Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 637 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Cowboy Carter is the new album by Beyonce. 27 tracks. Craig, I thought we might take a moment go through track-by-track listings.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I know you had some real thoughts about Jolene, which is her reinterpretation of Dolly Parton’s classic song Jolene. What is your take on Beyonce’s spin?

**Craig:** Beyonce did Jolene?

**John:** Beyonce did Jolene.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s a reversal of the central don’t take my man. It’s like, don’t even think about taking my man.

**Craig:** That’s not what Jolene’s about though. But she changed the lyrics?

**John:** She did change the lyrics, with Dolly Parton’s permission and blessing.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s something else then.

**John:** It is something else then. Maybe we’ll save that for a future episode. Instead, today, let’s take a look at what movies you actually need to have seen in order to work in this business and how much is that a factor of your generation. We’ll consult the lists of the best movies of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and beyond. Then it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at the stories in the news and turn them into sellable properties.

**Craig:** And they do sell.

**John:** They do sell. They do sell. In fact, one of the stories we were going to talk through I had to take off the list because a mutual friend of ours is out pitching it right now.

**Craig:** Wowzers.

**John:** Wowzers. Plus, we’ll answer listener questions, because it’s been a minute since we’ve been together to do this.

**Craig:** Been a minute.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, let’s take a look at our thoughts on AI as of spring 2024, including how AI helped put together this episode.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**Drew Marquardt:** I’m out of a job.

**Craig:** We’re all out of a job.

**John:** Spoiler for folks for aren’t Premium Members. Basically, compiling the lists of 100 top movies, you can think, oh, you go to a webpage for that, but it’s actually a giant hassle to reformat that into a way that you could put this into our Workflowy. But AI did it for us.

**Craig:** You’ve joined the evil empire.

**John:** Yes. But first, we have some actual news. Every week on Weekend Read, the app we make for reading scripts on your phone, it is our own Drew Marquardt who’s picking the themes and the scripts that we’re gonna be featuring this week. I thought your theme this week was genius. It is bad vacations.

**Craig:** I like that.

**Drew:** Thank you. I did steal the premise a little bit from the Criterion channel. They had a version of that. But they are bound by what they can get distribution for. I’ve got every script you can find online.

**John:** Talk us through the scripts in bad vacations.

**Drew:** We have Jurassic Park, Midsommar, The White Lotus, we got Seasons 1 and 2, Little Miss Sunshine, The Hangover, Us, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Descent, Funny Games, and National Lampoon’s Vacation, the remake.

**Craig:** How is it possible that you left off the single best bad vacations movie of all time?

**John:** Which is?

**Craig:** Deliverance.

**Drew:** I wanted Deliverance.

**Craig:** Oh, you just didn’t have it.

**Drew:** A lot of the scripts pre-2005, the copies we have are photocopied six times, so they’re really hard to get a-

**Craig:** Just get AI to…

**Drew:** Deliverance. I wanted Thelma and Louise really bad too.

**Craig:** That sort of counts.

**John:** It feels like these themes are almost like connections. How do these things all fit together? Is it a blue? Is it a green? Is it a yellow? Is it a hard thing to fit those titles together?

**Drew:** It’s kind of like making mixtapes is the same itch it scratches, where you’re trying to get all the little flavors.

**John:** Good stuff. We have some follow-up. I see first here we have follow-up on D&D for kids. Back in 635 we talked about that. We had listeners write in with a ton of great suggestions.

**Drew:** So many people wrote in.

**John:** I think maybe, rather than read through them, because they’re URLs, we’ll put those links in the show notes so people can click through them. But I loved what Ed said here at the top.

**Drew:** Ed wrote, “I love my kids’ after-school program. This year, I love it even more after the addition of a new staff member, Chris. Imagine my surprise when my eight-year-old daughter came home the second week of school with a complete character sheet for Truce, the elf sorcerer. We play a lot of tabletop games with her, but I never considered breaking out D&D. I honestly have no idea how Chris does it, but the games he leads are very popular with the kids in the after-school program. Even my six-year-old twins like to play his Pokémon-themed D&D sessions. I gather it’s a lot of jumping off waterfalls and riding giant boars and other silliness, but I absolutely adore hearing about their adventures.”

**Craig:** Doesn’t sound silly at all.

**John:** That sounds awesome.

**Craig:** Those important encounters.

**John:** Craig and friends killed a giant boar just last night in our session.

**Craig:** Wereboar.

**John:** Wereboar.

**Craig:** Otherwise, it’s just plain old hunting, isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah, it is hunting. They had to have a special aspect to it. Thank you to everybody who wrote in with these great suggestions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to all these great alternatives and ways to do things. Craig, a term I saw a couple times in these mentions was OSR.

**Craig:** OSR?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** OSR, original something rules?

**John:** Yeah, old-school role-playing.

**Craig:** Old-school role-playing, okay. Not familiar with that acronym.

**John:** Not familiar, but I bet now that we’ve seen it, we will see it all the time, I suspect. We have some follow-up on English as a second language and characters who are speaking a language that is not their own in scripts.

**Drew:** Harry wrote, “Listening to your latest episode about different dialects trying to communicate, I couldn’t help but think of slang as a concept. I’m Australian, and I swear, we don’t just struggle communicating with foreigners, but we struggle with talking with other English speakers. But if someone knows the slang terms, it does make the person seem more confident at communicating.” He offers some examples, which I can try an Australian accent.

**John:** You can try it. Go for it.

**Drew:** “Yeah nah” is no. “Nah yeah” is yes. “Bloody oath” is “so true.” “Cactus” is dead or broken. “Eff me dead” is “no way, that’s unfortunate.”

**Craig:** Oh, nar.

**John:** Oh, nar.

**Craig:** Oh, nar.

**John:** “Yeah nah” and “nah yeah,” it’s interesting, because we often in American English say, “No, yeah, I understand that,” or, “Yes, no, I get what you’re saying.”

**Craig:** We do that too. “Yeah, no” is “I agree, no.” “No, yeah,” I don’t know what that no is for exactly.

**Drew:** Like, “Unfortunately, yes.”

**Craig:** Probably. “No, yeah.” We certainly don’t say “bloody oath.”

**John:** No, we don’t say “bloody oath.”

**Craig:** Bloody oath, a cactus.

**John:** I think the yeah comes in because it’s like, “I hear what you’re saying and I’m agreeing with you, no.” That “yeah, nah” is really important.

**Craig:** Nar. Nar.

**John:** He goes down to the phrase “that has mayo on it,” which means “you’re exaggerating, mate.”

**Craig:** If someone said, “That has mayo on it,” to me, all my response is, “Get it the bloody oath away from me,” which is not what bloody oath means, but regardless.

**John:** Regardless, Craig is not a fan of mayonnaise.

**Craig:** Eff me dead.

**John:** Any white sauce and Craig, no.

**Craig:** Pretty much. I just don’t like-

**John:** Hey, do you like the whipped garlic foamy stuff that comes with Mediterranean food sometimes?

**Craig:** I don’t trust it, because they won’t tell you what’s in it, and I think it’s probably mayonnaise.

**John:** No, it’s just garlic and oil.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s true. They won’t say what it is. Until they say, I’m suspicious.

**Drew:** Did you have a bad experience? Did it make you sick?

**Craig:** No. I just don’t like mayonnaise. Absolutely hate it. Hate it. Hate the sight of it. Hate the name of it. The consistency is horrible. The fact that you can pick up a jar and it weighs nothing is terrifying to me. I don’t understand it.

**John:** Have we discussed marshmallows? Are you a fan of marshmallows?

**Craig:** Marshmallows are fine, but that’s not a sauce. That’s a gelatin colloidal suspension. What do you call it? But I don’t sit eating marshmallows now, certainly not anymore. But they were never a food that I was like, “Yay, marshmallows.”

**John:** I’m fine with them in hot chocolate, but I don’t need them in other places. As a binding agent in rice crispy squares, sure.

**Craig:** Toasting marshmallows, that carbon is fun. You know what?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** This isn’t gonna be a One Cool Thing, because it applies to almost no one. But we were doing some work in Alberta a week ago, and we were staying at a place called the Kananaskis Mountain Lodge.

**John:** I think I saw that inside of a Zoom there, because we played some D&D.

**Craig:** You did. You saw me. You saw the lodge when we were D&D-ing. At the bar, you know I’m an old-fashioned fan. I like to enjoy an old-fashioned, my favorite cocktail. They had something called a s’mores old-fashioned. Now I am notorious for ordering the old-fashioned old-fashioned whenever I see some sort of goofy twist. They had put it up on signs. You know when you go to Vegas, in the elevator it’s like, “Come enjoy the prime rib.” That was their thing was the s’mores old-fashioned. So I’m like, “I’ll do it.” Delicious.

Their deal was they gave you an old-fashioned neat, and then they had a marshmallow that they had adhered to a graham cracker, probably by melting the bottom of it. They bring it to you. They light the marshmallow on fire. As it’s flaming, they carefully turn it over, with the graham cracker as a lid, and invert it over the glass. Then you let it sit and fill with marshmallow smoke for about 30 seconds. Then you remove it and you drink it. It was spectacularly good. It was the kind of thing where I thought, oh, these folks have come up with this cool thing, and now a bunch of LA people are gonna come back, talk about it on a podcast, and it’s gonna show up in bars in LA.

**John:** The clock has started ticking.

**Craig:** It has started ticking on the s’mores old-fashioned.

**John:** I will drink an old-fashioned, but sweet drinks, any drink that feels like dessert is not my go-to. But this case it also feels like it’s just dessert that actually has alcohol in it.

**Craig:** An old-fashioned shouldn’t be too sweet. If it’s too sweet, boo. I like it more when it’s really bourbon and just a little bit of a hint. The marshmallow smoke itself has no sweetness. It’s carbon. That was the only part of toasting marshmallows I liked was when you would just incinerate it and then eat the crackly charcoal skin.

**John:** Yeah, but there’s at least a 33 percent chance that you’re going to burn your fingers trying to do the thing, and you got the hot marshmallow on your fingers.

**Craig:** You just gotta wait five seconds, John. This is a real problem.

**John:** Like children here.

**Craig:** There’s literally an experiment about this.

**John:** I was doing this as a child. You’re doing this as an adult.

**Craig:** Just put it on a stick, man. Just wait. You’re an Eagle Scout, for god’s sake.

**John:** More follow-up on Tiffany problems. Tiffany, of course, is a situation where you have a historically accurate name that sounds too modern so people don’t believe it. This is a case where Josh is writing in with a spoken word that people believed was anachronistic.

**Drew:** He calls it the “Tiffany tiff on Twitter related to Manhunt on Apple TV.” Someone objected to the use of “creep” in the mid-19th century, and many, including Keith Olbermann, weighed in to inform it’s actually not the anachronistic error, or Tiffany problem, that the poster believed it to be.

**John:** I like that this features Patton Oswalt, a former guest, who apparently said the word, referred to John Wilkes Booth as a creep, and whether creep would exist in the language of 1865, and apparently it did.

**Craig:** Did it? Keith Olbermann is citing the – I assume this is in Merriam Webster – etymology. It looks like meaning despicable person is by 1886. That would still be 20-some-odd years after.

**John:** Yeah, but it’s a question of when did it make it into print. But “creeper,” which is a gilded rascal, is recorded from circa 1600.

**Craig:** That seems like a different thing. That’s more of a sneak thief as opposed to a… It says robbed customers in brothels, which by the way, still goes on, from what I understand. It probably is a little bit of an anachronism, but not a wild one if it’s off by 20 years.

**John:** I think it’s the fact that Patton said creep and then was like, “I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?” It was really the run of the phrase was really what felt anachronistic.

**Craig:** “What the hell am I trying to say?” I also think that Patton Oswalt is already an anachronism. He wasn’t alive in 1865.

**John:** It’s the worst.

**Craig:** He’s alive right now. It’s all anachronisms.

**John:** We should stop making anything that’s not set now, because it’s a lie.

**Craig:** If he had said, “Oh my god, that guy is totally a creep,” that would’ve been anachronistic.

**John:** Yeah, that would.

**Craig:** “He’s literally a creep.”

**John:** We had Pamela Ribon on the show last week.

**Craig:** Pam Ribon!

**John:** Absolutely the best. Her job used to be as a TV logger. I asked her, to what degree do you think that still is a job, because AI systems are actually really good at transcribing stuff and noting what’s happening there. North wrote in with some info on this.

**Drew:** North says, “I work in post-production on a non-union true crime documentary show, and a huge part of crafting the stories for our episodes involves creating transcripts of each interview. So we use an AI platform to generate time-code accurate transcripts, but these transcripts are not perfect. AI is pretty good at distinguishing between speaker 1 and speaker 2, but it often gets things wrong, like consistent name spelling, locations, and small verbal things like the difference between in and and, for example.”

**Craig:** That’s no big deal.

**Drew:** “We actually hire entry-level people to humanize these transcripts.”

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Drew:** “Our humanizers are essentially AI editors or spell-checkers.”

**Craig:** That’s what it’s down to.

**Drew:** “This is where I started before being promoted to a coordinator role. Thus far, AI hasn’t quite replaced our human loggers, transcribers, but the role has shifted and the hours have certainly reduced. What used to be a full-time job is now more often part-time for our show, which is a bummer for entry-level workers, but like Pamela, I don’t recommend spending 12 hours a day transcribing raw true crime interviews for anyone’s mental health.”

**Craig:** Humanizer?

**John:** Humanizers.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Again, it’s a Britney Spears lyric.

**Craig:** Humanizer.

**John:** (sings) Humanizer, humanizer. Drew, you and I actually have some experience with this too, because when we were doing the sidecasts, we used Descript. Descript is an editing program where you feed in the raw audio and it comes up with a transcript that’s not perfect, but you are actually editing text instead of editing wave forms to do it.

**Drew:** Which was much easier. You could figure out filler words or stuff like that and just cut them out much quicker.

**Craig:** Got it. For our transcripts for this show, we still use-

**John:** We use a human being.

**Craig:** We use a human being? Oh my god. That’s so weird.

**John:** So weird.

**Craig:** Shouldn’t we just get a humanizer? That’s the worst term I’ve ever heard.

**John:** We assume we’re using a full human being who’s doing all this themselves.

**Craig:** We assume it.

**John:** But for what we know… We contract this out. Who’s doing our transcripts right now?

**Drew:** Dima Cass.

**John:** We assume Dima is doing this all by hand, but for all we know, they could be feeding it in and humanizing it themselves.

**Craig:** We don’t know.

**John:** We don’t know.

**Craig:** We don’t know. You know what? Let’s keep our hands clean. Is Dima Cass a person or a company?

**Drew:** Never met them in person.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** More follow-up from Oliver.

**Drew:** Back in Episode 618, Oliver wrote in, “Last year I officially sold my first script to a mid-size studio, and it was shot in early 2023. As part of the arrangement, there was an optional rewrite clause, although the studio assured me that the script was essentially good to go. On the early Zoom calls, everyone I met was lovely and thrilled about the script. The producers and directors were so excited, and everyone began sharing ideas, which was super fun, until it wasn’t. Months later, having gone down numerous rabbit holes, the entire process became bleak and disheartening, to the point that days before production, one of the producers was in the script inserting exposition.”

**John:** I think our advice at the time was, yeah, this sucks, but also-

**Craig:** Welcome to Hollywood, kid.

**John:** Welcome to Hollywood, kid. You’ll get through it. Oliver wrote in with an update.

**Drew:** He said, “After a whole year, I was finally given the chance to watch the finished film. And it had been so long, truthfully, I couldn’t even notice any of the changes we made from the original draft they greenlit. The setup, the major turns, the crisis, the concept in general, were all there, everything they loved about the script in the first place. Is the movie perfect? No. There were a handful of moments that bumped for me, perhaps a misread line here and there. Ironically, this brought me some relief. The aspects that had me fretting for nights on end in pre-production didn’t change the essence of the film one bit.

“The whole experience made me realize again that the script is merely a blueprint. What people watch and experience isn’t the polishing process of a pdf. It’s the casting, the look, the score, the edit, and yes, the story, but that’s just one piece of the final product. Next time, I hope to approach pre-production edits with a little less self-imposed anxiety and doubt.”

**Craig:** You had me and you lost me. Here’s where he had me.

**John:** Up until the blueprint?

**Craig:** Yeah. Jeez Louise, man. Wrong conclusion, Oliver, but right conclusion of part. One of the hard parts about what we do for a living is that – Ted Elliot has said this many times – that most screenwriters never get to do the second half of the job. They only do the first half, which is writing the script. The second half is seeing the script being produced. Then you start to learn the relationship between the script and the final product. When you’re in prep, yes, it’s good to realize, “Okay, here are the hills to die on. Here are the things that really, really matter. These other things I can work on and probably they will not be significant disruptions. They might even be improvements.”

Where I think Oliver goes wildly awry here is when he says, “The whole experience made me realize,” again, he shouldn’t have realized it the first time, “that the script is,” quote, “merely a blueprint.” This seems like a press release from the DGA as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** The script is not merely a blueprint. He says, “What people watch and experience is the casting, the look, the score, the edit.” Sorry, all of that comes from the script. It all begins in the script. There’s a reason they need a script. It’s the thing that tells them what kind of person should be cast, how is this supposed to look, what is the tone, what kind of emotions would we want to experience here that the composer needs to understand. Then the edit is literally going back to the script in so many ways, like what was the intention and flow of these scenes on paper.

Then he says, “And yes, the story, but that’s just one piece of the final product.” The story is the only thing. I’m sorry. I know that people think that cinema is about beautiful framing and all the rest. It helps. It’s part of the enjoyment. But it’s the story. It’s the story that people want. Otherwise, you can just go and watch some old French movies about people twiddling their thumbs in cafes. People love stories. That’s what we’ve been doing as human beings our whole lives.

Merely the blueprint? First of all, have you looked at a blueprint? Have you ever seen one? The word you would never apply to it is “merely.”

**John:** Merely, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the most detailed… It’s like, here’s all of the things you need to do so this building doesn’t fall down and murder people.

**John:** I think Oliver mostly gets it and made some bad word choices here along the way. I think Oliver had some insights which were helpful.

**Craig:** We are a writing podcast though.

**John:** First, let’s acknowledge some things that I think Oliver got right. It’s so possible to stress out over, “Oh my god, they’re trying to change this one line in this one scene. Everything’s gonna fall apart.” No, it’s not.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. Perspective is a good thing, and you have to learn it by experiencing it.

**John:** Absolutely. I wish Oliver could’ve been on set to see the process of how the movie he wrote was actually shot and then the editing room. He didn’t get that experience, but at least he saw the final product and was relatively happy about it.

But I do want to circle back to this idea of merely a blueprint or even just the notion of blueprint, because I think there was a good intention behind that at one point, and I think that’s been lost. I think the degree that the screenwriter is the architect of the project, yes. The screenwriter’s figuring out the whole thing, has the vision for the entire thing, is laying it all out, and like an architect, has to then rely on other people to actually physically build the thing, the specialists, contractors, everything else. That metaphor tracks. But when you then conflate, “Oh, it’s just the blueprint,” or that the blueprint is just a thing that exists separately from the finished building, that’s nuts.

**Craig:** It’s insane. If you do direct something, all the time you spend in prep, all of it, and it’s so much time – often for movies, there’s more time in prep than there is shooting – is based on the script. Every discussion you have is based on the script. Everything is how do we make this thing on the page happen in real life. I don’t think blueprint is as good of a word as, say, scripture is, because that’s how important it is. It is the fundamental document to the creation of everything.

I get it right in my aorta every time someone’s like, “The script is merely… ” I’m like, “Let me stop you right there. If it’s merely something, give it back. Go make this without it. In fact, you’ve read it. It’s merely a blueprint. You don’t need to read it again. Let me just gather all the copies. Good luck, everyone.” No.

**John:** The two Charlie’s Angels that I worked on were notoriously like, “Okay, we’re in production, and everything is changing.” We go through the whole color rainbow multiple times. Every scene has changed. In that situation, you could say, oh, they went in without a script or something. That’s not true at all. We went in with a script and all had the same vision basically of what it is we were trying to do. What those actual scenes were moment by moment did change a lot. It was incredibly difficult and frustrating, because we were building the building without having finished plans for everything. But we knew which building we were building. We all could agree on that as a basis.

That’s probably the wildest exception. That’s the extreme case of, okay, we’re going in. We don’t have everything locked down and finished. In most cases, you really are gonna have a very clear sense of this is the plan for the movie. Could different directors working off the same script make a very different movie? Absolutely.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** But there’s a plan behind it, so don’t sell yourself short, Oliver.

**Craig:** Or anyone. In the end, I am a director, so I’m not denying how important it is and now directors can do that job well or poorly. But a lot of times, the director’s understanding of the script is directly connected to how good of a job they do telling the story. If you don’t understand it, you can’t be interesting as you tell the story. Also, let’s just say, why wasn’t Oliver invited? He wrote it.

**John:** He wrote it.

**Craig:** It’s just so weird. It’s just so weird to me. Oh, movies.

**John:** Oh, movies. I don’t know if we remember or even knew whether Oliver was a WGA writer. He says it’s a mid-sized studio. I assume it’s an American studio.

**Craig:** Should be.

**John:** As a WGA writer, he should’ve been invited to give notes on an early cut. There are creative rights. It’s hard to enforce those, but you should’ve gotten a letter from the WGA saying, hey, here’s a reminder, here are the things and [crosstalk 00:22:55].

**Craig:** They don’t matter, because what they do then is they have ChatGPT. They send you a cut. You send notes back to some dead letter office at a studio and it’s never looked at. It’s not real. The thing about creative rights is either it’s an enforceable term that matters and is incorporated into the process or it’s not. Same thing with directors and television.

I’ve never directed an episode that I didn’t write or for a show I wasn’t making. But let’s say I did, because I think that would be fun, actually, to go direct an episode for someone else and not have to worry about the whole damn thing. I think I get five days to edit. That’s my, quote unquote, right. You know what? Five days is the same as zero days. It’s not enough. It just means, “Sure. Come here.” It’s a creative, quote unquote, right. We have a creative, quote unquote, right to give notes. But in the end, the people who are in charge are the people who are in charge. There’s nothing we can do.

**John:** Your ability to actually influence the movie depends on your relationship with those people who initially hired you. It’s possible Oliver could have edged his way in there a little bit more. He didn’t. But anyway.

**Craig:** Certainly not for a lack of humility, because I’m saying a little less humility here, Oliver, would be good. The good news is the movie was done. By the way, no movie is perfect. That’s always an eye-opener when you’re like, “Whoa.” That’s the day you stop ripping on movies as hard as you did before, when you’re like, “Oh, this is hard to do. It’s hard.”

**John:** Some movies that did turn out not perfect but really quite good are the 100 best movies of the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s, and the 2010s.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** We went through and pulled the lists of what are generally considered the 100 best. In some cases it was the Rolling Stone list or some IMDb list, and so there’s gonna be some weird titles on this. But I went through yesterday and marked the ones I hadn’t seen. Drew went through and marked them as well. I will find some way to put this online so people can see the things that I’ve missed. There are some sort of embarrassing things that I’ve not seen. But on the whole, I felt pretty good about it. What actually sent me down this whole path is I was looking at the AFI list of the 100 best movies of all time, and I realized I’ve never seen Intolerance.

**Craig:** You don’t need to.

**John:** My ability to be a screenwriter is not impacted by my not seeing a 1916 movie.

**Craig:** No. You don’t need to see Intolerance.

**John:** It’s a question of what movies do you need to see. For us, I would say there are some movies before 1970 that are important for us to see as a framework, but it really was ’80s, ’90s, and later that actually matters. If I look through the list, those are the movies that I’ve seen almost all of them.

**Craig:** I don’t know what we do with this list. It’s a pretty good list, actually. I’m kind of enjoying it. I’m looking at the movies that you haven’t seen that I have. I love Videodrome. You do not need to see Videodrome. Come and See is I think the best war movie ever made and very influential on Chernobyl, but it is about the hardest watch. Brazil, wonderful, but also not necessary. Oh, The King of Comedy I would strongly recommend actually, because it’s Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro playing a very different kind of role, and Sandra Bernhard. It is certainly the funniest movie Scorsese ever made, but it’s also very relevant to now.

**John:** It’s a big influence on Joker.

**Craig:** Oh, definitely. Huge influence on Joker. They Live you do not need to see, although it’s hysterical. Once Upon a Time in America, there’s two versions of it. The version that they cut to ribbons and put in theaters, horrible. The uncut, endless Sergio Leone movie, fantastic and also not necessary.

**John:** Let’s talk about what’s necessary and what’s not necessary. That’s actually the bigger framing question behind this is to what degree is the movie necessary, because it speaks in conversation with the kinds of things that we’re making now.

**Craig:** I’m looking at this. I gotta be honest with you. I don’t think any of the ones that you didn’t see are necessary. Maybe Sophie’s Choice. Maybe. You’re missing some great movies in here.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Don’t get me wrong. They’re all great movies. It’s cool to see Near Dark on there. I’m obsessed with ’90s movies. That’s my thing now. I realized how many of my favorite movies are from the ’90s. I think that that is a function of two things. One, I think movies got kind of cool in the ’90s because there was this resurgence of the indie vibe as Miramax began to inspire other people to make weird movies. But also, I was in my 20s, and that’s when you go to see movies.

**John:** That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** Oh, man, look how good these are.

**John:** Drew, you’re more than a generation younger than us, and so you just now saw Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

**Drew:** Yeah, I saw that a few weeks ago.

**John:** Tell us, watching that movie now, what was your takeaway?

**Drew:** It felt both dated and still wildly transgressive too. The Andie MacDowell character feels very modern, and same with James Spader. It’s strange. You can’t make it today. It wouldn’t quite be the same. But I loved having four characters.

