There’s the concern that they will tend to favor European companies over American companies. Yeah, we get all that. I think what it comes down to is – I say people’s complaints are really about capitalism. The second part of that answer is, and the solutions to these things are demanding of your government to address these concerns, because you’re not going to be able to address these concerns. You can’t yell at the corporation to do better. You actually have to – it requires action to make any of these changes.

**Craig:** Yes. Corporations, by charter, are designed to maximize profits for their shareholders. That is their sole purpose. What that means is that if they could get away with paying their workers five cents an hour, including hiring children, they would, because that satisfies their charter, to maximize profits. That’s where we need regulation.

The people that are angry about capitalism probably, almost certainly, are reasonably angry, because they’re probably being underpaid. Most people are. Wages have not progressed as they should. And if the United States government were functional and mandated a healthy minimum wage, I think people would be complaining less, because that’s a huge problem. They don’t get paid enough.

Also, companies – particularly, the financial industry has become so complicated and so disconnected from creation that this concept of too big to fail is real. We’re now on the system where capitalism – some companies simply cannot lose. If they lose, society falls apart, because they’re too integrated into our backbone. That’s a huge problem.

**John:** I think a previous One Cool Thing on an earlier episode was a book I was reading on the history of corporations. Corporations have existed before capitalism. They were originally designed to do sailing expeditions to different places, basically how you’d raise enough money to do a thing. Importantly, corporations had to get a charter that was literally from the royals. The imperial state had to give them the charter.

The argument is basically that government should basically have that same kind of charter thing, saying you actually have to serve the public in what your corporation does. There has to be a purpose beyond just making money. That’s an idea that we’ve completely lost. That seems insane, but that was the idea.

**Craig:** That was the idea. Just as certain concepts like copyright have become abused or weaponized, so too has the notion of corporatism and the idea that corporation now begins to shield all human beings from accountability. The creation of corporations is something that, at least in the state of Delaware, appears to be a hand wave. You and I both made corporations for ourselves, loan-out corporations.

**John:** Scriptnotes is an LLC.

**Craig:** There you go. Those corporations required a whole lot of one page of paperwork.

**John:** Yes, indeed.

**Craig:** They exist to take advantage of certain business things and certain tax things, so the tax code, all of it. Think about that, that the tax code – that’s the oxygen that government breathes to live – is in and of itself interwoven into corporate creation and corporate function. The economists argue with each other constantly over how this all works. I suppose if we step back really, really far and boil it down to its simplest, simplest version, it’s that there needs to be a balance, and we are out of balance.

**John:** We’re out of balance. We’re simplifying, yet it’s actually accurate, because we recognize that all the good things about capitalism and corporations, in terms of price finding and all that stuff, there is an efficiency there that you cannot replace. But without the acknowledgement of the individual value of people and societies and the environment, you’re going to end up in a terrible, dark place.

**Craig:** If you only value profit, you will die. You have to also value things that will diminish profit, like the health and welfare of human beings, because in the end, that’s what the economy is for. What our economy has turned into is an economy that exists to hyper-enrich an incredibly small amount of people. It’s just not going to work. We’ve been here before. I think the richest person ever in terms of dollars out of the amount of dollars that existed on the planet was Rockefeller perhaps or maybe Getty.

**John:** Perhaps, yeah.

**Craig:** The original oil barons, the robber barons. That’s why it changed. There was that period in the earlier part of the 20th century where America corrected what had been an out-of-control corporatization in our country. We are so clearly in need of that now.

Part of what we struggle with is that all of the messaging and discussion and the politics and the way politics functions as – these campaigns are corporations – the corporations themselves are sitting there, including the ones you and I work for, guiding the discussion. The people who want to not return balance to the system are the ones that have their finger on the play button.

**John:** At least we’ve solved it. That’s the good news. We talked it through. We figured it out. So problems resolved.

**Craig:** Problem solved. There’s something counterfactual where Rupert Murdoch isn’t born or decides to learn guitar and be in a band, a lovely band in Australia.

**John:** Or he has some sort of Christmas Carol kind of visiting by three ghosts, and things turn out very differently.

**Craig:** Where are the ghosts when you need them?

**John:** That’s the question. Never the ghosts when you want one. Craig, Drew, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [What If?](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/406281) by Robert Cowley
* [Thomas Edison: The Unintentional Founder of Hollywood](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-the-unintentional-founder-of-hollywood/) by Garrett O’Brien for the Saturday Evening Post
* [United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc.) on Wikipedia
* [George Lucas: The Car Wreck That Changed His Life and Led Him to ‘Star Wars’](https://www.biography.com/movies-tv/george-lucas-car-crash-star-wars) by Tim Ott for Biography
* [When ‘Titanic’ Was Expected to Be a Huge Flop](https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/titanic-movie-flop-history-facts) by Jake Rossen for Mental Floss
* [‘John Carter’ Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/john-carter-bombed-1235109193/) by Richard Newby for THR
* [Financial Interest and Syndication Rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Interest_and_Syndication_Rules)
* [Post-Quantum Cryptography](https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/)
* [S’more! S’more! His artisanal marshmallows were the greatest. Then he tried to scale them.](https://www.businessinsider.com/smashmallow-lawsuit-marshmallow-failure-silicon-valley-business-growth-2024-1) by Adam Rogers
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Zach Lo ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/634standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 632 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is about mystery and suspense. It’s also a best of episode. To explain why we’re airing material from the vaults, I need to tell you a little story. So sit back, get comfortable.

Now, longtime listeners will recognize that in no fewer than three episodes of Scriptnotes, we have urged our listeners to get their flu shots. In fact, in the opening moments of Episode 5, back in 2011, Craig and I talked about it. Drew, let’s play a clip from that episode, right from the very start, because this is before we even had bloops as a (sings). Back then, I used to pick different theme music from the shows. Let’s play that now.

[Episode 5 clip]

**John:** Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

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

**John:** Hello, Craig. How are you doing today?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. How about yourself?

**John:** I am doing pretty well. It’s been a day of many small errands and things to take care of. I got my flu shot today, for example.

**Craig:** You know I’m a huge pro-vaccination guy, but I always feel like the flu shot is the one vaccine that’s kind of a waste of time, just because of the whole thing where there are so many different strains, and they’re kind of guessing.

**John:** They are guessing. They have to figure out which flu they think is going to be the biggest strain to hit American shores at the time. My gambler’s aspect of it is that having the flu completely sucks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, if I can spend $20 and take 20 minutes to have a very good chance of avoiding a terrible flu, I’ll gladly spend that money and take that time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And that’s why I’ll get a flu shot, also. And I always get my kids flu shots. I just always feel a little silly about it as opposed to proper vaccinations, which, of course, are life savers.

The other thing about the flu is, I feel like people misuse the word “flu,” because flu is a very specific virus. And usually, when people say they have the flu, what they mean is they have the common cold.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You really have to be pretty sick for it to be the flu.

**John:** If you’re knocked on your back and really, really hating life, that could very well be the flu.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got, like, a serious fever, muscle pains, that’s… Flu’s bad stuff.

[End of clip]

**Drew Marquardt:** Oh my gosh, you sound like babies.

**John:** We were so young, so naïve.

**Drew:** The 10 years of cigars hadn’t lowered your voice or anything like that.

**John:** The Trump administration, the bourbon, everything else that has happened. Here we have our first clue about what may be going on here. Craig and I were talking about the flu, so either one of the two of us or someone in our orb must have gotten the flu. And in fact, that has already happened on the show.

