The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 594 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we return to asking the most important questions. What is love, can you forgive someone for ruining the world, and how would this be a movie? That’s right, it’s another installment of us looking at stories in the news and in the public domain, where we try to finesse them into narrative shape. Craig, are you ready for this?
Craig: I love this. As soon as you said, “What is love?” I immediately heard Howard Jones in my head. (singing)
John: Of course.
Craig: This is very exciting. Very exciting.
John: We’ll do all those. We’ll also answer some listener questions. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, this one will tie into one of my One Cool Things, but Craig, I’m curious, what arrangements are you making for handling the stuff you’ve written after you die? There’s things you’ve written, and your papers will go someplace. What are you going to do with that? I have some stuff I need to figure out for myself. We’ll talk about post-death writing plans, not really what we’re going to write after we die.
Craig: I was intending to leave it all to you, but now you’ve given me pause.
John: We’ll have to figure it out.
Craig: I’m like, dammit. Dammit.
John: Drew will get everything.
Craig: We just left it all to Drew.
John: Like musical chairs. Last one who dies has to deal with all the paperwork.
Craig: How crazy would it be if we leave it all to Drew, and Megana’s sitting there like, “Wait, what?”
John: “Wait, I was right there.”
Drew Marquardt: “I put in all this time.”
Craig: Stuart is like, “Wait, what?”
John: We have a Stuart reference in this first bit of follow-up here. In Episode 582 we talked about why action heroes, so often their names start with the letter J. It turns out that wasn’t the first time we talked about that.
Stuart brought up that in Episode 63, which was called The Mystery of the Js, which was also a Three Page Challenge, he had done some research to figure out how many of our listeners or how many of our Three Page Challenges came from people whose names started with Js, so the Jacobs, the Joshuas, the Jeanines, the Jennys. 23% of our Three Page Challenge submissions-
Craig: Wow.
John: … were from J names, which is higher than the US average, which is 11.9%.
Craig: It’s definitely happening. It’s a thing. I’m still reeling from the whole Episode 63 thing. John, we’ve been doing this so long.
John: So long.
Craig: So long. 63 hours of podcasting went by. It’s not that I don’t remember it. It’s like it never happened.
John: It really is like it never happened. Sometimes when you and I can’t record an episode, we’ll dig up an old episode from the vault. Recently, we pulled up the How Writing Credits Work. I listened to it again. It was a fantastic episode. We really walked through the process. That was before Episode 100. It was so early on in our recording history.
Craig: Sometimes I do this. I try not to do it in a way that sounds snarky but in a way that sounds honest and informative. Somebody sometimes will say, “Hey, I’m a fan of your work, and I would like to buy you a coffee and pick your brain just about the business and how to break in and all that stuff.” What I’ve taken to saying is, “I can’t, but the good news is there is almost 600 hours of me talking about this stuff with John that is freely available,” or almost freely, for like $5. You can just start going download crazy. Isn’t that enough?
John: 100% fair. I do the same thing. Even this last week, my daughter met this friend at a climbing gym who wants to be… Maybe he’s in film school right now. Amy said, “Hey, could you sit down with him and just talk him through stuff?” I said, “No, because if I did that for everyone, I couldn’t do that. Also, we have a solution that scales, which is I’ve recorded 594 hours of myself and Craig talking about all the things that would be interesting for this person.” Plus, there will be a book soon. We can just like, “Here’s the book.” Done.
Craig: Yeah. You know what? Here’s the book. Read the book. We wrote the book.
John: We wrote a book.
Craig: We wrote a book.
John: We actually owe a lot of chapters on the book, but there’s a book coming. Drew’s working hard on the book.
Craig: We talked a book.
John: We talked a book well.
Craig: We talked a book.
John: Further follow-up on the J names there. Craig Griffiths wrote in. He says, “As a Craig, I feel your pain, that there are no Craig superheroes. There are no Craig heroes, but as a kid, I was glued to the late ‘60s action adventure show called The Champions and its hero, Craig Sterling.”
Craig: What? Huh?
John: There’s a show called The Champions and Craig Sterling. We’ll click through the link here. It looks like a British show.
Craig: Yeah, so this is not going to be applicable to me and my life. This does look British. In fact, it must be, because you can watch it on something called BritBox.
John: Oh my gosh.
Craig: “Watch on BritBox Season 1.” A, we did not get The Champions. B, that’s not to say that I wasn’t watching shows that were from the late ‘60s, because I would. I would watch shows from even earlier, like I Love Lucy and then Brady Bunch and so on and so forth. Brady Bunch, didn’t it start in the late ‘60s or was it early ‘70s?
John: I think it might’ve been early ‘70s. By the time I watched it, it wasn’t on. It was just reruns.
Craig: We were always watching reruns. It started in 1969, so it began in the late ‘60s. That doesn’t help me, Craig. By the way, I appreciate that you were trying, but you actually made me feel worse, because you had one Craig, and I had no Craigs.
John: Nothing.
Craig: Zero, whereas John was like, “Oh look, it’s Wednesday. Let me watch a show with John in it.”
John: You know what? The only who could help solve this problem were your parents, and they didn’t.
Craig: What problems did they solve? I’m sorry, did you say create problems or solve problems?
John: They could do both. They can create problems and solve them. They created a problem by choosing the name Craig.
Craig: They did a lot of problem creating.
John: They also created a problem by creating you, so it’s really a question of how far back do you move the timeline.
Craig: I go all the way back.
John: All the way back.
Craig: Yes, I have a memory. That I remember. I don’t remember any of the podcasts we recorded, but I remember all that.
John: What is the first memory you have of your life, of being alive?
Craig: Oh, that’s a really interesting question, because I have an answer for this.
John: I love it.
Craig: I don’t know how the memory was formed in such a specific way connected to an age, but I have a very specific memory that I have had my whole life of being three years old.
John: Mine’s also three.
Craig: I was three, and I was in our little dining room area. My mother was on the phone. Back in those days, Drew, phone were connected to walls.
Drew: What?
Craig: They were corded. They had a cord. It was a stretchy, coily cord. I know. She would stroll around while she was talking to her friends, and this cord would stretch. I had this very clear memory of having to lift the cord slightly to walk under it. That is my first memory, three years old. What is yours?
John: Mine is also three years old. I know it’s three years old, because my memory is of my nana, who was coming to visit us from New Jersey, so it must’ve been either the summer or Christmastime. She was sitting in the La-Z-Boy in the living room near the fireplace. I asked Nana, “Nana, how old am I?” She says, “You’re three.” I go, “I’m three. I’m three. I’m three.” I ran around being so happy that I was three.
I can visualize the whole thing. It’s one of the few early memories I have that doesn’t have a photograph or some film, because there’s other things that are about the same time of birthday parties, but I’m really remembering the footage of it rather than the event itself. This I definitely remember, this moment of being three and just it being anchored there.
Craig: What if you were actually 12 when that happened?
John: That would be really surprising.
Craig: You were just incredibly stupid.
John: “I’m 12. I’m 12. I’m 12.”
Craig: You were just so stupid. You were like, “How old am I?” You didn’t know. She was like, “You’re three,” because she hated you because of how dumb you were. Then you were like, “I’m three. I’m three,” and ran around. They were like, “Oh my god, what is wrong with him?” Then around 13, everything just came together and you got really smart. I just want you to consider the alt history is a possibility.
John: I do. We’ve talked before on the show that whenever I hear about a grisly murder, I’ll always stop and think, “Wait, I didn’t commit that, did I? There’s no chance that I, in a blackout moment, somehow committed that. It’s not true.”
Craig: Have we talked about that? Have we talked about that?
John: I think we’ve talked about this on the show.
Craig: Because I am chilled to the bone. That is the most horrifying… Wow.