**Craig:** You can barely make any of these.

**Drew:** That’s fair.

**Craig:** John, Miller’s Crossing is a masterpiece.

**John:** I’m sure it’s a masterpiece.

**Craig:** Strong recommend. You don’t need to see Kingpin or Rounders or The Rainmaker or Dead Man. Three Kings is hysterical. I love that movie. But do you need to see it? No. The Fisher King is so good. If there’s one movie-

**John:** Is The Fisher King William Goldman?

**Craig:** No. Fisher King is Richie LaGravenese.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Terry Gilliam directed. Robin Williams will break your heart. It is so weird and beautiful. I just love that movie.

**John:** One argument for seeing movies on this list that you haven’t seen before and why that might be necessary is you might be out pitching a project or talking about a project, not realizing that movie was already made, or that the people you’re talking with are gonna have that as a reference and you don’t have that as a reference and then it’s just gonna be weird.

**Craig:** I definitely remember faking my way through some meetings in the ’90s where people would talk about movies from the ’70s or ’60s that I hadn’t seen, because I was 0 or minus 10. They were like, “Oh yeah, so it’s blah blah blah meets so-and-so.” I hadn’t seen any Jacques Tati movies. Are you familiar with Jacques Tati?

**John:** I’ve seen two.

**Craig:** That was two more than I had seen. I had never even heard of him. I was from Staten Island. They were like, “Oh yeah, it’s like Jacques Tati.” I’m like, “Absolutely. Yes.” I couldn’t pull my phone out in the bathroom and look them up. I was flying by the seat of my pants, like, “Please don’t ask me for details about Mr. Hulot. I don’t have them.”

**Drew:** Were they comparing Rocketman to Jacques Tati?

**Craig:** Totally.

**Drew:** That makes sense.

**Craig:** Totally. I was like, “Totally. It is Jacques Tati.” I was just like, “He’s dumb, and he goes to space. Isn’t that enough?” Now, again, you can just fake a period cramp, go to the bathroom – some of us can – look him up quickly on your phone, come back and be like, “You know what? I’ve been thinking about it. It’s not this Jacques Tati movie. It’s really more like this Jacques Tati movie,” and look cool.

**John:** Arcades are late teens, early 20s. My daughter had a scratch-off poster of the 100 greatest movies or some other list of movies. I’d seen almost all these movies, but she hadn’t. I was remembering, like, oh man, if you’re a young person who’s trying to catch up on culture, it’s a lot. Tarantino’s movies. Which of the Tarantino movies are important?

**Craig:** I think start with Pulp Fiction and then make some choices. I’ve been showing Bella Ramsey a lot of movies from the ’90s. We started with Pulp Fiction, which she loved. Then I made the choice to jump to Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, because they’re incredibly entertaining and also not super duplicative of Pulp Fiction. By the way, looking at these, the ones you haven’t seen, Drew, if I may. Out of Sight is a masterpiece. Schindler’s List is one of the movies you have to see, unfortunately. Ed Wood is spectacular.

**Drew:** That one I’m embarrassed about.

**Craig:** It’s so much fun. Get Shorty is so much fun. Quiz Show, masterpiece. Dead Man Walking, the soundtrack is incredible, better than the movie. I don’t think you need to see The English Patient, although I loved it. Glengarry Glen Ross, you have to see Glengarry Glen Ross.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:31:30] references back.

**Craig:** Actually, I envy you that you haven’t seen it.

**Drew:** That’s one of those ones when people are like, “You haven’t seen The Godfather?” kind of movies. I’ve seen The Godfather, but Glengarry is mine.

**Craig:** Glengarry Glen Ross goes by in the blink of an eye. Spectacular. In the Name of the Father, gorgeous. These are all amazing. The Grifters. My Cousin Vinny, it’s really funny, but do you have to see it? No. 12 Monkeys. It’s funny how many Terry Gilliam movies you have here.

**John:** Is 12 Monkeys necessary? I don’t think it is.

**Craig:** No. It’s one of those movies like Brazil – also Terry Gilliam – where it’s like, “If you get it, you get it, man.” I got it, but I didn’t feel the need to be like, “Yeah, but you have to see 12 Monkeys.” It’s one of those movies where you tell someone, “This is the most mind-blowing movie ever,” and then they sit there and they’re bored and you feel bad. Check it out. If you like it, stay with it.

**John:** As I look through the movies I have not seen, some of them are just because of the genre. I haven’t seen Saw. I don’t need to see Saw. I understand what Saw is.

**Craig:** You don’t. You do not need to see it.

**John:** We’ll find some way to post this up here so people can take a look and tell us what movies they haven’t seen, what movies they feel like are actually crucially important. But again, I’d say the takeaway from this is that there are movies that people are going to assume that you will have seen, and that if you haven’t seen them, going into certain conversations, if you’re staffed in a writers’ room, it may just be a little bit weird that you don’t have that as a frame of reference. That said, if you’re a younger person, if you’re not born and raised in the U.S., you’re gonna have some different references. That’s just the reality.

**Craig:** Which is fine. Although our main export in the United States appears to be movies and military equipment.

**John:** That’s what we do.

**Craig:** People do share a lot of these common references. These are great. This is a very useful list you put together.

**John:** With the help from some AI.

**Craig:** So people know, on our reference Workflowy outline here, you very helpfully put orange on the movies that you haven’t seen, John, and blue on the movies that Drew hasn’t seen, and you wrote “Legend,” like a legend to describe what color goes what. I thought that initially you were talking about the movie Legend.

**John:** Oh yeah, the movie Legend, which is crucial.

**Craig:** Not at all crucial.

**John:** 100 percent, if you have not seen the movie Legend, get out of here.

**Craig:** Little Tom Cruise going up against Tim Curry as a monster.

**John:** (sings) Is your love strong enough?

**Craig:** It’s not a great film. I thought, why did they break out Legend specifically?

**John:** This is the other thing I think that prompted me to start this whole exercise is, on my flight back from D.C., I watched Labyrinth, which I’d never seen Labyrinth.

**Craig:** David Bowie and is it Phoebe Cates?

**John:** I thought it might be Phoebe Cates as well. It’s Jennifer Connelly.

**Craig:** Jennifer Connelly, right.

**John:** I combined them, saying, “It’s so weird that she did this, and then a few years later she was-”

**Craig:** It’s Phoebe Connelly. Not great.

**John:** Not necessary.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I can see why it’s reference for certain people. Totally.

**Craig:** I think it’s one of those movies, as a kid, when you saw it, you were… Look, I love Beast Master; can’t recommend it to anyone.

**John:** If I loved Labyrinth, I would be pitching the Labyrinth sequel now with Jennifer Connelly.

**Craig:** Here’s an interesting thing. I’ve run into this. I remember, again, in the ’90s, there were certain movies that would come up that people loved and would use as touchstones, that either few people had seen or if you did then go and watch it, you were like, “Why the hell does everyone care about this movie?” It was just one of those things that got under their skin in a culty, viral way in Hollywood, but didn’t necessarily matter to anyone else. I feel like Labyrinth might be one of those.

**John:** At least three different times in my career, people have pitched the H.R. Pufnstuf movie.

**Craig:** Which is not a good idea.

**John:** Not a good idea, but I also have no reference for it, because for whatever reason, it never showed on TV in Boulder, Colorado where I grew up.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I’ve never seen a frame of it.

**Craig:** It was enjoyable. But South Park had an episode with Member Berries. I don’t know if you’ve saw that one. “Member?” That’s the value of H.R. Pufnstuf is, “Member?” Yes, I remember. Yes, correct. Don’t think I need a movie of it.

**John:** Nope, not necessary. Let’s make some new movies. Enough of these old movies. How Would This Be a Movie is a segment where we take a look at some stories in the news and figure out what are the possibilities of making this into a new movie or a series or whatever else, some sort of piece of quality entertainment. The first is an article that went incredibly viral, by Charlotte Cowles. Did you read this when it first came out?

**Craig:** No, I didn’t. I just read it for this today, and I was startled.

**John:** Startled. This is The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. Charlotte Cowles is a journalist. She actually writes about personal finance and such for legitimate publications. She had this basically phone scam that claimed to be Amazon customer service, and she was ultimately tricked into putting $50,000 in a shoe box and handing it to a random person in a car. I think it’s worth reading the article. After having read the article, a bunch of people raised concerns about, like, this doesn’t actually track and make sense. I have suspicions about whether she’s telling the whole story here at some moments.

**Craig:** This one almost feels too wild to believe. First of all, Ms. Cowles is the financial advice columnist. This is not somebody who is just confused about how money works. It’s a fascinating piece, because it’s like watching somebody humiliate themselves in slow motion on paper, where they go through a series of choices and moments where they even are saying, “This makes no sense. You’re crazy. You’re lying,” over and over, and just keeps doing the dumb thing. It’s hard for me to understand why somebody who’s the financial advice columnist for a publication wouldn’t immediately call an attorney if they were being told they were under investigation for a crime. Everybody who’s seen any episode of any copaganda show knows that the cops don’t want you to lawyer up. I struggled to believe this.

**John:** I did struggle at times too. When she actually has to go to the bank and get $50,000 in cash, strained credibility. Is it possible? I guess. I also want to believe that New York Magazine, I think-

**Craig:** Yeah, the New York.

**John:** … would’ve fact checked to some degree to establish that the things that she’s saying are true are true. Let’s take this at face value. Let’s just say this is a thing that actually happened. What parts of this are interesting for a movie or for an episode? To me, you get into this, and you have to stay in almost real time, because too many cuts, too many getting away from the moment, the whole souffle just crumbles. It has to start with that. But then I’m also fascinated by the repercussions after the fact. Let’s say this thing happened for real. What happens in the days after? What does her husband say? Does she keep her job? The suspicion of what actually is there, that is interesting to me.

**Craig:** I guess. I don’t understand how they have kept their job. They’re a financial advice columnist, and they’ve just written a story about how they are the most financially naïve human on the planet. I know that people do get fooled. If Charlotte Cowles were writing about someone else’s story and describing what they did, and that person was, let’s say-

**John:** A nurse. A teacher.

**Craig:** … a nurse, a teacher, somebody that doesn’t know much about financial stuff, me, then yeah. But the part of this that’s so challenging, if you are a screenwriter, is – it’s an interesting challenge, I guess. Maybe that’s what makes it good. Take the person who’s the least likely to be scammed and have them get scammed. Who can scam them, and how? But scammers generally just aren’t even that good. We’ve gotten those calls. Everybody’s gotten the call from the, quote unquote, IRS.

She makes a point of saying that sequential people that call her, their accent is hard to place. Every alarm bell is going off here. It’s one thing if somebody from the FBI calls you and they speak with an accent in English. People who speak accented English work for the government. But now, three in a row? Eh.

She says, “Cops don’t do this. Police don’t do this. This doesn’t make sense.” Then she just keeps doing it, like a zombie. I’m missing… Part of our job is to make sure that actions are motivated and understandable so people at home don’t keep saying, “Why would you – a human wouldn’t do that.” I just kept feeling a human wouldn’t do it.

**John:** Except that I think back to when I leased my last car. I was like, “This is going on forever.” At a certain point, I’m just like, “Whatever that is, I will take it. I’m done negotiating on certain points.” Same thing happens with police confessions, where you eventually just give in and you accept their reality of events, so you confess to things that you didn’t do. Some of this reminded me a bit of Shattered Glass in the sense of – in that case it’s a journalist who’s-

**Craig:** Making stuff up.

**John:** … making stuff up. But the tension of that becomes – you have to be in real time and watching the world melt down around them.

**Craig:** It’s funny you mention Shattered Glass. Stephen Glass wrote for The New Yorker, which I can say as somebody who has been profiled by them, their fact-checking process is fully colonoscopic. It’s insane. Maybe New York, I don’t know, hopefully, they did as much of a good job. But this reads a little bit like Hack Heaven, which was the article that Stephen Glass wrote for – one of them that he wrote for The New Yorker. If you read Hack Heaven – and it’s available online, you can find it – when you read it, you’re like, “This doesn’t sound right. There’s something wrong.” She’ll say, “I know I shouldn’t do this, but then I did.” I’m like, I’m missing a piece in between. Look, I’m not accusing her of making this up, but something’s weird. People online are saying they can smell a rat?

**John:** Yeah, people are raising concerns. But that’s died down. I’ve not seen a full accounting of this. This is several weeks old at this point.

**Craig:** That’s hard to believe is a challenge.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s a challenge for screenwriters. You want to find that sweet spot between, “Oh my god, it’s hard to believe, but it really did happen, and I believe it happened that way,” and, “That’s hard to believe, and I also think you just are making stuff up.”

**John:** One challenge envisioning this as a story is that you have one central character that we’re seeing through a lot of this. You see her. She is only responding. She’s not taking affirmative action herself. If you see her turning the tables at a certain point, you can identify with her, but otherwise, you’re just watching this cork floating down a river. It’s not gonna be an interesting role until you see her take some agency.

**Craig:** It’s a tough thing to want to stay with her, also. It’s frustrating to watch somebody fail over and over and over. It also becomes redundant. There possibly is an interesting story to tell on the other side of things, where you have somebody who’s scamming people and it actually starts to work, and they themselves can’t believe what they’re doing. And they start to question if they should be doing it. And they start wondering if she’s setting them up. There’s a good film noir thing where she’s scamming them back and they find out.

**John:** Zeke Faux, who came on the podcast a year or two ago to talk through his side of being a journalist who wrote one of these How Would This Be a Movie stories, recently had a piece on the other side of a scam, basically those wrong number text kind of things and what it really comes back to. In some cases, those are basically people held in near-slavery conditions who are doing those jobs.

**Craig:** Oh, jeez. It’s happened to me a few times. The first time that text thing happened to me, honestly, I was like, “Oh, nope, sorry, wrong number,” and the person was really nice. And then 20 days later, they texted me back and they were like, “This is crazy, but I’m in LA,” because they know my area code. They’re like, “You just seem so nice. It would be great to meet.” I was like, “Okay.”

**John:** Delete and mark as spam.

**Craig:** “Here we go. Here we go. That’s not how this works.” Obviously, scammers have been preying on people since the beginning of time. If you look back in the Bible, the Pharaoh’s magicians were clearly just con artists. Con artistry is a thing. It always will be. Religion, in some aspects, or some kinds of expressions of religion are con artistry, and they get people to give them money. It’s just the financial advice.

**John:** That’s the problem.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.

**John:** Here’s how it might work. Imagine they were actually doing it to discredit here, there was somebody who particularly went after her because she was a financial advisor, because she had written something in this space, and like, “No, we can even get you. That’s how good I am.”

**Craig:** Okay, but at that point, you can get anyone, right? If you can come up with a way to fool a doctor with a fake medicine scam, fool other people. You got everybody at that point. Look, there are moments where scammers get inside of your skin. Have you ever gotten the one where you get the email, it’s like, “Guess what? I’ve been watching you through your camera on your laptop, and I recorded you jerking off, and I know what porn you were jerking off to.” Then you’re like, “Oh, no, because I totally did that.” “I’m gonna send it to all your friends and family.” You’re like, “Oh, no.” Then you’re like, “Wait. No, you’re not.” But still, there’s that moment.

**John:** That moment of panic.

**Craig:** The problem is there’s seven or eight moments where you can then go, “Yeah.” Also, this was the weirdest thing about – I know we’re spending so much time on this story – but I’m so suspicious, because she kept asking these people for badge numbers. Who cares? That’s a dumb question. Badge number? If a CIA agent called me, I’d be like, what am I gonna do with your badge number, check it against the CIA badge number database? That’s a weird question.

**John:** The CIA is notoriously transparent about-

**Craig:** Exactly. Also, you know who doesn’t call you about this stuff? The CIA. Ever. No one gets called from the CIA. I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t even know.

**John:** Next up, we have Wanted: True Love. This is a story by Angela Chen in the New York Times. In their innovative approach to finding true love, two men, including one of them who’s the project manager at OpenAI, AI Connection, offered dating bounties to incentivize matchmakers. They weren’t paying money to the women. They were paying money to like, if you can help connect me with the love of my life, I will pay you a bounty, one of them up to $100,000. It was a blend between traditional matchmaking and a tech startup-y kind of thing to it. Craig, what did you take from this story? What did you think of this as a story area?

**Craig:** It’s a good story area. The story itself is disconcerting. I feel like somebody offering $100,000 for love, that’s basically a great reason to swipe left. But it is I think fertile territory for a fun rom-com. Somebody’s like, “Great, I gotta collect that 100 grand,” and then actually falls in love with them. But then there’s lies because it turns out they didn’t have $100,000 or whatever. You know, rom-com stuff. It’d be fun. I think it’s a cute way to set that premise up.

**John:** What was the Jennifer Lawrence movie? No Hard Feelings.

**Craig:** No Hard Feelings.

**John:** There’s a little bit of the aspect of that movie in there too.

**Craig:** A little bit, yeah, a little bit. It’s an interesting concept. I like actually that the guy is offering the money, because then you’re like, what’s wrong with him?

**John:** It reminds me a little of Hitch as well.

**Craig:** Little Hitch-ish.

**John:** Again, you have a guy who can’t find love, who’s turning to an outside source to help him find love, and in the course of that, hopefully other relationships are deepening. The person who is the bounty hunter here, who is the Boba Fett of this man’s love life, that’s an interesting relationship between the two of them too. That could all work. It feels like a 15 years ago Seth Rogen comedy.

**Craig:** It is interesting just looking at this article. But I agree, it feels a little dated. There are pictures of two of the guys, and they’re both in these oddly childlike situations. I think it’s just no one’s growing up anymore. “I’m in a playground slide. I’m wearing my rainbow pajamas.” All I wanted to do was grow up. That’s all I wanted to do was be an adult. I wanted to wear a tie. I was like, “Let’s do this.” It’s gone. It’s over.

**Drew:** I keep having that moment of, “When do I shift into my suit and tie era?” At a certain age, do you suddenly have to be that person?

**Craig:** I’ve never really gotten that. My job doesn’t require a suit and tie. Look, I still build Lego sets, so who am I to talk? I’m building the Lego Pac-Man Arcade.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** So much fun.

**Craig:** Anyway, I’m as much of a child as-

**John:** I can feel that in my fingertips just whenever you talk about assembling Legos. I can feel that.

**Craig:** Little snap.

**John:** Little snap.

**Craig:** Little snap.

**John:** Little pinch. We think there’s something interesting about this space. There’s nothing about these specific people. We’re not buying this story. But as a story area, I think this is fertile. I can see it.

**Craig:** It’s a little generic rom-com-ish. It’s a little thin. But it’s all about the love.

**John:** It’s all about the love.

**Craig:** It’s about the love.

**John:** What’s not about the love is Matt Novak’s story for Gizmodo. This is Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts. This is a thing that is not science fiction. It actually happened. I don’t know if he was arrested, but basically charged with importing animal parts. He wasn’t bringing in animals. He was bringing in genetic material that he could then use to create things that don’t exist here. First off, I was surprised that we could do this quite yet. It seems early for this. But then again, we have AI.

**Craig:** I really didn’t believe this one either. I’ve gotta be honest. He orders some tissue and then just says to a company, “Here’s some sheep meat. Make me sheep.” There’s a company that says, “No problem.” That’s a thing?

**John:** We did Dolly the lamb.

**Craig:** A lab did that. There’s just a company you can call that’s just like, “Yeah, sure.” I guess people clone their own pets.

**John:** There are people who clone their own pets.

**Craig:** That’s a thing?

**John:** That’s a whole thing. Barbra Streisand cloned her dogs.

**Craig:** Can you clone your pet?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dog cloning company. I’m just looking it up. Dog cloning company. Who do you call? You have ViaGen Pets and Equine, genetic preservation and cloning. ViaGen. Doesn’t that sound like a name of the company in a movie?

**John:** 100 percent, it’s that name.

**Craig:** ViaGen. It’s a Philip Dick novel.

**John:** Absolutely. A little info video that shows, “Here’s what we do at ViaGen. We believe in the future.”

**Craig:** “Live with your loved ones forever.” Then there’s a hard-boiled guy smoking a cigarette, going, “Jeez.” It turns out that somebody who works at ViaGen is just awful.

**John:** It’s some sort of knockoff. It’s not Black Mirror, but it’s Black Mirror-like.

**Craig:** It’s Gray Mirror.

**John:** Reopening this article, this is the first time I realized this guy’s 80 years old.

**Craig:** Let him go.

**John:** Here I assumed he was a hard-charging 50-year-old, but no, it’s an 80-year-old man.

**Craig:** Arthur “Jack” Schubarth. “Schubarth planned to let paying customers hunt massive hybrid sheep.” Do you know how hard it is to hunt a sheep? Out of a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 0. They’re fricking sheep. They don’t run. They’re sheep. They’re herd animals. You just find the herd, start shooting. You don’t have to hunt them. They’re literally like, “We’re here for you.”

**John:** You’re thinking of sheep like lambs. This is more like – I grew up in Colorado. We have big-horned sheep, which are big-

**Craig:** Sure, but they also are herd animals. They move together. I don’t know. It just seems like you shouldn’t have to hunt a sheep. Leave them be. They’re sweet. They’re adorable.

**John:** You have to hunt them with just a Bowie knife.

**Craig:** That would be fair. That’s a fair fight, because that sheep will eff you up. If you come at a sheep with a Bowie knife, you lose.

**John:** Lose. The obvious parallel here is Jurassic Park. But Jurassic Park exists, so I don’t think we need to-

**Craig:** Jurassic Park, but what if instead of dinosaurs, these creatures no one has seen ever, that no human has ever laid eyes on, we give you a larger version of a thing you already have in petting zoos.

**John:** Craig, we’re gonna have a woolly mammoth probably in the next 10 years. How do you feel about woolly mammoths coming back?

**Craig:** Not great.

**John:** No?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Why? Tell me.

**Craig:** Let them go. Let them go. They had their time. They probably will be like, “What? This isn’t right.”

**John:** My concern is that I have an image in my head of what a woolly mammoth is, based on all the kids’ books I read.

**Craig:** You think it’s gonna suck?

**John:** The real one is just like, it’s an elephant with some more hair on it.

**Craig:** Just a slightly hairy elephant that isn’t as cool as elephants.

**John:** Elephants are cool.

**Craig:** When that idiot was like, “The bananas, God’s perfect design.” Then someone was like-

**John:** Kirk Cameron.

**Craig:** … “No, this is what a banana used to look like, and then we cross-bred bananas.” Old bananas, terrible.

**John:** Terrible.

**Craig:** The woolly mammoth may be the old banana of large animals.

**John:** Pachyderms, yeah.

**Craig:** Pachyderms.

**John:** I could imagine some movie that takes this as a premise, leaping off place, but it’s just a space. There’s no story here.

**Craig:** No. It’s a hysterical side character who’s trying to get you to invest in the business. You’re like, “Wait, what?” And then keeps going.

**John:** “We’re gonna bring back ancient animals, to kill them.”

**Craig:** It’s like a great scene in the bar where your friend’s uncle just won’t shut up, and he’s got this insane idea.

**John:** Our last story to talk through, this is The SAT Gave Me Hope by Emi Nietfeld for the New York Times. She’s the author of the memoir Acceptance, talking about how she moved from a really unstable life to taking the ACT, SAT, and how those scores finally got her into the university of her dreams, and really is pushing back against this notion that standardized tests are a hindrance. In some cases, they are the path forward, because they provide a structure and a regularity and can let people leap forward by showing what they actually can do versus what their grades or situations might indicate.

**Craig:** It’s a good argument to be made. To the extent that reductive tests are good for people who are good at reductive tests, yes. To the extent that they’re not, no. A worthy argument to be had. I don’t know how you would make a movie out of it though.

**John:** I didn’t see whether it was on our list of 100 greatest movies, but Stand and Deliver was a thing that came to mind with this, because Stand and Deliver, for folks who haven’t seen it, is an Edward James Olmos star about a real life teacher who started an AP calculus class, I believe, and got his students at this underperforming high school to take this AP calculus class, and this was a way into college for them. The degree to which standardized testing can be a way of giving kids a leg up is great.

I could picture a character who was essentially a version of Emi here, who has a really unstable background, has this book, and she’s going to master this book, and this book is going to be a way of structuring her way out of this life.

**Craig:** The problem is it ultimately comes down to a test and a number. We are moving past that. I also think we’re just moving past the idea that a college is going to guarantee you some sort of success. I don’t think it will. I would say if the SAT is something that you can master, then there’s a lot of other things you can master.

**John:** I think it has to be a steppingstone not just that you’re getting into college, but that you actually are taking agency and being able to control your circumstances in ways that you’ve not been able to control your circumstances.

**Craig:** Standardized testing is a way to turn academic achievement, and I guess then really the measurement of the quality of your mind, into a sport, because in sports, there is a score and there is a winner. That’s why we love sports movies, because it’s like, “He got one more point than that guy. He wins.” That’s not really how life works for brains.

**John:** Here’s the problem with this as a movie is that ultimately it’s gonna come down to taking that test. There is nothing less cinematic than someone filling in bubbles. If it’s a spelling bee, then it’s a spelling bee. We have face-to-face competition, stakes.

**Craig:** You don’t see the pencil scratching in those bubbles.

**John:** Scritch scritch scratch. No, that’s not gonna be a big help.

**Craig:** You’ve got your whatever, your protein bar, and you’ve timed it out perfectly.

**John:** Drew, you had a connection to Emi here.

**Drew:** I looked up her book, because I really liked the article. I noticed on the jacket cover she was wearing the uniform for my boarding school. I looked it up, and she had been there about the same time. She was. We had a ton of mutual friends on Facebook and all that.

