The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/how-would-this-be-a-bio-pic).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** It is Episode 621 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
The past few weeks have offered up a lot of big personalities in the news, with some of these individuals dying or being fired or removed from Congress. Today on the show, we ask the most important question, of course: how would this be a biopic?
**Craig:** Thank you for saying BAI-oh-pik and not bai-AH-pik.
**John:** A film that is a biographic is a BAI-oh-pik, but sometimes it’s written out as without a hyphen, and it becomes bai-AH-pik. That’s not a thing.
**Craig:** That’s not a thing. I think people are confusing it with myopic, which is understandable, but also not understandable, because it’s not like we refer to people’s bios as bai-AHs.
**John:** No.
**Craig:** So BAI-oh-pik, everyone.
**John:** BAI-oh-pik.
**Craig:** BAI-oh-pik.
**John:** We’re making a strong stand here for that.
**Craig:** Damn right.
**John:** We also have some follow-up on AI and inner monologues. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, I want to pontificate about which event in history has had the biggest negative impact on human civilization.
**Craig:** Wow.
**John:** Yeah, so some college stoner talk here.
**Craig:** Woo! Okay.
**John:** Maybe think about some alt histories there. We also have some news. We have a live show coming up, this Sunday, December 17th, at 4:00 p.m. The show’s going to be sold out by the time you’re listening to this.
**Craig:** Of course. We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.
**John:** It’s going to be at Dynasty Typewriter again. There will be some streaming tickets available. If you’re listening to this on the Tuesday that the episode drops, check the link in the show notes for our live show at Dynasty Typewriter. We’re going to have some great guests. It’s our holiday show. It came together kind of last minute, but we’re very excited to do it.
**Craig:** Who is it benefiting this time?
**John:** This time it’s benefiting the Writers Guild Foundation.
**Craig:** Fantastic, which does excellent work supporting veterans and the writing community in general. Just so people know, it’s not the Writers Guild. It is the charitable nonprofit arm of the Writers Guild, vaguely associated.
**John:** We’ve done a lot of shows with them, for them over the years. It’s nice to be back doing one for them. Now, before we get into the work follow-up here, apparently there’s an important bit of Melissa follow-up about Thanksgiving.
**Craig:** We are recording this on December 3rd. It is Melissa’s birthday, by the way. Happy birthday, Melissa.
**John:** Happy birthday, Melissa.
**Craig:** She said, “I have follow-up for you.”
**John:** We should say that Melissa Mazin is your wife.
**Craig:** She is my wife, and has been for quite some time. She said, “In your last show about Thanksgiving, you said that the women,” meaning her and our friend Beth, “were not allowed to cook,” that Josh and I were the only ones who were allowed to cook. She said, “That’s not accurate. We chose not to cook.” Now, I’m going to say, in follow-up to that follow-up, we haven’t ever gotten to the place where we would need to say to her, “You’re not allowed to cook.” If she chose to cook, there would have to be a discussion. But she wanted it to be clear that she didn’t need permission. She simply wasn’t interested.
**John:** That’s a fair distinction there. I think many cases in life, you can see, was that actually a choice, did she actually have the ability to choose to cook, and was that denied from her.
**Craig:** She feels she had the choice. There’ll be follow-up to this one on a subsequent podcast.
**John:** Apparently so. It’s nice to know that Melissa does listen to the show.
**Craig:** Religiously.
**John:** That’s great. By religiously, you mean that she listens with votive candles burning around her.
**Craig:** With my face on them. Absolutely.
**John:** Let’s get to some less controversial follow-up. We’ll start with David. This is back to Episode 620. We were talking about visual effects and digital doubles and AI. David writes, “The bad crowd work mentioned in Prom Pact, that was meme-ified as, quote, ‘Disney put AI people into this crowd.’ That wasn’t AI. That was just cheap VFX, likely done at the last second.”
**Craig:** That sounds right. In looking at it again, they did seem like were sort of the kinds of people we see in previs stuff. We used to just have storyboards, and now for complicated sequences, we can do previs, where you do get these horror-looking humans. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not meant to be seen by anybody except for you, for planning purposes. I think David’s probably right there.
**John:** I would also say that the differentiation between this is AI versus VFX is increasingly irrelevant. A lot of visual effects are going to have AI components built into them. The fact that it looks terrible doesn’t… Whether it was done with visual effects or AI, it’s not actually so important. It’s the fact that they put something on screen that look like human beings, that were not human beings. That’s the concern.
**Craig:** If we get used to it, if we normalize it, as the kids say, we’re in trouble. Reasonable distinction to make.
**John:** You want to take Alana here?
**Craig:** We’ve got some follow-up from Alana. She is commenting on Episode 611, where I apparently mentioned a screenwriting format that’s divided into two columns, one for what you see and one for what you hear, and that it might make more sense for screenwriting than the current standardized format. “In Mexican telenovelas, the two-column format has been used for decades as the standard screenwriting format, though apparently in recent years, people have turned to the standard format that’s used in most places.” I wonder if perhaps the folks writing the Mexican telenovelas may have gone backwards here, because I think that makes sense. I think it makes sense.
**John:** I was trying to find an example of Mexican telenovelas in the two-column format, because I’m familiar with two-column format, which is often used in commercials.
**Craig:** Commercials.
**John:** Other things, you see it there. Left-hand side is the visuals. The audio, and including the dialogue, is on the right-hand side. Yes, it does kind of make sense overall. I think our current screenplay format, which it’s all one big flow, it reads really well. You can actually read and get a sense of what’s happening very cleanly and smoothly in our current version. There’s trade-offs to doing that two-column format.
**Craig:** I agree with you. I think maybe the two-column format might be best used by production. There are times where it’s hard to create simultaneity. We can do it in dialogue, with double dialogue, which I just sort of hate doing anyway, because it just sends the actors into a shouting over each other tizzy. But what’s almost impossible to do is simultaneous action and dialogue. You can do a little bit of it. But even then, if you put it in parentheses, it’s still like there’s a temporal thing. It’s a bit linear. The two-column format does allow for something that’s simultaneous. But I agree with you. It is easier to read. Maybe not as useful for production, but more useful for reading.
**John:** Going back to simultaneity, even in dialogue, when Greta Gerwig was on the show, she was talking about how in her dual dialogue, she had very specific points where she wanted the actors to be overlapping and how things fit together. She put these little slashes in to indicate where these things are supposed to fall. That is the kind of micro-control you would love to be able to have. You’re always going to bump up against the hard limits of how you can portray speech on page.
