The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 656 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you create a film genre? If you’re a filmmaker, perhaps your work inspires others to copy or remix those elements until the resulting movies feel like their own genre or subgenre. I’d argue that’s how we get slasher movies, for example. While there were definitely antecedents, we probably wouldn’t have the slasher subgenre without John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978. That’s not the only way you can create a film genre. If you’re a journalist or movie critic, perhaps you notice a common thread connecting a bunch of existing films and give it a name, like a scientist discovering a new taxonomy.
That’s the case with a microgenre we’re going to discuss today. I’m happy to have its originator as our guest. Max Read is a journalist, screenwriter, editor, and the owner operator of ReadMax, a weekly newsletter guide to the future. His writing has appeared in various publications with the word New York in the title, including New York Magazine, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, all put together there. He’s also the former editor of some defunct websites, including Gawker and Select All. Welcome to the show, Max.
Max Read: Thanks for having me.
John: As we were discussing on email, you’ve actually been mentioned on the podcast before, correct?
Max: Yes. I have a lot of friends who subscribe and they never ever text me after my newsletter goes out. Then lo and behold, I was on John August’s podcast and all of a sudden I got a lot of texts about my newsletter.
John: What were we talking about? Was this about–
Max: There was a Harper’s piece about the future of labor in Hollywood, I guess, in particular screenwriter labor. It was a riff that I’d been thinking about for a while about YouTube, TikTok, online influencers, a lot of which is my beat as a journalist, thinking about those people as competitors to what we do and thinking about one of the problems that we face as unionized writers is the fact that there’s this huge non-union workforce who are doing remarkably similar jobs to us, similar jobs to actors and directors as well. I gave it a goofy headline that didn’t live up to the promise of the headline. It’s something that has been on my mind for a long time now as a journalist, as a person online, as a person who consumes a lot of crap online, but also as a member of WGA and somebody who is a little nervous about the future of Hollywood right now.
John: Talk to us about why you’re a member of WGA. Is it for feature and TV work or is it because through the Writers Guild East and how that has organized some labor under the journalism?
Max: I am a member through TV writing, though it’s funny you ask that question. I was at Gawker between 2010 and 2015. WGAE organized Gawker while I was there. Then the week I left, the week after I left, they were finally certified. I was never actually a member of WGAE at Gawker. A few years later, I sold a show with a friend of mine based on our time at Gawker as it happened. That was what jumped me into the WGAE.
John: I love that you say jumped into it. Like it is just a mafia thing.
Max: There really weren’t enough initiation rituals in the end.
John: Totally. We have on the show to talk about halogencore, which is this micro genre you brought up. That’s something we’ll get into in a second. While you’re here, I also would like to talk about journalism and the overlap with what we do in film and TV writing, because those are blurry boundaries now. Actually how one makes a living in journalism these days, because it feels like a transition is happening there that’s going to be familiar to anybody working in television, for example.
Because once upon a time, you were a staff writer on Cheers, and that was your entire job for all your year, was doing that. Now it’s about assembling a bunch of jobs over the course of a year. It’s about making your year, earning enough money to actually stay in this business. That feels very much like what so many writers working in other parts of the media are doing these days.
Max: Like you say, I’ve had a number of jobs over the 15 or so years that I’ve been a journalist. My career has both been very traditional and very unorthodox. I got my start working at Gawker as a blogger at a time when that was still a pretty new thing to be doing. Then I went and worked at New York Magazine for five years. That was a fantastic education on how a magazine is made. Some of my favorite things I’ve ever written and worked on came out in that time. Then I left New York to pursue screenwriting, and then also to start this newsletter that we’ve been talking about.
The newsletter is probably the newest of job that I’ve been doing. I’m essentially a columnist. I write two newsletters a week. I’m also the publisher. I have to keep track of subscribers and think about how I’m gaining subscribers and keep track of my numbers and think about all these things. For me personally, I like it a lot. I like the independence. In some ways, it’s motivating to be my own boss in all these ways. It’s not for everybody. I would hate to see a world where this is the only way that journalists are getting work.
Unfortunately, it has not been a good few years since the pandemic. In particular, jobs at newspapers and magazines have just been hemorrhaging. It feels like basically everybody these days works for either the Times or one of the big Condé Nast publications, which it’s good that I can be making money doing this newsletter but it doesn’t feel good. I don’t have a good sense of what the next 10 years look like either.
John: I definitely want to dig into that. We’ll take care of some news and follow up first, but then we’ll get to halogencore. Then we’ll get into what it’s like to make it living as an independent writer. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I’d like to talk with you about the acceleration of time and events that we’re going through right now, because it feels like the last eight weeks, something broke and everything is now just happening faster than it’s ever happened before.
I know you’re a person every year who does a recap of what happened over the course of the previous year. I fear for you because it just feels like so much has happened so quickly that as you’re bringing down the months, like January and February and March might look normal. Then just the length and volume of what’s happened in the last period just seems unfathomable. I’d love to get into this sense of the acceleration of time with you.
Max: In some ways, it’s very good. If your job is working off the news, the more material, the better. There was a time when August was just absolutely dead as a month to do it. Now it’s like, “Oh, there’s always something to write about every week.” I don’t have to spend all weekend worrying about what my column’s going to be like the next year. It’s also it’s exhausting. It is a really good way to bring yourself out.
For a long time, I’ve said to myself, I don’t want to be a weekly columnist, I need to work on longer projects or whatever. I also just think, personally there’s just something about my metabolism, my processing metabolism, that really helps to just when stuff is happening to be able to take it, put something on the page, work out how I feel about it in writing, think it through, and then be able to move on instead of– The writing actually helps the sense of being buried under all this stuff.
Look, if you’re reading a lot of things, you’re getting a lot of ideas. If you’re also doing fiction at the same time that you’re doing nonfiction, you’re just constantly getting stuff that might work or might not work for something you’re doing in the future. If you can’t sort that out well, then maybe that’s a bad thing. I think it can be nice to know that you’ve got this big, I don’t know what people have, a bookmarks folder, or just a document where they’re pasting links or whatever, it is that people are doing to just know next time you’re stuck, you’ve got something you can go scroll through to remember everything that happened in July that might be useful to you.
John: Let me make a note, because I do want to get back to how you organize all the stuff that comes in and how you think about that stuff. First off, though, we have a little bit of news here. Highland, which is the screenwriting and general purpose writing app that my company makes, has an amazing new version that’s out in beta now. I’ve been using this version of it for some 18 months or so. Now you can too. It’s really good. It’s for the Mac, it’s for iPad and iPhone. Drew, you’ve been using it?