So back in Episode 434, January 2020, Craig talks about how he got the flu. He describes going to Urgent Care. And Craig asks me, “John, do you know how they test for the flu? They put a swab up your nose and swirl it around,” which is wild. That used to be a new thing. This is January 2020 he’s telling me this. We were just about to have COVID. We were just about to all have our noses swabbed endlessly for the rest of our lives, but this was a new thing for Craig.

**Drew:** No idea what was coming.

**John:** Nope, no idea, which brings us to 2024. Last week, it’s a Saturday evening. I am feeling a little bit achy, but I was just at the gym that morning. It’s nothing too big, nothing too pressing. We’re having friends over to play board games, so as a responsible host, I take a COVID test. I swab my nose, just as Craig had done back in 434. COVID test turns out negative, so hooray. Friends come over. We play Spyfall. We play Poetry for Neanderthals. We play Celebrity. A great time is had by all.

The guests leave, and suddenly I just feel awful. Everything comes crashing down. I’m guessing that what I was experiencing during that game night was essentially stage health, where you can feel good when you’re actually out on stage, when you’re actually performing, and then it all comes crashing down. Drew, you were an actor. You may have seen something like that in your orbit.

**Drew:** I’ve absolutely had that happen several times. Usually, the times when I was the lead, I would have full-blown laryngitis backstage and then get on and be able to project out and not know how I did it.

**John:** We were doing Big Fish in London. There was this cold that went through the entire cast. These people, they were basically invalids. They were so sick. Then you just shove them up on stage, and they could somehow do it. They’re belting, and then they can’t talk off stage. I think it was some bit of that. I just did not feel how bad I felt while people were there. But I am now so cold, I am shaking. I have a fever of 101. I take some Advil. I go to bed. I don’t sleep too well. I get too hot, too cold. I start sweating. I feel gross. I take my temperature throughout the night, and it gets up to 105.5.

**Drew:** Oh my god.

**John:** At that point, I genuinely don’t know what to do, because if I Google now, I see that over 105, you’re supposed to go to the emergency room, but it’s not like it was staying over 105. I don’t have any of the other emergency symptoms like that. I’m not convulsing. I’m not confused or delirious.

Anyway, first thing in the morning, Mike takes me to Urgent Care. I say, “I think I have the flu.” They swab my nose. They say, “You have the flu.” They send me home with Tamiflu. The doctor says, “Listen, you’re going to have three bad days, and then you’ll be okay.” The doctor was accurate, but I don’t know, he didn’t fully describe the experience. It was just horrible. I have friends who’ve had much more serious illnesses. I don’t want to downplay that. But for whatever reason and good fortune, I’ve never been this sick as an adult. I don’t want to just downplay how awful the flu was for me. It was just bad. Have you had the flu as a grown-up?

**Drew:** I don’t think I’ve had it as an adult. I’m sure I’ve had it as a kid, because kids get everything.

**John:** I’m sure I had it as a kid too. I remember things that felt like this as a kid. But your kid body is just so different. I felt like everything was just down and broken. I had fever, body aches, chills, diarrhea, but that’s it. I had none of the respiratory things. But what I had was enough. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t really sleep. I just laid there in this fugue state envisioning boxes being assembled. I couldn’t think any organized thoughts, other than just repetitive, simple thoughts. I felt like a video game that had crashed, and the screen was half pixelated, sort of broken. It was bad.

I eventually came back online. I’d have these moments where I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far,” and I still felt terrible, but it was better than I’d felt two hours before. Then a few hours later, I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far.” That was the gradual coming out of it. Now, we’re on the fifth day. Flu-wise, I feel like I’m basically through it. The last couple days I’ve been able to do some phone calls. For reasons we’ll get into, I’ve had so many phone calls. The flu sucks. That’s my takeaway from the flu.

To answer the mystery and suspense question I posed at the very start of this, the reason why this is a best of episode is because we had a bigger episode planned. We were going to have a guest host on. We had a menu of things we were going to go through. That’s going to be pushed back a week. But we have a lot of other things to talk through. This is a hybrid of old stuff and new stuff in one episode.

Takeaways, I guess, flu shot. Get your flu shot. It didn’t protect me this time. It’s protected me many other years, I’m sure. Tamiflu, sure, great. It’s not the magic bullet I hoped it would be. You see people who get the COVID drug, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I suddenly feel great.” It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t just like, oh, suddenly, the lights came on. It is crazy that we don’t have an at-home test in the U.S. for flu. They exist in Europe. They exist in Asia.

**Drew:** Really?

**John:** Yeah, they have these tests where you can swab. It’s one test that swabs for flu, RSV, and COVID. If I’d had a test like that, I would’ve swabbed my nose, and I would’ve tested positive for flu. I would’ve not had friends come over. I probably could’ve gotten Tamiflu 12 hours earlier. It’s really frustrating we don’t have those here.

**Drew:** That feels so obvious that we would have them. Now I’m very frustrated.

**John:** Apparently, the reason why we don’t have them is it was proposed years ago, and they said, “Americans aren’t ready to handle at-home testing of things,” but we are now. So just get over it. We can do it. Of my board game party group, no one is sick yet, which is great. Some of them took Tamiflu, which is smart and great. Hopefully, they’ll all stay healthy.

**Drew:** Terrible for you, but it sounds like it worked out okay.

**John:** Drew, tell us about the mystery and suspense portions you have picked out for us this episode.

**Drew:** This is an episode about mystery and suspense, but it’s not just detectives and thrillers. This is how to use mystery and suspense techniques in every story, including comedies, so really helpful. We’re going to start with Episode 269. That’s Mystery Versus Confusion. It’s about using mystery to capture an audience’s curiosity, but making sure that doesn’t tip over into confusion or frustration or just making sure it’s all very deliberate. Then we’ll go to Episode 332, which is called Wait For It. It’s about suspense and the different types of suspense and how to craft it on the page.

**John:** Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, you and I are going to talk about the Apple Vision Pro, which we had in the office and got a chance to test out and play around with. But before we get into any of that, we have some news. We actually had a busy news week. First, we need to start with all the agent stuff that happened this week. Agencies are always going through changes. Agents move from one firm to another. Sometimes they take their clients with them. Sometimes they shutter, and that happened this past week with one of the smaller agencies.

**Drew:** That’s right. The first one was A3, which used to be Abrams Artists Agency. An email went out on Friday, February 9th, that the agency was shutting down on Monday. It sounds like the decision to pull the trigger was made completely by the chairman, Adam Bold. Bold has that power to make that unilateral move because of an operating agreement they signed last year, which the CEO Robert Attermann and President Brian Cho have been suing Bold over. It sounds like there’s quite a lot of drama here. They did that reportedly in attempt to block Bold from selling off A3’s digital and unscripted departments to Gersh, which happened in January. And now that agency’s completely dissolved.

**John:** My recollection is that A3 represented both… I know they represented some writers, because back in the WGA agency campaign, I remember them being one of the agencies that we had to negotiate with. But they also represented other talent as well.

It’s frustrating when your agency melts away, because then you don’t know, as a piece of talent, what are you supposed to do, where are you supposed to go. I also feel bad, of course, for the agents who are suddenly without a job. Those changes do happen. That is an agency shutting down. What’s more common to happen in Hollywood is that an agent will leave an agency either taking his or her clients to a different firm or setting up a new agency. That’s what happened this past week.