**Craig:** At some point, you are going to have to explain it to the actors and make sure they understand that this is a technical thing you’re aiming for. I find that actors in general appreciate it if you put it in that context. If you say this is actually going to be a bit technical, then they get it. If you try and convince them that this is about art, then I think reasonably, they’re like, “No. This is not how I would do it. Humans wouldn’t normally do this.” But if you put it in technical terms…
**John:** Follow-up from Joe in New Zealand talking about Episode 615, called The Mind’s Eye. He says, “The discussion about inner monologues hit home for me, because my lovely wife has a primarily outer monologue.”
**Craig:** What?
**John:** “She goes about her days speaking aloud near constantly-”
**Craig:** Oh my god.
**John:** “… whether she’s in the room alone or in a room with me.”
**Craig:** Oh, Joe, no.
**John:** “Early in our relationship, it caused confusion, because she’s mostly unaware of it. To her, it feels like going from silence to talking when she addresses me, but my attention filter doesn’t always pick up on it. I thought of it as a singular quirk until we visited her family. I found myself in the living room with her, her brother, her father, and her mother, four adults all wandering around, playing with a dog, going about their business, talking constantly.”
**Craig:** Oh my god.
**John:** “Not to each other, not engaging, not questioning or responding, just a stream of conscious thought flowing out of each of them. It was so funny and so charming in the moment, but I definitely lied about why I was smiling and chuckling. It’s still a minor source of confusion 18 years later, but ever since then, the music of her chatter from the other side of the house is simply one of the many joys of our home.”
**Craig:** This is the most kiwi thing I’ve ever read in my life. Joe, the good news is that your wife, who I will refer to as Mrs. Joe, found the best possible husband. The fact that you consider it a joy is why you are still married 18 years later. I would go insane. I love a quiet house. I don’t know about you.
**John:** I like a quiet house too. It’s nice.
**Craig:** It’s wonderful. I will admit that there are times where I have an outer monologue, and those times are very specifically when I’m working on puzzles. I will start to talk. Melissa will say, “You’re sitting there saying things like, ‘But what is that about? Why would that be there? Oh, okay, so this is absolutely this kind of… Okay, so if I do that…'” I just do it because I’m working weirdly. But if I were to do that constantly-
**John:** You’d be divorced?
**Craig:** No, I’d probably be the victim of a accident.
**John:** This is reminding me of some interview I saw with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They’re talking about their producing partner who apparently had a bit of this, and if they were driving someplace, would have to read aloud every sign that they saw, that they passed. It’s a thing. They have to externalize that stuff.
**Craig:** Just going to have to just bear with them, I guess.
**John:** To some degree, I am talking. I definitely talk to my dog a lot if it’s just me and Lambert.
**Craig:** Everyone talks to their dog.
**John:** Because they’re such good boys.
**Craig:** Lambert is such a good boy. We got some follow-up from Greenhorn from back in 615. Greenhorn says, “My thanks to John and Craig for their helpful advice.” Oh, I remember this. This was the second unit director who was trying to claim co-writer credit.
Greenhorn says, “The pushy second unit director backed down in trying to claim co-writer credit. He said a production company wanted to see a script. I said that I’d need to be paid to write a draft, and then that would also clear up any confusion over our roles. I am the writer, writing a project for you to direct. He accepted this. In his trying to squeeze writer credit, either he as a second unit director thus far was just ignorant of what was fair, as Craig suggested, or he was trying his luck. If the latter, that does not bode well for a working relationship, but I’m so keen to get my break that I’m kind of taking the view that if swimming with sharks is what it takes, so be it, so long as I can protect myself.
“Now, the director said he relayed my response, which is, ‘Pay me for a draft then,’ to the production company, and they replied that they didn’t have a development budget. This company makes $100 million movies, so it’s hard to believe that they can’t afford to pay a writer to write up a script for a project they’re interested in, or is this standard practice in the US?
“I’m a London-based British writer, and happily, I’ve started to get paid to write outlines and scripts, but only today I’ve had a reputable US producer put a writing brief to me. I’ve offered a take on it, which he likes, but he says he’d need a spec, not an outline. I said, ‘I’m being paid to write scripts now, so I’m not looking to write on spec.’ The UK producer I’m speaking with on other projects gladly seem to get this, but this guy just repeated that he’d need a script. It feels wrong and, frankly, insulting that he’s expecting me to give weeks or months of work without any kind of pay or commitment, or is that something that US producers can get away with when a writer hasn’t broken in yet and indeed join the WGA?” Oh, there are some facts we can lay out here, John.
**John:** Yes, there are. Greenhorn, it’s good that you are being paid to write stuff in the UK. You should be paid to write stuff everywhere. Writing something on spec for somebody in a situation you don’t control is not a good practice to get into. For, certainly, a US-based producer, someone who’s a WGA signatory, they should not be doing that at all.
**Craig:** It is a violation of our contract, very specifically, a violation of our minimum basic agreement, our collective bargaining agreement. It also is a violation of the WGA working rules. You are not allowed to write anything on spec for a signatory. You can pitch stuff, but you can’t write. Now, of course, Greenhorn is British. Greenhorn is not in the WGA. This US producer is fully aware of what the deal is. Can they get away with asking a British person to do this? Sure, but it’s wrong. I’m not sure that I would use the word reputable in front of this US producer’s name. If you’re reputable, you don’t ask for this, as far as I’m concerned.
**John:** As a reminder, when we talk about writing on spec, this is a thing where you as the writer are choosing to write a project. Ideally, it’s something you own and control. It’s entirely your thing. Now, there could be situations where a producer comes, is like, “I really want to do a movie set at McDonald’s in space.” It’s like, great. You could go off and write that movie, and that person could be interested in your thing, but you control this fully. You cannot do that situation where that producer somehow owns this thing without having paid you money to write it.
**Craig:** That’s right. If you hear an idea and think, “That sounds amazing. I really want to write this,” the deal is that producer is going to attach themselves and maybe just be a dead weight on it. But it’s yours. You own it. They don’t own the copyright. You wrote it. By the way, you shouldn’t write an outline either. You should write nothing unless you have an employment agreement.
Now, that’s how we do it here with WGA writers in our business. The British system is not as protective as ours, which is odd, because they don’t have work for hire. And yet, as we’ve said many times, in exchange for giving up copyright, we get all the protections a union can afford, and it’s clear that they don’t quite have that in the UK.
**John:** Let’s get to our main topic this week, which is how would this be a biopic.
**Craig:** It’s not bai-AH-pik.
**John:** Not bai-AH-pik. It’s a BAI-oh-pik. We had a whole series of deaths happen recently. People who live long lives are just fantastic. We love people living a long time.