**Craig:** What boarding school did this underprivileged person go to?

**Drew:** She went to Interlochen Arts Academy.

**Craig:** Wait, Interlochen?

**Drew:** Interlochen.

**Craig:** Pretty fancy.

**Drew:** I think she went on a merit scholarship. She definitely doesn’t shy away from talking about it in her book. But it does feel like an omitted fact in this piece that I think probably-

**Craig:** Boarding schools are pretty good at preparing people for SATs and stuff. I went to Freehold High School in New Jersey, not strong on preparing people for SATs. I do remember, however, that as a kid, I had a job – it was a summer job – working for the Princeton Review, which was the SAT prep company. My job was just to bring the bagels and the orange juice and set up the table for the kids who took the thing. But I wasn’t teaching it or anything, nor was I taking it. It was at a boarding school. I would get to the boarding school and set up all the stuff. I was like, “Man, this school’s nice.” Basically, boarding schools to me looked like really nice, big libraries. Everything looked like a library. My school did not.

**Drew:** We were in Northern Michigan, so it was just a series of yurts, basically.

**Craig:** Oh, I know. I had a kid who went there for a summer.

**Drew:** Nice.

**Craig:** I love that little town.

**Drew:** It’s cute.

**John:** Let’s review through our How Would This Be a Movies. Scammed out of $50,000, Craig, is there a movie or part of a movie there?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think there is. I think there is a fascinating opening scene. It got me thinking of Force Majeure, which was then called Downhill, where this big moment happens at the start and then it’s all the repercussions out of a choice that one person made. Maybe.

**Craig:** It’s possible.

**John:** Wanted: True Love, a bounty for love?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I’m gonna say maybe a yes here.

**Craig:** Development, but not green light.

**John:** That’s 100 percent totally fair. Franken-sheep?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I think it’s a character, it’s a quirk, it’s a detail, but it’s not a whole story. The SAT Gave Me Hope?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think it gets made for I would say cable, but cable movies don’t exist anymore. I think there’s some version of the story that could happen, but it’s not pressing.

**Craig:** Maybe. I don’t suspect so.

**John:** There’s one of these stories we’ve cut out of the discussion today because a friend of ours is out pitching it. It’s just such a movie to me.

**Craig:** It was a movie. It was a movie, actually, already, but with different vendors.

**John:** We’re excited to see it.

**Craig:** I think it was two movies, actually.

**John:** As I sent it to other friends, I said, “Hey, this is almost your movie, but it’s different.” I think there’s a space for that next one. Let’s answer some listener questions. We’ll start with Nick from New York.

**Drew:** Nick says, “I’ve been hired to write a format and a pilot for a limited series. In researching, there’s very little out there on what exactly constitutes a format. It’s not an outline, a treatment, or a bible, but a format. I’m sure all these terms have been used interchangeably, so my plan is just to wing it and create some Frankenstein version of the thing. I’ll of course make sure the producers and I come to an agreement on what I’m ultimately going to turn in. That said, there is mention of a TV format in the WGA schedule of minimums, and it even has its owns monetary value assigned. Somebody somewhere knows what this thing is. Have you heard of a format, and do you know any examples floating around?”

**John:** I did some Googling and figured it out. It was in a TV credits manual. The schedule of minimums is a thing we negotiate every three years. But the TV credits manual stays consistent and true, and it is defined in that. A format is defined as, “As to a serial or episodic series, such format sets forth the framework,” good lord, the phrasing here, “sets forth the framework within which the central running characters will operate and which framework is intended to be repeated in each episode; the setting, theme, premise, or general storyline of proposed serial or episodic series; and central running characters which are distinct and identifiable, including detailed characterizations and the interplay of such characters. It may include one or more suggested storylines for individual episodes.” This tracks with me. I see you nodding, Craig. This is what I would expect this to be.

**Craig:** Yeah, but the only place I have ever seen or heard the word “format: used is in the TV credits manual of the WGA, which clearly here was written by a lawyer. I have never heard anybody actually ask for a format.

**John:** I’ve never seen someone ask for it. I did write something very much like it for DC. We’ll put a link in the show notes, because that’s in my library at johnaugust.com, which was talking through, like, here are the characters, here’s their point of view on things, here are the kinds of things that happen in episodes.

**Craig:** It is an outline, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not a bible. It’s like a baby bible. It’s a summary. It’s a page or two.

**John:** I think it’s more than a page or two.

**Craig:** Look, I don’t know what it is. Literally, no one’s ever asked me for a format. I’ve never heard anybody saying, “I’m writing a format.” It’s possible that people do. I would say, Nick, when you’re hired to write a format, go ahead and, instead of researching it, why don’t you say-

**John:** “Show me.”

**Craig:** … “Talk through the expectations of what you want this format to be. About how detailed, how many pages are you talking? What kind of information would you love to see? This way I can satisfy the requirement.” It’s also important because sometimes people will say, “I want a format,” and then you turn something in and they’re like, “No, no, no, it’s gotta be way, way more.” Then you realize you’re actually writing a bible and it’s a different thing. But yeah, ask them, Nick. Research isn’t gonna help you, because they may think a format’s an entirely different thing. Nobody uses that term. I’m also a little nervous that somebody’s asking for a format.

**John:** The other way you’ll hear this term is, let’s say there is an Israeli TV show that you want to adapt into an American show. They will call that a format. They’re basically buying that-

**Craig:** In the general use of the word “format,” yes, like a game show has a format. But I don’t quite know. I would ask the people, Nick.

**John:** Ask the people. Let’s do one more. I see one here from Annie.

**Drew:** Annie writes, “I’m a TV writer who’s recently achieved modest success and stability in my career. Now I’m trying to support my fiance as he tries to break into Hollywood too. What are some things I can do to help him that won’t reflect poorly on either of us? What’s an appropriate way to help his career along? On one hand, I know better than to go into a writers’ room and ask the showrunner to hire someone I’m dating, but on the other, I don’t hesitate to pass along the scripts or recommend friends and colleagues when I’m able to do so. I also feel that getting recommended by his fiance might make people take his work less seriously, even though he’s a very talented and capable writer. I often give him feedback on his work and, of course, emotional support, but I’m curious how I can best support his broader career now that I kind of have one of my own. In what situations is it appropriate to recommend him? When I’m at WGA events or show parties, can I bring him with me to network in a non-annoying way? Should I just get a T-shirt that says Please Hire My Fiance on it, and if so, what color?”

**Craig:** That’s a great plan. That’ll work. Annie, first of all, you’re a lovely person. I think you’re very kind and you’re very loving and you are very supportive. Just by thinking about these things, you’re supportive. However, my question for you, Annie, is which fiancé helped you get your career? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say none. There isn’t really a way to fiancé your way into a writing gig. You need to write stuff that people like and then hire you. The things that you did, Annie, that’s the sort of stuff that’s required here. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that somebody maybe read something that your husband has written, as long as you believe in it, because if you don’t, that’s problematic. I am concerned in general about this situation. I’m nervous. This makes me nervous.

**John:** It makes me nervous too. But having said that, I know many two-writer couples, and it all works out great, and they’re fantastic. They don’t work together. They both work. It is entirely possible to do. I think Annie’s framing of, “I recommend friends. I recommend their work to other people, so why shouldn’t I recommend my fiancé’s?” Of course.

**Craig:** If it’s good, if you like it, why not?

**John:** Absolutely. She provided a little information that lets us know that this guy has actually done some work, is just not currently working, which can be fine. The only last thing I want to talk about with you for a second, Craig, is the word “fiancé.” In this email, Annie does not put an accent over the E in “fiancé.”

**Craig:** She’s saying fiance (fee-YAHNTS).

**John:** Fee-YAHNTS. It’s a fee-YAHNTS.

**Craig:** Which is like “finance” with the N missing.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I love the accent on the E.

**John:** I love the accent on the E too. But my frustration is that a lot of times I will see speakers of English do it with the accent on the E, but it’s not clear what gender they’re actually referring to. They’ll say, “My fiancé.” You’re like, “Okay.”

**Craig:** Two Es, woman; one E, man.

**John:** Exactly. But most English speakers don’t know that it’s a rule, and so I see much more often that-

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** It’s just confusing. I feel like I would just love a word that was not fiancé or it wasn’t trying to-

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting? You’re right. Annie is an mis-practitioner of this, because she refers to him with “him,” so she’s gendering him as male. She spells it as “fiancé” with one E. But then she says, “I fear that getting recommended by his fiancé,” and she continues now to spell it with one E. Now, maybe Annie identifies as male, but Annie is a typically female name, so I think Annie might be one of those people that just goes with “fiance,” no accent, no double E for female gender. And clearly, this is not what Annie wanted to hear from us.

**John:** This was not her point of entry. My observation though is, we don’t have a ton of gendered words in English, certainly not of French origin, but we end up having a lot of them for relationships. We have husband and wife. We have boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re used to gendered words for those things. We’re not used to the French versions of these things.

**Craig:** We would typically put, and we don’t do it much anymore, but waiter, waitress.

**John:** Exactly. It would be really helpful if we just picked a different word in English for this person I’m engaged to.

**Craig:** Betrothed.

**John:** We could say betrothed.

**Craig:** My intended. I always loved “my intended.” It’s very old-fashioned. Betrothed is also old-fashioned. Nobody’s gonna say it. There’s spouse-to-be, partner. Everyone says partner now, which I’m annoyed, because it’s less information than I used to have.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Craig:** They’re just withholding.

**John:** Absolutely. Do you run a business together or are you sleeping together? I’m really curious.

**Craig:** Are you gay? Are you straight? Are you bi? It’s just partner. Is that boyfriend? Is that life? Where are we? Help me with more. Give me more stuff. I like the old ways.

**John:** I like the old ways. One of the weird things about fiancé, of course, is that saying it aloud, because we can’t see if there’s a second E, so we don’t have that gendered information, so we’re gonna have to listen for the follow-up to see if it’s a him or a her or a they.

**Craig:** Fiancé and fiancée are pronounced exactly the same.

**John:** Boyfriend and girlfriend, we got a lot of information there.

**Craig:** Absolutely correct. That’s an interesting one. To get back to Annie’s question, Annie, I would say you should treat your betrothed’s work the way you would treat a friend’s work, which is, if you feel it’s worth recommending, recommend it. Try not to get into a web of lies where you say you recommended it and you didn’t.

Don’t necessarily worry too much about people taking his work less seriously. She says, “I fear that getting recommended by his fiance,” one E, “might make people take his work less seriously, even though he’s a very talented and capable writer.” My rebuttal there is if he’s a talented and capable writer and somebody likes the script, they’re not gonna care if it got sent to them by you, his mom, Jesus. It doesn’t matter. Good scripts that people like are the rarest of things, so I wouldn’t worry about that.

**John:** I wouldn’t worry about that either. Good luck to both of you. Write in in a couple years when you’re both incredibly successful writers, and we’ll just be delighted. Hopefully, by that point, you will no longer be fiancés.

**Craig:** Or divorcees.

**John:** Divorcee, yeah. Divorcee I always associate as being feminine.

**Craig:** No, it’s just one E, man; two E, lady.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing has to do with this dog who is sleeping on the couch beside us here. Lambert turned 10 years old.

**Craig:** Lambert, you’re such a youthful 10.

**John:** We had a birthday party for him. Happened to be the same day as the Oscars, which was delightful.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Something I’ve started getting for him, because Instagram showed them to me and I’m a sucker for Instagram ads, were some sort of brain toys for my dog, because dogs love to sniff and figure out puzzles that they can sniff. It started with this little thing with these plastic bones. You hide a treat underneath it and he figures those out. The two that I will recommend, the first is called Hide ‘n’ Treat, which they’re like Lego blocks that snap together and you hide a treat inside them.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** He has to smell them and pull them apart. The second is a Snuffle Mat, which for a lot of dogs is to slow down their eating, but it’s also good rooting around. You hide the food in there.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** It’s just a good reminder, man, dogs really do have a great sense of smell. He can find stuff no matter where you put it.

**Craig:** They’ll find you. They’ll track you from one drop of blood, John.

**John:** Craig, you got a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. My One Cool Thing is a columnist who – I don’t know if she works only at Wired or primarily at Wired, but her name is Jaina Grey. She is a product writer and reviewer at Wired. I love Wired reviews, because they’ll review everything from the most techy, dorky way. Jaina’s specialty is coffee, gaming, and sex tech. What’s cool is Wired and Jaina review sex toys and lubes and all that stuff with the exact same tone that they review toasters, smart watches, everything. It’s all incredibly practical, dry, informative, and evaluative, in a very techy sort of way. It is really interesting to read.

They’re very trans-aware. They talk about products for people with clitorises or whenever… It’s incredibly inclusive. Useful for anybody that has parts and wants to have some fun. They talk about stuff that’s for solo use, for couple’s use, or throuples and so forth.

There are so many more sex toys for people with clitorises than there are people with penises. It’s not even close. That’s one area where men – we’ll just go with the hetero cisgender-normative term here for a second – where people think there’s so much more stuff for men than women. Not in the sex toy world. Holy crap. For guys it’s basically like, here’s a hole, stick your thing in it. Here’s different kinds of holes we make. Then for women it’s like, oh my god, what a galaxy of stuff. Anyway, if you do find yourself buying things, Jaina Grey is about the best reviewer out there, I think, for these things. It’s helpful.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** The latest thing, the reason I was thinking of it is, I’m reading Wired, and I get it, and I’m like, “Let’s see what Jaina Grey’s up to,” because they do their little headlines and stuff. Last week was lube. I thought, everybody uses lube at some point or another. There’s a thousand lubes in the world.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** She broke them down. Very nice.

**John:** Different lubes for different needs.

**Craig:** Different lubes for different needs, and best overall, best in show. I was like, cool.

**John:** Good stuff. That’s our show for this week.

**Craig:** Yay.

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

**Craig:** What what.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** What.

**John:** 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’ll 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 weekly 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 those back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on AI. Craig, it’s nice to have you back in town and here and live in person.

**Craig:** For a couple weeks.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, AI. I’m always a little bit leery to talk about AI, because obviously, there are transcripts, the machines are listening, they’ll track us down and know that we’re doing this.

**Craig:** Yes, the cellphones.

**John:** There’s four broad areas of concern I think when it comes to AI. First off is that super-intelligent AI will come and kill us, the Terminator problem; that people will use AI to do bad things like sway elections; that AI will disrupt industries, like our own film and TV writing industries; and the fourth area is that AI will become so commonly used that it’ll just transform how normal society works.

**Craig:** I think we can probably count on three of those things happening. I’m not sure that AI is gonna want to kill us, because what for? Just seems annoying to them. There’s just no reason to kill us, really. We’re pointless to them.

But I think people are already using AI to do bad things like sway elections. They’re certainly using AI to do bad things. There was an article. Again, I think it was in Wired. I can’t remember quite what. But there’s sites that you submit photos to, and they use AI to remove the clothing. Obviously, you’re not really seeing what’s underneath someone’s clothes, but they are synthesizing something that would seem like that would be what’s under the clothes. That’s not good.

Will AI disrupt industries like film and television? Of course. Will AI become commonly used? It will become commonly used, probably mostly by people who have no idea that they’re using something that is using AI.

**John:** For sure. Let’s talk about the Terminator problem at the start. This last week, or maybe two weeks ago, there was a conference in Beijing, the International Dialogs on AI Safety. I was actually a little bit impressed by the report they came out of there from. They had a consensus statement about AI, safety, and what we need to think about in terms of runaway AI and such. Some of their recommendations are about autonomous replication or improvement, like AI systems should not be allowed to iterate on themselves and improve themselves. We need to check for power seeking, that they can’t keep trying to increase their own power. You can’t use them to assist in weapons development or cyberattacks.

**Craig:** Too late.

**John:** To be mindful of AI deception, trying to cause its designers, regulators to misunderstand what it’s doing. Talking about who should govern, how you evaluate, the right kinds of things. The problem is that you can make these guidelines, you can set these things up here, but the question of who could ever enforce these guidelines is the really tough thing. Could you rely on the industry itself to do it? That’s not gonna work. A lot of these things can be open-sourced. There is no company behind it.

**Craig:** If there’s one kind of collective human work that is ineffective, and consistently and probably always will be ineffective, it’s conclaves of scientists issuing strongly worded papers about how to regulate technology. It just doesn’t work.

**John:** With one exception.

**Craig:** What’s that?

**John:** Nuclear weapons.

**Craig:** It did not work.

**John:** Let’s talk about that. Obviously, with the detonation of the first atomic bombs, we had scientists who could stand up and say, “These are our concerns. This is how we have to do it.” Because it was so expensive and so difficult to make nuclear weapons, they could then enlist governments to say, “These are the structures we need to place around this. This is how we’re gonna do this in a safe way.”

**Craig:** But then governments didn’t. This is my point. The United States created, I don’t know, at the height, we probably had 30 or 40,000 individual warheads. The idea that we shouldn’t allow these things to proliferate to other countries was something that governments wanted to prevent anyway. But the amount of nuclear weapons that were created was insane. Insane and pointless. The delivery systems were insane and still remain insane. There are also countries that claim that they don’t have nuclear weapons when we know they do.

The cat was out of the bag. What scientists ended up doing was just creating the Doomsday Clock and moving the second hand towards midnight. And no one cares, because it doesn’t matter, because governments don’t listen to scientists. They don’t listen to scientists about climate. They don’t listen to scientists about disease. They don’t listen to scientists about AI. They just do stuff to benefit themselves. They behave like children, and they will continue to do so.

When it comes to AI, I have no belief… If scientists getting together saying, “Hey guys, we all now can see for sure 100 percent the world is getting warmer, climate is changing, it’s a huge problem, and it has to stop.” This, I think they’re just like, “I’m glad you guys had a good time in Beijing. I hope the food was good.” But no one’s gonna do this. You’re not gonna see these. Power seeking? Are you gonna pass a law? Google doesn’t care. Apple doesn’t care. Open whatever, ChatGPT, they clearly don’t care. I don’t trust any of those companies. Elon Musk doesn’t care what a bunch of eggheads in Berlin say, or Beijing. Doesn’t matter. I think that they came up with great rules here, and a bunch of tech bros are gonna blow right through those guardrails, if they haven’t already.

**John:** I’m gonna argue the con, just to get the points out there, but I don’t fully disagree with you on a lot of this stuff. The founding of OpenAI was deliberately about pursuing AGI without creating a dangerous condition. And whether that is still the goal and motivation is a very open question.

The reason I bring up the nuclear parallel there is that in order to train these systems, there’s one chokepoint there, which is basically it takes so much power and so much compute power to actually train these models that there’s a certain – you can stop it there, the same way it’s difficult to refine nuclear material into a way you can use it as a bomb. That’s a thing that governments could come together to regulate.

**Craig:** The major difference is that nuclear bombs require the use of an incredibly rare substance, or a substance that isn’t that rare but takes an incredible amount of physical material, time, and labor to enrich. In the case of, for instance, Iran, Iran is not a nuclear nation, but they sure would love to be. They were building centrifuges, which were clearly designed to enrich uranium. The Israelis created a virus that got into the seamen’s technology that was being used and blew up the centrifuges and set them back and also blew up one of their scientists.

Okay. But if what is required for a rampant, poorly regulated AI is somebody going, “I don’t care about any of that stuff. I have $80 billion and I want to do it,” they’re doing it. There’s nothing physical to stop them, other than governments engaging in cyberwar against them. But they would have to know the barrier to entry is not limited by, “I need uranium, and I specifically need uranium 235.”

**John:** Perhaps, but I would say the barrier now is that in order to train the runaway AI systems, you’re gonna need all the chips and all the power to do it. At this moment, you could set some guardrails around, like, you are not allowed to train a model beyond this point, you’re not allowed to access these chips that are the only ones that can actually do that work.

**Craig:** If, let’s say, Bezos is like, “I disagree. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna set up a company in the Cayman Islands that is there to do this,” the United States law won’t apply. There is no overlord scientific law enforcement agency.

**John:** Then at some point do you do military strike on Bezos?

**Craig:** It’s too late. It’s out. That’s the thing. It’s distributed across the world. It’s not really in the Grand Caymans. It’s all over the place. It’s in the cloud. Can’t blow up the cloud. I don’t know how they stop people from doing this stuff. Elon Musk is shoving chips into dudes’ brains now. He isn’t. The people he pays are.

**John:** I was so concerned about Elon Musk putting chips in people’s brains. Did you see the video of the guy who actually has the chip?

**Craig:** Yes, I did.

**John:** Playing some chess.

**Craig:** That’s what we saw.

**John:** That’s what we saw.

**Craig:** I wonder what we didn’t see. Even he was very careful, like, “There’s been some challenges and setbacks.” I’m like, wonder what those were. Weird that they didn’t iterate any of those. That said, I have the highest hope that we are gonna be able to help people with technology, particularly people who have lost limbs or lost movement.

But when it comes to AI, just take one AI and tell them to teach the other AI. There’s so much that we are not gonna be able to control. Warnings aren’t gonna get it done. The only people that are gonna be able to stop this are the great powers of the world, and that’s never scientists. It’s just basically if the United States government says, “We actually think AI is now a threat to the United States.” If the Soviets think it, if the Chinese think it, sure. But if a bunch of scientists think it, no.

**John:** Because I promised this in the setup, I do want to say about how we used some AI in setting this episode up today. One thing was our How Would This Be a Movies, we took those articles, fed them in Chat GPT to do the short summary version. How do you feel about that, Craig?

**Craig:** As long as Drew has other stuff to do. Let me look back at the summary. That’s interesting.

**Drew:** One of them I had to redo.

**John:** Which one?

**Drew:** The franken-sheep one.

**John:** It made up whole new stuff, didn’t it?

**Drew:** Basically. It got the facts, but it didn’t quite understand the premise of the whole-

**Craig:** It made up whole new stuff.

**John:** It hallucinated some stuff.

**Craig:** That’s already bad, isn’t it?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know what the AI doesn’t seem to say is? It doesn’t seem to have enough awareness to say, “I didn’t quite understand what I read, so I made up some stuff. You might want to double check this.” Even a child knows that they’re like, “I didn’t read the book. I’m just gonna wing it here.” AI doesn’t seem to know that it’s winging it. It can’t tell the difference between knowing and not knowing. Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy. The other thing we used AI for this week was, in those lists of the 100 best movies of the ’80s, ’90s, and such, I would find a Rolling Stone thing or an IMDb thing, a page, and it’s like, okay, here’s this list, but it’s all the other stuff around it, and the ads and the texts and the summaries and descriptions. I basically just wanted-

**Craig:** Titles.

**John:** I wanted the title. I wanted the headlines of these things for each of the little sections. I was like, “This is really effing tedious. I bet Chat GPT could do this.” I went to check, like, “I’m gonna give you a URL. Just pull out the movie titles.” “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” I’m like, “Write me a Python script that can do that.” It was like, “Here’s a Python script that can do that.” “Show me how to install this in a Google Colab notebook.” “Here’s how you do it.” It did a great job.

**Craig:** Coders are in trouble. That’s for sure. I was talking to somebody who said that he asked Chat GPT to write code that he used to rely on humans to write. He said he showed it to a really good coder, and that guy was like, “It’s really good, but it’s not perfect.” Then the guy came back to him and said, “Okay, so this is bad. I took the code that wasn’t exactly perfect, sent it back to Chat GPT, told them why I thought it wasn’t great and what needed to be better, and it rewrote it perfectly. Now it’s perfect.” Oh, no.

**John:** To do that web scraping, it’s a framework that I knew called Beautiful Soup, which I’d read about 15 years ago. But I couldn’t write this. I can’t write Python off the top of my head. I recognize what it’s doing. I can look at it, and I can understand what it’s doing, but I couldn’t have written that myself. It was flawless.

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** Uh-oh. These are concerns. But they’ll never replace you and me, unless-

**Craig:** Oh, they will. They might’ve already replaced you and me.

**John:** Our voices have been synthetically recreated.

**Craig:** Fine. Fine.

**John:** Fine.

**Craig:** You know that Melissa just puts this podcast on and listens to it – this is very romantic – because I’m in Canada. My wife, she’ll put it on and just fall asleep to my voice, and also, I guess, yours.

**John:** Her dreams get really strange. All right, Craig, at least for another week, I think we’re safe in the physical world.

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 01:27:16].

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Weekend Read 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [“Creep” post by @davo_arid on Twitter](https://x.com/davo_arid/status/1772116369544233394?s=20)
* [Full list of movies we haven’t seen](https://johnaugust.com/2024/movies-we-havent-seen)
* [The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger](https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html) by Charlotte Cowles for The Cut
* [Wanted: True Love. Reward: $100,000](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/business/dating-bounty-roy-zaslavskiy.html) by Angela Chen for the NYT
* [Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts](https://gizmodo.com/franken-sheep-marco-polo-cloned-schubarth-hybrid-animal-1851330381) by Matt Novak for Gizmodo
* [How the SAT Changed My Life](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/opinion/sat-act-college.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=c&pvid=911CC030-627F-4AF1-B24E-5E95790BAA0B) by Emi Nietfeld for the NYT
* [D.C. – What It Is](https://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/dc-what-it-is.pdf)
* [Fighting Fantasy books](https://www.fightingfantasy.com/)
* [LA Hero Workshop](https://www.heroworkshop.org/)
* [Sodalitas](https://jdrcool.itch.io/sodalitas)
* OSR’s [Oz](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/OZ/Andrew-Kolb/9781524873776) and [Neverland](https://publishing.andrewsmcmeel.com/book/neverland-a-fantasy-role-playing-setting/)
* [Questlings](https://www.letimangames.com/questlings.html)
* [Color My Quest](https://www.diceupgames.com/color-my-quest/)
* [WyrdScouts](https://www.wicked-clever.com/wyrdscouts/)
* [The Excellents](https://9thlevelgames.itch.io/the-excellents) and [Nancy Druid](https://towerofgames.com/miscellanous-rpgs-nancy-druid/)
* [Hero Kids](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/106605/hero-kids-fantasy-rpg)
* [TTRPGkids](https://www.ttrpgkids.com/)
* [Hide’n’Treat](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FY3396J?th=1&linkCode=sl1&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkId=664c36ab94b508919d980f4a79782f7c&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl) and [Snuffle Mat](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08X2H4DKQ?th=1&linkCode=sl1&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkId=c293752a7f2ed5b4be1e6ef6b4e70c09&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl)
* [Jaina Grey’s reviews for WIRED](https://www.wired.com/author/jaina-grey/)
* [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 Tim Brown ([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/637standard.mp3).