Drew: Yes. I love it. It’s so clean, and it’s gorgeous, and it’s fast. I’m excited for people to try it.
John: Over the summer, Drew had to do some work in Final Draft because I was working on a project where he had to deliver some Final Draft files as well. That was brutal to transition to Final Draft after that.
Drew: It hurt to go back.
John: Anyway, if you would like to beta test this, we’ll put a link in the show notes for how you sign up for that. It’s not going to be a very long beta. It’s only a couple weeks before we get this out into the world, hopefully. We’d love to have some more people out there testing it. Max, what do you write in? The columns you’re doing, what has Read Max written in?
Max: This is a sin for most journalists, but I write directly into the CMS, the content management system that the blog publishes to. For a long time, you were never supposed to do that because there was no way to save things on the web. If it crashed, you would lose the whole post. I have to say, I write on Substack as the platform I write for, and they have created what, as far as I’m concerned, is the best CMS I’ve ever used in all my years working in these things. It auto-saves. I never feel uncomfortable. It’s a little like when you’re writing a screenplay, you like to have it formatted as it’s going to be in the end. It’s much easier to do that. I like being able to see how it’s going to look on the page as I’m writing it. When I do longer magazine features, I go in Google Docs, partly just because the sharing is the easiest way to do it, and commenting is really easy for editors. My editors always take it out of Google Docs and put it in Microsoft Word. I just have version of this everywhere, basically.
John: No, it’s brutal. We’re testing this one and see if there’s stuff in Highland that you like. Other follow-up here, Drew, back in episode 582, we were talking about this playwright who wanted to move into screenwriting, and we had someone write back with some extra advice for that.
Drew: Yeah, Laura wrote, “As a playwright turned TV writer and feature writer myself, I wanted to offer some advice to Bethany. It sounds to me like her impulse to put people in a room and let things explode comes from an exposure to a lot of single-set, single-room plays, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, August Osage County, et cetera. I highly recommend she does some deep study on films that essentially do the same thing to see how she can begin to adapt from one medium into another. Shiva Baby and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande are great places to start. Leo Grande feels the most like a stage play, two characters, one location, except for the final scene, with time passing in between each scene. Shiva Baby is a great example of how to chuck a bunch of people into the same shared space and keep things propulsive because the protagonist is trapped in a house with her antagonists.”
John: I was also thinking about My Dinner with Andre is it another classic film where there’s a bunch of people in one space doing one thing. Those are all great examples. As I thought more about this initial question, see it feels like Bethany is struggling not so much with keeping people in one location, but understanding how to jump forward in time and that it’s really about the ability to cut forward in time and to eliminate those moments in between stuff that is the power of film, the ability to cut. It’s really understanding how cutting works and how things can move forward.
Some of these movies that Laura was mentioning here have examples of that where you’re in one location but you’re jumping forward in time. I think you just need to be more comfortable with the form of not having characters walk in and say their thing than exit, but rather the movie itself is telling its story through cutting and through time. She’s just going to have to experiment with that and just write some things that necessitate cutting.
Also had some follow-up on Hallmark movies. We talked a little bit about like Hallmark Christmas movies. Craig had wondered aloud how many Hallmark Christmas movies there were. Stephen Follows, who’s the guy who does all the data analysis of film and stuff, has done other projects with us before. Stephen Follows wrote this great blog post about just how many Hallmark Christmas movies there are and really detailed into the tropes and the expectations of a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Drew: In his blog post, Stephen Follows says he found a total of 307 Hallmark Christmas movies with production reaching an average of 30 a year over the past few years.
John: He included some great charts to talk through how much the production of these movies has grown over the years. 30 in a genre per year is crazy that there’s 30 of these being made each year. He listed the genres within them. Obviously romance is very high for these Christmas movies. Most of them come out in November and December, which also makes sense. If you’re curious about holiday movies on Hallmark, this is the definitive source, the definitive article, I think, for the data behind this. 180 degrees, I think, not as opposite as you can get from a Hallmark Christmas movie is this genre that Max Read has described in, I think originally on your Letterboxd, but then became a blog post. Can you tell us about what Halogencore is? Try to define this genre for us.
Max: If you don’t mind, I can just read a little bit.
John: Sure, go for it.
Max: I’ll just read a short thing that I wrote, partly just me trying to list out what I liked about these movies.
“Halogencore movies are stories of corporate intrigue and malfeasance told from the point of view of characters on the outside of the inside, low-level apparatchiks, functionaries, subordinates, and middle managers, navigating crisis from the periphery of real power. They usually take place over a short timeframe, day or a night or a weekend, and against a ticking clock. They are not stories of lasting change, stunning revelation, or dramatic reversals of fortune. They’re stories of beaten-down people acquiescing to or negotiating compromise with power. The victory of a happy ending in a Halogencore movie is not that power has been toppled, but that our compromised hero has managed to survive inside the machine without being crushed. As the name suggests, Halogencore movies feature lots of fluorescent lighting and nighttime city shots. The action is largely office-bound.”
John: At this moment, I’d love to actually play a clip from Margin Call. Margin Call is one of the ones you identify. Let’s take a listen to this moment from Margin Call, which I think actually does hit a lot of these beats. I think you’ll recognize it once we play it.
[plays a clip from the movie Margin Call]
John: Max, that to me feels like what you’re describing here. You have a bunch of folks who work for this investment firm. One of them has discovered something that is highly amiss, but they’re not classic outsiders coming into a space and having to learn about a space. They were already part of the system and they’re discovering a new flaw. They’re discovering a new way that the world is broken. Is that a fair description?
Max: Yes. And you’ll notice they don’t quite know what’s going on themselves yet. They’re ahead of you, the audience, but they themselves are still behind somebody else who’s not on screen. Their first action when they uncover whatever secret or whatever revelation they’ve just found is they have to call their bosses. It’s not like a, “Let’s go get this published.” It’s not like whatever. It’s like the subordinates have to find the guy, the middle manager has to call the middle manager above him. Margin Call is a movie that’s great with working through hierarchy and establishing and demonstrating hierarchies in that way. The music does a lot there. It’s a great music cue, but you can feel the tension mounting just through the dialogue in that scene without really ever learning. If you’ve never seen Margin Call, it’s about banks, but if you didn’t know that, you don’t need to know what they’re talking about or what’s happening to understand just through what they’re saying to each other how serious everything that’s happening is.