**Craig:** Rosalynn Carter.
**John:** I thought we’d start with Sandra Day O’Connor. Sandra Day O’Connor, for folks who are younger or not American, she was our first female Supreme Court justice. She died recently at 93 due to complications related to advanced dementia. She’d been public about the fact that she had dementia coming on.
**Craig:** Yes, so she has not been-
**John:** In public life.
**Craig:** … in the public eye for many, many years.
**John:** She obviously was an inspiration to a generation of female lawyers, as this pioneer there. She grew up in Arizona. She was a graduate of Stanford, went to Stanford Law School. She was dating William Rehnquist while she was there.
**Craig:** So hot.
**John:** So hot. A belated chief justice. But then she went on to marry another classmate, John O’Connor.
**Craig:** Well done. It has to have been an upgrade.
**John:** When she graduated from Stanford Law School, she was turned down by law firms, because she was a woman. She had to start her own firm with her husband. She was an Arizona state senator, first female majority leader. She became a judge through the Arizona system and then was appointed by Reagan to the Supreme Court. She was a deciding vote in a lot of crucial cases. She was a conservative, but she also voted with liberal majority on other situations, in controversial cases.
Probably the thing she’s most noted for is Planned Parenthood versus Casey, about a woman’s right to abortion and the term “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion. Undue burden felt like a good phrase to hang around a story told about her. Craig, how would this be a movie? Is there a movie? What are some comps that you’re thinking in your head?
**Craig:** I think there is a movie. They made a movie about Ruth Ginsburg.
**John:** Yeah, On the Basis of Sex.
**Craig:** Correct. I actually think there may be a more interesting movie to be made about Sandra Day O’Connor. The reason why is, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a progressive firebrand who served faithfully and brilliantly for many, many years, doing exactly what she said she would do. It was one of those stories where somebody is principled, and they stay principled. They face people, obstacles and things in their way. They surmount, and they thrive. Sandra Day O’Connor was far more sneaky. She’s an interesting case of somebody who came up through what you and I knew to be Republicans. That party’s no longer in existence. Might as well call it a different name.
The party of Reagan. In the “only Nixon can go to China” thing, Ronald Reagan, being the first president to appoint a female Supreme Court justice, did so under the aegis of, “This isn’t about women’s lib stuff, of course. She’s a good, staunch conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold.” Like many Supreme Court justices, including some that we have today, she began to surprise people, because while many people disagree with the lifetime appointment clause, what it does is it lets people just do what they want.
**John:** It’s like tenure.
**Craig:** It’s tenure. Sandra Day O’Connor showed an evolution and a wisdom and began to change the way the court was thinking. I love the fact that she dated William Rehnquist. That’s really cool, because then they’re on the court together. That’s fun. There’s cool moments and scenes like that, and also ,somebody wrestling with their own conscience and wrestling with their own principles. The fact that she had to take her husband on just to get a law firm, it’s…You can see somebody compromising until they didn’t have to anymore. That’s really interesting.
**John:** The question of any biopic we’re going to wrestle with a lot-
**Craig:** BAI-oh-pik.
**John:** BAI-oh-pik, gotta say BAI-oh-pik. The question is always where are the edges of this, where do you start the story, where do you end the story. There’s that temptation to do cradle to grave, which I think is generally a mistake. Those are not going to be the most interesting moments of a life. Once you do decide what the more limited window is, do you stay within it, or do you jump out to trace other things? You’re trying to thematically fold this all together.
I can imagine a Sandra Day O’Connor movie that is essentially just about the decision to appoint her and her going in through this moment and surviving that little crucible. I don’t recall her nomination process.
**Craig:** Very smooth.
**John:** So probably not that.
**Craig:** Ronald Reagan had full control.
**John:** He had control of everything.
**Craig:** The Republican Party was a corporation back then and ran like one. The thing I would need is actually information about her marriage, because at the heart of it, you do want that relationship. You want some sort of love story. Same thing that happened with the Ginsburg story. I think also there is something brutal about the greatest minds succumbing to dementia and fading away and what that means for the person who loves her and loved her all that time. That I think is valuable, but it’s also a story of legacy, and that’s really interesting to me. There is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg without Sandra Day O’Connor.
**John:** Absolutely. Depending on where the edges are of the story you’re telling, she was the first, but then Ginsburg is the second woman, I think, on the court.
**Craig:** That sounds right.
**John:** That sounds right. After she’s broken this through, what is it like to have a second woman, once you’ve actually been through there, and how do you-
**Craig:** A woman who’s from, quote unquote, the other side. That’s where it gets interesting. The Supreme Court is notable for very odd bedfellows, weird friendships that form. Kavanaugh, fascinatingly, has become a slightly weird swing vote at times. No one can seem to predict what happens when people get on the court.
**John:** Yeah, because important to recognize that you are appointed because they believe you’re going to have one set of facts, basically that you’re going to be the same person. But of course, people do change over time. That’s why stories are interesting.
**Craig:** Absolutely. When you watch Supreme Court hearings, they are a study in political non-commitment. Everyone knows what’s going on. The job is to be slippery without seeming like you’re slippery, until we all vote yes, and then you’re going to do whatever you want.
**John:** Next up, not controversial at all, Henry Kissinger died recently at 100 years of age.
**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think this is going to be too… Yeah.
**John:** 100 years old. Actually, you listened to audio this last week of just him at events, coherent and talking at 100 years old, which is great. Statesman, war criminal. Movies have to make choices about how they’re going to portray the complexity of a man’s life.
**Craig:** Kissinger is going to be a movie. That will be a movie.
**John:** 100%. A movie or a mini series. That’s worth talking about.
**Craig:** Movie or a mini series.
**John:** I feel like Sandra Day O’Connor is a movie.
**Craig:** Movie. Kissinger probably you could do a mini series. I’m sure it’s in development already. He falls into the category of monumentous people, for better or worse. He was just this fascinating character, working for a president that openly detested Jews. Here was Henry Kissinger, the most Jewish of Jews.
**John:** Born in Germany. Born Jewish in Germany, fled-
**Craig:** Fled.
**John:** … with his family to New York.
**Craig:** But notably, never lost the accent. He was always an immigrant. For Jewish people, there are levels of assimilation, like there are for any ethnicity in the United States. Having that accent, it’s just remarkable to me. That Nixon-Kissinger relationship is fascinating. There are moments, I think, where Kissinger probably did good, in the way that Lindsey Graham, in his bootlicky way, probably kept Trump from doing some terrible, terrible things. I think Kissinger probably did halt some horrible things. There were some things where he didn’t let Nixon get on the phone because he was drunk. Having somebody that is such an outsider be so inside is fascinating, from a dramatic point of view.