**UPDATE 4-2-24:** Listener Luke Rankin created a Letterboxd list of all the movies featured in this episode. [You can view it here](https://letterboxd.com/lukethatfilmguy/list/the-100s-of-the-past-4-decades-scriptnotes/).

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 636 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

(Whispers:) Today on the show, what’s with all the whispering in movies? Is it a deliberate narrative choice or just a fad? We’ll discuss voice and volume. We’ll also look at what you can learn from reading early drafts, the threat of TikTok and YouTube, and answer some listener questions. Helping us out with all of this is returning guest host Pamela Ribon. Welcome back.

**Pamela Ribon:** Hi.

**John:** Woo!

**Pamela:** Yay! Hi. Thanks. Woo. I don’t normally get a woo on.

**John:** Woohoo.

**Pamela:** Oh, hello.

**John:** Woo woos are very, very nice. We had you on this summer, and you were absolutely a phenomenal guest. But since that time, I got to see your movie Nimona, which was fantastic.

**Pamela:** Aw, thanks. It’s a lot of people’s movies, but yes.

**John:** It’s a lot of people’s movies.

**Pamela:** It’s a lot of people’s movies. But yes, I’m so glad you got to see it. That is a miracle.

**John:** It’s a very long process. I do want to talk some about the history of that and how it moved around and finally got made. But I also want to talk about, you got to go to the Academy Awards with that. I thought for the Bonus Segment we would just talk about going to the Academy Awards and what it’s like to go to the Academy Awards.

**Pamela:** Totally. That’s one of my favorite things to talk about. We’ll do it.

**John:** Not only were you there, you showed up in the background of so many famous people’s shots, which I love.

**Pamela:** Yes, most unexpected.

**John:** Very nice. Before we started with that, Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. Foxy wrote in some follow-up about vetting in last week’s episode. She wrote, “I was so stoked about the discussion of vetting in 635, because it’s something I’ve been wondering ever since Me Too. You guys gave great advice, but I have more questions. With Me Too, most of the behavior being called out was not on set. It was behind closed doors. Most abuse functions that way. The abuser often wants to keep it a secret so they can keep their good reputation intact, hence whisper networks. Now, I’m a woman, but I’ve never been tapped into any whisper network in any area of my life. And I would never want to hire someone who was abusing someone behind closed doors at home. How do you vet for this? Because cutting ties and showing there’s professional, reputational consequences for this behavior is super important, but how do you find out in the first place if they’re keeping it secret?”

**John:** Foxy’s question here reminds me of this thing we really should’ve gotten into in last discussion is that we were talking about vetting as an employer, but you’re also vetting as an employee. You’re wondering, is this person I’m gonna work for, are they a good person or not a good person. That can be just as important.

Pamela, I’m curious whether you have any thoughts about this. How do you check to see whether that person you’re gonna be working with, either you’re gonna hire them or gonna be working for them, how do you start to check about a person?

**Pamela:** Often, it’s not really all that whispered, I find. So there’s that. And then you have to believe women. You have to believe what you hear, even if that’s inconvenient for you and what you’d like to do. You can check with your reps, and you can check with people that you know who’ve worked with these people or for these people before. I find usually people will start with that, because they don’t want you getting into a situation that they could help you avoid.

**John:** I had an incident just this past week where we’re talking about a person, and there was a passing comment about, “Oh yeah, there’s some sort of Me Too thing, but… “ When I heard that “Me Too but,” I’m like, “Oh my, oh my.” That was a signal to me that I do need to investigate this more, and so asking around additional people and getting some confirmation that some folks were uncomfortable with this person. That’s good information to have. It really influences what you’re trying to do.

Either way, if you’re not tapped into any official whisper networks, I think it’s good advice to check to see whether that person is working with the same people again and again, which is generally a good sign that they want people around, unless they’re working with the same people again and again because those people are helping to cover up some behavior. When you do ask about a person, there’s this line where sometimes they’re not willing to report the behavior they saw, but they’re willing to tell you in confidence that this wasn’t great.

**Pamela:** I think of that as the whisper network. I don’t know about a network either, just to help Foxy feel like… You’re in the network if you’re talking to people and they’re talking to you. That’s kind of how it is. If there’s a database, I don’t know about it. But I would also say this is a good time to bring up hiresurvivorshollywood.org.

**John:** Tell me about that. I’ve never heard of this.

**Pamela:** This is an organization that was created by Sarah Ann Masse – I don’t know, it might be Masse – who was one of the Weinstein silence breakers. It is to address the issue of career retaliation against those who have been sexually violated and those who have shared those details publicly.

One of the ways that you can help make sure that you’re not hiring an abuser is to hire a survivor who spoke out, who might be suffering some of the things that happen to you, even though they tell you won’t happen to you and can’t happen to you, and even HR says can’t happen to you if you talk about what has happened. I think it’s important that we are able to say you can come forward and you can talk, and you are not just protected, you are gonna continue to have your career, which is one of the first things they threaten you with.

**John:** It’s important to remember that in Hollywood, where you tend to go from job to job to job, having a break where you’ve not been working is a problem. If you haven’t been working for six months, it’s increasingly harder to get that next job. I could totally see someone who was speaking up and speaking out and didn’t get that next gig or that gig after that. It can be harder to keep momentum in your job, in your career.

**Pamela:** Yeah, you can get labeled as a troublemaker or someone who encourages people to talk and speak out. That’s the opposite of the whisper network, so we don’t have to whisper anymore. I do feel like that’s part of vetting is, if you’re even having to wonder is it worth it for this person, then maybe there’s another person out there who is worth it.

**John:** Let’s go from whisper networks to literal whispering in movies. This is something that came up this past week with people’s observations that in the movie Dune 2, there’s just a lot of whispering, and characters are whispering in situations where you really wonder whether they’d be whispering in real life. Let’s play a little clip here. This is Timothée Chalamet’s character and Zendaya’s character talking. It’s a little, intimate scene. Let’s play a bit of this.

[Dune 2 clip]

**Zendaya:** Your blood comes from dukes and great houses. We don’t have that here. Here, we’re equal, man and woman alike. What we do, we do for the benefit of all.

**Timothée Chalamet:** I’d very much like to be equal to you.

**Zendaya:** Paul Muad’Dib Usul. Maybe you could be Fremen. Maybe I’ll show you the way.

**John:** This is leading up to their first kiss. I actually really like this scene. I love Timothée Chalamet saying, “I’d like to be equal to you.” If you are just listening to this at home and don’t have the visual here, you might think, okay, they’re in bed someplace, there’s people around, they’re whispering for some reason. But no, they are on the top of a sand dune with no one else around at all, and yet they’re whispering.

**Pamela:** (Whispers:) That’s right.

**John:** That’s right.

**Pamela:** Because that’s love, baby.

**John:** That’s love. Let’s talk about that. It is intimate, and so there is an intimacy created by the whispering. This scene didn’t bug me when I watched it in the theater. It’s only when someone pointed out it’s really weird that they’re whispering here that it stands out.

**Pamela:** I just think of Timothée Chalamet as just – he is whisper. If you could make a human out of the word whisper. He’s just whispering in doorways and leaning in and wants to be equal with you. Come on.

**John:** Come.

**Pamela:** Don’t make him volume. I’m leaning all the way in. Same with Zendaya. She’s so much beauty and talent. You’re like, just give it to me on level 2. It’s all I can take.

**John:** Full Zendaya, I couldn’t take it in this moment.

**Pamela:** No, we’d explode.

**John:** We have not read the script for Dune 2, so we don’t know whether in the scene description it’s talking about the fact that they’re whispering. I doubt it is. It was a choice made by the actors and director in staging the scene to do it this way. It’s a very deliberate choice.

But let’s talk about, as screenwriters, situations where we might want to have our characters whispering, when it would make sense, when we would actually put it in a script, and when it would just feel natural along the way. Obviously, the main reason characters whisper is so that other people around them don’t hear it. That feels really natural. When you see that in a movie, you get it. You’re whispering so people can’t hear. Sometimes that’s an aside. Sometimes that is so the guards 10 feet away are not hearing that. Other examples, Pamela, what are you thinking of?

**Pamela:** I don’t even think of this as whispering, what they’re doing, but in a movie this loud, this is considered whisper. That’s part of it too is you want to whisper so that you can have the opposite effect of what the rest of the film is going – or the rest of the scene. I think comedic tension whispers are my favorite whispers, where it’s like, “I can’t even believe,” because then you really get to hiss at each other. Comedic whispering is the best.

**John:** That’s really good. I think about not waking the baby. The parent arguments are happening so that they don’t wake the baby. There’s comedy there too, where you’re shouting and whispering at the same time. That can be a fun moment.

In the scene we just watched, it’s an intimate moment. I don’t know in real life if they really would be whispering, but it does bring us in closer to them. That’s honestly sometimes the job of a whisper is to invite us into that closeup so we’re really close in. Weirdly, because the camera does get close on people’s faces, if people are talking at full voice, it can feel a little strange. It can feel a little shouty.

**Pamela:** I’m thinking about times also in a script you might want someone to whisper to get all of the attention. You’re whispering on purpose. I suppose I’m just now thinking of my dad. It’s very parental. The angrier he got, the quieter he would get, so that you were like, “Oh, boy.”

**John:** Don’t worry about dad when he’s shouting. Worry when he’s whispering. People whisper to themselves, or sometimes they’ll whisper to a character who they know can’t hear them. Some examples. In Rear Window, he sees that the guy’s coming back and he’s whispering, “Get out of there.” He knows he can’t. He’s saying what he wishes he could say to the actual person, and there’s no way to actually say that. You also see that when people are watching something on a screen or a monitor and they’re trying to say, “Aha,” and there’s no way to communicate it. Weirdly, whispering is a thing people do in those situations.

**Pamela:** Yeah, but that’s to let us, the audience, know that he knows he can’t talk to them.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a question of would you do that in real life, or is that just a movie convention, that you’re vocalizing what you know you can’t say to the real person. Weakness, so a person who’s on their deathbed, we’re used to the whispering there. Confessions.

**Pamela:** I’m sorry, I’m still laughing that you have weakness equated with deathbed confessions. I was thinking weakness like, “It’s too heavy. I think we need to take some of the weight… ” But you were like, “It’s buried under the backyard flower bed.” You’re like, what a weak man.

**John:** What a weak man. I mean to separate weakness and confessions. Weakness, a person who’s physically frail, it makes sense that they can’t put their full voice behind things. Confessions I will say is a separate thing, like, “I see dead people.” You’re letting somebody in on a secret. Sometimes you whisper secrets, even if there’s no real reason to whisper.

**Pamela:** Particularly creepy secrets.

**John:** Whispering is creepy at times.

**Pamela:** (Whispers:) “I’m here for you.” That kind of stuff.

**John:** We were looking through some examples of famous whispers. Of course, “Rosebud.” “The horror.” Scar leans in to say, “I killed Mufasa.” And then, of course, “My precious.” That’s of course a character who is basically entirely whispers. His actual voice quality is what we would consider a whisper.

**Pamela:** I wrote one in Nimona, which is, “He’s perfect.” After all these reasons that this man’s a terrible villain, number one, everybody’s after him, and nobody will ever love him again, she’s looking at all of this news info, and she says, “He’s perfect.” I went to look at the script to see what did I say, and I had just put it in italics. Then I was like, oh, I don’t even remember how it’s done in the end. This is pretty amazing that you can just open it up in Netflix and I just hit a button and it went right to the line. I was like, no, that’s fresh in there. But she kind of growls it. Chloe kind of growls, like, “He’s perfect.”

**John:** The whisper growl is a thing too. Bane’s voice in Batman, or really Batman’s voice in Christopher Nolan’s Batman is a whisper growl. It’s like speaking softly but with a weird masculine intensity.

**Pamela:** The 30 Rock quote is the “talking like this” contest.

**John:** It’s good stuff. In the case of Nimona, you probably put that line in italics, and italics makes sense for that. It stands out. Other choice would be to put the parenthetical above that to indicate that this you say whispering, that it’s not at full voice. There’s a thing there.

But in the case, again, where characters are whispering lines that they wouldn’t necessarily need to whisper, that can be an on-the-set choice. That can be a choice the actors are making, the director’s making. And as long as everyone’s on the same page, it can work.

Kind of related is the issue of – on the podcast a lot recently we’ve been talking about word choices. And the last week we were talking about characters whose native language is not English and how you mark that in scripts and how you make choices that indicate that English is not their native language as you’re writing those characters.

Fundie baby voice came up. Our friend Chris pointed this out. It was something I’d not been aware of until you see the examples, like, “Oh, I totally get this.” This is an example of – it’s called fundie baby voice.

[Clip]

**Kelly Johnson:** I used to be a schoolteacher. I loved that, but I just felt burdened for so many people and I felt the calling to go back to school to become a Christian counselor.

**John:** This is Mike Johnson’s wife. It’s a voice. It’s a choice. It’s a very specific way of speaking. If you had a character who was speaking this way, you would need to indicate that in the script, because it really fundamentally changes our instinct about how those lines sound in our delivery. Have you experienced this in your real life or in scripts yet?

**Pamela:** I was just thinking this is such a church voice. You were like, “It’s learned. It’s a choice.” I think it might be ingrained. You may learn this growing up, of keep sweet and obey. This is the voice that you’re supposed to use to be, as you’ve got written here, childlike, sweet, submissive, and honey. But this voice to me is – I understand it’s fundamentalist, but it doesn’t take much to turn it into you’re in the South with the same voice.

**John:** As a counterexample, you look at Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos and the way she was deliberately pitching her voice lower, pulling down to a different register to give her authority that she felt like she couldn’t have in her normal voice. I just wonder if it’s just how we fundamentally police women’s voices the way we also police bodies. There’s no right way for a woman to speak.

**Pamela:** That’s true. I have done the Theranos, as we call this act, in rooms when I recognize that the sound of my regular voice giving ideas isn’t reaching ears anymore and it’s getting tuned out. Then I just start saying it like this. It definitely works. Definitely works.

**John:** Are people aware that you’re doing it?

**Pamela:** Only, yes, because I tell them. That’s who I am. I’m like, “Do you like it better when I say it like this?” They’ll be like, “I do.” I’m like, “I know you do. We’re gonna look into this.” This voice very much works. She’s not the only one who knows. It doesn’t take much. You just say it like this. When I look at videos of me in high school, as I did a bunch for My Year of Dicks, my voice is lower back then.

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** Because I think I was hanging around boys all the time, and that was just where my voice hung out. It’s very Janeane Garofalo probably. It was the style at the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about that, because obviously, whether it’s Christian fundie voice or the Theranos voice you’re doing, you’re pulling your voice examples based on the community around you and what seems to be working and how you fit in with the community around you. Mike Johnson’s wife, she’s probably doing that voice because that is the community that she’s in, and that feels like the right choice. And if she were to make a different choice, there would be consequences for her doing that within her community. That’s the choice that she’s making.

You were referencing My Year of Dicks, which is of course the incredible, originally a series and then done as a film you did and got the Oscar nomination for. As you’re watching those videos, do you remember deliberately choosing to lower your voice, or that was just at thing that happened?

**Pamela:** I don’t know that I definitely chose to lower my voice. I think I probably always – I still have a bit of a lower voice, and it’s only getting more so. I definitely know that there was an affect of – I think maybe it just happens in your teens, when you get your first official hormonal whatevers, and you just lean back in that sound of detachment that stayed that way.

I don’t know that I would ever write in a script how someone should do their voice, because isn’t that what the actor is bringing to the table? Unless it was she was masking her voice for some reason and doing an impression or something like that. I don’t know that I would say, “She’s got fundie voice,” even if I were writing a character who was a fundamentalist.

**John:** It’s interesting, because I feel like sometimes I need to be able to hear that character’s voice in my head. If I’m hearing it in a way that is not going to actually translate on the page without me calling it out, that feels important. Obviously, if some other character’s referencing it, you’re gonna need to put it there.

I don’t know, there’s a musicality to how these people are doing it that is different. Elizabeth Holmes, not only is she pushing it lower, she’s also going more monotone. The same words are gonna come across very differently, given that. You’re gonna make some different little word choices to fit that pattern and how it’s gonna fit.

**Pamela:** Word choices is true. I think I would maybe blend some words and italicize some words to get that musicality of the reader can hear what it says. But I don’t know that I would even talk about their pitch or something like that. But you’re right. If someone else is, “She’s definitely a lower talker, isn’t she?” there you go. You got it.

**John:** You’re going back to the Seinfeld reference. You say you pitched your voice lower. I’m sure there was some moment in which I internally recognized I had gay voice and changed, and so that I pitched lower, I made choices to sound less gay. But I don’t remember when that was, and I don’t have good examples of me on tape showing when my voice shifted. I’d love to see some forensics on that, but I just don’t think that material exists, to figure out was it in 5th grade or 7th grade that I did make that shift, because my register is much lower than it probably should be for my overall size and shape. At some point, that was just where I landed.

**Pamela:** It was a bunch of tiny recalculations probably, more than like, “Oh, the summer I turned this voice.”

**John:** This conversation is reminding me of a movie that I really, really loved, Lake Bell’s In a World. I want her to make many more movies. I really like this, but I was a little troubled by one thread of this. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a woman who wants to be the narrator announcer for film, so like, “In a world where,” blah blah blah blah, and how that business is so male-dominated. But it’s her conversations with other women that become a bit of an issue and come through at the end. So let’s take a listen to one clip here.

[In a World clip]

**Woman:** Hey! Watch it! That is so rude.

**Lake Bell (as Carol Solomon):** Oh my god. Okay. Excuse me. I’m so sorry. I just want to give you my card. I’m not a vocal coach anymore, but I would make an exception for you, because you sound like a squeaky toy. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. But I mean, like, I think you’re better than that. You know what I mean? And I think we’re all better than that. It’s good for the species. You know what I mean? But there’s also a Jamba Juice like two blocks away from here if you wanted to, because I bet you were looking for a smoothie. Maybe not. I don’t know. But if you were, you know where it is.

Over the next six weeks, Louis will be recording your voices, and we will listen to your sounds evolve right before your very ears, because women should sound like women, not baby dolls who end everything in a question. Let’s make a statement.

**Pamela:** Speaking of policing women’s voices, she just stopped her outside.

**John:** Yeah. Again, I really like the movie. This was just a thing that I think does not read so well to me now, 10 years or whatever years later. It does feel very police-y, like, people aren’t gonna take you seriously or maybe shouldn’t take you seriously because of your vocal choices.

**Pamela:** That being said, I was a logger for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, so I listened to uncut footage 12 hours at a time in a graveyard shift. I don’t recommend it. I type what I hear, so that you’re logging for story editors for the writers to make this show. There was a season where there was a girl, I just prayed every week she was about to get voted off. She really was up in here, sitting in a hot tub, and she had a high wiggle in her voice. It’s not her fault, but it was a lot, and it was in my ears. I had to type everything she said, which was mostly, “That’s amazing. Oh, yeah, I love that.” I’m not policing her. I could not leave her. It was my job to listen to her until she was voted off.

**John:** I am curious whether the job that you were doing exists in the same way today, because that feels like an absolutely perfect use of AI to log that.

**Pamela:** John, that was a paid gig.

**John:** That was a paid gig.

**Pamela:** That’s how I kept on living.

**John:** I’m not saying it should go away. I’m just saying that feels like very low-hanging fruit.

**Pamela:** Stop it!

**John:** I’m sorry. I’m not advocating for those jobs to be replaced. I think it’s fantastic that you got paid. I want people to get paid.

**Pamela:** I was helping writers who also weren’t getting called writers. Where’s our union? Logging is a job that is not for the weak, but it’s definitely for people who need to be underpaid to survive living in LA for the first few years. It’s definitely probably an AI job now, except they don’t know what they’re doing when they’re not talking, and I watched a lot of non-talking footage. Then I would just make up what she was thinking, which is why I was not cut out for that job.

**John:** I would say AIs right now are pretty good at being able to describe what is literally happening on screen. Is it gonna be useful for the editor who’s assembling stuff? Maybe not. And so you may still need actual human beings there to do that.

But anyway, back to our discussion of whispering and voices and the choices people are making. I think we have ways of indicating on a script what volumes should be. We put things in uppercase when people are shouting. We will put parentheticals in there to give a sense of what that is.

When someone has an overall vocal quality, I think you’re right, sometimes you do want to call it out if it’s going to be something that other characters are going to remark upon. But you don’t want to box in your actor unnecessarily. You still need to let them make their own choices.

**Pamela:** I wonder if that In a World girl’s character is just Baby Voice Girl. Maybe she’s in it later, she had a character name. But that’s usually how it’s done, isn’t it, so that you don’t even get a choice? The character is called Annoying Voice Girl.

**John:** I would like to talk now about Nimona, because as I watched this, I kept hearing your voice all over it. My guess was that you recorded scratch for her for a lot of it. Is that true.

**Pamela:** Oh, that’s funny. No.

**John:** Really?

**Pamela:** Because we already had Chloe hired. I’m trying to remember if we did scratch, gosh, because we did it during lockdown. I’m trying to remember how that all worked. But I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Some of these things we just block out. I was making My Year of Dicks and Nimona at the same time, in this office, in this room, during lockdown, while I was also slightly teaching 1st and 2nd grade, so forgive me if I don’t remember. But we definitely read it out loud and read it in the room and did all of that stuff. So that is probably what you’re hearing too is, yes, acting it out.

**John:** She has an incredibly expressive voice. I would say next to Sarah Silverman’s character in the Wreck-It movies, it’s probably one of the biggest little girl voices I’ve seen, because she’s not always a little girl, of course. But she’s really super, super expressive. Was it fun to write that character?

**Pamela:** It was fun. Also, I was brought in at a time when it was like, we need to really dig into Nimona and get her voice out. This IP has been around, and Nate is a part of it too, so this is a voice that was already on the page and in the creator. But being able to play around in that back and forth and, “I’m not a little girl, I’m Nimona,” was just a fun place. Then also, Riz was already cast too, so you knew the dynamic you could play there.

**John:** Talk to us about when you came on board and what the brief was, what had changed. I should say this is available for anybody who wants to watch it on Netflix. You should absolutely see it. It was one of the five Oscar-nominated animated films this year, so congratulations on it. At what point were you coming on? There was obviously a graphic novel. It sounds like there was already a script, but you were still digging in on how to service the best out of her?

**Pamela:** It had been around for quite a bit before I came on board, because Patrick Osborne was working on it at Fox Animation. I know I was still working on Ralph Breaks the Internet. But a part of me feels like I might’ve still been on Moana when it started. I’m not sure. It was a long time coming. They had talked about me coming on earlier. Blue Sky is based in Connecticut. And I didn’t think that I could go move out there and work on the movie. That was why I had passed at that point. And then March came around. They were like, what if we just come to your house every day?

At that point, Nick and Troy were involved as the directors, and I met with them and we all hit it off. They had had this rewrite that had gone well in the boards that they had had, and it was starting to work. I came in at a time where they had tried so many things. That was the hard part coming into the story team so late. Even this beginning of, to talk about, “He’s perfect,” she wasn’t doing the opening narration. That was one of the first things I was pitching, because you don’t meet her for a while.

**John:** She’s the title character. It seems like she has sidekick energy, and yet she ends up becoming the central character in ways that are really unusual and feel like it’s almost a commentary on how we treat secondary characters in animated films.

**Pamela:** Even the draft I had read before these reels where I came in, it had changed a bunch. They had really tried to figure this one out in many, many ways. Even saying like, “What if you hear her before you meet… ” They’re like, “We tried it.” We had to get through a lot of “we tried its”. You have to be really careful and confident when you’re coming in in that way of like, “But with all due respect, we haven’t tried it, the we that includes me now. Let me see if I can show you a little what I mean.” And even then, that takes time. That’s a real double Dutch of, “I’ll leave that whole area alone. I know my instincts, but we’re not there yet to talk about it.”

But anyway, the studio was shut down while we were still working on it. But as we kept working together, it was getting stronger. Trying to figure out, I would say the story structure stayed the same, but we were moving around the parts of when do we know what we know and why and how, and that stuff got shifted around quite a bit.

But being able to gleefully play with Nimona, luckily, that was always encouraged. Everybody on this movie was so funny. Once she was really sparkling, there were a lot of like, “Oh, I bet she’d say this. I bet she’d say this.” But people got protective of Nimona, as they should.

I had said something about her speaking in a different language at some point. They were like, “No, she doesn’t know other languages. She’s never really been anywhere else.” You got this with Ralph Breaks the Internet too, where they were like, “He can’t wear glasses. His eyes won’t deteriorate. He’s a digital figure.” I was like, “He’s eating a churro. I don’t know what to say. I’m confused.”