John: Yes. Let’s talk about some of the other films in the genre because if it was just Margin Call, it’s like, oh Margin Call is a one-off. It’s an example of this thing, but it’s not a genre until there’s many films that can be categorized with it. Talk to us about the other things you identify as being, oh, this feels like halogencore.
Max: To me, the big one is Michael Clayton. Michael Clayton, in some ways, this was me attempting to define movies that are like Michael Clayton because it’s just one of my favorite movies. Michael Clayton is similarly, again, it’s about a lawyer who’s on the outside of his own law firm. At one point, his brother says to him, all the lawyers think you’re a cop, all the cops think you’re a lawyer. He’s in this liminal identity space. He’s working against time to find his mentor. It’s all in offices. There’s the similar droney music making you feel anxious the whole time.
I actually didn’t write this out, the set of observations out till I’d seen The Assistant, which is a relatively recent movie where Julia Garner plays the assistant to an unseen and unnamed, but very clearly Harvey Weinstein-based movie producer. The movie is about the office environment under a tyrant like that, where everybody knows something bad has happened or is happening and nobody is able to talk about it or do anything about it. Again, it has the same sense of like, you the audience are a little bit behind the characters. They do this in a really enjoyable feeling. You don’t quite know what’s going on.
Part of the reason it works is that the characters themselves are also a little bit behind. They themselves don’t quite know the depth of wrongdoing or exactly what’s happening. They’re trying to figure it out themselves, but also to figure it out without getting in trouble. They’re not crusading. To me, that’s three that really hit the mark. There’s a bunch of others that have a similar, let’s call it a vibe. There’s earlier movies, movies that were made– Shattered Glass, it’s a great movie about the New Republic and Stephen Glass, who is famously identified as having fabricated a bunch of stories.
Syriana is a total favorite of mine, is a Stephen Gaghan movie about– It’s a little like Traffic. It’s all these interconnected stories about geopolitics, extremely depressing movie, just unbelievably politically bleak movie, but similarly has a lot of these– Jeffrey Wright plays a high-powered corporate lawyer who suddenly steps into the world of oil money and political assassination and realizes how much more insane everything has gotten than he understood.
Even a more recent movie, High Flying Bird, the Steven Soderbergh movie, which is a very different arena. It’s not banks. It’s not oil. It’s about an NBA agent who’s trying to break the owner’s cartel in the NBA. It’s a little more fun than these other ones, I suppose, but it has the same rhythms because a lot of people are on the phone all the time, they’re having these secret meetings. You’re constantly catching up to the action as it happens.
I could keep going on, there’s another movie that I want to really recommend, because I don’t think many people have seen it, called Azor, which is, to me, one of my favorite movies of the last few years. It’s a Swiss-Argentinian movie, Swiss director, set in Argentina about a Swiss banker who comes over to Argentina during the Dirty War, under the military junta, and is looking for his partner, who’s disappeared. He spends the whole movie in these shadowy meetings with these very scary Argentinian fascists and military apparatchiks, trying to uncover what’s happened amidst this world where kids are disappearing, students are disappearing all the time.
He’s recognizing and uncovering, and unlike what you might expect from a Hollywood movie, it’s not about, “I’m going to uncover this, bring everybody to justice.” It’s, “I’m going to uncover this and then cover it right back up because I didn’t really want to know in the first place and I just need to get my own thing and get out of here.” Those are some good ones. There’s a Letterboxd list, there’s my newsletter, people are welcome to come suggest ones to me, too, if they’ve got them.
John: Let’s talk about the common elements we’re seeing here, because there’s structural elements. We talked about how these tend to be stories that have a protagonist who’s already part of that world. I love that you say they’re on the outside of the inside. They’re already part of the system, but they don’t know quite how the whole system works, but they’re ahead of us as the audience is. But really, the vibe is what’s crucial. The vibe, you say anxiety, you say dread, paranoia, this pessimism, this sense of a crushing doom. In this setup, I was talking about slasher films, and in a weird way, there is an aspect of a slasher. It’s not about bringing down the system, it’s just about surviving.
It’s just being the person who actually emerges at the end, and there’s not a sense that you’re going to topple this regime, you’re just trying to get through it. I think back to the end of Michael Clayton, and we do see Michael Clayton, the George Clooney character, be able to get a victory over Tilda Swinton’s character, but then as he’s in his cab ride leaving, he recognizes he didn’t really do all that much. It’s not like the problem of the movie is fully solved, it’s just he got through this one situation, he got through this one moment.
Max: Yes. One really obvious antecedent to these is paranoia thrillers of the ‘70s. Three Days of the Condor is a really classic one that has– What’s the final line? Something like, “But are they going to print it?” He’s got all his documents, he’s taken into the Times. What’s one of the things that’s interesting to me about this is that, as we’ve been saying, there’s not a do-gooder figure. It’s really rare that there’s a crusading — It’s not Pelican brief. There’s not a Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington crusading to uncover something. It doesn’t have like a journalist at the center.
It’s guys who work at law firms or at banks or in big glass offices who are forced to compromise whatever small measure of integrity they have left. That’s the vibe of that, like you say, of that pessimism and bleakness is, to me, all about that sense that you can’t do anything. You can save yourself, maybe. That’s maybe the best thing you can do. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is get out of there.
John: The relationship between these movies and the paranoid thrillers, which tended to focus on investigators or on journalists is really interesting because in the journalism thrillers, it tends to be, we have our crusading journalists going in and looking for answers. The point of view is from the journalist. Look at Spotlight, which is a movie that feels like it’s close to this in some ways, except that they are an outsider looking into a system. In those, the POV tends to be, in my estimation, fairly well locked to the characters investigating. But as I think to Margin Call, or I think to Michael Clayton, the movie is willing to switch POVs and show us things that our central protagonist does not know yet.
We’re able to cut to Tilda Swinton’s POV and see how she’s freaking out in the restroom stall. In Margin Call, we’re able to cut to Kevin Spacey’s character trying to get his way out of the situation. We as an audience have information that at times even our protagonist doesn’t have. I think that leads to this overall greater sense of dread, the same way in a horror film, where sometimes we’re cutting to the killer’s point of view and we know where the killer is in relationship to our hero who’s trying to hide or succeed or get away from the killer.