So the big news in my friend group this past week has been about Verve. On Tuesday, it was announced that Bill Weinstein, who’s one of the founders, partners, and the CEO of Verve Talent, had left the firm. And as longtime listeners will know, I actually moved to Verve during the WGA agency campaign, and Bill was my primary agent. The trades are reporting that three other agents are joining him on this new venture. There could be more.

We’re recording this on Thursday, so by the time this episode comes out on Tuesday, a lot more may have developed. But Drew, it’s fair to say that a ton of phone calls have happened in the office here over the last two or three days.

**Drew:** Yes, I would absolutely say that.

**John:** It’s weird. The phone doesn’t ring nearly as much as it used to, because everything is now emails or text messages. But when you need real-time information, you just pick up the phone and call a person, especially when they want to talk about advice. The reason why people were calling me were mostly friends of mine who were at Verve, and just to think about, “Do I stay at Verve? Do I go to this new place? Do I go to a third place?”

One of the things I tried to talk everybody through is not to fall into the false dichotomy of only two options. There’s a sense of you either have to choose A or B. You can choose A or B or neither of those and go to a different situation, different solution.

For some people, if they have a primary relationship with an agent who is staying at Verve, it probably makes sense to stay at Verse. If they have a primary relationship with an agent who’s moving to this new firm, it may make sense to move to the new firm. But in other cases, it may make sense to look around and see where is the right place to end up. That could be at a different agency. It could be with a manager.

For me personally, as we’re recording this, I don’t know where I’m going to go. I don’t know if I’m staying at Verve or going to the new agency or going someplace else. It will be a busy couple weeks as this all sorts itself out.

**Drew:** It’s mystery and suspense.

**John:** It is mystery and suspense, Drew.

**Drew:** It is.

**John:** The second bit of business we have not covered yet on the program is OpenAI announced Sora. Sora is this new video generation tool. We’ve seen tools before that do what Dall-E did for images that created videos, but they were terrible. They were just awful. You would not believe them to be real at all. Drew, you saw these demos. What’d you think?

**Drew:** I was blown away. The physics of it is amazing. Seeing things underwater videos are incredible. There’s one I was telling you about. It’s a drone shot from 1850s California or something like that. It’s both incredible and awe-inspiring and a little bit terrifying.

**John:** The first text message I got from a friend was, quote, “How petrified should I be?” I told them, don’t be petrified. It’s a long way from these little demo clips to typing a prompt in for, “Make me a biopic about Janis Joplin in the style of Baz Luhrmann. There’s a reason why writers and other film professionals are involved to get you from that notion to an actual film that people see.

All of that said, there are important things to consider with these technologies and the impact they could have on our business. First off, the demos they showed were largely about someone typing something into a box and it coming up with a little clip. But it can also take video’s input.

So you can feed it video of a film and say, “Replace Kevin Spacey,” because Kevin Spacey’s a problematic person right now, and it could probably do a very good job of replacing Kevin Spacey in a film. And so suddenly, you don’t have to re-shoot or do anything else. If you are the copyright holder on this film, and you want to make money off this, you might replace Kevin Spacey in a film, and it can do it pretty simply.

Likewise, if you are the holder of copyright on something in your vault, and you want to refresh it and make it more palatable to modern audiences, you could do certain things like up-ressing it or you could change the aspect ratio of it. If it’s shot more square and you want it to be more widescreen, you could fill in the edges there much better with AI. You can really figure out… It’s like the Photoshop’s generative fill. It’ll have a good sense of what should actually be in the spaces that are missing. That is really useful for that.

Is it transformative enough that it is covered by copyright? That’s an open question, and that’s a thing that’s going to be wrestled with. But it raises the question of, what is a refresh of an existing film versus what is a remake, because writers and directors and other folks, we get paid for when our material is remade. If someone wants to remake Go, I get paid for that, because that’s my original thing. But if you’re just constantly rejuvenating an existing property, that gets to be a little bit murkier.

I guess, what do we call the stuff that comes out of these engines? Because some of it can look like animation; some of it can look like live action, but it’s not really either of the above. There were no actors being filmed, so it’s not live action as we think of, but it’s also not animation and the animation process. It’s just a thing that’s being generated.

As WGA writers, we want to make sure that material that comes out of a process like this isn’t defaulted into animation, because the WGA does represent animation, but not exclusively. It could be a way for studios to run around protections that we have put in place for writers. We want to make sure that there’s no loophole here where using this technology gets them out of hiring WGA writers.

Finally, you talked about the physics of the stuff that you saw. The knock-on effect that these things have had is that they have become these reality engines. They’ve ingested so much material, so much video, that they create these pretty compelling drone shots. They have a sense of how things move in space. If a character was in front of another character and it clues it, there’s persistence of vision.

**Drew:** It has object permanence almost.

**John:** Object permanence, yeah, like a baby learns object permanence. It’s just much more sophisticated than things we’re used to coming out of this. Because of it, it can actually do things like, by watching a bunch of Minecraft videos, it gets Minecraft, and it can simulate Minecraft so well that it becomes basically just Minecraft. If you can do that with Minecraft, to what degree are you going to be able to simulate off of real-world video what reality is? That has troubling implications for – not troubling, but fascinating implications for the nature of reality and how it understands the world around it.

I think it’s just really interesting to watch this space. Obviously, we’re concerned about it, because it looks like it could replace the jobs of Hollywood workers, but it could actually have broader implications even beyond that. I think it’s nothing to panic about right now, but it’s something we should be mindful of, because as of this moment in 2024, it’s just interesting. It could be much more than interesting in a few years.

**Drew:** Do you feel like there’s a next step from it almost? Do you anticipate any of that or is it all just an unknown?

**John:** Right now, they’re showing the demos, but they’re not releasing the tool for people to use. That’s because there are obvious applications of this for disinformation, for deep fakes. All of that’s really troubling. Figuring out how you would even put this in the public’s hands is a big concern.

Some people pushed back against my blog post on it – we’ll put a link in the show notes to the blog post I put up about it – saying, like, “John, you ignored the fact that AI material can’t be copyrighted.” I think that’s naïve. It is a fact that right now, existing U.S. law suggests that material generated by AI by itself cannot be copyrighted, but there’s really no clear gradations there.

My example of using AI to do some film enhancements… The Zone of Interest, there are these really cool sequences which I originally thought were animation, but they turn out they were shot with this night vision camera that looked really surreal. Those cameras are not high enough resolution to create a good image on screen, but they could take that and then use AI to fix the issues in it. That’s still going to be copyrightable. You still were starting with something.

I think the degree to which you can use AI to do stuff in your film does not make it un-copyrightable. That’s all going to need to be figured out. We don’t know what the line is right now. I think, as people who are working in guilds, we need to be thinking about how do we make sure that we help draw the line, and it’s not just the studios who are drawing the line.

**Drew:** Cool.

**John:** Before we get to the new stuff, Drew, some things we need from our listeners. First off, we’re trying to do an episode that includes some counterfactual Hollywood history. I’ve been reading this great book on counterfactual military history, so like, what happens if this battle back in ancient times had gone differently and the other side had won? Would we be speaking Roman right now? Sometimes in history, small changes can lead to giant differences of outcome.