**John:** Absolutely. I was going through the incredibly long Wikipedia article on him, pulling out some little moments. He became a US citizen after he joined the Army to fight in the war. There was a moment which he was just a private during the American advance into Germany and was put in charge of administration of the city of Krefeld, because he was the guy who could speak German, and actually, apparently, did a really good job. It’s just those weird moments of, oh, now we’re fighting the Germans, and you speak German, and that is the moment where you can pick up and shine. That feels like the kind of thing that is in the longer version of this, which is probably the mini series. I don’t know that this fits into the movie.
**Craig:** I agree. That’s why you do want it to be a mini series, because for somebody like Kissinger, you want to walk away… It’s a little bit like the way Sorkin ended Social Network. You feel like you’ve known the spirit of somebody, but you also pity them and loathe them all at the same time. There’s just a core of something that’s sad there. But you can’t make a mini series merely to say, “Bad. This person bad.” That’s not the goal, I don’t think.
**John:** We have some insight into his character, obviously. He gave a lot of interviews. This one interview I wanted to pull out was with an Italian journalist. He writes, “The cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into town and does everything by himself. This amazing romantic character suits me precisely, because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like it, my technique, together with independence. It’s very important for me, and conviction. I’ve always been convinced I had to do whatever I’ve done.”
**Craig:** Yes, which a lot of terrible people also have. Certainly, Kissinger did not lack any conviction. But I would suggest that that is bravado, in that everybody has a dark midnight.
**John:** What does he fear? That’s a thing I don’t think we have a sense of yet, but what the movie or mini series would have to get into.
**Craig:** Given the decisions he was making and the lives that he destroyed, particularly in Cambodia, but all over Southeast Asia, there had to have been moments of doubt, had to, because ultimately, it didn’t work.
**John:** Thinking about the edges of this mini series – it’s going to be a mini series – I think you have to pick an exit point, because he ended up staying in governmental life and policy life up until months ago. He was always an advisor to people. But I don’t think that’s going to be interesting. I don’t think that’s relevant.
**Craig:** Agreed. The meat of it ends with the fall of Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Then I think you jump ahead to him much, much later in life and see him trying to rehabilitate or defend or whatever, and yet still, again, there is that last moment where you have to ask, where is the humanity of this person, and what happened? How does it feel?
**John:** So question of how many actors. Where do you break up his life? Is it three actors? Is there a 20-something, is there a 40-something, and then an old man version? Where are the splits?
**Craig:** If I were doing it, I would probably want just one actor, if I could. If he’s very young in the war – I don’t know how old he was when he was in World War II – then it’s hard. Then you want two. But if he’s a full adult, then I think… Because also, you’re going to need to do some prosthetic work and makeup on somebody to play Kissinger. Nobody’s just walking in the room looking like him. You don’t necessarily want to drift into the whole Saturday Night Live, “Look, I look exactly like the guy.” We had to deal with this with Mikhail Gorbachev in Chernobyl. It was a tricky thing. I feel like you could probably get away with one really, really good actor, because the great bulk of the work is going to be-
**John:** The Nixon era.
**Craig:** … 60s and 70s.
**John:** I’m surprised there’s not a movie out there yet. There’s a documentary Alex Gibney did, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The comps I was thinking about for this, it’s obviously Oppenheimer, a recent version, which was focused though on one moment in his life. I think we’re expanding beyond just the one focal point. It also made me think of, there’s a Michael Jackson biopic coming out. It reminded of just like, wow, you are walking into a minefield there. Talk about someone who’s a hero and a villain.
**Craig:** Yes, and you have to go in knowing that people are going to be critiquing this heavily no matter what you do. There’s no way that you put this out and everybody goes, “Yeah.”
**John:** “Yeah, that’s good.”
**Craig:** “We all agree.” It’s not as simple as something like Frost/Nixon, for instance, where Nixon’s clearly the villain, and really the hero journey there is, will David Frost get this guy to spill it or not. This is different. It’s also different than, the other thing I was thinking about was the John Adams mini series, Paul Giamatti. The point of that was that John Adams, crusty and grouchy and miserable as he was, was perhaps the most important Founding Father. That’s not the case here. This is something else.
**John:** Simpler story perhaps, Rosalynn Carter passed away recently, also in her 90s. She was the First Lady when her husband, Jimmy Carter, was the president. Born in Plains, Georgia, married Jimmy Carter, was politically active during her husband’s entire governorship and presidency. She was very involved as a First Lady. She was in cabinet meetings in ways that was controversial at the time, although there’s precedent for that before then, of course. Active with the Equal Rights Amendments. One of the first modern feminists who was in the White House there. Portrayed as a Steel Magnolia, sweet and loving but spine of steel.
**Craig:** Tough.
**John:** Tough. Criticized for lack of attention paid to fashion, which I think is an interesting thing, the sexism that goes in there. Hard to point to achievements in and of herself. It’s hard to imagine the Rosalynn Carter story that isn’t largely about Jimmy Carter, although I would say a comp for me would be Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, which is looking at the wife of Elvis, rather than that whole story.
**Craig:** But even there in Priscilla, the point is she was a child, that we have forgotten that Elvis essentially was a pedophile, I guess, by modern standards.
**John:** Yeah, by modern standards.
**Craig:** It’s funny. Melissa went to the Stevie Nicks concert last night. Apparently, Stevie’s still crushing it in her 70s. I was like, “Did she play Edge of Seventeen?” “Oh yeah, of course.” I’m like, “That’s about a boy who’s 16, so I guess technically it’s still pedophilia by today’s standards.”
In the case of Rosalynn Carter, to me the story is probably about the relationship between Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter. It’s a little bit more like Johnny Cash. I don’t know. It just feels like on her own… By the way, in a weird way, on Jimmy Carter’s own, even though he was president, I’m not sure there would be enough there. But their relationship was fascinating, so long-lived and so beautiful and decent, and the way that they both just walked the walk. Also, the two of them defined a kind of Christianity that is what I would think of as actual Christianity.
**John:** When you look at the Habitat for Humanity work that Carter was doing later on in his years, it’s literally building houses for people, just like, be a carpenter.
**Craig:** Following the teachings of Jesus and giving and giving and giving. You’d like to think that, in part, that’s why they both made it so far in life. They were fulfilled with each other and by life and their good works, which is in stark contrast to some of the people that we now deal with, these social media-baiting idiots. It’s almost like a different species of person. The sadness of her death to me was more in the context of end of an era.