Max: Margin Call does something I think is absolutely brilliant, which is it hides– It’s about the Lehman Brothers crash in ’08. You know what’s going on. It effectively hides the actual mechanics of the secret and the problem. You focus is almost entirely on internal personal dynamics at the bank and fear and frustration and paranoia until the bank’s CEO arrives with an unbelievably great cameo by Jeremy Irons, just being the most Jeremy Irons he possibly can be. And he’s the guy who’s like, “Can somebody please explain to me what the fuck is going on as though I were a dog or a small child?”
It both works really well because finally the audience is clued in, and they’re clued in a great, natural and organic way. We get the explanation from Kevin Spacey and Zachary Quinto about exactly what’s been happening. But it’s also thematically great because you finally see that, even the guy at the very center, even the inside of the inside, doesn’t really know what’s happening. Everybody is out on a limb. Everybody is piecing together information as it comes in. Everybody’s fearing for their own ass. Everybody is trying to get out. To me, that’s the best scene in the movie. It’s a boardroom scene. It just works really well. It just nails exactly what’s happening.
John: Let’s look at other movies that are doing similar things, but sometimes funnier or sometimes just in a different way. We talk about financial shenanigans, The Big Short, of course, is a great look at the collapse of this housing bubble and how everything goes awry. We have those moments where we need to explain to a character on screen, but also to the audience, what’s really happening here. I think the difference is that while some of our characters are complicit in what’s happening here, there’s not that same sense of dread to it. We know that a calamity is coming, but there’s not that sense of impending doom.
Another example would be Moneyball. Moneyball is very insider. You have characters who know things that the audience doesn’t know. They recognize how complicated the situation is. Yet the movie ultimately lets itself have more fun than it’s not just all dread the whole time. There are moments of real tension and suspense. That’s not the overall goal of the story.
Max: It’s funny because there’s a bunch of techniques. Moneyball, for example, looks– It’s got that Soderbergh digital camera washed out look and the post-rock soundtrack to give you a little bit of that feeling. But it subverts the expectations of that in a nice way, that it’s funny and it’s a little inspiring, even if it’s ambiguously inspiring. It’s not like the A’s won the World Series. I like a movie like that, that can magpie pick things that create certain expectations in the audience and then subvert them a little. Soderbergh is, to me, a huge influence on this general genre, probably because of his use of digital cinematography. Early traffic is probably an early version of this. He loves his really intricate screenplays that are hiding all kinds of things from all kinds of characters.
But probably his most halogencore movie is actually The Informant with Matt Damon, which is a great, very funny and probably underseen movie that takes all the halogencore ideas and tropes and then just plays it like a straight comedy. It’s a really interesting exercise in what you can do when you set up a set of expectations and then just tweak one of your knobs a little bit. You’re like, “What if we accept that this is actually quite funny and we make it and we just play that up a little bit?”
John: As we were listening to the clip from Margin Call, I was also thinking about Glengarry Glen Ross in the sense of the overlapping dialogue, the sense of characters never fully completing a thought, but they’re recognizing they’re building on top of each other. There’s a sense of power that’s created by ideas not being fully expressed, but recognition that this motion is happening. Or The Insider, which is another great story, identified as being a proto-halogencore, because it has a journalist at the center of it, it’s not quite the same situation as being trapped inside the space with these characters, but those are all aspects of that.
Going back to Soderbergh, I think you’re right to nail his digital cinematography, but it’s also it’s pulling a documentary aesthetic into a classic narrative space. He didn’t end up directing Moneyball, but Moneyball is often shot like a documentary. It’s shot and has that aspect that you feel like you’re wandering into conversations that were already happening. Even the scouts are talking around the table, it feels like, “Oh, this could have just been an actual real thing that they just set up some cameras and shot.” I think you get that in a lot of these movies where it feels like the camera happened to find these characters having this conversation, which is an aesthetic on that.
Max: Pretty true to most of these. The immediacy, I think, is really important because, to me the ticking clock is one of the most important things of movies like this, that there is a deadline that people are working against and that creates all the urgency and the camera wobbling and turning corners, that Wiseman documentary, it’s like very Frederick Wiseman, like just a guy with a camera wandering around the high-powered lawyer’s office for some reason. It heightens that sense. There’s no stately compositions or anything. It’s just like, we got a snippet of this conversation. It mimics the idea that you might overhear something at the office and realize that– The Assistant is particularly good at this, because so much of that is she hears things going on behind the closed door and your acid reflux starts to activate because you’re feeling just as stressed as she is.
John: We’re talking about feature films. Feature films obviously are a story with a beginning and an end in a short period of time, which feel like they’re crucial aspects to the structure of the halogencore movies. They’re not necessarily in real time, but they’re at a compressed period of time. Yet, I see some of these aesthetics also being done in series television. If you look at Succession, I think there’s an aspect of this dread happening in many individual episodes of Succession. I think Severance has aspects of this too, where there is this sense of crushing dread and characters who are the part of it, but they don’t see the whole picture. They’re touching a piece of the elephant, but they don’t know what the whole elephant is. Even though we’re talking about something that is a film or genre, aspects of that can absolutely apply to series television as well.
Max: We joked about proto-halogencore, about movies that are maybe a little too early to be considered the genre but are obviously like serious influences. A few that come to mind are actually ‘70s and ‘80s BBC television series, which are limited series. It’s in this ambiguous space between endlessly serial and the TV. The original BBC, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is very– John le Carre as a novelist and all the movies that have been based on his novels are also very important, I think to– Nobody’s better at cultivating that sense of rot on the inside than John le Carre.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there’s a great series called Edge of Darkness from the ‘80s about a detective, it’s a nuclear paranoia, a detective looking for his daughter, that have a lot of these things. It’s like 1980s England in the minds of filmmakers of the time was one of the bleakest places imaginable. They nailed it, I suppose. Those are great examples of ways to, even if you don’t necessarily have a ticking clock to draw out these threads of bleakness, of paranoia, of despair, of just mopping up a mess that is never really going to be fully clean.
John: I want to close this up by talking about the actual practical takeaways from this, because it’s one thing to identify a genre, but it’s actually can be useful for people who want to make movies, because it’s hard to say, “I want to make a movie like Michael Clayton. I want to make a movie like this.” Once you identify it’s in this space, and so you don’t necessarily need to use the term halogencore, but once you can identify multiple examples of this thing, and what is the aesthetic, what is the choice that you’re going for, that’s really, really useful.