We’d love to do that for Hollywood, if we could, for a future episode. If you have suggestions for, if this one event had gone differently, what would the impact be. For example, if the movie Titanic had tanked and was a disaster, what would be the knock-on impacts of that? Or if Iron Man had failed, would we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

We’d love your questions about that. It doesn’t just have to be about movies. It could be about television. It could be about some other impact of technology or if another country had gotten to a certain thing first. But what we’d love is not too sci-fi-ish. It’s not about what if aliens had invaded at this point. It’s about flip of a coin, a thing that could’ve gone either way, could’ve gone the other way. It’s always fun to think about that. If you have suggestions for counterfactual Hollywood history, we’d love to hear those.

**Drew:** Email those to ask@johnaugust.com, and I’ll look at them all.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, let’s get started with our mystery and suspense. Which episode are we hearing first, and which one’s number two?

**Drew:** It’s Episode 269 first, and then Episode 332.

**John:** Great. We will be back here after that with some One Cool Things and to wrap stuff up.

[Episode 269 clip]

**John:** Craig, get it started. Why should we care about mystery?

**Craig Mazin:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers, we’re trying to do something, and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question, but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything? Well, because, oh, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things.

And we get maybe a little distracted by the word “mystery,” because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity, and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative.

The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story, because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them, but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?”

Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character?” or “Why did she say that?” or, “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more, because we want to see what’s happening. And so often, they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human. It’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious. We insist upon knowing certain things.

If you walk down the street, and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, there’s no decision to want to know. What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right?

So as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of the crowd outside the store and its blacked-out windows. If our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating. We would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing, which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient and sort of frustrated and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much.

That’s a thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story. Otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished, in general, because people are too busy staring at boobs, and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part. So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs, because then it’s like, “I’m confused. I’m distracted.”

So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction – and I know you’re distracted – I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery; it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story. And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then it’s not really mystery; then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows.

This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens – and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges – with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it. I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways.

I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t. So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something? Because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking.

I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening, and I don’t know why they’re happening, so now I’m getting really worried and distracted.

And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused. If I’m watching a David Lynch film and suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be… This is abstract. Okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think, “I’m not supposed to be confused right now, and I am so confused.”

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards, that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers, because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie. That can be a real thing. That can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved.

And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form, What moments were you confused in a bad way?” Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions, because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for, like, “This wasn’t intriguing; this was annoying that I didn’t know what was actually happening here.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. There is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away and that answers will be revealed, and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie. That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book, because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Every single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, “Okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful.” And what you said before about you feel like, “If I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion.”

And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery. And after you’ve seen one of these movies, you recognize, in the third act, they will confront the mystery, and there’ll be little tiny mysteries, but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour, you’re going to know who the killer is, and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long arc stories of an Alias or a Lost, where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling that you had a sense of, like, “Are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries, or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?”

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important, I think, to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies, that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that? And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment, and so very broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, “Okay, who’s her? Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do” Very simple, very easy, and then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” “Did you do it?” “I did it.” “And?” “It was hard.” What’s it? Oh, I have to know. What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun, and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our “pick a card, any card.” People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing. It’s a flashbulb. It’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that I will never solve for you.

Just like what does Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because you will never know, and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to. And the situations where I see it is, you enter into two characters having a conversation, and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or how the actors actually changed some words, but it makes it seem like… They’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody, and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, “Wait. Are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is?”

So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery. But if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people… When you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious. Right? You are now involved. And that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved.

There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that, personally, I love this version when I see it. And every now and then, I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something, and the character lies. And we know they’re lying, because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions, and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like, “Wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here? I’m curious what that is.”

Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this, because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all. It’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just look at the lines and you’re like, “Oh, wait, he says this on this page but this and the other page.” If you don’t somehow single out that this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap.

I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will forget, like, “Oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there. That’s a lie there.” And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides, and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, “Oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.”

So this is a case where the slyly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores that she’s a terrific liar, something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, “Remember, this is not actually the truth here.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary. It’s later on when you want to think, “Okay, maybe somebody has forgotten.” Or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, “Okay, you’re a liar. Why? I need to know.” Right? So this is a good little mini mystery. Similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object, like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Or you got a camera looking. Here’s a little mystery.

At the end of Inglourious Basterds, it’s not much of mystery, because you can pretty much see it coming, but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak, actually. I think it’s a friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak. Looking up at them looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa, and they’re talking about it. And we are the perspective, so we don’t know what it is, but they’re talking about it, and then we reveal the answer to the mystery. Listen. It may seem inevitable to you, because that’s how you saw the movie. It was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do, and it’s what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information. So in this idea, someone asks someone a question, and they get an answer, and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us. And that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” And the person goes, “Yeah.” And the person asking the question says, “Thank you,” walks outside, and starts crying. Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations, and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point, that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment, like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that, because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectations. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” No. You’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means. We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do, we should do and must do everything we can to create that movie. And if that means that we are directing on the page, in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle. No. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions, because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen. So the short-term mystery. So there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?” Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person, which is okay, or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are, for some reason, slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in. Well, okay. Why are they doing that? And obviously, they’re going to light it up. But why are they going to light it on fire? And what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries, I kind of think of those as middle-of-the-movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on, and there are some characters with relationships, who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t. They know secret motivations. They know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it.

This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie, to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward. It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then. So these are good little middle-of-the-movie things.

The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident.” But typically they are slightly more interesting than that, and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term “hang a lantern on things” and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice, I’m doing something here, so yes, you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here, and I’m going to be doing something with it later on. You are marking this for follow-up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie, at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. You’ve done the right job there, because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful, and that’s a great way of… The mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie, right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or your main character has a scar, and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, “Mm.” And then maybe somebody else asks, “Where did you get that?” If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar. It won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing. If I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? They are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie, like, we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of, because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about a plot mystery, and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water, which in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it, but there’s a long-term mystery in it, which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it. Yes, they’re doing it to get money but there’s clearly a specific reason and there’s a plan, but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time, much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on what their actual plan is is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do, unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

[Episode 332 clip]

**John:** All right, let’s get to our feature marquee topic of this first episode of 2018, which is suspense.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Ooh, wait for it.

**Craig:** Wait for it.

**John:** So, suspense, actually, the word itself is fascinating. So, it’s from a French word “suspendre,” which is “pendre,” which is to hang, and “sus,” above. So, to hang above. What a great image that is. It’s like something is dangling above you and you’re waiting for it to fall. That is suspense. And that’s mostly what we’re talking about when we talk about suspense as a narrative device. It is that sense of there is something that is going to happen. You see it’s going to happen. And you are waiting for it. And attention builds because of that.

I would define it in a very general sense, suspense is any technique that involves prolonged anticipation. There is a thing that is going to happen. You see it. And you are waiting for it to happen.