**John:** I worry about lack of conflict. I don’t know where the source of the conflict is. The conflict doesn’t feel like it’s between the two of them. Who is the antagonist here, and how is she growing and changing? I don’t have a sense of that yet. Any movie is going to need to figure out what that is, because right now, it’s almost Hallmarky in the sense it’s just smooth sailing.
**Craig:** One of the things that drama struggles with is to portray decency, steady, reliable decency, because it’s not interesting. We simply aren’t entertained by it. Neither one of them seemed interested in interesting anyone. They just wanted to do good things. I do think a Rosalynn Carter biopic would be a challenge. Jimmy Carter, you know that he was involved in this insane nuclear accident?
**John:** No, I don’t know anything about that.
**Craig:** Not that he caused it, but he was a nuclear engineer. He worked on nuclear submarines. There was an accident at a reactor. Jimmy Carter and his team was sent in to clean it up, and they did. It was Chernobyl-ish in the fact that they were exposed to quite a bit of radiation and all the rest of it. He was an heroic guy, and I think more than any other president, has received a little bit of historical rehabilitation, at least any other from my lifetime.
**John:** Going back to the whole issues of conflict and where is the conflict in this story, I am aware that we on Scriptnotes are always talking about the hero’s journey, the sense of, oh, this is the character who grows up in a place, leaves the place, is transformed, goes through these trials. That’s not the only way stories can work mythologically. There’s things called the heroine’s journey and other alternative ways of thinking about what a central character’s journey might be. We’re trying to put together an episode talking through these alternate ways of thinking about that.
**Craig:** Listen. Anything that interests people, I think, is the goal. It doesn’t have to be from one perspective or another. What’s fascinating to me is that, as varied as world cultures are, storytelling and mythologizing are incredibly similar. The Hero’s Journey ultimately really was just saying that. The word hero was applied to all genders. It is kind of incredible. It makes me wonder if this way we think about storytelling, it’s just imprinted in the brain. It’s not necessarily cultural. The brain has a way of organizing drama. But that said, I’m open to anything. If it makes people sit forward and engages them, yes.
**John:** I think some of the overlooked stories in mythology would be Demeter’s story, or the kidnapped woman who has to adapt and survive in a place, Medea as a woman who is not a classic protagonist story, yet is a part of foundational.
**Craig:** Great story there.
**John:** It’s a great story though.
**Craig:** Those kids die.
**John:** They do.
**Craig:** She’s angry.
**John:** She’s very angry.
**Craig:** Oh, man, does she get angry.
**John:** You know who else is angry?
**Craig:** Who?
**John:** George Santos.
**Craig:** The Pope, George Santos?
**John:** Pope George Santos. For folks who are listening to this years after we recorded it and are going, “Who is George Santos?”
**Craig:** “Who is George Santos?” George Santos, I believe he was the Pope. He was a Jewish, not-Jewish, astronaut, physicist, professor. I think he was the president and also none of those, just a liar.
**John:** George Anthony Devolder Santos we believe is his full name.
**Craig:** Maybe.
**John:** Spent his early life in Jackson Heights and also in Brazil. He was elected as a US Representative from New York City as a Republican, openly gay. Everything that basically he ended up saying turned out to be a lie.
**Craig:** Lie.
**John:** This was all revealed after he was elected. The New York Times reported how much of his life was misrepresented. There was really a sense of failure of journalism to have not investigated any of this stuff earlier on. He was the sixth person ever kicked out of Congress.
**Craig:** Congress is enormous. 535, I think, people. Over the course of 200 and whatever many years, he’s number six. He not only was a serial fabulist, who for instance eventually would say, “I’m Jew-ish.” He also was a fraud. He was misusing campaign funds to buy fabulous things. We’re talking about him like he’s dead. He’s still alive. He is fascinating.
**John:** Yes. I think he’s a great character.
**Craig:** He is. I love listening to him, because it’s like somebody coming out and saying, “And now, the dumpster fire show.” It’s weirdly funny.
**John:** It’s funny because you recognize he actually has no power. With Trump, it’s terrifying, because like, oh shit, people are actually going to vote for him. Everyone recognizes this is absurd.
**Craig:** It is a remarkable clown show. You’re right. He does feel vaguely innocuous. He did misuse campaign funds, and that’s a crime.
**John:** That’s a crime. He’s indicted. He will probably go to jail.
**Craig:** He will go to prison, as well he should. I hope he does. But he’s also kind of ridiculous. Even when Saturday Night Live would make fun of him, it seemed like they were enjoying it.
**John:** Absolutely. Bowen Yang’s portrayal of him was delightful and funny. You’d worry, oh, it’s softening him too much, but not really. It’s not like the thing you worry about with Trump, where you’re making him likable. You’re not making him likable, because he’s absurd.
**Craig:** He’s absurd and he was ejected from a Republican-controlled Congress, and he was a Republican. He is now starting to accuse other people of things. He’s like, “Okay. If you kick me out, I’m going to say that one’s gay and that one did this and that one beat his wife.” There’s a great exchange where he accused a guy of beating his wife. The problem with George Santos is he’s like the kid who cried wolf times a thousand. Who knows what anything coming out of his mouth-
**John:** You can’t believe anything, I think-
**Craig:** Nothing.
**John:** … which is part of the fun. Looking for comps with this, Shattered Glass, in terms of a fabulist, is just watching it all come crashing down. What’s so weird though is, in the movie Shattered Glass – Billy Ray wrote and directed that – it’s over the course of one day, it just all comes crashing down. Here, the story comes out, but it just keeps going and going and going.
**Craig:** It just keeps going.
**John:** It reminded me a little more of Tiger King, where it’s just like, you’re an absurd character here, and somehow the world has to go around.
**Craig:** Great comp. That’s a great comp. That’s why a documentary that would follow, if it had followed George Santos around-
**John:** Oh, god.
**Craig:** … and picked up his reaction and his bizarre lies and then showing how he was lying with a simple edit from what he says to what is real would’ve been amazing. Shattered Glass, Billy portrays Stephen Glass as a tragic figure who wants applause and love and can’t get it. Peter Sarsgaard does such a beautiful job of playing somebody who beats himself up for getting suckered.
Everybody knows. There’s no conflict. Everybody knows. He knows. He knows he’s lying when he’s lying. He’s basically saying, “I’m lying.” There’s a great clip from Fox News where someone asks him something, and he gives an answer, and she goes, “You just can’t tell the truth.” That is literally on Fox News. No one ever believed anything he said, and then that’s it. Then he got kicked out.