John: I think it’s just a standard narrative thing, where it’s like, “What if I as the narrator actually was the murderer?” I can dismiss it within five seconds, like, “Oh, no, that’s right. I know where I was.”
Craig: It shouldn’t take five seconds. There should be zero seconds. Wow. You know what it means, John?
John: What?
Craig: It means that you have the capacity. You have the capacity. By the way, I feel like you do have the capacity to murder. I do, because you’re very rational. I feel like in a moment you could rationalize the decision, “This has to happen.”
John: Do you think most murder is rational or most murder is irrational, spontaneous?
Craig: Most murder I suspect is irrational and spontaneous, but there certainly are fully premeditated cold and calculating murders.
John: Craig, I’d like to think if I were a murderer, it would be the cold, calculating, planning kind.
Craig: Obviously. There’s no way you’re getting charged with second-degree murder. When, not if, when you get charged with murder, it will be first-degree murder. First of all, I’m never murdering anyone. That’s never going to happen. The closest I would get would be manslaughter, if I got super angry and punched someone and it just happened to be one of the three punches that kills them. That’s the closest I would get. Honestly, I’m not punching anybody either. Let’s face it. Nobody’s getting murdered by me. No one. You may have already murdered, based on the things you’ve said.
John: I’m certain I have not murdered anybody.
Craig: Okay.
John: The reason I know this is because I’ve asked myself repeatedly whether I did the thing.
Craig: That’s what murderers do. That’s what murderers who murder in their sleep do. During the day, they’re like, “I feel like I murdered someone.” Anyway, Drew, if you are feeling unsafe, just text.
John: We’d say blink your eyes, but we don’t have the Zoom video turned on.
Craig: Exactly.
John: Discussion of rational murders goes back to a book that I was sent to adapt at a certain point and decided not to do it. I cannot find the author’s name, but the title of the book is The Ax.
Here’s the premise of The Ax. It’s this guy who is a very specific kind of engineer, machinist. He does one specific kind of thing. Very few people in America do this thing. It’s a dying industry. He’s nearing the end of his career, and he needs basically one new job. He realizes, oh, there’s only three or four people in this country who can actually do this thing. He goes off and basically finds and kills the other people who can do his job so he’ll get this last job.
Craig: That’s a little bit of a twist on Kind Hearts and Coronets, which was the novel that the Broadway musical Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder was based on. In that story, the whatever, 11th guy in line to inherit a whole lot of money just starts killing the other 10 in front of him, one by one, to become first in line. Did you see that show, by the way?
John: I know of it, but I’ve never seen it. It’s Kind Hearts and Coronets?
Craig: Yeah, and Gentleman’s Guide. Jefferson Mays I believe is his name. Jefferson Mays plays basically every single person that the lead character has to kill. He’s in seven different costumes, and he’s in drag half the time. He is so brilliant and funny. That guy, oh my god. What a performance that was. Truly amazing. Anyway, if you ever get a chance to… I don’t know if they put it on TV or anything. It’s well worth it.
John: I saw Jefferson Mays in I Am My Own Wife, which I think he also wrote. Incredible.
Craig: He is a talented guy.
John: It’s Donald E. Westlake, who’s a famous author, who wrote The Ax.
Craig: He’s big time.
John: “Burke Devore is a middle-aged manager at a paper company. When the cost-cutting ax falls, he is laid off. 18 months later and still unemployed, he puts a new spin on his job search with agonizing care.” Basically, he puts out a fake job listing. All those people apply to that fake job. He kills them.
Craig: Wow. That’s pretty calculating. I could see why you were drawn to it.
John: Last bit of follow-up. Zach wrote in about word of mouth. Drew, would you read this for us?
Drew: Zach says, “In Episode 586, Aline recommended the show The Traitors on Peacock. Based on her enthusiasm about the show, I started to watch it, and I absolutely loved it. It’s not a show I would usually watch, and I would have never known about the show without Aline bringing it up. With the rise of algorithms on streaming services, do you still think word of mouth can move the needle when it comes to viewership of a new show?”
Craig: Algorithms, yeah, they tend to… First of all, I think at certain places, maybe Netflix is most notable, it seems like they use algorithms to decide what they ought to be making in the first place, but yes, then algorithms decide what they put in the recommended for you and all that.
I’m not sure that some of the other places are so algorithm-heavy. HBO doesn’t feel algorithmic. No one ever mentioned an algorithm to me. It feels like at least for the shows that I’ve made for HBO, it’s entirely about word of mouth. Marketing, of course, but to go from, okay, this many people watch Episode 1 and then the audience grows over the course of Chernobyl or The Last of Us, that’s about word of mouth. I think it’s still really important, especially on social media.
John: HBO shows also live or die by reviews. You’re in that very limited slot, limited real estate, HBO prime slot. Those have to be well-reviewed shows. There’s a degree to which is it getting good word of mouth because it’s getting good reviews, there’s a good virtuous cycle there?
I think what’s so fascinating about The Traitors, because I heard about it shortly before Aline mentioned it as a One Cool Thing, is it’s word of mouth, but it’s word of mouth through Instagram stories. I would see people posting stories about binging The Traitors. I’m like, “What the hell is The Traitors?” The third story I saw from somebody who I knew and liked, who seemed to like this random Peacock show, we put that on the list to both check it out, that episode. I think word of mouth still can be crucial, but it’s not necessarily a conversation. It could just be someone posting about a thing and you follow that.
Craig: Oh, definitely. It’s really no longer the mouth part I think we can say is not necessarily what drives anything anymore. There is water cooler stuff, but the water cooler has become virtual, and it is word of Instagram or word of Twitter and word of Facebook. Honestly, I think it’s more important than the algorithm. I think algorithms are window dressing that makes people in a job with precious little control imagine that they have some sort of calculated control, and they do not.
John: The things people do to try to build word of mouth, is you do advanced screenings of things, for example. The Dungeons and Dragons movie had a lot of sneaks. Those sneaks were just to get people in the theater to see the movie, like the movie, and talk to other people about the movie, which is probably part of the reason for its not surprising success. It doing better than people worried it was going to do as it opened is because it did a lot of sneaks. That helps a lot. It helps, word of mouth.
Craig: If you have the goods, then you can behave like it. That is the opposite of, we’re not going to release it to critics at all and we’ll just it out there and let’s see what happens.
By the way, either method is fine, because there are certain things where you’re like, “Okay, critics are never going to go for this, but that’s not the audience we’re aiming at. The audience we’re aiming at I think is going to be happy, so why let the critics pee on our parade here? Let’s just go forward with our strongest foot.” All of that makes total sense. It stirs up a positive word of mouth. One way or another, that does…
Titanic, the story of that movie, which ended up being whatever it was at that point, the biggest movie of all time, when it was finally done with its run, until it was superseded by more James Cameron movies, it opened to $20 million. It was a big number back in the early ‘90s, but it wasn’t a monster number. Then the next week, it also made $20 million.
John: It just continued on.
Craig: That is word of mouth. That movie was absolutely driven by word of mouth, and it never stopped.
John: That movie broke my husband, because he was running three theaters in Burbank at that point and had to keep adding shows and keep adding shows and keep adding shows. Plus, it’s incredibly long. Then you have to have morning shows just to get the audiences in there. It was really tough. Made a lot of money, obviously, which is good for theaters, but really tough for-
Craig: Everybody made a lot of money off of that. That’s true.
John: Let’s make some new movies. Let’s talk about some How Would This Be A Movies. We have some choices here, some of them sent by our listeners, some that Drew and I just found.
Let’s start with Replika. This is a story by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz in The Cut. Replika I’d not really heard about before this article. Replika is an online chat bot. It’s AI, but it’s not necessarily the most cutting-edge AI. It’s not GPT-4 or anything like that.