**Craig:** The waiting.

**John:** Waiting for it. You usually think about suspense in a bad way, like there’s a bomb ticking under the table. But suspense can also be a good thing. If you are waiting for a surprise party, there’s a good suspense, too. So it’s not just thrillers. It’s not just sort of the big action movies that have suspense. It’s a technique that we can use in all of our scripts. And so I thought we’d dig in on that today.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a great idea. I believe this topic was proposed by somebody on Twitter, so thank you for that. And it’s a very crafty thing, and I like talking about these. You know, a lot of times when we discuss writing, and I think a lot of times when we go through Three Page Challenges, we’re looking for truth. We’re looking for verisimilitude. We’re talking about how as writers we can create these moments, these people, their words and their actions that ring true to us. This is not that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** In general, life does not have suspense at all. This is a very artificial thing. It’s as artificial in my mind as a montage, which simply does not exist in life. And yet we find it incredibly gratifying when we experience it. And because it is this technique, a craft, it’s good for us to talk I think about how the nuts and bolts of it actually work, because it’s one of the few times as writers we get to be mathematicians. And I like that.

**John:** I think it’s also important to focus on this as a writing technique, because so often you see Hitchcock is a master of suspense, and you think about it as being a director’s tool. And it’s absolutely true that the way a director is choosing to frame shots, to edit a sequence, to build out the world of the film or the TV show, there’s a lot of craft and technique that is a director’s focus in building suspense. But none of it would be there unless the writer had planned for that sequence to be suspenseful and really laid out the structure that’s going to create a sequence that is suspenseful.

And suspense, I should point out, really is generally a sequence kind of technique. Within a scene maybe there will be some suspense, but generally it’s a course of a couple of scenes together that build a rising sense of suspense. And so that’s going to happen on the page. So, let’s dig into how you might do it.

**Craig:** Great. Well, I guess to start with, I divide suspense roughly into two categories. Suspense of the unknown and suspense of the known. Because they’re very different kinds of suspense. When I think about suspense of the unknown, I think about information that is being withheld either from the audience or from a character. Do you know what I mean by those distinctions?

**John:** I think I do. So, the unknown is like we are curious. We’re leaning in to see what is going to happen. Or in some cases, we have more information than the character who we’re watching has. So, we know there’s something dangerous in that room, and so we’re yelling at the screen like, “Don’t go in that room.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But the other broad category you’re leaving out there is suspense of the known. Because of the nature of the genre, because of the nature of the kind of story that you’re setting up, we kind of know where it’s going to go. We just don’t know how we’re going to get there. We don’t know what the actual mechanics are. And that is what has us leaning in, has us curious. It’s a question we want answered. And I think almost all cases of suspense, there is that question that we want to see answered.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think suspense of the known is far more common, and it’s also applicable across every genre, comedy, romance, everything. When we hear suspense, at least initially, we think of that Hitchcockian mode, which is more of the suspense of the unknown. Or it’s a kind of a whodunit suspense. The key for me when you look inside, for instance, there is information that you, the writer…

And by the way, let me just take a step back for a second. You’re so right in saying that this is something that is important for writers to understand. We think suspense, like we think all technical aspects of cinema, like for instance, montage, is from the director. And I argue, as I often do, that that is not true. It’s not that it’s not from them. It’s that it’s from us.

The writer must lay out the montage so that it has a purpose, that it has a beginning and an end, that it makes sense for the characters. It’s there for a reason. You don’t just haphazardly decide one day on set, “I think, you know what, let’s have a montage.” It doesn’t work that way. It is intentional. And it is from the script.

Similarly, we must plan our suspense. Otherwise, there’s no opportunity for it. How the director creates it visually, we can even put some clues ourselves into the script. But, yes, certainly directors have an enormous role to play in that. So let’s talk a little bit about that situation where there is information that you, the writer, have, the director has, but the audience doesn’t have, and also the characters don’t have.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the most classic example of this is the whodunit, where the character is trying to figure out who killed the person, who is the villain in this situation. There’s a fundamental thing which you as the writer know and the audience and the lead character does not know.

So, in order to build that suspense, you’re probably laying out some clues that will help that person get closer. You will have some misdirects. You’ll have some sort of near misses. You are trying to lead the character and the audience on a path that will take them towards it, but a really fascinating path that will take them towards the answer, with a lot of frustrations and delays that are ultimately gratifying.

I mean, the best kind of suspenses are kind of like beautiful agony. It’s that moment of delayed gratificatio,n and so when you finally get there, aha, it’s there. Other cases, you know, the suspense might be you’re trying to get away from that thing, and will you get away from that villain. In those situations, you as the audience might have more information about how close the other person is than the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also another classic kind of suspense of the unknown, what I’ll call, for lack of a better phrase, mystery of circumstance. For instance, Lost. Or I don’t know if you ever saw that old show from the ‘60s, The Prisoner.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Which Lost is basically riffing on.

**John:** Yeah. What is the nature of this world? What the hell is going on? And you’re waiting for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so now everyone is confused and you’re confused, and you’re confused with them. But they’re making discoveries. And episodic television has this wonderful tool of suspense, which is, “Show’s over. What will happen next week?” That’s the cliffhanger. I mean, when you talk about cliffhangers, that is literal suspense. I am suspended over a chasm.

But figuratively, these sorts of moments of suspense are happening all the time, and all of it is creating this ache to understand, because what suspense is playing on is a human fact. And the human fact is that we naturally seek to make sense of and order the world around us. So suspense is playing with that natural desire that every human… Babies have it. So, this is something that’s going right to this primal need that the audience has.

Then on the other hand, we have the other kind of suspense, which I think is more common and very useful, even if it’s not always thought of as suspense, which is suspense of the known.

**John:** So these are situations where because of the nature of the genre, because of the kind of story that you’re telling, we have a sense of where things are going. We just don’t know how. We don’t know what the path is that is going to lead them there. And we are looking for clues that will get us to that conclusion.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name yet. But you start watching Call Me By Your Name and you have a good sense of some of the things that are going to happen, but you just have no idea how you’re going to get those things to connect. And that is the thrill of the movie is watching those things happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? I mean, you’d think that the point of suspense is not knowing. And yet when we sit down and someone says, “Oh, here’s a movie from 1998. It stars Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Lopez. And they bump into each other on the street. And he’s getting married and she’s the wedding planner for the marriage.” And you’re like, “Well, I know how that ends.” And you do. You know exactly how it ends. In fact, you know roughly how the whole movie is going to go, don’t you? Yes. And yet if you sit down and watch it, you will begin to feel great suspense.

And this kind of suspense to me is really anticipation more than suspense. It’s a slightly different feeling. It’s the feeling from the old ketchup commercials. Well, the ketchup is going to come out of the bottle. Don’t know when. Don’t know how. Is it going to come out in a big blob? Right? So, this is like watching somebody continually pulling a slingshot back. You know they’re going to let it go, but when? When? And you start to need it. You start to need it.

So, even though we know inside of these movies, like for instance, friend of the podcast Tess Morris’s Man Up. Is she going to get him in time? Is he going to get to her in time? Is she going to believe him? Is he going to believe her? Of course. Of course. But how? And will they? And is it going to go the way that we think?

This all creates this enormous suspense. And all of it really – I think you hit upon it earlier in a beautiful way – is kind of sweetly torturing the audience. That’s the point.

**John:** Yes. And so I will say that even the examples of the rom-coms where we as the audience know they’re going to eventually connect at the end – we can see what the template basically is that’s going to take us to that place – within those beats there will be moments in which we as the audience have more information than the characters do. And that is part of the joy. Within sequences, we might know something about the other guy that she doesn’t know yet, and that is important. Or we know that there’s a secret that’s going to come out and we’re wondering when will that secret come out.