**John:** There is a movie in development.
**Craig:** You’re kidding me.
**John:** Oh, no.
**Craig:** Oh, come on.
**John:** It’s HBO. It could be really fun.
**Craig:** It’s on HBO? Who’s doing it?
**John:** It’s written by Mike Makowsky, who came on Scriptnotes. He’s the guy who did-
**Craig:** Oh, I remember.
**John:** … Bad Education.
**Craig:** He’s a good writer.
**John:** Good writer. Episode 448, he was on for that. Here’s the write-up that we have so far. “The film tells the story of a seemingly minor local race that wound up a battle for the soul of Long Island and unexpectedly carved the path to the world’s most famous and now disgraced Congressman. It follows the Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on the truth, and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American dream.”
**Craig:** I wish Mike all the luck. I don’t know how I would do… I also don’t know how to do a lot of things. Then I see them and I’m like, “Oh, that’s how you do it.”
**John:** It feels like the HBO movie is the right way to go. It’s Frank Rich who-
**Craig:** It’s a movie?
**John:** Yeah, a movie.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** It looks like it’s a movie.
**Craig:** You said Frank Rich?
**John:** Frank Rich. Veep and-
**Craig:** Now I’m in.
**John:** … Succession.
**Craig:** No offense to Mike. He’s a really good writer. But Frank Rich just simply to me, he doesn’t just signify quality, he creates quality. I can’t imagine that anything involving Frank Rich will be anything less than excellent.
**John:** Now you’re excited.
**Craig:** Now I’m sitting full-
**John:** Now you’re on board.
**Craig:** I’m going to watch this.
**John:** The last one is Sam Altman and OpenAI. The short version of this, we’re recording this the 3rd of December, 2023. Who knows what the next-
**Craig:** Week or two will bring.
**John:** New stuff always happens. Essentially, Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, which is one of the big AI companies as of 2023. His rise to this position, at 19 he founded Loopt, which is a location-based social networking mobile application, raised $30 million in venture capital, ultimately sold it for $43 million. Was president of Y Combinator, the big venture startup, and then OpenAI, which was founded by him, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, other folks in there.
**Craig:** Veritable rogues gallery.
**John:** Absolutely. You’ve got some really fascinating personalities in there. Then of course, the big thing that happened recently for us was that OpenAI’s board, which is a nonprofit, which is really confusing, voted to oust him. His employees rose up and said, “No, you can’t get rid of him,” and so he came back in.
**Craig:** Now, in the traditional version of this story, what happens is the evil board decides to push AI into dangerous territory to make more money, and the courageous CEO, backed by his faithful workers, rebel. It is the opposite of what has happened here. What appears to have happened is the board was worried that things were getting pushed too far, and Sam was like, “No.”
**John:** We don’t honestly know. One of the things that’s so fascinating about this moment we’re in right now is that we don’t know they actually fired him, because they’ve been so, so vague.
**Craig:** I guess maybe I’m saying a rumor.
**John:** You’re saying a rumor. It’s been so, so vague. The best explanation I’ve heard most recently is the board realized they couldn’t control him. It wasn’t about a worry of a specific thing. They just figured out, “Oh, we have three votes. We could oust him.” They just did it without thinking through stuff.
I think my question is, when a version of this story is told, which I think probably will be told, again, where are the edges of this? Do you just really focus on those few days and all of the drama around it? It’s a really tight thing, like Margin Call, which is really a tight, little story, or do you go bigger and broader? Because we’re still in the middle of it, we don’t know what is actually going to happen with OpenAI. I think that’s probably a mistake. I think you do need to put some edges on it.
**Craig:** We should ask ChatGPT what it thinks.
**John:** Absolutely.
**Craig:** I feel like it’s a sequence in a movie. I don’t think in and of itself, a board ousting somebody and then putting them back in feels… I wouldn’t tune in.
**John:** It feels like part of an episode of Succession. It doesn’t feel like enough of a story in itself.
**Craig:** In fact, it’s part of seven episodes of Succession.
**John:** It’s happened a few times on Succession.
**Craig:** Just a few. The board voting and getting rid of somebody and not getting rid of somebody, we’ve definitely seen that. It does work as a dramatic device in fiction. In reality, in some of the Apple movies, they’ve said, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of Steve Jobs. Oh, we’re going to put Steve Jobs back in.” But it’s never the focus of the movie.
**John:** The other comps obviously are Social Network, Blackberry, which I really enjoyed.
**Craig:** I want to see Blackberry. I haven’t seen it.
**John:** Blackberry’s fun. It’s like, “Oh wow, we’ve built this amazing thing.” Then the iPhone comes out, and everything comes crashing down in ways that are delightful.
**Craig:** Yeah, and they’re Canadian.
**John:** They’re Canadian. It’s a thoroughly Canadian movie.
**Craig:** So Canadian. I love that.
**John:** It’s so good. The appealing thing about trying to do this movie is it gives you a chance to also include a bunch of other famous people. Peter Thiel and Elon, Satya Nadella. There’s lots of people you can stick in there.
**Craig:** So many people that will sue you.
**John:** Let’s talk about that.
**Craig:** Thiel’s going to sue you, for sure.
**John:** Thiel, he’s already sued-
**Craig:** He may sue us for even talking about him.
**John:** Absolutely. We have no criticism of Peter Thiel on this podcast.
**Craig:** Oh, god.
**John:** But I will say, let’s talk about who can sue you of the people we’ve talked about’s things. The nice thing about the dead people is they can’t sue you.
**Craig:** Dead people can’t sue you.
**John:** Santos is going to have a hard time suing you.
**Craig:** Santos, he could try, but he doesn’t have the money anymore, and he’s going to go to prison probably. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk can sue you in the blink of an eye, and in doing so, wreck you if you fight back, because obviously, they have essentially unlimited resources. That’s terrifying. It is one of the reasons why we need an independent, free, and thriving press in this country, because the press really is protected in ways that individuals aren’t. I’m sure that any company making something like this would be a little concerned. Elon and Peter certainly have been litigious before.
**John:** Of the biopics we talked through today, which ones do we think are going to actually happen? You were pretty thumbs up on Sandra Day O’Connor.
**Craig:** Yes. I think that Sandra Day O’Connor feels like it could be a decent movie.
**John:** Henry Kissinger?
**Craig:** Definitely.
**John:** 100%. Multiple versions of it probably.
**Craig:** Yes. That’d be a good HBO mini series, I would imagine. Limited series, I should say.
**John:** Rosalynn Carter?
**Craig:** I don’t think so.
**John:** I don’t think so either. I think you’d have to find a very specific way into it. George Santos is actually already happening.