If you’re setting out to write a project that is in this space or you have written a project that is in this space, to be able to talk about how it fits into the overall landscape is really useful. I do hope, and I think it’s a plausible hope, that some folks are out there writing films that could fall into this genre. Just by having this conversation and by giving a word for it might make it a little bit easier for them to find the financing, find the champions for the project, because they see like, “Oh, I get what this is.” This is not a one-time unique thing.
Max: I’ve taken generals and tried to explain this concept to executives, and there’s a lot of executives who love these movies. They’re great movies. Who doesn’t love Michael Clayton? The more we can spread the gospel of halogencore, the easier it’ll be to sit down across from somebody and say, “I’m writing a halogencore movie.” I would like to watch more of these personally. I would like to get more made. So I hope that’s true.
John: Talk to me about halogencore as a title. I’ll confess that it took me a beat to figure out what it was that you were going for, because halogen, to me, I think of my dorm room that had the torch here, halogen light, that always, word was going to set the whole room on fire. There’s that light aesthetic. I see what you’re going for there.
Max: This is the problem with doing this as a one-off letterbox list before it became a running theme on my– If I had thought it was going to come back, I would have sat on it a little bit longer. I didn’t let my New York Magazine packaging instincts really take over.
I do think we talked about this documentary, the washed-out digital, like Michael Mann and Soderbergh, early digital cinema pioneers, the documentary aesthetic, that feels so important. Just trying to communicate that idea of the establishing shot of so many of these movies is a huge tower in the city at night, and one floor or one office is lit up. You’re in for a good ride if that’s the establishing shot for your movie. That was what I wanted to get at, was that halogencore. That’s what I’m looking for when I start my movie.
John: Great. Let’s transition to talking about the– Oh, what is the New York Magazine package for it? You have to have an image for it. Let’s talk a little bit more about journalism and what your history has been, writing for other people and writing for yourself now, because most of the folks who are listening to this podcast are probably writing for themselves. As a screenwriter, I’ve always been writing for myself, going from job to job to job. More classically, as a journalist, you were employed at a publication. You were there exclusively for a time. That’s not the reality now. Can you just quickly chart through how you got started and what the trajectory has been for you?
Max: I had a normal start. I was an intern at the Daily Beast back when Tina Brown ran it. I met a woman named Maureen O’Connor, a great journalist who had gone to Gawker. She was working nighttime. I wanted to leave Daily Beast. She said, “Come take my night shift.” So I spent a year doing 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM. That was the entrance. Once I had that job and could demonstrate that I could do it, I was able to advance in Gawker and then get this job at New York Magazine. I love both experiences, but in terms of working for people, Gawker was a much more independent place, and I think prepared me for my current, much more independent job in a lot of ways.
We had editors but not at every moment was every single thing cleared. Certainly, very few things, until the later stages, were deeply read through or crossed out. We were mostly writing 200, 300 words. A lot of the training there was activation energy to find things, come up with an angle, write them fast, whereas New York Mag, in general, especially on the print side, was a much more collaborative thoughtful place. It was still a little bit helter-skelter because we were putting out a magazine every two weeks, but you’d have a month, two months, three months of lead time. Oftentimes, you’d spend a lot of time reporting. You’re in meetings with your editor. You’re in meetings with the art department. I really loved that. I love that collaborative work.
A good TV room can be very similar where you just have a lot of people with a lot of great ideas, able to bounce off one another to really craft something that feels like it’s the best possible version of what it can be. Now my job is like, I don’t even have coworkers. I’m here at home. The closest thing I have to coworkers is a bunch of group chats that I just am constantly hitting every day that function as the slack room of my coworkers. It’s a challenge in some ways.
I have a three-year-old, and it’s been really useful to have a very flexible schedule when I have a toddler. That, to me, is the best thing about working by myself with no real obligations. It is hard. I find this when I’m trying to write spec scripts or whatever, that it can be really hard. Everybody who’s listened to the podcast knows how hard it can be to force yourself to work when there’s no stick and maybe no carrot either. You’re just like, “I got to go put some words on the page.”
But the structure of, I obligate to my subscriber, I am obligated to produce one post or two posts a week to my subscribers, is really useful to just keep my brain moving, keep the wheels greased, so to speak. But Journalism is so volatile right now. I hope the newsletter process can sustain itself and people will keep wanting to pay for years to come. I feel like I may have to jump back into the office world sometime soon, or who knows.
John: Talk to me about making your year, making your month, because you’re publishing through Substack. For that, you have a certain number of subscribers and the subscribers are paying you a certain amount per month. You can expect how much to get in, which is our premium members to Scriptnotes, they are paying us five bucks a month, and that is income that we can count on, which is great, it helps stabilize things. That’s not the only thing you do. You can also write pieces for existing magazines if you want to, you can do special things. What do you find is the balance there, and how much are you pursuing just writing for yourself versus outside work?
Max: I’m trying to do a couple feature, like magazine features a year. It depends a lot on the work itself. If I get a freelance offer that I am passionate about, that I know I can complete quite quickly, then I will usually say yes, just because why not? It’s not going to take a lot of my time. But I find that a long, full-length magazine feature really takes it out of me. Whether or not I was doing the newsletter, it requires a lot of work. Despite producing two newsletters a week, I am a pretty slow writer, and I don’t want to be tearing my hair out. It’s good, I think, to challenge yourself. It’s good for me to challenge myself and make sure that I have some end of year or end of quarter, or whatever it is, goal.
I’m going to finish this piece, I’m going to finish this script, I’m going to do this. But I don’t like the system changes every six months. It’s like some months it’s really nice to have, Monday is the day I work on this project, and then Tuesday I do the newsletter, and then Wednesday is the whatever. That just isn’t going to work. Especially because when you’re doing the newsletter, if something happens in the world that you have a quick response to, you have to listen to that, that’s the best, quickest, easiest way that you’re going to get a newsletter out that week. You might think Monday is my script day but then news drops that you’re like, “I have a 1,600 word idea about that I can just bang out right now,” and now Monday’s not your script day anymore, so I hope Tuesday can be your script day or Friday or whatever it is. It’s hard. If somebody out there has figured out a solution to this, please let me know. It’s a matter of picking projects that I don’t dread working on in the end of the day.
I shouldn’t say this. I hope my manager’s not listening. If I have a pilot spec that I’m working on, and it’s taking me a lot longer than it should, it might be because I don’t actually want to do this pilot spec. That I had this idea and it– maybe it’s just time to throw it in the can and say, let’s find something that I actually will want to work on after my kid goes to bed or that I’ll want to work on in the middle of the day or after lunch or whatever. It’s the hardest thing about being a writer, I think.