So it’s not just one kind of suspense. There’s going to be little moments of suspense during the whole time. And even in action sequences, you know, will he get past that part of the cliff before the boulder falls? There’s always going to be little small moments of suspense within the bigger moments of suspense.

**Craig:** Correct. And this kind of suspense fuels genres that we don’t necessarily think of as suspenseful, but definitely are, and in fact require suspense. For instance, comedies of error. A comedy of errors is entirely based on suspense. Someone overhears something, misinterprets it, and then what ensues is a comedy that really is about us going, “Oh my god, would you just ask him the right question? Would you just say what you want to say and then it will… Oh, do it, do it, do it.” And then they finally do it. Every episode of Three’s Company was a suspenseful episode in its own way.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s take a look at some of the techniques a writer uses in order to build suspense, both on a scene or a sequence level, but also on a more macro level for the entire course of the story.

The thing I think we’re talking about sort of fundamentally is delay. And in most of these cases, the ball could drop immediately. The bomb under the table could just go off. But suspense is the ticking. Suspense is delaying the bomb going off, or having some other obstacle get in the way that is keeping the thing from happening, which you know is going to have to happen next. So those two characters finally meeting. The explosion finally happening. The asteroid blowing up. There’s going to be something that has to happen, and you’re delaying that. And you’re finding good reasons to delay that, that are reasonable for the course of the story that you’re telling, but also provide a jolt of energy for the narrative and for the audience.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in order to create delay, we have to do things purposefully. We have to use our story and find circumstances to frustrate the characters. And we have to use our craft to obstruct. And there are different ways of doing this.

The most common way and perhaps the easiest way, but oftentimes the least satisfying way, is coincidence. Coincidence is used all the time to frustrate and obstruct people. Instead of walking into the room and seeing somebody do something, they do it, walk out just as you’re walking in, and you just miss seeing them do it. And the audience goes, “Oh!” Well, that’s coincidence.

There’s a classic axiom. You’re allowed to use coincidence to get your characters into trouble or make things harder for them. You’re not allowed to use it to make things easier for them. And that’s true. But when we’re creating suspense and we’re trying to delay things, the less you can use coincidence, the better. Because no matter how you employ coincidence, the audience will always subconsciously understand you moved pieces on the chessboard in order to achieve an effect. It didn’t happen sort of naturally or for reasons that were human or understandable. And therefore, we’re just a little less excited by the outcome.

**John:** Absolutely. If we’re talking about two events, if it’s A and then B, if A causes B, we’re generally going to be happier. If we can see that there is a causal relationship between those two things, we’re going to be happier. But coincidence, I agree, can be really, really helpful. And the coincidences that get in the way of your character achieving the thing he wants, that’s great.

And it’s always nice when the bad guy catches a lucky break, because that’s just great. And so we’re used to having our hero suddenly have this big stroke of luck. So having the hero not get that stroke, or having the villain who you despise just really be lucky, or start to tumble but then save himself, that’s great. It’s surprising. And so it’s not what we expect. It’s going to be a helpful kind of way to keep that suspense going, to keep the sequence running along.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you can subvert your coincidences, all the better. For instance, there’s a famous and wonderful moment in Die Hard where our hero coincidentally catches the bad guy. He just catches him. He doesn’t know he’s the bad guy, but he catches him. And we’re like, “Oh my god, the coincidence of that just made life so much easier for our hero.” And then the bad guy pretends, in a way that is very surprising and shocking to us, to not be the bad guy at all, but to be a hostage. And our hero believes him. And now a terrible suspense is created because now we don’t know what will happen. We know the bad guy is going to use this to his benefit. And we know that our hero is now in terrible danger. We know it. The hero doesn’t know it.

Oh, suspense of the unknown. Wonderful. So in that case, you’re actually taking coincidence and using it in your favor in a way that isn’t even coincidental. So I love that sort of thing.

**John:** Over the course of Die Hard, which is a suspenseful movie from the core, you have this moment of intense micro suspense. Because we know at some point the gig is going to be up and Bruce Willis is going to recognize what’s really going on. But will it be in time? There can even be moments with Ian, just really small, second-by-second suspense, like, does he still have a bullet left in his gun? That is a question that you don’t know, he doesn’t know. What is the choice going to be? And as long as you can sort of juggle all of those things, you are going to make a much tighter, stronger sequence.

**Craig:** As a writer, you are looking for opportunities. You are looking for targets in which to create suspense. All the time, in every genre, again, every single genre, don’t think of suspense only as when will the bomb go off or who shot Mrs. McGillicuddy. And when you find those opportunities, it’s really important for you to use them. Exploit them, because they’re little gifts.

When you have a moment of suspense – for instance, the hero doesn’t know that he’s even caught the villain, he thinks the villain is a victim – wonderful. Use it. And inside of that, now you have free rein to just torture the audience. Do not be afraid to torture the audience. Be afraid of not torturing them. This is where you want to tease them. You want to tantalize them. You want to almost have the hero figure it out and then take it away from the hero. You want to drive them crazy.

This is sort of the closest thing writers have to sexual interaction with an audience. Sorry, Sexy Craig. I’m going to be unsexy about this. But it is a bizarre, flirtatious, sweet kind of torture, all of which is designed to delay release. It is a bit like saying, “I’m going to give you an itch and I am not going to scratch it. I almost scratched it. Almost did. Oh, you thought I scratched it, but I didn’t,” until you finally do it. And in this way, something that is as expected an outcome as “itch is scratched” becomes remarkably satisfying. It is a release. And in that sense, it is a catharsis.

**John:** It is a catharsis. And so I think it’s also important to keep in mind – we talk about the victory lap, and we talk about sort of the success at the end of that – when you finally do let that person have their success, make sure you give them enough of a scene to celebrate that success. Because there’s nothing more frustrating to me when I see a movie where the character finally does it and then it immediately cuts away to the next thing. Let them actually enjoy it for a moment, because we as the audience need that moment of release as well. We need that moment of celebration, like okay, we finally got to that thing.

You know, throughout this whole sequence, maybe we’ve seen that door in the distance, or we’re running into it and we get there and it just shuts. And the thing we’ve been going to that whole time is no longer an option. Aliens is a movie of tremendous success, where there’s always a plan, and the plan is always getting frustrated. And it finally gives us those moments at the very, very end where like, okay, we’re safe, everything is down, and we can sort of go off, quote unquote, “safely into the distance.”

So, make sure that in those teases and all the misdirects, the red herrings, everything you’re doing to set that up, make sure that by the time you get them through that sequence, you do get that moment of release.

**Craig:** And to guide you on this journey, dear writer, is your best tool: your empathy with the audience. Suspense really needs to be a function of your empathy with an audience. You already know the movie. You’ve seen it. You know everything. Now put yourself in their shoes. Do it over and over and over. Weirdly, they’re the most important character in your movie, even though they’re not in the movie. You’re thinking about them all the time. And it is especially important to think about the audience when we are talking about these, let’s call them artifices, because that’s what these kinds of craft works are.

If you do, then you’ll know, okay, in the moment where you finally do the reveal and you release the tension and the ketchup comes out of the bottle, well, again, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What do I want here?” And, of course, what you want to do is just wallow in the joy of it. Just let them wallow.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up by talking about what does this actually look like on the page. Because we say like, okay, obviously film and TV directors are responsible for a lot of the visuals we’re seeing on screen, but the choice of what we’re overall going to be seeing there is the writer’s choice. And so let’s look at what those techniques look like on the page, because so much of successful suspense really is the scene description. Those are the words that are going to give you the feeling of what it’s going to feel like when you see it visually.