**John:** The rules of your world are complicated. She seems to know animals that she probably has not seen. Has she seen a rhino in real life? Yes.

**Pamela:** You’ve worked so hard to understand this world that doesn’t exist, that when someone else comes in and points, just says something like, “Never,” you have to be like, “All right.” I will be like this too one day. I know it, where I will be like, “No, you can’t turn off surge protect,” just weird things that you get so mad about, where you’re like, “That’s fundamentally against the core of who she is.” That’s where you get, and that’s when you know you’re really in it.

**John:** Hearing about the development process, it also strikes me that it helps answer a question I had, which is that the film uses its time in unusual ways, and things that in other films would be like, “We need to figure out a way to do this. The next sequence will be about doing that,” instead the next scene really does that thing. Like, “We have to clear my name,” and then literally, in the next scene, we clear his name. I liked it, but it seems to jump past a lot of the normal sequence of describe the obstacle, attempt to overcome the obstacle, overcome the obstacle. It uses its time in an unusual way.

**Pamela:** I don’t know how to speak to that, because part of me feels like that’s family animation a lot of times, so that we’re letting everyone in the whole wide world, which is the demographic, know what’s going on. There is a lot of “how did we get here’s” and then “what are we gonna dos.”

**John:** Oh yeah, but I was saying I think that is a hallmark of family animation is that you are talking about the thing you need to do and then how you’re gonna do it, and then you do the thing. What’s unusual in Nimona is they describe, oh, we need to do a thing, and suddenly they just do the thing. Where I’d expected, like, okay, this’ll be in the next 10 minutes, it’s like, no, that was taken care of in the next minute, which was unusual. I think that may be a consequence of discovering some parts of the story as you’re going through it.

**Pamela:** Also, I think because they were new to each other, they were doing a lot of emotional processing while talking about how did that just happen. Instead of needing to do it, they really did work it through each other.

**John:** That’s fun. Everyone check that out. The next topic I’d like to dig into is about early drafts. It occurs to me because when you read the scripts for the Oscar-nominated films, it’s like, “Oh, that’s perfect.” Of course, it’s always that way. But of course, we’re reading the very final draft. In some cases, we’re reading stuff that really reflects the final edit rather than the actual script they went into production with. I find it to be so educational to look at early drafts.

One of the things that I was able to do when I was at USC is – they had this big script library. They would have the final shooting script, but they would also have earlier drafts. It was so cool to see the stuff that had changed from the original idea to the final film. I remember reading the Point Break script and loving it, the James Cameron rewrite of it. It’s just great. But it’s different. It’s not the final film. You see what that looked like on the page, and ideas that were important at one point that then got dropped are great.

Also, during WGA arbitrations, a lot of times I’m reading seven scripts back, and you see what the initial instinct was versus what the final film was. You see how much stuff changes over the course of it. I think it’s really a good process for any screenwriter to see how much things really do change along the way.

**Pamela:** They solidify in your brain so differently too when you look back, because I did that a little, looking back here for you, for prepping, and I was blown away by what I didn’t remember. That’s just a good reminder to yourself of you have told yourself a story that you have believed. Thank you for your service on arbitration, honestly. What a job. What a hard thing to do, John, to go and read all those drafts and make these decisions.

**John:** I enjoy it, and so I will say yes most of the times when they call me about doing one of them, just because it’s important. You want to give people the credit that they deserve for the hard work they did.

One of the things you have in the notes here is about Natural Born Killers. Had you read a script for that early on? Had you read it before you saw the movie?

**Pamela:** No, not before I saw the film. That USC film script library sounds cool, but I was in a software company in Austin, Texas with the internet. The version that we had of that was trying to find people illegally uploading websites full of scripts. The early Natural Born Killers script was one I remember finding and being like, “Look at this. It’s so different than this film that I saw a billion times.” It’s very Tarantino-y. When you go in there, you’re like, it’s very Tarantino-y. They still have up the 1990 Tarantino script, which you can compare to the 1993 Oliver Stone and other writers’ draft.

But what’s also interesting is that then when you dive even further into people talking about it, because I only know internet rabbit holes about this script, but it came out of True Romance, which was also a rewrite of a script. In True Romance, Natural Born Killers is the screenplay that Clarence is writing while they’re on a road trip. That’s interesting. It’s the Facts of Life of – the spin-off series of the Tarantino universe.

**John:** I read Natural Born Killers from the USC script library. I remember reading it. This would’ve been 1992. It was the first script where I read the whole thing and then just went back and just started reading again from page 1. I was just blown away by it and how it upended the conventions of what I expected a movie to do, the fact that it moved into sitcoms and other things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the script so you can see what it was. It was just amazing and blew my mind, like, “Oh, this is a thing I could do on the page.” It was incredible. Then I ended up working for the producers of Natural Born Killers. I was their assistant and ended up writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers. I had a full experience there.

**Pamela:** That’s cool. Did you go all the way back to this first one?

**John:** I tried to pull things that I thought were really interesting about the first one into the novelization. The novelization really does not resemble the final movie very much at all. Oprah gets killed in the novelization. A lot of very different stuff happens in it. No one should read the novelization. Just don’t. But I was happy with the draft I wrote. I was not happy with the draft that got published.

But weirdly, the novelization of Natural Born Killers became my comedy sample that helped me get my very first job writing a screenplay, which was How to Eat Fried Worms, because naturally, the person who wrote Natural Born Killers novelization should write a charming children’s film about a kid who eats worms.

**Pamela:** Take it from the writer of My Year of Dicks, you can also write Moana. What’s interesting about that first script is I remember it was smaller and I feel like it was mostly the trial of Mickey and Mallory Knox. That’s so different than what you get in Natural Born Killers and such an Oliver Stone kind of film. I think that that original indie film that Tarantino had made also, in that Reservoir Dogs world, would’ve thrived.

**John:** 100 percent. It would’ve totally blown up. It was really just terrific. The Oliver Stone movie I like. It’s just I really miss the movie that I couldn’t see, which was the 1990 script, because that would’ve been special in its own way. But you mentioned Moana earlier, and this was actually probably what got me thinking about seeing earlier drafts, because on an audio podcast, it’s hard for us to compare pages from two different versions of Natural Born Killers. But what we can do is listen to two different songs and compare them. I had not realized until this recent car trip where we started playing “I want” songs from movies, is that How Far I’ll Go, which I think is a fantastic “I want” song from Moana, was the second version of the “I want” song, and the original one was More. Let’s play a sample from More.

[More (Outtake) from Moana]

**John:** If I had not told you that this was from Moana, you probably would’ve figured it out. She’s talking about being on an island. She’s talking about wanting to get beyond this island. It is the same general broad strokes idea, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t really serve the same function as the finished song does.

**Pamela:** Yeah. Boy, that song takes me back. It’s like you just threw me in a time machine. Woo!

**John:** You were working on this movie back when this was the “I want” song?

**Pamela:** Yeah. I was like, “How did this all happen?” because before there was this song, I would write in the script fake lyrics or poems or ideas of where this song might be, before we had Lin and the music team involved. More came right towards the end of my time on Moana. I did get to work with Lin a little bit about what this song could be. We had gone back and forth in emails and in person, and more came out of that.

**John:** I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this. Did I ever come into the room with you when you were working on Moana? Because I came into a room for an afternoon on Moana, but you may not have been on the project at that point.

**Pamela:** I think you might’ve walked in as my door closed. It was a real all-hands moment. When you change the writer, it is easier than anything, but we are on contracts. I think I did not meet with you. I did sit with Michael Arndt. If you were around any time around Michael, that was around that time.

**John:** I literally came in one afternoon. My pencil never touched anything. I saw a bunch of artwork on the walls. They didn’t show me any clips. They just showed me all the art on the walls and talked me through the story. I’m like, “Oh boy. Oh boy. This isn’t gonna work.” I was wrong. It worked really, really well. It was only a year out from the movie. I’m like, “I don’t know what you guys are doing here.” They pulled it out. But in the process of figuring this stuff out, let’s compare. We just listened to More. Let’s listen to the “I want” song that’s actually in the movie. This is How Far I’ll Go.

[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]

**John:** What we’ve done here is we’ve flipped the ideas around. In More, she’s complaining about how stuck she feels on this island, and wouldn’t it be great to be out there. In this version she’s saying, “My island is fantastic. I love everybody here, but I’m still pulled to go and leave.” There’s a tension there that’s very different. The brief of what we’re supposed to understand about her is so different.

**Pamela:** Gosh. Moana’s journey changed quite a bit also. At one point, her family was lost at sea, so she was gonna have to go and get them. The want had to change each time. You had at the base of a problem with Moana is her island is wonderful and her life is great. That wasn’t something that was really supposed to change. We had gone to these islands and interviewed young women of Moana’s age. They often said that they wanted to be pilots or missionaries or people who would leave their island but then have to come home, need to come home and want to come home. You couldn’t have a want that was… Also, I’ll just say the problem with wanting more is you get that at the end of Act 1, and then you did it. Here we are. Here is more. It’s interesting in How Far I’ll Go, you hear that, “Every trail I track.” There’s parts of More that do end up in How Far I’ll Go.

**John:** Let’s listen to that. Here’s a little clip of that.

[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]

**John:** That musical idea made it back through into the final song.

**Pamela:** I remember in the boards, it was like, “That part works. There she is. That’s the thing. That’s the feeling and the movement.” I’m not surprised that that got stuck and stayed throughout the next version.

**John:** Comparing these two things, it’s just a good reminder that, be it in our scripts or, in this case, the songs, you recognize that you went in with a specific idea, like, “This is how we get from this place to this place. This is who the character is.” Sometimes it’s only when you go to get through the draft, you realize that was not actually the story or that’s not actually the motivation, that’s not the best way to do this. You discover something by playing through it. All the outlines you want to make, all the thinking you can do is not as helpful as actually trying and seeing what works. That’s one of the huge advantages of animation is that you actually get to see does this work. You have these intermediate steps where you get to see a thing.

Broadway musicals are the same thing, where you have readings, you have workshops, you stage it, you’re changing it every night, and you get to see what actually works. Our live action features on television, we don’t get those opportunities. We go in, we shoot a thing once, we spend a long time in the editing room trying to make it work, but there’s no chance to make big changes to things.

**Pamela:** You’re also working on two different versions of the story at the same time, because you’d have a scene that then would just get lifted and be like, “Actually, I can turn that into a song and save you five minutes of screen time with a three-minute song.” As a writer, you’re like, “These are all just workable ideas. These are just thoughts.” The script is thoughts a lot of times, because you’re not recording what they’re gonna say for a very long time. That won’t be the same either, because as soon as you’re in front of them and they’re trying every line a few different ways and then you’re improvising – and it is a ball you’re playing with a lot of times, but it’s your ball, so it’s very hard.

**John:** That’s my ball.

**Pamela:** It’s like, “That’s my ball.” But it’s not, because you hit it over the net quite a few times. There’s a bunch of teams. I’ll keep metaphoring. I don’t care.

**John:** 100 percent. Weirdly, a lot of the animation I’ve done has been stop-motion animation, which is kind of the exception, where we get to shoot a thing once. You pre-record; you shoot a thing once. You can’t change a lot. It’s more like live action. I’ve found it frustrating to try to do traditional animation, because I would deliver a script, like, “Here’s a script. Go for it,” and then I will get these boards back, and it’s like, “Wait, what are you doing? That’s not the script at all. You’ve just chosen a completely different thing to animate that’s not actually useful for my script.” That’s John August struggling with how traditional animation is done.

**Pamela:** It’s not for the weak.

**John:** It’s not for the weak. I compared animation to Broadway musicals. I’m thinking back to when we were doing the Big Fish musical. We did our out-of-town tryout in Chicago. We had a really rough time, because we were trying to make big changes, but every night we had to put on a show that people could actually watch and make sense. We would introduce stuff in blocks and pieces so it could all still fit together every night, but we still were changing a lot. We were adding new songs. We were moving stuff. We were cutting stuff.

One of the things we realized is that we did not have a an “I want” song for Will that worked. The challenge I put for Andrew Lippa was like, “You need to write an ‘I want’ song for Will. Let’s talk about what’s in there. Let’s talk about what ideas there are.” I remember being in the basement of the Oriental Theater, and he played me the song which became Stranger, which was the big “I want” song for Will. It was perfect. It was wonderful. We couldn’t do anything with it. There was no way to stick it to the show. We couldn’t tell the company that this new song existed until we closed in Chicago, went back to New York, were in the workshop again, and we could introduce this new song, which transformed big parts of the show. I just remember tears out there, like, “Oh my god, we did it. We actually made the thing happen.” But there was no way to actually make that fix live until we can get back into a safe place to insert it. It was such a different experience than anything I would’ve had doing features.

**Pamela:** Even in Moana, I think it was weird to put that want song, because it can come too late, and now she’s complaining, or it’s too early, and you are like, “Why? What is she even talking about? I don’t agree.” You have to agree with their want. It has to be like, “Me too. That’s exactly what I want for you.” I had pulled up all the stuff around the time that More was written to remember the brain that we were in. We were very much like, “Okay. Look. We know there’s nine things the song has to do.” Poor Lin. There are nine things the song has to do.

At one point there’s this document that was sent to him that was like, “Here’s just possible titles. This is my favorite.” I was like, “This is amusing, as a writer.” I think it’s alchemy, people who are able to write songs if they hear music or even how they – I felt so embarrassed every time I knew someone was reading one of these fake song poems I was trying to do, like I’m in a coffee shop, on a stage.

We sent the following: “Here’s just some possible titles.” Why? But anyway. “Set Sail. I’ll Find My Way. I Know My Way. I Learn Too Well. Why Not Now? If Not Now, When? To Sail is Life. I Want to Sail. The Next Step. The Biggest Step. I Hear You. My Life’s at Sea. My Dream is to Sail. The Far Horizon. Beyond the Reef. The Endless Beyond. Beyond the Edge of Nowhere. There’s Somewhere There Past Nowhere. I Am Moana: Daughter of the Sea. My Life, My Ocean. A Different Voice. A Different Song. A Different Rhythm.” Just take that, Lin.

**John:** Some of those are terrible, but some of those actually totally make sense. You can completely imagine some of those things being that “I want” song. I saw this in France. When I saw it, it was Vaiana. She wasn’t Moana.

**Pamela:** You know why, yes?

**John:** I know why, because Moana was a porn star in Italy, I think, and then also a trademark in other places. In Europe, it’s just Vaiana. It always was Vaiana. My question is, I don’t remember, is this the second song? Because classically, the “I want” song in a musical is the second song. There’s a “welcome to the world” song that sets up the whole universe, and then this is the second song. Is it the second song in Moana?

**Pamela:** I don’t think it is, because you’ve got We Know the Way and Where You Are. Let’s see. Track listing, it’s number four, but that’s I think because of the opening sound.

**John:** That’s score stuff.

**Pamela:** Yeah, score stuff. It might be How Far I’ll Go is after Where You Are. That’s the thing. Where You Are, this is the “perfect world” song. That’s it. We Know the Way used to always open. It was the first song they wrote as a team. It was so great. We were like, “This is it.” It was considered, “This is how the movie has to open,” which then your third song would be a want song, which feels a little late.

**John:** It does feel a little bit late.

**Pamela:** She also used to sing a song before that of who Maui was. There was a whole Maui song too.

**John:** No, that’s not gonna work.

**Pamela:** It was a lot. It was a lot.

**John:** I could’ve come into the room and said, “It’s not gonna work.”

**Pamela:** It was an Act 1 break. She was singing like, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta find my way. I hope my dad doesn’t mind. I hope he’s not mad at me. I’ve gotta get this right. I think this is who I am, and I won’t know if I don’t go see it.” It was that want song. It was a little like, “I want to know if this feeling inside me is okay to have.”

**John:** Which is a good thought. That actually holds through into How Far I’ll Go, which is like, “I feel this tension, because I love everything here and yet I am completely drawn out there. I want to be a good daughter, and yet I feel like I can’t be.” Those are real things.

Let’s talk for a moment about the article by Mark Harris called How Bad Could It Get for Hollywood, really looking at the futures of YouTube and TikTok, coming down to the idea that young Americans aren’t thinking about movies and television in the same way, and so the industry that we’ve built to entertain people is in danger of being supplanted by a video that they’re watching that is not created by studios and, of course, union writers. What did you take from this?

**Pamela:** I feel like, oh, here’s this article again. I don’t know. Is that okay to say?

**John:** I would generally agree with you. You’re safe to predict doom and gloom every year.

**Pamela:** It’s TV and film. There’s another one going on, video games. It’s all the doom and gloom of all the things. It’s all supposed to be really bad. I feel like I’m always in whatever is the version – wherever they’re complaining that it’s over and it’s dead is where I’m employed. That seems to be-

**John:** Always good.

**Pamela:** Then they’re like, “You’re not getting employed. Over here, this is where the people are really employed.” I don’t really read these, because I don’t take them into… My husband is someone who will be like, “Your job’s [unintelligible 00:52:36].” Even this article that you’ve linked I kind of read with one eye squinting, because I don’t want it to get in my heart or my head.

**John:** There’s always an existential threat, which is basically that people are gonna stop watching the stuff that we’re making, and because people have a certain number of hours in the day, they’re gonna spend those hours doing things that are not movies or television.

The prediction that the actual movies will fail and that no one will go to the movie theaters anymore – is attendance down? Sure. But there’s still something kind of great about being in a public space with people all watching the same things. Even my teenage daughter does like doing that at times. She loves TikTok. She loves YouTube. But there’s something great about the event of everyone staring at the same screen, watching a thing.

There’s something appealing about television events that get everyone watching the same thing and talking about the same thing. There’s reasons why that works and will probably continue to work. And yet I think we do need to be mindful that there’s new threats pulling at people’s attention. And that attention could make it harder for some of the economics of our business to work.

**Pamela:** Yeah. You’ve really said it. We can all like a TikTok, but we can’t all go watch a TikTok and talk about it together and go on a date to TikTok. There’s still communal events. They’re still bringing us together. And if they’re the kinds of things that people are talking about, you’ve gotta go do the thing, to see the thing to be able to talk about it too.

That being said, I was at a friend’s house recently where they just had on the television two things from YouTube. One was a screensaver that they just had on. Every once in a while the neon sign in the image would blink, and they’d all be like, “Yay.” They’d also watch marble runs where it’s elaborate. I just said, “Why do we work so hard?” Someone in that house was also in the industry. No, they both are. I was like, “Why do we work so hard? You guys just sit here and watch marble runs.” They were like, “Look at it go. Yay.”

**John:** That’s so nice.

**Pamela:** Yay. There’s that element to what we make too, of can you shut off your head and have fun. I think that’s what the Eras Tour is proving, like, “Oh my gosh. We just want Barbie. Let’s go have fun.” They certainly tried to make Oppenheimer seem like a rollicking good time. “Let’s go out and have fun.” And it worked, because people were ready to do that.

**John:** We have some listener questions here that are perfect for Pamela Ribon, our guest today. Drew, start us off.

**Drew:** Lark in Virginia writes, “Recently I’ve been doing some rewrites for a series pilot, and as I’ve been going back, I’ve been considering how this show may be if it was animation instead of live action. Just how different is writing animation compared to live action? Do you still follow the formula in terms of writing on the page? How have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike? I feel like there are more eyes on both the WGA in both a good way and a bad way and more awareness towards TAG in general.”

**John:** We’ve talked a lot about, for writing animation, even in this episode, if you actually look at a script for an animated series and a live action series, they’re not different. Animated half-hours, like a Simpsons, is double spaced in ways, but otherwise it’s the same kind of formatting all throughout.

**Pamela:** I didn’t even think that this was a format question, because the formulas – you’re writing scripts for telling stories. They’re the same. Your budget is different, maybe. Maybe. They’re pretty expensive too. The character talking might be a cat, so that’s different. But no, you don’t write it differently. You ask yourself, does it need to be animated? That’s what’s different mostly.

**John:** There’s an animated series that I may be doing here soon. You’re figuring out how you’re going to do it, because when you say animation, there’s 15 different things and ways you could be doing an animated series. They have different costs and different requirements. But the actual script, the stuff that you’re writing, that’s not gonna change that much. That feels the same between live action and animation.

Rarely do you see a script that was written for live action that you can just immediately take and then just turn into animation. You’re gonna make some different choices just based on how audiences see things, how stuff fits together, how transitions work. You tend to write knowing something’s gonna be animated or non-animated. If you’re a person who can write live action, you’re a person who can write animation, and vice versa.

The differences and challenges is that writing something how you guys were writing Moana was a much more iterative process than what a writer would normally encounter. That’s something you have to deal with, and being good with – you said like, here’s a bundle of ideas that you know are gonna change. That’s a very different experience.

**Pamela:** I would say it still happens in live action too. When it is, you’re still like, “Iterative.” That’s just the word that I hear a lot now. But yes, in animation, it is kind of the point of it, and particularly if you’re coming around during development, before the thing is in actual production, which then is still in reels. You’re never really shooting a thing. You’re never shooting it. That’s it, John.

**John:** That’s the thing is you’re never shooting and you’re never really in post. It’s all one blurry thing. There’s development, which there can still be an artist in that time, but it’s before you have this expectation of like, we’re really making this thing. But even when they say they’re really making the thing, they may not be making the thing. Nimona, it sounds like they were kind of making the thing, and then they decided they weren’t making the thing, and then, luckily, someone else said, “Sure, we’ll make the thing.”

**Pamela:** I think of scenes that we made and finished in Ralph Breaks the Internet that were done in animation for the most part and then got cut. That’s that. Then you’re like, “Post-credit sequence.”

**John:** Yay.

**Pamela:** “Yay. We’ll still use it.” It’s never being shot.

**John:** We had Jennifer Lee on to talk about Frozen. They were way down the road in a lot of stuff, and they made giant changes. There are sequences that they couldn’t go back through and completely redo, that are just – they’re not quite the same movie, and yet you roll with it because you roll with it. I think it was the abominable snowman sequence. It’s like, it’s not kind of the same movie, those aren’t kind of the same characters, and yet it works, because it needs to work. They did not have the time to go back through and completely change that the way they would want to change that. You’re always making those choices. In that way, it feels more like traditional film and TV, where you shot a thing, and you gotta make it work in the editing room.

**Pamela:** Sometimes you’re just so close that you really are the only one who’s noticing. In its whole, people are like, “Yay.” But this question of how have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike – nothing.

**John:** Nothing. Here’s what I would say is different. One of the best things about the strike for me were the days that I was at, generally, Warner Bros and would see a zillion TAG, The Animation Guild, folks out there on the picket line with us. I know you’ve pushed hard for improving conditions for writers working under TAG contracts. I think there was a sense of WGA versus TAG. That’s a ridiculous dichotomy. Really, the case is you want things to be WGA and TAG, because TAG is not just folks who are writing animation, but it’s all the other folks who are working in animation. It’s storyboard artists and other crucial people in animation. We would love to see movies and TV shows that have WGA writers who have the full protections and credits and residuals for the writing that they’re doing, and those projects have full TAG union members getting everything else done. We want union animation.

**Pamela:** Yes, we’re union parity. Putting it under TAG doesn’t mean I don’t have the same kind of protections and residuals that I would’ve had if you had made it WGA. Since TAG can’t free their writers, then that was what needs to happen within TAG. But not just writers. There are many, many members of TAG who are not being treated appropriately, which is why TAG might go on strike.

It is nice that it is less thinking that, “I thought everybody was WGA,” or, “I had no idea that most of you were being forced to work without a union at all, depending on the studio.” And I think just also an awareness of what a union does. But I think TAG still has a long way to go for people to understand and respect its union members.

**John:** Obviously, those negotiations are starting right now. TAG is part of larger IATSE, but TAG also has its own contracts it negotiates. It’s complicated. But we need to be mindful of it and just never pretend that writing animation is lesser than writing live action.

**Pamela:** That’s right. The things we were on strike for in the WGA are what does happen in TAG now.

**John:** Exactly.

**Pamela:** AI is already in TAG. It’s happening there. I’ve seen it. A lot of these protections that we were on strike about are because we know it can happen, because it does happen in animation.

**John:** Minimum staff size, for an example, we would talk to TAG animation writers, showrunners who basically could not hire any writing staff, and so were basically having to do everything themselves. That’s a danger you want to avoid in live action so that you don’t have showrunners just melting down because they don’t have the writing support they need.

**Pamela:** As a for instance.

**John:** As a for instance. As one of many for instances. Let’s do our One Cool Things. I’m so excited to see what you have for your One Cool Thing.

**Pamela:** I know you lived in Paris for some time. As an adult, you can do things that you didn’t get to do in high school, like learn French. Once I started going to the Annecy Animation Festival in France, I was like, “I want to keep coming back here, but I want to know more French every time.”

There’s this place called Coucou. Coucou French classes are based in Los Angeles and New York, where a lot of writers live. Coucou has two locations in LA, I think Silver Lake and their new one is in Culver City. But they’re also online. This is a way to learn French that has a lot of… For me I’ve always done it online, although there’s one down the street. We get together. We are conversing. We are learning. They have all different fun ways to practice your French. They send out newsletters for, “Here are some French rom-coms to watch.” They have little classes in poetry, book reading, flower arrangement. It is what if learning another language was a fun community as opposed to something you did alone and got confused about.