**Craig:** It’s happening.
**John:** It’s happening.
**Craig:** Frank Rich.
**John:** Frank Rich.
**Craig:** Mike Makowsky.
**John:** Sam Altman, I don’t think yet.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** People are trying to do it. I know there’s people milling around.
**Craig:** He’s also just now emerged as a name people know because of this. Prior to that, he wasn’t TV famous.
**John:** He’s also young. There’s a lot of runway ahead for him.
**Craig:** Absolutely. I assume that he, like all of the Silicon people, uses a blood boy to refresh his blood.
**John:** A thing I didn’t talk about is, in addition to OpenAI, he has that service that’s scanning people’s eyeballs for identity and cryptocurrency.
**Craig:** Fantastic.
**John:** That’s good stuff.
**Craig:** Can’t wait to-
**John:** Can’t wait for that.
**Craig:** … see what’s coming on the horizon.
**John:** Nothing ominous about that.
**Craig:** Nope. Going to hide in my house.
**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which I’m now learning, because I’ve never learned it. The IPA is a way of describing all the sounds in human languages. It’s a very distinct system for how you write that down. I’ve always seen it, and I’ve never been able to interpret it or understand it. I’m writing my flashcards, and I’m just learning how to do it.
**Craig:** Love that.
**John:** It is really clever and cool. You recognize the similarities and differences between languages and between dialects and accents, because the same word in English, based on different accents, would have very different written versions in IPA.
**Craig:** Notations.
**John:** Notations in IPA.
**Craig:** I just did a puzzle recently where part of the deal was you had to use one of the IPA diacritics, a single dot, two dots, or a line, to change the pronunciation of a word-
**John:** Oh, neat.
**Craig:** … in the clue to be able to solve the answer. Then later, when you looked at all of those things, the dots and the dashes form Morse code letters.
**John:** Love it.
**Craig:** It was fun to sit with the IPA notation there and do that. It’s very cool for nerds.
**John:** For nerds. For nerds.
**Craig:** For uncool people like us.
**John:** But also, those are homonyms. What’s one-
**Craig:** Homophone?
**John:** When a word has two different pronunciations, but it’s written the same way, that’s a homonym?
**Craig:** That is a homonym, right.
**John:** Homonym.
**Craig:** Homophones are the ones that sound the same but mean different things.
**John:** Present versus present. They track those differently. It’s not just where the emphasis is. Literally, the vowel sounds have changed.
**Craig:** Yes, exactly. I’m with you. I support your One Cool Thing. I think it is cool.
**John:** Every January 1st, I try to have an area of interest for the new year.
**Craig:** That’s very John August of you.
**John:** IPA is going to be my area of interest.
**Craig:** I did a variety writers thing a few days ago, and Nathan Fielder was one of the other writers on the panel. He listens to our show.
**John:** As does Bowen Yang, who played George Santos.
**Craig:** Bowen listens to our show?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** He’s a genius. I’m obsessed all the way back to his lip syncing videos. You’ve seen those, right?
**John:** Oh, 100%.
**Craig:** They’re amazing.
**John:** That’s where I first became aware of him.
**Craig:** He’s amazing. Okay, so Bowen, hi. Come on our show. You’re awesome. Nathan wanted me to pass along hello to you. He also said, in his Nathan, he’s like, “I feel like John August is a very organized guy.” Then he said, “I don’t mean to say that you’re not organized. I just feel like, you know.” I was like, “No, you nailed it. He’s a very organized guy.” You’ve organized your new topic for 2024.
**John:** Yeah. I’m prepared.
**Craig:** Well done. My One Cool Thing is a trailer for a television series that just came out, I believe two days ago, as of this recording. It is for the show Fallout.
**John:** I’m excited to see Fallout. Our friends have made that show.
**Craig:** Fallout is executive produced by Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, who have been on our show before. Jonah, I believe, directed the first couple of episodes. I don’t think they’re the showrunners. I just know them. I’m so sorry to the showrunners. We’ll get you in the show notes, I promise. After The Last of Us, there seemed to be this, I don’t know, epidemic of sudden development of video games into shows and movies and things. I suspect quite a few of them are not going to work very well.
What I loved about the trailer for Fallout was the vibe, which I think is different than tone. Tone is sort of like, what kind of comedy, what kind of drama, is it melodramatic, is it realistic. Vibe is this other stuff. It’s just like, did you capture the soul of something. As a Fallout fan, I watch that trailer, and I’m like, “Yeah, they got the vibe.”
Now, I can’t say anything yet about the story they’re telling. They have to create a central character, because when you play, it’s just you. You don’t have a name, and you don’t talk. We’ll see how that works. The vibe, that retro futuristic thing, and how they smartly knew to say, “Okay, the power suits have to look exactly like that, but the ghouls don’t have to look like the ghouls in the game. We want to maintain Walter Goggins’s face so that he can act.” These are the decisions you have to make when you’re adapting video games. So far, from what I’ve seen, looking awesome.
**John:** That’s great.
**Craig:** That’s on Amazon.
**John:** Feels like Amazon. We’re guessing. It’s on a streamer.
**Craig:** Amazon? It’s Fallout. Whatever. It’s Fallout.
**John:** I’m excited to see it.
**Craig:** Yeah, very much so.
**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** That’s right.
**John:** Our outro this week comes from James Llonch. It features Craig Mazin ranting about his least favorite screenwriting app.
**Craig:** Which one? Oh, yes, that one.
**John:** That one. If you have an outro, you could send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We always love to hear your outros. That’s also the place where you can send questions and follow-up. You can find the show notes for 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 can find them at Cotton Bureau. They ship in time for Christmas, so get those.
**Craig:** Great Christmas gift-
**John:** Great Christmas gift.
**Craig:** … for the dork in your family.
**John:** Also, Christmas gift, Arlo Finches are still out there for the kids out there.
**Craig:** I don’t know if Finches is… I want to make it different. I want to give you a different pluralization.
**John:** Arlos Finch?
**Craig:** Arlo Finchae.
**John:** Finchae?
**Craig:** I like Arlo Finchae.
**John:** All right. They’re good. You can get them signed. There’s a link in the show notes for those. Writer Emergency Pack, they sell really big on Amazon. Craig-
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** It’s weird making a seasonal product, because literally, our chart is just like a straight line up. It’s like a hockey stick. It’s a gift. People give it.