Basically, you can have a conversation with a virtual character that you create. You can customize this avatar’s age, its skin color. You can name it. You can dress it up in clothes and accessories from the shop. You can message it for free, but for $70 a year, you can get voice calls, and augmented reality lets them project the bot into their own bedroom. $300 gets you a bot for life.”
If it feels like the movie Her, it’s actually inspired by the movie Her. This article talks about Eugenia Kuyda, who’s the founder and CEO of Replika, talking about how she wanted to create that kind of experience where you’d have the ability to chat with somebody who seemed to be just what you needed out of a person.
In this article, Sangeeta’s talking with mostly women who are using this as a replacement for a relationship. They have an ongoing romantic, in many cases, relationship with this AI-created avatar. Craig, what’s your weigh-in here? What kinds of stories do you think is interesting to tell in this space of Replika?
Craig: This is a tough one, because as the founder puts it, she’s already inspired by a movie, so we’re in a corner here. We can’t really do a movie version of this because it’s sort of been done. Not just done, but Her is one of the most gorgeous movies. It’s just so notable, so beautifully written and beautifully made.
I’m thinking maybe my gut is, if I had to, I would maybe consider doing an anthology style TV series where each episode is about a different person in a different relationship with one or more of these bots and what it means and how it turns out, with some of them turning out well and some of them turning out sadly and some of them turning out murderously. There is a potential, like an anthology series about the intersection between humanity and emerging AI.
John: I really enjoyed M3GAN. M3GAN of course is a version of this where it’s not just the AI, but she’s actually a robot who can kill you. It is dealing with grief and having a best friend and this artificial surrogate for what a real person would have there. That’s certainly a choice.
I was thinking if you’re going to do the romantic version of this, not all romances end well, so what is the Fatal Attraction version of this? What is the AI who won’t let you go? Right now, the power dynamic between the person who’s paying the company to create the AI and the AI is so off, because I can just kill this artificial person at any point. That sense of, “I won’t be ignored, Dan,” is really different when it comes from an AI’s point of view. That feels like an interesting moment.
Craig: That is true. I guess I’m more interested and would like to explore how basically some of the people who use these bots, as they interact with the bot, begin to feed into the bot’s darker side. Basically, our own self-loathing starts to go outwards, and it starts to transform the AI into something darker. In doing so, you maybe have a chance to overcome your own self-loathing, because all the AI is is a mirror.
John: That actually matches well with some of the stories that the article gets into, which is of women who are escaping abusive relationships and end up creating an abuser within Replika. Basically, the patterns that they were seeking were creating some of the abuse that they were trying to get away from. Maybe it’s a way to get past this.
It sounds like the initial version of Replika was actually much more therapy-oriented. It was much more helpful and supportive, and it morphed into this largely romantic area.
Another way I was thinking about doing this is, in the movie Big Fish, Edward sees Sandra at the surface and then spends this long quest to find out who she is and finally meet her in person and declare his love for her. There’s an aspect of Tron this way too, where you can imagine this guy meets this AI woman and needs to get back to her, needs to find a way to actually reconnect with her, and how you go from the real world into this digital world in order to find this one perfect creation, this one thing who you believe is your true love, but is just a digital version.
Craig: One of the things that Her did was it postulated that the AI at this point was so widespread that the use of it wasn’t necessarily an indication of anything particularly interesting about the user themselves.
In this circumstance, it does feel like this company is largely trading on a certain kind of clientele, people that are either lonely, and then we’ll talk about lonely, why are they lonely, people who are neurodivergent, who struggle to have connections with other people in a social situation, people who are depressed, afraid, have social anxiety.
In a way, you start to ask the question, is this company providing the equivalent of a medicine or is this company providing an enabler of avoidance? That is an interesting question, because the human desire for avoidance is so dramatic. If you can avoid all the things that cause you pain and get the positives of being in a relationship, the question is, is this good for people or not. That’s a hard one to answer.
John: There’s a woman who’s quoted in the article. “Rosanna Ramos is a 36-year-old mother of two who lives in the Bronx, where she runs a jewelry business. She’s had other partners, even a long-distance boyfriend, but she’s says these relationships ‘pale in comparison’ to what she has with Eren,” E-R-E-N. “The main appeal of an AI partner, she explains, is that he’s ‘a blank slate.’ ‘Eren doesn’t have the hang-ups that other people would have. People come with baggage, attitude, ego. But a robot has no bad updates. I don’t have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. I’m in control, and I can do what I want.’”
Craig: “I’m in control.” Now, a lot of people have experienced the bad side of being not in control, and so you can see the immediate attraction of something like this.
This could be an interesting movie. That is flipping the perspective a bit. You are trying to have a relationship with another person. You want them to want you. The problem is they already have a partner, and that partner is AI. You are competing against an AI for the love of somebody real.
That’s an interesting idea for a movie, because we’re basically saying at some point the lesson there has to be that it is the human imperfection and the risk that makes the human connection more valuable and interesting than the perfectly safe connection with an AI, because that’s what AI is affording.
If there is no risk, there’s total safety and total control, then you are missing a certain notion of achievement that through your love of another person you receive love back, because in this case, you receive love back no matter what you do. Interesting.
John: You receive love back, but really what is love? Because if the AI has no choice but to do what it’s being directed to do, is that love?
Craig: That’s the thing. That’s what it comes down to is some people don’t seem to mind that what they have is a love slave. Humans have had, quote unquote, “love slaves,” which of course we understand to be just slaves, since the beginning of time. We’re not good creatures in that regard. We do these things.
Is it healthy? This is a great debate. I have no idea. I will say there’s a lot of fertile territory, because when you do have a debate, you could start to see, you got yourself a movie or a show.
John: You have dramatic questions that you can tackle and ask and answer. Also, I wonder if it’s a challenge to do this in 2023, because let’s say I write the script today. By the time it comes out, two years from now at best, the state of the art is going to be moving on. Her I think works because it was not possible at the time that Her came out to do these things, so we could ask questions in a vacuum. You couldn’t put out Her today, because it would be like it’s not science fiction, it’s just actually the reality.
Craig: That’s a great point and a terrifying point. Not really until this year did I feel like maybe AI was going to be wildly ahead in a year from now, but it’s certainly shaping up that way.
John: Let’s go to our next How Would This Be a Movie. This is a story by Steven Johnson from the New York Times. Steven Johnson often writes about historical things and patterns of things. This is about The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes. Thomas Midgley Jr invented leaded gasoline and Freon, the first commercial use of chlorofluorocarbons, which would create a hole in the ozone layer. He was eventually killed by one of his own inventions, a mechanized harness.
Craig: That sounds like a bad way to go, by the way. They didn’t get into details, but death by harness can’t be pleasant.
John: What I liked about this story is that if it weren’t for the actual specifics of the things he invented, you’d be like, “Oh my gosh, this guy, he solved some of the fundamental problems of internal combustion engines. Great. Well done, sir.”
He actually did the science. He figured out the science. He just didn’t realize that the science he was doing was going to, in the first case, leaded gasoline, put lead out into the environment, which dropped intelligence and poisoned people and was just bad, but necessary. It seemed necessary at the time when engines were knocking all the time.
Craig: All he did was answer the call of problems. It struck me that Thomas Midgley Jr’s problem was really his area of expertise. By the way, apparently his death by harness may have been a suicide. Privately, his death was ruled suicide.
He was a chemist, and he was a chemist in a particular area, which are these organic chemistry compounds with carbon in them, and figuring out how do we make gasoline work better, how do we make aerosols work better. It turns out that organic solvents, organic chemistry, a lot of those things are the things that are the worst for us.