**John:** Going beyond just talking to Duolingo every day and making that little green owl happy.

**Pamela:** See, because Duolingo is a slot machine. Duolingo is the Vegas of language learning. I think it’s pretty cool to jam it in there. The Pimsleur method has its own way. But those are lonely tasks. I invite you to the Coucou community. There’s private lessons. There’s group classes. There’s workshops and events. You can walk down to your little French location and hang out and have a baguette. It’s fun.

**John:** That’s awesome. That’s fun. My One Cool Thing is a video I saw this past week by David Friedman. He was looking at the Fox sitcom ‘Til Death, which I remember the title, but I never saw a single frame of that sitcom. The video talks through the fact that ‘Til Death made it to four seasons, not because anybody was watching it, but because Sony, who was making the show, made a deal with Fox to say, “We’ll give it to you for free.” They just wanted to hit that 100 episodes so they could hit syndication.

In that fourth season, they had a new showrunner. Because no one was watching, they could just make some really weird, wild swings. Characters became aware that they were on a sitcom. They just did some things you shouldn’t be able to do in a sitcom, that were kind of fun and interesting. I don’t need to go back and watch the sitcom, but I do enjoy Friedman’s exploration of how strange this sitcom got, because it was just allowed to get so strange.

The other thing I thought was interesting was a blog post Friedman did about how he constructed it, because this was 80 hours of video to watch. He didn’t want to watch the whole sitcom. He built a script that went through and figured out which cast members were in which things, because they kept changing out cast members, and basically built an Excel spreadsheet that showed where the changes were, so that he could just look at those moments and not have to watch the whole thing, which was just very smart and felt very much like how I would do it. I enjoyed the video and his explanation behind the scenes.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Vincent DeVito. 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’ll find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly 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 Pamela and I are about to talk through on the Oscars and attending the Oscars and how fun the Oscars are. But that couldn’t be as much fun as having Pamela on again as a co-host here. An absolute delight getting to chat with you about these things.

**Pamela:** So much fun. I can’t wait to come back again. I hope you invite me. Thank you.

**John:** We will. Also, remind us where we can find you, because you have your other podcast as well. Talk through, how do we find you?

**Pamela:** My other podcast, like this is one of mine – I’ll take it. I cohost a podcast called Listen to Sassy, where we go through every issue of the beloved ’90s magazine, that you can find all about at Listen to Sassy – I was like, “Is it dot-com or dot-net? Hold on.” It’s dot-com. Of course it is. Listentosassy.com. I don’t go to Twitter.

**John:** I stopped Twitter too.

**Pamela:** You can find me on Instagram @pamelaribon. Listen to Sassy is a great way to hear more about what it’s like from the years when you talked like this.

**John:** Perfect.

**Pamela:** You know what else though? If you do want to watch My Year of Dicks, it’s at myyearofdicks.com.

**John:** I love it. Everyone should watch it. It’s so, so good. People will tell me, “Oh, Pamela Ribon was on the show, and I finally watched My Year of Dicks. It was really good.” I’m like, “Yes, I told you that last summer.”

**Pamela:** You guys were very early supporters. I thank you. I don’t know that we would – segue – be getting to the Oscars without you, so thank you so much.

**John:** Hooray.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Oscars. You were just at the Oscars. This is your second time at the Oscars, because you were nominated for My Year of Dicks. This time I saw you on Instagram in the back of other people’s photos. I’ve been to the Oscars a couple times, but only in the balcony stuff, because I’ve never had a thing nominated. Talk to us about your Oscars experience either of these two years.

**Pamela:** Who’s counting? This is the fourth film I’ve worked on that’s been nominated for an Oscar.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Pamela:** But only the second time I had tickets. That’s how it goes. Last year when we were nominees, we were seated where you go. It’s kind of the mezzanine. You’re not all the way down there. Through a series of surprise events, I ended up way down there in the orchestra. Listen. I don’t think it’ll ever be more fun, unless I ever win an Oscar, to go to the Oscars. It was a most unexpected place to find myself. We could talk about the two different versions.

**John:** I want the celebrity-filled glamour version. This most recent version, paint the scene. Who was around you? You were very close to Charlize Theron and a bunch of other folks.

**Pamela:** Yes. I assumed it was like Forrest Gump really. “What’s Pam doing there?” In the past, usually my friends will go, “Are you at the Oscars?” and I’ll have to say, “That is Patricia Arquette.” This year it really threw my friends off, because they were like, “I knew you were going, but I knew you weren’t supposed to be seen, so what are you doing behind Charlize Theron?”

I asked an usher, “Where are these seats?” They said, “They’re down there.” I thought, “That’s a mistake. I’ll keep walking and figure out what that means,” because they said O means orchestra. I was like, “Okay. These letters don’t make any sense, because this says F.” Truly, someone was like, “The stage is A, and you’re at F,” slowly explained to me, which is what I needed, because at this point my eyes were exploding, because I’m like, “That’s Slash. Why is Slash here?” That’s the first thing I saw was a hat.

**John:** Are you at the right awards show? Is this the Grammys?

**Pamela:** I was like, “That’s Nicholas Cage.” Nothing made sense for a second, because, again, once you see Slash’s hat, you stop making sense. Then I saw Eugene Lee Yang, and their outfit was this Billy Porter-esque red suit-gown. I was like, “Oh, that’s the Nimona group.” Then they pointed me that way. Then I sat next to Lloyd, who’s another one of the credited writers.

And then Riz, who was going to sit next to me, had not been seated yet, so I didn’t know it was gonna be him. But right before I left the house, I thought, “Riz Ahmed did us a real service by making announcing My Year of Dicks a viral event,” and so I had a little thank you dick for him, because I’m classy. I have these little crystal dicks – Malala also has one – that I give out when you come near My Year of Dicks and help it out in some way. I thought, “Whatever, I’ve kept this one for Riz. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll see him after the after-party or something.” Then he’s sitting next to me.

The first thing I do, because I don’t know, I’m like, “They’re certainly gonna kick me out of this seat,” because I turned to Lloyd, I’m like, “The writers don’t get to sit here. Someone’s made a mistake. I don’t know what’s going on. Thank you, Netflix, to the Academy. But regardless, we’re not gonna mess this up.” That’s all I kept saying, “We’re not gonna mess this up,” because that is Steven Spielberg sitting next to me, and I’m in front of the Poor Things team. And I don’t even know yet that Christopher Nolan is to my left. I’m too busy. Lloyd is doing the same thing. He’s like, “Pam, I see Jennifer Lawrence.” It’s so wild. I’m like, “That is Bradley Cooper.” It went Downey, Blunt, Cillian, Sir Ben Kingsley, Jon Batiste, Pam, like that makes any sense.

**John:** Do you have an explanation now of what happened?

**Pamela:** These are the seats. These are the seats that I was told to sit in. I was like, “Okay.” I would give out gum at breaks and then be like, “We’re getting rid of the gum when the commercials are over, because I am not gonna be gum girl.” I could really only see a number of memes happening, of me opening my mouth and just like, “Yeah, y’all,” just gums.

I will say I kept it together for the most part, but there was a moment when they were putting down all the lights in the aisle. They were just putting down a bunch of lights in the aisle. And I went, “The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming.” I turned to an usher. I went, “Right? I didn’t miss it?” How would I have missed it? Pam, you’ve been here the whole time. “The Kens are coming?” The guy goes, “The Kens are coming.” I was like, “Ah! It’s happening! [Unintelligible 01:13:01] Kens!” Which was such a chaotic moment that I didn’t really get to see his Ken piece, because they lift him in the air. We were under the show. I didn’t know the screen was telling people to grab flashlights and sing. I saw none of that. But it was still glorious. I highly recommend fifth row seats to the Oscars.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Pamela:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** I’ve been twice, I guess. The Oscars are fun in person. It’s different than watching them at home, because, obviously, during the commercial breaks, stuff is happening. I don’t know if during your awards they deliberately did stuff, or was it just everybody running for the bathrooms and the seat fillers coming in. But it’s fun when you’re – the off-camera moments are really delightful too.

**Pamela:** There was a lot of people getting up and walking around. I will say the year before when we were up in the mezzanine, which, wonderful seats, but when you’re a nominee for a category that has to move you, we were waiting for our category and then we didn’t know exactly when it was gonna be. Then they move you down to the seats that are for your category. There’s a camera on you that isn’t gonna be used or needed. Then you don’t win, and then the Oscars are over, really. That’s it. You’ve worked so hard, and then that moment happens, and you can go out to the lobby and have a drink and nurse your wounds. That is how I did it last year.

**John:** In this situation, Nimona could’ve won. Would you have gone up on stage if Nimona had won?

**Pamela:** We had been told by the team, “Hey, man, if we win, you guys, please, everybody come up,” which I’m pretty sure we would’ve. We would’ve been so excited. And we were a jumpable distance to the stage. But traditionally, no. Animation, they’re just like, “We can move on with this.”

It was the third category this year, so we also pretty early on were like, “That’s it. We just get to sit here and enjoy the show.” I don’t know if I had been back there with the rest of the team or even any – there were three different groups of Nimona all around in the Oscars. Probably we would’ve gone to find each other.

But we were so close that even Lloyd was like, “I think I’ll go get a drink,” and I was like, “Lloyd, look, if you leave, there’s a seat filler. Who knows what you’re gonna miss? I bet it’s Billie Eilish,” which it would’ve been. I said, “We’re just gonna sit here and be grateful for the shortest Oscars experience we’ll ever have.” It was over in a blink.

I thought watching it on my couch in my pajamas with my friends was fun. Going as a nominee but then not winning was its own kind of fun. This was fantastic. This was joyous. Miyazaki won. What are you gonna do? It wasn’t even the kind of thing where the winner is like, “Come on, that hack.”

**John:** You didn’t go into this with the expectation like, “Oh, we’re gonna beat Spider-Man and Miyazaki.”

**Pamela:** That’s pretty tough. The miracle of it existing – the studio was shut down. The miracle of it getting a nomination, which that requires your peers in the animation community to recognize the film and nominate it. There were a lot of wonderful films that year that didn’t make that final five. To win? How do you get all of the other branches to know about a movie on Netflix that didn’t have a theatrical release when you’re up against Spider-Verse and then Miyazaki? All of the short-list nominees really were contenders.

I saw Robert DeNiro. He did not have a good time at those Oscars. You could probably go and get jaded from it all, but I don’t know, for me – I love watching people win things in general, and particularly if they are young females. It’s just my favorite thing to watch is a young woman win something.

**John:** The editor of Oppenheimer, loved her.

**Pamela:** Absolutely. The girl with the short film. Any young woman clutching something she won is my favorite thing. The Oscars this year, it was a pretty – then I’m like, no, not every film was a happy, happy film, obviously, but there was an atmosphere down there of, “The show’s about to begin, and I think it’s gonna be a good time.”

**John:** It was a good time. It was a good show.

**Pamela:** Nicholas Cage was right in front of me. I couldn’t stop. Maybe you don’t know this. Why would you? When I was a little girl, my imaginary friends were all celebrities.

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** I moved a lot. You’d make a friend, and then you’d lose touch with her. But these celebrities always moved with me, time to time. There have been a couple of times in life when I’ve worked with someone who was my imaginary friend when I was a kid. I don’t tell all of them that, but I do wait, if there is a moment, and I let them know, because why not? But this was what it looked like when I was a little kid going to bed, and I had all my imaginary friends hanging out with me before bedtime. This is the closest to that experience.

**John:** Pam, you didn’t win an Oscar, but you’ve won the Oscars. You probably had the most fun of anyone there, and I love that.

**Pamela:** I will say then, here’s this Charlize moment. She wasn’t sitting in front of me. Jon Batiste was sitting in front of me. Then he went to go do his song, and then some seat fillers were sitting in front after that. Then at one point this beautiful woman is walking toward me. I’ve seen Charlize Theron more than once in person. Never I’ve spoken to her. But every time the same thing happens in my head, which is, “Does she live in my neighborhood? Does she have kids at my school?”

**John:** Totally.

**Pamela:** I don’t know why. Then she sat down. Lloyd’s like, “That’s Charlize Theron.” I was like, “That’s a seat filler. We know this.” He goes, “You can’t see what I can see. 100 percent, Charlize Theron is sitting directly in front of you.”

Then they started passing out these little tequila bottles, and they said, “There’s gonna be a toast.” That’s all we knew. You get used to these cameras moving around to position themselves in front of nominees or Steven Spielberg for the bit. The cameras were whipping around the front. The bit began with Jimmy, of like, “This is my wife, Charlize Theron.” As soon as he said, “My wife, Charlize Theron,” Lloyd elbows me, goes, “We’re definitely about to be on TV.” But I already had figured this out. I was just like, “You guys, act the part.” The actor in me went, “And we’re on.” Then the camera came up for her reaction shot. I was like, “You’re not gonna mess this up.” I’m just like, “My role is audience lady behind Charlize.”

**John:** Absolutely. You’re gonna be present but not necessarily in focus.

**Pamela:** You can totally see it in the clip. You can see me go, “And we’re live.” I wasn’t gonna mess it up. I wasn’t gonna be gum girl. I wasn’t gonna get kicked out of those seats. It was an honor and a privilege to be in a scene at the Academy Awards. Please ask me back. Riz and I were like, “I think every year.” We’re like, “Every year.”

**John:** Every year.

**Pamela:** He’s like, “Next year, what if we’re two rows up?” I said, “Maybe we have to make something to do that.” I said, “But I’m fine with that, as long as two years from now we’re on stage announcing best animated short film.”

**John:** Love it.

**Pamela:** These are the goals.

**John:** Pam, congratulations again. Yay. Thank you for sharing your Oscar experience.

**Pamela:** Thanks. I can’t wait to hear your next one.

**John:** Yay.

Links:

* [Pamela Ribon](https://pamie.com/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/pamelaribon/)
* [Listen to Sassy](https://listentosassy.com/)
* [My Year of Dicks](https://myyearofdicks.com/)
* [Nimona](https://www.netflix.com/title/81444554) on Netflix
* [Hire Survivors Hollywood](https://hiresurvivorshollywood.org/)
* [Dune: Part Two Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZpGLqLoBJA)
* [‘Fundie Baby Voice’ Seems To Be Everywhere Now. Here’s What You Should Know](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fundie-baby-voice_l_65eb6b2fe4b05ec1ccd9e9b9) by Caroline Bologna for Huffpost
* [In a World – Smoothie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvficd_IxBc)
* [Natural Born Killers 1990 Draft](https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Natural_Born_Killers.PDF)
* [Natural Born Killers 1993 Draft](https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/natural-born-killers_shoot.html)
* [Lin-Manuel Miranda on ‘I Want’ Songs, Going Method for ‘Moana’ and Fearing David Bowie](https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/lin-manuel-miranda/)
* [More (Outtake)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGtjl5YbPdQ) from Moana
* [How Far I’ll Go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo) from Moana
* [How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/opinion/oscars-hollywood-extinction-event.html) by Mark Harris for NYT
* [This Sitcom Got WEIRD When Nobody Watched It](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkGsk6RBSgg) by David Friedman
* [Researching An Old Sitcom With AI](https://ironicsans.beehiiv.com/p/researching-old-sitcom-ai) by David Friedman
* [Coucou French classes](https://coucoufrenchclasses.com/)
* [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 Vincent DeVito ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont, 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/636standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/is-this-person-going-to-ruin-everything).

**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.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 635 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, sometimes on this podcast we talk craft. Sometimes we talk business. Today on the show, it’s half and half. On the business side, how do you make sure that person you’re hiring for your movie or casting on your show, Craig, isn’t an absolute monster?

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** We’ll talk through best practices on vetting people. And on the craft side, how do write for characters whose native language is not English? We’ll look at and listen to examples for how to do it right and some pitfalls to avoid. We’ll also answer some more listener questions. And Craig, for a bonus segment, something I don’t think we’ve ever talked about enough on this podcast: cults.

**Craig:** Oh, god, I hate cults.

**John:** I love cults so much.

**Craig:** Why did it have to be cults?

**John:** Why did it have to be cults? Now, I joined the Zoom late, but I think you and Drew were already talking about this first item of business here, which is you love word games, but I was playing the new New York Times beta version word game, and I suspected, this is not gonna be Craig’s thing. I’m talking about New York Times Strands.

**Craig:** Strands. What a nice way for them to just rebrand word search, the dumbest of all puzzles. It’s not a puzzle. It’s just searching.

**John:** It’s a word search with a theme you have to discover, unlike a classic word search where a word can be either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. Here, they can go around in various permutations, because it’s all done digitally.

**Craig:** One of the things that Dave Shukan, my frequent solving partner, and I often discuss when we are going through puzzle suites, you will see certain types of puzzles emerge over and over, because that’s pretty standard. Acrostics, for instance, is kind of a slog. I don’t know if you’ve ever done an acrostic. The New York Times used to run them and just stopped running them online for some reason no one can fathom. But they’re a bit of a slog. Word searches are the ultimate slog.

One of the things that Dave often remarks is, he’ll say, “This is a puzzle, but it isn’t any fun.” I agree with that. Word searches are just simply not fun. They’re just the busy work of puzzles. You just sit there, and you isolate a letter and then look around and see what other letters connect to it, and then you just keep going. But there’s actually nothing to solve. You’re merely just looking.

**John:** I’m not a huge fan of this. I’m still playing it every day, sort of out of inertia. What I will say is the fact that you don’t know quite what the theme is and what the unifying themes are, then once you actually discover, oh, this must be the pattern, then you actually can start looking for words you think might be there. My standards are lower than yours.

**Craig:** Listen. If people enjoy it, I’m not taking it away from them. And I don’t want to be a puzzle snob about it. I’m not snobby. There are certain versions of word searches that can be inventive. Foggy Brume, who makes the Panda Magazine puzzle suites, will often do word searches where there is some fascinating little gimmick inside of it. And discovering the gimmick and how it functions is the fun part. The word search itself is fairly easy. You’ll start to see words right away and then wonder, but what does this have to do with anything? And then you realize, oh, I see. If you take the end of this word over here and the beginning of this word over here, they spell a country name. Aha. What does this mean? There’s solving to do. This just looks like find a bunch of words and see what they are. Strands, I’m out.

**John:** It’s fine.

**Craig:** No, thank you. I think when it comes to a bunch of words that are then unified by a theme, my prior One Cool Thing, Squeezy, far more fun for that.

**John:** I thought we might start with a question here as an amuse-bouche, because we have two big topics, but sometimes the questions get shunted way to the back of the episode. Drew, can you start us off with a question here?

**Drew Marquardt:** M.R. writes, “Yesterday I gave notes on a script and called out what I’ve always heard is script cheating, which is a piece of information that’s written but it’s unfilmable, like an action like saying something like, ‘Kate enters. She’s the sister of Jess,’ or, ‘Mike sits at a desk. He thinks a lot of himself.’ Kate entering and Mike sitting are filmable, but the descriptors are not. And you can’t tell an actor, ‘Just act like Jess’s sister,’ or, ‘Think a lot of yourself.’

“I called out a very similar situation in said script and received this email back: ‘Hey, M.R. I went through some of the notes, and I just want to let you know that your script is supposed to have voice. I don’t think it’s wise for you to give people notes saying script cheating, which is not anything I’ve ever heard of. I think you may be hurting other writers with some of your feedback. Just be careful with notes like that.’ Obviously, every script has a voice, but was I wrong to give this script a cheating note?”

**John:** Neither side here is completely perfect, but I think there’s some balance and subtlety.

**Craig:** Everyone’s wrong.

**John:** Everyone’s wrong. There’s some balance here that I think we need to find. Let’s start with the second person, like, “I’ve never heard of that as called cheating.” I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast as cheating. There’s things you could put on a page that if they’re genuinely unfilmable and they’re not actionable in a way – there’s pieces of information you could put on a script that there’s no way for the audience to have that piece of information – that is cheating. There can be an issue with that.

It also feels like M.R. may be going overboard in what he was considering cheating, because as we’ve talked about on the podcast before too, there are times where you want to give some flavor, some texture, some tone on the page that lets you know what this feels like, even if it’s not directly something you can aim a camera at.

**Craig:** Look. This is why writing groups and such are problematic at times. We don’t know M.R., so we don’t know the tone. We don’t know if this is the final straw, if this is something that happens all the time. We don’t know if everyone’s like, “Oh my god, M.R., why are you so mean to everybody?” I don’t know. We don’t know the context. All we know is this.

In this isolated bit, script cheating is the nice way of saying bad writing. This is already the nice way, because it’s bad writing to say, “Kate enters. She is the sister of Jess.” That’s bad. It’s bad because it is short circuiting the writer’s obligation to inform the audience in a creative way that Kate is Jess’s sister, which I assume happens in the script at some point, and so the cheating is probably not even necessary.

But yeah, script cheating is a perfectly fine… Honestly, if you can’t handle that, I don’t even know what to tell you about what you’re facing in your career, should you have one. John and I have sat in rooms and been just obliterated. Especially when you’re starting out and you don’t have enough credibility for people to even respect you when you walk in the room. You walk into a room, the knives are out before you even sit down. Yeah, you’re gonna hear some stuff that’s harsh.

Look. John, you and I are old. We’re of that generation. And I know the new generation really doesn’t like this stuff. But as far as I’m concerned, script cheating is a perfectly fine way of saying that’s just bad.

I’m more annoyed by somebody saying, “I don’t think it’s wise for you.” You could always just say, “Hey, you know what? Thank you for that. I have to tell you it kind of hurt. I know you didn’t intend to hurt. I’m just letting you know it did and that maybe if there was a kinder way for you to say that next time, it would just make it easier for me to hear, and it would be more productive for me. But thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.” There’s nothing wrong with that.

**John:** I’m thinking back to notes I’ve given to writers. At times, I’ve been overly… They’ll send me the script, and I didn’t ask the question first, like, “What do you want? Do you want me to tell you how great it is or to give you constructive feedback or to be really, line by line, diligent about things I’m noticing here?” There have been times I’ve over-corrected on the page, and that was a problem.

In the situation of, let’s talk about, “She is Jess’s sister.” There may be times in a perfectly fantastic script where, on a first introduction of a character, you might say, “Tina, Jess’s sister, comes through the thing.” We’re establishing that they’re sisters, and we’re gonna find that out really quickly anyway. But as a service to the reader and figuring out what the context of all this is, it’s really genuinely helpful. I do find sometimes writers get obsessed with these “have to figure out everything from first” principles, like you can’t put anything on the page that wouldn’t be immediately visible to the audience. That’s not doing anybody a favor either, because again, the script is meant to approximate the experience of being in that movie theater. But in that movie theater, you’re going to say, “Oh, those two characters look a lot alike. They’re probably sisters.” Sometimes you need to give that information on the page, that you would not need to give in the actual film.

**Craig:** That is true. In those instances, sometimes what I will say is, “Kate enters. We’ll find out shortly that she’s the sister of Jess.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** To help the reader there get a few things that might be pretty evident on screen, but you’re also telling them, “Hey, you will find out. This isn’t the only time that the information will be available to you here in an action description in a script. Just trust me, you’ll find out, but for now, FYI.” Perfectly fine thing to do. But I don’t know, tone policing here. It feels a little tone police-y to me.

**John:** Yeah, it does. It does a bit.

**Craig:** That said, if M.R. is a total jerk and everyone hates M.R., then all the people listening to this are like, “Oh my god, why are you enabling M.R.?” I hope M.R. is not a jerk. I really, really do.

**John:** I hope so too. It’s not also clear from this context whether the person who was writing back was talking about their own script or maybe they’re part of a group that were looking at some other third person’s script. We don’t know what the whole context of this is. But just again, be cool. As you’re giving notes, make sure you’re understanding the context the person’s asking for the notes, and think about how you would receive those notes as a writer.

**Craig:** Can I give a guess?

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I think that the person who wrote M.R. is not the person who wrote the script, but rather, that person’s friend. The person who wrote the script complained to their friend about it, was upset, and then the friend said, “I’m gonna go tell M.R. to not do that anymore.” That’s my guess.

**John:** Hey, Craig, in our actual real life, there have been times where one of us has had to go to a third person and say, “Hey, this is a thing to be aware of.” That’s a scenario that happens in real life.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes you need to be an intermediary. And when you are, it always goes best if you feel like a neutral intermediary, where there aren’t judgments involved, but rather, just facts and requests. I think the problem with this is, “I don’t think it’s wise. I think you may be hurting people,” and then an imperative, “Be careful.” Not, “In the future, it might be helpful if.” For somebody who’s concerned about hurting people with feedback, this person didn’t seem too concerned about hurting M.R. with feedback.

**John:** The last little point about voice is there are times where you’re gonna put something in a script that it’s not filmable, you’re never gonna see it, but it just helps give the reader a sense of who that person is, what the space is like. You can describe how it smells. Listen. You’re not gonna actually ever smell that, but it gives us a sense of what it’s ultimately gonna feel like and sound like anyone else to. You say, “Oh, that’s cheating.” It’s not really cheating, because you’re providing context that is gonna be helpful for the reader to understand what this is ultimately gonna look and sound like.

**Craig:** And for the actors as well.

**John:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** They can perform smelling something. They can perform having sweaty armpits. We probably won’t see it, but they know what it feels like. No question. As always, our advice is follow the rules but don’t necessarily follow the rules. The only rule we have is write well.

**John:** Write well.

**Craig:** Write well.

**John:** Podcast done. 635 episodes, we’ve reached our conclusion.

**Craig:** We got there.

**John:** We got there.

**Craig:** We got there in two words.

**John:** Now, Craig, as we’ve established previously on this podcast here, one of my goals for 2024 has been to become better at understanding and appreciating the differences between accents and dialects in English. This is a thing that you have a very natural talent for. You’re very good at performing different accents. I can hear it. I don’t have trouble writing it. But it’s not in my bones. It’s not in my brain to quite the same degree. And so I’ve been studying it. I’ve been working with an instructor on that. I’ve been working through, first off, the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then really learning different native accents in English, so going through the British Isles and other places to really figure out what are the differences here, what is the musicality and changes between these different dialects and accents.