And so it’s cross-cutting. We’re with this character, and then we cross-cut to the other person who is getting close. It’s finding honestly the adverbs and the short, clipped sentences that gives us a sense of like how close they are to each other. Or like, he’s almost at the door. But then, no, it slams shut.

These are the cases where you may want to break out that sort of heavy artillery of the underlines, the boldfaced words, the exclamation points. Maybe even double exclamation points when it really is a stopper. So that we as the reader get a real sense of what it’s going to feel like to be the audience in the seat watching that up on the screen.

And that’s also why I’m so conservative with using those big guns when I don’t need them in action and writing. Because when you really do need them, they need to be fresh. You got to have some dry powder for when you really need to sell those big moments. Like, hey, pay attention to this thing because this is what it’s going to feel like.

**Craig:** 100%. And I also think the great weapon in our arsenal when we are creating suspense on the page – and you’re absolutely right; it has to be done with action – well, if suspense is delay, and suspense is waiting, delay and waiting for us in terms of text and page is white space.

When I want people to feel as if it’s an agonizing wait, I use a lot of white space. Burn it up, because that’s what it tells you. Sometimes I’ll do three, four, five things in a row. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Boom. It’s amazing how cinematic that can be when 99% of the script is just line, line, line, line, line, you know, double space, line, line, line, line.

So white space becomes essentially your timeline. It’s your way of expanding that moment to agony. And it’s not something that you can get away with more than I think once in a script. And you may not need to do it at all. But if you do have that moment where it’s the big reveal, burn up some space and let people feel it on the page.

[End of clips]

**John:** All right. That was nice to travel back in time for a moment. We’re here in 2024 with some recommendations. Earlier, I was talking about Sora, the new OpenAI thing and potential negative implications of that. My One Cool Thing is GOODY-2, which will not do anything bad for the world. Drew, I know you like GOODY-2 as well.

**Drew:** I love GOODY-2.

**John:** It is the world’s most responsible chat bot. If you haven’t played with it, it’s really fun. It looks like ChatGPT or any of the other ones. You can ask it a question. It understands what you’re asking. It will not help you out at all. It will find a way to avoid answering it. It’ll give you detailed reasons for why it’s not answering it. I think what impresses me is you could think that it would have a canned list of responses, but no. It’s clearly doing a lot of AI work to really parse what the meaning of the question is and why it’s not going to answer you. I just thought it was really, really smart.

**Drew:** I’m dying to know how they built that model, because it’s really adaptive to anything you can throw it at. That’s really fun.

**John:** My guess is that they did not have to train a whole new thing. I think they just were able to find the right parameters, so peeling under the hood here a little bit, because we’ve had to do some of this work in our own experiments. When you send in a query to OpenAI or any of the open-source models, you get the string that the user types, but you can of course change that string to be whatever you want to get the model to say back. It may be wrapping whatever you’re saying in a bunch of stuff around it that says, “But make sure that you’re not giving them anything useful or dangerous, and pad it in a lot of really protective language.” They may have found a way to do that without having to actually train their own model. It’s just really smart like that.

We’ll put a link in the show notes to a wider article about the chat bot and the reason why they made it, because they’re trying to point out the importance of safeties on chat bots, but also how difficult it is to do this and how you think locking this down would be the way to solve it. If you over-lock these things down, they become parodies of themselves, which is what this is.

**Drew:** There’s also something lovely about, at least feels like a different type of large language model. The way you’re interacting with it, it feels like it expands the possibilities of what these could be.

**John:** You were saying that you and Heather were playing around with it, trying to get it to do something.

**Drew:** Heather’s like, “What’s five steps towards world peace?” It won’t get you any of that. It’ll tell you why you’re in the wrong for even trying, basically.

**John:** Good stuff. What do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Drew:** I have a much more old-school One Cool Thing. I have books. I have an author that I love. Her name is Claire Keegan. In the last probably six to eight months, I have just devoured everything she’s ever written. She writes mostly novellas, really quick books. They’re small. You can read them in an afternoon. She’s got Foster and Small Things Like These are both incredible. She’s got lots of short stories. I just love her. She’s an Irish author. A lot of it has to do with rural Ireland. It sounds like it could be a little too quaint or a little too maudlin, but they’re not. They’re perfect. Claire Keegan is my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Excellent. Wonderful. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Drew:** Woo.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. Drew looks through all those questions, so please send them through. Send through your counterfactual Hollywood history scenarios. We’d love both your, what if this happened, and some things you think might be the outcomes of that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on the Apple Vision Pro. Drew, thank you so much for chatting through this with me.

**Drew:** Absolutely. John, I hope you feel better.

**John:** Thank you very much. Matthew Chilelli, god bless you for cutting this down to make me sound somewhat coherent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Apple Vision Pro. As everybody on Earth knows, I’m sure, Apple came out with this new mixed-reality headset. It’s complete goggles that cover your face, but it still looks like you’re looking through, because it has cameras that let the video pass through. It’s super expensive. It’s indulgent. My company makes software that runs on it, so we bought one. We have it here at the house. Drew, I would love your honest first opinion of using it, not whether anyone should buy it, but what is the experience of using it like?

**Drew:** The eye tracking is pretty amazing. The way it works out is it has its primary user, which it perfectly calibrates to, and then it has a guest mode. I was in the guest mode. Even that, its eye tracking is outstanding. A lot of it feels intuitive. The clicking your fingers to click the buttons feels intuitive. I had trouble moving some stuff or figuring out placing windows and that kind of thing. But it just feels like a new language in a lot of ways.

I don’t know. It’s hard not to be optimistic when you put one of the headsets on. When you’re outside of people wearing those headsets, it looks ridiculous. But when you’re inside and you’re playing with it, I’m wrestling with whether it’s going to be useful immediately. But it’s hard not to be excited. I don’t know.

**John:** I’m excited and also temper my expectations, just because I think it’s going to be a ramp up, and we just don’t know how steep the ramp up is to get to widespread use of these kind of things or if it’ll even ever be widespread use. In terms of the UI and how they do stuff, it reminded me a lot of the first Macintoshes, because the metaphors were just so different. You had to learn how to use the mouse and the abstraction of doing this. Putting on the Vision Pro and then using your hand to do stuff, they really walk you through that quickly. I was surprised how quickly I got up to speed on doing a lot of things.

I think one of the challenges comparing it to early computers is that computers were clearly just so useful for doing things we had to do other ways before. If you needed to write a paper, man, it was so much better to write a paper on a computer than it was to write it by hand or write it on a typewriter. It was just a complete game changer. It’s not a game changer for doing a lot of the productivity stuff that we do right now on our computers or on our phones or iPads. It doesn’t change that. Some of the immersive stuff it does is really just incredible and has no parallel. It’s like being there, but it’s also like being there in a way you couldn’t possibly be there.

If you have a chance to go into an Apple Store, if they’re still doing demos, you can sign up for a half-hour demo, even if you have no intention of buying it, it’s worth seeing it, I think just because you get a sense, like, oh, this is where the puck is headed. We can do this stuff now. You have to think about what impacts does that have for you. How does it change the ways we write things?