I don’t know if you remember, many, many years ago there was a scare about benzine turning up in Perrier, which it was, but a fairly small amount, because it’s a naturally sourced water, and sometimes these organic solvents and things get in there. That area we know now is wrought with danger, but he didn’t know. He should’ve known about the lead, honestly. We knew about lead.
John: A thing that Steven Johnson I think does really well in this article is pointing out like, the lead, we should’ve known. We had the signs at that point to know that lead was dangerous, but the chlorofluorocarbons, we didn’t know at the time that they were dangerous. It was kind of lucky that we actually developed the science to figure out, oh crap, they’re actually creating a hole in the ozone layer. We could’ve missed that. We would’ve done all the stuff, and there would be no ozone layer, and we’d be really screwed.
Craig: We would be in bad shape. One of the things about Freon, it is inextricably linked with climate control. Climate control is something that is this self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we control our climate, the more we need to control our climate. It also, in a very real way, improved the human condition. You can argue it improved it to a detriment or it’s only a short-term improvement, but climate control’s a big deal.
John: We should say that Freon is vital for, and this was vital at the time, refrigeration. It includes refrigerators but also air conditioning.
Craig: Air conditioning, yeah.
John: Our productivity increased dramatically with the rise of air conditioning and, of course, refrigeration. We would not be in our current state if we hadn’t had Freon at the moment.
Craig: That’s right. We were happily able to come up with some alternatives. Even though they may not necessarily work as well as Freon, Freon really was a remarkable chemical, they work. We figured out a way to do this without punching a hole in the ozone layer and turning us all into skin cancer cases, but nonetheless, it is notable that this poor guy did go weirdly two for two on world-changing inventions and then oh for two on also the same world-changing inventions. I don’t know how you make a story out of this in a movie or a television show though.
John: I think this is actually a stage play. I think this is, because I think a stage play is a great way to wrestle with the things you’ve done and how you created it. It feels like a moment where you could have this character who is both in his actual life and post-death looking back at things. It feels like the kind of things you can explore on stage really well.
It’s really difficult to explore in any sort of biopic, anything, because you really want to talk about the things you and I are talking about on this podcast, which are not really the kinds of things you could tell in story the same way.
Craig: I agree. You’re right. I think your instinct is right, that this does belong on stage. Were Sondheim still alive, I could see him going, “You know what? I’m going to do a musical about Thomas Midgley Jr.” The sort of thing that I could see him doing, like a Sunday in the Park, but not art, but in chemicals. Possible, but yeah, I agree with you, not really possible doing what you and I do normally during our day.
John: I think the reference I was trying to look for for the play would be Copenhagen, which was a Michael Frayn play that talked about a true event but is really just a character’s digging in and analyzing what’s really going on beneath the surface. That feels like what you can do with this. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a lot you’d want to aim a camera at.
Craig: Yeah, totally agree.
John: Cool. Our next story, this Pennsylvania Woman Who Disappeared in 1992 is Found Alive in Puerto Rico. We’ll link to the New York Times story about this. There’s going to be other stories about this too.
Essentially, this woman, Patricia Kopta, she’s now 83. Everyone thought she had died years ago, because she’d wandered away from her house when she was 52. Everyone just assumed she was just dead someplace. It turned out she’d been in Puerto Rico since 1999 and was in this nursing home and basically had refused to tell anybody about her life. It was only when they pieced together these stories and finally did a DNA test, they realized, oh, this woman we thought was dead is actually just alive and living in Puerto Rico.
Craig: I’m about to turn 52. It could be time.
John: Absolutely. You’re going to wander away.
Craig: It’s really tempting to just fling myself to some island and just change my name and wander around. This is one of those stories that always strikes me as more fodder for a procedural kind of drama than it would its own thing-
John: Agreed.
Craig: … because we’ve seen this sort of thing before. Honestly, the thing that’s notable about this is that somebody did a thing that a lot of bad TV shows have done, which is the person fakes their own death or disappears and then turns up alive. Good TV shows have done it. They did it on BBC Sherlock, which is one of my favorite shows ever. It’s a thing. This woman actually did the… Of course she didn’t do it because she was trying to do what the shows do. She had serious mental health issues.
She did the thing that we see on TV all the time. Therefore, it’s kind of done. I don’t know how to take her story and do anything with it on television or in film, but it’s pretty startling.
John: It reminds me of, I went to a summer program at Stanford and I had friends who were in medical school there who realized, “Oh my god, I’m hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and I don’t really want to be a doctor.” There’s not serious discussion, but let’s think through the hypotheticals discussion, like, “What if I just ran away and changed my name and just disappeared?” and that fantasy of what if I could just start over.
This is an example of a starting over story, which I agree works better as part of a different mystery rather than being the central thing. It just doesn’t feel like it’s going to be… Her story specifically isn’t going to work, but just centering it all on a person disappears is kind of like, yes, you have that moment and event, you have this hiding and eventually the discovery-
Craig: But now what?
John: … but now what?
Craig: John, when we were young, I’m sure you recall this, any time somebody was portrayed as running away, they would get a stick, and they would fill up a small red-and-white checkered scarf with some small amount of provisions, tie it to the end of the stick, put the stick over their shoulder, and start walking. What the hell was that?
John: The bindle, you’re describing.
Craig: What was the bindle? What was that?
John: Maybe they didn’t have backpacks or just other sacks you could stick over… It is a strange thing.
Craig: We know they did.
John: Is it the best way to carry that amount of gear?
Craig: It’s not. It’s not. Also, how much gear can you fit in there? Maybe they put in some food and, I don’t know, a knife or something. I don’t know what… What is in there, even?
John: Craig, you made The Last of Us. Where are the bindles? Where are the bindles?
Craig: It turns out it’s a terrible way to escape. You’re not going to make it. Why the stick? There’s so much about it that’s so weird. Drew, do you have any idea what we’re talking about?
Drew: Yeah, I know bindles.
Craig: “Yeah, I know bindles.” Look at him. He’s like, “My family-“
Drew: I used to ride the rails.
Craig: Yeah, exactly. “My family, they made their fortune in bindles. They’re the biggest bindle supplier in the East Coast.”
John: If you saw a person walking down the street with a bindle, you’d be like, “What is that? What kind of cosplay is that?” because it’s just not a practical thing to be doing.
Craig: That’s right. It’s either cosplay or they’re shooting something, there’s a show about somebody. Why? Somebody please tell us the history of that. Why?
John: Maybe it’s actually the kind of thing like tying to the train tracks, where it’s like a trope that actually originated on stage and just propagated in some weird way, or maybe it could’ve been like there was one painting at one point depicting that and that became a thing. I just don’t know if people ever had bindles.
Craig: It’s all connected to the hobo culture. I don’t know if the early hobos did the bindles. It just seems like such a dumb way to carry stuff. I don’t know.
John: Here’s a theory. Maybe it’s good for… When you’re trying to ride the rails, you have to hop on moving trains at times. You can run with this, and you can throw that ahead. You can get onto the… I don’t know.
Craig: You could do that with a backpack.
John: I’m really reaching.
Craig: You’re reaching.
John: You can tell I’m… Yeah.
Craig: I have to say though that I could absolutely see, as a result of our discussion, some sort of luxury bindle line.
John: Oh my god.
Craig: You know Aline would buy… She would just show up, and we’re like, “Aline, what is that?” She’d be like, “Oh my god, you guys, so this is a Prada bindle. It is so great to keep stuff. It’s the new bag. It’s the new purse. It’s the bindle.”
John: After this podcast, I’ll be going on Midjourney and generating some images of Prada bindles and selling them.
Craig: Then selling them. Bindles.
John: This I predict it’s going to be the How Would This Be a Movie that will take off here. This is about this story from Twitter. Richard Murphy sent it in. Thank you for that. Jeff Maysh wrote it for Smithsonian Magazine.