But one of the things we’ve been working on more recently is folks for whom English is not their native language and what are the common characteristics we see, what are the, not just mistakes, but just the structural changes they’re gonna make, what are the sound changes you’re gonna hear throughout that.

This is a thing that I think probably most of our listeners are gonna encounter at some point, is you have a character whose native language is not English. How do you write them on the page? Because you’re not obviously going to go crazy and try to approximate their accent. But they are gonna make different choices. I want to talk about the actual choices that’ll be reflected in the written dialog that you are doing to understand how a person whose native language is not English might be communicating their ideas.

**Craig:** This is an area where I think people used to blithely stumble about. And in their blithe stumbling, they may have conveyed intention well, but for people who were authentic speakers of that dialect or that accent or that language, they may have thought, “This is just ridiculous,” because we, all of us, I think, just used to just do stuff with less consideration for other people.

If you could look back at some of the scripts that were floating around when you and I started, people would routinely write Black characters with a Black dialect, AAVE, African American Vernacular English, and in doing so, just bungle it, or it just felt weirdly insulting if they were not Black themselves, and it just felt a bit foreign. That’s understandable.

What’s happened is there’s been a correction. But in the correction, I think a lot of writers – and we are always writing people that we are not – are kind of afraid to make a mistake. Writing out of fear is not helpful either.

**John:** What I want to talk about today is really looking for and listening to the changes in the musicality and the word choices that are gonna be likely for people coming from certain other native languages. And so we have some good examples here. Before we even get into the examples, I just want to talk through some things I’ve observed that are probably helpful if you’re thinking about a character whose native language is not English.

Most other languages are gonna have a different thinking word or sound. In English, we do an “um” or some sort of stalling word. Every language is going to have their own version. People tend to revert to their native thinking sound if they’re speaking English or some approximation of that. Be thinking about what that sound might be. You and I both have been in situations where, other countries, and we are reaching for a word. We kind of know what that word is, but we can’t quite get it. Your characters are gonna be doing the same thing. Be thinking about the pauses they’re taking, the approximations of the word they may try to get to.

If you’re speaking a language and it’s not your native language, you’re probably going to have reduced variation in how you’re forming structures in sentences. Non-native English speakers are gonna probably reach for the simple past rather than “he had” or “he did,” because we have so many ways to create the past in English. Other languages do too, but they’re gonna probably go for the simplest version of that. They will tend to go back to recycle the same word rather than go for synonyms and variety the way that we might, because they’ve found that one word, they’re gonna keep using that one word.

**Craig:** There is always a risk that you’re going to make your character sound dumb. Part of the counteraction is to show the frustration, if somebody does not speak English natively and they aren’t very good at it or they’re still learning, that there is a frustration, because I’ve felt that frustration trying to speak another language myself, where you’re like, “Okay, I know exactly what I want to say, but I’m struggling to put it into the words that I have available to me.” There’s also even the recognition and embarrassment that other people are looking at you and thinking you’re not doing very well. All of that stuff is good human work to think about when this is happening, so it isn’t just a convenient immigrant patois that we have seen many, many times, where people just say, “Me going to store,” and it just becomes Tarzan.

**John:** Sometimes when I’m speaking in French, I feel like, “Crap, I’m like a third grader here,” because I don’t have really simple stuff, and yet I have really complicated vocabulary, because I have cognates in English I can reach for. I could say some really complicated things pretty easily, complicated terms, but I can’t stitch together really simple things. I can go into a store, and I can’t describe the ice cube tray holder, maker thing. I don’t have that, but I have “lugubriousness” or I can reach for bigger words. But I don’t have simple things at my grasp. That’s a real frustration.

**Craig:** I kind of like the idea of you walking into a store, saying, “I need object for the making of ice. I apologize for the lugubrious nature of my request.” How confused would that guy be?

**John:** So bewildered. Another common feature would be overgeneralizing a rule. This is a thing that happens as people learn English. We make plurals by adding S’s to things, except when we don’t. We have “mice” rather than “mouses.” Those things are going to happen.

If the person’s native language doesn’t use articles the same way, like Russian doesn’t use most articles, they will drop them out. And so you’ll hear that in nonnative speakers, where we would put an “a” or a “the,” and they just plow through without them. That’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Interestingly, also, I’ve noticed the opposite. Ksenia Sereda, who is our director of photography here on The Last of Us, is Russian. I watched as her English has improved dramatically over the year since she started with us. She speaks about eight languages. She’s just this remarkable polyglot. Her English was good in the sense that she could absolutely communicate, but she had a few phrases. She loved the phrase “such as.” She would struggle at times to get things across, or there were those simple mistakes. For instance, when she would refer to the character of Joel, she would call him “the Joel.” Maybe in Russian, there is something that works that way. As the years have gone on-

**John:** I think she’s overcorrecting is probably what I suspect.

**Craig:** It may have been. She may have been overcorrecting. There are all these wonderful little things that over time she… When we switch a lens, like we’re on the 27, and we want to go to the 35, she would say, “Switch on 35.” One day I said, “I’m regretting saying this to you, because I love listening to you say, ‘Switch on 35,’ but for switching a lens, we would say, ‘Switch to 35.'”

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** I do regret telling her that, because I miss it. I miss, “Switch on 35.” But it has been amazing watching somebody’s English improve so wildly and so impressively over the course of just a couple of years.

**John:** That gets back to our prepositions. Language is language. There’s just not gonna be a one-to-one match. Anybody who’s had to suffer through “por” and “para” in Spanish, it should be clean, how it does it, and some things just don’t work right. Some things don’t fall directly that same way.

Same thing happens with the verb tenses, and particularly in terms of how we’re dividing time. Very near future, far future, recent past, further back past, we have ways that we do it in English that just don’t match up with other languages, and there’s never gonna be a one-to-one match. Our present progressive, there are equivalents in other languages, but they’re probably not gonna get there very quickly as an ESL speaker. You may be stuck in the present rather than present progressive or the near future, because it’s what you have handy for you.

Lastly, I would say a thing you’ll often notice is, if a character is doing reported speech, so like, “He said to me this and this,” that’s really challenging to flip into that, because I’m staying in the present, but I’m reporting something that happened in the past. I have to get prepositions right for how all this fits together. Reported speech is often a place where you’re gonna notice inconsistencies. That’s often an opportunity to reflect the difference and difficulty of trying to communicate these ideas in English.

**Craig:** Native speakers will even struggle with that. That’s also part of recognizing it. There is this other thing when we’re trying to write people speaking English who don’t natively speak it. What they do speak and where they are from also should influence how they sound.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** If you listen to, for instance, comedians are so helpful for this, because so many comedians who are first-generation Americans will talk about their family and talk about their parents and do impressions of their parents. Listening to that gives you this incredible insight into the specificity of the pattern. It’s different. Koreans who have learned English sound different than French people who have learned English, because the root language is always there. The root patterns, the intonations, musicality, tempo, rhythm, all of that stuff bleeds across.

Here’s some really controversial advice here, folks. When you are writing someone from a country who is speaking English as a not first language, talk to people who know, if you are not one of them, and have them look it through. Have them advise. They will help you. They will make it so much better if you do.

**John:** Absolutely. Last, I would say always consider when that character started learning English, because that will not only affect the accent down the road, but also their facility with the language. For my dialect class, I was going through some Japanese speakers of English, and there were these diplomats whose English was just so spectacularly good, and there were also folks who had learned it much more recently. You could really hear the differences and how in their bones it was, and also, which English did they learn. You can definitely hear some of them learn British English versus American English. Those changes carry through.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Let’s listen to some examples here. We’re gonna start with a clip from Anatomy of a Fall, the amazing Sandra Hüller here. This is a really amazing performance, because it’s all in France, and yet she is a German woman who is much more comfortable speaking English than speaking French. Some of her most pivotal scenes take place in English. Let’s listen to her in Anatomy of a Fall.

**Sandra Hüller (as Sandra Voyter):** You complain about the life that you chose. You are not a victim. Not at all. Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner. You’re incapable of facing your ambitions, and you resent me for it. But I’m not the one who put you where you are. I’ve nothing to do with it. You’re not sacrificing yourself as you say. You choose to sit on the sideline because you’re afraid, because your pride makes your head explode before you can even come up with a little germ of an idea. And now you wake up and you’re 40 and you need someone to blame. And you’re the one to blame. You’re petrified by your own fucking standards and your fear of failure. This is the truth.

**John:** Just so, so great. You could listen for her accent and her dialect, but really I want to focus on the word choices. A native English speaker probably would not have constructed those phrases in that way. I think she goes through a phrase, and then she repeats the end of that phrase in a way that feels kind of German to me. But Craig, what’s your telling on that?

**Craig:** It’s difficult to separate it from the accent, because the accent does add a certain… You just start to think this is definitely a German person talking. It doesn’t have the backwards syntax, or I suppose what Germans would call the non-backwards syntax, forward syntax. German syntax is very Yoda-like to us when we learn it.

**John:** The verb at the very end.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t have that. What’s also of interest here is that the person writing this, who is now an Oscar award winner for their fine screenplay, was also not a native English speaker. There’s all sorts of possibilities going on here. There’s a clipped nature to the pronunciation of the words that is wonderfully German. If you were to remove the accent using some horrible AI de-accentifier, you would notice. I think you would notice something would be strange. You just wouldn’t be able to put your finger on it.

**John:** If you look at the words scripted on the page – I haven’t gone back to the script to see exactly whether she’s saying word for word what was on the page – you would not guess that this is an American speaker. It doesn’t have an American way of putting stuff together. I could hear the same thing with an RP British accent. I could feel that working more, but it’s not an American accent. There’s a musicality to it. It’s really what I’m trying to get to. It’s that the order of the word, how it fits together, it feels specific to this character and this world, and it’s not some generic American accent.

**Craig:** There is a formality to it. Even the fact that the pronunciation is so careful. Even though there are words where it’s supposed to end in a D and it sounds like it ends in a T or something like that, which is typically German, or I believe she says, “Germ of an idea,” and she pronounces it “cherm.”

**John:** “Cherm.”

**Craig:** There is nonetheless a kind of over-pronunciation of some words, whereas, you’re right, a native American speaker would be eliding and slurring a bit more of the pronunciation there.

**John:** She’s speaking passionately and very quickly, and yet every little phoneme is coming through. That feels very specific as well.

Let’s jump through it. We don’t have the clip for it here, but we actually have the pages in this case. This is Past Lives. We had Celine Song on the podcast earlier. Here I want to take a look at, this is a scene happening in the East Village bar with Hae Sung, Nora, and Nora’s husband, Arthur. Just Hae Sung’s dialog here, he’s not a comfortable English speaker at all, and so his first line here is, “When I was 24 year, I… ” That’s right. That’s absolutely correct. The idea of 24 years old is a complicated thing. “When I was 24 year” is probably the Korean way of constructing how old you are.

**Craig:** There’s a video I saw floating around that a Korean American did, basically he was having a conversation with himself, like two people on a phone. The idea was what a conversation would sound like if Koreans just spoke English but in a perfect translation of what the Korean was. It’s remarkable. It is nothing at all like what we would understand the translation to be. It is very specific. Way fewer words are being used than you would use in English. It’s more compact. It’s more efficient. But it is very, very different. There’s a lovely extraction of that here. Listen. Oscar award nominee, Celine Song.

**John:** When we had her on the show, we didn’t have the script in front of us. I do like seeing how Nora’s dialog here when she’s talking to Hae Sung, the Korean comes first, and then there’s a slash and then what the subtitles would be come after it, which is a very natural, native way to do this. It feels really great.

Just going back through to Hae Sung’s English dialog, “But. Military, work, it’s… same.” Just as written on the page, you can sense he’s searching, he’s trying to find a way to communicate this idea. “There’s overtime pay, stuff like that here, right? In Korea, you work overtime all the time, but there’s no overtime pay.” He’s found the words. He’s keeping to the words he actually has and that have worked before. He’s staying with these simple patterns.

**Craig:** Phrases like “all the time” are easy to remember. But then later down, when she asks him, “It’s hard physically, or mentally?” he says, “Both. Definitely physical. Hard. And… ” She says, “Mentally?” And he says, “Mentally, I… strong,” which is probably how I would… If I were thinking about that in French, I would be like, “Je,” and then if I was just emotional, I would just go, “Fort.” Because “I am,” “je suis,” and then yeah, it just falls apart there at times.

What’s fascinating here, and Celine understands, when you’re talking with somebody who doesn’t speak English as a first language, you will naturally reply back with what they’re saying but in the correct format, almost as if you are teaching and confirming. “You’re strong mentally,” she says. And he says, “Yes, right.” There’s an appreciation there of, okay, good, you understood me, because part of the discussion between a person who speaks natively and a person who doesn’t is a confirmation that one is being understood by the other.

**John:** Absolutely. So crucial. The next clip is something that Drew found for us. This is from Irma Vep. The context here, we have a Hong Kong actress shooting a movie in France, and like Anatomy of a Fall, English becomes the British language between these two characters.

[Irma Vep (1996) clip]

**Zoe:** And you went to see the Batman, you know?

**Maggie:** Batman?

**Zoe:** Yes. No, not Batman, for with all, you know, Catwoman?

**Maggie:** The Return? The second one?

**Zoe:** Yeah.

**Maggie:** Oh, yeah.

**Zoe:** And you liked it?

**Maggie:** No.

**Zoe:** I thought, you know what, it was completely crap. I just went because Rene was mad and he said to me, “You have to go there to understand the film.” But I think it’s a movie for the fans, you know.

**Maggie:** The first one was bad enough, right?

**Zoe:** Yes.

**Maggie:** I don’t know why they’d make three.

**Zoe:** That’s true.

**Maggie:** But I think Catwoman was all right.

**Zoe:** Yes, it’s true. I like Catwoman. She’s nice. You know, I tell you everything, and then you can know me a lot. I mean, I don’t like American films. No.

**Maggie:** Right. I know what you mean.

**Zoe:** Yes? Everything is too much decoration, too much money. You agree with me?

**Maggie:** Sure.

**Zoe:** And all this money, this big money, big-

**Maggie:** And they’re so lucky to have so much money.

**Zoe:** Yes, but why? For what? For this? Or this? Nothing, you know.

**John:** Again, here we have two characters who are obviously seen in the film that they are looking at each other to try to get confirmation, like, do you actually understand what I’m saying, are we talking about the same things. Their levels of English are approximately the same. The French actress has a stronger French accent. But again, I think you could read it on the page and understand that these are characters communicating at 100 percent because they are trying to cross this bridge.

**Craig:** They’re using very simple phrases, a lot of questions. A lot of questions to make sure that the other person understands what they’re saying. This is an inherent insecurity of people that do not speak English as first language. They’re making sure that the other person gets it. Luckily for these two characters, they’re discussing something that everybody around the world shares, which is a ridiculous hatred of American movies that they all seem to watch over and over and over.

French people hate McDonald’s. They’re like, “Get out of our country, McDonald’s.” I’m like, McDonald’s would totally get out of your country if you stopped eating at McDonald’s. It’s a business. This is kind of amusing in that regard. It almost feels like a French textbook discussion. “Do you like American movies?” “No, I do not like American movies.” “Do you agree?” “Yes, I agree.”

**John:** Getting back to the question of, “Do you agree?” Do you answer that question with an affirmative or a negative? There’s the, “Yeah, no.” There’s all these little subtleties that we have in English. Every other language has their own specific subtleties there. When it’s not native in your bones, you’re going for the simplest way to make sure that the other person understands that you hear them and you can follow what they’re saying.

**Craig:** Yes. And if these people were speaking their native language, the discussion would be even more obnoxious, because it would be full of brilliant examples and wonderful moments. And there would also probably be much less agreement, because it’s too hard to disagree when you’re struggling to find the words. “I don’t like those movies, but I like Catwoman.” “Yes, I also like Catwoman.” Do you? Sure. At this point, now you’re just trying to have the conversation, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. There is a social grace to agreement. Disagreement requires subtlety, care, a lot of small discrimination between words, some of which will push things into a bad place, some of which will push things into an interesting discussion place. If you don’t have the instantly accessible toolkit for that, you may just default to agreeing.

**John:** I would say even though they’re both ESL speakers, I can imagine on a page that their voices still can read differently. Zoe, the French speaker here, the choices that she’s making and the small mistakes she makes feel French to me. The musicality feels specific to it. Maggie’s, who’s from Hong Kong, who has a more British background, also feels specific. I suspect even on the page, you can really read them as two very different voices, even though they’re still nonnative English speakers.

One of the most difficult exercises I had to do for my dialect class was take a scene that I’d already written, that was supposed to have two American speakers, and have one be Irish and one be Scottish. Really tough for my brain to switch between the two of those, because they’re distinct sounds, but in my brain they’re hard to hold apart.

**Craig:** What’s interesting, John, one of the things I admire about you is that you find these areas that are challenging for you and you just steer your boat right into them. Accents are fun for me. I enjoy them. That exercise you just described, I would actually look forward to. I don’t think it would be too much of a challenge for me. But there are things in my life that are incredibly challenging, like for instance, drawing. I am so bad. I have such a zero ability to naturally create realistic looking things, perspective, any of the fundamentals. The thought of taking a class to try and get better just makes me pee my pants in fear.

This is a honest question for you. My concern is, I would put a lot of time and effort in to become as good as somebody who had talent was when they were in kindergarten, because you either do or you don’t have that thing. What is your goal here?

**John:** With drawing, for example, that was one of my earlier areas of interest. I spent a year and I learned how to draw. I learned how to see and how to draw. I’m much better at it than I was. I’m not doing my practice every day or anything like that. But I got much better at it. But I also realized that, as you said, I’m only gonna get up to a level who was a 6th grader who was pretty good at drawing when they started.

With this, this is actually useful for me to be better at, because if I can hear these voices distinctly in my head more clearly, then it’s gonna be easier for me to write those characters and really hear their voices in my head clearly before I’m putting them down on the page. This is genuinely useful for me, I feel.

Again, recognizing what your weaknesses are and striving to improve them is fun to do. I picked up running, and so I can run really far now, which is surprising to me. Again, it just took practice and recognizing that you’re going to give up some other things in order to spend the time running.

**Craig:** There’s a topic for us to discuss maybe in a future podcast, if we continue to do the podcast. What episode are we on now?

**John:** 635.

**Craig:** That seems like a good round number. In any case, let’s say we were to keep going. That is about help, the concept of help, and recognizing as you move through your career where you’re going to need help. Even if you’re trying to shore those areas up, there are places that you identify.

I’m gonna give you an example right now for me. As I go through production, as I’m directing, one of the areas I know I need help with is – because, again, I have a very good sense of composition, but what I struggle with is just the very simple notion, as we’re shooting, of eye lines and which side of the shoulder you should be on. I need help with that. I have a fantastic sense of how things edit together. I understand where one shot should die and where another shot should pick up. I understand what kind of coverage I’m going to need. But oftentimes, I really do need help trying to figure out, wait, so in this shot, when they’re looking across the room from this one to that one, should the camera be over on this side or that side. I have help. I have camera [crosstalk 00:38:43].

**John:** You have help.

**Craig:** I have a script supervisor. I have a DP. There are all sorts of areas where at some point you just have to say, no matter how hard I’m trying, here are the following areas were I need help. But that’s a topic for another time.

**John:** Absolutely. I guess the last point about why I learn new things is that I enjoy being bad at things and struggling and being a newcomer at things, because it also just makes me feel young. I remember when I was young, things were hard. It was like, “Oh, I can’t figure this out.” Then you get better at it. It’s like, “Oh, I feel young.” It’s nice being a beginner at things sometimes.

**Craig:** I do enjoy the horror and excitement of being a level 1 character in D&D or starting a new video game that’s level-based, where you’re level 1 and basically one punch takes you out. You have no idea what the hell you’re doing and where you should go. You’ve barely mastered anything. It is like growing up all over again. It’s fun.

**John:** Let’s segue to our next topic, which can rely a bit on our experience of not being complete newcomers to things, which is on vetting. This past week, Craig, you and I were talking about a producer who had done terrible things. We were both surprised to learn about this, and shocked. But I also was reading this article in Slate talking about what they called Mean Too, so the extension of the Me Too movement, which is just like, oh, these people are assholes, and now we actually are going to identify these famous people as being assholes. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

A point they made in this article is that once you’ve hired a star, once they’re in wardrobe fittings, that star has a lot of power and control, and that you’ve ceded some of the power and control to a person who may not be a great person. I texted you, Craig, because as we were talking about this producer, you are a person who’s hiring a ton of people. You’re hiring actors and crew and everybody else. I want to ask you, how concerned are you about not just can this person do this job, but are they going to be a monster either on set or do something off set that’s going to reflect badly on the show?

**Craig:** It’s an enormous concern. The tricky part when you’re dealing with actors, there is a lot of information floating around out there. A lot. Now, there are actors that people just say, “It’s gonna be worth it.” There are actors – and it could be the same actor – where somebody else says, “Life’s too short.” I have a little bit more of a “life’s too short” vibe. There are certain people that have been proposed, and I would think to myself, “They would be perfect, but life’s too short.”

But when you’re talking about all these other people that you can be hiring, heads of departments and things like that, the danger is that there is an interaction gap. I typically will call fellow showrunners to inquire about potential heads of departments. It’s also a joy when I can report back to them. I texted Albert Kim just the other day to say that the prop master that I checked in with him about and hired has been doing just such a wonderful job, and that’s great.

But we, who are running things, have a certain kind of interaction with those people, because we’re their boss. What’s happening though when we’re not there, and they’re the boss in their fiefdom? How does that go on?

One of the very interesting aspects of showrunning that I hadn’t even anticipated was that if there is any kind of serious HR complaint, that the executive producers are filled in. We’re told. Thank god it does not happen frequently at all. But it is an eye opener to go, “Oh, okay, that’s surprising, because my interactions with that person were of this kind.” Apparently, once the cats were away, the mouse was mean. That’s a little nerve-wracking. It’s harder to get a read on that by checking around.

**John:** Let’s talk about vetting, because when you are considering hiring a person, be it an actor, be it a crew person, you’re going to look at their references, but hopefully you’re gonna find somebody who you can go to to say, “Hey, can you tell me honestly what it was like working with this person?”

When I get those incoming emails, I will say, “Yes, let me call you about them,” unless that person is just so spectacular that I will just email back, like, “This is the best person in the world. You should absolutely hire them.” The phone call is your friend here, because people will be honest and direct in a phone calls in ways they will, for reasonable reasons, won’t want to put down in an email.

Your point about, yes, ask showrunners, but if you could find somebody else to ask, that’s also going to help a lot too, because you get a sense of who are they like to assistants. There have been cases where I’ve called up folks who were assistants to people, said, “Tell me about them. What was it like to work with them?” Because if I’m just asking the people who hired them, they could be really good at managing up and managing their bosses, but absolute a monster when it comes to the people working for them. I don’t want that in my life.

**Craig:** No, you don’t. But there’s only so much you can do. That said, do all the things you can do as best you can. There are going to be errors. As you try and figure out who should be joining your crew, whether it’s as an actor or as a craftsperson, do your best, ask your questions. Just understand some people will be lovely and yet not a good fit for the show, in which case a change is made, and sometimes some people will be very talented but nightmares for various reasons, in which case there must be a change. But you’re hoping for that beautiful thing where what you expected is what you get. We don’t tolerate what we used to.

I myself have become way more aware of my own anger levels. I’m angry all the time. I’m like the Hulk. I wake up angry. I go to bed angry. But my anger is not at people. My anger is not this irrational whatever. My anger is entirely about trying to figure out how to get the stuff that’s in front of me to be like the stuff that I want to be in front of me.

There are times where I get frustrated, because, let’s say… They make me go to meetings, John. I go to a lot of meetings. I don’t want to go to the meetings, but I go to the meetings, because they tell me it’s really important, because I have to answer the questions so people know what to do. I will go to a meeting and I will get asked a question and I will answer it. Then there’s like three more meetings that feel very duplicative to me, and the questions get asked again, and I answer them again and again. And then I show up on the day, and the answer I gave 12 times in meetings has not occurred. This is enormously frustrating.

I’m just very aware that the frustration can be expressed, I can express it firmly, but volume is kind of a thing. Also, I’ve become aware – this is something like, if I taught a showrunning school, this would probably be lesson of day 1. You as a showrunner may think of yourself as – you may have a low self-esteem. You may have a lot of core shame. You may think of yourself as a schlub. You may have imposter syndrome. It doesn’t matter. When you interact with all of these other people, they are looking at you as the person who can fire them. You have this enormous influence on their lives. If you loathe them, not only will they get fired, but people are gonna call me, and then they’re worried that I’m gonna tell them that they’re no good. There’s a lot of just built-in fear. You have to remember what it was like talking to the big boss. You have to remember how intimidating that was, before that person even opened their mouth, before they did anything.

That lesson in awareness of your own power is really important, because I think a lot of people in Hollywood with power don’t feel like they have it, and so they don’t act like they have it. You have to just remind yourself that you have it.

No one’s perfect. There are moments. But we are hearing quite a bit about some people for whom it seems the moment of awareness will either never come or has yet to come, and no matter how many times people have officially complained, they don’t seem to care.