**Craig:** I don’t think people who don’t sell things understand what Christmas is really about.
**John:** It is crazy.
**Craig:** Christmas is an economic phenomenon.
**John:** 80% of the money we make on Writer Emergency Pack is holidays.
**Craig:** You are hardly the only business that does.
**John:** You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net. Also, a good gift, you could get somebody a Scriptnotes gift. At scriptnotes.net, you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on which event in history had the most negative impact on civilization.
**Craig:** Heavy.
**John:** Thanks, Craig.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** This Bonus Segment topic I’m stealing from Electoral Vote, which is a website I read every day about what’s happening in US government. It’s a good site for that. Their question was, which single event at any time in history has had the biggest negative impact on civilization? They had good suggestions from their own listeners, but I wanted to hear from you, what you were thinking about. We also have to discuss, what is a single event? Is this a thing that happens in the course of a day, or can it be over a couple years? Is World War I an event?
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** Yeah, sure.
**Craig:** Sure. You could, if you wanted to, just squish it down to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which kicked it off.
**John:** Yeah, but there would still probably have been a World War I. It was going to happen.
**Craig:** It was a pile of gasoline-soaked rags.
**John:** I’m saying the African slave trade is not an event. That to me is too broad of a thing.
**Craig:** It is not an event. We’re looking for an event. That’s a tough one. It also eliminates things like disease, which has had a greater impact on us than anything.
**John:** The Black Death.
**Craig:** Bubonic plague, smallpox, all of these things. The adoption of Christianity by the Romans and the transformation of this-
**John:** Theodosius, I think, was the-
**Craig:** It was Constantine. I believe it was Constantine.
**John:** The Romans, they were taking this, what essentially was a kind of obscure cult, and making it the state religion.
**Craig:** Just made it the state. I thought it was Constantine, but I could be wrong. Either way, whoever did it suddenly turned this cult of sacrificial, the worship of the poor, and made it imperial. The Holy Roman Empire then spread and essentially took over all of Europe and went to war with the Ottoman Empire, and also imparted what the Americans called manifest destiny, a religious aspect to the concept of domination, dominating other cultures because they were not appropriately religious. The Holy Wars were incredibly costly. Then the sectarianism, where the church had a schism, and that created wars, all the way through to what was happening in Ireland. That, I think, as an event, it’s… Listen. There’s another way of looking at it, which is if the Romans hadn’t done that, and they spread the Roman mythology across, that it still turns out terrible.
**John:** There’s plenty of alt histories, which is basically like, what if they hadn’t done that? We’re living under a more standard Roman mythology of stuff. That would be weird as well.
**Craig:** We worship Jupiter.
**John:** Exactly. Along the thread of conquering the world, you also have Genghis Khan and say his birth or his rise out of that place. You look at the transformation of Asia and the fact that some astonishing number of percentage of people have Genghis Khan’s DNA because of what happened there.
**Craig:** You could point to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In terms of hard-to-comprehend numbers of deaths, maybe 20 million people. Numbers that we really can’t get our arms around.
**John:** Columbus visiting America. Would Europeans have gotten to America at some other point? Yes.
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** But Columbus’s arrival and then subsequent voyages and having the Crown behind him and the resources to really annihilate indigenous peoples.
**Craig:** Annihilate them largely through disease, although I would still trace that back to the notion of we must spread Christian values to the world of nonbelievers and pagans.
**John:** I don’t have a good sense, honestly, of when the missionaries actually became part of it, because I perceive it as being a gold rush at the start.
**Craig:** Yeah, the missionaries were right there. The conquistadors. Everybody went under the banner of Christ. Everybody was there to spread the word. Justin Marks, we’ve had Justin on the show.
**John:** I think so. He was on the show.
**Craig:** Yeah. He’s got Shogun coming out, which also looks fantastic. I love Shogun, by the way. One of my favorite novels. The Jesuits were there in Japan in the 1800s. They go everywhere. The missionaries find themselves all over the world. That was the tip of the spear of colonialism and the slave trade and all sorts of terrible things. Oh, man, one event.
**John:** The burning of the Library at Alexandria.
**Craig:** Brutal.
**John:** Brutal, brutal loss. It’s a little unclear how much those were the only copies of those documents and how much other stuff could be found.
**Craig:** Why didn’t they back it up in the Cloud?
**John:** Come on. Cloud storage, man.
**Craig:** Guys, it’s Cloud storage. It’s free.
**John:** Absolutely. Dropbox.
**Craig:** Wouldn’t it have been cool to go back and say, “You guys can back this up in the Cloud.” They just look up.
**John:** Let’s talk about inventions. The steam engine, obviously, as an instrument of war. A lot of these things, you could see there’s the pro and the con. The printing press allowed for misinformation and the Bible, but it also allowed for literacy and development of culture.
**Craig:** One of the great events that transformed the world, I think again, probably for good and for bad in equal measures, was industrialization, the concept of the assembly line. In the Revolutionary War, Americans kind of invented assembly lines to create arms, to create armaments. It was one of the reasons we won. You could certainly point to gunpowder as being a huge problem.
**John:** Or the first mass-produced revolver was 1836. That’s a huge change. Before then, you’re making a gun one at a time.
**Craig:** Exactly, and you’re firing one shot at a time and loading in your things. Yes, all absolutely true. Then there’s the open question of nuclear weapons.
**John:** Is Hiroshima the event?
**Craig:** There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the invasion of Japan and even more Japanese deaths and more American deaths. There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the Soviet invasion of Japan, and then the Stalinist oppression of that country. Then of course, there are people who say, “Sorry, you just murdered tens and tens and thousands and thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with this war. They were just civilians.” But also, notable, we haven’t had a world war since the invention of nuclear weapons, because it seems untenable.
**John:** Maybe some future topic we’ll talk about the good things, the single best things that have happened, because I can think of a couple off the top of my head. The contraceptive pill changed society for the best.
**Craig:** Absolutely.
**John:** Just the ability for women to head to the workforce and have control over their fertility.
**Craig:** Vaccination.
**John:** Vaccination.
**Craig:** Vaccination on its own is a miracle. A miracle. So of course, idiots have to blame it for things. It’s unbelievable.
**John:** It’s the worst. Thank you, Craig.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
Links:
* [Sandra Day O’Connor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Day_O%27Connor)
* [Henry Kissinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger)
* [Rosalynn Carter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalynn_Carter)
* [George Santos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos)
* [Sam Altman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman)
* [What happened at OpenAI? The Sam Altman saga, explained](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/20/openai-sam-altman-ceo-oust/) by Rachel Lehman for The Washington Post
* [International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)](https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/)
* [Fallout – Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kQ8i2FpRDk)
* [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 James Llonch ([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/621standard.mp3).