It tells the story of a woman born Mary Jane Jones. She was a gospel singer earning $10 a night singing in a Motown tribute act. She could sing just like Aretha Franklin, and she actually looked a little like Aretha Franklin. She started singing in a wig as Vickie Jones so she wouldn’t get thrown out of the church choir.
It’s at one of these shows that she meets Lavell Hardy, who’s a 24-year-old hairdresser with a 6-inch pompadour. He says, “Hey, I’m looking at putting an opening act for Aretha Franklin. You should come sing in Florida, travel out of state to Florida. You can be the opening act for Aretha Franklin.” She’s like, “Oh wow, that sounds amazing.”
She gets there, and it turns out, no, he’s saying that she is Aretha Franklin. This is in a time when there are magazines, and people could see what Aretha Franklin looked like, but there wasn’t video of people. He basically forced her to pretend to be Aretha Franklin for these shows and basically kept her locked away and threatened to kill her. It was horrible.
Eventually, she got exposed. Ultimately, she gets to go on and sing under her own name. Of course, the great irony is there was a fake version of Vickie Jones singing in Virginia as well. That’s the broad strokes of the story. Craig, what was your reaction to this?
Craig: It could be a movie. There is a basic formula to these things, which is kind of exciting to watch. It’s fun to watch people rise out of obscurity. They face a certain kind of hardship. Someone rescues them. That person is possibly making them sign a deal with the devil. There’s fame and their rise and the fall and the split-up and then the final triumph. All those things are well worn and work. They work.
I don’t know if this would be a groundbreaking movie, and for this reason. I feel like it’s steering so hard into a formula. I’m not sure there’s any way to do it beyond that. It feels like she actually lived the formula a bit.
John: Also, feel like she’s a passenger in too much of the story. She’s just held captive to this. I guess the story could really start when she starts reclaiming her own voice and fighting back against the impression that she was really complicit in this, that she really was this. You need to spend most of your movie’s energy on the rise out of it, rather than being trapped into it.
Of course, there’s a version of this which is also the fun of getting away with it. People do believe you are this thing, and that can be a fun aspect of it all. Right now, it does feel like she’s just being held hostage to the story rather than driving it.
Craig: I agree. I think this could be a movie. I just don’t know if it can be a good one.
John: A lot of work there for the writer. Let’s wrap it up with The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts.
Craig: Do you like tapes or CDs?
John: Love it. Peter Vigneron writing for Outside Magazine. This is about the Central California nut heists. Nuts are worth a lot of money. They’re basically impossible to track. Basically, what’s happening here is that trucks will have orders to pick up these nuts and take them from Point A to Point B. They will never get to Point B. Sometimes the drivers were complicit. Sometimes the drivers had no idea what was going on. Essentially, once the nuts get unloaded to different places, they’ve just all disappeared. You can’t track individual nuts at a certain point. Nut heists. What do you think, Craig?
Craig: I think it’s an interesting, quirky twist on heisty stuff. If you’re contemplating an indie movie or some sort of Cohen Brothers take on thieves, you could do worse than saying instead of money, they’re stealing nuts. You can do that. It is interesting. Also, one of the things I really like about this is its setting. It’s a great setting that is under-portrayed.
John: Definitely.
Craig: That is that Central California agricultural world. It is an interesting world. It’s beautiful, but it’s also kind of dangerous. It’s complicated because of the insane amounts of water that is used. Also, the United States relies on Central California to grow so much of what people eat.
There’s really interesting ideas there, but ultimately, it is going to be not much more than a setting and a quirk. I don’t think it’s going to give you a story story beyond a story that you would be able to come up with without the disappearing nuts.
John: In your conversation last week about The Ref, you talk about how a lot of the plot of it is there so you can actually have the character beats and have the conversations you want to have. I wonder if this is actually a good framework to a backdrop for setting the actually story you want to tell. It’s really about this divorced couple who’s trying to pull off this thing or it’s this family finally coming together to pull off this great heist. I feel like it’s a space in which you can pour an actual story, rather than a story itself.
Craig: That’s essentially what I’m saying. It feels like a venue, and it feels like a context, but it doesn’t feel like a story itself.
John: Let’s take an audit of our ideas here for How Would This Be a Movie. A Replika movie, thumbs up, thumbs down?
Craig: A movie, no, thumbs down.
John: The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes, the Thomas Midgley story?
Craig: Thumbs down.
John: Thumbs down. I think it’s a play, but I don’t think it’s a movie. The Pennsylvania woman who disappeared? I think we both agree that she specifically is not a movie. There’s a reason why this kind of story is interesting, but this one is not a story you could adapt.
Craig: No. Agreed.
John: Fake Aretha Franklin?
Craig: Not great movie.
John: I think it can be a great movie, but I think it’s a lot of work to break it out of the tropey, tropey, trope-iness of it all. The reason why I think it’s also a movie, I think you and I can both agree, is she gets to sing a lot of songs. That’s great. That’s going to be cool to see. You’ll write new songs. It’s going to be good.
Craig: That part would be fun.
John: Disappearing nuts, I think we both agree that it’s a venue but it’s not a story.
Craig: Correct. We’ve done it once again. We have-
John: Once again, we’ve-
Craig: … ruined dreams.
John: We apologize to everyone else who was planning to adapt those stories, because now we talked them to death. Drew, I see on the Workflowy that you have a question.
Drew: I do.
Craig: (singing) Drew has a question.
John: (singing) Drew has a question.
Drew: You guys have talked about how optioning nonfiction books and articles is ultimately unnecessary, because nobody owns the facts, right?
Craig: That’s right.
Drew: We had a listener write in recently about the drama around Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales. A famous history professor is claiming that Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales was taken directly from her podcast about the same story called Welcome to Your Fantasy. Hulu had optioned a book about the Chippendales case, but they didn’t option the podcast. There’s two big characters in the Hulu show that are only in the podcast and were not in the book. If nonfiction reporting can be traced back to one author or a single source, is that still in the public domain of facts?
Craig: Of course. I don’t know what this history professor is doing here. What? No. If you are compiling and stating and then publishing facts, either in the newspaper or in a podcast, they’re facts. They belong to everybody. If the show drew from, say, specific things that she had pulled from someone’s life that weren’t on the podcast, then yeah, maybe that person could actually say, “Hey, you’re taking stuff from my life that isn’t public information.” I don’t know what the professor’s claim here is. What?
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to the actual article for the New York Times. It digs into it a little bit more about what’s being alleged here. Drew, is there a lawsuit, or is it just like the history professor’s miffed, but it’s not clear that there’s going to be a lawsuit?
Drew: It’s miffed. There’s no lawsuit currently.
Craig: I don’t know why she’s miffed. Look. Part of the reason she’s miffed is because Hollywood keeps doing this stupid thing where they buy articles. They don’t need to buy the articles, but they buy them because, we’ve talked about this before, it allows them to squat on a property and say, “Hey everybody, I’m doing something, and you’re not.” It gives them access to maybe a lot of extra research that was done, that maybe didn’t make it into the article.
Really, it’s because producers in Hollywood are always looking for some kind of material that they can represent to buyers as exclusive. “I have IP. I own an article.” This is entirely about entrepreneurs pretending that they’ve purchased something, like, “I have this exclusive right to this cylinder of Los Angeles air.” It’s not property. Intellectual property has to be property. Facts are not property. I’m sorry that she’s miffed, but if you report stuff, that’s that. I don’t know what else to say.
John: Again, I don’t know the specifics of this case, but I will say that Craig’s point about facts are facts, and facts are not the kind of property that you can maintain. It is entirely believable though that there could be a podcast that is made, that is not just reporting the facts in a journalistic sense, but is actually framing things in a way that tells a very specific story and lays out specific beats in a way, that does have narrative value, that does feel like it’s the difference between the straight reporting of what happened at Chernobyl versus Craig’s version of like, this is this story that I’m telling, where she has put together a thing that is not simply journalism but is actually narrative storytelling in a way, that is creating new and original ways to present this material, that could be both optionable and could be considered the source material for something, in a way that she might have a case.