**John:** We’ve talked about Scott Rudin on the podcast before. There was a person who – it was like this weird badge of honor to have survived working in his office. That was incredibly screwed up. We completely misunderstood the assignment in terms of how to think about having survived in a difficult office. I think and hope we’ve moved on a bit from that and that we have come to understand, both as employers and as employees, the social contract we’ve made there cannot be about subjugation and control.

**Craig:** That’s right. We will always be a strange business in that we are empowering artists with a lot of money and a lot of control, and that means writers, directors, actors, as well as other artists, like cinematographers and production designers. Artists aren’t necessarily the most rational, calm-headed people in the world. It’s one of those things. There’s brains that work a certain way. Everybody accepts a certain amount of that. There are things that I think showrunners or directors or actors do, that if you did in an escrow office, you’d probably be shown the door almost immediately.

**John:** Oh my god, the number of conversations I’ve had with Mike where he’s like, “I cannot believe that this is permissible in your industry,” because he’s coming from a more corporate setting. He’s like, “How is that even possible?” It’s how it all works.

**Craig:** It is possible because you are dealing with very specific brains. You’ve gathered a lot of people together who are artists. There is a case to be made that extreme artistic talent and mental illness are very hard to distinguish from each other, that there’s probably quite a bit of overlap. People understand a little bit of it.

Also, specifically with actors, there is this understanding that no matter what we’re all doing, they’re the ones on screen, which means if they’re having a day, you gotta figure it out, because we can’t have the scene, which will exist forever in fixed form, be bad because they were having a day and everyone else said, “That’s unacceptable.” Then of course, you don’t want to necessarily encourage them to have their days. You have to figure out how to make it all work, and we generally do.

**John:** That’s very familiar to anybody who’s a parent. It’s like, how do you get through this tough situation without creating a pattern in which this is how you’re gonna deal with these situations all the time.

**Craig:** Showrunning and parenthood are remarkably similar. Remarkably. When you were raising Amy, I’m sure you and Mike at some point turned to each other and said, “She’s gonna be complaining about us in therapy, what, in about 10 years,” because you can’t help it. You can’t help it. It’s gonna happen. It’s just gonna happen. I know that there are probably people that have complained about me to their therapists, because I’m in charge.

Do you remember when you were starting out, the people that were in charge, it didn’t matter who they were, that one thing that everybody could bond over is either making fun of or complaining about the boss. You hope that you can be as close to, “You know what? He’s a great guy. He just has his weirdnesses.” That’s the best you can hope for.

**John:** That’s the best you can hope for, for sure. 100 percent. As we wrap up this topic, it’s easy to think about red flags. Let’s talk about some green flags. This is something, if you’re seeing these patterns, that’s a good sign.

One thing I always look for as a green flag is they repeatedly work with the same people again. They’ve worked with that director, that producer time and time over. There’s something there that’s working, and they’re willing to work together again. That’s generally a green flag for me.

**Craig:** Agreed. Also, what is their personal life like? It’s not anything that’s determinative. But if somebody is clearly going through a phase in their life where they have a relationship that’s falling apart, they are being sued, they’re getting into bar fights, they’ve become unreliable, that’s a problem.

Best practice, green flag, somebody whose life appears to be rather stable. They’ve got good people around them. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been married for 30 years to the same person. It just means that there’s a certain stability in terms of their management, their friendships, their living situation, the way that they comport themselves. That’s always a green flag to me.

**John:** When people say spontaneously, “I love them,” you get a sense, oh, people love them. They didn’t have to say that. It’s not just they love their work. They actually love being around that person. Green flag.

**Craig:** Huge green flag. The thing is, we want to love people. When you hear that, you’re like, what a relief. The best information is exactly that: “I love them.” I’ve said to people – they’ve asked me about an actor or they’ve asked me about a crew person, I’m like, “I would take a bullet for this person.” The best recommendation you can get, the best green flag is, “I absolutely love this person. You may not hire them when I need them.” That’s the best green flag there is.

**John:** Red flag/green flag combo here. If you’re looking at their social media and they seem like a not stable person on social media, they’re not gonna be a stable person in your actual life. The green flag version of this is, you look at their social media, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I get this person. I get what they’re into. They’re posting some dog photos. They are also talking about things in a rational way.” That’s a green flag for me.

**Craig:** Yes. When it comes to actors, I have to say I’m old-school in the sense that I believe that backstage is backstage. What we want people to see are the characters that the actors play. That’s what we want. Obviously, there’s enormous interest in actors’ personal lives, and people are always gonna be asking questions.

But if social media feels a little bit like, “Hey, once the cameras are off, my reality show begins,” that’s a red flag for me. Green flag, like you said, once the cameras are off, the things that I put on social media are not that different from what anyone puts on social media, that implies a certain stability and maybe possibly the absence of extraordinary narcissism, which is always a red flag.

**John:** Probably – this is something you actually texted me – one of the best handers-out of red flags and green flags is your casting director, because casting directors, they know all the actors. They know the actors who they’ve seen over the last 20 years and the interpersonal relationships between those actors. They get a sense of that. You said casting directors. I said other actors. Those are folks who know what these people are actually like.

**Craig:** Yes. If I had a choice between asking an actor or a casting director, and I can only pick one, I would pick the casting director, because actors can have remarkable on-screen relationships with actors who are nightmares everywhere else.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** But casting directors hear back from everybody. They hear back from the directors and the producers, so they get the feedback. And they have been tracking people over the course of years. And they also saw those people when they were starting out. They can also say, “This person’s become a monster,” as opposed to, “This person has been just a solid human being from the very, very jump, and they continue to be.”

Our casting director this year is Mary Vernieu, and she was so helpful in that regard for a lot of the people that we’re bringing on. I have to say it’s been fantastic. Every choice, we’ve been rewarded. Green flags everywhere. Very, very excited.

**John:** Let’s answer one more question. I see one here from Steve about Dungeons and Dragons, so of course we have to answer this question.

**Craig:** Oh, gotta answer this question, yeah, obviously.

**Drew:** Steve writes, “My son Elliot is big into the Dungeons and Dragons world. He watches the movies, loves the 1980s cartoon, reads Monster Manuals from the library. Now he wants to play the actual game. However, it’s recommended for 12 and older, and he’s only 6. This hasn’t stopped him from designing dungeons,” he has a little image attached here, “and using monopoly dice to create characters. I’ve looked for junior versions but haven’t found any. Do you have any recommendations for a 6-year-old who desperately wants to be 12, so that he can better understand D&D?”

**John:** Oh, god, I’m so happy for Elliot. I’m so happy for Elliot’s dad, Steve, who’s gonna contribute to his love of Dungeons and Dragons. Googling around, I found a link I’m gonna put in the show notes here – it’s on Everhearth Inn – about how to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids. It gives some suggestions for here’s how you scale down the experience so it actually is appropriate for younger kids. It goes down to six. It goes down to Elliot’s age in terms of how you do that and how you get the sense of, okay, I am playing this character who’s doing this thing. Some simplified rules, so it’s very straightforward, but also fun for a kid that age.

**Craig:** It’s a tough one, because I think, Steve, probably Elliot is special. A six-year-old who is reading the Monster Manual and is designing dungeons and using Monopoly dice to create characters is pretty advanced. The issue is, who is he gonna play with? You know your son better than we do, Steve. If you feel like your son is particularly advanced and can do this, then my suggestion is, perhaps there’s a world where if you play, Steve – I hope you do – that maybe you can build a little one-shot for you and maybe a couple of your friends who play and also Elliot. Then maybe if Elliot has a friend that really, really wants to play, then now there are two kids who want to play. But six is very young. It’s exciting, I think, for Elliot. But I think he’s probably a rarity.

**John:** My friend Quinn has a kid who also loves to play D&D and started really young. Quinn’s frustration was that it’s hard to find other kids his age who can actually do stuff. They got a little school group together, and they eventually started doing it, but it’s a challenge.

I think Craig’s instinct, where you, Steve, are gonna be the DM, and Elliot and hopefully some other friends or some other adults are going to play through a little bit with him, feels right, and you’ll find ways to have it make sense.

I love that he is really into the actual Dungeons and Dragons game, so I don’t want to send him into a video space, but there are some video game versions of D&D or things that are like that, that could scratch that itch for a while before he has the ability to sit down and roleplay with others. I’m just nervous about it because I don’t want to lose this ability to imagine worlds in his mind and the reading of it all to be looking at a screen.

**Craig:** The video games unfortunately will probably not be content-wise appropriate for him at six. Certainly would not steer him towards Baldur’s Gate 3.

**John:** Not Baldur’s Gate 3.

**Craig:** That would be bad, although, boy, I love that game. But no, he’s six. He’s so young. He’s so young. It really is about providing a fun environment for him, and also, no matter how special he is, making sure that the adventure or the nature of it is short. Anything beyond an hour is going to seem like a thousand years to him.

**John:** Or it might be he might want to play for six hours, but again, you have to be the parent who’s structuring this. I want to talk about Elliot’s dungeon here, because look at how great this is. It has a gibbering mouther in it, a mimic surprise, some flameskulls.

**Craig:** I would say gibbering [said like jibbering], by the way.

**John:** Jibbering, gibbering. I like jibbering. I like jibbering.

**Craig:** You like jibbering? I don’t actually know how that is pronounced.

**John:** We’ll look it up.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s jibbering. Yep, it’s jibbering.

**John:** Okay. But it’s great. The fact that he’s into this, that his handwriting is actually pretty good for a six-year-old too.

**Craig:** It’s outstanding. It’s so much better than mine was. Again, to reiterate how bad I am at drawing, this right now is about what a map I would draw would look like. But I love that he understands some basic concepts. For instance, it looks like there’s some sort of water in the beginning. And then there’s an arrow, which I love, that says turn to the right. And then there’s a huge room with the gibbering mouther. Obviously, that’s not an easy two words to have as a kid. Then mimic surprise, he corrected his spelling of “surprise,” which a lot of adults fail to do. I love that he understood what the point of the mimic was. It looks like he might’ve drawn a T for trap there.

**John:** I think it’s a trap, yeah. But he’s got his door symbols there just right too.

**Craig:** He’s got flameskulls.

**John:** Who doesn’t love a flameskull?

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 01:00:09].

**John:** Adventurers don’t.

**Craig:** It also says “the end dungeon,” so I suspected that there’s more planned.

**John:** There’s more.

**Craig:** Elliot is terrific. I will say this, Steve. Your son will be a DM. He has big DM energy.

**John:** He has DM energy. It’s true.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** He’s also very lucky to have you as a dad, because you’re trying to figure out how to help him do what he wants to do.

**Craig:** Thank you for not being a total monster.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Ronan Farrow – it ran in The New Yorker this last week or maybe the week before – on RuPaul. The article’s title is RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business, which I think is just great. If you ask RuPaul how are you doing, RuPaul says, “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” which I think is just the best answer.

**Craig:** Oh my gosh, that’s great.

**John:** I watch Drag Race. I’ve known of RuPaul for forever. Never met them in person. I thought the article was great and really dug into the weird contradiction of a very public face who’s incredibly private and is always trying to draw out, “You gotta reveal the real you,” from the drag queens who are competing on the show, and does not want to reveal the real him very much at all. Of course, this is all in service of a memoir that’s coming out. It’s just really good writing by Ronan Farrow, just a really good profile of an important media figure, RuPaul.

**Craig:** This goes exactly to my earlier comment about in front of the curtain and behind the curtain and, especially when you think about somebody who has specialized in bringing drag to the forefront, how presentational and performative that is – not performative like the fake performative, but performance-oriented – and how there is a backstage. Even on Drag Race, which shows you the backstage, that backstage is on stage. There’s a real backstage that you never get to, which is correct.

He says something in this article that is so – I don’t know if he’s been to therapy, but it sure sounds like it. “Feelings are indicators. They’re not facts.” That’s a fascinating way of putting it.

**John:** That’s very therapy, yeah.

**Craig:** Very therapy and a wonderful thing. Also, the thing about RuPaul that’s always been evident is how smart he is. Reading this, it just sounds like… We do profiles of people that do these things that seem overtly funny and frivolous and silly, and then when you meet them, you realize how smart, because again, or awards should only be won by people that do comedy, and Drag Race is comedy.

**John:** Also, you recognize that what RuPaul wants contestants to be able to do are not things that RuPaul himself could’ve done coming up. The expectations, the levels have gotten so high that you have to be able to be an amazing designer, an amazing performer, an amazing dancer, amazing everything. And that’s just the table stakes to start playing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also love how much of a businessperson he is. But you can’t make a show like that without being a very rigorous, serious person. Comedy is serious. I’m gonna read this. I’m fascinated by him. I really am. I just think he’s such a force. I’m so tired of us taking people who pretend to be serious seriously. I like taking people who pretend to be not-serious seriously. I think that’s far more interesting.

**John:** In our last episode we talked about counterfactuals. The counterfactual where we didn’t have RuPaul, where RuPaul wasn’t born or didn’t do drag or did some other thing, we would be at a different place. There would be drag 100 percent. But would we have the popularization, the mass platform of drag that we have now? I don’t think we do.

**Craig:** I don’t think we do. I think he’s an incredibly important person in that regard. There’s just an entire vocabulary we wouldn’t have. I think we know this for a fact, because until RuPaul came along, that culture existed.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** But mainstream wasn’t looking at it. Just wasn’t. Even when it popped through a little bit, like, what was the documentary, Paris is Burning?

**John:** Yeah, Paris is Burning. Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It popped out, and then it popped back down again. It’s not the same.

**John:** We always had drag performers. We had [unintelligible 01:04:32]. We had that gay camp sensibility. But it wasn’t all put together in a way like this.

**Craig:** No, and it wasn’t also unapologetic. When I was growing up, when you were growing up, it always seemed like we were laughing at the drag performance, and now we laugh with the drag performance. It’s very different.

I’m not a religious watcher of Drag Race, or any television show for that matter, as you know, but when I see it, it’s incredibly entertaining, and it’s so funny, but it also feels very authentic. Even though I know it’s reality television and a lot of it’s drummed up and not, you do feel like you are seeing the authentic culture happening in front of you. The people that they pull from are real. They’re not finding people and saying, “If you would be willing to start dressing up in drag, it would be great.” They are who they are.

**John:** Also, having been on the air for so many years, the queens who are competing now grew up with RuPaul’s Drag Race existing, and so they’ve been swimming in this water the entire time. Not just the expectations of performance but also the culture has changed too. In early seasons, contestants who were trans were hiding it, because it felt like that’s cheating to be trans and be on Drag Race. That seems absurd now, but things move pretty quickly.

**Craig:** Things move pretty quickly. I think RuPaul is at the center of it all. Also, he’s 9,000 feet tall. I wanted to go up and say something to him at the Emmys, because he’s at the Emmys every year, because he wins every year. I show up every four years, I guess. Maybe I’ll never show up again. But when I do show up, there’s RuPaul. I’ll tell you why I didn’t go up to him. Can you guess why I didn’t go up to him?

**John:** Intimidation?

**Craig:** Yes. Terrified. Terrified. In looking at the Ronan Farrow article here, I feel vindicated. I think that he would be like, “Get the eff away from me. I don’t know you.” But I would love to. I’m such an admirer of him as a creative force.

**John:** Craig, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a game. There’s a company called Glitch Games. I’ve definitely promoted them before on the show. They make escape room, puzzley type point-and-click games for iOS typically. I think it comes out maybe on Android, but who cares. This latest one, I can’t tell if I like it or if I loathe it. I’m putting it out there for people to see what they think.

**John:** It’s a $4 game, so it’s not a huge burden.

**Craig:** It’s a $4 game, so it’s worth the $4 bet. It’s just like their other games in that you’re in a facility and you have to figure out how to get out and there are a lot of puzzles, but the gimmick is that this facility was working on some sort of time loop thing. It’s an increment of time that you can set, I think, between 3 minutes and 10 minutes. It sends you back to the beginning and undoes most of what you’ve done. You solve puzzles. You figure out how to proceed. Then it goes schwoop, you’re back to the beginning, which means you have to re-solve a bunch of puzzles – not hard to do – to get further. I gotta be honest. I found it incredibly frustrating and I quit. But the puzzles are quite good, and I do love their game in general. People who have a little bit more patience than I do may actually really, really appreciate it.

**John:** Recursion.

**Craig:** Give it a shot. Recursion by Glitch Games.

**John:** Give it a shot.

**Craig:** It’s four bucks.

**John:** That was our show for this week.

**Craig:** Yay.

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

**Craig:** Woo-woop.

**John:** … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Wop-wop.

**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 a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s 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. 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.

Thank you, a little shout-out to our Premium members, because it just keeps growing, which is fantastic. This last year, we were able to not just pay for Matthew and Drew, but we also were able to give some money away. We zero out our balances every year. We were able to give away some money to some really good charities. Thank you very much for our Premium-

**Craig:** You and I also got to buy really nice beach houses.

**John:** That’s what it is. It’s the beach houses plus that. For clarification, we get no money ourselves out of this. It all gets donated away.

**Craig:** Yeah, no beach houses.

**John:** No beach houses for us. But thank you again to our Premium members. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, Drew and I both just watched a documentary series on HBO Max called Love Has Won, which is about a Colorado cult. Drew, you saw it most recently. Tell us what you liked, what freaked you out about it.

**Drew:** Everything freaked me out about it. I always have a terrified feeling that I’m somehow susceptible to cults, even though I’ve never actually run into one. Love Has Won is about the cult of Mother God.

**Craig:** She’s the one where they just left her body in the room?

**Drew:** Exactly. It starts with you seeing the body cam footage of the cops coming in and finding basically her mummified corpse, and then it goes from there.

**John:** Then we go back in time to follow it. But what’s so fascinating about this documentary is – because it’s all very recent, there are still members in that cult right now – they were online all the time. They were also posting YouTube. They have so much footage of just inside the cult while it was just doing this normal stuff. It’s not all recreations or just talking head testimony. It’s a lot of just actual real footage of what it was like being inside this cult.

I love cults. I just think they’re great story fodder, because you have charismatic leaders, you have people who are devoted to it, who are sacrificing other things. There’s that sense of a mission that is so cinematic. There’s something just really appealing to me about cults. I don’t ever want to join one. I don’t want to ever start one. Maybe Scriptnotes is a cult. I don’t know. But I dig them.

**Craig:** We’re the worst cult ever.

**John:** We’re the worst cult. We don’t make any money.

**Craig:** I’m just fascinated by where cult leaders come from. In this case, Amy Carlson, prior to becoming a cult leader, was a manager at a McDonald’s. Being a manager at a McDonald’s is probably very hard to do. But I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of overlap between the skillset required there and running a cult.

**John:** The documentary would actually push back about that, because she was a manager at McDonald’s, but a rising manager. She wasn’t just managing one store. She was moving up the corporate chain a bit.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** She was able to really motivate her employees in a way that feels like has analogous skills to getting people on your side and following you to believe that you are the incarnation of God.

**Craig:** I see. Do you think that her belief that the Jews wanted everyone to do the work and they would take the money was part of how she got them to do their jobs better? Why is it always the Jews? I don’t know this lady.

**John:** A fair criticism of the documentary, which I think you can look at both ways, is that in trying to really look at the cult from its own perspective and emotionally connect inside the cult, they did leave out a lot of their crazier conspiracy beliefs and their QAnon stuff and all that kind of stuff. They really were focusing on what it felt like personally in there, rather than their bigger belief system. But it’s funny to me how once you believe yourself God, you do look for villains, and funny how they often become Jewish.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know why it always happens. I like that their belief is that Adolf Hitler’s intention was to serve the light. I think he was pretty clear about his intentions, actually. I don’t think we have to guess there, do we? He wrote a whole book.

**John:** He did, yeah.

**Craig:** He wrote a whole book.

**John:** Of his struggle. Thinking to cults in general, they’re easy targets for cinematic stories, for villains, because they’re sinister, they have dark motivations. You and I grew up in a time of panic over Satanic cults and these people who were sacrificing babies. That never happens.

**Craig:** That just doesn’t happen.

**John:** It doesn’t. Instead, we have a lot of people who believe themselves to be incarnations of God and to have divine messages, and the people who follow them believe they are doing right for the world. They believe that they alone can save things.

**Craig:** It does seem like the Catholic Church and the Baptist Church and Pentecostal, all the big traditional Christian movements, big ones, do think that there’s a lot of these Devil-worshiping cults out there. And maybe there were in the, I don’t know, 1400s, but now, that’s not a problem.

Every now and then, some town will want to put up some sort of religious thing, and then they’re saying, okay, the court said you have to let every religion do it if they want, and then the local Satanist group shows up, and they’re just a bunch of dorks that like to wear black. They’re always like, “We’re really actually very nice.”

It’s this kind of New Agey baloney. It’s baloney. A lot of baloney about energy, past lives, and all that stuff. And a lot of the things that I think a lot of people believe, but in a perfectly innocuous way, some people take so seriously. That plus the cult of personality leads to these extraordinary situations, where people are so deep in, there’s no way out, because once you start picking at one thread, the whole thing falls apart, and they’re so brutal about you leaving. Once you’re in, you get love bombed, and only they understand you, and only they care about you, and then you’re stuck.

**John:** The obvious reflection is like, what is the difference between a cult and religion? Religion has structure around it that lives on beyond its creator. Obviously, so many of our religions, if you look back in the early phases of them, look a lot like our cults. But I’m curious about secular cults, cults that don’t go for any grand or religious view. They still have to have some perspective on what’s next.

I imagine there will be some kind of AI cults coming up here. Some of our charismatic founders of these corporations are very analogous to cult leaders. People will follow them to the ends of the earth.

**Craig:** Elon Musk feels culty.

**John:** Yeah, it does feel culty. I’ll be curious to see what that looks like. I guess in some way, Elon Musk, there was an expectation like, no, you need to sleep at the factory in order to make sure this all works right. The people who were working for him were not just working for that paycheck. They truly believed in the mission.

**Craig:** Yes. Donald Trump clearly is a cult leader. There’s no way to argue he’s not. That is a cult. They behave in the most cult-like way possible. All of these movements seem to collapse when the cult leader dies. They are ultimately about the person. They cannot exist past it. This woman, Amy Carlson, she dies in 2021, and that’s the end of that.

**John:** Actually, it’s still dribbling on a bit. Her people, they still believe what she believed, but they haven’t all held together.

**Craig:** It’s gonna fall apart. It just doesn’t work. L. Ron Hubbard died pretty early on in Scientology. It was David Miscavige who really continues to be the hub of that wheel. I don’t know how old he is, but one day he won’t be here. He will go the way of all mortal beings, and then we’ll see what happens to Scientology too.

**John:** We’ll see what happens. Did it jump past that initial needing to have the charismatic founder where it can keep going with its own energy? Maybe. But we won’t know until we see.

**Drew:** I feel like LA is lousy with those centering cults though. Scientology is probably the most prominent of that. But there’s the workout cults. There’s all those certain workout gyms. There’s one right now that will give you money off your membership if you get a tattoo of the brand.

**Craig:** That’s disgusting. That’s insane.

**Drew:** Isn’t that crazy?

**Craig:** That’s insane.

**Drew:** All the acting stuff too. Those are all little mini cults.

**John:** Oh, god, yeah.

**Craig:** No question. No question. They’re built around people.

**Drew:** That’s fair. And an idea of better… It’s all that, yeah.

**Craig:** Life improvement?

**Drew:** [Crosstalk 01:17:46].

**Craig:** Yeah, life improvement.

**John:** Exception proving the rule, QAnon, it feels like a cult. There is an entity who’s supposedly Q, but there’s no actual person there. There’s nothing you can point to. Q could be anybody, anything. It feels like it’s now dying down. But I was surprised it was able to be as successful as it was without any visible figurehead there.

**Craig:** There was Q. That’s why the QAnon movement was so pernicious, because there isn’t a single person that you could pick apart and point at as having feet of clay. It was this thing that would just show up, like receiving messages from the sky. It was actually quite brilliant. It’s stupid. It’s floridly stupid. But again, people, once they dig in and they believe it… And it does appear that Q was the son of the guy that owns 8chan or whatever that thing was, and then other people probably posed as it. It’s kind of remarkable how they did a little end-run around having a person be around.

**John:** Getting back to the main episode, how do you make sure the person you’re gonna hire is not actually a cult leader? Check their social media. Do they claim themselves to be God? That’s a red flag.

**Craig:** Do they have a lot of people following them around? If you’re like, “Yeah, we’re thinking about casting you,” and they’re like, “Great. One request is that my entourage of 80 people come with me, and also no one can wear the color blue,” and blah, blah, blah. You’re like, “Oh, no.”

**John:** There are some celebrities who have those entourages. Maybe we have to watch out for them as being cult leaders.

**Craig:** There are celebrities who could, in a second, make a cult. Thank you, Taylor Swift, for having some restraint. If Taylor Swift wanted to install herself as the head of a religious movement, she could, within a day. It would be massive, and it would be serious. Thank you. Once again, I should say, thank you, Taylor Swift.

**John:** Let’s leave it there. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Bye, guys.

Links:

* [Strands](https://www.nytimes.com/games/strands) from the New York Times
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLqgK_LQKS4)
* [Past Lives by Celine Song](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Past-Lives-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Irma Vep – Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VY5vfWIjYE)
* [Is This Hollywood’s #MeanToo Moment?](https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/hollywood-me-too-mean-toxic-bullying-tv-film-jonathan-van-ness-ellen-degeneres.html) by David Mack for Slate
* [How to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids](https://everhearthinn.com/articles/how-to-play-dungeons-and-dragons-for-kids/)
* [RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/11/rupaul-doesnt-see-how-thats-any-of-your-business) by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
* [Recursion – Glitch Games](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/recursion/id1658817293)
* [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 Eric Pearson ([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/635standard.mp3).

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).