John: For the Scriptnotes book, I was just editing the chapter with Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Like you, is a writer who works both in journalism, doing celebrity profiles, but also writes her own stuff, or writes her own books, and now runs her own TV shows. She talks about sort of the challenge of figuring out like, how am I spending my time right now? What is the best use of my– thing to do right now? Unlike you, she’s a very fast writer, so she can do all these things at once, but it is that juggling act.
One thing you mentioned is that you have group chats with other writers and that that becomes, essentially, your Slack channel, your newsroom. It’s the people around you. But I do notice that there’s an ecosystem within these writers who are doing Substacks and doing other things that I feel like you’re also always in communication with each other. I think I probably first found you because Today in Tabs have linked out to an article that you had done.
There’s also like the Noahpinions and the Tyler Cowens. There is this web of independent people writing stuff that does feed on itself and sort of supports itself. Do you actively try to sustain that or is that just a thing that naturally comes up?
Max: That’s a good question. We used to call that the blogosphere when they were blogs.
John: Sure. Back in the day, yes.
Max: From a business perspective, it’s hugely important. Actually, if I’m just separating out the creative process part of it, I get new subscribers like you because these other people link to me, so I need that as a growth plan. From a stuff perspective, I presume that I could. It probably wouldn’t be great if my newsletter every week was just something I came up with completely off the top of my head.
This dialogue with other writers, the ability to hear what they’re saying and respond to it, I think not only gives me– means that I’m doing a little bit less work every week in terms of ideating, to use a horrible neologism, but also that I’m responding to things out there in the world that are actually happening. It brings in new readers, and I actually think readers enjoy it.
One of the weirdest and funniest things about my job as a newsletter writer is that, a lot of ways, what I do is I’m like a YouTuber for Gen-Xers and elder Millennials. It’s as much about me and the way I think about things and my personality and my preferences as it is about the specific topics under review or my arguments or whatever else. That makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m just at the very early end of a generation that is comfortable with being a social media influencer.
I think you have to make a little bit of peace with the fact that this is how people get to know you. This is how they follow you and why they follow you. When I have an article, I have 40,000 people on my list who will go read it because I say, “Here’s an article I read.” If I were to write a book or what– any other project that I want people to get to, I now have this audience.
Part of that is just they know me. They know how I think about things, they know what kinds of things I like. I don’t like to do super personal — I’m not really a personal writer, I like to give my son and my wife a little bit of privacy, but it’s the sense that I have a particular way of thinking about things and people like to read me think through things in that way that I think is the kind of thing. Just to connect it back to your first question, I think that’s true of a lot of these writers.
There’s these sort of personalities who are like, I don’t always agree what Tyler Cowen says, but I think he’s somebody who– he gives me a valuable perspective from that particular kind of person he is and the expertise he has or whatever, and I want to read him because it allows me to set my own, to think about how I feel about something. The more people there are in that kind of network or ecosystem the more fertile and fruitful it can be.
John: You’re making your living through the Substack and yet that’s not the only place you express your ideas. There’s this aspect of like we’re expected to do multiple things at once or sort of have multi-media presences at once. I was a blogger, so my johnaugust.com was a blog and for many years it was a blog. The whole reason we started the podcast was that a blog is just a monologue. It’s just me having a conversation with myself.
There were comments on the blog for a while and there was that sense that people were reading it and there was some feedback there. It wasn’t until there was a podcast that it could actually be a conversation and people could engage and dig in on a topic. The overlap between what we do on this podcast and what I do on the blog versus an influencer or a YouTuber is really interesting. It’s a generational shift.
I would say that one of the real advantages, though, to doing it as a print is it’s easy for me to go back and look through your old posts on Halogencore. I could see what you’ve written on Halogencore before and YouTube would be almost impossible for me to go back and assemble like what all that stuff was before. It’s just a real advantage to print. One of the reasons why we’ve had transcripts of the podcast since the very beginning is because it makes it simple for us to actually go back and find what was there and what the history was.
Have we talked about this topic before? What did we say then? How has our thinking changed? That’s just a huge advantage to writing stuff down versus a YouTube video or even tweets. I sometimes see and Tyler Cowen will often link out to things that I think are going to be blog posts were actually just a thread of like seven tweets. Well, is that an article? What is that? Do you ever struggle with the idea of like, is this something that should be a newsletter or should this be a tweet?
Max: Well, I quit Twitter. I quit Twitter in 20– like during–
John: Yes, I noticed you’re not on there.
Max: No.
John: You’re not really on threads either so you–
Max: No. One thing I can say for Substack is, once I had– once I recognized that I could make money from my tossed-off thoughts, as long as I expanded them to 600, 800, 1,200 words, I’ve– there’s no looking back. I was like really active on Twitter when I was at Gawker and New York Magazine. In a lot of ways, I owe a lot of my career to Twitter. I don’t think I would have been able to start this newsletter without the audience I’d already built up on Twitter.
At some point, it became clear that I just, like many people, did not really have a healthy relationship to it, spent too much time on it. I would find myself, before going to bed, looking at my phone and getting furious at somebody I didn’t even know. It’s like, what a waste of my energy and time. I quit and around the same time I started the Substack. I wasn’t really thinking of the Substack as a replacement for Twitter but now that I know that I can put out to an audience that really wants to receive it, my thoughts, and I will probably get money for doing so, it has helped nip in the bud–
In addition to the fact that the Musk takeover has scattered everything that was special about Twitter to the winds, and Threads and Bluesky haven’t quite hit the mass or the whatever it is that allows them to replace it. To answer your question, this is something that I think I learned really well at Gawker, is that if something occupies your mind for a certain amount of time, for five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, it actually probably is worth writing about.
Maybe you don’t have anything more to say about it in a sentence, but I bet you could squeeze a paragraph or two out of it. You can have multiple items in your newsletter. You could do blogs where you just do a short thing every time. We used to have this joke, Slack is a workplace chat app There was a rule- It wasn’t a Gawker rule, it was for Deadspin, the sports blog. -there’s a certain number of Slack messages, if 10 Slack messages about a single topic went by, somebody had to write about it for the site.
If it was interesting enough for 10 messages, then it needs to go on a site. Don’t hem and haw, don’t think about it. If you’re a writer, almost– you’re almost guaranteed to be overthinking this kind of thing all the time, just go for it.