Some of the immersive demos they have, Drew, you did the dinosaurs one, where it’s like Jurassic Park, but you’re inside Jurassic Park, and dinosaurs are coming over, butterflies are landing on your finger. It was really impressive, right?

**Drew:** It’s incredibly impressive. I think you can do that because it’s 3D models, because it’s CG, basically. They can place those around you so you’re interacting with it in a really immersive way. I guess that’s really the only word for it. I’m really curious to know what human beings and storytelling is going to be like with that on. I’m not sure what that’s going to be or how that would work, other than it just being a presentation.

**John:** I’ve gone through some of the other demos. They have Alicia Keys in the rehearsal room. They also have one where you’re at this rhino sanctuary. They’re both incredibly impressive, because there are cameras that are there, and it’s like having a wide angle lens, but you’re right up in there, and so these rhinos are eating out of your hands. You’re just much closer than you probably ever would even be as a human being to one of these things.

In the case of Alicia Keys, it’s really easy to envision a play where you’re watching it in this space, because it’s not just in 3D; it’s like it’s around you. It’s like being in a theater in the round. Amazing, but also it changes how you would write and stage something like that, because you can’t perform the same way to a camera when there’s multiple cameras, when the viewer can actually move inside the space with you.

It’s really fascinating. I think there will be incredible things built for this. We just don’t know what they’re going to look like. It may be the wrong assumption to think we’re going to adapt existing media to fit this. It may be a different kind of thing that only makes sense in these spaces.

**Drew:** That’s fair. I also think it’s got to be really hard to light for a 360 video. How do you hide that?

**John:** You put the lights up high. That’s what they clearly did for the Alicia Keys thing. Also, the cameras, they are in these white towers that feel kind of 2001. They look like maybe they’re humidifiers, and you ultimately figure out those were the cameras, because they’re in the space too, and you can see where the cameras are. For sporting events, it’s going to be incredible, because you could literally put the camera in places where you could never otherwise see, which feels great and real. That’s going to be fascinating.

All the entertainment parts of it are compelling. I’ve watched some television. I’ve watched parts of movies in there. It really is great when you want to just shut the whole world out and just focus on a thing. That’s really nice, because it’s increasingly difficult to do that in these times. I was watching an episode of television, and I wasn’t also looking at my phone or also doing something else. I was just focused on the episode. That can be really nice.

**Drew:** One thing I do really like about it, that it doesn’t have those hiccups, those visual hiccups that the other VR/AR headsets have, because I remember using the Quest for the first time and then taking that off, and even in my dreams, I was starting to have that visual latency. It was really strange. But this doesn’t do that at all, which really helps.

**John:** Also, I get super motion sick, and I’ve had no issues with that at all with this. Now, the essential reason why we bought this was because we make Highland and Weekend Read and other apps that can work on the Vision Pro.

We already have Weekend Read for the Vision Pro. It’s absurd but actually kind of cool on that. I can open up the script for Anatomy of a Fall, and it can be bigger than I am. I could scale that one to be bigger. You’re scrolling through, and the fonts scale perfectly. That letter G is as big as my hand, which doesn’t seem useful, but in a weird way, you can study a text closely, because you can literally come up closer to the text.

The version of Weekend Read we have for Apple Vision Pro is the iPad version, and so all the iPad stuff basically works in there. You can highlight stuff. You can have characters read stuff aloud. It’s amazing that it just works. Is it optimized for it? No, not at all. You can envision a better way to do it. But it’s fine for what it is.

What I’ll be curious to see is whether apps like Highland, whether it really makes sense to build special versions for Apple Vision Pro, because there could be something very nice about the sense of just, you have these on, just like you’re watching a movie. You can put all the distractions away, and it’s just you and the words. You’re in your writing space. You’re in your little writers’ room, and you’re writing the script. There’s something compelling about that, because it can use an external keyboard, so you’re not typing with the little weird, floaty keyboard. You can actually type real, full-speed stuff inside it.

**Drew:** We had a listener write in who shared an article about someone who has a whole setup in the Yosemite Valley setting of the Vision Pro and writes essentially in a little snowy cabin, but they’re in their chair at home.

**John:** That makes sense. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That’s David Sparks, who does a Mac podcast I think I was on many, many years ago. It’s true, I can envision you build your own space, and that just becomes your writers’ room. When I was writing the first Arlo Finch, I needed to finish that first book while we were living in France. We moved to Paris during a heatwave. We had no air conditioning. I’m writing all these snowy scenes. I have to ponder this wintery valley. I would find these videos on YouTube that are just 12 hours of snowstorms and just the sound of snowstorms.

**Drew:** I love those.

**John:** Put those on my headphones, and that would be my space. Even though it was 100 degrees in the apartment, I would channel myself there. If I’d had the Apple Vision Pro at this point, it would’ve been really nice to just, again, pull up that snowy Yosemite Valley and write the scene in that place. There’s something nice about conjuring that. It could be really great.

Anyway, I’m not recommending listeners go out and buy one of these things, but if you have a chance to try it, it’s really worth trying it, because they really are some fascinating directions in which it can move us, thinking about the future. We’re definitely going to put some more stuff on it. People who do have it, we’ll announce when we’re putting out stuff that could be useful for it. I don’t know. It’s fun to see something new that’s really well designed and yet you also sense is going to change completely.

One of the things it reminded me about too was the Apple Watch was introduced. It looks like the Apple Watch of today. But if you actually go back and look at the features that were in it and what they thought was important, it was completely different. It was all about sending your heartbeat to your friend or staying in touch with your closest buddies. It was completely different. They didn’t realize this is mostly a fitness tracker that also keeps notifications. That’s what the Apple Watch is now. I think we’ll figure out in the next couple years what the Apple Vision Pro really is for and what the use cases are, and a lot of what we talk about now will seem a little bit silly.

**Drew:** I wonder if that has been the barrier for most of the VR/AR stuff is just that people don’t have the headsets. I think like you were saying, having computers in your home let people experiment with computers and figure out what that is.

**John:** Also, I will say there are much cheaper headsets out there. For a certain thing, I’m sure they’re great and probably better than the Apple Vision Pro. The rock stability of the illusion that you’re actually in that space is so good that that’s why I’m saying even if you’ve tried other headsets and been under-impressed, it’s worth it to go into guest mode on somebody else’s and just see what the world is like.

**Drew:** Yeah, definitely.

**John:** Drew, thanks so much.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 269 – Mystery vs. Confusion](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion)
* [Scriptnotes 332 – Wait for It](https://johnaugust.com/2018/wait-for-it-2)
* [A3 Artists Agency Shuts Down](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/a3-artists-agency-shuts-down-1235821430/) by Aaron Couch and Rebecca Sun for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Verve CEO and Co-Founder Bill Weinstein Leaves Agency After 14 Years](https://variety.com/2024/biz/news/bill-weinstein-verve-talent-agency-out-1235916578/) by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
* [A few thoughts on Sora](https://johnaugust.com/2024/a-few-thoughts-on-sora) by John August
* [GOODY-2](https://www.goody2.ai/)
* [Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot](https://www.wired.com/story/goody-2-worlds-most-responsible-ai-chatbot/) by Will Knight for Wired
* [Claire Keegan](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/274817.Claire_Keegan)
* [Contextual computing with Vision Pro: My Writing Cabin](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2024/02/contextual-computing-with-vision-pro-my-writing-cabin/) by David Sparks
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Segments originally produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/632standardV2.mp3).