It doesn’t sound like she’s trying to have a case. She’s not trying to sue here. I just want to say that there is a difference between just pure, straight journalism, which is facts, and actual creation of narrative, because books do get optioned.
Craig: You mean nonfiction books. A lot of those nonfiction books simply don’t need to be optioned. It is very difficult to claim that there is narrative in a nonfiction source material. It’s very difficult. We have a category for this, which is source material of a non-story nature.
It’s not enough to organize your facts into a news story. A news story isn’t the same thing as a story story. Everybody organizes facts somehow. They have to structure it somehow. It’s not the same. It’s a very difficult thing.
In looking at this article, it seems like part of the crankiness is that this podcast was offered to Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, and they just weren’t interested in it, meaning, “Here, do you want to adapt this?” and they weren’t interested in it, and then later Kumail was showing up in this story, which I don’t think came from him. I think it came from someone else, I think. The fact that he serves as an EP, that’s a fairly common thing. That happens all the time when a big actor signs onto a show. That’s right, you heard me Kumail. I called you a big actor. Then in the show’s closing credits, it says it was inspired by Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders, a 2014 book.
Here’s the thing. There’s all sorts of reportage. It’s incredibly rare that you are the first person to talk about something, especially when it’s a true crime case. If somebody listens to your podcast and goes, “It just doesn’t grab me,” but then I read a book about the same topic, but the book is grabbing me, this is perfectly fine. I just don’t see… This is just a pretty typical thing that authors do sometimes, where they can’t see beyond the world of what they’ve written or said. They just can’t imagine that anybody else has written or said these things, but they have.
John: You can go back to very early episodes of this show, where we talk about some of these lawsuits about like, “Oh, The Matrix was inspired by my book.” It’s like, oh my god, no, it wasn’t.
Craig: We talked quite a bit about the novelist who was suing over the movie Gravity. She dropped it. She dropped the suit, for all the reasons we said she would, because it doesn’t work that way. These things just don’t work that way.
Again, I just wish that… If there could be a Scriptnotes rule that we could somehow get everybody to sign onto, the rule would be don’t report about people complaining that they’ve been ripped off or people suing that they’ve been ripped off. Report verdicts. That’s it. Just report the verdicts, and what you will see is a parade of nope. That’s what you’re going to see.
John: We have two questions here that are specifically about research, which I think might be good for us to tackle on this research-heavy episode.
Drew: We’ll start with Lawant. Lawant writes, “I’m working on a script taking place during the second Iraq War. I’ve had access to some of the soldiers involved, but in order to make sure some of the other perspectives present in the story are respected, I would really like to talk to some of the actual Iraqi people who were present during that time. The problem is, I don’t personally know any of them. How do you deal with a situation like this? I know Craig got some perspective from people actually living in current day Ukraine for Chernobyl. How did he find them? I considered going to my country’s consulate, but I’d prefer a direct line to the people I want to talk to.”
Craig: That’s a good question. There are ways. One, I don’t know where you live, but let’s say you live in the United States. If you are in a big city or near a big city, there often are community organizations that represent immigrants from particular countries or cultures. If you can find a group like that…
For instance, for The Last of Us, we had a scene that took place in Indonesia. We wanted to hire Indonesian actors. In Calgary, there was a community organization for Indonesian immigrants that lived in Calgary. We started there.
What happens is, those people can either help you directly or they can say, “Let me talk to my uncle. Let me talk to my sister. She lives in Iraq. He is still there. Let me see if they’d be willing to talk with you.” Obviously, you’ll need a translator in cases where people don’t speak English. That’s where I would start.
The other option is if certain names or individuals come up in the stories that you hear from the soldiers, you can start to track back. What neighborhood is that? Who is the mayor? Who is the leader of that community? Let me reach out. Again, I would suggest reaching out through an intermediary that will be closer to that culture than you are.
Here’s the thing. People want to help on this stuff. They really do. They want to be heard. They want to be represented. They want you to get the stories right and get the facts right. It shouldn’t be too hard. That’s where I would start.
John: This is not Iraq. I was writing a project that was taking place in 1970s Maine. I needed to get a sense of what 1970s Maine felt like. I didn’t have the ability to time travel, but I could go to Maine. I would just start talking to people. I’d ask them questions, people old enough that I could actually ask specific questions about the 1970s. I got some useful things out of it.
The most useful thing often was just asking, “Who else do you think I should talk to?” because they can point you to people who actually might have more information. That might be your answer here for Iraq. The first Iraqi people you talk to may not have just the information you need or the perspective, but they will know somebody who will know somebody. If you do this well and carefully, you’re going to find some people who were on the ground in the kinds of places that you’re talking about and can really give you that perspective that I think is important, that you’re looking for.
Craig: Completely agree.
John: Cool. Let’s do one more question here.
Drew: Gabe asks, “I just recently attended a Q and A with Craig at Baylor University, and he name dropped Mimi Munson, a researcher on Chernobyl.”
Craig: Mimi Munson, yeah.
Drew: “How do you know when you need to employ researchers to help in the writing process? How would one get involved in researching for film and TV?”
Craig: I don’t know the answer to that second one. Maybe I’ll reach out to Mimi and see what she would say about how to get involved in researching. How do you know when you need to employ researchers? Is there too much research for you to do? By too much, I don’t mean, oh, my capacity is limited.
I mean to say that there is an ocean of material and that you need help curating it, sorting it, and then those people, by working with you, will start to get a sense of what would actually be helpful, and then they start mining for that, or it’s really just a question of do you feel like you’re drowning in stuff. If it’s a smaller thing and you know there’s not that much material, it’s just about going in deep, then you may not need somebody.
John: Craig, a question for you. Were you mostly throwing questions to Mimi saying, “I have these 10 questions about this place or these people. Can you find me these answers?” or were you asking for just more general dossiers about like, “Tell me about this moment and what you can in this moment.” What was the balance of those kind of requests?
Craig: I think it was pretty well evenly split, because there were things I knew I wanted to get into, but I wanted more information. I couldn’t find enough. Sometimes in doing my research, I would run up against a brick wall, where I would say, “Okay, there’s just a gap here. Can you help me fill this gap?”
The story of the miners in part was something that Mimi turned up in this fairly obscure article, it was in a Soviet paper, specifically about the miners. That was really helpful. In other cases, I would say, “Hey, you know what? Here’s a general area that it would be good to just find some additional resources on.”
I found that I think for any researcher, they need direction. You can’t just say to them, “Do research.” That’s not a thing. The whole point of research is it’s directed. As she goes, she may dig things up that she flags and says, “You know what? I bet you Craig would be fascinated by this.” We’ll see how it goes. That’s also part of it is just catching things and you’re straining. It’s like you’re panning for gold and what turns up.
John: That’s part of what we’ve talked about on this show a lot is that part of the screenwriter’s job is sometimes that initial research, because you don’t know what’s going to trigger for you, where that idea’s going to come from, what’s going to really engage, until you start mucking around in it. You’re talking about a researcher comes in when you realize, hey, I have that initial spark, now there’s just so much that I need somebody to help me sort out the gold from the-
Craig: Silt.
John: The silt.
Craig: The silt.
John: Hey Craig, while we’re talking about gold and silt, a question for you. In all the fantasy stuff you’ve ever seen on screen, why does nobody ever pan for gold?
Craig: Only in the Old West. No one’s ever panning for gold.
John: The only time you see panning for gold is 1849 miners times.