John: The reason this episode is this is because I posted a link in Slack to Drew saying like, “Hey, this is a really interesting article,” and I realized, as I post, it’s like, “Oh, you should probably have him on to talk about Halogencore.” It does circle all back around. I want to wrap this up by talking about, you are also a person who wants to write film and television.
You have a manager, you have that as an aspiration as well. How do you think about balancing what you want to do there versus what your– what is your day job, at a day job you actually really like which is running the Substack, because there’s an opportunity cost to doing all the 600, 800,000 words on a topic because that’s time you’re not writing a script.
Max: Yeah. The newsletters only two years old. I haven’t been in a room while I’ve been doing it. So far, it’s been like a, “Well, that’ll be a good problem to have whenever I have it.” For me, the real balance is the having a family and a social life and all these other things. If I had no other obligations, I could easily be in a room all day or do punch-ups on a script or whatever, and then write the newsletter at night, but I want to spend time with my son and my wife, and I want to go out and have dinner and all these other things.
To be brutally honest, right now, the way TV writing in particular is looking in Hollywood, it feels like I should be concentrating my energy on the guaranteed income I make from the newsletter versus the sort of possibility that I might be one of the 10 TV writers getting work this year. Part of the thing I was saying before about passion, the passion stuff, is I hadn’t written fiction, until I started writing this show with my friend back in 2018, I hadn’t written fiction since high school, basically, and I’d forgotten how much I loved it. I’d forgotten how those muscles worked and how much I enjoyed being able to exercise that part of me. And so in some ways it’s like, I’m having ideas throughout the day- It’s similar to what we were just talking about, -I’m having ideas throughout the day, so why not?
Even if it’s a slim chance that this thing’s going to get made, or it’s going to get me in the right room or whatever it is, why not, therapeutically, just for the hobby sake, do that? But again, as we keep saying, the balance is impossible to figure out. There’ll be weeks where it’s like I won’t do anything on the newsletter, but I will get 40 or 50 pages out on a script that I’m interested in.
Then there are months where I’m like, it’s just a newsletter every week and maybe a magazine feature. I haven’t opened final draft, it’s just the moldering on my desktop somewhere.
John: Maybe not opening a final draft is the right choice, we need to get you writing in Highland instead.
Max: Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe that’s what I need.
John: That is the secret. That’s what’s going to change everything for you. Everyone was listening to the moment that his whole life changed.
All right, let’s get to our one cool things. I have two one cool things this week. First is an article by Sarah Schaefer about leaving Los Angeles. I guess it’s actually a blog post. Maybe it’s even a Substack post.
Sarah Schaefer has been on the show before. She is super smart. She’s a comedy writer, and she writes in this post about her decision to leave Los Angeles, basically. That Los Angeles was so expensive that she decided to move with her husband to Virginia and why she decided to do that. Also, the weird way that you have to talk about like, I’m not giving up on my writing career, it’s just I’m moving to Virginia, but that’s not a change from that.
The question of, what are you doing right now in a time when, especially in TV writing, it’s so tough, that maybe we should stop asking, “What are you working on,” and instead be asking, “Where are you? Like, “What’s happening in your life?” It is a Substack. I look at the URL, it is a Substack, so another Substacker to follow.
Second one cool thing was, I went to the show, Mike Birbiglia had the show in Los Angeles at Largo, invited me to. It was Mike Birbiglia and a bunch of other really incredible standup comedians.
The final act was this guy Billy Strings who I’d never heard of before. He’s a Bluegrass performer. I would never have guessed that I liked Bluegrass. This guy was just remarkably talented and just the fastest picking playing I’d ever seen. Really good song craft, so it’s a thing you probably don’t know that you would enjoy, but I’ll put a link in the show notes to this video so you can see a sense of what this is like. Let me play a little clip for you right now just to get a sense of what this sounds like so you’ll, hopefully, click through to the video.
[music]
I ain’t slept in seven days, haven’t ate in three
Methamphetamine has got a damn good hold of me
My tweaker friends have got me to the point of no return
I just took the lighter to the bulb and watched it burn
This life of sin (life of sin) has got me in (got me in)
Well it’s got me back in prison once again
I used my only phone call to contact my daddy
I got twenty long years for some dust in a baggie
[music]
John: If that’s at all intriguing, click through the video and take a listen to Billy Strings. Max, what have you got for us?
Max: I just read a book that I am trying to push on everybody. I’m a big sci-fi guy, and the book is called In Ascension. It’s by a guy named Martin McInnes. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but I haven’t seen it get a ton of attention or reviews. If you’re a sci-fi guy like me, it’s sort of a– it’s a little bit Jeff VanderMeer, it’s a little bit Ted Chiang. It’s even a little bit Carl Sagan, but it’s also its own thing.
It’s about a Dutch biologist who first investigates a mysterious crevice at the bottom of the ocean and then is sent into space to investigate a mysterious object on the outer edges of space. I don’t want to say too much more because I don’t want to give it away, but there’s also– it’s just a beautiful, beautifully written, beautifully structured, beautifully composed story. I can’t wait to read more by McInnes, and I highly recommend this one.
John: That sounds great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Brown. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.
That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the acceleration of time.
If you’d like to sign up for the Highland beta, there’s a link in the show notes for that. Click through to that, and you can take a look at the next version of Highland. Max Read, thank you for coming on the show to talk to us about Halogencore and journalism and other writing topics.
Max: Yes, thank you so much for having me.
John: If you would like to read more from Max, you should go to his Substack. It is maxread.substack.com. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, too, but you will find him writing twice a week about all sorts of topics on the future.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, in our bonus segment, we are recording this on the Friday after the Democratic National Convention. Kamala Harris has just received the nomination of the Democrats to run for president. This caps off a month of her being the candidate, which is just crazy. It’s crazy how much has happened this summer, and it feels like things are only happening faster and faster. Max, as a person who has to– takes it upon yourself- You don’t have to do this. -but you’ve taken it upon yourself to recap the events of the year each year, man, it’s going to be a very long block for this summer. It’s just so much has happened.
Max: As a journalist, this is actually what you want. I can’t take my journalist hat off here. Just there’s more stuff to write about, more stuff to talk about, more grist for the content mill. It is going to take me a long time to sort through everything. At the end of the year, I do these– I call them the year in weird and stupid futures, and I try to round up everything that’s like a harbinger of our very weird and stupid present, let’s be honest, but also future. My bookmarks folder is already basically full. I’m going to have to be deleting stuff rather than searching it out at the end.
John: I want to talk about how you organize your stuff. You say a bookmarks folder. Is it literally just in Safari you have a folder of all the bookmarks for things? How are you organizing things?
Max: It’s like MTV Cribs, and you walk into my room, and it’s like such a mess it feels so embarrassing. Right now, I’m using a product called Aboard, which is made by a friend of mine named Paul Ford, who’s a great writer and programmer. Aboard is a bookmarking service that creates little cards with images and links, and you can put notes, and you can tag them, and you can sort them and whatever you want.
It’s a really useful way for me to just be saving snippets of things that I might use for future articles. I’m working on a piece about generated AI slop right now, and I’m tagging stuff that I find so that I can save it for later. I’m tagging weird futures things. I see a link to a musician I want to listen to or a book I want to read, I’ll throw it in there too. It’s just a bucket for everything.
I’m using a browser called Arc that I really like. It’s got a really great tab system where you can separate– you can save tabs, and you can separate them out and do sort of things. Some stuff is getting saved in the Arc tab system-
John: Yes, it’s dangerous.
Max: -and but some stuff’s getting saved in the board, and I’m going to lose a lot of stuff, I’m sure. It feels very clean because everything’s designed so well.
John: I’m using Pinboard for all these sort of things that come up. I see something, I make a pin, and it goes to Pinboard, which is like a very bare bones. It’s been around for 20 years. It holds together.
Max: Yes, well, so I was a longtime Pinboard user, and I switched to a board because I wanted to support Paul, and I just have been sort of stuck in it, but I love Pinboard too. It’s just very straightforward, easy, to the point. I think I still pay for mine because I’ve got eight years of Pinboard links to look back upon.
John: Absolutely. As you think about all of the links that are now being put into Pinboard or a board, it does just feel crazy. There are moments in time when it feels like, oh my gosh, I’m actually in a part of a story. I remember, obviously, the 2016 election, the moment like, oh shit, like I could feel that everything has changed around me. Start of the pandemic felt like that as well. This summer, Craig and I were recording this podcast when Trump got shot.
Trump got shot. It’s so weird that a presidential candidate was a attempted assassination, and his ear got bloodied, and could have died, like inches away, he could have died, and we barely remember that as actually even happening this summer. Just so much has happened so quickly. The other thing I would say is that I feel like the advent of ChatGPT and just the realization like, oh shit, like AI is like much better and faster than we ever had anticipated, accelerated the sense too that we are– that line between like here’s where we are now, and that’s the future, instead of like, oh, we’ve jumped into the future, and we really weren’t quite ready for it.
Max: Yeah. I think about this sometimes just as a journalist. We live in a relatively fragmented media environment. It’s not like there are three networks that we all sit down in front of every night to help us sort of memorialize things that happened. Which means that if it was, obviously, if it was 50 years ago, we probably would still be hearing about the Trump assassination attempt because that– we would have our agendas set by three networks and five major metropolitan papers.
Now, novelty is such a premium in this kind of environment where you’re getting your news from whoever and whenever and wherever. For the worst, usually, not for the better. Novelty is such a premium that the collective boredom of the internet sets in so much earlier on everything. It’s like hard to grapple with, kind of. One of the funniest things we noticed at Gawker when I was there is that we could do incredible traffic with a rubric we called remember when, and we would just we would just lift tabloid stories from maybe 10 years earlier.
Some of this is sort of urban legend stuff, like remember when Tim Allen was busted for doing cocaine. I mean, that’s not an urban legend, but it is a story that everybody knows, but not everybody knows it online. There’s this funny thing where not only is everything happening and being forgotten all at once, everything is also being remembered all at once right now, too.
The remember when thing is now you go on TikTok and there’s TikToks constantly of Zoomers describing the first World Trade Center bombing or other things, other ‘90s news stories that were part of my childhood that I remember relatively well, but the Zoomers have never heard of and are now sort of breathlessly telling each other about. A total flattening of time in this very funny way.
John: Yes. Obviously, there’s going to be peaks and valleys and things will probably normalize to some degree, things will slow down a little bit, probably, and yet we’re racing up to an election. September, normally is– like you said in the setup here, August is usually a very slow month. No one deliberately does anything in August because people are gone and there’s sort of nothing happens in August. People are on vacation.
Now, suddenly, things are happening. It’s not just in the US. UK calls for snap elections and suddenly they have a new person in charge of the UK. Macron calls for elections in France and suddenly, like three weeks later, they’re voting, and they have new people in power. I think as it became clear that, after Biden’s disastrous debate, everyone’s like, well, we can’t actually do something that’s dramatic and swap out the candidate because it takes years to do that stuff and there’s the whole expectations.
I would point to Europe and say like, yes, but like Europe just does it. We can suddenly just do it. The result of this DNC process was just a reminder like, oh yes, we can actually do things quickly when we need to. So many of our systems are there because of just inertia and because we’ve always done it that way, but it doesn’t mean we couldn’t do it much faster if we needed to do it much faster.
Max: This is the sort of acceleration of time, like increases itself, right?
John: Yes.
Max: When that you can accelerate it, you’re like, well, let’s just keep on doing that, maybe.
John: Yes, let’s go faster and faster and break things and see, sort of see what happens there. It sets a weird expectation. If nothing happens in a week, it’s going to feel like, wait, no big thing happened? Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck filed for divorce this past week, and I would have totally missed it except that it showed up on one little thing, but like it was the perfect time to announce that you are separating because like, who can pay attention to that?
Max: I know. Really, if you’re a crisis PR person, and your first advice isn’t, “Don’t do anything,” then you’re not good at your job. Whenever a bad thing happens just ignore it and see if it goes away, because it probably will.
John: Yes, it probably will. Yeah, that is the cycle these days. Max, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about time and the acceleration of time and Halogencore. An absolute delight getting to know you.
Max: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, John.
John: Cool. Thanks.
Links:
- Beta test the new Highland – sign up here!
- Max Read’s newsletter READ MAX
- Shiva Baby and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
- How many Hallmark Christmas movies are there?! by Stephen Follows
- The Read Max ‘Halogencore’ Guide
- Max Read’s Halogencore list on Letterboxd
- Where Are You Now? by Sara Schaefer
- Billy Strings – Dust in a Baggie
- In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Brown (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.