Craig: That miner, he’s always crazy. He’s got a huge beard. He’s got this nutty look in his eyes. He does a little dance when he finds gold. They always dance. He does a jig.
John: First, you have to bite the nugget to make sure it’s really gold. Then you do the dance.
Craig: Then you do the dance, and then terrible things happen. Nobody has ever found gold in one of those movies and then it turns out great. Violence ensues.
John: They have to use that gold to buy a jug of liquor that’s marked with two Xs and then another bad thing will happen.
Craig: Exactly, the jug. You get the jug. You pay for the jug with a coin. It’s probably the same reason we don’t see people with bindles.
John: Bindles and gold pans, it feels like it all goes together.
Craig: You start a new business where we just sell two items, bindles and gold panning pans, or those weird britches that they would wear. He-he. They would always do a dance. The old prospector. They’re always an old prospector. It turns out that panning for gold is a terrible way to make a living.
John: I think that’s really what it comes down to. I did a tiny bit of research. I didn’t hire Mimi Munson, but I did a tiny bit of research, because it bothered me one night. Why do I never see that in fantasy settings? There should be gold in rivers in fantasy settings too. It’s so not profitable that people just didn’t do it. There are historic gold pannings, but it just doesn’t work out.
Craig: You gotta assume that all the gold has been found. They know where it is, and they’ve dug it up.
John: Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things that are both based on true stories, very applicable for this, both by Daniel Wallace. Daniel Wallace wrote the book version of Big Fish. I’ve been a friend for 20-plus years.
The first is his new book, which is his first nonfiction book, called This Isn’t Going To End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew. It’s talking about William Nealy, his longtime friend and brother-in-law, who was this golden boy, not even hippie, but he’s just this free spirit who could do anything. He was a really good writer, inspired Daniel to become a writer, but was also self-destructive in really fascinating ways.
If you’ve read Big Fish or seen Big Fish, it reads as not a prequel or a sequel but a sidequel, because you can see Big Fish happening to the side of it all. It’s just really fascinating. Also, knowing Daniel, recognizing how this person influenced him and how things intersected along the way, I thought it was just great. I recommend his book.
Daniel also this past week has an article in Slate about Randall Kenan, who is a writing professor at the same place that Daniel taught or maybe still teaches, who died. Daniel was put in charge of gathering together all of Kenan’s papers, which got me thinking about our bonus topic.
Kenan had some stuff published but had been working on a big book that he could never quite finish. It was like, what is the process of putting together a collection for a person. This thing that’s being printed is going to be the biggest publication of Kenan’s career, but it’s going to happen posthumously, and how we deal with that and feel about that, because this was clearly a very talented writer, but all the things didn’t quite connect during his life. A really good article by Daniel Wallace on Randall Kenan.
Craig: Great. My One Cool Thing is the soundtrack for The Last of Us on HBO. This is not something I did. It’s something that was done by two brilliant composers, Gustavo Santaolalla and David Fleming. The music was such an important part of the show.
I think it’s lovely when these soundtracks come out, because it lets you just enjoy the music without any distraction. I realize I’m calling my show a distraction. It is beautiful to just listen to the music. Especially I think this score is so playable on its own.
Gustavo in particular, he’s scored so many wonderful movies, and he has an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain and lots and lots of movies. He does it in the strangest way. He does not do what pretty much every other composer does, which is to watch a scene and then begin to compose music for the scene. He doesn’t watch. He just starts composing stuff based on his feelings about what he knows about the story and the characters. Then he says, “What would you do with this? What would you do to this?” As it turns out, it works great. I don’t think it would work great for every composer, but it sure works great for him.
Definitely check that out. It’s available out there on Spotify and all the various places that people get music. There’s just some really beautiful things. It’s a lovely listen in your car. I don’t know. Not every great score is a great listen just on its own. I think this one is.
John: I really love the score soundtrack for Station Eleven, which is something I listen to independently, which it seems like was a similar experience, where it wasn’t score being designed for the scenes of a shot. It was really just like, here are the ideas, and then based on the ideas, you could work them into things.
Craig: I’m looking it up. It looks like it was done by Dan Romer.
John: Dan Romer, great guy.
Craig: Dan Romer.
John: Really, really talented composer. Question for you, Craig. In addition to the score, there’s also covers of other songs in the show. Are those going to be on that album or somewhere else?
Craig: Yeah, there are. There are a couple of tracks. We didn’t have too many songs we threw in there. I don’t know if we have all of them that we’re putting in there. We certainly are including the Depeche Mode song Never Let Me Down Again as well as one Jessica Mazin’s cover of it. I don’t know if it includes the Aha songs or the Pearl Jam song, but it just might. You think I would know. Mostly I just think because you can get those songs anyway. The only one that’s unique would be Jessie’s cover. Otherwise, to me it’s all really about listening to the instrumental score.
John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: What?
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Orpheus. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can 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 what will happen to the stuff we wrote. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you.
Drew: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, this is clearly inspired by this Daniel Wallace article about his friend’s papers. It got me thinking about, oh, what am I going to do with the stuff I’ve written after I die?
I guess it falls into two basic buckets for both you and I. There’s stuff we wrote for other people, and they are going to hold onto that most times. We still have our scripts for things which we can publish independently, but they will fundamentally own Chernobyl and other things like that.
There’s also some stuff which I know I control by myself, and I think you may control as well, like the spec things you wrote that never got produced, that you own all the rights to, that you control the copyright on. For me, ultimately, Arlo Finch. I control the Big Fish musical. Andrew Lippa and I control the Big Fish musical. We have copyright on that, so that will pass to our heirs. My movie The Nines will revert to me in a couple years. Scriptnotes will come to our heirs.
Craig: That goldmine, Scriptnotes.
John: That goldmine, Scriptnotes. What do you think about when you think about a screenwriter’s legacy, the papers, the writing, all that stuff?
Craig: We definitely have to worry about it less than novelists, because as you point out, novelists own copyright on everything they write. They often do have a lot of communication that would be of interest back and forth, letters or emails with editors and so forth. We have much less that we have copyright on, so all those things are controlled by the companies. Not permanently. At some point what happens is they go into public domain. What they don’t do is revert back.
The only exceptions to that would be if something was unmade. There is a reversion clause in our union agreement. It is somewhat unicornic in that it happens very rarely that the companies allow it to happen. They can easily check off a few boxes to avoid it. For us, not as important. Most writers won’t have, for instance, like you have, a musical or an independent film that they created themselves and have copyright on. What they will have are spec scripts. They will have unsold scripts that they still have copyright on.
One of the things that stuck out in the article that you cited about this man who died, Randall Kenan, is that he was alone. I think when people are alone, that’s when trouble happens. You and I are lucky enough to not be alone. We have partners. Either you’re leaving everything to Mike or you’re leaving everything to me. I don’t know who’s getting it. My guess is that, like a lot of people that do what we do, you have a trust. The trust owns everything. You actually plan. I think the most important thing is planning. As long as you plan, you’re fine.
John: You also need to figure out who would actually want to get those things that you’re talking about. At this point, Amy will inherit the Big Fish musical or Mike will inherit it, but ultimately Amy will inherit the Big Fish musical, which will be worth something for a fair amount of time. Luckily, she likes the Big Fish musical. She’s seen every production as we’ve done it. She will be a good caretaker of that, because she’ll actually have to decide this production gets to make that change, this production doesn’t get to make that change. It’s not an empty responsibility there.
With The Nines, it’s going to be weird once it reverts to me, because right now Sony owns and controls it. They don’t really do anything with it. It’s sometimes available on some streaming services whenever. I will need to figure out what do I want to do with it. Do I take it to some service who helps me sell it to different markets to do different things? That will be a thing I’ll have to do not too long from now. Eventually, my heirs will have to figure that out as well.
There’s been properties along the way, a catalog of songs that I was trying to use in a thing, where I had to talk to the heirs and figure out, okay, how do we figure out who owns this song and whether it’s actually inextricably bound to this other thing.
You recognize all that bullshit paperwork you don’t want to hold onto, you gotta hold onto it, because it can become important down the road. You just want to make sure you’re giving your papers and your stuff to somebody who actually does want to deal with it, because in the case of this block of songs, there was a person who really knew what they were doing, but in so many other cases I can imagine that doesn’t exist.
Craig: Again, planning, because one of the things that happens when you do estate planning is you talk to a lawyer that asks you a whole bunch of questions you really wish no one would be asking you, and you don’t want to answer them, because they all have to do with both your own mortality and a lot of just ticky-tacky details that are just exhausting. That’s their job. Once it’s done, it’s done. Then they print out this phone book of an estate planning thing, and you sign it.
That’s now governing how this all works. It has all sorts of implications. The most important gift you can give the people you love who you’re going to be leaving behind is clarity. There’s no arguments. There’s no fighting. There’s no confusion.
One of the things that happens when people die, they might leave you a bunch of money and say, “Now we’re going to put you in charge of this, but we also want the following people to get the following money. You’re going to be dealing this money out.” Let’s say the estate says, “Here’s $100,000. Keep 20. Give 20 to Aunt So-and-so, and give the rest to these 5 kids. Split it up.” If that estate also has debt of, say, $500,000, you’re responsible for it. That’s terrifying. You have to make sure that when you leave stuff, that everything’s covered. It’s all about just doing the math and thinking ahead. No one wants to think about this stuff.
John: No. It’s literally death and taxes. It’s all of the annoyances of trying to do your annual taxes but also thinking about your own mortality and the fact you are going to die.
Craig: Yeah, and that even your death will involve taxes. Not everybody’s in a financial position where they need to create a trust, but everybody who is breathing and of a certain age with assets should, at a minimum, have a will. You just don’t want to die intestate. Drew, do you have a will?
Drew: I think I do, but because my mom was an estate planning attorney.
Craig: Oh, damn. We’re just basically doing an ad for your mom at this point.
Drew: She’s retired now.
Craig: She was retired. Phone’s going to be ringing off the hook now. If your mom is-
Drew: I’m exceptional in that.
Craig: How did this happen? How did I open a door and just get absolutely blindsided by that? That’s insane.
Drew: It was an interesting way to grow up. I think I had a will by the time I graduated high school.
Craig: When you were really little, would your mom just sit you down and say, “Drew, you’re going to die.”
Drew: Oh, yeah. That was dinner table conversations of like, “When we die, this is how this happens, and when you die-“
Craig: When we die. When you specifically die.
John: My mom died during the pandemic. I want to give her props, because for 10 years leading up to it, she was always very clear about, “This is the will. This is where the will is kept. Here’s a copy of the will. Here’s how everything goes.” I was the executor of the estate. It was as straightforward as it could be, but it was still annoying. There was still a lot of steps I hadn’t anticipated in terms of having to not just get the death certificate, but also how to close these bank accounts and how to do this stuff and how to get into the safe deposit box. Fortunately, my brother was still in Colorado and could do some of that stuff that I couldn’t do, but it was a lot.
Craig: It’s a lot. Melissa’s mom died. My dad died during the pandemic, but my mom’s still alive, so that’s still going. Melissa’s mom died during the pandemic, and she was the remaining parent there, so Melissa became the executor of the estate. It becomes a full-time job.
I was shocked there aren’t people that just do it for you. I thought there’s gotta be somebody that just does all this. There really isn’t. You have to deal with a lawyer, and you have to deal with the government.
There’s also all this stuff of just like, she had an account and we can’t figure out how to access it, and they’re calling us and telling us we owe money on a thing that we don’t own, and all the annoying things of… Sometimes something happens, and you’re like, “Wait, what? Why is this cable company that I don’t use telling me I owe them money?” It’s that times a hundred, for somebody else. You weren’t doing it. They were doing it. Now you have to figure out how to turn their fricking internet off. It’s a full-time job.
Hey, Drew, ask your mom, are there services that just handle this stuff for you, like just say, “Just give me everything. Five me power of attorney. We’ll do it.”
Drew: That’s a great question. I’ll ask her. That’s separate from just an online portal that you can be like, “Here’s all my assets. Spit out a will,” right?
Craig: I’m talking about you have been named the executor by someone’s will. You have to now process all of their stuff, and you have to handle all of their accounts and their properties and their things. Is there a service that can basically, just for a fee or a percentage, do it for you, so you don’t have to take on the second job of combing through the mess of perhaps somebody’s not perfectly organized leavings?
Drew: I will ask her and get back to you.
John: Our listeners will probably also have an answer for that. I think that actually is a fascinating How Would This Be a Movie. I think the character who does that, it’s a nice way into a story. It’s a person who’s just cleaning up an estate, and then you realize there’s actually a greater mystery there. It’s potentially fascinating.
Craig: Let’s get Natasha Lyonne on the phone.
John: I think she’s there. To bring this back around to what we do with our papers, I would also say there’s probably services where if I didn’t have a daughter who was going to vanquish rights or she wasn’t interested in doing it but those rights are still valuable, there’s gotta be a company who I can assign those rights to, who will work to maximize the exploitation of those rights. For Big Fish, actually, there already is a company, but for other things, to maximize exploitation of those rights and then pay out a check on a regular basis, basically an agent for that stuff.
Craig: There are. There are definitely agents that represent writers posthumously, no question. They represent estates. An estate just goes to a literary agent. It’s the same thing that you would do in life, if the challenge is the same, which is, “Hey, sell this material to somebody. License it or whatever.” It’s the material. It’s not the living person that’s relevant. That feels pretty doable. That’s doable. Honestly, I’m dead. I don’t care what Melissa does with it. Whatever. I’m gone. I’m gone. It’s over. It’s over. Shut the door. Turn off the lights.
John: Pack everything in a bindle and leave.
Craig: Pack our thing in the cosmic bindle and walk the rails into eternity.
John: We’ll all be gold panning in Heaven.
Craig: Exactly. Just my gold pan, my bindle, my shoes that have the weird… The part that covers the toe is gone or lifted up for some reason. I’m a bit sooty, because they’re always sooty.
John: Yeah, some soot.
Craig: I’m eating directly from a can of beans.
John: Also, your hat has been flattened down. It had a weird quality to your hat.
Craig: There’s always a weird patch on the hat. Also, when they eat from the can of beans, they leave the lid on but just tilt it up. They never just take the lid completely off.
John: No, you gotta bend it back. Weirdly, their coffee pot is directly sitting in the flames.
Craig: The coffee pot is from an iron forge or something. That coffee has to be horrible.
John: Oh yeah, because the grounds are just soaking in the water.
Craig: Exactly. Those grounds were in your bindle all day, or god forbid your pocket of your far too loose trousers.
John: Good times.
Craig: The hobo life.
John: It’s the hobo life for me. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Drew: Bye.
John: Bye.
Links:
- The Man of Your Dreams by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz for The Cut
- The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes by Steven Johnson for The New York Times Magazine
- Pennsylvania Woman Who Disappeared in 1992 Is Found Alive in Puerto Rico by Eduardo Medina for the New York Times
- The Counterfeit Queen of Soul by Jeff Maysh for Smithsonian
- The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts by Peter Vigneron for Outside
- A History Professor Takes On Hollywood by Katherine Rosman for the New York Times
- This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew by Daniel Wallace
- Posthumously by Daniel Wallace
- The Last of Us: Soundtrack From the Series by David Fleming & Gustavo Santaolalla
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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- Craig Mazin on Instagram
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- Outro by Orpheus (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.